before I had left America I had talked with Robert Walker about his
venture—the money he was trying to raise on McKinley’s notes. His
confidence was untarnished.
“The Major knows, Sis. He will see this thing through. I’d do anything
to back him.”
And he did. When on my return I went to see my friends I found they had
given up practically everything, and Robert Walker himself was utterly
broken by the ignominy heaped on him.
I begged him to give me his side of the story, let me tell it, told him
I would never rest until I had an opportunity to put down what I knew of
his long support of the Major’s ambitions, what I believed of him as a
man of unselfish integrity. He absolutely and finally refused. “Nobody
would ever believe the Major could do anything wrong. I didn’t.”
But the Major had allowed the oldest and most loyal friend he had in his
public life to be ruined not only in fortune but in reputation. Now that
Robert Walker and Mrs. Walker are both gone and reviving the episode can
no longer give them pain, it gives me a certain solace to put down the
story as I believe it.
I was leaving Poland, but what was I to do? Today, with my passion for
the microscope still undimmed, I would naturally seek a place in one of
the many laboratories now open to women. Hundreds of women in the
country bent on scientific research are now in industrial,
institutional, or governmental laboratories, but in 1882 there was
almost nothing of that kind open to women. The change is due, first, to
the tremendous advance in scientific research; second, to the way women
have proved their adaptability to laboratory work. No doubt the great
majority of them are, like the majority of women in offices, laboratory
wives, but we have inspired workers among them; probably, all things
considered, as large a proportion as among men.
If things had been as they were in 1876, when I asked my father if he
could put me through college and he had so cheerfully and happily, I
think, agreed, I could have asked to be financed for higher studies. But
things were not as they had been, and it would have been quite out of
the question in 1882, when I decided that my first step towards economic
independence was mistaken, for him to finance me—the country was coming
into a new depression, that of ’83 and ’84, and the oil business was in
a serious state for those who produced the oil.
But my home was open, wide open. I think it was this fact that is at the
bottom of my strong conviction that the home is an essential link in the
security of men and women. After one has gone forth on his own there
frequently comes a time when he is shelterless as far as his own
resources go. To have a refuge of which he is sure is one of the most
heartening and stabilizing experiences in a life. If my Poland venture
was a failure professionally it did not throw me on the street; I had a
place to go and think it over. When I asked my mother if it would be all
right for me to come home, her answer was what it always was to be in
the future when I was obliged (more than once) to make the request: “Of
course, that is your right.” That is, my father and mother looked on the
home they had created not as something belonging only to them—a place
they had for their comfort and privacy, it was a place for all of those
in the family procession who had no other place to go. In turn I saw
that home opened to grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles,
children and grandchildren, quite regardless of the extra burden it put
on their resources, limitations on their space, the irritations and
complications that are always bred by the injection of extra persons,
however beloved and close, into a settled group.
It was in June, 1882, that I went back home, dusted my desk in the Tower
room now shared with my sister’s playhouse and dolls—set up my
microscope and went to work on the Hydrozoa. But not for long.
5
A FRESH START—A SECOND RETREAT
It was the custom of the Tarbell household to do its part in
entertaining the Methodist ministers and presiding elders who
periodically “filled the pulpit” of our church. In the winter after my
return from the Poland venture we had a guest, an important local
personage, Dr. Theodore L. Flood, a preacher who had retired from active
ministry to take the editorship of a magazine called _The Chautauquan_,
published in the town thirty miles from Titusville where I had so
recently spent four years—Meadville, the home of Allegheny College.
On this visit Dr. Flood asked me to “help him out” for a month or two in
a new department in his magazine. I was quick to accept, glad to be
useful, for I had grown up with what was called the Chautauqua Movement.
Indeed, it had been almost as much a part of my life as the oil
business, and in its way it was as typically American. If we had a truer
measure for values we would count it more important.
