left out of the original conspiracy, and in a number of cases (as was
soon to be shown) outraged chiefly for that reason, sent a committee to
the Oil Region to see what was doing. The committee was joyfully
welcomed, partly because its chairman was well known to them all. It was
my Rouseville neighbor, Henry H. Rogers.
Mr. Rogers had left the Creek in 1867 and become a partner in the Pratt
firm of refiners and exporters of Brooklyn, New York. He and his
associates saw as clearly as his old friends in the Oil Region that—let
the South Improvement Company succeed in its plan for a
monopoly—everybody not in the ring would be forced to go out of
business. The New York men seem to have been convinced that the plans
for saving themselves which the organized producers and refiners were
laying stood a good chance of success, for back in New York Mr. Rogers
gave a long interview to the _Herald_. He did not mince words. Cleveland
and Pittsburgh were “straining every nerve to create a monopoly.” They
would succeed if their control of the railroads continued. He and his
fellows felt as the men in the Oil Region did, that the breaking up of
the South Improvement Company was a “necessity for self-existence.” They
were as bold in action as in words, for when a little later the
president of the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller
(to date, the only beneficiary of the South Improvement Company), sought
an interview in New York with Mr. Rogers and his committee he was
treated cavalierly and according to the newspapers retreated after a
brief reception “looking badly crestfallen.”
Thus was the Henry H. Rogers of 1872.
Out of the long struggle begun as a scrimmage came finally a well
developed cooperative movement guaranteeing fair play all around. It was
signed by the Standard Oil Company’s representative and all the
oil-carrying railroads. The railroads indeed were the first to succumb,
knowing as they did that what they were doing was contrary to the common
law of the land, and being thundered at as they were by the press and
politicians of all the country. “I told Willie not to go into that
scheme,” said old Commodore Vanderbilt; and Jay Gould whined, “I didn’t
sign until everybody else had.”
Out of the alarm and bitterness and confusion, I gathered from my
father’s talk a conviction to which I still hold—that what had been
undertaken was _wrong_. My father told me it was as if somebody had
tried to crowd me off the road. Now I knew very well that, on this road
where our little white horse trotted up and down, we had our side, there
were rules, you couldn’t use the road unless you obeyed those rules, it
was not only bad manners but dangerous to attempt to disobey them. The
railroads—so said my father—ran through the valley by the consent of the
people; they had given them a right of way. The road on which I trotted
was a right of way. One man had the same right as another, but the
railroads had given to one something they would not give to another. It
was wrong. I sometimes hear learned people arguing that in the days of
this historic quarrel everybody took rebates, it was the accepted way.
If they had lived in the Oil Region through those days in 1872, they
would have realized that, far from being accepted, it was fought tooth
and nail. Everybody did not do it. In the nature of the offense
everybody could not do it. The strong wrested from the railroads the
privilege of preying upon the weak, and the railroads never dared give
the privilege save under promise of secrecy.
In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make. He can
choose the fair and open path, the path which sound ethics, sound
democracy, and the common law prescribe, or choose the secret way by
which he can get the better of his fellow man. It was that choice made
by powerful men that suddenly confronted the Oil Region. The sly,
secret, greedy way won in the end, and bitterness and unhappiness and
incalculable ethical deterioration for the country at large came out of
that struggle and others like it which were going on all over the
country—an old struggle with old defeats but never without men willing
to make stiff fights for their rights, even if it cost them all they
ever hoped to possess.
At all events, uncomprehending as I was in that fine fight, there was
born in me a hatred of privilege—privilege of any sort. It was all
pretty hazy to be sure, but still it was well, at fifteen, to have one
definite plank based on things seen and heard, ready for a future
platform of social and economic justice if I should ever awake to my
need of one. At the moment, however, my reflection did not carry me
beyond the wrongness of the privilege which had so upset our world,
contradicting as it did the principle of consideration for others which
had always been basic in our family and religious teaching. I could not
think further in this direction, for now my whole mind was absorbed by
the overwhelming discovery that the world was not made in six days of
twenty-four hours each.
