writers and artists who were attaching themselves to the new magazine.
Bert was so fond of us all that he could not endure the idea that we did
not all know one another, and he made it his business to see that we had
at least the opportunity. He lived on the south of Stuyvesant Square,
four flights up. There was no one in all that circle of distinguished
contributors who did not welcome the chance to climb those stairs to
Bert’s dinners and teas. And what a group of people came! They are
recorded in his guest book: Booth Tarkington, Edna Ferber, Stewart
Edward White, his wife and his brother Gilbert, Julian and Ada Street,
the Norrises, the Rices and Martins of Louisville, Joe Chase, Will
Irwin, and a dozen more, along with visiting celebrities, politicians,
scientists, adventurers. What talk went on in that high-up living room!
What wonderful tales we heard!
Bert was so much younger than the rest of us, so full of enthusiasm and
hope, so much more vital and all-shedding, that it is still to me
incredible that he should have left this world so much earlier than I.
He died in 1925, but he lives in a little book which J. S. P. edited in
his memory. How proud Bert would have been of that! “There is nobody
like J. S. P.,” he used to say. Many of his big circle of friends
contributed their recollections of him. I have never known another
person in my life for whom quite such a book could have been written.
In spite of the gay unity of our group, the vigor and steadiness with
which it began and continued its operation, I had suffered a heavy
shock. I know now I should not have taken it as well as I did (and
inwardly that was nothing to boast of) if it had not been cushioned by
an engrossing personal interest. I had started out to make a home for
myself.
I had already made three major attempts to establish myself—first in
Meadville, then in Paris, then in Washington—and all had failed. When in
1898 it became evident that if I were to remain on the _McClure’s_ staff
I must come to New York, I was in no mood to adopt a new home town. New
York might be my writing headquarters, but Titusville should be home.
Finally I would return there, I told myself. But Titusville was five
hundred miles away. There were no airplanes in those days. The railroad
journey was tedious and expensive, week-ending was impossible. I soon
grew weary of the week-end makeshifts of a homeless person in a city. I
wanted something of my own. And at last by a series of circumstances,
purely fortuitous, I acquired forty acres and a little old house in
Connecticut.
I had meant to let the land and the house run to seed if they wanted to.
I had no stomach, or money, for a “place.” I wanted something of my very
own with no cares. Idle dream in a world busy in adding artificial cares
to the load Nature lays on our shoulders.
Things happened: the roof leaked; the grass must be cut if I was to have
a comfortable sward to sit on; water in the house was imperative. And
what I had not reckoned with came from all the corners of my land:
incessant calls—fields calling to be rid of underbrush and weeds and
turned to their proper work; a garden spot calling for a chance to show
what it could do; apple trees begging to be trimmed and sprayed. I had
bought an abandoned farm, and it cried loud to go about its business.
Why should I not answer the cry? Why should I not be a farmer? Before I
knew it I was at least going through the motions, having fields plowed,
putting in crops, planting an orchard, supporting horses, a cow, a pig,
a poultry yard—giving up a new evening gown to buy fertilizer!
Seeing what I was in for and fearing lest I should do as so many of my
friends had done—go in deeper than my income justified, find myself
borrowing and mortgaging in order to carry out the fascinating things I
saw to do—I laid down a strict rule which I have followed ever since,
and which I recommend to people of limited incomes who acquire a spot in
the country, and want it to be a continuous pleasure instead of a
continuous anxiety. I resolved that I would spend only what I could lay
aside from income, that I would divide this appropriation into three
parts—one for the land, one for the house, one for furnishing. As the
budget was very small it meant that a thousand things that I wanted to
do went undone, and still are undone. But it meant also that I had
little or no financial anxiety.
If the call of the land had been unexpected and not to be denied, even
more unexpected and still less to be denied was the call of the
neighborhood. I was not long in learning that in the houses I could see
in valley and on hillside centered the most genuine of human dramas,
tragic and comic.
After the land and its background, the greatest gift of God to us (“us”
including my niece Esther) was our nearest neighbors Mr. and Mrs. G.
Burr Tucker, at the side of whose house swung a sign, “Antiques for
Sale.”
