part in editorial counsels, but it was recognized that all the time I

demanded should be given to the serial. I know of no other editor and no

other publisher who has so fully recognized the necessity of generous

pay and ample time, if he were to get from a staff work done according

to the best editorial standard, and worthy of the magazine and the

writer.

When it was finally decided that Mr. Phillips was to sever his long

relation to _McClure’s_ several members of the editorial staff resigned,

including Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, John Siddall, the

efficient young managing editor Albert Boyden, and myself. We could not

see the magazine without Mr. Phillips.

The last day we left the office, then on Twenty-third Street near Fourth

Avenue, some of us went together to Madison Square and sat on a bench

talking over our future. We were derelicts without a job.

But not for long.

[Illustration:

_First year of The American Magazine, 1907_

]

There was then in New York, though it was not generally known, a

magazine group which wanted a change. The magazine was very old—long

known as _Frank Leslie’s Illustrated_ _Monthly_, recently changed to

_The American Magazine_. Its owner was Frederick L. Colver; its editor,

Ellery Sedgwick (afterward editor of the _Atlantic_); its publisher,

William Morrow (afterward the founder of William Morrow & Company, the

book publishing house). Mr. Colver approached Mr. Phillips: “Why don’t

_you_ take it over?”

Finally in council assembled, our editorial group together with David A.

McKinlay and John Trainor of the McClure business department, decided to

incorporate the Phillips Publishing Company and buy _The American

Magazine_. With what we could put in ourselves and money from the sale

of stock to interested friends, we secured funds for the purchase and

sufficient working capital.

We left _McClure’s_ in March: six months later, October, 1906, appeared

our first issue. The announcement shows how seriously we took ourselves,

as befitted people who had seen something in which they deeply believed

go to pieces. We had been too cruelly bruised to take anything lightly,

but luckily we were able to make two additions to our staff, each man

with a vein of humor not to be dried up or muddled by any

cataclysms—William Allen White and Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley).

We had known Mr. White in the _McClure’s_ office since the day of his

famous editorial, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” After that came his

Boyville stories, two or three of which _McClure’s_ published, and then

at intervals studies of political situations and political figures. It

was not long before he began to come to New York. He was a little

city-shy then, or wanted us to think so. As I was one of the official

entertainers of the group, it occasionally fell to me to “take him by

the hand,” as he put it, and show him the town. I could have hardly had

a more delightful experience. He judged New York by Kansas standards,

and New York usually suffered. His affection and loyalty for his state,

his appreciation and understanding of everything that she does—wise and

foolish—the incomparable journalistic style in which he presents her are

what has made him so valuable a national citizen. His crowning

achievement among the many to be credited to him has been remaining

first, last, and always the editor of the Emporia _Gazette_. A staunch

friendship had sprung up between Mr. White and Mr. Phillips, and it was

natural enough that he interested himself in the new venture.

As for Peter Dunne, we went after him and rather to my surprise he came

along, taking a desk in our cramped offices and appearing with amazing

regularity. At this time he was some forty years old—the greatest

satirist in my judgment the country has yet produced. He had a wide

knowledge of men and their ways. There was no malice in his judgments,

but a great contempt for humbuggery as well as for all forms of

self-deception devoted to uplifting the world. However, he felt kindly

towards our ardent desire to improve things by demonstrating their

unsoundness and approved our unwillingness to use any other tools than

those which belonged legitimately to our profession. He came out

strongest in his contributions to the department of editorial comment,

which Mr. Phillips had introduced under the head of “The Interpreter’s

House.” We were all supposed to contribute whatever was on our minds to

this department. Mr. Phillips and Mr. Dunne did the censoring and

dovetailing. I did not often make “The Interpreter’s House,” much to my

chagrin. Dunne said, “You sputter like a woman,” which I fear was true.

If it had not been for him the first Christmas issue of “The

Interpreter’s House” would have been bleak reading. We had each of us

broken forth in lament for the particular evil of the world which was

disturbing us, offering our remedies.

It seems to me [wrote Dunne, editing our contributions] that we are

serving up a savory Christmas number ... a nice present to be found

in the bottom of a stocking....

You cannot go to the Patent Office in Washington and take out a

patent that will transform men into angels. The way upward, long and

tedious as it is, lies through the hearts of men. It has been so

since the founding of the Feast. Nothing has been proved more

clearly in the political history of the race than this, that good

will to men has done more to improve government than laws and wars.

... Let us close down our desks for the year. If you want to find me

for another week I will be found in the wonderful little toy shop

around the corner.

That editorial broke the tension which had made me think this was no

time to go home for Christmas. I went.

Peter Dunne hated the pains of writing. His labor affected the whole

office—sympathy with what he was going through, fear that his copy would

not be in on time, eagerness to see it when it came, to know if it was

“one of his best.” But Peter’s work was never what he thought it ought

to be, and he sought forgetfulness.

Indispensable on the new editorial staff, seeing Peter through his birth

pains, keeping the rest of us at our tasks, nursing new writers, making

up the magazine, was Albert Boyden. He had come fresh from Harvard to

_McClure’s_ and had at once made himself a place by his genius for

keeping things going and his gift for sympathetic friendliness. It was a

combination which became more valuable and irresistible as time went on.

Bert was everybody’s friend, whether editor, artist, or writer. “One can

have friends, one can have editors,” Ray Stannard Baker was to write

later, “but Bert was both.”

He was of the greatest value to the _American_ in bringing together

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.

The leader in the revolt, interested in railroad reform rather than the

tariff, was La Follette of Wisconsin. Others were Beveridge of Indiana,

Cummins and Dolliver of Iowa, Borah of Idaho, and Bristow of Kansas.

They were already familiar figures at the _American_ along with certain

members of the House, particularly the salty and peppery William Kent of

California—Phillips, Baker and Steffens being in frequent communication

with them.

The most brilliant and witty, as well as the most thoroughly informed of

the tariff insurgents was the amiable Senator Dolliver from Iowa—twenty

years in Congress—always regular—always stoutly supporting the tariff

bills turned out by the committee.

“What ails you now?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “I had been going on for twenty years taking

practically without question what they handed me; but these alliances

between the party and industrial interests have at last set me thinking.

I began to understand something of the injustice that was being done to

the consumer. And then we promised to reform the tariff.”

When the insurgents divided up the schedules for study, Schedule

K—wool—the most difficult and the most important politically, fell to

Senator Dolliver. He found he had been voting for years for duties

which, when he sat down to read the schedule, he could not understand.

He discovered they were a mixture of tricks, evasions, and

discriminations—intended to be so, he believed. He determined to master

them.

And master them he did by months of the severest night work. He pored

over statistics and technical treatises. He visited mills and importing

houses and retail shops. He sought the aid of experts, and in the end he

knew his subject so well that he went onto the floor of the Senate

without a manuscript and literally played with Schedule K, and

incidentally also with Senator Aldrich, who was said to fly to the cloak

room whenever Senator Dolliver rose to speak. When he had finished his

clean, competent dissection, Schedule K lay before the Senate a law

without principles or morals; and yet, just as it was, the Senate of the

United States passed it, and the President of the United States signed

it, and it went on the statute books.

Why? Neither Mr. Taft nor Mr. Aldrich defended the wool schedule which

made the bill odious. They both were frank in explaining that it was

politically necessary, not at all a question of the fairness of the

schedule, but a question of what powerful interests demanded. The wool

interests could defeat the bill if they did not get what they wanted.

My conviction about the inequity of Schedule K was so strong that when

the _Outlook_ published a long defense of it, plainly an advertisement

but not so marked, I protested in a personal letter to its vociferous

contributing editor, Theodore Roosevelt, with whom by this time I was on

fairly friendly terms. Just what I said in my letter about the _Herald_

which so stirred his wrath I do not remember, but his answer to my

comment is so typically Rooseveltian in temper and reasoning that I

think it should be preserved:

May 6, 1911

Oh! Miss Tarbell, Miss Tarbell!

How can you take the view you do of the Herald! You compare it with

the Tribune. It is perfectly legitimate to compare the Tribune with

Mr. Watterson’s paper, the Courier-Journal. Honest people could

agree or disagree about those two papers. Personally I think that

during the last thirty or forty years the Tribune has been

infinitely more helpful to good causes than the Courier-Journal,

but, as I say, people can differ on such a subject; and I should be

very glad to meet at any time either Henry Watterson or Whitelaw

Reid. But to compare either one of them with the Herald is literally

and precisely as if I should compare either the American Magazine or

The Outlook with Town Topics.

Having expressed his opinion of the _Herald_, he proceeded to an

elaborate specious explanation of the matter which had so stirred my ire

that I had protested to him.

Now as for what you say about The Outlook’s publishing “The Truth

about K.” In the first place, I admit at once that the title, the

type, and the placing of this advertisement _did_ make it look to

many readers like an editorial article. We used the same title, type

and placing that had been used for similar articles for twenty

years; but our attention was subsequently called to the fact, to

which you now call my attention, i.e., that some people were misled

in the matter; and in consequence we at once abandoned this twenty

years’ custom. From now on, every article of the kind will appear

under the heading of “Advertising Department” or “Advertising

Section,” so that there cannot be any possible mistake in the

future. As for the publication of the article itself, I most

emphatically think that it was not only justifiable, but

commendable. The Outlook publishes continually letters from people

upholding policies or views with which The Outlook diametrically

disagrees. (For example, The Outlook has on several different

occasions published letters taking a very dark view of my own

character and achievements, whether at San Juan Hill or elsewhere.)

This particular article by Spencer I should have been glad to see

published in the regular section of the Outlook as putting forth his

side of the case, just as I am now trying to secure publication in

The Outlook of an article from the North Western farmers giving

their side of the case against Canadian reciprocity. Spencer’s

article, however, was too long, and such being the case, as I say, I

was not merely willing but glad to see it put in. (I did not know it

had been put in, of course, until long after it had appeared; but

when I did see it, I was glad that it had been put in.) Probably you

know that on April 8th The Outlook editorially took up this

question, stated that the American Woolen Company was entirely

justified in printing their article as an advertisement, and that

The Outlook violated in no degree the ethics of journalism in

admitting the advertisement to its pages and expressed its total

disagreement with the views expressed in the article. I would have

gone further than this; I would have stated that The Outlook did not

violate the ethics of journalism, but rendered a great and needed

service as an example in showing its willingness to accept the

statement of a case with which it did not agree, to put it in

exactly as it was written, and then itself to comment with absolute

freedom, as it has done, upon the arguments made in the

advertisement. Let me repeat that if The Outlook had had space,

which it unfortunately did not have, I should have been glad to see

Spencer’s article inserted, not as an advertisement, but as a

communication signed by Spencer, and avowedly stating his side of

the case.

Sincerely yours

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

I felt that I had won my case with Mr. Roosevelt’s assurance that

henceforth every article of the kind would appear under the head of

“Advertising Department.”

When the Payne-Aldrich bill was finally passed with Mr. Taft’s and Mr.

Aldrich’s brutally frank explanations, I was done with the tariff as a

subject for further study and writing. Four years later came the

Democratic effort to make a revision. I had only the most casual

interest. It was the same old method. They might make a better bill, I

told myself, but there never could be a fair one as long as tariffs were

set by a Congress under the thumb of people personally interested.

One thing seemed to me clear which is still clearer now, the combined

prohibitive tariff industries were digging their own grave. Foreign

markets they had to have; but they refused to buy from those to whom

they wanted to sell. What the gentlemen did not realize was that by this

procedure they were practically forcing nations not naturally industrial

to copy their methods, industrialize themselves. These nations soon were

succeeding with such skill that in spite of the boosting of the tariff

again and again the foreigners continued to undersell us.

But the prohibitive protectionists were building a future competitor

threatening to be stronger than foreign trade. This in the realm of

politics. There had been no more hearty and conscienceless supporters of

prohibitive tariffs than certain groups of organized labor,

conspicuously the Amalgamated Steel and Iron Workers under John Jarrett.

They were not a numerous body, but with the cry of the full dinner pail

they were able to back the demands of the employers. They had a body of

votes that no political party dared defy. But in teaching organized

labor the power of political pressure the industrialists gave them a

weapon that they did not see might one day be turned against themselves.

Back in the eighties one of the wisest and soundest economists we have

produced, David A. Wells, said in substance of the victory of the tariff

lobbies: “This is a revolution. It will take another revolution to

overthrow the leadership now established by business men.”

I felt after the bill of 1909 that there was nothing for an outsider

like me to do but wait for that revolution.

I felt this so deeply that when President Wilson invited me to be a

member of the Tariff Commission he formed in December, 1916, I refused.

I was pleased, of course, that Mr. Wilson thought me fit for such a

place. I knew that I should find the associations interesting. The dean

of tariff students in the United States—Dr. Taussig of Harvard—was the

chairman. To be under him would be an education that would be worth the

taking, but I did not hesitate.

First, there was my personal situation—my obligations. I had no right to

give up my profession for a connection of that sort, in its nature

temporary. Then I realized my own unfitness as Mr. Wilson could not. I

had had no experience in the kind of work this required. I was an

observer and reporter, not a negotiator. I am not a good fighter in a

group; I forget my duty in watching the contestants. But primarily there

was my hopelessness about the service the Tariff Commission might

render. Its researches and its conclusions, however sound, would stand

no chance in Congress when a wool or iron and steel or sugar lobby

appeared. A Tariff Commission was hamstrung from the start.

Of course it was not only my interest and work on the tariff that had

led Mr. Wilson to offer me the position. He was looking about for women

to whom he could give recognition. He was an outspoken advocate of

suffrage and wanted to use women when he thought them qualified.

Jane Addams pleaded with me to accept “for the sake of women,” but I did

not feel that women were served merely by an appointment to office.

Women, like men, serve in proportion to their fitness for office, to the

actual fact they have something to contribute. I had no enthusiasm for

the task, did not even respect it greatly. I believed, too, that harm is

done all around by undertaking technical jobs without proper scientific

training. The cause of women is not to be advanced by putting them into

positions for which they are untrained.

The press comments on the idea of a woman on this commission were not

unfriendly, as far as I saw them; but they were a little surprised and,

as I was to find later, protests were made to Mr. Wilson. My friend Ray

Stannard Baker, working on the Wilson papers, came across an answer of

the President on December 27, 1916, to one protesting gentleman which I

am not too modest to print:

As a matter of fact, she has written more good sense, good plain

common sense, about the tariff than any man I know of, and is a

student of industrial conditions in this country of the most serious

and sensible sort.

14

THE GOLDEN RULE IN INDUSTRY

I was done with the tariff, but it was out of the tariff that my next

serial came—born partly of a guilty conscience! In attempting to prove

that in certain highly protected industries only a small part of a duty

laid in the interest of labor went to labor, I had taken satisfaction in

picturing the worst conditions I could find, badly ventilated and

dangerous factories, unsanitary homes, underfed children. But in looking

for this material I found, in both protected and unprotected industries,

substantial and important efforts making to improve conditions, raise

wages, shorten hours, humanize relations.

My conscience began to trouble me. Was it not as much my business as a

reporter to present this side of the picture as to present the other? If

there were leaders in practically every industry who regarded it not

only as sound ethics but as sound economics to improve the lot of the

worker, ought not the public to be familiarized with this belief?

At that moment, and indeed for a good many years, the public had heard

little except of the atrocities of industrial life. By emphasizing, the

reformers had hoped to hasten changes they sought. The public was coming

to believe that the inevitable result of corporate industrial management

was exploitation, neglect, bullying, crushing of labor, that the only

hope was in destroying the system.

But if the practices were not universal, if there was a steady, though

slow, progress, ought not the public to recognize it? Was it not the

duty of those who were called muckrakers to rake up the good earth as

well as the noxious? Was there not as much driving force in a good

example as in an evil one?

The office was not unfriendly to the idea. As a matter of fact _The

American Magazine_ had little genuine muckraking spirit. It did have a

large and fighting interest in fair play; it sought to present things as

they were, not as somebody thought they ought to be. We were

journalists, not propagandists; and as journalists we sought new angles

on old subjects. The idea that there was something fundamentally sound

and good in industrial relations, that in many spots had gone far beyond

what either labor or reformers were demanding, came to the office as a

new attack on the old problem. Mr. Phillips, always keenly aware of the

new and significant, had his eye on the movement, I found, and was

willing to commission me to go out and see what I could find.

This was in 1912, and for the next four years I spent the bulk of my

time in factories and industrial towns. The work took me from Maine to

Alabama, from New York to Kansas. I found my material in all sorts of

industries: iron and steel in and around Pittsburgh, Chicago, Duluth;

mines in West Virginia, Illinois, and Wisconsin; paper boxes and books

and newspapers everywhere; candy in Philadelphia; beer and tanneries and

woodwork in Wisconsin; shirts and collars and shoes in New York and

Massachusetts. I watched numberless things in the making: turbines and

optical lenses, jewelry and mesh bags, kodaks and pocketknives, plated

cutlery and solid silver tea services, Minton tableware and American

Belleek, cans and ironware, linen tablecloths and sails for a cup

defender, furniture I suspected was to be sold in Europe for antiques,

and bric-a-brac I knew was to be sold in America as Chinese

importations, railroad rails and wire for a thousand purposes, hookless

fasteners and mechanical toys. I seemed never to tire of seeing things

made. But do not ask me now how they were made!

I never counted the number of factories I visited. Looking at the volume

in which I finally gathered my findings, I find there are some

fifty-five major concerns mentioned; but these were those which in my

judgment best illustrated the particular point I was trying to make.

There were many more.

My visits had to be arranged beforehand. I took pains to make sure of my

credentials, but I soon discovered that my past work served me well. The

heads of the industries and many workmen were magazine readers, liked to

talk about writers and asked all sorts of curious questions about men

and women they had become acquainted with in _McClure’s_ and the

_American_: Kipling, Baker, Steffens, Will White, Edna Ferber, just

coming on at that time. There was often considerable asperity at the top

when I presented my letters of introduction. They set me down as an

enemy of business; but again and again this asperity was softened by a

man’s love of Abraham Lincoln. He had a habit of reading everything

about Lincoln that he could put his hands on, collected books, brought

out my “Life” to be autographed. That is, while I was _persona non

grata_ for one piece of work, another piece softened suspicion and

opened doors to me.

My first move in a factory was to study the processes of the particular

industry. Machines were not devils to me as they were to some of my

reforming friends, particularly that splendid old warrior Florence

Kelley, then in the thick of her fight for “ethical gains through

legislation.” To me machines freed from heavy labor, created abundance.

That is, I started out free of the inhibition that hate of a machine

puts on many observers. I think because of this I was better able to

judge the character of a factory, to see its weak as well as its good

points. I was able to understand what the enemy of the machine rarely

admits: that men and women who have arrived at the dignity of steady

workers not only respect, but frequently take pride in, their machines.

