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Nor did Ida enjoy close friendships with other women. Throughout her life she found most women frivolous, uninteresting, and ill-informed. How else can we account for her half-joking remark, "The only reason I am glad I am a woman is because I don't have to marry one"? Despite her life-long assertion that women played an important a role in American life, she clearly absorbed her culture's belief that men had greater value. She admired and aspired to the qualities identified as "masculine" rather than those labeled "feminine". Certainly she learned to hold herself aloof from the world of "poor women" like Madame Roland.
In 1892, the most important man in Tarbell's life knocked on the door of her Paris apartment. Samuel Sidney McClure was a dynamo, an "idea man". His idea? McClure's Magazine. A challenge to the premier magazines of the day-- -The Century and The Nation--McClure's was to be a less expensive, more energetic, reform minded magazine. And Sam McClure needed a stable of dedicated, idealistic writers to make. He transformed Ida's life, giving it meaning, direction, purpose. He provided her with job security and emotional support, praising her work and depending upon her counsel. Who was this man who gave Ida so much, and in the end, caused her so much pain?
Irish by birth, McClure came to the United States at the age of nine with his impoverished widowed mother and three younger brothers. He worked his way through Illinois' Knox College where he met John Phillips, editor of the campus newspaper. Travelling east to Boston after graduation, he worked on a magazine on cycling, then a fashionable craze, and later wrote for The Century magazine. After founding a news syndicate with his wife Hattie, he came up with the idea of a magazine focusing on reform--journalism with a conscience. Together with John Phillips, he scoured the United States and Europe for talented writers to staff his publication. His travels brought him to Ida Tarbell's door.
McClure offered Ida a job as a writer. Should she return to the United
States and work for this charismatic young man, or stay in Paris and complete
her biography of Madame Roland? She proposed a compromise, promising McClure
articles for his magazine while she finished her book. Finally, her
manuscript completed, she returned to New York City and a job with S.S.
McClure in 1894. The best years of her life were before her.
Each issue of McClure's contained a biographical sketch of a famous person, and Ida Tarbell's first major responsibility at the magazine was to research and write a "Short Life of Napoleon." Lavishly illustrated, her series was a great hit, and sent circulation of the young magazine soaring. With her popular series on Abraham Lincoln, Ida Tarbell's name became a household word.
Yet, she met her sudden fame with humility--it made her uneasy. Women, she believed, were not supposed to be ambitious or seek recognition. They should be selfless and work for others, instead. Ida's humility was sincere, but it concealed insecurities--as a writer and a professional woman- -that she never resolved.
The environment at McClure's was friendly and energetic, vibrant with enthusiasm and a common goal--to point out the flaws in American life and encourage their correction. Although her first loyalty was always to Sam McClure, she trusted McClure's editor, John Phillips, to look at her work and criticize it. She submitted to his judgment believing he, of all people, knew that she was "really, underneath it all, no writer." Again, Ida revealed her lack of confidence and her dependence upon men's assessment of her work.
Despite her self-doubts, Sam McClure thought her work exceptional and increased her responsibilities at the magazine. Wytter Bynner, poetry editor at McClure's, described Ida as the central figure on the staff, as "firm as the Statue of Liberty and holding up the lantern of integrity."
"I can see her still, sitting there and gravely weighing prospects, possibilities, checking errors, smoothing differences," he recalled. "Her interest was mainly factual and moral rather than literary... Every fiber of her was firm and true...And this was not only in matters of magazine policy or contents. It was in personal matters too. She was pacifier and arbiter, philosopher and friend."But cigar-chewing Viola Roseboro, the literary editor with the vocabulary of a longshoreman, was a shrewd observer when it came to office politics and Ida's relationships with the young men on the magazine's staff.
"When I first knew her in the McClure's office, remotely enough for she had no idea of letting me close--her life largely consisted in holding people off--one of the things I sharply noted and watched with pleasure was the attitude toward her of the office full of young men. Another woman who was with us for a time demonstrated how offensive authority in a woman could be in such males... They all detested her and her assumed masculinity. [Ida] they doted on and frankly looked up to, accepting her innate power as above all theirs and entitling her to authority."Clearly, Ida had learned what it took to "make it" in the male world of journalism.
And "make it", she did.