My interest in science, which meant for me simply larger familiarity
with plants and animals and rocks, had set me looking over my father’s
books. Among them I found Hugh Miller’s “Testimony of the Rocks,” and
sat down to read it. Gradually I grasped with a combination of horror
and amazement that, instead of a creation, the earth was a growth—that
the creative days I had so clearly visualized were periods, eons long,
not to be visualized. It was all too clear to deny, backed as it was by
a wealth of geological facts. If this were true, why did the Bible
describe so particularly the work of each day, describe it and declare,
“And the evening and the morning were the first day,” etc., and end,
“and he rested on the seventh day”? Hugh Miller labored to prove that
there was no necessary contradiction between Genesis and Geology. But I
was too startled to accept what he said. A Bible that needed
reconciling, that did not mean what it said, was not the rock I had
supposed my feet were on; that words could have other meaning than that
I had always given them, I had not yet grasped.
I was soon to find that the biblical day was disturbing a great part of
the Christian world, was a chief point of controversy in the church. I
had hardly made my discovery when Genesis and Geology appeared in the
pulpit of the Methodist Church of Titusville, Pennsylvania. Filling this
pulpit at that time was a remarkable and brilliant man, Amos Norton
Craft. Dr. Craft was an indefatigable student. It was told of him to the
wonder of the church that he laid aside yearly $200 of his meager salary
to buy books. Like all the ministers of those days, he was obliged to
face the challenges of science. Many of his fellows—most of them, so far
as my knowledge went—took refuge in heated declarations that the
conclusions that science was making were profane, godless, an affront to
divinity. Not so Dr. Craft. He accepted them, strove to fit them into
the Christian system. He startled his congregation and interested the
town profoundly by announcing an evening course of lectures on the
reconciliation of Genesis and Geology. The first of the series dealt
with the universe. I had never known there was one. The stars, yes. I
could name planets and constellations and liked nothing better than to
lie on my back and watch them; but a universe with figures of its size
was staggering. I went away from those Sunday night lectures fascinated,
horror-stricken, confused—a most miserable child, for not only was my
idea of the world shattered, not only was I left dizzily gyrating in a
space to which there was no end, but the whole Christian system I had
been taught was falling in a general ruin. I began to feel that I ought
to leave the church. I did not believe what I was supposed to believe. I
did not have the consolation of pride in emancipation which I find youth
frequently has when it finds itself obliged to desert the views it has
been taught. Indeed, I doubted greatly whether it was an emancipation.
What troubled me most was that if I gave up the church I had nothing to
put in place of something it had given me which seemed to me of supreme
importance; summed up, that something was in the commandment, “Do as you
would be done by.” Certainly nothing which Hugh Miller or Herbert
Spencer, whom I began to read in 1872 in the _Popular Science Monthly_,
helped me here. They gave me nothing to take the place of what had
always been the unwritten law of the Tarbell household, based as I knew
upon the teachings of the Bible. The gist of the Bible, as it had come
to me, was what I later came to call the brotherhood of man. Practically
it was that we should do nothing, say nothing, that injured another.
That was a catastrophe, and when it happened in our household—an
inarticulate household on the whole, though one extraordinarily
conscious of the minds and hearts of one another—when it happened the
whole household was shadowed for hours and it was not until by sensitive
unspoken efforts the injured one had been consoled, that we went on
about our usual ways.
This was something too precious to give up, and something for which I
did not find a substitute in the scientific thinking and arguing in
which I was floundering. The scientists offered me nothing to guide me
in human relations, and they did not satisfy a craving from which I
could not escape; that was the need of direction, the need of that which
I called God and which I still call God. Perhaps I was a calculating
person, a cautious one. At all events I made up my mind to wait and find
out something which better took the place of those things which I so
valued. It cost me curious little compromises, compromises that I had to
argue myself into. The chief came in repeating the creed.