Again, I gave myself time around these factories. The observer who once

in his life goes down for half a day into a mine or spends two or three

hours walking through a steel mill, naturally revolts against the

darkness, the clatter, the smoke, the danger. As a rule he misses the

points of real hardship; he also misses the satisfactions. As my

pilgrimage lengthened, I became more and more convinced that there is no

trade which has not its devotee.

“Once a miner, always a miner.” “Once a sailor, always a sailor.” One

might go through the whole category.

“Why,” I now and then asked miners, “do you stay by the mine?”

“I was brought up to it.” “I like it.” “Nobody bothers you when you are

working with a pick.” “Nice and quiet in the mines.”

“But the danger!”

“No worse than railroading.” “My brother got killed by a horse last

week.”

In the end I came to the conclusion that there was probably no larger

percentage of whose who did not like the work they were doing than there

is in the white-collar occupations. In the heavy industries

particularly, I found something like the farmer’s conviction that they

were doing a man’s job. It made them contemptuous of white-collar

workers.

I spent quite as much time looking at homes as at plants. The test I

made of the industrial villages and of company houses was whether or no,

if I set myself to it, I could make a decent home in them. I found even

in the most barren and unattractive company districts women who had made

attractive homes. There was the greatest difference in home-making

ability, in the training of women for it. The pride of the man who had a

good housekeeper as a wife, a good cook, was great. I do not remember

that a man ever asked me to come to his house unless he considered his

wife a good housekeeper. I remember one so proud of his home that he

took me all over it, showing with delight how his Sunday clothes, his

winter overcoat, the Sunday dress of his little girl, were hung on

hangers with a calico curtain in front to keep them clean. His

housekeeper, in this case a mother-in-law, confided to me in talking

things over that night that in her judgment the reason so many men drank

was that the women did not know how to keep house.

Visiting with the family after the supper dishes were cleared away, I

managed to get at what was most important in their lives. After steady

work it was the church. After minister or priest, the public-school

teacher was the most trusted friend of the household. In many places,

however, I found her authority beginning to be divided with the company

nurse, for the company nurse was just being added to industrial staffs.

Many of my reforming friends felt that in going into a factory and

taking a salary a nurse was aligning herself with the evil intentions of

the corporation, but the average man did not feel that way. She helped

him out in too many tight places.

As to the relation of workmen to their union—for often they belonged to

a union—I concluded that in the average industrial community it was not

unlike that of the average citizen to his political party and political

boss.

Both the union and the employer seemed to me to be missing opportunities

to help men to understand the structure of industry, perhaps because

they did not themselves understand it too well, or sank their

understanding in politics. Both union and employer depended upon one or

another form of force when there was unrest, rather than education and

arbitration. In doing this they weakened, perhaps in the end destroyed,

that by which they all lived.

The most distressing thing in mills and factories seemed to me to be the

atmosphere of suspicion which had accumulated from years of appeal to

force. I felt it as soon as I went into certain plants—everybody

watching me, the guide, the boss, the men at the machines.

But to conclude that because of this suspicion, this lack of

understanding, which keeps so many industries always on the verge of

destruction, there were no natural friendly contacts between the

management and the men is not to know the world. I found that

practically always the foreman or the boss, sometimes the big boss, in

an industry had come up from the ranks. In various industrial towns I

found the foreman’s family or the superintendent’s family living just

around the corner, and his brother, perhaps his father, working in the

mine or the mill. He was one in the family who had been able to lift

himself. Nor did it follow that there was bad blood between a “big boss”

and the head of a warlike union. I had been led to believe they did not

speak in passing. I had supposed that, if Samuel Gompers and Judge Gary

met, they would probably fly at each other’s throat; but at the

Washington Industrial Conference in 1919, standing in a corridor of the

Pan-American Building, I saw the two approaching from different

directions. They were going to pass close to me. I had a cold chill

about what might happen. But what happened was that Mr. Gompers said,

“Hello, Judge,” in the friendliest tone and Judge Gary called

cheerfully, “Hello, Sam.” And that was all there was to it. Later, when

I was to see much of Judge Gary, trying to make out what the famous Gary

code meant, and how it was being applied, we talked more than once of

Samuel Gompers and his technique. The Judge had great respect for him as

a political opponent, as well he might.

It is hard to stop talking when I recall these four years, drifting up

and down the country into factories and homes. The contrast between old

ways and new ways was always before me. Many a sad thing I saw—nothing

more disturbing than the strikes, for I managed to get on the outskirts

of several and follow up the aftermath, which was usually tragic.

There was the ghastly strike in certain fertilizer plants at Roosevelt

on the Jersey coast. I followed it through to its unsatisfactory end.

Rival labor and political bodies fought each other for days while the

men with drawn and hopeless faces loafed in groups in saloons or on

doorsteps.

“All going to the devil while their unions fight,” said the woman who

gave me my meals in the only boarding house in the desolate place. “I am

for the union, but the union does not know when they go into a strike

which they can avoid what they are doing to men. It turns them into

tramps. They leave their families and take to the road. It is better

that they leave. I think the women often think that, so they won’t have

any more babies. No, the union does not see what it does to men. But

what are the men going to do when things were like they were in this

place? You know what their wages were. You know what a hellish sort of

place this is. What are they going to do?”

It was the men who saw industry as a cooperative undertaking who gave me

heart. I do not mean political cooperation, but practical cooperation,

worked out on the ground by the persons concerned. The problems and

needs of no two industrial undertakings are ever alike. For results each

must be treated according to the situation. The greatest contributions I

found to industrial peace and stability came when a man recognized that

a condition was wrong and set out to correct it.

There was Thomas Lynch, president of the Frick Coke Company of

Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Tommy Lynch had swung a pick before

John Lewis did and, like Lewis, had risen by virtue of hard work and

real ability, from one position to another—one to become the head of a

group of mines, the other to become the head of a group of miners. But

no union could keep up with Tommy Lynch in the improvements he demanded

for his mines and miners. It was he who originated the famous slogan

“Safety First.” When I talked with him about rescue crews he swore

heartily, “Damn rescue work—prevent accidents.”

Tommy Lynch’s work did not end in the mine. He had a theory that you

could not be a good worker unless you had a good home. He literally

lifted some seven thousand company houses, which he had inherited from

an old management, out of their locations between high mountains of

lifeless slag and put them onto tillable land, gave every woman water in

her kitchen and a plot of land for a garden.

In 1914, when I was first there, out of 7,000 homes 6,923 had gardens.

And such gardens! It took three days for Mr. Lynch and two or three

other distinguished gentlemen to decide on the winners of the nine

prizes given for the finest displays. They were estimating that the

vegetable gardens yielded $143,000 worth of vegetables that year. I went

back to see what they were doing with those gardens in the middle of the

late depression. There were even more of them, and they were even more

productive. Knowing what the garden meant, the miners had turned to the

cultivation with immense energy. The company had plowed and fertilized

tracts of untilled land near each settlement, and the men were raising

extra food for the winter. Many of these miners were selling vegetables

in the near-by town markets.

Believing as I do that the connection of men and women with the soil is

not only most healthy for the body but essential for the mind and the

soul, these gardens aroused almost as much thankfulness in my heart as

the safety work.

But Tommy Lynch could not have worked out his notions of safety and

gardening without the cooperation of the miners, even if it was

sometimes begrudging.

Then there was Henry Ford attacking the problem which most concerned his

plant, labor turnover—in his case something like 1200 per cent. He had

come into the industrial picture with his minimum wage of five dollars a

day just before I began my work. In May of 1915 I set up shop for ten

days in a Detroit hotel in order to study what he was doing. The days I

spent in and around the Ford factory; nights, tired out with

observations and emotions, I came back to a hot bath and dinner in bed,

talking my findings into a dictaphone until I fell off to sleep.

Connections had not been hard to make. There was then at the head of

Ford publicity an experienced and able gentleman who realized that

articles in _The American Magazine_ on the Ford plant, whether favorable

or not, were good for the concern, and who saw to it that I had every

chance. Mr. Ford himself was my first important objective. He saw me in

his big office looking down on the plant, a plant then employing

eighteen thousand men. At the first glimpse of his smiling face I was

startled by the resemblance to the picture of the young Lincoln which

had played such a part in the launching of the Lincoln articles in

_McClure’s_. It was the face of a poet and a philosopher, as in the

young Lincoln there was a young Emerson.

Like a poet and a philosopher, Henry Ford was unhurried. He was no slave

to his desk. I saw it practically abandoned when he was wrestling with

the successor to Model T. “Mr. Ford does not often come in,” my

conductor told me. “He is wandering through the factories these days. We

never touch his desk.”

He was boyish and natural in off hours. Coming into the private

lunchroom for officers at the plant, where I judged a place was always

left for him, I saw him throw his long right leg over the back of the

chair before he slid leisurely into the seat.

“I have got an idea,” he said. “People complain about the doors of the

car—not convenient. I am going to put a can opener into every car from

now on and let them cut their own.”

He delighted in the flow of Ford jokes, wanted to hear the latest, to

see it in the house organ.

When he saw me, it was he who did the talking, and he seemed to be

straightening out his thoughts rather than replying to my questions.

When I asked him his reasons for mass production he had a straight-away

answer.

“It is to give people everything they want and then some,” he said. And

then he went on to enlarge in a way I have never forgotten.

“There’s no reason why everybody shouldn’t have everything he needs if

we managed it right, weren’t afraid of making too much. Our business is

to make things so cheap that everybody can buy ’em. Take these shears.”

He picked up a handsome pair of large shears on his desk. “They sell for

three or four dollars, I guess. No reason you couldn’t get them down to

fifty cents. Yes, fifty cents,” he repeated as I gasped. “No reason at

all. Best in the world—so every little girl in the world could have a

pair. There’s more money in giving everybody things than in keeping them

dear so only a few can have them. I want our car so cheap that every

workman in our shop can have one if he wants it. Make things everybody

can have—that’s what we want to do. And give ’em money enough. The

trouble’s been we didn’t pay men enough. High wages pay. People do more

work. We never thought we’d get back our five dollars a day; didn’t

think of it; just thought that something was wrong that so many people

were out of work and hadn’t anything saved up, and thought we ought to

divide. But we got it all back right away. That means we can make the

car cheaper, and give more men work. Of course when you’re building and

trying new things all the time you’ve got to have money; but you get it

if you make men. I don’t know that our scheme is best. It will take five

years to try it out, but we are doing the best we can and changing when

we strike a snag.”

What it simmered down to was that if you wanted to make a business you

must make men, and you must make men by seeing that they had a chance

for what we are pleased to call these days a good life. And if they are

going to have a good life they must not only have money but have low

prices.

There was much more, I soon found, than five dollars a day and upwards

that was behind the making of men at Ford’s. There was the most

scientific system for handling mass production processes that I had ever

seen. Tasks were graded. A workman was given every incentive to get into

higher classes. But I was not long at Ford’s before I discovered that it

was not this system, already established, it was not the five dollars,

it was not the flourishing business, it was not advertising—deeply and

efficiently and aggressively as all these things were handled—which at

the moment was absorbing the leaders of the business. It was what Mr.

Ford was calling “the making of men.” It was a thoroughly worth-while

and deeply human method. Mr. Ford knew that, do all you can for a man in

the factory—a short day, higher wages, good conditions, training,

advancement—if things are not right for him at home he will not in the

long run be a good workman. So he set out to reorganize the home life of

the men.

It was done by a sociological department made up at that time of some

eighty men all taken out of the factory itself, for Mr. Ford’s theory

was then that, no matter what you wanted done, you could always find

somebody among the eighteen thousand “down there,” as he called it, that

was qualified. So they had selected eighty for social service work and

these men were doing it with a thoroughness and a frankness which was

almost as important as the five dollars a day had been.

“Paternal” was the adjective generally applied to the Ford method; but

one of the interesting things about Mr. Ford is the little effect a word

has on him. Call a thing what you like, it is the idea, the method, that

he is after. If that seems to him to make sense, you may have your

word—it doesn’t trouble him.

So they went energetically about their determination to add to what they

were doing for the making of men inside of the factory a thorough

overhauling of the men’s lives outside. There were certain things that

were laid down as essential. You had to be clean—cleanliness had played

no part in the lives of hundreds of these men. But when they did not get

their “big envelope” and asked why, they were told it was because their

hands were dirty, they didn’t wash their necks, didn’t wear clean

clothes. Ford’s men must be clean. Already it had made an astonishing

difference in the general look of the factory. And this cleanliness was

carried by the sociological department into the home. The men must be

kept clean, and the women must do their part. Many of the women as well

as the men were discovering for the first time the satisfaction of

cleanliness. “Feels good,” said a working woman to me, reluctant but

thorough convert according to my conductor. “Feels good to be clean.”

They were enemies of liquor, and no man who drank could keep his place.

But he was not thrown out: he must reform. And some of the most

surprising cures of habitual drunkenness that I have ever come across I

found in the Ford factory in 1915.

There was a strong sympathy throughout the factory for derelicts. There

were four hundred men in Ford’s when I was there who had served prison

terms. Nobody knew them, but each had his special guardian; and no

mother ever looked after a child more carefully than these guardians

looked after their charges.

In this social work Mr. Ford was constantly and deeply interested. As

nearly as I could make out, there was nothing of which they all talked

more.

I dined one night with four or five of the officers, including Mr. Ford,

and while I had expected to hear much about mass production and wage

problems the only thing I heard was, “How are you getting on with Mary?”

“How about John?” “Do you think we can make this housing scheme work?”

That is, what I was discovering at Ford’s was that they were not

thinking in terms of labor and capital, but in terms of Tom, Dick, and

Harry. They were taking men and women, individuals, families, and with

patience and sense and humor and determination were putting them on

their feet, giving them interest and direction in managing their lives.

This was the Henry Ford of 1916.

But work like that of Tommy Lynch and Henry Ford depended upon

individual qualities of a rare and exceptional kind, also upon the

opportunity to test ideas. Neither Lynch nor Ford was willing to let bad

situations, a stiff problem alone. It challenged their wits,

particularly when it concerned men in mine and factory. They were not

hampered by dogmas or politics. They did things in their own way, and if

one method did not work tried another; and both had a rare power to

persuade men to follow them. They were self-made, unhampered products of

old-fashioned democracy, and both were thorns in the flesh of those who

worked according to blue prints, mechanized organizations or the status

quo. But the success of both with the particular labor problems they

tackled was the answer to critics.

Only how could men of lesser personality, lesser freedom of action, and

lesser boldness in trying out things follow? They could not. They had to

have a more scientific practice if they were to achieve genuine

cooperation in working out their problems. And what I was seeing in

certain plants, as I went up and down the country, convinced me it had

come in the Frederick Taylor science of management.

I had first heard of Taylor in the _American Magazine_ office. John

Phillips had sensed something important on foot when he read that Louis

Brandeis, acting as counsel for certain shippers in a suit they had

brought against the railroads, had told the defendants that they could

afford lower rates if they would reorganize their business on the lines

of scientific management which Frederick Taylor had developed. They

could lower rates and raise wages.

“And who is Frederick Taylor?” asked Mr. Phillips. “Baker, you better

find out.”

And so Frederick Taylor had come to know the _American_ group, and he

had given to the _American_, much to our pride, his first popular

article explaining what he meant by scientific management. In the

following letter Mr. Taylor tells a protesting friend why he gave it to

us:

I have no doubt that the Atlantic Monthly would give us a better

audience from a literary point of view than we could get from the

American Magazine. But the readers of the Atlantic Monthly consist

probably very largely of professors and literary men, who would be

interested more in the abstract theory than in the actual good which

would come from the introduction of scientific management.

On the other hand, I feel that the readers of the American Magazine

consist largely of those who are actually doing the practical work

of the world. The people whom I want to reach with the article are

principally those men who are doing the manufacturing and

construction work of our country, both employers and employees, and

I have an idea that many more persons of that kind would be reached

through the American Magazine than through the Atlantic Monthly.

In considering the best magazine to publish the paper in, I am very

considerably influenced by the opinion I have formed of the editors

who have been here to talk over the subject; and of these Ray

Stannard Baker was by far the most thorough and enthusiastic in his

analysis of the whole subject. He looked at all sides in a way which

no other editor dreamed of doing. He even got next to the workingmen

and talked to them at great length on the subject. I cannot but

feel, also, that the audience which reads the work of men of his

type must be an intelligent and earnest audience.

Mr. ——, who has just been here, suggested that among a certain class

of people the American Magazine is looked upon as a muckraking

magazine. I think that any magazine which opposed the

“stand-patters” and was not under the control of the moneyed powers

of the United States would now be classed among the muckrakers.

This, therefore, has no very great weight with me.

Taylor believed like Henry Ford that the world could take all we could

make, that the power of consumption was limitless. “To give the world

all it needs is the mission of industry,” he shouted at me one day I

spent with him at Boxley (his home near Philadelphia)—shouted it with

many picturesque oaths. I have never known a man who could swear so

beautifully and so unconsciously.

Mr. Taylor’s system in part or whole had been applied in many factories

which I visited in my four years. You knew its outward sign as soon as

you entered the yard. Order, routing, were first laws, and the old

cluttered shops where you fell over scattered material and picked your

way around dump heaps were now models of classified order. A man knew

where to find the thing he needed, and things were placed where it took

the fewest steps to reach them.

Quite as conspicuous as the physical changes in the shop was the change

in what may be called its human atmosphere. Under the Taylor System the

business of management was not only planning but controlling what it

planned. Management laid out ahead the day’s work for each man at his

machine; to him they went with their instructions, to them he went for

explanations and suggestions. Office and shop intermingled. They

realized their mutual dependence as never before, learned to respect

each other for what they were worth. Watching the functioning, one

realized men had come to feel more or less as Taylor himself felt: that

nothing of moment was ever accomplished save by cooperation, which must

be “intimate and friendly.” Praised once for his work on the art of

cutting metal he said a thing all leaders would do well to heed:

“I feel strongly that work of any account in order to be done rightly

should be done through true cooperation, rather than through the

individual effort of any one man; and, in fact, I should feel rather

ashamed of any achievement in which I attempted to do the whole thing

myself.”

Nothing was more exciting to me than the principles by which Taylor had

developed his science. They were the principles he had applied to

revolutionary discoveries and inventions in engineering. I made a brief

table of them. They make the best code I know for progress in human

undertakings:

1) Find out what others have done before you and begin where they

left off.

2) Question everything—prove everything.

3) Tackle only one variable at a time. Shun the temptation to try

more than one in order to get quick results.

