IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER Read online

  Praise for Kathleen Brady’s Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker

  “Kathleen Brady’s triumphant portrait of Ida Tarbell will last for generations. No other biography of Ida Tarbell is likely to provide a move vivid look at this endlessly fascinating woman.” —Doris Kearns Goodwin, 2014

  “Kathleen Brady brings to life the personality of Ida Tarbell, queen of the muckrakers, who was one of the first women to break the gender gap in American journalism … The biography is replete with revealing anecdotes.” —The New York Times

  “A graceful … biography.” —Time Magazine

  “It is with some joy that I read Kathleen Brady’s fine new biography, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker, and have at last made the acquaintance of surely the bravest and most determined woman in American journalism and among the most diligent and scrupulous in her work.” —Gloria Emerson, Washington Journalism Review

  “Based on thorough research in manuscript collections and on a knowledge of most of the relevant secondary literature IDA TARBELL: Portrait of a Muckraker is a well-written and lively book. It should be read by all those interested in the history of journalism and the Progressive era as well as by those concerned with the role of women in American history.” —Allen F. Davis, American Historical Review

  “Admirable … Brady has been remarkably successful in her attempt to reconstruct the interior life of a subject who does not yield easily to such examination.” —James Boylan, Columbia Journalism Review

  IDA TARBELL

  PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

  KATHLEEN BRADY

  For my mother,

  Frances Sellmeyer Brady

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  I BEGINNINGS

  1 An Unaccommodating Child

  2 Pantheistic Evolutionist

  3 A Young Lady of Fine Literary Mind

  II EXALTATION

  4 Une Femme Travailleuse

  5 The French Salon

  Photographs

  III SUCCESS

  6 The Americanization of Ida Tarbell

  7 The Lady of Muckrake

  8 Unexplored Land

  9 A Second Crusade

  10 A Bad Woman

  IV VALOR

  11 Workhorse

  12 At Rest

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Ida Tarbell is the first woman I ever encountered in my history books. I was nine years old and my female consciousness was embryonic indeed, but the discovery of a woman in the masculine preserve of American greatness captivated and encouraged me. I had just discovered the delights of writing and of being published in our mimeographed school newspaper and when I saw her in our history book described as a crusader and reformer, I understood for the first time that words had the power not only to capture life, but to change it.

  When I decided to write this book in 1979 women of achievement were no longer rare, and it was poignant to recall that she had been my only touchstone. Ida Tarbell now interested me more as an investigative journalist than as a woman, yet as I worked I found that Tarbell’s femininity was a crucially important aspect of her, albeit one she tried to deny. It was like a strange piece of a jigsaw puzzle, which she could neither fit into the rest of her life nor totally ignore.

  In her youth she had often wondered what it meant to be a woman and how a woman could create a fruitful life for herself. She looked in history books, statistical records, and among inventors listed in the U.S. Patent Office, but she never dared look within herself.

  Instead she focused on the world outside her, taking on such formidable subjects as the Standard Oil Company, the injustices of the tariff system, and the sufferings of the factory worker. Her political ideals were progressive, but her ideas on women were hackneyed. In terms of woman’s advancement she was a weather vane, not an engine of change.

  She seemed to satisfy no one, least of all herself, but satisfaction was not what she asked of life. What she sought was accomplishment. Hers is the story of how one person handled the human dilemma of daring great things, despite galling limitations, and succeeded admirably.

  PART I

  BEGINNINGS

  One

  An Unaccommodating Child

  In May 1873, a tall, silk-hatted businessman walked through the streets of Titusville, Pennsylvania, extending to a distrustful local populace the olive branch of a fresh deal. Thwarted the year before in his attempt to take over the entire oil business, John D. Rockefeller, onetime purveyor of groceries, was trying again. In his early middle age, a Clevelander dissatisfied with having control of only one-third of the market, he took the precaution of visiting the oil region in a party of colleagues. Through his associates, he asked independent petroleum producers to join with him in limiting output and maintaining price. Most declined, spurning him and his Standard Oil Company. “Sic semper tyrannis,” gloated a feisty newspaper editor when Rockefeller decamped. Rockefeller himself felt not defeated, merely set back.