Ida Tarbell's greatest work, her triumph in the masculine world of investigative reporting was The History of Standard Oil, published in installments by McClure's from 1902-1904. Ida's expose of the Standard Oil Trust, owned and controlled by John D. Rockefeller, was in part, an effort to vindicate her father. Franklin Tarbell and many other independent oil men fought Standard Oil's take-over of production in western Pennsylvania. The pressures Standard Oil exerted on these Independents drove her father and his friends into debt--Franklin even mortgaged the family's Titusville home to fight the Oil Trust. Ida always insisted that her motive in writing The History of Standard Oil was not to attack capitalism, as she was so often accused of doing, but to show how Rockefeller's illegal and unethical business practices destroyed competition in the oil industry and undermined the capitalist system.
She succeeded.
Her hard work, her research, her scrupulous attention to detail and careful assembling of evidence resulted in a classic work of expose journalism. It prompted investigation of the Oil Trust by the federal government which, in turn, led to the 1911 Supreme Court decision which "busted" the huge Rockefeller Trust.
Sadly, Franklin Tarbell did not live to see the fruits of his daughter's labors. He died in March, 1905, before her work was completed. His death muted her sense of accomplishment. Ida, always her own worst critic, was dissatisfied with the series. Her expose fell short, she said, of educating the public about Rockefeller's unscrupulous practices. But perhaps she was also wounded by critics who attributed the "spleen" of her attack on Rockefeller to her "spinsterhood"! In any event, she never allowed herself to enjoy the acclaim she so richly deserved as America's foremost investigative journalist.
As Ida's star was rising, her co-workers also added to the luster of McClure's magazine. Lincoln Steffens' expose of urban political corruption, The Shame of the Cities, and Ray Stannard Baker's series on the United Mine Workers' strike in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, The Right to Work, fueled the Progressive Movement sweeping across America. McClure's talented writers stirred public outcry for government action against corruption. Their unrelenting attack prompted a harried President Theodore Roosevelt to label these harbingers of a new kind of journalism, "muckrakers". Condemning them for their overzealous attention to corruption without the perspective of the "sky" above, Roosevelt called to mind the man with the muckrake in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress so absorbed in cleaning the filth surrounding him that he failed to see a celestial crown.
"There are beautiful things above and around them," TeddyRoosevelt exclaimed, "and if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is gone. If the whole picture is painted black there remains no hue whereby to single out the rascals for distinction from their fellows."
Ida Tarbell's fame as the "Lady Muckraker" singled her out from her male colleagues and prompted public fascination with her life. The result was the dramatization of her investigation of Standard Oil, The Lion and the Mouse, a hit of the 1905 theatrical season. "The Lion", John B. Ryder, was a thinly disguised John D. Rockefeller. "The Mouse", girl-reporter Shirley Rossmore, was Ida Tarbell. But the tale of Shirley/Ida's experience was transformed into a love story for public consumption. Shirley's motive in investigating Ryder is to vindicate her father, ruined by Ryder's oil trust. During her investigation, however, Shirley falls in love with Ryder's son. Although her expose results in "The Lion's" downfall, he admits the error of his ways and, on his deathbed gives his blessing to the union of "The Mouse" and his son.
Ironically, the public who made The Lion and the Mouse a box-office smash, who admired Ida's work dethroning the king of Standard Oil, was not ready for the single career woman, whose hard work, and devotion to her craft produced The History of Standard Oil. How did it feel for the reserved Ida to see her "story" on the stage, yet altered in violation of the principle that defined her life--that of always putting her head before her heart?
But even in the bright glow of McClure's success as the beacon of Progressive Reform were the shadows of its demise. Sam McClure's enthusiasm for reform led him to develop a grandiose scheme to solve the problems his writers exposed. In 1905 he returned from a Europe with a plan to found a new magazine, McClure's Universal Journal, the centerpiece of an enormous business empire that also included a University, planned on a correspondence course model; a Universal Library, publishing books for mass consumption; a Life Insurance Company; a Bank; and a Settlement Project, providing low-cost housing.
McClure's loyal staff was appalled. Complicating matters was the discovery that McClure was having an affair with Florence Wilkinson. The revelation of an affair with yet another woman who threatened to publish his love letters upset his staff who had worked long and hard to maintain the moral and ethical integrity of the magazine. Had he lost his mind? they wondered.