4) Hold surrounding conditions as constant and uniform as possible

while experimenting with your variable.

5) Work with all men against no one. Make them want to go along.

There is enduring vitality in these principles and there is

universality. They are as good for battered commonwealths as for

backward disorganized industries. Think what it would mean in Washington

today if all the experimenters began where others had left off, if no

demonstrated failure was repeated, if theory was held to be but 25 per

cent of an achievement, practice 75, if one variable at a time was

experimented with, if time were taken for solutions and above all if

everybody concerned accepted “intimate and friendly” cooperation as the

most essential of all factors in our restoration.

This hunt for practical application of the Golden Rule in industry left

me in much better spirits than my studies of transportation and tariff

privileges. The longer I looked into the latter the deeper had been my

conviction that in the long run they would ruin the hope of peaceful

unity of life in America. They seemed to me inconsistent with democracy

as I understood it and certainly inconsistent with my simple notions of

what made men and women of character. Were we not getting a larger and

larger class interested only in what money would buy? Particularly did I

dislike the spreading belief that wealth piled up by a combination of

ability, illegality, and bludgeoning could be so used as to justify

itself—that the good to be done would cancel the evil done. What it

amounted to was the promotion of humanitarianism at the expense of

Christian ethics; and that, I believe, made for moral softness instead

of stoutness.

But there was nothing soft about the experiments I had been following.

Where they succeeded, it was by following unconsciously in general

Taylor’s stiff principles. Patient training, stern discipline, active

cooperation alone produced safety, health, efficient workmen, abundance

of cheap honest output. I had faith in these things. They were the

foundation of genuine social service. All desired goods followed them as

they became part of the nation’s habit of life, reaching down to its

lowest depths.

Many of my reforming friends were shocked because the one and only

reason most industrial leaders gave for their experiments was that it

paid. Generally speaking, the leaders were the kind who would have cut

their tongues out before acknowledging that any other motive than profit

influenced them. Certainly they sought dividends; but they believed

stability, order, peace, progress, cooperation were back of dividends.

That industry which paid must, as Mr. Ford said, “make men.” That the

right thing paid, was one of their most far-reaching demonstrations. Men

had not believed it. They were proving the contrary; so in spite of the

charge of many of my friends that I was going over to the enemy, joining

the corporation lawyer and the company nurse, I clung to the new ideals.

What I never could make some of these friends see was that I had no

quarrel with corporate business so long as it played fair. It was the

unfairness I feared and despised. I had no quarrel with men of wealth if

they could show performance back of it untainted by privilege.

Sometimes I suspected that the gains I set forth as practical results of

this experimenting inside industry were resented by those who had been

working for them for years through legislation, organization, agitation,

because they had come about by other methods than theirs and generally

in a more complete form than they had ventured to demand. But that the

idealists had been a driving force behind the new movement inside

industry was certain. Their method could not do the thing, but it could

and did drive men to prove it could be done.

My critics who charged me with giving comfort to the enemy did not see

that often this enemy disliked what I was trying to do even more deeply

than my so-called muckraking. Indeed, he took those pictures of new

industrial methods and principles as a kind of backhanded

muckraking—indirect and so unfair. It threw all established methods of

force into a relief as damaging as anything I ever had said about high

duties and manipulations of railroad rates.

Whatever challenges my new interest aroused, however confused my own

defense of it was, I knew only that I should keep my eye on it and

report any development which seemed to me a step ahead. That, of course,

was counting on continued editorial sympathy in the _American_. But

hardly had I finished my book before that sympathy was cut off by a

change in ownership.

The change was inevitable, things being as they were in the magazine

world after 1914. The crew who had manned our little ship so gallantly

in 1906 when we left _McClure’s_ had lost only one of its numbers. A few

months after we started Lincoln Steffens withdrew. He objected to the

editing of his articles, demanded that they go in as he wrote them. The

same editorial principles were being applied to his productions that

were applied to those of other contributors. They were the principles

which he himself had been accustomed to applying and to submitting to on

_McClure’s_. The editorial board decided the policy could not be changed

and accepted Steffens’ resignation.

Back of his withdrawal, as I saw it, was Steffens’ growing

dissatisfaction with the restrictions of journalism. He wanted a wider

field, one in which he could more directly influence political and

social leaders, preach more directly his notions of the Golden Rule,

which certainly at that time was his chosen guide.

Certainly it was the creed of the _American_. It had always been John

Phillips’ answer to our fervent efforts to change things, “The only way

to improve the world is to persuade it to follow the Golden Rule.”

I suppose Steffens had heard of the Golden Rule, but I am certain he had

never thought about it as a practical scheme for improving society. It

seemed to me, at the time, that it came to him as an illumination, and

for some years he held tight to it, preaching it to political bosses, to

the tycoons of Wall Street, the Brahmins of Boston, confronting them

with amazing frankness and no little satisfaction with their open

disregard of its meanings. He became greatly disillusioned finally by

discovering that men were quite willing to let their opponents act upon

the Golden Rule but much less so to be governed by it themselves.

My first realization that Steffens was struggling with the problem which

confronted us all—that is, whether we should stick to our profession or

become propagandists—was one day when I looked up suddenly to find him

standing by my desk more sober, less certain of himself than I had ever

seen him.

“Charles Edward Russell has gone over to the Socialist party,” he said.

“Is that not what we should all be doing? Should we not make _The

American Magazine_ a Socialist organ?”

I flared. Our only hope for usefulness was in keeping our freedom,

avoiding dogma, I argued. And that the _American_ continued to do.

In the years that were to come, wars and revolutions largely occupied

Steffens. Wherever there was a revolution you found him. He wrote many

brilliant comments on what was going on in the world. When he came back

from Russia after the Kerensky revolution he was like a man who had seen

a long hoped-for vision.

“I have looked at the millennium and it works,” he told me.

It was to be the practical application of that Golden Rule he had

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.

For fifteen months the people of the world have waited for the

governments to act; have waited for governments to lead Europe out

of its unspeakable agony and suffering and to prevent Europe’s

entire destruction. As European neutral governments are unable to

act without the cooperation of our government, and as our

government, for unknown reasons, has not offered this cooperation,

no further time can be wasted in waiting for governmental action.

In order that their sacrifice may not have been in vain, humanity

owes it to the millions of men led like cattle to the slaughter

house, that a supreme effort be made to stop this wicked waste of

life.

The people of the belligerent countries did not want the war. The

people did not make it. The people want peace. It is their human

right to get a chance to make it. The world looks to us, to America,

to lead in ideals. The greatest mission ever before a nation is

ours.

This is why I appealed to you, as a representative of American

democracy, in my telegram of the twenty-fourth. It is for this same

reason that I repeat my appeal to you and urge you to join a peace

pilgrimage.

Men and women of our country, representing all of its ideals and all

of its activities, will start from New York on the 4th of December

aboard the Scandinavian-American Steamship Oscar II. The peace ship

that carries the American delegation will proceed to Christiania,

where Norway’s valiant sons and daughters will join the crusade. In

Stockholm, the ship’s company will be reinforced by the choicest of

Sweden’s democracy. The crusade will then go on to Copenhagen, where

further harbingers of peace will be foregathered.

These various groups will add such momentum to the crusade that when

the pilgrims reach The Hague, with its achievements of international

justice and comity, the moral power of the peace movement will be

irresistible. In The Hague we hope to meet delegations from

Switzerland and from Spain.

From all these various delegations will be selected a small

deliberative body which shall sit in one of the neutral capitals.

Here it will be joined by a limited number of authorities of

international promise from each belligerent country. This

International Conference will frame terms of peace, based on justice

for all, regardless of the military situation.

This International Conference will be an agency for continuous

mediation. It will be dedicated to the stoppage of this hideous

international carnage and further dedicated to the prevention of

future wars through the abolition of competitive armaments.

In case of a governmental call for an official neutral conference

before the Peace Ship departs from New York, or even reaches

European shores, our party will continue on its mission, rejoicing

that the official gathering has materialized. We will then place our

united strength solidly behind those entrusted by the governments to

carry on the peace negotiations.

In The Hague the members of the Peace Pilgrimage will dissolve.

Accommodations will be provided for each one back to his home. It is

impossible to determine the exact length of time the pilgrimage will

take. Six weeks, however, should be allowed.

I respectfully beg of you to respond to the call of humanity and

join the consecrated spirits who have already signified a desire to

help make history in a new way. The people of Europe cry out to you.

Information about the meeting place in New York, the hour of

sailing, the amount of luggage, your accommodations, etc., will be

sent as soon as we have your reply. I should appreciate it if you

would telegraph your affirmative decision. Will you send it to the

Hotel Biltmore, Suite 717, New York, our temporary headquarters.

Yours for peace

HENRY FORD.

I have no copies of my replies, but I know the gist of them must have

been a heavy-hearted “I can’t do it, Mr. Ford.”

The night after my visit to the hotel Miss Addams called me up, and for

a half-hour we argued the matter on the telephone. All I could say was:

“If you see it you must go, Miss Addams. I don’t see it and I can’t. It

is possible that standing on the street corner and crying, ‘Peace,

Peace,’ may do good. I do not say that it will not, but I cannot see it

for myself.”

We were to talk it over in the morning, but that night they took her to

Chicago, hurried her into a hospital. She was very ill. Jane Addams did

not go on the Peace Ship.

Years after, I asked her, “Would you have gone if you had not been ill?”

“I certainly should,” she said. “There was a chance, and I was for

taking every chance.”

She always took every chance when it was a matter of human relief. And

if she had gone things would have been different on the Peace Ship, for

she and not Madame Schwimmer would have been in command. She saw quite

clearly the managerial tendencies of Madame Schwimmer, but she saw also

her abilities. She was not willing because of doubts to throw over a

chance to strengthen the demand for peace, and she undoubtedly trusted

to her own long experience in handling people to handle Madame

Schwimmer. But she did not go.

It was a tragedy of hasty action, of attempting a great end without

proper preparation. Mr. Ford would never have attempted to build a new

type of automobile engine as he attempted to handle the most powerful

thing in the world—the unbridled passions of men organized to come to a

conclusion by killing one another.

The Peace Ship was a failure; but so were the under-cover official

efforts the President and his sympathizers then steadily pushed. Things

grew blacker. The day when we would go in seemed always nearer to me. In

February of 1916 my depression was deepened by hearing Mr. Wilson

himself admit it. My friends Secretary and Mrs. Daniels had been so

gracious as to include me among their guests at the Cabinet dinner they

were giving in honor of the President and the new Mrs. Wilson.

We were all standing in the Daniels drawing room waiting their arrival.

I was talking so interestedly with somebody that I had forgotten what it

was all about, when I was conscious of a distinguished pair in the

doorway. It took me an instant to remember what we were there for, and

that this was the President and his lady. How they looked the part!

At the dinner table the President was gay, telling stories, quoting

limericks. Later, when it came my turn to talk to him and I told him how

charming I had found Mrs. Wilson’s animation and lively wit, he rather

eagerly fell to talking of her and, to my amazed delight, of the

difficulties of courting a lady when each time he calls the house is

surrounded by secret service men!

Dropping his gaiety, he told me a little of the situation at the moment.

“I never go to bed without realizing that I may be called up by news

that will mean that we are at war. Before tomorrow morning we may be at

war. It is harder because the reports that come to us must be kept

secret. Hasty action, indiscretion might plunge us into a dangerous

situation when a little care would entirely change the face of things.

My great duty is not to see red.”

I carried away from that dinner a feeling of the tremendous difficulty,

of the tremendous threat under which we lived, and of a man that had

steeled himself to see us through. It strengthened my confidence in him.

But of all this I could say nothing on my Chautauqua circuit, even when

I began to realize that, more than anything else, these people were

interested in the War.

One of the most convincing proofs I received of this came from things I

overheard at night. We ended our circuit with a siege of terrific

heat—the kind of heat that made sleep impossible. The best room you

could get was generally on the second-floor front. You pulled your bed

to the window, and lay with your head practically out; but if you could

not sleep you would certainly be entertained, for on the sidewalks below

there would gather, around nine-thirty or ten, a little group of

citizens who had come downtown after supper “to see a man.” Shopkeepers,

laborers, traveling men, lawyers, and occasional preachers and hotel

keepers would sit out talking war, preparedness, neutrality, Wilson,

Hughes, for half the night.

“Look at them,” said a talkative Congressional candidate. “Four years

ago I could have told how practically every one of the men in this town

would vote in November. I can’t do it today. Nobody can. They are freed

from partisanship, as I could never have believed. They are out there

now thrashing over Wilson and Hughes, and not 25 per cent of them know

which it will be when election day comes.”

More and more I came to feel that you could count on these people for

any effort or sacrifice that they believed necessary. One of the most

revealing things about a country is the way it takes the threat of war.

Just after we started, the call for troops for Mexico came. It seemed as

if war were inevitable. There was no undue excitement where we traveled,

but boys in khaki seemed to spring out of the ground.

I shall never forget one scene, which was being duplicated in many

places in that region. We were in an old mountain town in Pennsylvania.

Our hotel was on the public square, a small plot encircled by a row of

dignified, old-fashioned buildings. In the center stood a band-stand,

and beside it a foolish little stone soldier mounted on an overhigh

pedestal—a Civil War monument. We were told that on the square at

half-past nine in the evening a town meeting would be called to say

good-bye to the boys who were “off to Mexico on the ten-thirty.” “How

many of them?” I asked. “One hundred and thirty-five,” was the answer.

And this was a town of not over twenty-eight hundred people.

As the hour approached, the whole town gathered. It came quietly, as if

for some natural weekly meeting; but a little before ten o’clock we

heard the drum and fife, and down the street came a procession that set

my heart thumping. Close beside the City Fathers and speakers came a

dozen old soldiers, some of them in faded blue, two or three on

crutches, and behind them the boys, one hundred and thirty-five of

them—sober, consciously erect, their eyes straight ahead, their step so

full of youth.

The procession formed before the little stone soldier, who somehow

suddenly became anything but foolish; he took on dignity and power as

had the boys in rank—boys whom, if I had seen them the day before, I

might have called unthinking, shiftless, unreliable. The mayor, the

ministers, a former Congressman, all talked. There was a prayer, the

crowd in solemn tones sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” There was a curt

order; the procession re-formed; the old soldiers led the way, and the

town followed the boys to the “ten-thirty.”

Nothing could have equaled the impression made by the quietness and the

naturalness of the proceedings. Beside the continuous agitations and

hysteria to which the East had treated us in the last two and a half

years, this dignity, this immediate action, this willingness to see it

through, gave one a solemn sense of the power and trustworthiness of

this people. It was a realization that I should have been willing to pay

almost any price to come to. Certainly it more than paid me for my

forty-nine nights in forty-nine different beds.

Eight months later this impression of the steadiness of the people under

the threat of war was deepened. After my Chautauqua circuit, which I had

supposed to be a temporary adventure, the lecture bureau asked to book

me for a month of lyceum work, most of it in the Middle West. Late in

January of 1917 I started out.

I was on the road when the break with Germany came. Our evening papers

of February 3rd had the digest of the President’s speech to Congress.

The next Sunday morning there was the full text. I went out to walk

early that morning, and one of the first things I saw was a lively row

in front of a barber shop. Inquiring, I found that a big Swede had

expressed sympathy with the Kaiser, and was being thrown into the

street. At the hotel, my chambermaid, the elevator boy, the table

waiter, did not wait for me to introduce the subject. Everybody was

talking about what the break meant—war of course. They were ready, they

said.

As the days went on, I found that was the opinion of everybody. One

morning I landed at a railway junction town, with no train until late

afternoon. It was a forlorn place at any time, but deadly now, with the

thermometer around twenty below. A friendly ticket agent warned me that

the only hotel was no place for ladies, and sent me off into the

territory beyond the railroad shops to a dingy-looking house which, he

said, was kept by a woman who was clean and decent. It was anything but

inviting on the outside, but travelers who are choosers are poor sports.

The woman gave me a room and, following the only wisdom for the lecturer

who would keep himself fit, I went to bed. It was four o’clock in the

afternoon when I came down. The woman of the house, whom I had found in

the morning rubbing out clothes, was in a fresh gingham dress, sitting

in the living room reading the Chicago _Tribune_. Beside her lay a copy

of the _Record Herald_. I found that this woman since the beginning of

the trouble in Europe had been reading full details in these admirably

edited newspapers. She had not been for a war, she said, until they went

back on their word.

“That settled it for everybody out here. Now,” she said, “there is

nothing else to do.”

I do not know how often I heard those words in the days that followed.

When the President said of America in closing his address to Congress on

April 2, 1917, “God helping her she can do no other,” he was only

expressing that to which the majority of the people of the West, as I

heard them, had made up their minds.

Closely watching, I personally felt utterly remote. There was nothing

for me to do. In the pandemonium of opinion nothing I could say or do

would hinder or help, and so I went on with my daily rounds.

I was speaking at a big dinner in Cleveland early in April when a

telegram was handed to me, signed by the President. It appointed me a

member of what he called the Woman’s Committee of the Council of

National Defense.

I did not know what the appointment meant, but when your Government is

trying to put through a war, whether you approve or not, I had long ago

concluded that as for me I would do whatever I was asked to do. And so I

sent at once an acceptance of what I took as an order. Two weeks later I

received my first instructions. They came from the head of the

committee, Dr. Anna H. Shaw.

16

WOMEN AND WAR

What is it all about? That is what we asked ourselves when on May 2nd,

answering the call of our chairman Dr. Anna Shaw, we met in Washington.

And where were we to sit? We were but one of many anxious, confused,

scrambling committees for which a place must be found. Our predicament

was settled by finding a room somewhere on Pennsylvania Avenue—a dreary

room with a rough table and not enough chairs to go around. My first

contribution to winning the War was looting chairs from adjacent

offices. My success gave me hope that after all I might be at least an

errand boy in the war machine.

It was not long, however, before the Woman’s Committee was a beneficiary

of the civilian outbreak of patriotic generosity which had swept

Washington. “You may have our house, our apartment,” people cried. A

fine and spacious old house close to Connecticut Avenue facing the

British Embassy was offered us, a much more comfortable and dignified

headquarters than I think we expected under the conditions. We remained

there throughout the War.

But what were we there for? The Administration had called us into being.

What did it expect of us? It was quickly obvious that what it wanted at

the moment was an official group to which it could refer the zealous and

importuning women who wanted to “help,” the various organizations

already mobilizing women for action. Considerable rivalry had developed

between them, and it was certain to become more and more embarrassing.