This Chautauqua Movement had grown out of a Methodist camp meeting held
annually at Fair Point on the pleasant lake which in my childhood had
been the terminus of our most ambitious all-day excursions. The
president of this Association by 1870 was a man justly respected in all
that part of the world for his good deeds, as well as his business
acumen—Lewis Miller, a manufacturer of Akron, Ohio. Mr. Miller was to be
known nationally as the father-in-law of Thomas Edison, but old-time
Chautauquans put it the other way: “Edison is Lewis Miller’s
son-in-law.” That was enough recommendation for Edison in their minds.
Lewis Miller’s interest in Chautauqua went beyond the annual camp
meeting. He saw the opportunity to build up there a summer home where
parents could give their children healthy out-of-door amusement,
protection from the evil ways of the unregenerate, and sound modern
instruction in the Bible. Sympathy with this program induced a
half-dozen families in the Titusville Methodist Church to join in the
purchase of a lot on the outskirts of the grounds and start a Titusville
settlement—a cottage with a mess hall and a few rooms—tents serving as
sleeping quarters for extras. Father joined the colony soon after we
moved to Titusville. We had a tent and a flat-bottomed boat.
Through the years I have been recalling, the years in high school,
college, as Preceptress of Poland Union Seminary, part of all my summers
had been spent at Chautauqua. Lewis Miller’s laudable attempt to furnish
attractive instruction in the Bible meant little or nothing to me at
first; the flat-bottomed boat meant a great deal. But in 1874 something
happened that dragged me away from the water. Lewis Miller had persuaded
the most eminent advocate of the Sunday school in America, Dr.
(afterwards Bishop) John H. Vincent, to select Fair Point as the home of
a National Interdenominational Sunday School Institute which he and
those who saw with him had been for some time planning. The first
session of this new organization was held in 1874 under the name of the
Chautauqua Assembly. It was recognized at once as a revolution upsetting
the old order.
The most spectacular feature of the revolution was the Chautauqua
platform, making as it did stirring, challenging contacts with current
intellectual life. There one heard the great speakers of the day on all
sorts of subjects. There fine concerts were given. It was the scientific
lectures which caught me, particularly those of Dr. R. Ogden Doremus of
New York. His platform experiments, in which two skillful women
assisted, excited me as I had never been before. But what aroused me
most were certain demonstrations with a magnificent microscope which
they were giving in a little building at one side. Nothing in the world
seemed to matter to me so much as to be able to talk with these women,
to ask their advice about the work I was beginning with the little
instrument bought with my own carefully saved money. Perhaps, oh,
perhaps, I dreamed, they would let me look through the great beauty they
handled so deftly, focus it, watch the life which went on in its field.
So one day I hung around after the talk was over, slipped up to them,
steeled myself to tell them that I was going to be a microscopist,
begged them to give me a few lessons, advise me. The two ladies smiled
down from their height, so plainly showing they thought me a country
child with a queer behavior complex. “Quite impossible,” they said, and
turned back to their conference with Dr. Doremus.
Abashed, humiliated, but luckily too angry to cry I made my way back to
my flat-bottomed boat. I would show them, I resolved, clenching my
fists!
It was years before I attempted again to get from a Chautauqua
undertaking more than it was offering to the public at large. There were
many of these undertakings. Dr. Vincent saw to that. A man better fitted
by experience, conviction, and personality to persuade a half-asleep,
wholly satisfied community to accept a new order could not have been
found in the America of the eighties. John Vincent was forty-two years
old when he came to Chautauqua—handsome, confident, alert, energetic,
radiating well-being. And he was an orator, and orating at Chautauqua
made men tolerant even of heresy. He went about his business of
organizing the work of the Assembly with a skill which commanded the
admiration of everybody, even those hostile to the secularization of
their beloved camp meeting. As a platform manager I never have known his
equal. He had magnetism, but he knew when and how to turn it on; he was
shrewd, cunning, pungent. He pricked bubbles, disciplined his audience.