  On Titusville’s Main Street, in a tower room reached by a steep stair, Ida Tarbell squinted into her microscope. Upset to have been deceived by the matter of the Six Days of Creation, fretful over where she fit in a chaotic cosmic scheme, the girl had decided to trust only what she could discover for herself.

  With her savings, Ida had purchased a microscope and submitted to its powers such diverse objects as rock salt and hangnails, fly wings and petals; if the minister could not tell her what created the buttercup, she would ask the buttercup itself. At fifteen, she was tall for her age—nearly six feet—and possessed of one other striking feature—a widow’s peak from which flowed her long dark hair. God, Nature, or some Darwinian process had also granted her ambition—a trait she hardly recognized or admitted to.

  If the young girl and the astute entrepreneur seemed unrelated—if Rockefeller’s sway over oil and wealth seemed to have little to do with the plain girl’s diligent investigations in the tower room—they would have everything to do with the woman young Ida Tarbell would become.

  Fate, in the peregrinations of her ancestors, had given her life in a most unpromising spot. Northwestern Pennsylvania is a place of bitter winters, muddy springs, and scraggy acreage. Pioneers flowed around it in waves seeking more prosperous pastures, and Ida’s own father was inclined to follow them. When she was born on November 5, 1857, in a Hatch Hollow log cabin, he was working land in Iowa, where he planned to bring his wife and baby.

  Franklin Sumner Tarbell’s family had cleared America’s land and fought its wars. The earliest Tarbell recorded in America was Thomas, who in 1632 purchased land in Watertown, Massachusetts, near Boston. The Tarbells pushed up to Salem where John, who fought the Indians in King Philip’s War, married Mary, whose mother Rebecca Nurse had been hanged for witchcraft in 1692. The family lived in New Hampshire and Massachusetts until William, a veteran of the War of 1812, settled briefly in Oxford, New York, where his son Franklin was born in 1827.

  Franklin Tarbell was tall and spare, traits he passed on to Ida. Always fast on his feet, he was like a wire that could coil and spring, and was given to outbursts of frantic activity. His penetrating blue eyes sometimes twinkled but usually peered from deep sockets, which gave him the intense gaze of an evangelist. Children loved him and teased him about his whistling and his endless hunger for casaba seeds.

  He loved learning but was the family’s least accomplished speller. Franklin’s favorite books, besides religious ones, told of travel. He delighted in the adventures of Henry Morton Stanley and eagerly attended the circus, which brought to Pennsylvania animals from India and Africa.

>   On the maternal side, Ida Tarbell was a McCullough. Alexander M’Cullough, a wheelwright of Scotch ancestry, came to Boston from the north of Ireland in about 1730 and helped to settle Pelham, Massachusetts. In 1785 his son James married Hannah Raleigh, said to be the nearest living kin to the famous Sir Walter. Their grandson married Sarah Seabury, descendant of the first Episcopal bishop and, through him, was related to John Alden of the Mayflower. To this couple was born Esther Ann McCullough, Ida’s mother.

  Ida Minerva Tarbell was the firstborn and the only one of her siblings who would not be given a forebear’s name. Her twenty-seven-year-old mother, far from her husband and still under her parents’ roof, perhaps found this the only rebellion possible.

  At Ida’s birth in 1857 a financial panic raged. Land speculation had bubbled until the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company had the impact of a sharp pin on an overinflated balloon. In Iowa, construction of railway lines stopped abruptly, leaving half-laid tracks in the middle of vast empty fields. Buildings went roofless, and Franklin Tarbell was forced to walk back to his family. He crossed Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio on foot, earning what little money he could by teaching along the way. When at last he arrived home, his eighteen-month-old daughter, indignant to see him take her mother in his arms, cried, “Go away, bad man!”