Our committee had been cleverly organized to spike this rivalry,

including as it did the presidents of the leading national groups of

women: the National Suffrage Society, the Women’s Federation of Clubs,

the National Women’s Council, the Colonial Dames, the National League

for Women’s Service. Everybody in the list represented something except

myself. I was a lone journalist with no active connection with any

organization or publication. I was conscious that that was against me in

the committee though apparently it had not been in the minds of

President Wilson and Secretary Baker.

We were not an independent body, but one of the many subsidiaries of the

Council of National Defense, the managing head of which was the present

president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Walter

Gifford—a man of intelligence, sense, amazing self-control and patience.

This I had reason to know, as I frequently represented the committee

before him.

The fact that we had to go to men for orders irritated Dr. Shaw from the

start. She felt we ought to be able to decide for ourselves what women

should do, or at least she, the head of the committee, should sit on the

Council of National Defense. I think Dr. Anna never quite forgave the

Administration for subjecting us to the directions of man, whose

exclusive authority in world affairs she had so long disputed.

Our mandate had been to consider women’s defense work for the nation.

But what were we to do with the results of our consideration, our

recommendations? Our conclusion was that we must find a way to get them

to the women of the country. To do that, we must coordinate the various

agencies represented in our body, enlist others, create a channel for

the Government’s requests and orders. It meant organization. Here we

were strong, for Dr. Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt were the most

experienced and successful organizers of women in the country. Moreover,

they could command not only the organizations which they had created

but, through their partners on the committee, other great national

groups. To me the way that organization came into existence so quickly

and so quietly was magic, unaccustomed as I was to organization in any

form. It was not long before every state, every county, practically

every community, had a branch of the Woman’s Committee of the Council of

National Defense. Before the year was up there were states which in

twenty-four hours after receiving our requests could pass them down to

their remotest corner.

From the start the committee worked—Dr. Anna saw to that. She and Mrs.

Catt settled down in Washington. For myself I canceled two book

contracts, determined to do what I could, indefinite as the task seemed.

We met regularly; we kept office hours; we were keen to make something

of our job.

The committee took it for granted that we were to handle the food

problem already looming so large. By midsummer we had our organizations

everywhere, planting and hoeing. On top of this came dehydration, and we

had many hot discussions about the best method. I remember a morning

when the committee gave itself over to reminiscences of helping

grandmother string apples for drying, of the way mother dried corn and

berries.

Then came canning—the larder was to be full. We were pretty well under

way and rather proud of ourselves, thinking this was a special job, when

Herbert Hoover came back from feeding Europe and was put at the head of

the American Food Administration in a building of his own, practically a

dictator of the food of America. Obviously Mr. Hoover was the one man in

the world who could properly manage the huge and many-sided job; but it

caused considerable heartburning in the Woman’s Committee that gardening

and canning and drying should not be left entirely to us. Were we not

already in the field? Had we not an organization which was rapidly

extending to the last woman in the country? Were they not digging and

planting and canning and saving? But in spite of Dr. Anna’s bristling

opposition we were soon put in our place, made an auxiliary. It fell to

me to act as liaison officer, which amounted to nothing more than

finding out at food headquarters what they wanted from women and passing

it on.

What we soon had contrived to become, thanks largely to Dr. Anna and

Mrs. Catt, was a free channel through which we could pour speedily and

uninterruptedly any request which came to us from any department of the

war machine. We developed a disciplined army with other things to do

than knitting and bandage making, gardening and canning, essential and

important as these were.

Our most useful service, as I see it, was a growing activity in

preventing the machinery of daily life from rusting in the storm of war.

Take the women going in droves into industry. For the most part they

were as untrained as the boys drafted into the Army, as willing as these

to take it, throw themselves away.

Jane Addams had said to me at the beginning of the War: “Everything that

we have gained in the way of social legislation will be destroyed. It

will throw us back where we were twenty-five years ago.”

That did not seem to me to be necessary nor indeed to be the way things

were already going. Take this woman in industry for whom Miss Addams was

especially alarmed. Recruiting for munition factories had been pushed

before we went into the War by the National League for Woman’s Service,

of which Maude Wetmore, a member of the Woman’s Committee, was chairman.

As early as March, 1917, the league was at work in the Department of

Labor. Soon after war was declared the President and the Secretaries of

War and Labor called for general support of labor laws for women as well

as for men. Mrs. J. Borden Harriman was soon made chairman of a

committee on women in industry of the Council of National Defense. About

the same time our committee created a department to handle the problem

and was given a tenth member from the ranks of organized women—Miss

Agnes Nestor of Chicago, a leader in the glove workers’ union. We were a

little concerned about the new appointee, but Miss Nestor from the start

was one of the most useful members of the committee—wise and patient in

understanding all problems though naturally concentrated chiefly on her

own, which were grave enough, because of the rapid multiplication of

agencies with their unavoidable rivalries and jealousies.

The determination not only to protect woman in her new capacity but

educate her, thrust her ahead, was strong. Representatives of organized

women met in Kansas City in June demanding new standards for war

contracts. The upshot was that Florence Kelley was made a member of the

Board of Control of Labor standards for Army Clothing. Things went

rapidly after that. A woman’s division was created in January in the

United States Employment Service with Mrs. H. M. Richard at its head.

About the same time Mary Van Kleeck was made head of a woman’s branch in

the Ordnance Service and our Agnes Nestor, who had by this time become

generally recognized for her intelligence and steadiness, was appointed

on the newly formed advisory council to the Secretary of Labor in war

labor legislation.

Agnes Nestor and Mary Anderson, the present head of the Women’s Bureau

of the Department of Labor, demonstrated as I had never seen it the

education to be had in a labor organization which seeks by arbitration

and more arbitration and still more arbitration to improve its situation

without weakening the industry by which it lives, one that appeals to

force only as a last resort, never as a mere threat.

What all this amounts to is that through the activities of women in and

out of industry there was a steady clarification and strengthening of

our position.

The chief service of the Woman’s Committee in the matter was seeing that

full information of what was going on was sent broadcast. Miss Nestor’s

reports reached women in quarters where labor standards had probably

never been heard of. In our bulletins we kept up a constant stream of

news items of what women were doing in industry not only in this country

but in others. To make our vast horde conscious of the needs of sisters

at the machine, eager to support what the Government had decided was

right and just for her protection, was our aim. We did our part in

proving that even in war determined women can not only prevent backward

movements but even move forward.

Similar to what we did for the woman in industry was the help we were

able to give to the Children’s Bureau. Julia Lathrop, its head, told us

how its work was falling behind: playgrounds in many places given up,

maternity work shut down. Could we help to stem this backward flow? We

turned our machinery at once to the support of the bureau. Women in

districts where its work had never been known were aroused to establish

nursing centers, look after maternity cases, interest themselves afresh

in what was happening to children. It was a work of education as well as

of renewal.

Julia Lathrop told me one day just before the committee went out of

existence that the work of her bureau had been extended more in the few

months that we had been promoting it than it could have been with their

machinery in as many years.

As the effectiveness of our national channel began to be understood,

naturally enough all sorts of requests came to help out in putting over

this or that scheme, to grant favors for this or that friend. While the

majority of such efforts were entirely legitimate, there were some of

dubious character.

I recall an amusing illustration of the latter. Just after war began to

take its toll the Gold Star Mothers were organized, and our committee

was asked to prepare an official arm band with a gold star or stars. The

idea had not been noised about before a gentleman high in the counsels

of the nation came to us with the request that we make the badge not of

black as decided but purple—purple velvet. His reason was that a friend

of his, a manufacturer of velvet, had on hand some thousands of yards of

purple velvet which he would like to dispose of. We did not see our way

to change our choice of color and material.

A request which led to a peck of trouble for me came from the two

persons in the country I least expected to look to us for help—Loie

Fuller and Sam Hill, friends of Queen Marie of Rumania. If I remember

correctly they wanted us to bring her over in the interest of the Allied

cause. We compromised by promising to send her a message of sympathy. I

was commissioned to see that it was properly illuminated, and through my

affiliation with the Pen and Brush Club of New York, a group of women

writers and artists, a really beautiful parchment roll was turned out.

We were so pleased with it that we had one made for Queen Elisabeth of

Belgium.

But how were we going to get them to the Queens? Mr. Gifford of the

Council was unsympathetic. No one would have dared suggest to Mr.

Lansing that the State Department interest itself. The War Department

could not be expected to carry them. Those messages lay about the

Woman’s Committee for weeks a burden and finally a joke, a burden and a

joke which was thrown on my shoulders when in January of 1919 I went to

Paris for observation for the _Red Cross Magazine_. Surely in Paris

there would be some way of delivering them. It was Robert Bliss of our

Embassy who came to my help in the case of Queen Marie, and much to my

relief passed the roll on—to a representative of the Rumanian

Government, I understood, although I never had any diplomatic assurance

that it really landed on the desk of the Queen.

As to the message to Queen Elisabeth, Mrs. Vernon Kellogg, who was

_persona grata_ with the Queen, was in Paris and, knowing that she was

going back to Brussels, I hastened to her with my roll, told her my

predicament, begged her to take it off my hands, which she kindly did.

And that was the last I heard of the messages to the Queens.

By the end of our first year I was persuaded that the making of a

permanent Federal agency lay in the Woman’s Committee. I took my notion

to the Secretary of the Interior, Franklin Lane, who had proved a

helpful friend of the committee in moments of strain.

“Why,” I asked, “could not the present Woman’s Committee be continued

after the War in the Department of the Interior? Why could it not be put

under a woman assistant secretary and used as a channel to carry to

women in the last outposts of the country knowledge of what the various

departments of the Government are doing for the improvement of the life

of the people? You know how limited is the reach of many of the findings

of the bureaus of research, of their planning for health and education

and training? Why not do for peace what we are doing for war?”

Secretary Lane was interested, but in the committee itself there was

little response. Dr. Anna pooh-poohed it. It was too limited a

recognition. What she wanted was a representative in the Cabinet, and

she was unwilling to take anything else.

It is possible that Dr. Anna did not want to encourage ideas concerning

women from a woman as lukewarm as I had always been in the matter of

suffrage. She wanted a committee as actively interested in pushing ahead

the cause of votes for women as it was in defense work, in protecting

women and children. From her point of view the cause was as vital as

protecting women in industries, indeed essential to that problem.

There was only one other woman on the committee as lukewarm as I in the

matter of suffrage, and that was one of our most valuable and

distinguished members—Mrs. Joseph Lamar of Atlanta, the widow of Justice

Lamar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mrs. Lamar and I saw

eye to eye as a rule in the work of the committee, and we both felt it

should keep out of suffrage work. Not so easy for old-time national

leaders like Dr. Anna and Mrs. Catt, with militant suffragists picketing

the White House, begging for arrest; but they showed admirable

restraint. Indeed, I believe that restraint to have been in the long run

the soundest politics. It certainly helped in bringing both Houses of

the Congress to accept the Nineteenth Amendment in the early summer of

1919, giving nation-wide suffrage to women.

Dr. Anna’s attitude towards me was quite understandable. She was

familiar with and resented, as she told me quite frankly, certain

activities of mine which had conflicted with both her convictions and

her arguments—activities which had been a surprise and a regret to many

of those whose opinions I valued highly.

I had always resented the pains that militant suffragists took to

belittle the work that woman had done in the past in the world,

picturing her as a meek and prostrate “doormat.” They refused, I felt,

to pay proper credit to the fine social and economic work that women had

done in the building of America. And in 1909, after we took over the

_American Magazine_, I burst out with a series of studies of leading

American women from the Revolution to the Civil War, including such

stalwarts as Mercy Warren, Abigail Adams, Esther Reed, Mary Lyon,

Catharine Beecher, the fighting antislavery leaders—not omitting two for

whom I had warm admiration, if I was not in entire agreement with them,

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

I thought I made a pretty good showing, but I found it was not welcome.

And on top of that I settled my position in the minds of Dr. Anna and

many of her friends by a series of little essays which I finally brought

together under the title of “The Business of Being a Woman.” That title

was like a red rag to many of my militant friends. The idea that woman

had a business assigned by nature and society which was of more

importance than public life disturbed them; even if it was so, they did

not want it emphasized.

Feeling as I did, I could not fight for suffrage, although I did not

fight against it. Moreover, I believed that it would come because in the

minds of most people democracy is a piece of machinery, its motive power

the ballot. The majority of the advocates for women’s suffrage saw

regeneration, a new world through laws and systems; but I saw democracy

as a spiritual faith. I did not deny that it must be interpreted in laws

and systems, but their work deepens, broadens, only as the spirit grows.

What I feared in women was that they would substitute the letter for the

spirit, weaken the strategic place Nature and society had given them for

keeping the spirit alive in the democracy, elevating it to the head of

the procession of life, training youth for its place. But what chance

had such ideas beside the practical program of the suffragist?

My arguments again had no emotional stuff in them. They carried no

promise of speedily remaking the hard life most women were living, had

always lived. The suffragists pictured a society renewed, regenerated,

stripped of corruption and injustice, all done by a single stroke—giving

votes to women. They would never betray the trust—the old fiction to

which they held so tenaciously that women are by nature “better” than

men and need only the chance in politics to clear society of its

corruption. I could not agree.

It is not to be wondered that Dr. Anna suspected me, had a certain

resentment at my being a member of her committee. In spite of all this,

as the months went on she and I became better and better friends. She

was so able, so zealous, so utterly given to her cause that I had always

had genuine admiration for her. Now I found her a most warm-hearted and

human person, as well as delightfully salty in her bristling against men

and their ways.

An event in the history of our committee was a grand evening gathering

in one of Washington’s theaters. We all sat in state on the platform,

and in the boxes were several members of the Cabinet with President

Wilson himself, for a part of the evening at least. Dr. Anna made a

capital speech, little antimasculine chips flying off her shoulder every

now and then, to the particular delight of the President.

“Dr. Anna,” I told her the next day, “you are one of the most

provocative women I have ever known, an out-and-out flirt.” But we were

good enough friends by this time for her to laugh. I am not sure but she

was a bit flattered.

When the work of the committee was over and she was sending out her

final report, thanking each of us officially for our part in what I

always think of as her achievement, she included in mine a hand-written

personal letter which I shall always treasure as a proof of the bigness

and the beauty of the nature of this splendid woman.

Evidently she remembered how she had sputtered at me sometimes. “You

talk too much, Miss Tarbell.” True—I always do if I have a listening

audience. “I hate a lukewarm person,” she declared when I persisted in

balancing arguments. She did; she had never known for a moment in her

life the frustration, the perplexities of lukewarmness.

But now she wrote thanking me for what she called “my consideration and

kindness” toward what she called her “blunders and mistakes.” Just what

she meant, I do not know. It was enough for me that she should end with

“sincere and affectionate regard”—enough because I knew she understood

what I had never put into words, that for her I had never had anything

but a sincere regard—a regard which our associations had turned to real

affection.

The only professional work I did in this period was a few weeks of

lecturing, a contract which I had made before we went into the War.

I have spoken of the quietness and steadiness with which people through

the country seemed to me to be taking the call for troops in 1916 when I

was on the Chautauqua circuit—of the conviction I had as I saw them in

the Middle West on the declaration of war in April of 1917, that they

had already made up their minds, were ready to go.

But I confess I was unprepared for what I everywhere met early in 1918,

traveling chiefly in the South, the Middle West, and the Southwest. The

country was no longer quiet, no longer reflective. On every street

corner, around every table, it was fighting the War, watchfully,

suspiciously, determinedly. All the paraphernalia of life had taken on

war coloring; the platforms from which I spoke were so swathed in flags

that I often had to watch my step entering and leaving. I found I was

expected to wear a flag—not a corsage. At every lunch or dinner where I

was a guest all declarations were red, white, and blue.

When you are on a lecture trip one of your few resources is the

newsstand. I had the habit of searching the postal-card racks for local

points of interest—local celebrations. But now all these had

disappeared. The racks were filled with pictures of soldiers in all of

their scores of operations, humble and otherwise—not only on parade, but

on “spud duty.” There were thrilling pictures of cavalry charges, of

marches across country, of aeroplanes directing field maneuvers,

touching scenes in hospitals, cheering ones of games, endless

sentimental ones to be sent to the boys.

A change had come over the literature of the newsstands. Serious

magazines I had never before seen in certain southwestern towns were

there now. “Anything that pertains to patriotism is a good seller,” a

railroad station news agent told me. “Why, look at the books we carry!”

And there they were, Hankey, Empey, Boyd Cable, disputing attention with

“Slashaway, the Fearless,” “Gunpowder Jim,” “The Mystery of Demon

Hollow.”

The libraries of scores of towns made a specialty of war books. At

Council Bluffs—an old, large, rich, and cultivated town of course—I

found on an open shelf beside the librarian’s desk Hazen’s “Modern

European History,” John Masefield’s “Gallipoli,” “The Old Front Line,”

André Chéradame’s essays, Hueffer’s “Between St. Denis and St. George,”

and a score of others. They all showed signs of much reading.

As for the newspapers, they were given over to the war. It was my duty

to make sure that they were giving the releases of our committee fair

attention. They were—the local women were attending to that. Editors

might and did grumble because Washington was swamping them with

information and suggestions which often they felt were “old stuff,”

repetition; but they sweated to do their part.

The editorial attitude was not characterized by excessive respect for

great names, particularly if the great name was that of an enemy. I was

in Texas when the Zimmermann note was given out by the President.

Nothing could have been more amusing than the contemptuous attitude of

the average Texan citizen whom I met. Some of the country newspapers did

not even take the trouble to print the gentleman’s name, but called him

“Zim.” You received the impression that a German-Japanese attack on our

Southwest border would be a very simple matter for Texans to clean up.

All they asked, I was told, was for Uncle Sam to keep his hands off.

They would take care of it. There was little anger but much contempt.

Everywhere the boys were the absorbing interest. In the Southwest and

along the Atlantic coast I practically lived with them. They crowded

every railroad station, hustled into every train. There was rarely a

night that I was not wakened by their demanding beds in already

overflowing sleepers. Troop trains passed you en route, all sorts of

slogans scribbled in chalk on the cars. From wherever they came they

were sure to announce that they were bound for Berlin.

It is of course beside the truth to say that all young soldiers were big

and cheerful and spirited and brave; but the total impression was

certainly one of bigness, of freedom, and of exultation in the

enterprise. One came to have a fierce pride in them, an impatience of

any criticism of what they did, a longing to fight for them, since one

could not fight beside them.

Crossing the Apache Trail in March of 1918, we picked up three silent,

rough youths who had come from somewhere out of the desert, and were

making for camp to enlist. They were fascinating traveling companions,

shy, watchful, suspicious, discovering for the first time the ordinary

arrangements of railroad life. I remember a wonderful young savage with

whom I traveled for a day. We were depending on eating houses for food

and woke up to find our train six hours late. This meant no breakfast

until possibly eleven o’clock. Of course the boy was famished. He ate

ravenously and then bought right and left sandwiches, pie, hard-boiled

eggs, an armful of packages. You could almost hear him saying to

himself, “They are not going to catch me again.” They had put one over

on him, but next time he would be ready for them.