The Chautauqua audience came to be one of the best behaved out-of-door
audiences in the country. The fact that we were out of doors had
persuaded us that we were free to leave meetings if we were bored or
suddenly remembered that we had left bread in the oven, or that the baby
must have wakened. When the performance had been stopped once or twice
to “give that lady a chance to go out without further disturbing the
speaker” we learned to stay at home or to sit out the lecture.
There is only one word to describe what Lewis Miller and Dr. Vincent now
did to Chautauqua, and that is “electrification.” The community was made
up mainly of hard-working men and women who wanted a vacation in
surroundings where they would not “have to worry about the children.”
Certainly if high fences with gates through which you could not pass in
or out after ten P.M.—never pass without your ticket, and not even with
one on Sundays—if watchful guards and ten o’clock curfew, if a mass
public opinion on the part of elders in support of these restrictions,
could have suppressed all the mischief and lawlessness in the youth
which swarmed Chautauqua, parents were right in sleeping tranquilly. As
a matter of fact I never knew of any serious offenses, though there
probably were many which I was still too much of a little girl to
recognize. The worst mischief in which I personally assisted was playing
tag up and down the relief model of Palestine, which skirted the lake as
Palestine does the Mediterranean. It was spotted with plaster-of-Paris
models of towns from Damascus to Bethsaida. I remember one rule of our
game was that you could not be tagged if you straddled Jerusalem. The
most serious vandalism of which I knew and in which I had no part was
stealing Damascus or Nazareth or Tyre and carrying it away bodily.
Dr. Vincent did not change the restrictions, but he made them more
endurable by the fresh interest he put into our lives. His effect on the
community physically was immediate. It began to grow. The sound of the
hammers nailing together the, for the most part, flimsy cottages was
never still. The result was very like what Mark Twain found in the
summer colony of Onteora in the Catskills in its first year—“the
partitions so thin you can hear the women changing their minds.”
Housekeeping improved. It had been as sketchy as the cottages—picnic
housekeeping. You saw them at it, out in the rear of their cottages,
over an old wood stove or stone fireplace, the men in their shirt
sleeves, the women in big aprons, if not wrappers. Planks on sawhorses
for tables, mats (we had not learned to say “doilies” yet), benches for
seats. The natural practice of bringing discarded furniture from home to
furnish the cottages led to the only distinctive piece of Chautauqua
furniture I recall—a long high-backed bench made from an old-fashioned
four-post bedstead. There were few garrets in all the country about
Chautauqua that did not harbor one or more such bedsteads. They had been
hidden away when families could afford the new-styled quartered-oak or
walnut bedroom suites. Some ingenious mind had seen that by shortening
the sidepieces of a four-poster to seat width, using the headboard for a
back, you had a commodious and, with cushions, a comfortable seat, even
couch. They were scattered all over the place.
With the coming of Dr. Vincent, Chautauqua rapidly developed a Promenade
along the south end of the lake front. Cottages here were lathed and
plastered, had wicker chairs on their verandahs, and the residents soon
were taking their meals at the really stately Athenaeum Hotel. It was in
this front row that Dr. and Mrs. Vincent came to live in a tent, a tent
de luxe with a real house—so it looked to us—behind it.
Sometimes when we were properly dressed and shod we walked past the
hotel and the cottages housing our aristocrats, and if by chance we saw
Dr. or Mrs. Vincent or, best of all, the “Vincents’ little boy”—George,
we later learned his name to be—why, then we boasted of it at the supper
table as one might say today, “I saw President Roosevelt, Mrs.
Roosevelt, Sistie, Buzzie.”
