In 1924, rather than institutionalize her brother Will, she installed him and his wife at her Redding Ridge “retreat” near her niece Clara. Since Tarbell bore the financial responsibility for the entire family, she turned from oil to what would be more immediately profitable—a biography of Judge Elbert H. Gary, chairman of the U.S. Steel Corporation. She convinced McClure to accept these installments in lieu of her oil exposé.
Gary’s was not a life she was eager to write and she at first declined. As she wrote to Rutger Bleeker Jewett, editor-in-chief of Appleton-Century: “As I look at him he is one of the best types that the ‘hard-boiled’ big business period has produced, but the best of that period does not stir me to great enthusiasm or make me desire to hold him up as a model.”32 That was in January 1924.
Refusing to accept her answer, Judge Gary said he would open all his material to her. However, that would not have laid him open to an exposé, even if Tarbell had had the heart for it. Gary sent her a memo saying that if she found anything distasteful she would not have to go on—she would be paid for her time and her materials would be taken over by someone else. Her fee would be ten thousand dollars for the book and another ten thousand for serialization.
She temporized. She wrote her publisher in late February: “I have too much respect for my remaining vitality to use it up on the U.S. Steel Company and its head, even a great one.” Then she went off for a lecture tour stretching from Bradford, Pennsylvania, to Pawhuska, Oklahoma, where she was stricken by near-pneumonia. By June she decided to work on the book, but without a contract; and by September she totally capitulated. She told Jewett on September 3 that she would start at once if he would send her weekly checks for one hundred fifty dollars or six hundred per month as he chose. Six days later Gary let it be known that he wanted her to start immediately.
Publicly, she insisted that she was glad to write about a good businessman for a change, that she felt honor-bound to balance the picture she had created of American businessmen; to put, as the late Teddy Roosevelt had asked so long before, “more sky in her landscapes” and less dirt. But her history with Gary indicates that she had to swallow hard and suffer much before she allowed herself to earn her money this way. She had never liked Gary. During the Industrial Conference in 1919, which Samuel Gompers had sabotaged by refusing to discuss anything but collective bargaining, she wrote Phillips that she was also disappointed by Gary’s insistence on arbitration as the means of settling labor disputes. Tarbell would have liked each man to be more willing to compromise.
Moreover, she had interviewed Gary in 1911 for her series on the humanizing of factory conditions and she told him he would have to pay more attention to the problems of labor.33
Gary, who had been a right-hand man to J. P. Morgan, lacked the force of builders like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan. Gary was the prototypical corporation man, but he did have certain achievements to his credit. In a new age of regulation of corporations, he avoided the appearance of monopoly while preserving the reality. He was a master of public relations and a champion of the rights of stockholders. Gary insisted that they be informed about the state of U.S. Steel and he prevented its officers from profiting from inside information. He adopted a stock purchase plan for employees in 1903, but he held workers to a twelve-hour day and to grueling fortnightly twenty-four-hour shifts.
The major weakness in Tarbell’s book, which was published in late 1925, was that it was so sympathetic. Once she had written that consolidation of an industry served only to boost a commodity’s cost to the consumer. In the Gary biography, she praised him for eliminating competitors and thereby forging a stronger steel industry.
Who knows if Tarbell did not intend the public to read between her sugared lines? A much-quoted passage on page eighty-one of her book showed how Gary helped Morgan get around the law by legal methods. The Tarbell of 1902 would not have approved of such finagling. The Tarbell of 1925 offered it as an example of Gary’s acumen.