The interest of the boys in what was before them was unflagging. They

were not afraid to talk about the worst. When the _Tuscania_ went down,

those bound for sailing points were not fazed in the least by the danger

of the passage; but more than once I felt that the tragedy had whetted

their desire to get at the enemy.

The interest of older men in the young soldier was inexhaustible. They

were like the little boys in that. Little boys could not resist a

soldier. It was startling to see a baby of three years slip away from

his mother, walk down the aisle to where a soldier boy was sitting,

watch him silently with wide-open eyes, get a little bolder, stretch out

his hand and stroke his clothes, get a little bolder still and ask him

if he might put on his cap.

Soldier or not soldier, however, the men talked war, talked it all the

time when they were not reading their newspapers. How the news filtered

to them in certain remote spots, it was hard to understand. In crossing

the Apache Trail I was startled to see a man rise from the desert, as it

seemed, and ask if we had any more news about “them big guns,” if

anybody had found out “how they do it.” We gave him all the papers we

had, and the passengers freely aired their theories of the mystery.

With the inexhaustible interest went a fierce determination to see that

every suggestion of the Government was carried out. When the Third

Liberty Loan opened I was traveling in a section where there were many

German settlers.

“What is their attitude?” I asked a woman active in the work of our

committee.

“We have but one family in this town,” she said. “After being waited on

by five of our leading citizens they took $10,000 of Liberty Bonds.”

I do not know whether these citizens carried ropes in their hands when

they made the call, but I did see in one town a detachment of citizens

parading with ropes on the pummels of their saddles and banners marked

“Beware.”

It had been agreed by all concerned that I talk on what was doing in

Washington as I had been seeing it. Now and then I was “lent” by my

sponsor to aid in a drive of one kind or another. Once I spoke from the

platform of “Oklahoma Billy Sunday,” a picturesque and highly successful

revivalist who patterned his campaigns after those of his great

namesake. A liberty loan drive was on, and no gathering, not even a

revival, certainly not a lecture, was allowed in the town which did not

share its time with the grim banker heading the local committee. He

opened the meeting and left me shivering with what might happen to those

who differed with him about the size of their purchase. Then came

boisterous singing and praying, broken to let me tell my story. How dull

and uninspired it sounded, sandwiched between this goading and

inflaming!

I realized more and more as I went on that I did not really know much

more of my subject than they did in Bisbee, Arizona, or Little Rock,

Arkansas, so persistently did they tap every source of information; but

I certainly knew fewer things that were not so. It was inevitable that,

stirred to their depths by the continuous flow of all this young life

towards the battle fields of Europe, they should “see red,” hate,

suspect. I could neither give them the inside information they craved

nor stir them to the hate of which they had absolute need, I sometimes

felt, to keep up their courage.

“Are you a pacifist?” a stern citizen on a Missouri railway platform

asked me one morning as I was leaving a town where I had spoken the

night before, and where I had deplored the will to hate I was sensing.

“Well,” I parried, “I am for winning this war.”

“Did you sign this?” He pulled out a prewar list of names, a peace

society list where my name appeared. It was headed by Jane Addams—“that

woman,” he called her.

“I am proud to be classed with ‘that woman,’” I said indignantly. “She

is one of the world’s greatest, and if the world could or would have

heeded her counsels you boys would not be dying in France.”

There was no time for argument or arrest, for my train came. I took it,

followed by the black looks of more than one listener.

But it was the boys that were doing this. They had given of their blood,

and their hearts went with the gift. They were all like an old fellow

that I heard cry out one day, “I can’t bear to think of one of Ours

gettin’ hurt.”

It would be idle of course to pretend that in the territory over which I

traveled between the break with Germany and the Armistice—in twenty-five

different states, something like twenty-five thousand miles—there were

no indications of revolt; but, as I saw them, they were infrequent and

never in public. Now and then I came upon a man or woman who dared to

say to me when he had me in a corner: “I am a pacifist. We must find

another way.” With which I so heartily agreed. But that man or woman

would not have said that on the street corner without danger to his

life.

People generally did not have much interest in what was to happen after

the War was ended. They took it for granted that Germany would be driven

back. That was what they were working for. But how the adjustments were

to be made—that did not deeply concern them. What they wanted was to

have it over and get the boys back. That done, they were willing to

forget, pay the bill—but there must be no more of this senseless

business in the world. Even the most violent occasionally confided that

to you.

All these observations—of which I talked, I am afraid too much, to the

members of the committee when I came back—strengthened my conviction

that, whatever it cost, there was no doubt that the country would insist

on seeing it through. That conviction was never stronger than when the

Armistice was suddenly signed.

17

AFTER THE ARMISTICE

The War was over and the United States was setting the brakes on its war

machinery, setting them so hurriedly in some cases that they created

situations almost as destructive as war. There was nothing left now for

the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense but to clean up

and move out. Dr. Anna stayed by while an admirable executive secretary

and a small clerical force put things into order, reported what had been

done, thanked everybody for his or her cooperation.

By the end of the year my desk had been cleared and I was preparing for

a new job, to go to France for the _Red Cross Magazine_. My old editor,

John S. Phillips, had been in charge there for some months, making a

really significant and stimulating journal. He wanted a fresh eye on the

rehabilitation work the organization was carrying on in France. He

thought I might furnish it. I agreed to try.

Crossing the ocean in January, 1919, gave one some notions of what war

had done to the accustomed orderly procedure of life. I was to sail to

Bordeaux at a fixed hour; but no ship as yet went on time, though

passengers were expected to arrive on time and to sit for hours as we

were locked in the waiting room at the dock. At least it gave you an

opportunity to eye as a whole those who were to be your fellow

passengers. Everybody on my ship was evidently connected with some

problem of restoration, the most interesting being the French bent on

rehabilitating families they feared were stripped of everything. They

were even taking food. As we waited a woman who guarded two enormous

hams explained to me that her mother had begged her to bring a _jambon_.

She had not had a _jambon_ for so long. It was a new idea to me. I knew

that sweets would be welcome to my friends, and I had armed myself with

chocolates and bonbons; but a _jambon!_ Why should I not take one to my

dear Madame Marillier? Securing a permit to leave the dock, I hunted up

a neighboring market and after much negotiation persuaded a wholesale

dealer to sell me a ham, almost as big as I was. It was a problem to get

it into the ship, but it was more of a problem to get it off, get it to

Paris. I had queer ideas of what I might need in the way of luggage, and

in my equipment was a pair of enormous saddlebags into which I had

thrown high boots, heavy blankets, sweaters, woolen tights and hose—just

in case. Crowding them all into one bag, into the other I put my

_jambon_. In the long and tedious railroad journey from Bordeaux to

Paris, I was packed in with a group of fine serious young Quakers going

over to help a reconstruction project, and that terrible piece of

luggage jumped from the rack and almost brained one of my companions. I

cannot recall all the adventures of that ham, but I know that I was

never more relieved than when I laid it at the feet of my old friend.

“What in the world?” she exclaimed (or its equivalent). And Seignobos

said, “Oh, these Americans.”

I was not long in Paris before I felt keenly that many of the French

were saying, “Oh, these Americans!” We seemed to swarm over everything,

to absorb things. At least this was true in the quarters where, at the

urgency of my friends Auguste Jaccaci and William Allen White, I had

gone to live—the Hôtel de Vouillemont just off the Place de la Concorde.

Walking down the Rue de Rivoli to the Red Cross Headquarters was like

walking the streets of Washington in the vicinity of the governmental

departments active in the prosecution of the War. All the familiar faces

seemed to have been transported to Paris, as indeed great numbers of

them had. Mingling with them were officers and men on leave, many

seeking desperately to drown ghastly memories in any form of pleasure

that would bring forgetfulness, more of them intent on sightseeing,

buying gifts to take home. I found the pleasantest duty my Red Cross

uniform brought me in Paris was when stalwart doughboys accosted me.

“Say, sister, won’t you help me find something to take home to my

mother—my girl?” Before we were through with the shopping I had the

family history but never a word about the war—that was done with. They

wanted to forget it and go home. They resented the delay.

“We have paid our debt to Lafayette. Now who in hell do we owe?” This

was the legend I saw once on a camion crossing the Place de la Concorde.

I was told it was torn down by a scandalized officer and forbidden to be

used in the future. But it expressed the doughboy’s opinion, as I got

it, better than anything else I saw or heard.

Not only the scenes in my quarter but the conditions of living shattered

all my preconceived notions of hardship. I had been prepared for

hardtack, but once at Vouillemont I found that if I took the trouble to

market and bring in my purchases I could supplement the unbalanced meals

with almost anything I wanted. The prices were high to be sure—sixteen

cents each for eggs—two to four dollars a pound for butter—a dollar and

a half for a little jar of honey. Many extras could be bought more

cheaply at the American Commissariat. William Allen White was buying at

the Commissariat the prunes on which he seemed principally to live, but

marketing gave me the opportunity I wanted for finding out what the

alert Parisian shopkeepers were thinking and saying. I sounded out that

opinion daily until it was cut off by the conviction running through the

town that America no longer sympathized fully with the French, that she

was not going to force Germany to pay the sixty-five billion dollars the

people felt they should have.

[Illustration:

_Photograph by Christian Duvivier_

_Red Cross Headquarters, Paris, France, 1919_

]

The Americans living around the Place de la Concorde assured me that

Paris was not changed; not for them perhaps, but when I went among my

old French friends, most of whom had stuck it through the War, changes

stared me in the face. I had hurried to my old quarter on the Left Bank.

Great gaps in the circle around the Panthéon and in the Boulevard

Saint-Michel skirting the Luxembourg told the story of what the quarter

had endured. The _laiterie_ where once I had bought eggs and milk and

cheese was gone, the space carefully boarded. I hunted among the

neighbors for the cheerful Madame whom I had so enjoyed. She had died

with the building, they told me.

There were little neglects in the once carefully kept apartments of my

friends that affected me all out of proportion to their importance. The

door into Madame Marillier’s _chambre à coucher_ would not close.

“Nothing has been mended in Paris, you know, now for three years,” my

friend explained.

It was literally true: nothing painted, nothing mended, little replaced.

Craftsmen and tradesmen were in the trenches or in their graves. So many

of those whom once you had known, the people who had served you or had

been your comrades, were in their graves. Madame Marillier, pointing to

a long roster of names on her desk in the salon, said: “Look, these are

our dead. Read them. You will remember some of the names.” And I did,

men whom I had known twenty-five years before, and whose brilliant talk

I had listened to at her Wednesday night dinners.

They could not bring back their dead; but after all the horror life was

to go on, and they were bravely doing their best to give it something of

its character before the War.

One thing they were counting on was the return to their homes and to the

museums of their treasured _belles choses_. When I went out to dinner

with French acquaintances who had possessed beautiful things, often

pictures catalogued as national treasures, empty frames stared from the

walls. The canvases had been cut out and sent to a safe place, generally

somewhere in the South; but they would soon have them back, and that

would help.

Not only in Paris but wherever invasion was threatened there had been an

immediate effort to hustle the best loved treasures out of reach. At

Amiens, they told me, they had “sent away” the famous _L’Ange pleurant_.

It was back when I was there in March, and people were coming from all

the towns near by to see it, to gloat and weep over it.

I was concerned with the fate of the “pretty girl of Lille” that

exquisite wax bust attributed by some to Leonardo da Vinci; and when I

made Lille my headquarters for a few days I at once made inquiries. The

gallery was closed, but there had just been received many boxes of

pictures which the Germans were carrying off when stopped on their

retreat. The authorities were not adverse to having an accredited

journalist see with his own eyes what had happened, and I was permitted

to visit the gallery. The boxes were there standing against the wall,

still unopened, and on each was clearly printed the name of the picture

and of the German museum to which it had been assigned—beautiful

evidence of the amazing efficiency with which the Germans had conducted

their looting.

“Why, there,” I said as I went about, “there is the ‘pretty girl of

Lille’!”

The curator winked at me. “Do you think so?” he said. “That is what the

German Emperor thought when he went through the museum. It is a replica.

The pretty girl is in a safe place and she will stay there until I am

sure they won’t come back.” (“They” was the term I heard almost

universally applied to the Germans in the devastated regions.)

Everywhere was the same joy over the safety and the return of their

_belles choses_. I think I have never been in a group where gratitude

mingled with sorrow was stronger than when my friend Auguste Jaccaci,

who had been in Paris throughout the War at the head of the beautiful

work for Belgian and French children lost or orphaned by the War, asked

me to go with him to the opening of a room in the Louvre, closed of

course through the dark period. It was one of the smaller galleries, but

in it had been gathered new possessions, things bought in the War,

others left by wills, a collection of choicest pieces. They were

welcomed by the leading connoisseurs of the city: the directors of the

Louvre and the Luxembourg, a few artists, a few great ladies. Everybody

was in black and went about with unsmiling but touching appreciation,

hardly believing, it seemed to me, that again he or she was free to

rejoice in beauty. It was like coming home after the long funeral of a

beloved member of a family.

But I was more concerned with the everyday conditions under which humble

people were living, particularly in the territory so lately occupied.

That was where the Red Cross could now be of the most practical help, it

seemed to me. It took but little looking about to see that nothing we

could provide would come amiss, either to those who had been caught and

so remained through the War or to those who were now coming back,

generally under the protest of the authorities.

I had not imagined that a bombardment could so strip a community, a

countryside, of all the little conveniences of life. At Lens—once a

great manufacturing and mining town, now a vast mass of red brick dust,

hardly a wall left—I went about looking for signs of life, for I had

been told that a few people had weathered the horror and were to be

found living underground. Coming on what seemed to be a path running

over a pile of debris, I followed it into an opening; and there, in what

was left of a basement, sat a woman sewing. There was a fire on the

hearth. She got up to greet me—a child ran out, a little girl with

tousled head, dirty and ragged. “You must pardon the way we look. We

have been here for many months. We haven’t a comb. No pins, nothing. But

we are happy they have gone.”

Every now and then I came upon little groups who had found shelter in

enemy trenches throughout the War. In a small town southeast of Laon, in

the region occupied at the beginning of the War and held until the final

retreat, I came upon a half-dozen children who had been brought up in

the trenches. A couple of French sisters had come back to the region and

were trying to civilize them. “You have no idea,” they told me, “how

difficult it is to teach them to use handkerchiefs.” This was an apology

for running noses. But, if ignorant of all civilized ways, these

youngsters were remarkably healthy. They had had the food of the

invaders, and they had lived in the earth very much like young animals.

While they knew nothing of books they knew everything about war: guns,

batteries, shells, uniforms. On the latter they had positive ideas. They

had never seen a Red Cross uniform before, and they criticized it

openly: “pas chic”—by which I suppose they meant “bungling.” And I must

confess mine was.

Continually as I went about I asked myself how it could be that every

pin, every needle, every spool of thread, every comb, had gone. Larger

articles you understood, but these little things! The silence of the

devastated regions was even more perplexing than this stripping. I drove

to the Belgian border several times, and it was a long time before I

could make out why it was so still. Finally it occurred to me that I saw

and heard nothing alive, no cat, no dog, no hen. All these creatures had

completely disappeared. And when they began to be brought back the

rejoicing was like that of the return of the beautiful things to the

cities. One would live again perhaps.

At Vic-sur-Aisne where the American Committee for Devastated France was

carrying on its fine practical work, among the many, many, things it was

doing was attempting to restock with poultry. The daughter of an eminent

New York family had an incubator in her bedroom where she told me she

soon hoped to have a flock of chicks. The day that I was there a hen

which had been imported laid an egg. It was an event in the countryside.

I saw peasant women wipe away tears that day as they looked at that hen

and her egg. They would live again.

I shared this feeling later when spring began to come, and in going over

torn battlefields I saw the primroses. One day I heard a skylark sing

and sing until it came out of the blue and dropped like a stone to the

ground. It was like a voice of promise from heaven.

What saved one’s reason within this immense devastation—so completely,

incredibly horrible—was the intelligent and energetic way in which

restoration was going on. Highways had been opened from Paris to Lille

and on to Brussels. They included such shattered towns as Albert, Arras,

Béthune, Lens, Armentières. I could go comfortably, and did, to Ypres,

Cambrai, Saint-Quentin, Laon, Rheims—to all important points in

northeastern France and along the border. It was when you disobeyed

orders and explored unopened territory that you got into trouble. I

tried Messines Ridge and landed in a shell hole. It took twenty small

Annamese, located by my doughboy chauffeur at work on a clean-up job a

mile or so away, to lift out our car and carry it a quarter of a mile to

something like safety. The angry berating of an English officer—the

English being responsible in that territory—still rings in my ears.

The most heartening sight was the steady, slow redemption of the

mutilated land. As a rule the job of clearing away the first layer of

war debris was given to German prisoners and soldiers from French

colonies. It was a horrifying mess of abandoned tanks, artillery, guns,

shells, hand grenades—not all duds, unhappily, as daily accidents

demonstrated. With the debris cleared away, the heavy task of leveling

the land followed. It was often deeply riddled, as over the Chemin des

Dames, where the underpinning of hard white limestone lay shattered on

the top—the soil far below. After the leveling came the tractors plowing

the land, and finally the seeding. Along the highways outside of most of

the big wrecked towns I saw between Paris and Lille were short stretches

in one or another stage of this orderly redemption.

French, English, and Americans were all connected with the restoration.

What really mattered, I felt, was the work of the French: first, it was

their business; then, they understood their people—what they could and

could not expect them to do. They were most successful in getting

individuals to do the things they had always done in the way they had

always done them. The American workers, marvelous as they were, wanted

to reform the French modes of life. They were keen on sanitation and

chintz curtains; the Frenchmen were keen on community tractors; the

Frenchwomen, on community sewing machines.

After I had seen one little group of Frenchwomen gathered by an

energetic duchess in a wing of her battered château making over old

clothes for ragged refugees, who had had literally nothing new for

years, I thought I knew what the Red Cross could best do for the

devastated regions.

The Red Cross had on hand at the end of the war millions of garments,

the output of thousands of little sewing and knitting circles scattered

from ocean to ocean and from Great Lakes to Gulf. Innumerable shirts,

drawers, pajamas, scarfs, sweaters, were piled in storehouses—the most

extensive that I saw being at Lille. My cry was: “Turn them over to the

French sewing circles so rapidly forming and if possible send a sewing

machine with them. You can be sure that the Kalamazoo pajamas, the

Topeka shirts, everybody’s sweaters, will be refitted for children and

men and women who at present have not a decent shirt to their backs, or

decent drawers to their legs.” A desultory distribution was already

making, but I wanted it general and systematic. It was consoling to have

found at least one thing, obvious as it was, which I felt I could

energetically back.