Ida tried to convince her boss to abandon his wild schemes. Together with John Phillips she pointed out that his plan for a business empire was inconsistent with the anti-big business stance of McClure's, and that his affair with Wilkinson jeopardized the high moral tone the magazine took in its attacks on corruption. His plans, she warned, could destroy McClure's and risk the careers of its staff. But Ida failed. Consequently, she, Phillips, Baker, and Steffens left McClure's and began publication of The American Magazine in 1906.
That Ida felt let down by her mentor is an understatement. He filled the limited emotional needs she permitted herself. She idolized him. In her eyes, he was gallant, heroic; she loved him from afar. But he betrayed her. His grandiose schemes jeopardized her economic security and his infidelities violated her sense of morality. The woman wronged, she left him. Her departure from McClure's was a divorce, of sorts. And in 1906, at the age of 49, she was forced to begin again.
But this last phase of Ida Tarbell's life and career at The American Magazine was less inspiring and less inspired. A kinder and gentler McClure's, The American Magazine did not choose to expose the wrongs of society. Instead, it reported on how those wrongs were righted. Consequently, it lacked the focus, the bite, the power, of its model. During her years at The American, Tarbell completed two major series: The first, a history of America's tariff policy, prompted an invitation to serve on the U.S. Tariff Commission (which she declined). Widely read, it was met with acclaim. But Ida's second series on American women engendered the first real public criticism she experienced and forever tarnished her career.
On her own, unable to trust anyone ever again as she had trusted Sam McClure, Ida must have looked back at her life and questioned the choices she made. Introspection brought disillusionment and despair. The personal sacrifices she had made for her career seemed all for naught, jeopardized by a frivolous woman--Florence Wilkerson--and a besotted man. Was Ida jealous of Florence? Did she envy, yet despise, her "womanly weakness"? Was her anger at Florence generalized to include other women who challenged her or threatened her in any way? It was at this juncture in her life that Ida began to identify herself as anti-suffragist and wrote the articles later published as The Business of Being a Woman (1914) and The Ways of Woman (1915).
Conceived as a series to explore "the nature of woman", Ida's stated purpose in writing The Business of Being a Woman was to determine if women were suited for suffrage. The agitation for women's suffrage and the "unease" the issue prompted throughout America disturbed her, she said. Her conclusion? That women's discontentment with their lives was the fault of feminists who, she believed, "belittled" women's traditional role as wives and mothers. Deeply influenced by Freudian theory then in vogue among American intellectuals, Ida blamed women's unhappiness on their denial of their femininity and their desire to be like men. Once women accepted their "true nature", she concluded, their discontentment would be eased. Only then would they would find real happiness.
A woman's most important "business" in life was as a wife and mother. Women, Ida claimed, should be educated not for themselves, but for educating the youth--meaning young men--of tomorrow.
"The real service of the 'higher education', the freedom to take a part in whatever interests or stimulates her," she proclaimed, "lies in the fact that it fits he rintellectually to be a companion worthy of a child. She should know that unless she does this thing for him he goes forth with his mind still in swaddling clothes, with the chances that it will not be released until relentless life tears off the bands."In this remarkable passage from The Business of Being a Woman, Ida repudiated the very education she received at Allegheny College, an education that was the foundation of her career as a journalist and historian.
She warned young women away from careers in "masculine" fields. While they might prove themselves "competent", they would certainly never achieve greatness because women were incapable of it. It was not in their "nature". And the woman who sought to "make a Man of herself" was doomed to failure. If there were some women who appeared to succeed in the man's world outside the home, she warned,
"Nature and Society must not permit her triumph to appear desireable to the young. They must be made to understand what her winnings have cost in lovely and desireable things. They must know that the unrest which drove her to the attempt is not necessarily satisfied by her triumph, that it is merely stifled and may break out at any time in vagaries and follies. They must be made to realize the essential barrenness of her triumph, its lack of savor and tang of life, the multitude of makeshifts she must practice to recompense her for the lack of the great adventure of natural living."
Was this Ida Tarbell's comment on her own life? Did she regret the choices she made? Did she see her "triumphs" as "barren"--an especially telling term? Were her words a plea for understanding, or was she oblivious to the implications of what she was saying? Was hers an unexamined life?
