IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER
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Her New York apartment had been her working studio but was now a great expense. In 1940, she closed it with much regret; it was a visible sign that her working life in the world had ended. Worried about finances, Ida rented out the Little House that she had once lent Clara, and sold forty of her fifty acres. She wrote Alice Hegan Rice of her life: “I am not allowed to step up or down, so we have rigged up … a little apartment especially for me—a study, a bathroom, a bedroom and dressing room. My friends in New York who live in steam-heated places (and I suppose in Louisville too) fear that I’ll freeze to death. Indeed, my only trouble is being too warm, and when the thermometer falls to zero, which it has on several occasions, it’s so exciting to take care of all the cold spots—there are plenty of them in such an old house as this. I always had an idea weather was one of the most interesting things in the world and I know I am right now. The beauty of the view from my windows gives me unending joy.…”21
She seems never to have acknowledged any self-pity. Income tax infuriated her, but she did not resent family demands. She arranged for her nieces to inherit a larger share of her estate than Scott to offset her aid to him through the years; only to protect Sarah from having to watch over Ella as well as herself did she ask Will’s children to allow their mother to live with them.
During Will’s last illness, his wife Ella went to stay with their daughter Esther. After he died in March 1941, Esther wanted Ella to return to Redding Ridge. Ida wrote Phillips of the prospective meeting: “It’s going to be a rather messy gathering, I fear. I thought I had things fixed up for the rest of my life, but I seem to have upset not only my own but the family apple cart. Now if Hitler comes over he will finish the job and in that case I shall go about shouting HEIL PHILLIPS.…” Her exclamation point was an asterisk and a dash.22
There was much fear that the Germans would attack America’s coast, and the people of Connecticut prepared for it. Tarbell wrote to her old McClure’s colleague, Mollie Best: “Sara[h] and I will stay here unless we are ordered out, but I don’t look for bombing along the coast at the moment. It’s too obvious, and the blow will come at some unexpected spot if they follow their usual strategy. But we are getting ready—this Town of 1500 is prepared to take over 600 evacuees from Bridgeport. I hope they’ll do as well when the 600 come as they do in rehearsing for them.”23
Sarah, nearing eighty herself and tired by the tasks of finding food in wartime and coping with ration books, was vigilant about keeping people away from Ida. Few slipped past her—her grandniece Caroline managed to get in and found Ida expecting to recover and go back to work. Ada arrived at the house, pushed her way in to Ida’s room, and was allowed to stay exactly one minute.
Sometimes Ida could be querulous, usually over small things. Once she wanted a loose button sewn on and her nurse asked her to wait. Wanting the task done at once, she began to cry and recognized then that she had become an old lady. “There was Mr. P. shaking like an aspen at the idea,” she later wrote, pecking the words out on her typewriter. “You wanted to be attended to at once. You were old and sick and feeble and ‘They’ wouldn’t sew on a button. It was not the injustice of this babyishness that brought me to terms. It was the comicality of it. 80 years old and ready to cry because a nurse or a guardian burdened with things to be done didn’t stop and do something which could wait. Was that what made old age a nuisance for the world—one of the things. I made a resolve I would tabulate, chart, my nuisance symptoms.”24
She thought of developing a Montessori system for the aged—a method whereby old and trembling fingers could learn again to thread needles and loop buttons and negotiate the treachery of a bathtub. She and JSP, who had cracked his head when he slipped in the tub, shared these ideas, which were now as significant to them as the trust had ever been, through war-slowed mails.
Of course, Ida Tarbell never finished Life After Eighty. Pneumonia, shingles, and the determined ministrations of her sister would not allow her to overtax her strength. Just before Christmas 1943, Ida Tarbell sank into a coma. One newspaper later said that she had a moment of consciousness and requested that carolers sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” but that, according to those who were there, was apocryphal. On January 6, 1944, Ida Tarbell died of pneumonia at the Bridgeport hospital. As she wished, her body was taken to Titusville, and there the woman who struggled to be both a lady and a success was finally laid to rest.