Dr. Vincent kept the place on its toes not only by the steady
improvement of its platform, its amusements, in the quality of the
people who came to teach and preach, but by a steady flow of new
undertakings. He planned incessantly to stir not only our souls but our
minds. We came to expect new ideas at each successive session and were
never disappointed if sometimes a little bewildered. Behind all these
various undertakings was the steadying hand of Lewis Miller, the silent
partner, who had begun by spying out the land, establishing a community,
laying the foundations for the Institution as it exists today—a center
of democratic, Christian culture.
Dr. Vincent’s masterpiece, as I always thought, came in 1878 when he
laid before his Chautauquans a plan which had been long simmering in his
never quiet mind. He did this in the finest of what we call
inspirational talks that I ever heard—at least it stirred me so deeply
that I have never forgotten the face of the orator nor, more important,
the upturned faces of his hearers. He announced a scheme for a four-year
course of home reading under the direction of the Chautauqua management
adapted to men and women who had missed a college education, but who
felt a deep desire for knowledge and were willing to adopt any practical
plan which would give them a college outlook. It was to be called the
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.
Now this does not sound exciting; but as a matter of fact it was deeply
exciting, for the speaker was pouring out his heart. He had never had a
college education; he had never ceased to feel the lack of what he
believed it would have given him. He had struggled to make up for his
loss by persistent, systematic daily reading and study. Establishing the
habit as a boy, he had never abandoned it. It had given him deep
satisfaction, supplied, he thought, the college outlook. He believed
there were thousands of men and women in the United States, scores,
possibly hundreds, in his audience, who had been forced, as he had been,
to sacrifice their early ambitions for education. They had hidden the
hunger in their hearts where at times it still gnawed. He was offering
them the same help he had found, and confidently, glowingly, he outlined
the course of home reading which Dr. John H. Finley has so aptly named
the American Adult Education Pioneer.
The uplifted faces all about me told the story, particularly the faces
of the women of thirty or more. Women of that generation had had their
natural desire for knowledge intensified by the Woman’s Rights movement,
in which the strongest plank had been a demand for the opportunity for
higher education. These women were now beyond the day when they could go
to college, but here was something which they saw intuitively was
practical.
The immediacy of their response was in a degree accounted for by their
devotion to Dr. Vincent. I suppose most of the women who frequented
Chautauqua were more or less in love with him, the worship a man of
overflowing sentiment receives from the benches, but most of his
audience would have preferred to die rather than reveal their secret
passion.
Well, it was a great emotional experience with large and immediate
practical results, for, before the summer session was over, eight
thousand people had joined the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific
Circle.
They had joined, and they were buying the books chosen. The most
important volume in that first year’s course was Green’s “Short History
of the English People”—in my judgment the most important book save one
that the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle ever included, that
exception being W. C. Brownell’s “French Traits.” The sudden demand for
so large and expensive a volume as Green’s History, outside of regular
trade channels, followed as it was by spectacular sales of other books
from which neither publisher nor writer had expected anything out of the
normal, set the whole publishing world agog, and naturally raised the
question, “How are we to get in on this new market?”
There were many approaches, all legitimate enough so far as I know. I
found a rather amusing proof of one not long ago in Marjorie Wiggin
Prescott’s fine collection of manuscripts and rare books—a volume of Lew
Wallace’s “Ben Hur” enriched by a letter to the publisher, signed by
Mrs. Wallace and dated November 24, 1884. The letter, which is
self-explanatory, is reproduced here with Mrs. Prescott’s permission.
Crawfordsville, Nov. 24, 1884.
Dear Sir
Because of inquiries of correspondents as to the _number_ of _wives_
Gen. Wallace has had, I have thought best to instruct you to add to
the dedication of _Ben-Hur_, making it:
To
The Wife of My Youth
who still abides with me
This with Gen. Wallace’s consent.
Several literary clubs have made it a handbook for study in
connection with Roman History. If by some means you could have it
adopted by the Chautauqua Club, which numbers twenty thousand
members, it might be worth while to try. Pardon the suggestion.
May I ask you to furnish me a report of the sales of _Ben-Hur_, year
by year, from the beginning?