But it was as neighbors, not as customers Mr. and Mrs. Tucker regarded
us from the start. When Burr was not over helping us settle he was
watching what was going on from his front porch. I have never had more
pungent, salty, faithful friends. They had spent most of their lives on
the corner, not always selling antiques. Mrs. Tucker had taught in the
schoolhouse at the top of the hill for twenty-nine years, and Burr had
had a varied and picturesque career as a salesman of pumps, fruit trees,
any gadget that seemed to be useful to his country neighbors.
Not long before we moved in he had discovered by accident that there
were people in the outside world who bought old spinning wheels, ancient
chairs, ancient pottery. Burr knew the contents of every garret and
woodshed for twenty miles around, and when he made his discovery he
began systematically to buy them out. By the time I arrived on the scene
he had an established business.
Not knowing whether we were going to like our new acquisition well
enough to make it permanent, Esther and I had decided to furnish out of
a department store basement. But in looking over Burr’s miscellaneous
assortment my eye fell on an old-fashioned melodeon, charming in line,
its bellows broken but easy to repair—$10. I couldn’t resist it, and so
I became almost from the first day a customer of my nearest neighbor. It
was a great day when Burr went “teeking,” as they called the hunt for
treasures. We would watch for his return, and when his white horse and
wagon loaded high with loot appeared down the road we were on the ground
as soon as he was.
Not only did the immediate vicinity yield rich and exciting material,
but a little distance away there were people from the world we knew.
There were the friends who had first shown me the country—Noble and Ella
Hoggson, up the Valley, the center of a jolly and interesting group
known as the “Valley Crowd.” A mile or so away was one of the most
interesting women in the literary world of that day—Jeannette Gilder,
sister of Richard Watson Gilder, a lively writer and editor.
Perhaps no woman in her time carried to more perfection the then
feminine vogue for severe masculine dress: stout shoes, short skirt,
mannish jacket, shirt, tie, hat, stick. They were the last word in
style. They suited her as they did few, for she was large of frame, with
strong, bold features and a fine swinging gait; but the masculinity was
all on the surface. Esther came home one day shouting with laughter:
“Miss Gilder is a fake. She wears silk petticoats and is afraid of
mice.”
Soon after I acquired my farm the countryside was stirred by the news
that Mark Twain was building only eight or nine miles away from us.
Everybody seemed to know what was happening with the building, the
settling, the life going on. That was partly because of our omnivorous
curiosity and partly because Mark Twain was a friendly neighbor. He
every now and then gave a great party, sending the invitations around by
our peripatetic butcher, a member of one of our first families, a
gentleman as well as a good tradesman.
I have a few treasured recollections of days when Jeannette Gilder and I
drove over to tea or lunch with Mark Twain, heard great stories of the
doings in his new home. It was from him that I heard the story of the
famous burglary; it was from him I heard the story of one of the best
practical jokes ever played—when Peter Dunne and Robert Collier sent him
an elephant.
Not only was all this fun and excitement and novelty shared by my niece
and those of my family who came to see what we were so excited about,
but every member of the _American_ staff sooner or later appeared at the
farm to look us over. From the start our chief counselor had been Bert
Boyden, who six months after I had taken the first option on the place
had insisted on accompanying me to see whether I had better take it up.
Bert looked at the oaks, he looked at the gay little stream that ran
across the land, and without hesitation said, “Buy it.” And buy it, I
did. Having had a part in the purchase, Bert superintended henceforth
all changes. He approved my plan of budgeting. He helped me select the
wallpapers which were hung; he was interested in the larder for the
winter.
In the summer when his family was at a distance J. S. P. came often to
discuss the perplexities of the magazine and rest himself from the
commotion of the office. The Norrises came, and Kathleen named my pig.
Who but Kathleen would have called him “Juicy”? He looked it, fat as
butter. The Siddalls came often, for in the summer we kept their famous
cat, “Sammy Siddall.” The Rices, the Martins, the Bakers—all came to
look on that rough land and shell of a house and wonder, I suspect, how
I could be happy with anything so simple, be satisfied with no more
pretentious plans than I had.