I could repeat, “conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,”
because for many years I did not know what that meant. It was the
resurrection that disturbed me. I could not accept it, nor could I
accept the promise of personal immortality. That had become a grave
doubt with me when I first grew dizzy with the consciousness of the
vastness of the universe. Why should I expect to exist forever as a
conscious mind in that vast emptiness? What would become of me? I did
not want to think about it, and I came then to a conviction that has
never left me: that as far as I am concerned immortality is not my
business, that there is too much for me to attend to in this mortal life
without overspeculation on the immortal, that it is not necessary to my
peace of mind or to my effort to be a decent and useful person, to have
a definite assurance about the affairs of the next world. I say this
with humility, for I believe that some such assurance is necessary to
the peace and usefulness of many persons, and I am the last to scoff at
the revelations they claim.
And yet it was hard to give up heaven. Among the books on our
shelves—many of them orthodox religious books—was one that had a
frontispiece which I had accepted as a definite picture of the heaven to
which I was to go. Jehovah sat on a throne, cherubim and seraphim around
him, rank upon rank of angels filling the great amphitheater below. I
always wondered where my place would be, and whether there would be any
chance to work up in heaven as there seemed to be on earth, to become a
cherub.
But giving up this heaven was by no means the greatest tragedy in my
discovery that the world was not made in six days of twenty-four hours
each. The real tragedy was the birth in me of doubt and uncertainty.
Nothing was ever again to be final. Always I was to ask myself when
confronted with a problem, a system, a scheme, a code, a leader, “How
can I accept without knowing more?” The quest of the truth had been born
in me—the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of
man’s quests.
It was while groping my way, frightened like a lost child, I found a
word to hold to—evolution. Things grew. What did they grow from? They
all started somewhere. I was soon applying the idea. Nothing seemed to
matter now, except to find the starting point of things and, having
that, see why and how they grew into something else. How were you to go
to work to find the start of life? With a microscope. And I soon was in
the heat of my first intellectual passion, my first and greatest—that
for the microscope. With a microscope I could perhaps get an answer to
my mystification about the beginning of life, where it started; and
then, I believed, I should find God again.
I was a practical person apparently, for I at once began to save my
money and soon had enough to put into a small instrument. The house in
Titusville, like many of its period, had a tower room, a steep staircase
running up to it. This room was surrounded on three sides with big
double windows. I begged to have it for my own. Here I was allowed to
set up shop; here I had my desk, my papers, and my microscope; here I
was alone with my problems. That little microscope had a good deal to do
with my determination to go to college. If I was to become a
microscopist—I had already adopted that word—I must study, get an
education.
This determination of mine to get an education, go to college, was
chiefly due, no doubt, to the active crusade going on in those days for
what we called woman’s rights. Ours was a yeasty time, the ferment
reaching into every relation of life, attacking and remodeling every
tradition, every philosophy. As my father was hard hit by the attack on
his conception of individualism in a democracy—freedom with strictest
consideration for the rights and needs of others—as I was struggling
with all the handicaps of my ignorance, with the nature of life, a
search for God, so my mother was facing a little reluctantly a
readjustment of her status in the home and in society. She had grown up
with the Woman’s Rights movement. Had she never married, I feel sure she
would have sought to “vindicate her sex” by seeking a higher education,
possibly a profession. The fight would have delighted her. If she had
gone to Iowa she surely would have soon joined the agitation led there
in the late fifties by Amelia Bloomer, the inventor of the practical and
ugly costume which still carries her name, the real founder of dress
reform. We owe it to Amelia Bloomer that we can without public ridicule
wear short skirts and stout boots, be as sensible as our feminine
natures permit—which is not saying much for us when it comes to
fashions. But my mother found herself a pioneer in the Oil Region,
confronted by the sternest of problems which were to be settled only by
immediate individual effort and good will.