The response of The Nation, which was never consistent in evaluating Tarbell, was indicative of the way most reviewers greeted her effort. In an April 14, 1926, review titled “St. Elbert of the Heavenly Trust,” Benjamin Stolberg charged that Tarbell had never really been critical of business practices, she had simply been personally angry that Rockefeller “squeezed the Tarbell fortunes dry.” He said, “This book is receiving wide notice, certainly not on its own merits for it is a rather shoddy performance which ordinarily would command no more than a stick or two. It has, to be sure, the subtly worked attraction of being somewhat pathetic: for Miss Tarbell to have sunk to the reduction of complicated facts into simple falsehoods is a bit sad …”34
The partisans of Standard Oil were delighted. William Inglis, who had interviewed John D. Rockefeller, Sr., about The History of the Standard Oil Company, was gleeful. He wrote to the son’s secretary, “What do these reviews show? Do they not declare that the author has—perhaps unconsciously, certainly unintentionally—destroyed herself? If she was right in denouncing the Standard Oil men, how can she be right in praising the steel men, who followed in the path the Standard Oil men made?”35
In the midst of this criticism, her preeminence as a Lincoln biographer was assailed. In 1923, she had published In the Footsteps of the Lincolns, tracing the history of the family in America; it was the fruit of her meditations on Lincoln and her years of research. Critics acknowledged her work, while complaining that she was more than ever the biased devotée. Some eighteen months later, Carl Sandburg, whose poetry had won a special Pulitzer award in 1919, produced Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, which won glowing praise for its literary and biographical merit. Sandburg had done herculean library research and had sought Tarbell’s advice. To show his thanks, he sent page proofs to her and one other Lincoln scholar. “Yourself and Oliver R. Barrett [collector of Lincolniana] are the only persons receiving advance sheets as you are the two who have helped me most,” he said. Her reaction was generous and enthusiastic: “Your method is so like you and gives a quality of freshness to material which delights me. I believe you’ve done a new kind of book.”36
There are signs she was daunted by Sandburg’s achievement and by his power as a writer. In her memoirs she observed: “We all come to rest our case on the work to which we have given our best years, frequently come to live on that, so to speak. When the time comes that our field is invaded by new workers, enlarged, reshaped, made to yield new fruit, we suffer shock. We may put up a ‘No trespassing’ sign, but all to no use.” Benjamin Thomas quoted her as musing: “I am such a slave to facts, dates and things I mean, that I fail to see the great facts often.”37
She had come to an age of reflection. Now in her late sixties, Ida Tarbell observed that the world simply repeated itself and that events mattered far less than individuals. She kept her friends for life, but death deprived her of the two she least expected to lose. John Siddall died of cancer in 1923 at the age of forty-eight, having become prey to a bitterness that mocked all his former optimism. In 1925, fifty-year-old Bert Boyden was felled by pernicious anemia that he had developed in Poland during the war. Near the end, he struggled up the stairs to Ida’s apartment for one last visit while she watched him, smiling brightly and pretending she saw nothing amiss.
And by now the merry atmosphere of Ida’s Twin Oaks was gone. Will’s arrival meant the end of real entertaining. As she observed to a correspondent: “My little farm turned out to be a family sanitarium where keeping people in health instead of raising things from the land became the main object.”38 Ida gave her bedroom to her brother and an adjacent one to Ella. For herself she took a narrow downstairs room with a single window. Her plain iron bedstead was softened by a coverlet made by her mother from scraps of a quarter century of Tarbell gowns.