Among those who came in those early days was one who has left a crimson
streak across the history of his time—Jack Reed. Jack, just out of
Harvard, was giving half-time to the _American_, half-time to writing.
We would invite him for the week end but he was never at the station
when we drove over to find him. Likely he had missed his train, taken a
freight—that was more fun. And late in the evening he would come walking
over the hilltop demanding food and a bed, and we would sit long hearing
the adventures of his day.
It was on one of these trips that Jack found near by a natural
amphitheater. Before he had left he had planned to buy the place and
worked out in detail a Greek theater. He started towards New York on
foot, expecting to raise the money from friends en route. “I was all
ready to put up money,” one of them told me not many years ago.
[Illustration:
_From Lumière autochrome by Arnold Genthe, N. Y._
_Miss Tarbell in her garden at her Connecticut farm, 1914_
]
But when Jack was back at his desk in New York he forgot the theater—I
never heard of it afterwards. That was the delightful creature Jack Reed
was, up to the time that he discovered what is called life. He took it
hard. Now his bones lie under a tomb in Moscow, one of the martyrs to
Lenin’s great vision of the communal life.
All this was good for me, cushioned the shock I had suffered, convinced
me that at least I had gotten my hands on something permanent, a
fundamental factor in my future security—a home—a home capable of
feeding me if the worst came to the worst. But while it was good for me
it was not so good for my work on the magazine.
I had believed I could work better in the quiet of the country, but I
was discovering that the country was more exciting than the town and the
office as I knew it. Its attractions were proving too much for the
difficult task which had been assigned me in the planning for the first
year of the _American_. The task was nothing less than to write a
history of the making of our tariff schedules from the Civil War on. It
had been a natural enough selection for me after the experience with the
history of the Standard Oil Company for the tariff was quite as much a
matter of popular concern at the moment as the trust had been in 1900.
There was a growing demand for revision. How could we get into the
fight? A subject must be found for me. How about the tariff? Was a
historical treatment possible? I thought so; at least I so despised the
prohibitive tariff that I was willing to try if the magazine was willing
to back me.
I suppose most of us have had at various periods of our life homemade
remedies for the economic ills we see about us. When I was a girl in
high school I looked on an eight-hour day of productive labor for
everybody as the way out. I was much less worried by the hardships the
long day brought working people than the mental and moral deterioration
I imagined suffered by people who did not work. Idleness, not labor, was
the scourge of the world. For me the eight-hour day was a save-the-idle
day!
Before I left _The Chautauquan_ I had concluded that there was a trilogy
of wrongs—all curable—responsible for our repeated depressions and our
poorly distributed wealth: discrimination in transportation; tariffs
save for revenue only; private ownership of natural resources. I was
still of that opinion when, largely by accident, I had my chance to
strike at number one in my trilogy. Could I by the method I had followed
in that case, and the only one I knew how to use, present a plausible
argument against Number Two?
What had particularly aroused me was the way tariff schedules were made,
the strength of what we now call pressure groups—the powerful lobbies in
wool and cotton and iron and sugar which for twenty-five years I had
watched mowing Congress down like a high wind. There was no concealment
of the pressure. The lobbyists went at it hammer and tongs and battered
down opposition with threats, bribes, and unparalleled arrogance. By
these tactics they had overcome Mr. Cleveland’s famous tariff message of
1886, had passed the outrageous McKinley bill of 1890, had ruined the
Wilson bill of 1893, had defeated the promise of McKinley and Dingley
and Aldrich to lower duties in 1896, and had substituted the highest and
most distorted schedules the country had yet seen. But it looked in 1906
as if the Day of Judgment was near, and I asked nothing better than to
be on the jury.
I went into it blindly—on faith, certainly not on knowledge—and I had a
handicap that I was far from realizing at the time: that was that, while
in the case of the Standard Oil I had spent my life close to the events,
the tariff and its makers had never touched my life. This was something
that I had read in a book.
Another handicap was that my indignation was directed towards legal
acts. Congress had adopted these schedules, under coercion if you
please, but still it had adopted them. The beneficiaries had the
sanction of law. It was a different case from challenging railroad
discriminations, which were forbidden by law.
