so long preached. But to my mind the Russian Revolution had only
just begun. The event in which he saw the coming of the Lord I
looked on as only the first of probably many convulsions forced by
successive generations of unsatisfied radicals, irreconcilable
counterrevolutionists. When I voiced these pessimistic notions to
Steffens he called me heartless and blind.
But there were other forces working against the type of journalism in
which we believed. We were classed as muckrakers, and the school had
been so commercialized that the public was beginning to suspect it. The
public is not as stupid as it sometimes seems. The truth of the matter
was that the muckraking school was stupid. It had lost the passion for
facts in a passion for subscriptions.
The coming of the War in 1914 forced a new program. It became a grave
question whether, under the changed conditions, the increased confusion
of mind, the intellectual and financial uncertainties, an independent
magazine backed with little money could live. In undertaking the
_American_ we had all of us put in all the money we could lay our hands
on. We had cut the salaries of _McClure’s_ in two, reduced our scale of
living accordingly, and done it gaily as an adventure. And it had been a
fine fruitful adventure in professional comradeship. We had made a good
magazine, and we were all for making a better one and convinced we could
do it. “I don’t think,” Ray Baker wrote me not long ago, “that I look
back to any period of my life with greater interest than I do to
that—the eager enthusiasm, the earnestness, and the gaiety!” But we had
come to a time when under the new conditions the magazine required fresh
money, and we had no more to put in.
The upshot was that in 1915 the _American_ was sold to the Crowell
Publishing Company. The new owners wanted a different type of magazine,
and John Siddall, who had been steadily with us since I had unearthed
him in Cleveland as a help in investigating the Standard Oil Company,
was made active editor. Siddall was admirably cut out to make the type
of periodical the new controlling interests wanted. I have never known
any one in or out of the profession with his omnivorous curiosity about
human beings and their ways. He had enormous admiration for achievement
of any sort, the thing done whatever its nature or trend. His interest
in humankind was not diluted by any desire to save the world. It
included all men. He had a shrewd conviction that putting things down as
they are did more to save the world than any crusade. His instincts were
entirely healthy and decent. The magazine was bound to be what we call
wholesome. Very quickly he put his impress on the new journal, made it a
fine commercial success.
Gradually the old staff disintegrated. Peter Dunne went over to the
editorial page of _Collier’s_—Bert Boyden went to France with the
Y.M.C.A.—Mr. Phillips remained as a director and a consultant—Siddall
would hear of nothing else. “He is the greatest teacher I have ever
known. I could learn from him if I were making shoes,” he declared. And
years later when, facing his tragic death, he was preparing a new man to
take his place he told him solemnly, “Never fail to spend an hour a day
with J. S. P. just talking things over.”
As for me it was soon obvious there was no place for my type of work on
the new _American_. If I were to be free I must again give up security.
Hardly, however, had I acted on my resolution before along came Mr.
Louis Alber of the Coit Alber Lecture Bureau, one of the best known
concerns at that time in the business. Mr. Alber had frequently invited
me to join his troupe, and always I had laughed at the invitation: I was
too busy; moreover I had no experience, did not know how to lecture.
Now, however, it was a different matter. I was free, and I might forget
the situation in which I found myself by undertaking a new type of work.
Was not lecturing a natural adjunct to my profession? Moreover, Mr.
Alber wanted me to speak on these New Ideals in Business which I had
been discussing in the magazine, and he wanted me to speak on what was
known as a Chautauqua circuit, a kind of peripatetic Chautauqua. Perhaps
my willingness to go had an element of curiosity in it, a desire to find
out what this husky child of my old friend Chautauqua was like.
At all events I signed up for a seven weeks’ circuit, forty-nine days in
forty-nine different places.
15
A NEW PROFESSION
It was not until my signed contract to speak for forty-nine consecutive
days in forty-nine different places was laid before me that I realized I
had agreed to do what I did not know how to do. I had never in my life
stood on my feet and made a professional speech. To begin with—could I
make people hear? I felt convinced that I had something to say, and so
did my sponsors—but to what good if I could not be heard? What was this
thing they called “placing the voice”? I went to my friend Franklin
Sargent of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, told him of my
predicament. After a first test he agreed with me that I did not know
how to use my voice, and that unless I could learn I was letting myself
in for a bad failure.