Ida forgave Will everything, even episodes when he held them at gunpoint or threatened to kill Ella and himself so that they would not have to freeze to death during the winter. Sarah alone took Will to task. In turn, he c
harged Sarah, who had bought five acres from Ida in 1920, with embezzling Ida’s funds, and attempted to have Sarah jailed. Ida professed that her only consolation for these embarrassing scenes lay in finding Will’s behavior engrossing. She once defended him: “Let me say that I consider my brother a remarkable person, great possibilities combined with irresponsibility, immense egotism, charm, gaiety, but in money matters incapable of holding on to anything, generous, indifferent to accumulation, quick to sacrifice if irritated or stirred to pity, an amazing creature.”39
The periods when Will was subdued hurt her more than his rantings. Ida told Roseboro at one point that Will seemed to accept his situation: “It breaks my heart,” she said, “but it is immeasurable relief to those who are with him constantly, to Ella. When he was so stormy and rebellious and intolerant; pouring himself out against every one all the time it was terrible for her [his wife]. It was never hard on me—I was too interested.”40
During the peaceful days, the three old people—Ida, Will, and Ella—would sit before an open fire, preferring the soft flames of an old-fashioned lamp to harsh electric light as they listened to the radio. Occasionally, the name of Ida Tarbell came crackling over the air. Her story, “He Knew Lincoln,” had been dramatized February 12, 1924, on The Eveready Hour, the first sponsored network broadcast. Sometimes she was interviewed because of her value as one of America’s most intriguing women or because of her merit as a relic of a long-gone America. Tarbell said that whenever the Redding Ridge group heard her name announced the others looked at her in astonishment and she would feel that she had done something criminal.
Aside from her family, Ida still allowed few people to intrude upon her time. Her preoccupation was work, as a woman named Ada Peirce McCormick, whom she met in 1923, soon found out.
McCormick, a round little woman in her thirties with hair perpetually escaping from her chignon, was better at action than execution. Her family had made a fortune in Maine timber and her brother Waldo was an accomplished painter. Wedded to an insurance man, Ada decided her expertise was marriage and she arranged to give a course on the subject to three hundred students at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Her first lesson was how to make a notebook from brown paper where students could draw funny pictures about matrimony. Later in life, McCormick threw herself into such subjects as the effect of television violence on children, the threat of the atomic bomb, and the force of Gandhi. In these years, however, she was the typical poor little rich girl.
Her own mother had not been very affectionate, and Ada ever after looked for a substitute. She thought she found one in her godfather’s wife, in the mother superior of an Episcopal convent, and finally in Ida Tarbell. To her, Ida Tarbell seemed a “tall, stalwart-looking woman in white so wholesome looking and suggesting the picket fences of New England and cookie jars, and your favorite aunt, and Jo March grown up.”41
The first stage of Ada’s Tarbell campaign was to write letters that she hoped would provoke response—did Ida agree with Anita Loos that gentlemen marry brunettes? Finding such chat ignored, she sought advice on how to write. Eventually, Ida recommended that she apply to Viola Roseboro, who consulted for a fee.
Ada thought Viola a genius for suggesting she use strong verbs and substitute nouns for pronouns, but she did not give up on Ida Tarbell, a determination that would prove to be a mixed blessing to the beleaguered journalist.
Tarbell was buckling under professional demands. McCall’s Magazine gave her two assignments that promised to equal the importance of the work of her earlier years, but she allowed deadline pressures to rush her.
In 1925, McCall’s commissioned her to do a story on the deflating of the Florida land boom. It was the first journalistic work Tarbell had done since the Arms Limitation Conference, and she hoped that it might limber her up for serious writing again. She agreed to write three articles of ten to twenty thousand words each for sixteen thousand dollars, less expenses. Her schedule was punishing. She arrived in Florida on February 20, 1926, and delivered the first article a week later, the second on March 15 and the third on April 15. It was more of a jump start than a limbering exercise.
Overall, she traveled the state for several months interviewing civic leaders, speculators, architects, natives, and hoboes. The Florida land boom was an emblem of the 1920s, the ultimate in boosterism and get-rich-quick hot air. Around 1922, promoters and entrepreneurs who had bought up Florida land sought to “subdivide” and sell it to winter-weary Northerners at a huge profit. After an initial rush, buyers became less plentiful. Fierce hurricanes and stories of those who had been hoodwinked slowed the rush and values dropped. Tarbell reached Florida at the crest of the frenzy. She wrote Phillips from Gainesville that Floridians now longed for slow, steady development: “The boom is flattening out unquestionably and all Florida is hoping for farmers to come and save them—and they’ve run out of land [to sell].” She foresaw a healthy future for the state once speculators left and thought Florida a good investment: “I’d love to buy twenty acres,” she wrote Phillips, “but don’t worry. I won’t. I’ll probably never see the place again.”42
Tarbell had reason to be proud of her seventy thousand words titled “Florida—And Then What?” which ran from May to August 1926. It was a wonderfully descriptive history of Florida with an explanation of its imbalanced economy. McCall’s was sufficiently impressed that the editors sent her off on another great news story—the phenomenon of Benito Mussolini.