As I worked on the _Congressional Record_ and related documents I looked
up men still living who had had a part in the struggle on one side or
the other. There were many of them scattered around the country, now out
of Congress for the most part, but not averse to talking. As a rule I
got little from them. The fight which seemed to me so important was a
dead issue to them. They had lost or won. It was all part of a game.
Fresh from reading the daily discussions in the _Record_, curious about
this or that man or argument, I found them hazy, often not particularly
interested. There was little of the righteous indignation which I
thought I found in their recorded speeches. Had that been political,
instead of righteous, indignation? I began to think so.
It was Grover Cleveland who put heart in me. He had lost none of his
righteous indignation over the aid prohibitive tariffs were giving
certain trusts, none of his alarm over the growing disparity between
industry and agriculture they were fostering. He felt deeply the wrong
of the prices they were inflicting on the farmer, the professional
class, the poor. I got nothing but encouragement from him for the review
I had planned.
Luckily I already had a pleasant working relation with Mr. Cleveland. It
had come about in my last two years on _McClure’s_, when my chief
editorial task had been trying to persuade him that it was his duty to
write his reminiscences for us, incidentally offering myself as a ghost
if he felt that he needed one.
As his letters to me at this time show he was not entirely unfriendly to
the project:
I want to do the thing; and yet I am afraid the difficulties in the
way of doing it are fundamental and inexorable. You see the project
requires me to exploit myself and my doings before the public. I do
not see how I can do this, though I am terribly vain and often bore
my friends privately by tiresome reminiscence. And yet I cannot but
think that there are incidents and results in my career, which, by
their narration might be of service in stimulating those who aspire
to good citizenship—“and there we are.” This latter consideration
hints of duty; but then comes the fear that what seems to me duty is
a mere fantastic notion, and thereupon the old disinclination
resumes its sway.
* * * * *
I have frequently thought no one could help me so much as you; and
it has seemed to me more than once that you and I might possibly
“cook up something” in a summer vacation’s freedom from
distractions.
Nothing came at this time, 1904, of the “Tarbell-Cleveland fantasy,” as
Mr. Cleveland gaily dubbed it, and two years later the project was
dismissed, but in a letter so friendly that I cannot resist quoting from
it:
I do not believe a man who has turned the corner of sixty-nine
years, is any less vain and self-satisfied than when he was a youth.
At any rate here I am, in this sixty-nine predicament, delighted
with the generous things you say of me in the goodness of your
heart, and more than halfway deluding myself into the notion that I
deserve them. I want to be very sensible and hard-headed in this
affair; but in any event I am entitled to rejoice in your good
opinion of me, and your hearty wishes for my welfare and happiness.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for them; and I shall
gratefully remember them as long as I live. Somehow I have an idea
that you know me well—and surely I need not afflict myself with the
fear of vanity if I have found a friend in you.
With those letters in my files I felt free, when I undertook the tariff
work for the _American_, to ask Mr. Cleveland to talk to me about the
making of his tariff message in 1886, and the failure of the Wilson bill
in 1893. He was most generous, and when I had completed my story of the
two episodes I asked him to read the manuscript and give me a candid
judgment and of course his corrections and his suggestions. The chief
suggestion that he made showed a sensitiveness to his literary style in
public documents which I had not suspected. Charming letter writer as
Mr. Cleveland was, in his public documents he was ponderous. I must have
enlarged a little on this, for I find this paragraph in his letter with
which he sent back the proofs:
I have ventured to suggest a little toning down of your
characterization of my style—thinking perhaps you would be willing
to make an alteration to please me if for no other reason. You know
we are all a little sensitive on such a point.
There was another paragraph in that letter which touched me deeply:
Your article has caused me to feel again the greatest sorrow and
disappointment I have ever suffered in my public career—the failure
of my party to discharge its most important duty and its fatuous
departure from its appointed mission.
But lean as heavily as I dared on Mr. Cleveland, work as I would and did
on the tariff debates of Congress (I can wish my worst enemy no greater
punishment than reading them in full), I could not put vitality into my
narrative. It was of the _Congressional Record_—it was secondhand.