The move to Titusville, however, soon put my mother in touch with the
crusade for equal political rights which was taking the place of the
earlier movement for woman’s rights. The Civil War had slowed up that
agitation; indeed, many of its best talking points had been conceded and
were slowly going into practice. Most of the militants had thrown
themselves into war work and, after the war, into the campaign for negro
suffrage; but the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, for the
first time introducing the word “male” into the Constitution, aroused a
sense of outrage, not only in the advocates of equal rights but in many
women who had not approved of previous agitations. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the greatest of the early leaders, failing
to keep the humiliating distinction out of the Amendment, began a
tremendous national crusade for woman’s suffrage. They marshaled a group
of splendid women and undertook an intensive campaign meant to reach
every woman in the country. It reached us in Titusville, even reached
our home where my father and mother, always hospitable to crusaders,
opened their doors to them. I remember best Mary Livermore and Frances
Willard—not that either touched me, saw me; of this neglect I was
acutely conscious. I noted, too, that the men we entertained did notice
me, talked to me as a person—not merely as a possible member of a
society they were promoting. There was Neal Dow—father by this time was
a prohibitionist—who let me show him our Dante with Gustave Doré’s
pictures. Men were nicer than women to me, I mentally noted.
As the struggle for equal rights grew in heat I became aware that it was
far from a united struggle, that as a matter of fact leaders and
followers were spending almost as much time disapproving of one
another’s methods as fighting for their cause. The friction came largely
from the propensity of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony to form alliances
shocking to many of their oldest and wisest friends. Before the war they
had, rather recklessly from a political point of view, supported easier
divorce. As one of their friends wrote them, they had in so doing broken
the heart of the portly _Evening Post_ and nearly driven the _Tribune_
to the grave. Time had not cooled their ardor for strange bedfellows.
They made an alliance now of which I heard no little talk by my mother
and her friends; it was with the two most notorious women in the eye of
the public at the moment. “Hussies,” conservative circles in Titusville,
Pennsylvania, called them—Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.
It was not difficult for even a girl of fifteen to pick up some idea of
what these women were, so well did they advertise themselves, and so
delightedly did the press back them up in their doings. Beginning their
careers as clairvoyants, they had developed professionally their
undoubted powers until they were in the sixties—the two best known and
best paid trance-physicians of their day. Victoria claimed to have
raised a child from the dead, and Tennessee, the harder worker of the
two, made enough money to keep thirty-five relations in comfort. “If I
am a humbug sometimes, look at the dead beats I have to support,” was
her answer to those who accused her of abusing her talents. Both women
frankly advocated free love, and so it was believed quite as frankly
practiced it.
With this equipment they entered Wall Street in the eighteen-sixties as
consultants. The “lady brokers,” they were called. They quickly built up
a profitable business. Old Commodore Vanderbilt was so tickled by their
combination of beauty and effrontery, talents and ambitions, that he is
said to have proposed marriage to Victoria. He was more valuable as a
friend. She kept his picture on the wall of the salon where she received
her clients, and under it the framed motto, “Simply to thy cross I
cling.”
In 1870 Victoria Woodhull announced herself as a candidate for President
in 1872. So successful was she in attracting and holding big audiences,
and so brilliantly did she present the arguments for equal rights, that
Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony threw scruples to the wind and took her
into their camp—from which promptly there was a considerable exodus of
scandalized ladies. Not only did Victoria win the countenance of these
two great leaders, but she involved them in the Beecher-Tilton scandal,
which for months she worked steadily to force before the public.