Practical help was the more worth while because so intelligently turned

to use. The few returning to the towns from which they had been driven

often showed amazing resourcefulness and courage. They wanted to rebuild

their homes, set up their shops; but when they came to the town where

they once had lived it frequently was impossible to find the spot which

they supposed they owned. At Cantigny, an utterly devastated flat ruin

the day I saw it, a Frenchman and his wife appeared and quietly went

about trying to locate the site of their home. They went away in

disagreement as to where their street had run.

At Péronne I talked with a carpenter who had set up his shop. He told me

he had had difficulty in finding his old location, but he thought he was

on the right spot—at least the authorities told him he might settle

there. By pulling scaffoldings from tumbledown houses and bringing in

corrugated iron from near-by trenches he had made himself a waterproof

shelter, arranged a workbench and already was earning a little money

helping the authorities here and there in the cleaning up. A piece of

constructive work he had taken on was salvaging doors. Here he had found

a solid doorframe, there a panel; and, putting these together, he was

producing a stock. He was certain it would not be long before he would

have customers for them.

All this put heart in me in the same way the first primrose, the first

skylark, had done. There was an indomitable something in men then, as

there was in nature, something that made them live and grow.

Paris and the Peace Conference taxed my faith more severely than the

devastated regions. My brother back in the United States wrote me that

the job the Conference seemed to have set itself was as big as creating

the world. Men were not big enough for that, and one was aghast that

they felt so equal to it—or, if not that, were willing to give the

impression of feeling equal.

What scared me was that so many battered people accepted this notion of

what the Conference could and would do. From all over the globe they

brought their wrongs and hopes and needs to be satisfied. Many of them

also brought along ideas for the making and running of the new

world—ideas in which they felt the quality of inspiration. The success

of the Conference would depend in the mind of each of these suppliants,

upon his getting what he was after.

But at the very outset they were balked by their failure to reach the

one man who they believed had not only the will but the power to satisfy

their grievances and hopes—the Messiah of the Conference, Woodrow

Wilson.

There was always somebody in the complex and all-embracing organization

of the Conference to hear, sift, report their case; but again and again

they could get no notion of what was happening to it. Insistence on an

answer, on knowing how things were going, often closed doors which at

first had welcomed them. I felt this deeply in the case of the

Armenians. My interest in them had been aroused by a delegation at the

Hôtel de Vouillemont. In the number was a woman with one of the most

beautiful and tragic faces that I had ever looked on. It was not long

before this woman was putting her case before me in excellent English,

for she had had all the advantages of a European education. She and her

companions had all suffered from the cruel and relentless atrocities

which had paralyzed their country. Now their hope was that the United

States would take the mandate for Armenia. Before I realized it I had

become a determined advocate of that solution of their problem. I feel

sure that, if we had gone into the League of Nations, I should have felt

called to work for a mandate for Armenia.

The saddest thing was to see the gradual fall of their hopes, to know

the day had come when, whatever had been the original reception, they

could no longer get the ear of principals or experts. Balfour was said

to have shouted at an aide as he threw the memoranda of the Armenians in

the corner: “Do not bring me another of these things at this Conference.

I know all I want to know about this cause, and I will not read any more

memoranda.”

Something of this kind was happening in delegation after delegation, and

as hope went out of the suppliants resentment took its place. Soon many

of the disappointed were joining the no small number that from the start

had come to Paris, so far as I could see, to do their best to ruin the

Conference. From every country came political opponents of the chosen

delegates and of the settlements which they were seeking; from no

country were there more of these than from the United States, and

certainly from no country were there so many whose chief weapon was

malicious gossip.

There was nothing for these political malcontents to do but talk, and

that they did whenever they could find a listener—in cafés, on street

corners, at French dinner tables—dinner tables becoming more and more

unsympathetic as it began to be rumored that the full measure of

punishment they asked was not to be given Germany. These groups

naturally absorbed the bewildered people who were getting no answer to

their supplications, who were being put off from day to day. It was easy

to persuade them that the Peace Conference was a failure.

What startled me as the days went on was the passing of the will to

peace which had been strong, even taken for granted at the start. Hate

was replacing it. Again and again I recalled in those days a shrine I

had once seen in Brittany called “Our Lady of the Hates”—one of those

frank realistic shrines where symbolic figures portray the devils which

torment men and prevent peaceful living. That shrine haunted my dreams

when the confusion and bitterness seemed daily more confounded.

The social revolutionists at the Peace Conference never reached the

point of building barricades as I had seen them do in Paris twenty-five

years before; but they did make it rather lively on May 1st and

inconvenient for many people who wanted to do their part in keeping the

world moving in an orderly fashion—their humdrum part of delivering

milk, looking after the sick, keeping things clean. They threatened such

dire calamity if they were not allowed to meet and obstruct circulation

in certain central places that the Government, usually stupid in such

matters, shut down on their ambition so completely that of course they

collected in these forbidden places and did their best to cause

bloodshed.

I remember one young thing who thought the time had come and meant to be

in the center of carnage. She went out early in the morning and posted

herself on the steps of the Madeleine and sat there all day in a state

of honest, genuine enthusiasm ready to sacrifice herself as well as

everybody in sight. But there was no real fray—only some discouraging

little street rows, with theatrical attempts to make capital out of

them, and a few pitiful dead, little useful people with dependents

taking a holiday and eager to see.

It was a great day for American doughboys. They had been ordered to stay

indoors, to give up their firearms, and to do nothing that in any way

would invite disaster. Their answer was like that of the would-be

revolutionist for they streamed by hundreds over the monuments and

cannon of the Place de la Concorde. There was not a monument or a point

of vantage around that Place that any human being could climb to that

was not occupied by these youths. If there was to be a revolution, they

were going to be there to see it break out.

That which contributed more than anything else, it seemed to me at the

time, to the suspicion and commotion around the Peace Conference was

that it fed the onlookers (the press included) so little actual

information to chew on. The delegates and committees sat behind closed

doors, only spoke when a conclusion was reached, a document adopted. The

public wanted to sit in a gallery and hear the discussions leading to

conclusions and documents, and—being shut out—speculated, gossiped,

believed the worst, spread false and damaging reports.

It took out its resentment by creating a four-headed monster—Wilson,

Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando—preparing to dragoon the world

into a fresh crop of unholy alliances and commitments and to refuse

justice to multitudes of small and weak peoples and causes. It was

prepared beforehand to doubt whatever the Conference did.

In the confusion and discouragement the one concrete thing I found was

the International Labor Conference. At the beginning of the century one

of the hopes of pacifists like Dr. Jordan, Jane Addams, and their

associates had been the International Association for Labor Legislation,

organized in 1900. It had been carried on without much help from labor

itself until the War came; then labor set up a loud demand for

international action. The undertaking added to that Americanization of

the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Rivoli which had struck me on my

arrival. Many men and women I had known when I was working editorially

and otherwise on labor relations turned up. It was like home to see Mr.

Gompers barging up and down the Rue de Rivoli and to run onto Mary

Anderson and Rose Schneiderman in the garden of the Tuileries.

I was lucky enough to fall in at the start with Dr. James T. Shotwell,

the active head of the labor committee of the American delegation. Dr.

Shotwell’s intelligence and patience were of the utmost help, I have

always felt, in getting the final agreement adopted, early in April in a

full session. Certainly it was due to his generous explanations that I

was able to follow what was going on.

At the same time I had the satisfaction of finding old-time French

friends interested and active in the undertaking—most important of these

Albert Thomas, who from the start was one of the vital influences in the

Conference. Then my old friend Seignobos was actively interested.

Shotwell in his “At the Paris Peace Conference” describes him as “a

little old man, talking fast and furiously, very well satisfied with our

labor business, which he seems to hold in higher regard than we do.”

Seignobos did hold it in high regard, hoped much for its future. I

suspect he too was glad to find something in the complicated peace

negotiations he could put his hands on, see through.

One of the most unexpected of my experiences in these days was the

revival of past episodes in my life. The friends I had known so well in

Paris back in the nineties, such as had escaped death or disability,

were constantly turning up in important positions. Most influential

among them all was the Englishman Wickham Steed, now the editor of the

London _Times_, a person who ranked with ambassadors, but who was good

enough to take notice of his old Latin Quarter friends.

Another of my intimates of those days was Charles Borgeaud, who had come

up from Geneva with the Swiss plan for a confederation of nations, a

sound and excellent document, which I suppose was filed away with the

multitudes of plans which flooded the Conference in those days. I was so

excited by seeing about me so many of these old acquaintances and

friends that I attempted to get them together for lunch one

day—Seignobos, Madame Marillier, Steed, Louis Lapique, all that I could

put my hands on. The result gave me a melancholy sense of what

twenty-five years can do, particularly a twenty-five years ending in

such a catastrophe as they had all been going through, to take the edge

off once keen friendships.

A more satisfactory revival of past and gone associations came from

meeting numbers of former professional friends who were filling one or

another post. Here were William Allen White and Auguste Jaccaci; here

was Ray Stannard Baker, the head of the American press delegation, one

of the few Americans having an easy entree to the President himself,

conducting his difficult post with fine judgment and an absolute

fairness which silenced the tongues of some of the most bumptious and

political-minded correspondents.

“How can you bully so straight a chap as Ray Baker?” a correspondent

anxious for a special privilege said disconsolately in my hearing one

day.

There were hours when it seemed like a gathering in the office of the

old _American Magazine_, so natural and intimate it was.

But these hours were not very many. My business was to furnish at least

an article a month for the _Red Cross Magazine_ and to follow the

progress of the efforts to bring about a peace settlement including a

league of nations. There were days when it seemed to me an inexplicable

confusion, a bedlam; but, as a matter of fact, as the days went on I

became satisfied by studying the communiqués, following the press

conferences, reading the reliable English and French papers and the

daily digests of what the papers of the United States were saying

(posted at our press quarters), that a practical plan for international

cooperation was taking form and that gradually more and more of the

delegates of the thirty-one nations represented were consenting to it.

To get something they would all sign seemed to me creative statesmanship

of the highest order. For each of these nations had problems of its own,

political, economic, social, religious, which must be considered before

its representative dared sign. Thirty-one varieties of folks back home

sat at that peace table, and they all had to be heard. In final analysis

it was the failure patiently to listen to the political objections

coming from the United States and trying openly to meet them which kept

us out of the largest and soundest joint attempt the world had ever

seen, to put an end to war. For that is what I believed the Covenant of

the League of Nations to be when I heard the final draft read and

adopted at the Plenary Session of the Conference on April 28.

But no one could have studied the truly august assembly adopting the

Covenant without realizing the threats to its future in its make-up.

They lay in the certainty of a few that the problem was solved—there

would be no more wars. President Wilson, the noblest and the most

distinguished figure of them all, seemed to believe it. But there were

men putting down their names who did not believe it, who sneered as they

signed; and still more dangerous were the stolid ones who accepted

without knowing what it meant. Clemenceau had told his people what the

Covenant meant—“sacrifices,” sacrifice for all; he was the only man at

the Peace Conference whom I heard use the word, and yet the key to the

peace of the world is sacrifice, sacrifice of the strong to meet the

needs and urges of the weak. If the League of Nations, led as it has

been by the great satisfied nations, had grappled with that truth at the

start, it is possible we should not now be seeing signatories take up

war to satisfy their needs and urges.

These doubts weighed heavily upon me as I left the Plenary Session. But

in the group of exultant Americans who that day saw the world made over

I had no desire to voice them. There was only one of my friends to whom

I could confide my fears—that was Auguste Jaccaci, a doubting Thomas

with profound faith in some things (I never quite made out what): beauty

and a directing God, I think. The night after the signing of the

Covenant, Jac and I sat long in troubled silence over our coffee and

_petit verre_, for neither of us could believe that the signing of a

paper by however many nations could in itself bring immediate peace to

the world.

Still I believed with all my heart in the attempt. My business now as a

journalist and a lecturer, I told myself, was to explain the intent of

the Covenant, what it set out to do, also to warn that it must be given

time to work out its salvation.

Before leaving America for the Peace Conference I had signed a contract

to go for ten weeks of the summer of 1919 on a Chautauqua circuit in the

Northwest. By this time I had an understanding with my sponsors that I

should be allowed to talk on what I had seen and heard at the Peace

Conference. I now hurried home to fill that contract. I had hardly

landed before I realized how bitter was the political attack on the

Covenant. Would audiences in the Northwest listen to its defense?

But I did not allow this worry to intrude itself into my lecturing. In

fact it was not in me to worry, once on the road, for I quickly

discovered I was making what would probably be the most interesting trip

of my life. And so it turned out. The country was incredibly exciting

and of endless variety. I joined a circuit already ten weeks old in

northern Utah. We skirted the Great Salt Lake and traveled from one

Mormon settlement to another. It amuses me now to remember how surprised

I was to discover that Mormons were like Gentiles, that I at once felt

towards them exactly as I did towards different religious sects at home.

True, the attempt of taxi drivers, hotel clerks, baggagemen, to convert

me when they caught me idle in their vicinity was a bit disconcerting at

first, but I soon began to expect it and to find interest in their

arguments.

After Utah came the lava country of southern Idaho along the Snake

River. We climbed over the mountains into Oregon, went down the

Columbia, over to the sea, up the coast to Portland, Tacoma, Seattle. We

were in the Yakima apple country and in the berry fields of Puyallup,

and everywhere in cherry orchards, such cherries as I had never

imagined.

For a week we junketed around Vancouver Sound in primitive little

steamers. We pitched our tents in lumber towns built on stilts, crossed

fire-devastated mountains into the Coeur d’Alene region of northern

Idaho, where one still heard reverberations of the labor struggles which

had so agitated us on _McClure’s_ and the _American_. Then Montana—miles

of plateaus and plains, the air thick with smoke, the earth sprinkled

with ashes, for the mountains were on fire.

This magnificent and varied country carried with it a varied and

compelling human story. Each new town turned up some bit of human

tragedy or comedy. These people were pioneers, or pioneers once removed.

They knew all the dangers, the hardships, the defeats, and conquests of

pioneering. Their talk was of what they or their fathers had lived and

seen. Whatever it had been, their hope was unquenchable. Every town we

entered was the finest in the Northwest, the finest even when you knew

that shifting trade and industry was cutting the very feet out from

under it.

This was the land of Borah, but never in all those ten weeks, talking on

the League of Nations, did I receive from press or individuals anything

but respectful hearing. I was the first person who had come into their

territory from the Peace Conference, and they wanted to hear all I had

to give. They would do their own appraising.

As the days went by, I sensed a growing bewilderment at the fight

against the League. These people had listened for years to people they

honored urging some form of international union against war. They had

heard Dr. Jordan and Jane Addams preaching a national council for the

prevention of war, President Taft advocating a league to enforce peace.

In many of the towns there had been chapters of these societies.

On our circuit there was a superintendent who reminded me every time we

met that back in the 1890’s he had spent practically all his patrimony

going about the Northwest preaching a league of nations. It irked him,

he said, that I should be receiving money for talking what he

twenty-five years before had talked without price, purely for love of

the cause. And no wonder!

With such a background, was it strange that many people in the Northwest

should have been puzzled that the Congress of the United States was

seemingly more and more determined that we should not join this first

attempt of the civilized world to find substitutes for war in

international quarrels?

Seeking reasons for this refusal, I felt the one which had most weight

with people was the guarantee that France was asking from England and

the United States to come to her aid in case of unprovoked attack by

Germany, that is, a guarantee which was to remain in force until the

League of Nations was a going concern.

I found that most people were against this. They wouldn’t run the risk

of having to help France again. I was for granting the guarantee

provisionally and for a limited period. I believed such a guarantee

would quiet what I felt to be one of the real dangers of the after-war

situation, the near hysteria of France. Americans proud of their

generous part in saving France from what looked to them like calculated

annihilation said: “Why these hysterics? The War is over. The nations

are going to enforce peace. The devastated region is to be restored at

Germany’s expense. Forget it.”

How could America understand the years of horror France had just

suffered, the devastation of centuries of loving labor, the wiping out

of three and a half million of her best youth? And most serious of all

perhaps, how could America realize what France so clearly realized, that

the Great War was but the latest expression of centuries of

determination on the part of Central Europe to reach the sea? It must

have an ocean front even if this could be obtained only by crossing the

dead body of France.

I had spent some hours at Châlons-sur-Marne just before I returned.

Nobody in that town was so alive to me as Attila. Fifteen hundred

years before, he had led the forces of Central Europe so far and had

been stopped; but Central Europe had come back again and again, driven

by the urge for the sea. Again and again France had saved herself, but

she knew now she could never do it without the help of those who

believed her culture one of the earth’s great possessions. She must

have guarantees. But how could the United States understand that

centuries of experience were behind France’s fear? They had not met

Attila at Châlons-sur-Marne—I had.

All of this I talked in more or less detail until in midsummer my lips

were closed for two weeks by William Jennings Bryan. Mr. Bryan for many

years had been the brightest star of the Chautauqua platform. The

management of the circuit liked to introduce him for whatever time he

could give and they afford. It meant that the regular performer must

either step down or divide his period. The evening was the proper hour

for Mr. Bryan, for only then could the men come. Now I spoke in the

evening. “Cut your time to forty minutes, and go on a half-hour

earlier,” were my instructions. I, of course, obeyed.

Now Mr. Bryan was presenting a two-hour discussion of what he considered

the ideal political Democratic platform at that moment. In his planks he

included joining the League of Nations but turning down the guarantees

to France. At our first joint appearance he rose to condemn guarantees

an hour after I had pleaded for them. When he was told of the conflict

of opinion he at once looked me up, and in effect told me that I must

not present views opposed to his on a platform where he was speaking. He

in no way tried to influence my opinion, only to shut it off. I insisted

that it was good for the audience to hear both sides. “The audience came

to hear me,” said Mr. Bryan; “it is important they know my views.” He

did not want them confused as they might be, he said, if I began the

evening by airing mine.

Of course Mr. Bryan did not say, “You are of no political importance,

and I am of a great deal,” but that was what he meant. It was quite

true, and I bowed for the time being to the demands of politics, but

only for the moment. The two weeks over, I began again to talk

guarantees with more interest on the part of my audience because of what

Mr. Bryan had been saying and also, I suspect, less agreement.

By the time the circuit ended, the League was in a bad way in Congress.