  An amazing discovery allowed him to stay with his family. Edwin Drake, Moses searching for the promised land of oil, had struck at the earth and brought forth wealth. He was the agent of hopeful investors who had commissioned him, a vagrant and onetime railway conductor, to drill for oil. Until then oil for patent medicines, wheel lubrication, and lamps could be gathered only by skimming what oozed from the ground. Drake tapped a supply that could be refined into what mankind urgently needed—cheap illumination.

  Men greedily tried to collect the supply before it disappeared. The precious fluid could be anywhere, and there were theories on the best places to look. One held that a subterranean river of oil ran under natural waterways, so drills needled streams and riverbanks. Then it was hypothesized that hills were but sacs of petroleum, so derricks were shifted to higher ground. Finally, when oil was discovered in every pasture, the earth’s bounty was fully confirmed.

  Franklin Tarbell, by turns teacher, farmer, river pilot, and joiner, saw in this new enterprise the chance to get ahead. He perfected a wooden tank that would hold a hundred or more barrels of oil and thus managed to earn more money than he had thought he could make in a lifetime.

  When Ida was three years old and her brother Will three months, Franklin loaded the family into a wagon and for two days and three nights drove them over mud, rocks, and short stretches of corduroy road until they reached their new home in the encampment of Cherry Run, Pennsylvania.

  Cherry Run, like the rest of the petroleum regions, was squalid. The teeming population was ragged, muddy, and greasy, but the appearance of poverty was deceptive, for they bathed in oil. An observer noted: “No one lives amid this sea of oil but those who are making money, and all know that the oldest tatters are good enough for the filth amid which they dwell. Men think of oil, talk of oil, dream of oil; the smell and taste of oil predominate in all they eat and drink; they breathe an atmosphere of oil-gas, and the clamor of ‘ile, ile—ile’ rings in one’s ears from day-light until midnight.”

  The pervasive smell of gas nauseated visitors, but exhilarated oilmen liked even petroleum’s taste. Many drank two or three glasses daily to prevent chills and colds.1

  Women and children had to adjust to the satanic landscape of hissing steam, thrusting pumps, bellowing ungreased wheels, and the treacherous mire that devoured planks carefully laid out as sidewalks.

  From all indications, Esther Tarbell did not adapt willingly. She had been raised to remember always that the blood of Sir Walter Raleigh, of Massachusetts patriots, and of Episcopal hierarchy flowed in her veins. Though the McCulloughs lived in a log house in western Pennsylvania, the rule of a proper New England upbringing obtained. Esther and her sisters had been sent to live with an aunt near Albany to attend normal school and qualify as teachers. For a dozen years before her marriage, Esther had taught school. She would have continued, she told her children, had her mother not said working was improper for a wife.

  The early days of married life were not auspicious. Instead of large acreage in Iowa and continuation of the family tradition of settling the country, Esther Tarbell was living in a place of filth where there were as many prostitutes as decent women. She was forty miles and an era away from her parents’ pastoral farm, and she would never forget the indignity. Thirty years later she wrote to Ida, “I indured [sic] enough at Rouseville for all the rest of my life.”2

  The transition was as difficult for the child as the parent. Ida had played with lambs and colts at her grandfather’s farm. Now a creek raced by the house and open pits of oil gaped not far from their door. She suffered most from a loss of freedom to explore. Warned not to walk on one side of the house and not to climb on the derricks in the front yard, the rebellious Ida was often scolded and once switched for disobedience.

  “My first reaction to my new surroundings was one of acute dislike. It aroused me to a revolt which is the first thing I am sure I remember about my life—the birth in me of conscious experience. This revolt did not come from natural depravity; on the contrary it was a natural and righteous protest against having the life and home I had known, and which I loved, taken away without explanation and a new scene, a new set of rules which I did not like, suddenly imposed,” she later wrote.