Mr. Sargent was good enough to take me on as a pupil, uninteresting a
one as I must have been. He began by putting me on the simplest
exercises but with severe instructions about keeping them up. I went
about my apartment day and night shouting “Ma, Me, Mi, Mo,” “Ba, Be, Bi,
Bo.” I learned that the voice must come from the diaphragm, and that the
diaphragm must be strong to throw it out for an hour at a time.
Regularly every morning and every night, lying on my back with books on
my stomach, I breathed deeply until I could lift four or five volumes.
By the time the circuit opened in July I knew theoretically how to use
my voice; but I soon found that to do it without now and then getting it
into my throat, making horrible noises and throwing myself into nervous
panics, I must be more conscious of it than was good for my method of
handling my material. Indeed, it was not until my second year of
speaking that I could count on my voice for the hour of the performance.
I never came to a point where I did not have to ask that a glass of
water be put within reach—just in case. I found a glass of water a
safety device if my attention was distracted for a moment and I lost my
line of argument. I could pick it up, pretend to drink, change my
position, regain poise.
So much for my voice. I knew how to make people hear what I was saying.
Now as to material. I was to talk on the same subject day after day.
That is, I was supposed to make daily the same speech. I was afraid of a
memorized speech. A lecture experience of my old friend George Kennan
was largely responsible for that. After he had published his classic
work on Siberia Mr. Kennan took his story to the lecture platform. He
wrote his lecture with characteristic care—memorized it and repeated it
night after night on the long tours he made. It was an admirable
lecture, one of the most moving I ever heard.
In telling me of his platform experiences Mr. Kennan dropped this
warning: “In giving a memorized lecture one must be very careful that no
two sentences end with the same words. In my lecture on Siberia I
unwittingly used five or six identical words to end different
sentences—one near the opening, the other near the closing of my talk.
One night when perhaps I was unusually tired, instead of picking up what
followed the first sentence I picked up the words that followed the
second. That is, I was ending my lecture when I had only just begun it.
I saved myself, but after that I always took care that there were no two
sentences in my talk with identical, even similar endings.”
My memory is a tricky and unreliable organ—never properly trained, never
held resolutely to its job. I should have been afraid to trust it on a
lecture platform. Moreover, I realized that, since I was no orator and
never should be, my only hope was to give the appearance of talking
naturally, spontaneously. I put together what seemed to me a logical
framework and decided to drape it afresh every day, never to begin with
the same words, to use fresh illustrations, to think aloud,
experimenting. I soon discovered a fresh beginning every day was too
much to ask of myself under the conditions of travel. I found it
foolish, too, for if I had struck an opening that arrested attention,
why change it for one that might not? I soon found that illustrations
which were all right in an article did not serve with an audience. The
line of argument which I would have followed in an article became more
effective on a platform if switched. That is, as it turned out, although
I was giving the same lecture every day, it was never quite the same. I
worked on it constantly; and that is what kept my interest. I think,
because always I found however tired I might be, however much I despised
myself for undertaking to do what I more and more realized I did not
know how to do, I always was interested in my subject, talking as if it
was something of which I had never talked before. It was that personal
interest in my material which carried me through.
I had not given a thought in advance to the physical aspect of my
undertaking. I had known that every day for forty-nine days I was to
speak in a different place; I knew that meant daily traveling, but that
had not disturbed me. I had always prided myself that I was superior to
physical surroundings. I had not been long on the Chautauqua Circuit
before I was realizing that they played an enormous part in my day. I
found I was inquiring about the town to which we were headed: “How about
the hotel? Are there bathrooms? If so, am I to get one?”