When she spoke of the high price of success in "men's world" of politics, business, and journalism perhaps Ida was revealing what she herself had endured:
"...[I]f she succeeds she must suppress her national emotions and meet the world with a surface as non-resilient as she conceives that of man to be in his dealings with the world.... She incases herself in an unnatural armor...She must overcome her own nature, put it in bonds, cripple it, if she is to do her work. Here is a fundamental reason for the failure of woman to reach the first rank. She has sacrificed the most wonderful part of her endowment, that which when trained gives her vision, sharpens her intuitions...The common characterization of this atrophied woman is that she is 'cold'...self-centered and intensely personal. Let a woman make success in a trade or profession her exclusive and sufficient ambition, and the result, though it may be brilliant, is repellant."
These are chilling words, indeed. Is this how Ida really saw herself: cold, self-centered, atrophied, repellant? A being unworthy of the name of "woman"?
Ida did believe that some women were born with:
"...bachelor's souls -- an interesting and sometimes even charming, though always incomplete, possession! More often they are women who by the bungling machinery of society have been cast aside. There is no reason why these women should be idle, miserable, selfish, or antisocial. There are rich lives for them to work out and endless needs for them to meet. But they are not the women upon whom society depends; they are not the ones who build a nation."Rather, she argued, "the women who count...are at the great business of founding and filling those natural social centers which we call homes." Even though she may have seen herself as a "bachelor soul", she disparaged her contribution to American life.
When asked if women should vote, a right her mother believed in and fought to achieve, Ida was emphatic in her response. "No!"
She did not think women's suffrage could or would improve America, as so many of its supporters believed. She thought that women, ruled by their emotions, would easily be misled by men vastly more experienced in the world of politics than they. She even argued that the mere act of voting, participating in that world outside the home, could even irreparably damage women's special "powers" at home.
Her many critics were dismayed that such a famous figure as Ida Tarbell could hold such outmoded beliefs, and publicly align herself with the opponents of women's suffrage. They could not understand how this famous, accomplished woman could give voice to these words. Indeed, Ida Tarbell should have been a "poster woman" for the suffrage movement! But to her critics she replied:
"It is really worth being 'old', ...even worth being twitted in public on that fact by my younger sisters, to be so proud and so sure of anything as I am of the place and the value of women in the world--without the ballot."
Listening to these words, one can only wonder if Ida Tarbell resented a younger generation of women coming of age, a generation who took for granted, even diminished, many of the things she had fought to accomplish over the course of her lifetime and career, even as she had rejected the actions of her mother's generation of reformers? Did she envy their confidence? Was she jealous of the opportunities and choices they had before them? Did she regret the choices she, herself, had made?
In a letter to her old friend and colleague John Phillips who chided her on her views of women's suffrage, she revealed her ambivalence:
"We [women] seem to me in our effort to enlarge our lives and to serve society better to look too much to the way men try to do these things. That's what I mean by my ugly and unsatisfactory phrase 'Making a Man of Herself.' I have done it myself and I have watched hundreds of other women do it. Somewhere in there something is wrong..."
Did she long for the friendship and understanding of other accomplished women of her day? She told John Phillips:
"I don't believe you know how hard it is really for me to feel that I am not altogether with you and Jane Addams and a lot of other women, every one of them worth vastly more to society than I am."But still she held herself apart from these women--Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt--who she claimed were "worth vastly more to society" than she. Did she, fundamentally, think herself better than they? Or did she feel threatened by their confidence and competence?
Although her male colleagues respected and liked her, Ida was described by one of her female associates as someone who believed few women were her peers:
"I never saw [her] talk to any woman except mos unconsciously de haut en bas [high to low]. It is so natural, simple and gracious, it seems people do not get onto its subtleties, but it amused me much."
When Ida donned the protective armor of the masculine world in which she worked, it molded her. Although she gave lip service to "the ways of woman" and women's traditional roles, one senses condescension in her manner. She seems to have grouped women into two categories: those who were her inferiors and those who posed a threat to her. She viewed most women as her inferiors- -emotional, unsophisticated, beings--incapable of governing the world outside their homes. Can we ever really forget, or forgive, her remark that the reason she was glad she was a woman was because she did not have to marry one? Other women--the leaders in the Settlement House Movement, the Women's Suffrage Movement, or skilled young journalists and writers like Willa Cather with whom she worked for a time at McClure's--were challengers to her hard-earned position as an exceptional woman. Instead of welcoming them as her peers or mentoring them, she felt threatened by them. But as she distanced herself from them and disparaged their goals, she belittled her own accomplishments.
If Ida never decided whether the price she paid for the life she chose was too high, she certainly believed that other women should stay at home, in the wings of the world's stage.
Don't do as I did, she argued. Do as I say.
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