their troubles and hopes on our shoulders, confident of understanding
and counsel. Dr. Flood’s answers to such communications were courteous
but formal. Probably he appreciated as I did not that there lay safety.
I felt strongly that such an appeal or confidence should have a
personal, sympathetic letter, and I began producing them, pouring out
counsel and pity. I shudder now to think of the ignorant sentiment I
probably spilled. But my career as a professional counselor was checked
suddenly by the unexpected result of a series of letters to a
contributor. This gentleman, a foreign lecturer and teacher, had been
chilled by the lack of understanding by Americans of his ideals. And all
of this he was expressing in letters to the office after our acceptance
of one or two of his articles. I was deeply touched by his outpourings
and answered in kind—of course signing my editor’s name. Then one day
Dr. Flood received a letter saying that on such a day the gentleman
would be in Meadville. He must see the one who so understood him. And
come he did. Poor Dr. Flood did not know what it was all about.
“But these letters,” the visitor exclaimed. “Oh,” Dr. Flood said, “Miss
Tarbell wrote those. We’ll speak to her.”
And so he was presented—letters in hand—Dr. Flood looking sternly at me
and leaving me to my fate.
“Did you write these letters?” the bewildered and disappointed stranger
asked.
All I could say was, “Yes, I wrote them.”
“And Dr. Flood never saw them?”
“No,” I said, “he never does.”
“I might have known it was a woman,” he groaned, and fled. And that was
the last we ever saw or heard of him. But it made a vast difference in
my editorial correspondence.
I was not satisfied, however, with setting things to rights and
counseling the unhappy. Having convinced my editor-in-chief that I could
keep his house in better order than he had been interested in doing, I
became ambitious to contribute to its furnishing, to extend its field
beyond matters purely Chautauquan. I began by offering contributions to
what was called the Editor’s Table—the Editor’s Note Book. I began to
write articles, even went off on trips to gather information on subjects
which seemed to me to be fitting.
The first and most ambitious of these undertakings was an investigation
made in the Patent Office in Washington of the amount of inventing the
records showed women to have done. I had been disturbed for some time by
what seemed to me the calculated belittling of the past achievements of
women by many active in the campaign for suffrage. They agreed with
their opponents that women had shown little or no creative power. That,
they argued, was because man had purposely and jealously excluded her
from his field of action. The argument was intended, of course, to
arouse women’s indignation, stir them to action. It seemed to me rather
to throw doubt on her creative capacity. Power to create breaks all
barriers. Women had demonstrated this, I believed, again and again while
carrying on what I as an observer of society was coming to regard as the
most delicate, complex, and essential of all creative tasks—the making
of a home. There was the field of invention. At the moment it was being
said in print and on the platform that, in all the history of the Patent
Office, women had taken out only some three hundred patents.
I had seen so much of woman’s ingenuity on the farm and in the kitchen
that I questioned the figures; and so I went to see, feeling very
important if scared at my rashness in daring to penetrate a Government
department and interview its head. I was able to put my finger at once
on over two thousand patents, enough to convince me that, man-made world
or not, if a woman had a good idea and the gumption to seek a patent she
had the same chance as a man to get one. This was confirmed by
correspondence with two or three women who at the time were taking out
patents regularly.
These dashes into journalism, timid and factual as were the results,
gave my position more and more body, began slowly to arouse my
rudimentary capacity for self-expression. At the same time my position
was enriched by a novel feature of our undertaking, one that any editor
of a monthly journal can appreciate. We published but ten issues,
suspending in July and August in order to get out on the grounds at
Chautauqua an eight-page newspaper—the Chautauqua Assembly _Daily
Herald_. This meant moving our Meadville staff bodily to the Lake late
in June.
I was soon contributing two columns of editorials a day to the _Herald_,
comments on the daily doings of the Assembly, and making many
stimulating acquaintances in doing it. Among them I valued particularly
Dr. Herbert B. Adams and Dr. Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins University,
men who were stirring youth and shocking the elders by liberal
interpretations of history and economics. We felt rather proud of
ourselves at Chautauqua that we were liberal enough to engage Dr. Adams
and Dr. Ely as regular lecturers and teachers, and that our constituency
accepted them, if with occasional misgivings.