I was uneasy about the table—the ideas of cooking and serving—and at
night about the noises, the drafts and other unmentionable worries. To
my amazement the bed in which I was to sleep soon was taking an
altogether disproportionate place in my mind. It is a fact that, when
the circuit was over and I came to tell its story, I could draw a
diagram of any one of the rooms in which I had slept, giving the exact
location of the bed in relation to windows and doors and bathroom. I
remembered these beds when I did not remember the hotel.
To my surprise I found myself deeply interested in the physical life of
the circuit, so like the life of the circus. We performed in tents, and
our outfit was as gay as ever you saw—khaki tents bound in red, with a
great khaki fence about, pennants floating up and down the streets, and
within, order, cleanliness, and the smartest kind of little platform and
side dressing rooms.
Naturally I had no little curiosity about my traveling companions.
Scoffing eastern friends told me that there would be bell ringers,
trained dogs, and Tyrolese yodelers. I found no such entertainment, but
I could hardly have fallen in with pleasanter company. A quintette of
young people whose business it was to sing for three-quarters of an hour
before my afternoon lecture and for a like period before the evening
entertainment, proved to be the gayest, kindest, healthiest of
companions. They were hard workers, seriously interested in pleasing
their audiences. They knew not only how to work, but how to live on the
kind of junket that I had undertaken. In other words, here was a group
of five young people who were doing what to me was very unusual, in a
thoroughly professional way. The seventh member of our party, the
evening entertainer, Sydney Landon, had had long experience on the
circuit. He was doing his work exactly as a good writer or a good lawyer
would do his. I saw at once that what I had joined was not, as I had
hastily imagined, a haphazard semi-business, semi-philanthropic,
happy-go-lucky new kind of barnstorming. It was serious work.
In starting the Chautauqua work I was not conscious that there was a
large percentage of condescension in my attitude. My first audience
revealed my mind to me with painful definiteness, and humbled me beyond
expression. It was all so unlike anything that I had had in my mind. I
was to speak in the evening and arrived at my destination late and after
a rather hard day. It was a steel town—one which I had known long years
before. The picturesqueness of the thing struck me with amazement.
Planted on an open space in the straggling, dimly lighted streets, where
the heavy panting of the blast furnaces could be clearly heard, I saw
the tent ablaze with electric lights, for, if you please, we carried our
own electric equipment. From all directions men, women, and children
were flocking—white shirtwaists in profusion, few coats, and still fewer
hats. And there were so many of them! I felt a queer sensation of alarm.
Here in the high-banked tiers were scores upon scores of serious faces
of hard-working men. I had come to talk about the hopeful and optimistic
things that I had seen in the industrial life of the country; but face
to face with these men, within sound of the heavy panting of great
furnaces, within sight of the unpainted, undrained rows of company
houses which I had noticed as I came in on the train, the memory of many
a long and bitter labor struggle that I had known of in that valley came
to life, and all my pretty tales seemed now terribly flimsy. They were
so serious, they listened so intently to get something; and the tragedy
was that I had not more to give them. This was my first audience. I
never had another that made so deep an impression upon me.
I had not been long on the Circuit before I realized that my audience
had only a languid interest in my subject, that what they were really
interested in, wanted to hear and talk about, was the War, then ending
its second year. But I could not talk about the War. Nothing had ever so
engulfed me as in a black fog, closed my mouth, confused my mind.
Chiefly this was because of the apparent collapse of organized efforts
to persuade or to force peaceful settlements of international quarrels.
These had taken so large a place in the thinking and agitating of the
liberal-minded with whom I lived that I had begun to delude myself that
they were actually strong enough to prevent future wars. Largely these
efforts were the result of the revulsion the conflicts of the nineties
had caused; the Boer War, the Greco-Turkish War, the Spanish War. People
who wanted to live in peace wrote books, talked, organized
societies—national and international. Jane Addams stirred the
English-speaking world by her “Newer Ideals of Peace.” William H. Taft,
Elihu Root, leading public men, educators, combined in one or another
society advocating this or that form of machinery.
And while this was going on Theodore Roosevelt was doing his best to
counteract it by his bold talk of war as a maker of men, the only
adequate machine for preparing human beings for the beneficent strenuous
life he advocated.