With high regard,
Very truly yours
SUSAN E. WALLACE.
As the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle grew, there came
increasing necessity of a steady sympathetic administration. To help in
this task it was decided in 1880 to establish a monthly organ—_The
Chautauquan_, it was to be called—in which portions of the required
readings could be published more cheaply than in book form, and through
which by counsel and suggestions the leaders could keep in closer touch
with the readers—better meet their needs. Dr. Vincent was quick to sense
weak places in the organization, and ingenious in devising ways to take
care of them. It was to try out one of his devices that Dr. Flood was
now asking my temporary help.
Here was the situation that had been uncovered—hundreds of those who had
joined the great circle and bought its books were without dictionaries,
encyclopaedias, explanatory helps of any kind, and they lived too far
away—on the Plains, in the mountains, on distant farms—to reach
libraries. Headquarters were inundated with questions: How do you
pronounce this word, translate this phrase? Who was this man, this
woman? What does this or that mean?
“Could not _The Chautauquan_ take care of this difficulty,” suggested
Dr. Vincent, “by annotating the portions of the various texts to be read
in that particular month? Let some one try it out.”
As I happened to be the “some one” within reach when Dr. Flood received
the suggestion, the attempt was put up to me—temporary trial, I was made
to understand. Now I had known from childhood homes and towns where
there were practically no books beyond the Bible and the children’s
spellers. As books had always come after bread in our household I
naturally pitied those who did not have them; so I undertook the notes
with the determination to make them as helpful as I could.
To my surprise and delight Dr. Vincent sent word to me that I had caught
his idea, and that he had advised Dr. Flood to ask me to prepare similar
notes each month.
“Will you do it?” asked Dr. Flood.
I jumped at the chance, calculating that it would take not over two
weeks of my month, give me pin money, and leave time for the
microscope—that my future was in it, I did not dream.
But my task required better equipped libraries than Titusville offered;
Meadville, only thirty miles away, headquarters for _The Chautauquan_,
had them, and so I arranged to do my work there, remaining until I had
read the proofs—an exacting job which never ceased to worry me. What if
the accent was in the wrong place? What if I brought somebody into the
world in the wrong year? Something of the kind happened occasionally,
and when it did I quickly discovered that, while there might be many
Chautauqua readers who did not have books of reference, there were more
that did and knew how to use them.
Once in touch with the office of _The Chautauquan_ I began to see things
to do. Dr. Flood had little interest in detail. The magazine was made up
in a casual, and to my mind a disorderly, fashion. I could not keep my
fingers off. A woman is a natural executive: that has been her business
through the ages. Intuitively she picks up, sets to rights, establishes
order. I began at once to exercise my inheritance, proved useful, was
offered a full-time job, and threw myself heartily into an attempt to
learn how to make up a magazine in the way I suspected a magazine should
be made up.
When the long-suffering foreman of the printing office discovered I was
in earnest he undertook my education, taught me the vocabulary—the only
galley I had heard of up to that time was a war vessel of the Middle
Ages—suggested dummies, and offered a model. He installed a proper
respect for the dates on which copy was to be in, and forms closed:
showed me the importance of clean copy by compelling me to see with my
own eyes the time it took to make a correction, trained me until I could
stand over the closing of the last form and direct the necessary changes
to be made in order to make room for a three-line advertisement which
had just arrived, and which, such was the need of _The Chautauquan_ for
advertising, must under no consideration be thrown out. When I could do
that nonchalantly I felt as if I had arrived. And this training I owed
to as fine a craftsman as there was in the trade at the time; as well,
he was a courteous and patient gentleman—Adrian McCoy, long the head of
the pressroom where _The Chautauquan_ was printed.
My willingness to take on loose ends soon brought to my desk much of the
routine office correspondence—letters to be answered by a more or less
set form, signed with Dr. Flood’s name and mailed without troubling him
to read them.