A bitter partisan war had broken out and Woodrow Wilson ill, his Scotch

stubbornness the harder because of his illness, would not budge an inch.

It was a sickening thing to watch. The only consolation was that the

rest of the world wanted peace enough to make the sacrifices and run the

risks a League undoubtedly demanded.

Wilson’s enemies gloated: he was beaten, stripped of his glory; the

world would forget him, was already forgetting him. They were wrong.

In the months that followed the final collapse of the League as far as

the United States was concerned, I was much in Washington; and nothing I

saw was more moving than the continual quiet popular tributes to Woodrow

Wilson. On holidays and Sundays groups were always standing before his

home, watching for a glimpse of him. Let him enter a theater and the

house rose to cheer, while crowds waited outside in rain and cold to see

him come out—cheer him as he passed.

On November 11, 1921, the body of America’s Unknown Soldier was carried

from the Capitol where it had lain in state to its grave in Arlington—a

perfect ceremony of its kind. The bier was followed by all we had of

official greatness at that moment: President Harding and his Cabinet,

the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, officers of the Army and Navy,

and General Foch our guest of honor. At the end, following all this

greatness but not of it, came a carriage. As the packed ranks between

which the procession had passed in silence saw its occupants, Woodrow

Wilson and Mrs. Wilson, a muffled cry of love and gratitude broke out,

and that cry followed that carriage to the very doorway of their home.

It was to be so until he died. He was the man they could not forget.

They will not forget him in the future. He is the first leader in the

history of society who has treated the ancient dream of a peaceful world

as something more than wishful thinking, the first who was willing to

stake all in drawing the nations of the world together in an effort to

make that “just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations”

for which Abraham Lincoln pleaded.

In Paris in 1919 Woodrow Wilson actually persuaded the leaders of the

majority of the earth’s nations to help him build and set up a machine

for such a peace. The complaint is that it has not done all it

attempted. But how can any person who knows anything of man’s past

efforts to create machinery for the betterment of his life suppose that

this, the most ambitious international undertaking ever made, would from

the start run without friction or breakdown, would never need

overhauling, even rebuilding?

That is not in the nature of things. The League has lived for eighteen

years now. Its weaknesses have developed with experience, so has its

usefulness. Its services to the world have been innumerable if not

spectacular. If its failures have been spectacular, they have not

destroyed the structure; rather they have demonstrated certain points at

which it must be rebuilt.

The world will not forget the man who led in this effort to achieve

enduring peace. That is what I was saying in those bitter days and have

been saying in all the melancholy ones since.

18

GAMBLING WITH SECURITY

My ten weeks of daily talking on the Peace Conference and the Covenant

of the League of Nations ended the War for me. Also, it forced me to

consider anew the problem of security. It was nearly four years now

since I had put an end to it by severing my connection with _The

American Magazine_. But the years had been so full of the War, the

scramble to do something that somebody thought was needful, and at the

same time to keep the pot boiling, that I had not realized what had

happened. It meant for me, as I now saw, the end of an economic era.

I sat down to take stock. Here I was sixty-three with only a small

accumulation of material goods. I must work to live and satisfy my

obligations. To be sure I had my little home in Connecticut which in the

fifteen years since I had acquired it had not only grown increasingly

dear to me; it had also taken on an importance which I had not foreseen.

It had become the family home. Here my mother had come to pass the last

summers before her death in 1917; here my niece Esther had been married

under the Oaks; here my niece Clara and her husband Tristram Tupper,

battered by war service, had come in 1919 to live in our little guest

house. Here Tris had written his first successful magazine story. Here

their two children passed their first years. Near by, my sister had

built herself a studio to become her home. A hundred associations gave

the place a meaning and dignity which I had never expected to feel in

any home of my own, something that only comes when a place has been

hallowed by the joys and sorrows of family life.

I had carried out my original intention of never letting it become a

financial burden; so, adrift as I now was, I not only could afford my

home but felt that it was the strongest factor in my scheme of security,

for here I knew I could retire and raise all the food I needed if free

lancing petered out.

I was quite clear about the work I wanted to do. It was to continue

writing and speaking on the few subjects on which I felt strongly, and

of which I knew a little. These subjects had made a pattern in my mind.

If men would work out this pattern I felt that they would go a long way

towards ending the world’s quarrels, quieting its confusions. First and

most important were the privileges they had snatched. I wanted to see

them all gradually scrapped, cost what it might economically. They were

a threat to honest men, to sound industry, to peaceful international

life.

I wanted to help spread the knowledge of all the intelligent efforts

within and without industry and government, to put an end to militancy,

replace it with actual understanding. And then I wanted to do my part

towards making the world acquainted with the man who I believed had best

shown how to carry out a program of cooperation based on consideration

of others—that was Abraham Lincoln.

There was a man, I told myself, who took the time to understand a thing

before he spoke. He knew that hurry, acting before you were reasonably

sure, almost invariably makes a mess of even the best intentions. He

wanted to know what he was about before he acted, also he wanted all

those upon whom he must depend for results to know what he was about and

why. Whatever he did, he did without malice, taking into account men’s

limitations, not asking more from any one than he could give. More than

anybody I had studied he applied in public affairs Frederick Taylor’s

rules for achievement of which I have spoken above. The more people who

knew about Lincoln, the more chance democracy had to destroy its two

chief enemies, privilege and militancy. I proposed to take every chance

I had to talk about him.

[Illustration:

© _Jessie Tarbox Beals_

_Posing as a gardener, 1925_

]

This was the program on which I was so set that I was willing to follow

it even if it did take away from me the comforts of a regular salary.

Giving up the salary troubled me less than finding myself without the

regular professional contacts which I had so enjoyed for twenty years,

and on which I found, now I was free, that I had come to depend more

than I would have believed.

Not belonging to an editorial group meant that when I dropped my pen at

lunch time I no longer could join a half-dozen office mates full of

gossip of what the morning had brought: the last Tarkington manuscript;

something of Willa Cather’s; a letter from Kipling; that new person from

Louisville, George Madden Martin, with a real creation, Emmy Lou; that

new person from Wisconsin, Edna Ferber, with a bona fide human being in

hand, Emma McChesney; or it might be Dunne’s last “Dooley,” or Baker’s

last adventure in “Contentment,” or gossip from the last man in

Washington, perhaps direct from the White House, and always surely from

our liberal friends in Congress. This was the stuff of our lunch-table

talk. We gloated or mourned, and our eyes were always on what was coming

rather than what had been.

I no longer had an office next door to these friends. My study had

become my workshop. Now I must pay my own secretary’s bill, my own

telephone calls, buy my own stationery. I gasped when I found what these

extras amounted to. Freedom, I saw, was going to be expensive as well as

lonesome.

However, for nineteen years I have kept to my decision. How little I

have contributed to my program in these nineteen years! The chief piece

of writing I planned to do I have never finished. That was bringing “The

History of the Standard Oil Company” up to date. I had dropped the story

in 1904, but the dissolution of the company in 1911 left me with the

melancholy conviction that sooner or later I should have to estimate the

trial and put down how the new set-up was working. I talked two or three

times with George Wickersham, the Attorney General who brought the suit,

and he always cautioned me not to hurry, to let the decision have a

chance to work out. I think we decided that about ten years would do it.

But the War put a different face on oil. It suddenly became a matter for

government control. It was no longer a private business. It was life and

death for the Allies. Oil was as necessary to them, Clemenceau wrote to

Wilson, as the blood of men. Everything that rolled or sailed or flew

must have it. The great struggle of the nations with navies, England at

the head, to command oil at its source, followed the War. The earth was

ransacked for it in a terrific predatory hunt. In this effort of the

nations to command oil supplies great names arose challenging that of

Rockefeller—Sir Henri Deterding, Marcus Samuel, William Knox D’Arcy. The

Standard Oil Company no longer ruled the oil world. There were the Royal

Dutch and the Shell making up finally the Royal Dutch Shell; there was

the Anglo-Persian. All of the dramatic and frequently tragic goings-on

had to settle down into something like orderly procedure before the

history I had in mind could be written.

The time came, along in 1922, when Mr. Wickersham said, “You had better

go at it.” But it was not Mr. Wickersham’s dictum that hurried me to

undertake to tell the story of what had happened since 1904. It was an

entirely unexpected piratical attack on the two-volume edition of the

history which had been exhausted for some time. My publisher, wisely

enough, was waiting for the promised third volume before reprinting.

When it became known in the trade that the book was no longer on the

market a report was spread that the Standard Oil Company had bought and

destroyed the plates, and the price soared. Down in Louisiana Huey Long

paid one hundred dollars for a set, so I was told.

As I frequently received inquiries as to where the books could be found

or where a purchaser could be found for a set, I turned the

correspondence over to my secretary, a canny woman, who established a

trading relation with a dealer in old books; and the two of them were in

a fair way to do a nice little business when their hopes were blasted by

the appearance in a New York bookstore of an entirely new edition of the

work—a cheap edition, selling for five or six dollars. My publishers

made an immediate investigation and found that it had been printed in

England, probably from German plates.

As the third volume was not ready, there was nothing for the publisher

to do but reprint the two, which he very promptly did. On the appearance

of the reprint the pirated edition disappeared from the market. This

episode set me to work promptly at the third volume.

But I needed a financial backer if the work was to be put through

promptly. I found it unexpectedly in the editor-in-chief for whom the

first two volumes had been written—S. S. McClure. _McClure’s Magazine_,

which had been suspended for a few years, had been revived, Mr. McClure

in charge. He felt that bringing Standard Oil history up to date was a

logical and might be an important feature for the periodical.

For me there was satisfaction in trying to revive the old editorial

relations. I had always missed the gaiety and excitement Mr. McClure

gave to work, and, too, I had always felt a little anxious about, what I

suspected was happening to him in a group which, even if it was made up

of the very best of the town—men and women of ability and loyalty,

naturally eager to prove that they could make a _McClure’s Magazine_ as

good as ever had been made or better—could not, I was convinced,

understand Mr. McClure, get out of him what he had to give like his old

partner and friend John S. Phillips. So I was willing to give all I had

to help in the revival of the old periodical.

I had my book well in hand, some twenty thousand words written, when the

new _McClure’s_ was suspended and the third volume on the Standard Oil

Company was cast out before publication had begun.

Perhaps it was just as well, both for _McClure’s_ and for me. Repeating

yourself is a doubtful practice, particularly for editor and writer. I

feel now there was no hope of my recapturing the former interest in the

former way. The result would have smelt a bit musty. Indeed, though I

hate to admit it, I think there has been a slight mustiness about all I

have done in the nineteen years since I started “on my own”—that is, not

on assignment—built as it has been on work done before the Great War.

Left with twenty thousand words on hand and no editor, I was obliged to

make a quick turn in the interest of security and took on the first

piece of work that offered. For one reason or another I have never been

able to return to that third volume and it looks now as if it were a

piece of work for my ninth decade since it failed to mature in the

seventh and eighth!

If I failed to carry out my plan for tracing the maneuvers of the master

monopoly after the Government had taken it apart in 1911 and after it

adapted itself to the new and extraordinary situations forced by the

Great War, I did trace what could be done in a corporation whose parts

all had been built more or less on privilege, and which itself enjoyed

high tariff protection, when a man took hold of it who believed that

ordinary ethics did apply to business. This study was shaped around the

life of Judge Elbert H. Gary.

It was no idea of mine, this life of Gary, and when it was proposed to

me by that energetic and resourceful editor Rutger Jewett I promptly

said, “No.” But Mr. Jewett was insistent. He had talked the matter over

with Judge Gary, who had told him he would open his records and answer

my questions if I would do the book.

That meant, I supposed, that he had confidence in my ability to be

fair-minded, whatever my suspicions. His judgment was formed on my

handling of certain efforts to improve and humanize the conditions of

labor in the mills, factories, and towns of the United States Steel

Corporation. The Corporation under his direction had been a pioneer in

safety and sanitation work. It had developed a pension system, improved

communities, improved its housing, built schools and hospitals where

there was no community to take care of these needs. It was the broadest,

soundest record that I had found in my gathering of material for the

articles _The American Magazine_ had published under the title of “The

Golden Rule in Business.” I knew from my talks with Judge Gary that

there was nothing going on in the Steel Corporation in which he was more

deeply interested.

Moreover, I knew he was a man I could talk with freely. More than once,

when he as spokesman of the Corporation was under attack for arbitrary

dealings with labor, I had gone to him for his side of the case; and

although I might not agree, and frequently did not, I always came away

enlightened and with a rather humiliated feeling that I had shown myself

an amateur in a conversation where he was very much the expert.

But was I equal to finding out the truth of things in this enormous

industrial labyrinth which he ruled? Moreover, if Judge Gary had been an

industrial plunderer, should I be willing so to present him? I had no

heart for a repetition of my experience with H. H. Rogers.

Another reason for hesitation was that I knew if I did undertake it, and

was as fair as I knew how to be, I should at once be under suspicion by

groups with whose intentions for the most part I sympathized. They were

unwilling to consider Gary in any light save that of Scapegoat Number

One. An attack—yes—they would welcome it. An attempt to set down his

business life as he had actually lived it—no. That was whitewashing.

Finally I took the matter to Judge Gary himself. “I do not know that I

want to write your life,” I told him. “If I find practices which seem to

me against public policy as I understand it I shall have to say so. I

appreciate your efforts to make working conditions for labor as good as

you know how to make them, but it does not follow that I can stand for

your financial policies. It is not your humanitarianism but your ethics

I suspect.”

“Well,” Judge Gary laughed, “if you can find anything wrong in our

doings I want to know it. I had George Wickersham in here for a year or

more going over the whole set-up telling me what he thought we ought not

to do, and I followed every suggestion he made. The Government has had

its agency here for two years examining our books, and they gave us a

clean bill of health. The Supreme Court has refused to declare us a

monopoly in restraint of trade. Do your worst, and if you find anything

wrong I shall be grateful.”

I felt more of an amateur than ever after that. I also concluded that it

would be sheer cowardice on my part to refuse the job which I really

needed. I had not been long at my task, however, before I was heartened

by the certainty that, from the formation of the Corporation, Judge Gary

had made a steady and surprisingly successful fight to strip the

businesses which he was putting together of certain illegal privileges,

as well as to set up an entirely new code of fair practices—the Gary

Code, it was jeeringly called in Wall Street.

Orders went out neither to ask nor to accept special favors from the

railroads. Full yearly reports of the financial condition of the

Corporation, whether good or bad, were sent out. These reports reached

the public as early as they did the directors themselves, putting an end

to the advance information which many insiders were accustomed to using

for stock selling or buying. Various forms of predatory competition were

attacked from the inside. Judge Gary not only laid down his code, he

followed it up, preached it zealously to his board.

Another unheard-of innovation was his support of President Theodore

Roosevelt’s attempts to control business. It had become an axiom of Big

Business to fight every effort of the Government to inspect or regulate.

When Gary took the opposite course, applauded Roosevelt’s efforts,

declared that he was doing business good, doing him good, he was treated

as a traitor by many colleagues.

Well, this seemed to me as good business doctrine as I had come across

in any concern—much better, more definite and practical as a matter of

fact than I got from most corporation critics. But how far was this

followed up in practice? Before I was through I made up my mind that

Judge Gary’s code was applied just as completely and as rapidly as he

could persuade or drive his frequently doubting and recalcitrant

associates to it. But that took time, took frequent battles. Indeed,

more than once he had come close to losing his official head, fighting

for this or that plank in his platform. The Gary Code and the effort to

put it into practice reconciled me to my task.

Judge Gary was an easy man to work with because he was so interested in

following his own story. He had been too busy all his life to give

attention to the route by which he had come. Now he enjoyed the looks

back. Finding that he was willing to take literally his promise to open

records and answer questions, I laid out a little plan for covering his

life chronologically. It pleased him, for he was the most systematic of

men. It gave him delight to remember. “How a man’s mind unravels!” he

exclaimed one day when he had suddenly recalled something long

forgotten.

Our interviews were carried on always at 71 Broadway. He kept his

appointments exactly. Rarely did he keep me waiting, and if by necessity

he did he always apologized. If I came late I was made to feel clearly

that that was a thing not to be done.

While Judge Gary was prepared to be frank in his talks with me he was

not prepared to be misquoted. He evidently had learned that even with

the best intentions a reporter may distort what a man has said out of

all resemblance to what he meant. He guarded against this by always

having at our interviews a secretary who took down in shorthand all that

he said, all that I said. I made longhand notes, dictating them as soon

as I went back to my desk. I do not remember that a question of

misunderstanding of meaning ever came up.

Convinced that the Gary Code was genuine, not mere window dressing for

the public, nothing interested me more than how a man in his fifties who

had been for twenty years a successful corporation lawyer was willing to

preach to Wall Street as he had done. I finally concluded the truth to

be that Elbert Gary had never outgrown his early bringing up. He had

never gotten over a belief in the soundness of what he had learned in

Sunday school and of what later he had taught through most of his

manhood in Sunday school. The difference between him and some of his

fellows in business brought up in the same way was that he insisted that

the Sunday-school precepts of honesty, consideration for others, fair

play, should be preached on week days as well as Sundays, in the board

room as well as the church. If he ever sensed that his preaching was

both comic and irritating to Wall Street—which I doubt—he never gave

sign of such a perception.

I soon found that I need not hesitate to bring him all sorts of

criticisms of his doings as I unearthed them in studying the public’s

reactions to the Steel Corporation’s operations. They never fretted or

irritated him; rather he enjoyed analyzing them for my benefit. He never

dismissed radical opinions as nonsense. In the year I was working with

him there was never a public radical meeting in New York—and there were

a good many of them that year—that he did not read all the speeches, and

comment on them intelligently and with good humor.

“We must know about these things,” he said. “We must know all about

Lenin, all about Mussolini. They are great forces; they are trying new

forms of government.” His knowledge prevented him from being scared.

Above all Gary enjoyed stories of his struggles to establish his own

preeminence and his own code in the Steel Corporation. At the start he

had several of the strong men in the Corporation against him; but he had

won out, and it gave him the greatest satisfaction to show me letters of

congratulation, to quote former opponents as saying, “You were right, I

was wrong.” Particularly he enjoyed the very good terms on which he

stood with Theodore Roosevelt, whose unpopularity in Wall Street

surpassed even that of the second Roosevelt.

He still talked with emotion of the decision of the Government to bring

suit against the Steel Corporation under the Sherman Law. He thought he

had satisfied it that the Steel Corporation was not a monopoly in

restraint of trade, that it was what Mark Twain called a good trust; and

when the Attorney General’s office decided that there might be a

question about the quality of this goodness Gary was terribly disturbed.