What was the _American Magazine_ to do about it? It seemed to us that we
ought to find some answer to Theodore Roosevelt. Certainly we could not
do it by promoting organized efforts; certainly not by preaching. We
must prove him wrong.
In 1910 our attention was turned to what seemed a possibly useful
educational effort against war, inaugurated at Stanford University by
its president, David Starr Jordan. I knew Dr. Jordan slightly. His
argument for opening the channels of world trade in the interest of
peace had helped keep up my spirits when laboring against the tariff
lobbies that so effectively closed them. What were they doing in
Stanford? It was decided that I go out and see; at least there might be
material for an article or two. Early in 1911 Dr. Jordan arranged that I
spend a few weeks at the university. He was very cordial, meeting me at
Los Angeles, where I arrived low in mind and body from an attack of
influenza.
There was to be a peace meeting that night—Dr. Jordan was to speak. They
had announced me, and when I refused to get out of my bed they took it
as proof of indifference to the cause. The truth was that the idea of
speaking extemporaneously was at that time terrifying to me; ill too, I
could not, or perhaps would not, rally my forces. I would rather be
regarded as a sneak than attempt it.
But Dr. Jordan understood and laughed off my apology, and together we
made a leisurely trip to Palo Alto. He was a delightful companion when
he felt like talking, as he often did! There was nothing which did not
interest him. Looking out of the car window, he talked not of peace at
all but of birds and trees and fishes and Roosevelt and the recent
earthquake.
At Palo Alto I found that the most exciting course then offered to the
students was the six weeks on war and peace which I had come to study.
The big assembly room was packed for all the public lectures. Among the
advanced students following the course were several who have since made
names for themselves: Bruce Bliven, Robert L. Duffus, Maxwell Anderson.
There was considerable intensive work on special themes. One student was
collecting war slogans; another, making a comparison of declarations of
war, each of which called God to witness that its cause was just.
Another student was compiling tables showing the yearly increase in the
costs of armament in the twenty years from 1890 on; another, the
economic losses through the devastations caused by war; and so on. All
interesting and useful material.
But, study the work as closely as I could, I could not for the life of
me lay my hands on that definite something which the _American_ needed.
Finally I took my discouragement to Dr. Jordan, and together we planned
collaboration on a series of articles to be called “The Case Against
War.” Dr. Jordan in his autobiography, “The Days of a Man,” tells of our
scheme and what became of it; “crowding events permitted war to frame
its own case.”
In August, 1914, all of the machinery on which peace lovers had counted
collapsed. The Socialists in a body in every country took up arms; so
did organized labor, so did the professional advocates of peace.
It was not only this collapse of effort that had stunned me. From the
hour war was declared I had a sense of doom quite inexplicable in so
matter-of-fact a person. We should go in; of that, I felt certain. After
we did go in John Siddall more than once recalled how in August of 1914,
when a party of us were dining at the then popular Hungarian Restaurant
on Houston Street, I had said that before the thing was ended the United
States, the world, would be in.
“You are a prophet,” Siddall would laugh.
But I was not a prophet. It was the logic of my conviction that the
world is one, that isolation of nations is as fantastic as isolation of
the earth from the solar system, the solar system from the universe.
All this made a species of Fabian pacifist of me. I was for anything
that looked to peace, to neutrality, but it was always with the hopeless
feeling that one simply must do what one can if the house is on fire.
I could not share the hate of Germany, in spite of my profound devotion
to France, my conviction that Germany had believed a war of conquest
essential to realize what she called her destiny, that she had been
consciously preparing for it, that she thought the Day had come when she
could venture it.
The awful thing seemed too big for hate by puny humans, and I was amazed
and no little shocked soon after the outbreak when, visiting my friend
John Burroughs at Squirrel Lodge in the Catskills, I found him whom I
had always regarded as an apostle of peace and light in a continuous
angry fever against all things German. Woodchucks were troubling his
corn, and every morning he went out with his gun. “Another damned Hun,”
he would cry savagely when he returned with his dead game.