It was not only the faculty of Johns Hopkins which was adding to my
friends. One who remains today among those I most value came from its
student body—Dr. John H. Finley. Dr. Finley gave several summers to the
Assembly _Herald_, reading its copy and its proofs among other things.
It was he who read my two columns and, no doubt, kept me out of much
trouble; but once there did slip by him a misquotation over which he
still chuckles when we talk of Chautauqua days. I made it a practice to
head my first column with a digest of the day’s happenings—a line to an
event and, as a starter for the paragraph, a quotation. I had been
rather pleased one day to select a line from James Thomson:
[Illustration:
_Office staff of The Chautauquan, 1888: Miss Tarbell at left, sitting_
]
The meek-eyed Morn appears, mother of dews.
A copy of the paper was always thrown on the verandah of my upstairs
room around five o’clock in the morning, and I hopped out of bed to see
what had happened to my column. That morning something dire had
happened, for my quotation ran:
The _weak_-eyed _Worm_ appears, mother of dews.
Eminence came from across the water annually and gave color and
importance, so we thought, to our doings. A foreign visitor with whom I
had a pleasant acquaintance running over some years was Dr. J. P.
Mahaffy of the University of Dublin. Dr. Mahaffy had contributed a
series of delightful articles to the required readings in _The
Chautauquan_—“Gossip About Greece”—and in the summer of 1889 he came
over for two or three courses of lectures at the Assembly. A
distinguished figure, he was, and such a contrast in his tweeds, his
free movements, his spirited wide-ranging talk to most of us.
My acquaintance grew out of our mutual interest in the flora of any spot
where we happened to be. One day as I came in from a botanizing
expedition outside the grounds carrying stocks of the lovely field
lilies common in the region, Dr. Mahaffy seized my arm: “You care for
flowers and plants? I thought American women had no interest in them.” A
libel I quickly hooted. In defense of my sisterhood I went diligently to
work to show him our summer flora. But he cared for nothing as much as
our summer lilies, begged me after the flowering was over to send him
bulbs, which I proudly did. In exchange I received from his Dublin
garden seeds of a white poppy which, he wrote me, he had originally
gathered in the shadow of the statue of Memnon in Egypt. Those poppies
have always gone with me; they flourished in my mother’s garden in
Titusville—now they flourish in my Connecticut garden.
My life was busy, varied, unfolding pleasantly in many ways, but it also
after six years was increasingly unsatisfactory, so unsatisfactory that
I was secretly, very secretly, meditating a change.
I was scared by what _The Chautauquan_ seemed to be doing to the plan I
had worked out for the development of my mind. I had grown up with a
stout determination to follow one course of study to the end, to develop
a specialty. The work I was doing demanded a scattering of mind which I
began to fear would unfit me for ever thinking anything through. I
realized that an editor of value must have made up his mind about more
things than had I, feel himself ready to fight for those things if
necessary. I had no program in which _The Chautauquan_ was interested.
Moreover, I did not want to be an editor.
But to break with _The Chautauquan_ meant sacrificing security. I had
always had a vision of myself settled somewhere in a secure corner,
simple, not too large. I never had wanted things; I always had a dislike
of impedimenta, but I wanted something cheerful and warm and enduring.
There I could work over that which interested me, day in and day out,
with no alarm for my keep. Now _The Chautauquan_ was a secure berth; so
far as I could figure, it would last through my time at least. To give
it up meant complete economic insecurity. I probably should not have
been willing to sacrifice what I think I had honestly earned if there
had not been growing upon me a conviction of the sterility of security.
All about me were people who at least believed themselves materially
secure. They lived comfortably within their means, they were busy
keeping things as they were, preserving what they had. They were the
most respectable people in town, but secretly I was beginning to suspect
their respectability.