In life she had never found repose. As a woman in a male world, she felt herself so inferior, especially when glimpsed from the height of her dreams, that she dared not face many aspects of herself. Ida Tarbell was not the flinty stuff of which the cutting edge of any revolution is made. She was a reasonable woman who thought she tried to accommodate herself to circumstances, not to change them. Yet she was called to achievement in a day when women were called only to exist. Her triumph was that she succeeded. Her tragedy was never to know it.
Notes
Some last words are in order. Ray Stannard Baker said that anyone who attempted to write Ida Tarbell’s life would have the problem of writing about goodness. This proved to be true, but the real challenge was trying to explain an enigma. “I have often found it difficult to explain myself to myself, and I do not often try,” she told her best friend. She was seldom more forthcoming with anyone else, and those who knew her best have long been dead.
Adding to the task of unraveling Tarbell’s personality is the difficulty of organizing her papers, which are scattered nationwide in various degrees of disarray. I searched through every folder at Allegheny College, the Drake Well Museum, and the Little Chapel of All Nations. This was daunting, but provided the thrill of a treasure hunt and the opportunity to work with material no one else had ever seen. To aid future researchers, I have given titles of cited manuscripts, memoranda, and so on.
Incredibly, Tarbell did not date the clippings she pasted into her scrapbook. I searched for the dates and page numbers; those I failed to find are indicated simply by their inclusion in her scrapbook at the Drake Well Museum. There is also some duplication of materials. In these notes, I have cited the institution that possesses the original. The private Tarbell family papers are in the collection of Ella Tarbell Price.
Most frequently cited libraries are the Pelletier Library of Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania; Drake Well Museum, Titusville, Pennsylvania; the Sophia Smith Library, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts; the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington; the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the Petroleum History and Research Center, the University of Wyoming, Laramie; and the Little Chapel of All Nations, Tucson, Arizona. I have abbreviated the citations, but the locations should be clear.
Other libraries with important documents are the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison; Olin Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; the New York Public Library; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Swarthmore College Peace Library, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania; Columbia University Libraries, New York City; Rockefeller Family Archives, New York City; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kentucky Library, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green; Sterling and Beinecke Libraries, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; and the Newberry Library, Chicago.
Tarbell’s letters are usually indicated by the initials of the most frequent correspondents, such as:
RSB—Ray Stannard Baker
AB—Albert Boyden
CDH—Charles Downer Hazen
HDL—Henry Demarest Lloyd
SSM—Samuel S. McClure
APM—Ada Peirce McCormick
JSP—John S. Phillips
VR—Viola Roseboro
JMS—John McAlpin Siddall
EMT—Esther M. Tarbell
FST—Franklin S. Tarbell
IMT—Ida M. Tarbell
SAT—Sarah A. Tarbel
l
WWT—William W. Tarbell
WAW—William Allen White
1. AN UNACCOMMODATING CHILD
All of Ida Tarbell’s quotes are taken from Chapters 1 and 2 of her autobiography, All in the Day’s Work (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939), unless otherwise noted.
1. “Petrolia,” The Leisure Hour, May 12, 1866, pp. 295–301.
2. EMT to IMT, July 1896, Allegheny College.
3. Tucson Dialogues, Little Chapel.
4. IMT to VR, December 9, 1935, Allegheny.
5. Tarbell, All Day’s, p. 14. Tarbell said here that her friend’s name was Ida Hess, but everywhere else in her papers she indicates it was a Laura Seaver, sometimes spelled Seaber.
6. “Notes and Comments in Old Age,” Allegheny.
7. Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1934), pp. 9–11.
8. Esther Tarbell Aldrich, “Grandpa,” Allegheny.
9. All Day’s, pp. 65–66.
10. Tarbell, “The Uneasy Woman,” The American Magazine, January 1912, pp. 259–62.
2. PANTHEISTIC EVOLUTIONIST
All of Ida Tarbell’s quotes are taken from Chapter 3 of her autobiography, All in the Day’s Work (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939), unless otherwise noted.