  In defiance, shortly after her third birthday, she tried to run away. She followed a path as far as she could but was finally overwhelmed by an embankment too high to climb. In adult life she recalled it as a dramatic scene in a play: “Never in all these years since have I faced defeat, known that I must retreat, that I have not been again that little figure with the black mountain in front of it.”

  Her baby brother Will intruded on her world and Ida rebelled again. To see if he could float, she led him onto a footbridge and tossed him into the creek. His billowing skirts buoyed him until a workman heard his screams and fished him out. She never recalled her spanking, only the joy of satisfied curiosity. She and the world were too young to term this sibling rivalry.

  Despite little Will’s brush with drowning, the threat of Ida’s childhood was fire, not water. A terrible derrick explosion occurred soon after Abraham Lincoln was elected president and Confederates attacked Fort Sumter. Taking in one burned victim who had managed to crawl to the Tarbell door, Esther turned her alcove “parlor” into a sick room for three months and allowed her best quilts and comforters to be stained with soothing linseed oil.

  Futile attempts were made to shield Ida from witnessing other such horrors. When three women died in a house fire in the early 1860s, Esther tried to ban Ida from the wake; but the curious child stole into the place where the bodies were laid out and lifted the sheets that covered them. The sight of flesh singed red and charred black returned to her in nightmares for weeks and must have lodged permanently in her psyche. When she was elderly, a filling station attendant accidentally spilled some gasoline on her. She surprised her companion by turning in an instant from a calm pleasant woman into a shrew hysterically screaming about fire.3

  If the town was a tinderbox in physical terms, its citizens also risked eternal fire in the usual ways. Good fought evil, sanctimony battled passion, decency met hedonism. The first step was taken toward forming a God-fearing community when some, the Tarbells among them, erected a white frame church with a steeple that poked heavenward beside the derricks. When the congregation voted to become Methodist, the Presbyterian Tarbells democratically converted. To regulate boomtown emotions, the group built a school and attempted to drive out prostitution by setting adrift Ben Hogan’s Floating Palace, which literally floated twenty miles down the Allegheny River before the exhausted revelers awoke.

  Though each man was still his own policeman by dint of
his gun, fireman by virtue of his bucket, and banker by means of his money belt, a town named Rouseville began to coalesce. Those with a preference for order left the mud flats where individual pine shanties abutted derricks and regrouped along the bluff. Franklin Tarbell moved his family to a house on a hillside that had never been drilled nor stripped of trees and shrubs. In the spring, leafy branches obscured the derricks below and all around them flourished white shadflowers and red maples, laurel, and azaleas. In autumn, the foliage gleamed, not with petroleum, but in crimsons and russets, and the air was crisp and clean in Ida’s nostrils. She loved the high-up places where she would take her pony. She loved climbing trees where she would perch in what her grandmother called “the loon’s nest.” When life was not sufficiently adventurous, she imagined herself as Miss Muffet, a pirate, a fairy godmother, or she marveled over the Civil War.

  Ida and Will followed it through a series of engravings in Harper’s Weekly. They lay on their stomachs, heels in the air, absorbing every detail of the Army of the Potomac encamped, under review, or charging into battle. Franklin Tarbell, now in his mid-thirties, did not go to the front, but was an ardent Republican who saw nobility in the cause. When Lincoln died he and Esther were both so grieved that Ida was astonished that something outside their own world could matter so much.

  Iron tanks soon superseded the wooden ones Franklin Tarbell produced, and he began to drill for oil and to sell lumber from the land his drills cleared. Those who stayed in the fast-changing oil business were those who could adapt. Others “went back to the States” as returning to the more civilized parts of America was known. Franklin Tarbell stayed.

  He was among the first to exploit the discovery of Pithole. It was the most legendary of oil rush cities where petroleum was so plentiful that pumps fighting fires struck oil instead of water and literally added fuel to flames. Firemen developed catapults to pelt out blazes with mud.