One day, listening to a fine elderly Scotch Presbyterian minister who
had in his congregation a large group of these stable, secure, best
citizens, I was startled when he leaned over his pulpit and, shaking his
fist at us, shouted, “You’re dyin’ of respectability.” Was that what was
happening to me? I saw with increasing clearness that I could not go
beyond a certain point on _The Chautauquan_, mentally, socially,
spiritually. If I remained, it was to accept a variety of limitations,
and my whole nature was against the acceptance of limitations. It was
contrary to the nature of things as I saw them; to be happy, I must go
on with fresh attempts, fresh adventuring. The thing that frightened me
earlier in my youth came to the top now: that thing that made me
determine I would never marry because it meant giving up freedom, was a
trap. It was clear enough that I was trapped—comfortably, most
pleasantly, most securely, but trapped.
As time went on I realized that this security to which people so clung
could not always be counted on. They might think so, but had I not seen
beautiful homes sold under the hammer in Titusville, homes of those whom
the town had looked on as impregnable financially? In my years on _The
Chautauquan_ in Meadville I had been a shocked observer of one of the
many dramatic political failures of the eighties, the defeat of the
Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania at a critical moment—a
Meadville banker, Wallace Delamater. I was too much of a mugwump to
sympathize with the Republican platform, but I liked Wallace Delamater.
I believed him, as I think the records show, to be a tool of a past
master of machine politics—Matthew Quay. Taken up by Quay, the resources
of the Delamater bank and of allied banks in Meadville at the call of
his party, he made a campaign which was called brilliant. There was no
doubt of the result in Meadville.
I went to bed early, the night of the election, expecting to be aroused
by the ringing of bells, the blowing of whistles, for there was to be a
celebration. When I awakened with a start it was broad daylight. Had I
slept through the celebration? A sense of doom hung over me; I dressed
hurriedly, went down to get the paper. Wallace Delamater was defeated.
Promptly the Delamater bank closed and, one after another, four banks of
the town followed. There was a heavy run on the one remaining, the one
where I had my little deposit. The panic in the town was desperate;
everything was going. I don’t think I have ever been more ashamed of
anything in my life connected with money than I was when I took my bank
book and went to my bank to ask for my deposit. It was all the money I
had in the world—times were bad. But I have always continued to be a
little ashamed that I yielded to the panic, the more because my bank
didn’t fail!
No, the security men flattered themselves they had achieved was never
certain. Moreover, my security was costing more in certain precious
things than I was willing to pay. Take the matter of making something
professionally sound, useful, justifiable, out of myself, which is the
only one of these “precious things” that I am talking about! I could do
no more towards it where I was. To begin with, I at last knew what I
wanted to do. It was no longer to seek truth with a microscope. My early
absorption in rocks and plants had veered to as intense an interest in
human beings. I was feeling the same passion to understand men and
women, the same eagerness to collect and to classify information about
them. I find the proofs of this slow and unconscious change of
allegiance in an accumulation of tattered notebooks tucked away for
years, forgotten and only brought out after I had set myself this
curious task of tracing the road I have traveled through my eighty
years, trying to find out why I did this thing and not that, getting
acquainted with my own working life.
I seem to have begun to enter observations on human beings soon after I
had settled down to learn how to put a magazine together in an orderly
fashion. I applied the same method that I had used for so many years in
collecting and classifying natural objects which excited my curiosity.
Take leaves, on which I was always keen. I started out in high school to
collect them from all the flora in my territory, classifying them by
shapes, veins, stalks, color. Rarely do I take up a family book of those
early years that there do not fall out from between the pages leaves of
one thing or another that I had pressed to help me carry on my scheme of
classification. I suspect that I did not get much beyond a glib naming
of parts.
Something analogous happened when I recognized that men and women were
as well worth notes as leaves, that there was a science of society as
well as of botany.