The reverberations of the conflict inside the suffrage party, together
with what I picked up about the Beecher trial (I read the testimony word
by word in our newspapers), did not increase my regard for my sex. They
did not seem to substantiate what I heard about the subjection of women,
nor did what I observed nearer home convince me. Subjection seemed to me
fairly divided. That is all: I saw there were “henpecked men,” as well
as “downtrodden women.” The chief unfairness which I recognized was in
the handling of household expenses. Women who must do the spending were
obliged to ask for money or depend on charging. My mother had not been
trained to live on as generous a scale as was now possible, but my
father never said, “We have so much and no more to spend.” They worked
often at cross purposes. So I gathered as I listened to intimate talks
between women, listened to suffrage speakers, read the literature; so
did many American husbands and wives. I felt no restraint myself, for I
always had at least a little money and I, too, could charge. This
foolish practice led me into funny expenditures.
I had no sense of the appropriate in clothes. Often I had an ardent
desire for something fitted only for grown-ups, and I always had a keen
ambition to fit myself out for occasions. Some time in the early
seventies Clara Louise Kellogg came to town. My father and mother were
in the West, but they had arranged that I was to hear her. It seemed as
if some kind of regalia was necessary, so I charged a wide pink sash and
a pair of yellow kid gloves.
Out of the agitation for rights as it came to me, two rights that were
worth going after quite definitely segregated themselves: the right to
an education, and the right to earn my living—education and economic
independence.
The older I grew, the more determined I became to be independent. I saw
only one way—teach; but if I was to teach I must fit myself, go to
college. My father and mother agreed. I had a clear notion of what I
wanted to teach—natural science, particularly the microscope, for I was
to be a biologist. I made my choice—Cornell, first opened to women in
1872; but at the moment when the steps to enter Cornell were to be
taken, there appeared in the household as an over-Sunday guest the
president of a small college in our neighborhood, only thirty miles
away, Allegheny. Among the patrons of that college was the Methodist
organization known as the Erie Conference, to which the Titusville
church belonged. I had heard of it annually when a representative
appeared in our pulpit, told its story and asked for support. The
president, Dr. Lucius Bugbee, was a delightful and entertaining guest
and, learning that I was headed Cornellward, adroitly painted the
advantages of Allegheny. It was near home; it was a ward of our church.
It had responded to the cry of women for educational opportunity and had
opened its doors before the institution I had chosen.
Was not here an opportunity for a serious young woman interested in the
advancement of her sex? Had I not a responsibility in the matter? If the
few colleges that had opened their doors were to keep them open, if
others were to imitate their example, two things were essential: women
must prove they wanted a college education by supporting those in their
vicinity; and they must prove by their scholarship what many
doubted—that they had minds as capable of development as young men.
Allegheny had not a large territory to draw from. I must be a pioneer.
As a matter of fact the only responsibility I had felt and assumed in
going to college was entirely selfish and personal. But the sense of
responsibility was not lacking nor dormant in me. It was one of the few
things I had found out about myself in the shanty on the flats when I
was six years old and there was a new baby in the family.
The woman looking after my mother had said, “Now you are old enough to
make a cup of tea and take it to her.” I think, in all my life since,
nothing has seemed more important, more wonderful to me than this being
called upon by an elder to do something for mother, be responsible for
it. I can feel that cup in my hand as I cautiously took it to the bed,
and can see my mother’s touching smile as she thanked me. Perhaps there
came to her a realization that this rebelling, experimenting child might
one day become a partner in the struggle for life so serious for her at
the moment, always to be more or less serious.
But to return to Dr. Bugbee and his argument; before he left the house I
had agreed to enter Allegheny in the fall of 1876. And that I did.
What did I take with me? Well, I took what from my earliest years I had
been told was necessary to everyone—a Purpose, always spelled with a
capital. I had an outline of the route which would lead to its
realization. Making outlines of what was in my mind was the one and only
fruit that I had gathered so far from long terms of struggle over
grammar, rhetoric, composition. Outlines which held together, I had
discovered, cleared my mind, gave it something to follow. I outlined all
my plans as I had diagramed sentences. It was not a poor beginning for
one who eventually, and by accident rather than by intention, was to
earn her living by writing—the core of which must be sound structure.