It was the making of the Payne-Aldrich bill in 1909 that finally gave a
certain life to my narrative. Here was something belonging to the
present, not something of the past. By all the signs Theodore Roosevelt
should have been the St. George to lead in the revision the public was
calling so loudly for, particularly after the panic of 1907. Few of his
party leaders paid attention.
“Are not all our fellows happy?” Speaker Joseph Cannon asked as the
demand for revision became louder.
Roosevelt himself heard it, but frankly said to his intimates that he
did not know anything about the tariff. He did not and he would not take
the time to learn. He hammered at the effects of privilege, pursued
“malefactors of great wealth,” but was not willing to do the hard
studying of the causes which produced the malefactors.
Mr. Taft, who followed Roosevelt, had no choice. The platform on which
he was elected called “unequivocally” for tariff reform, and as soon as
he was inaugurated he called a special session to do the work. My
chagrin was great when I realized at once that all the ancient technique
I had been trying to discredit was repeating itself. It is, I told
myself, the same old circus, the same old gilded chariots, the same old
clowns. So far as arguments were concerned they might have been taken
from the hearings of ’83, of ’88, of ’93, of ’96. Figures were changed,
and nobody could deny that these figures of growth were impressive; but
they came from interested men.
“They are incapable of judging,” Mr. Carnegie told the committee. “No
judge should be permitted to sit in a cause in which he is interested;
you make the greatest mistake in your life if you attach importance to
an interested witness.”
The process which “Sunset” Cox back in the seventies characterized as
“reciprocal rapine”—buying votes for the schedule their constituents
wanted by voting for schedules they could not justify—was in full swing.
Never was the tariff as the “cause of prosperity” worked harder. It was
the answer of the prohibitive protectionist to the charge that the
tariff was a tax. In all the early years they had called it so—a tax to
produce revenue, encourage new industries, protect higher wages, a
better standard of living. But Mr. Cleveland had called it boldly “a
vicious, inequitable, illogical tax,” and illustrated his adjectives
tellingly. The effect of his attack was so disastrous that the
supporters of prohibitive duties went into a huddle to find a new name.
“The cause of prosperity” was the euphemism they produced.
A repeater that had figured in every tariff bill was the answer of the
priests of the dogma to the argument that the poor should be considered.
According to the pictures they drew there were no poor in the United
States. This refusal to recognize poverty was no more discouraging in
the making of the bill of 1909 than the indifference to the effect high
tariffs were having on the cost of the necessities of life. In this they
ran true to historical precedent. From the time the business man took
charge in the late seventies any attempt to call the attention at
hearings to what a duty would do to the price of a necessity of life was
ignored or jeered.
Justice Brandeis, then plain lawyer Brandeis, was before a committee
considering the Dingley bill.
“And for whom do you appear?” he was asked.
“For the consumer,” he answered.
The committee, chairman and all, laughed aloud, but they were good
enough to say, “Oh, let him run down.”
This old indifference to the effect of higher prices on the living of
the poor stirred me to the only article in my series which seemed to
“take hold.” I called it, “Where Every Penny Counts.”
The worth-while thing, from my point of view, was that it reached women.
“I never knew what the tariff meant before,” Jane Addams wrote me.
Here was something which touched those in whom she was interested—wage
earners. She knew from actual contact what the increase of a cent in the
price of a quart of milk, a spool of thread, a pound of meat, meant to
working girls with their six or eight dollars a week. She knew that
every penny added to the cost of their food, clothes, or coal gave less
warmth, less covering. It was not difficult to show that what they were
trying to do in Washington in the making of the Payne-Aldrich bill was
just that—a tariff that would add to the cost of things that must be had
if people were to live at all.
To my deep satisfaction this effort to make the new tariff bill in the
good old way was promptly met by a rousing challenge from a group of
progressive Republican Senators, men who had been largely responsible
for forcing the promise to reform into the party platform. When they
discovered that there would be no reform if the lobbyists and their
friends in Congress could prevent it, they crystallized into one of the
most vigorous and intelligent fighting bands that had been seen for many
years in Congress. Insurgents, they were called.