What had happened was undoubtedly that the tumults, the challenges of my
day had finally penetrated my aloofness, and that I was feeling more and
more the need of taking a part in them. The decade I spent in Poland and
on _The Chautauquan_ had a background not so unlike that of the present
decade. At its beginning we were only fifteen years from a civil war
which had left behind not only a vast devastated region with the problem
of its reconstruction, but the problem of a newly freed people. It had
left bitterness which in intensity and endurance no war but a civil war
ever leaves. We had had our inflation, a devastating boom followed by
seven years of depression, outbreaks of all the various forms of radical
philosophy the world then knew. Youth talks glibly of communism today as
if it had just appeared in the country; but Marxian Communists
transferred the headquarters of the International to New York City in
the seventies. More conspicuous than the Communists were the Anarchists.
Every city in the United States had its little group, preaching and
every now and then practicing direct action. Indeed, they were a factor
in all the violent labor disturbances of the period.
In 1879 prosperity had come back with a whoop, and, as she usually does
after a long absence, had quickly exhausted herself by fantastic
economic excesses. By the time I undertook to annotate the Chautauqua
Literary and Scientific Circle’s readings the country had begun to
suffer again from its wanton speculation and reckless overbuilding of
railroads. Factories and mines and mills shut down; and when work
stopped disorder began, particularly on the railroads of the Southwest,
the awful massacre of Chinese in Wyoming—more awful, the Haymarket riot
in Chicago followed as it was by the execution of four men, all
counselors of violence to be sure, but no one of them found guilty
either of making or of throwing the bomb.
The eighties dripped with blood, and men struggled to get at causes, to
find corrections, to humanize and socialize the country; for then as now
there were those who dreamed of a good world although at times it seemed
to them to be going mad.
_The Chautauquan_ interested itself in all of this turbulent and
confused life. Indeed, it rapidly became my particular editorial
concern. We noted and discussed practically every item of the social
program which has been so steadily developing in the last fifty years,
the items which have crystallized into the Square Deal, the New Freedom,
the New Deal.
The present argument for high wages, we made in the eighties. We called
it “the new economic coefficient in our industrial life.” “It is the
well-paid workman,” said _The Chautauquan_, “who is a relatively large
consumer. We are built upon a foundation of which this well-paid workman
is an important part.”
As for hours and conditions, we were ardent supporters of the eight-hour
day, organized labor’s chief aim in the eighties, and we were for
contracts between labor and capital, each being held responsible for his
side of the bargain. We were for education, arbitration, legislation,
the program of the Knights of Labor rather than the program of force
which the growing American Federation of Labor was adopting. We
discussed interminably the growing problem of the slums, were
particularly strong for cooperative housing, laundries and bakeshops; we
supported the popular Town and Country Club, seeking to keep a healthy
balance between the two; we were advocates of temperance but shied at
prohibition—largely, I think, because it had become a political issue,
and we did not like to see our idealists going into politics, as Bellamy
and Henry George and the leaders of many causes were doing.
That is, in the decade of the eighties we were discussing and thinking
about the same fundamentals that we are today.
My realization of the stress of the period began at home. Titusville and
all the Oil Region of Pennsylvania were struggling to loosen the hold of
the mighty monopoly which, since its first attack on the business in
1872, had grown in power and extent until it owned and controlled over
90 per cent of the oil industry outside of the production of the raw
crude. The region was divided into two hostile camps—the Independent
Producers and Refiners, and the Standard Oil Company. Their maneuvers
and strategy kept town and country in a constant state of excitement, of
suspicion, of hope, and of despair.
There was a steady weakening of independent ranks both by the men worn
out or ruined by the struggle, and those who saw peace and security for
themselves only in settling and gave up the fight.
In those days I looked with more contempt on the man who had gone over
to the Standard than on the one who had been in jail. I felt pity for
the latter man, but none for the deserters from the ranks of the
fighting independents. Those were the days when the freeing of
transportation, the privilege which had more to do with the making of
the monopoly than anything else, more even than the great ability of its
management, was the aim of all reformers. For years the Independents had
worked for an interstate commerce law which would make rate
discrimination a crime. To me such a law had come to have a kind of
sanctity. It was the new freedom, and when it was passed in 1887 I felt
an uplift such as nothing in public life, unless I except Mr.