Time did not cure John Burroughs’ wrath, for in December, 1917, he
pledged himself in an open letter published in the New York _Tribune_
never to read a German book, never to buy an article of German make. But
John Burroughs was not the only one of my supposedly gentle-souled
friends who felt this serious necessity to punish not only now but
forever.
I was too befogged to hate or to take part in the organizations looking
to ending the War which sprang up all about, and which I felt so
despairingly were all futile.
There was Mr. Ford’s Peace Ship. Mr. Ford had startled me one day in the
spring of 1915, when in Detroit I was observing his methods for making
men, by saying suddenly: “You know I am rather coming to the conclusion
that we ought to join the Allies. If we go in we can finish the thing
quickly. And that is what should be done. As it is now, they will fight
to a finish. It ought some way to be stopped, and I see no other way.”
Six months later Mr. Ford called me up at my home in New York and asked
if I would not come to his hotel: he and Miss Addams wanted to talk with
me. Of course I went at once.
It is curious how sometimes, when one steps inside a door without
knowing what is behind it, one senses caution. The door was open to Mr.
Ford’s suite—nobody in sight, no answer to my ring; but I could hear
voices and followed them to a room at the end of the hall. Mr. Ford was
standing in the corner facing me. Before him were two rows of
men—reporters, I knew.
“Here, boys, is Miss Tarbell—she will go with us,” he called.
“Go where, Mr. Ford?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, “we are chartering a Peace Ship. We are going to Europe
and get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.”
I had a terrible sinking of heart. “Oh, Mr. Ford, I don’t think I could
go on such an expedition!”
“Come with me and we will convince you.”
And he led me into a room where Madame Rosika Schwimmer and my old
friend Fred Howe were talking—Jane Addams was not there.
“Tell Miss Tarbell what we are going to do. We want her to go along.”
And he went back to the reporters.
I put in one of the most difficult hours of my life. Madame Schwimmer
argued ably; so did Mr. Howe; and all that I could say was, feeling like
a poor worm as I said it, “I can’t see it.”
When Mr. Ford came back and they told him, “She can’t see it,” I tried
to explain my doubts. He listened intently and then very gently said,
“Don’t bother her—she’ll come.”
On top of this interview came a long telegram followed by a longer
letter, both signed by Henry Ford. I doubt now if he ever saw either of
them. Certainly the signature at the foot of the letter is not his. I am
putting them in here, long as they are, because they are important in
the history of the Peace Ship, and so far as I know have never been
printed. Here they are:
November 24, 1915
Will you come as my guest aboard the Oscar Second of the
Scandinavian-American Line sailing from New York December fourth for
Christiania, Stockholm and Copenhagen? I am cabling leading men and
women of the European Nations to join us en route and at some
central point to be determined later establish an International
Conference dedicated to negotiations leading to a just settlement of
the War. A hundred representative Americans are being invited among
whom Jane Addams, Thomas A. Edison and John Wanamaker have accepted
today. Full letter follows. With twenty thousand men killed every
twenty four hours, tens of thousands maimed, homes ruined, another
winter begun, the time has come for a few men and women with courage
and energy irrespective of the cost in personal inconvenience, money
sacrifice and criticism to free the good will of Europe that it may
assert itself for peace and justice with the strong probability that
international disarmament can be accomplished. Please wire reply.
November 27, 1915
Dear Miss Tarbell:—
From the moment I realized that the world situation demands
immediate action, if we do not want the war fire to spread any
further, I joined those international forces which are working
toward ending this unparalleled catastrophe. This I recognize as my
human duty.
There is full evidence that the carnage, which already has cost ten
millions of lives, can and is expected to be stopped through the
agency of a mediating conference of the six disinterested European
nations, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Spain, and
the United States.
Envoys to thirteen belligerent and neutral European governments have
ascertained in forty visits that there is a universal peace desire.
This peace desire, for the sake of diplomatic etiquette, never can
be expressed openly, or publicly, until one side, or the other, is
definitely defeated, or until both sides are entirely exhausted.