1. IMT to John Reynolds, October 25, 1939, Allegheny College.
2. Allegheny Literary Quarterly manuscript, Allegheny.
3. Frederick Tisden interview, Allegheny.
4. Iris Barr interview, March 30, 1944, Drake Well Museum.
5. Comments of Robert Walker, Allegheny.
6. The Youngstown Vindicator, April 30, 1939.
7. Tarbell, “Woman Suffrage as 1 See It,” Allegheny.
8. WWT to William Bayliss, March 30, 1882, Western American Collections, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
3. A YOUNG LADY OF FINE LITERARY MIND
1. The Chautauqua Assembly Herald IX, no. 4, p. 1.
2. Mary Mullett, “A Famous Writer Who Never Intended to Write,” The American Magazine, January 1925, p. 64.
3. Tarbell, “Women in Journalism,” The Chautauquan, April 1887, pp. 393, 395.
4. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939), p. 89.
5. IMT to Ada Vincent, September 18, 1892, Huntington Library.
6. Interview with Iris Barr, March 30, 1944, Drake Well Museum.
7. Harriet Carter, “A Cooperative Experiment,” The Chautauquan, November 1890, pp. 224–26.
8. IMT to Mrs. George Warnsing, August 31, 1928, Allegheny.
9. Early writing in the Chautauqua Period, Allegheny.
10. “Bee” to IMT, January 25, 1942, Ella Tarbell Price collection.
11. Jesse Hurlbut, The Story of Chautauqua (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), p. 239.
12. IMT to her family, February 16, 1893, and August 8, 1892, Little Chapel.
13. Rudyard Kipling, Abaft the Funnell (New York: B. W. Dodge & Co., 1909), pp. 180–203; William James, Talks to Teachers (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1900).
14. IMT to Herbert Baxter Adams, March 28, 1893, Herbert B. Adams Collection, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University.
15. Tarbell, All Day’s, pp. 75–76; Tarbell, “Women as Inventors,” The Chautauquan, March 1887, pp. 355–57.
16. Tarbell, “The Queen of the Gironde,” The Chautauquan, March 1891, pp. 756–61.
17. Tarbell, All Day’s, p. 85.
18. Ibid., p. 78.
19. Ibid., p. 88.
20. T. L. Flood to IMT, Allegheny; IMT to her family, n.d., and October 26, 1891, January 25, 1892, February 2, 1893, Little Chapel.
21. IMT to family, January 9, 1892, Little Chapel.
22. Mullet, “Famous Writer,” p. 64.
23. Tarbell, All Day’s, p. 88.
4. UNE FEMME TRAVAILLEUSE
Tarbell’s correspondence to her family written from France is in the collection of the Little Chapel of All Nations in Tucson.
1. Tarbell, “The Compatriot,” New England Magazine, September 1894.
2. IMT to family, September 9, 1891.
3. Ibid.
4. IMT to family, January 19, 1892.
5. Ibid.
6. IMT to family, December 27, 1891.
7. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939), pp. 93–94.
8. Meadville Morning Star, June 27, 1895.
9. Tarbell, All Day’s, p. 92.
10. IMT to family, March 1, 1892.
11. IMT to family, November 13, 1891.
12. IMT to family, May 24, 1892.
13. IMT to family, December 27, 1891.
14. IMT to family, July 1893.
15. EMT to IMT, June 29, 1893.
16. SAT to IMT, October 15, 1892.
17. Tarbell, Madame Roland (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), pp. 232–33.
18. CDH to IMT, March 30, 1896, Allegheny College.
19. Peter Lyon, Success Story: The Life and Times of S. S. McClure (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), p. 14.
20. Ibid., p. 117.
21. IMT to family, July 1892.
22. IMT to family, December 1893.
5. THE FRENCH SALON
Tarbell’s correspondence to her family written from France is in the collection of the Little Chapel of All Nations in Tucson.
1. IMT to family, July 13, 1893.
2. IMT to APM, December 27, 1930, Allegheny College.
3. IMT to APM, September 18, 1936, Allegheny.
4. IMT to family, January 12, 1894.
5. Tucson Dialogues, Little Chapel.
6. Henry Wickham Steed, Through Thirty Years, 1892–1922, vol. I (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1924), p. 47.