Cleveland’s tariff message of the year before, had ever given me.
But it was not the economic feature of the struggle in the Oil Region
which deeply disturbed or interested me. It was what it was doing to
people themselves, to the people I knew, to my father and mother and
their friends. It was the divided town, the suspicion and greed and
bitterness and defeats and surrenders. Here was a product meant to be a
blessing to men—so I believed; and it was proving a curse to the very
ones who had discovered it, developed it.
I began to fill pages with notes of things seen and heard, and finally I
decided I should write a novel about it. Very secretly indeed, I went at
it, assembling a cast, outlining a plot, writing two or three chapters.
Poor stuff. Luckily I soon found out I was beyond my depth and gave it
up.
From my notebooks I judge that I abandoned my novel the more readily
because I had conceived what I called “a more fundamental research”!
This was nothing less than a Science of Society to be illustrated by my
own observations on men and women. Looking over it now, I see that the
framework came from reading the voluminous discussions of the nature of
society then flooding the public. I took my framework where I found it,
but I filled it in with observations, gathered on all sides, of people I
knew, heard about, particularly read about in the newspaper.
But this ambitious work soon met the same fate as the novel. It broke
off at the end of the third chapter because I had concluded I could not
construct society as it was until I knew more about woman. I suspected
she had played a larger part in shaping society than she realized or
perhaps was willing to admit. I was questioning the argument that this
is entirely a man-made world. I had found too many woman-made parts in
it to accept the characterization at its face value. My science of
society would not be honest, I concluded, if the only part woman was
allowed to play in it was that of doormat, toy, and tool. I was
troubled, too, by the argument that women must be given suffrage if
society was to be improved. Man had made a mess of the world, I was
told; woman must take his tools and straighten things up. I did not feel
the confidence of my courageous friends. “Why should we expect them to
do better with the vote than men have done?” I asked. “Because they are
women,” I was told. But they were human beings, like men, and they were
human beings with no experience of the tools they wanted to use; and I
had enough sense of the past to believe that experience counted, and
that it would be wise for all men and women to consult it when they
tried new ventures.
There had been women in public life in the past. What had they done? I
had to satisfy myself before I went further with my science of society
or joined the suffragists. It was humiliating not to be able to make up
my mind quickly about the matter, as most of the women I knew did. What
was the matter with me, I asked myself, that I could not be quickly
sure? Why must I persist in the slow, tiresome practice of knowing more
about things before I had an opinion? Suppose everybody did that. What
chance for intuition, vision, emotion, action?
My notebooks show that I began my plodding by making out a list of women
who seemed to offer food for reflection. The group that excited me most
were the women of the French Revolution. I made little studies of
several, wrote little pieces about them, and these little pieces I
submitted to the editor of _The Chautauquan_; he published several of
them—a study of Madame de Staël, of Marie Antoinette, of Madame Roland.
But soon I became heartily ashamed of my sketches, written as they were
from so meager an equipment. I felt this particularly about Madame
Roland. I made up my mind that I was going to know more about this
woman, that she probably would teach me what sort of contribution might
be expected from a woman in public life.
That meant research. How was I to carry it on? Whatever studying I did
depended on my ability to support myself while doing it; whatever
studying I did while on _The Chautauquan_ must be turned into something
available for the magazine. My time and strength belonged to it.
Obviously, I could not do sufficient research and continue my position;
it was as impossible as it had been to act as preceptress of the Poland
Union Seminary and at the same time carry on my study with the
microscope. Where was I to carry on this research? There was but one
place—Paris. And how was I to finance myself in Paris—a strange country
and a strange tongue—long enough to write a book? I did not consider the
possibility of getting a regular job: I did not want one. I wanted
freedom, and I had an idea that there was no freedom in belonging to
things, no freedom in security. It took time to convince myself that I
dared go on my own. But finally I succeeded.