It was more investigation on the gallop—a four-part series on Mussolini’s regime for twenty-five thousand dollars. The editors wanted her first article by August first, thinking the world situation so volatile that delays could evaporate the value of her report.
Tarbell said of the assignment: “Uneasy as I was over the way things were going in the United States, I vaguely felt that when I was asked to go look all this up that possibly there were lessons there … However,” she added with characteristic honesty, “the real reason I went to Italy was because I was offered so large a sum that I thought I could not afford to refuse.”43
It was regarded as a dangerous undertaking. An undersecretary of state predicted she would be arrested. Others told her she dare not speak French while there. Her old friend August Jaccaci, now ensconced in Vence, France, and passionately attached to his young and beautiful Italian housekeeper, told her she would be searched and warned her not to carry any writing that could be construed as hostile to Mussolini.
Only what she called her “natural dislike of giving up an undertaking” kept her from refusing the assignment. At age sixty-nine, with a manic-depressive brother to support, she had no appetite for international intrigue. The one concession she made to fear was to practice the Fascist salute, just in case, in her Paris bedroom. The fact that none of the dire predictions came true disposed her even more favorably to Italy.
Tarbell made Rome her headquarters and she traveled to the agricultural south, to San Marino and Calabria where Mussolini was encouraging new methods of growing wheat more productively; to the industrialized north, to Milan, where the Pirelli firm was making underground cables for Chicago; and to Turin, with its hydroelectric and Fiat plants. She was as fascinated by these as she had been by America’s modernized factories. Seeing her interest and adventurousness, young engineers took the aging Tarbell high up on girders and trestles to show her their work, much to her delight.
In Rome, in the early weeks of August, she was doing some research in the embassy and saw the ambassador, Henry P. Fletcher, a one-time Rough Rider, who urged her to interview Mussolini immediately. She tried to tell Fletcher that she was wholly unprepared, that she wanted to change from her morning dress into something more formal. He insisted she go immediately, so she went directly to Mussolini’s headquarters in the Chigi Palace. For ninety minutes she waited in a room filled with petitioners ranging from peasants bearing a statue they had dug up on their property to an admiral who wanted to report on the fleet at Ostia. When at las
t she was led toward Mussolini’s office, visions of the imperial despot’s bulldog jaw and bulging eyes filled her head. Instead of organizing her thoughts, she pictured a very small Ida traversing an interminable room where a large dictator sat rigid at his desk, ready to bark orders and have her thrown out. When the door opened, however, she saw Il Duce a scant sixty feet away and he was smiling. Robust, forty-three, he shook hands and said, in English, “I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting. You must be very tired.” Switching to French, which he spoke more fluently, he took control of the interview and asked her what had most interested her about Italy. He was delighted that she had noticed his housing projects and pontificated: “No nation can survive, no people can be happy, when the home life of the manufacturing and industrial classes is miserable and unfit.”44
He ended the interview, which he extended from five minutes to thirty, by kissing her hand. She left, flustered and relieved, regretting she had not mentioned William James, whom Mussolini was said to have admired. Much as Il Duce charmed Tarbell, he extended to her only a minimum of the courtesies he often permitted the foreign press. He allowed other journalists besides Tarbell to sit in his presence if their countries were sufficiently important, and invited some to his home. Apparently, McCall’s did not rate sufficiently high for him to meet her at the door of his office; yet he did allow her to walk, not run, the twenty yards to his desk.
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