7. IMT to family, June 2, 1893.
8. IMT to family, early March 1893.
9. IMT to family, February 18, 1893.
10. Tarbell, “Pasteur at Home,” McClure’s Magazine, September 1899, p. 333.
11. McClure’s, July 1894, pp. 177–85.
12. IMT to family, Summer 1893.
13. IMT to family, November 22, 1893.
14. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939), p. 143.
15. Madame Roland, Mémoires de Madame Roland, with Notes by C. A. Dauban (Paris: Henri Plon, 1864), p. 24.
16. Tarbell, Madame Roland (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), pp. 288–89.
17. Ibid., p. 173.
18. IMT to Alice French, January 18, 1906, Newberry Library.
19. Tarbell, Madame Roland, p. 233.
20. Tarbell, “The Compatriot,” New England Magazine, September 1894, pp. 83–91.
21. IMT to family, February 1894.
22. “The Edge of the Future,” McClure’s, January 1894, pp. 199–216. All mottoes are cited in this feature.
23. IMT to family, December 1, 1894. All her descriptions of the writers are in this letter.
24. IMT to family, March 16, 1894.
25. Tarbell, All Day’s, p. 145.
6. THE AMERICANIZATION OF IDA TARBELL
1. Harold Odum, ed., Masters of American Social Science (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1927).
2. Gardiner Green Hubbard to IMT, October 31, 1894, Allegheny College.
3. Tarbell, “Napoleon Bonaparte,” McClure’s Magazine, April 1895, p. 436.
4. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939), p. 152.
5. Profitable Advertising, October 15, 1897.
6. Tarbell, All Day’s, p. 153.
7. Ibid., p. 191.
8. Ibid., p. 180.
9. VR to APM, 1929 or 1930, Little Chapel.
10. Benjamin Thomas, Portrait for Posterity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1947), p. 110.
11. McClure’s, November 1895, p. 501.
12. Thomas, Portrait, pp. 173, 188–90; Tarbell-Hitchcock correspondence, Smith College.
13. November 6, 1897, memorandum at Allegheny; Ladies’ Home Jou
rnal, February and March 1928. Later biographers, possibly at the suggestion of Tarbell, cited this incident. See Carl Sandburg and Paul Angle, Mary Lincoln: Wife and Mother (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932).
14. Thomas, Portrait, p. 187.
15. The Nation, March 1, 1900, p. 164; Scrapbook, Drake Well Museum.
16. IMT to Herbert Baxter Adams, February 21, 1896, Herbert B. Adams Collection, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University.
17. SSM to IMT, May 2, 1938, Allegheny.
18. Samuel S. McClure, My Autobiography (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1914), p. 222.
19. IMT to APM, December 16, 1928, Allegheny.
20. CDH to IMT, n.d., but probably 1896, Allegheny.
21. Leslie’s Weekly, August 27, 1896.
22. William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York: Macmillan Co., 1946), pp. 300–301.
23. Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), p. 80.
24. Peter Lyon, Success Story: The Life and Times of S. S. McClure (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), p. 135.
25. Tarbell, All Day’s, p. 178.
26. IMT to WWT, 1908, Allegheny.
27. An 1897 memorandum, IMT to Candace Stone, February 24, 1938, Allegheny; SSM to JSP, June 30, 1933, Lilly Library; The Dial, March 1, 1899, and American Historical Review, April 1899.
28. Tarbell, All Day’s, p. 184. Langley may well have regarded Rock Creek as his own preserve. He convinced Congress to fund it because the Smithsonian Institution needed live animals as models for its taxidermists. However, Langley’s days ended in disappointment. In 1903, shortly before the Wrights flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, he attempted to launch a manned aerodome and failed. Eight years later it was discovered that Langley’s machine had merely been launched incorrectly. Had it been fitted with pontoons, it would have flown and Langley would have gotten the credit that went to the Wrights.