There were advisers who thought he ought to try to settle the suit

outside, but he would not have it so. The Government had doubts, and he

must satisfy them. He believed that the law did not apply to the Steel

Corporation; he believed that the Corporation was not contrary to a

sound business policy, a menace to the country. That must be settled

once for all. Of course he was jubilant over the outcome: it justified

his conviction.

Judge Gary had done a great job, and he knew it; but, interestingly

enough, it never made him pompous. As a matter of fact he was simple,

natural, in talking about it. Along with this really simple enjoyment of

his own conflict he had a nice kind of dignity and a carefulness of

conduct which were not entirely natural to him. To be sure he had always

been a good Methodist, a good citizen, a hard-working lawyer; but at the

same time in all these earlier years he had led what was then called a

gay life. He had liked a fast horse, liked to hunt and see the world. He

was curious about all kinds of human performances, looked into them

whenever he had the chance. When he became the head of the Steel

Corporation he could no longer sing in the choir—he had to go to the

Opera and sit in a box. He no longer drove fast horses. He wanted to

fly, and the board of the Steel Corporation passed an ordinance against

it—too dangerous. When he traveled it was more or less in state, and he

couldn’t slip out with a crowd of men at the stopping places to see the

town.

It was hard on him, but he felt deeply that he owed it to the Steel

Corporation to be above reproach. Not a little of this carefulness was

due, I think, to the effect on the public, the exhibits that several of

the new steel men had made of themselves after the Corporation was

formed in 1901 and their offices were centered in New York. They were

rich beyond their wildest dreams. The restrictions of the home towns

were gone, and they broke loose in a riotous celebration which

scandalized even Mr. Morgan. Gary joined in nothing which approached

orgies. He was too hard a worker and always had been, and he saw with

distress the effect the high living of certain of the steel men was

having on the public. It was a danger, he felt, equal to the speculation

in steel stock by officers of the corporation. To counteract it he

gradually became more and more a model of correctness.

I came out of my task with a real liking for Judge Gary and a profound

conviction that industry has not produced one in our time who so well

deserves the title of industrial statesman. But I had to pay for saying

what I thought. Under the heading of “The Taming of Ida M. Tarbell” my

favorite newspaper declared that I had become a eulogist of the kind of

man to whom I was sworn as an eternal enemy. But Judge Gary was not the

kind of captain of industry to which I objected. On the contrary, he was

a man who, at the frequent risk of his position and fortune, had

steadily fought many of the privileges and practices to which I had been

objecting.

However, one is judged largely by the company one keeps. Judge Gary

belonged to an industrial world where the predatory, the brutal, the

illegal, the reckless speculator constantly forced public attention.

That there was another side to that world, a really honest and

intelligent effort in the making to put an end to these practices, few

knew or, knowing, acknowledged. I could not complain. I knew how it

would be when I started. But I must confess that more than once, while I

was carrying on my work, I shivered with distaste at the suspicion I

knew I was bringing on myself. The only time in my professional life I

feel I deserve to be called courageous was when I wrote the life of

Judge Gary.

My active interest in the industrial life of the country brought me

unexpected adventures. The most instructive as well as upsetting was

serving on a couple of those Government conferences which twentieth

century Presidents have used so freely in their attempts to solve

difficult national problems. An Industrial Conference called by

President Wilson for the fall of 1919 was the first of these. Mr. Wilson

felt clearly at the end of the War that our immediate important domestic

problem was to establish some common ground of agreement and action in

the conduct of industry. What he wanted evidently was a covenant by

which employer and employee could work out their common problems as

cooperators, not as enemies. There was need of action, as any one who

remembers those days will agree. The whole labor world was in an uproar,

and one of the periodical efforts to organize the steel industry was

under way. Mr. Gompers, the head of the American Federation, sponsoring

the strike, had had little or no sympathy with a contest at the moment

but had been pushed into it by the adroitness of the radical elements

boring from within throughout the War.

“These disturbances must not go on. It should be possible to make plans

for a peaceful solution,” Mr. Wilson said.

And so a Conference was called. In spite of my refusal to serve on his

Tariff Commission, President Wilson had evidently not given me up. As a

matter of fact our acquaintance and mutual confidence had grown during

the War.

He now named me as one of four women representatives, the others being

Lillian Wald, head of the Nurses’ Settlement in New York City, Gertrude

Barnum, assistant director of the investigation service of the United

States Department of Labor, and Sara Conboy of the textile workers’

union.

The Conference was an impressive and exciting body of some fifty persons

divided into three groups representing the public, labor, the employers.

I, of course, sat in the first group, where I found as my colleagues a

bewildering assortment of men from various ranks of life. There were Dr.

Charles Eliot, Charles Edward Russell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Judge

Gary, John Spargo, Bernard Baruch, Thomas L. Chadbourne, Jr., and a

score or more less known to the public, though not necessarily less

influential.

At the head of the labor group was Samuel Gompers. Among his colleagues

were some of the most experienced labor leaders in the country.

The members of the employer group were chosen from among men who had

been particularly helpful in directing their industries during the War.

There were many interesting characters on the body. Two that I

particularly enjoyed were Henry Endicott, who with the Johnsons had

established the famous shoe towns near Binghamton, New York, and a

delightful pungent character from Georgia—Fuller E. Callaway—who in

twenty years had built up from scratch mills and a village with homes

and schools—everything to give life and a chance to hard-working mill

people. Mr. Callaway’s story of what he had done in Georgia was one of

the very few joyous contributions to a gathering doomed to be a dismal

failure.

A body could have scarcely had a heartier welcome from the public than

we did. People seemed to feel we should find a way to end the fighting;

that was what we were there for, Secretary of Labor Wilson told us in

his keynote speech. If we could produce a document which would secure

the rights of all those concerned in an industry, it would find a place

in the hearts of men like the Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the

Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and

the Emancipation Proclamation. He brought us all to our feet—all save a

few who were too interested in political strategy to entertain a high

purpose.

We were there to plan for the future of industry. But almost at once we

discovered that it was not peace or the future of industry that was in

Mr. Gompers’ mind. Also, we discovered that the master politician of the

body was Mr. Gompers. We were hardly organized before he called upon us

to appoint a committee to report on the steel strike.

Dr. Charles Eliot, outraged, rose in all his very genuine majesty and

reminded the body that we were not there to attend to the troubles of

the present but to plan that such troubles might be avoided in the

future. But the steel strike was on the table, and we left it there when

we disbanded, a menace and an irritation.

It was not Mr. Gompers’ resolution, however, which ruined the

Conference. It was the inability of the representatives of labor and

employers to agree on a definition for collective bargaining. The

Conference as a whole contended that such a definition must be a leading

plank in the platform we were there to make, but there were to be many

other planks. Committees were at once formed to frame them. Almost every

member of the Conference, too, had some particular resolution that he

wanted to incorporate. I know I did. But most of us never found an

opportunity to present our notions. Collective bargaining and what it

meant were always getting in our way. The employer group and a

considerable number of the public group believed that the definition

which the labor group offered meant a closed shop. Judge Gary openly

charged this. But labor was quite as strong in its suspicion that the

definition which came from the employer group encouraged company unions,

at that moment flourishing in numbers that alarmed them. Suspicion

governed both groups.

This went on for two weeks; then Secretary Lane, the acting chairman of

the Conference, appealed to a very sick President, and from his bed

Woodrow Wilson begged us not to allow division on one point to destroy

our opportunity:

At a time when the nations of the world are endeavoring to find a

way of avoiding international war [he wrote], are we to confess that

there is no method to be found for carrying on industry except in

the spirit and with the very method of war? Must suspicion and

hatred and force rule us in civil life? Are our industrial leaders

and our industrial workers to live together without faith in each

other, constantly struggling for advantage over each other, doing

naught but what is compelled?

My friends, this would be an intolerable outlook, a prospect

unworthy of the large things done by this people in the mastering of

this continent; indeed, it would be an invitation to national

disaster. From such a possibility my mind turns away, for my

confidence is abiding that in this land we have learned how to

accept the general judgment upon matters that affect the public

weal. And this is the very heart and soul of democracy.

But it was too late. The labor body walked out, except a few railroad

men, wise and experienced in negotiations. A group of employers followed

them. It was defeat. There was nothing for the President to do but

disband the Conference. He did ask, however, that the public group of

some twenty-five carry on. Now this group included a number of

extraordinarily able men. From them had come some of the wisest and

broadest suggestions that had been placed before the Conference. They

could have presented an impressive program, but they had been

outmaneuvered. They lost heart; they refused to go on. The only remarks

I made at that Conference, bewildered as I had been by the political

maneuvering, were when I saw the public group prepared for the cowardly

business of denying the President’s request. “Let us stick to it, do our

best, make some report,” I pleaded.

But I do not think anybody heard me. I had an impression as I talked

that most of them were calculating when they could get a train to New

York.

My next adventure in Government service came two years later as a member

of President Harding’s Unemployment Conference. The country had been

caught in the first great postwar depression, and nobody was ready for

it. Nobody knew, indeed, how widespread the unemployment was. Mr.

Harding called a conference to deal with the problem without attempting

to find out. The result was that on one hand you had an opposition

belittling the numbers, on the other hand you had the responsible

sponsors of the Conference probably exaggerating them. Nobody knew. And

how easy it would have been to find out, by the same method the country

had used in the War when, by a cooperative effort, the number of

draftable men was counted in twenty-four hours at a limited expense!

This was an impressive Conference because of the make-up, and it was a

mighty well conducted Conference: the chairman, Secretary of Commerce

Hoover, kept it in hand from the start—and this in spite of the fact

that there were all the elements of conflict found in the Industrial

Conference and some extra, for here we had rivalry between the labor

groups themselves, particularly that thorny problem of trade

jurisdiction. But Mr. Hoover was enormously skillful, and we came out

with a program which, if it had been carried out with the machinery

which the Conference devised, would have brought the country to 1929 in

a very different state of preparedness.

After our dismissal I put together in a lecture what I conceived to be

the practical conclusion of the Conference. As my text I used one of the

first principles laid down, “The time to act is before a crisis becomes

inevitable.” This text was an official and authoritative recognition of

the unpalatable fact that business always moves in cycles—that a boom

will be followed by a slump, that common sense demands preparedness.

How prepare? The Federal Government, state, county, community down to

the smallest, was to have in reserve plans and money for work it wanted

done that was not absolutely essential at the moment. When a slump

started, this reserve was to be called out.

Private industry was by no means let off. In good times it was to lay up

a surplus with which to keep plants and laboratory alive and ready for

action as soon as there was a return of orders. The employee was to be

protected by employment insurance. The individual householder was to

keep back certain needed repairs and improvements for the day of need.

That is, everybody was to be ready with his life preserver.

For two years I talked with the conviction of one who has a scheme he

believes sound, and I was listened to with more or less enthusiasm,

until it was obvious the slump was passing. It was a bad dream well

over—good times had come. Why lay plans for the future? By 1926 there

were no longer audiences to listen to a talk on preparing for

unemployment. Apparently everybody, even President Hoover, who had been

the all-efficient chairman of the Conference, forgot all about the

program.

On the whole my little excursions into public service were discouraging

and disillusioning; but they did convince me that I was right when I

gave as one of my reasons for not going on to President Wilson’s Tariff

Commission the fact that I was not fitted for the kind of work a

commission or conference requires.

I was an observer, a reporter. What interested me was watching my fellow

members in action: the silent wariness of Secretary Hoover; the amused

and slightly contemptuous smile of Charlie Schwab when he heard a woman

had been put on the coal committee; the unwillingness of representatives

of rival mining unions to do anything to relieve the immediate suffering

of West Virginia miners, sufferings so useful in their campaigns; the

stubborn look on the faces of those who fought over jurisdiction in an

effort to reach an adjustment which would permit hungry men to take up

work waiting for them; the quick political lineup; the clever political

plays; the gradual fade-out of the objective, its replacement by party

ambitions.

All together it was a revealing study of the reason there is so little

steady progress in the world. These failures joined to the refusal to

have anything to do with the League of Nations put an end to my hope

that the War had taught us much of anything. We were not ready for the

sacrifices necessary for peace, nor had we grasped the natural methods

by which things grow. We believed we could talk, petition, legislate,

vote ourselves into peace and prosperity. We had not learned that toil

and self-control are three-fourths of any achievement, and that toil and

self-control begin with the individual.

I went on with my talking in these years with a troubled mind. Continue

this way, and we would destroy democracy. We had allowed, often

encouraged, groups of self-interested individuals to have their way.

That meant transformations in government machinery, new types of

leaders, a multiplication of the children of privilege we had always so

feared, the substitution of humanitarianism for ethics, sympathy for

justice.

I was discouraged, but I never lost faith in our scheme of things. I

never came to believe that we must change democracy for socialism or

communism or a dictatorship. You do not change human nature by changing

the machinery. Under freedom human nature has the best chances for

growth, for correcting its weaknesses and failures, for developing its

capacities. It is on these improvements in men that the future welfare

of the world depends. So I believed, and so I argued as I went about,

though sometimes, I confess, with a spirit so low that my tongue was in

my cheek.

Such was my growing disillusionment when in 1926 I was asked to go to

Italy to report on the Fascist State of Benito Mussolini, now four years

in power, a scandal to the democracies at which he openly jeered, but an

even greater one to the Socialists and Communists who once had thought

him on the way to being the strongest radical leader in Europe.

I knew little of what had gone on in Italy after the end of the War. I

knew the parliamentary system had broken down; I knew there had been two

years of guerrilla warfare after the Peace Conference, a period in which

it was nip and tuck whether the next ruler of Italy would be Communist

or Fascist. The Fascists under their leader Mussolini had won out. I had

been amazed, and had never ceased to be amazed, that the dramatic march

on Rome which ended in changing a parliamentary form of government into

a dictatorship had been carried out without bloodshed. An astonished

world had seen tens of thousands of unorganized and in part unarmed men

march from every point in Italy to Rome, call for Mussolini, get him by

order of the King and then march home again—not a brick thrown, not a

head broken. It was the most amazing transfer of government I had known

of.

But I had never given much attention to what had followed. I had never

asked myself if it was inevitable that a dictator should arise in Italy.

I had never asked who was this man Mussolini or what was this corporate

state which was emerging.

Uneasy as I was over the way things were going in the United States, I

vaguely felt when I was asked to go look all this up that possibly there

were lessons there. Possibly I might learn something from Italy’s

experience about the process by which manacles are put on free

government. However, the real reason I went to Italy was because I was

offered so large a sum that I thought I could not afford to refuse.

My friends did their best to discourage my going. Down in Washington a

worried undersecretary who gave me my passport and letters of

introduction told me pessimistically that I probably should be arrested.

“But why?” I asked.

“Well, that is what is happening now to all our Americans. They drink

too much, talk too much. The chief reason, as far as we can make out, is

that they have to arrest them because they are attacking the government.

We do the same thing here now and then, you know.”

In Paris my best friends, among them Mr. Jaccaci, so much of an Italian

that he talked the dialects of several provinces, told me with all

seriousness that I should be searched. I must not carry letters to

members of the opposition, nor books hostile to Mussolini. Now I was

armed with things of that sort, collected in Washington, New York, and

Paris. I did not propose to give them up without a struggle.

I was told I should find no newspapers excepting those sympathetic to

the regime—a serious handicap, as I always count largely on newspapers.

I must always use the Fascist salute. I took this so seriously that I

practiced it in my Paris bedroom. I must not speak French. I was

counting on that, as I speak no Italian. That is, I started off to Italy

with a large collection of “don’ts” coming from people I considered

informed. If I had not had a natural dislike of giving up an undertaking

I never would have carried out my assignment.

However, at the end of the first day in Rome, a very exciting day, I

awakened to the fact that nobody had searched my bags for incriminating

documents, that I had talked French all day, and that I hadn’t noticed

anybody using the Fascist salute, and, most important, that I had found

at every newspaper kiosk all the French and English papers side by side

with the Italian. It gave me confidence. As a matter of fact in the four

to five months that I was in Italy I did practically what I had planned

to do, and nobody paid any attention to me. My mail was never interfered

with, so far as I know. That is, none of the dire prophecies of

interference to which I had listened at the start came true.

I do not mean to say it was always easy to get to the people with whom I

wanted to talk; more than once, when I succeeded, I found the person

fearful of quotation. I do not mean to say that I found no revolts. Down

in Palermo, in corners of Milan and Florence and Turin, as a matter of

fact almost everywhere, I ran across bitter critics of the new regime

such as I hear every day in this year of 1938 of the President of the

United States; but on the whole even good parliamentarians were

accepting Mussolini. “He has saved the country,” men told me. “We don’t

accept his methods, we don’t believe in dictatorship; but it is better

than anarchy.”

Making my headquarters at Rome, I went over the country fairly well,

particularly the industrial sections. I visited Turin with its

hydroelectric developments, its great Fiat factory, its artificial silk,

all plants of the first order. I spent some days in Milan, visited the

great Pirelli plant, at the moment making underground cables for

Chicago. I saw what was left of the cooperatives at Bologna. I climbed

into that plucky little independent Republic of San Marino. Mussolini

had been there just before I arrived. They were all for him. He worked

and made people work. That is what had made San Marino.

I went south into Calabria, over into Sicily—always looking for the

effects of the new regime on the life of the people. There was no doubt

sensible things were going on—redemption of land, extension of water

power, amazing efforts at wheat production; and the people were

accepting the regime with understanding, realists that they were.

The first thing that springs to my mind now when I recall those months

in Italy is a long procession of men, women, and children bent in labor.

They harvested fields of rice, wheat, alfalfa, laying grain in perfect

swaths; they sat on the ground, stripping and sorting tobacco leaves.

Tiny girls, old women crowded narrow rooms, embroidering with sure

fingers lovely designs on linen, fine and coarse; they cooked their

meals before all the world in the narrow streets of Naples; they carried

home at sunset from the terraces or slopes of mountains great baskets of

grapes, olives, lemons—young women straight and firm, their burdens

poised surely on their heads, old women bent under the weight on their

backs. They drove donkeys so laden that only a nodding head, a switching

tail were visible; they filled the roads with their gay two-wheeled

carts, tended sheep, ran machines, sat in markets, spun, weaved, molded,

built—a world of work.

Mingled with these pictures of labor were equally vagrant ones of these

same men and women at play: holiday and Sunday crowds filling the

streets, the roads, the cinemas, the dancing pavilions, the squares of

little towns that traced their history back clearly more than two

thousand years. In those squares, gay with flags and streamers and light

and booths, in the evenings, throngs held their breath as to the notes

of soft music the lithe figures of the ropewalkers passed high overhead

with slow and rhythmic steps.

It was hard to realize when I looked on them that six years earlier

these same people had been as badly out of step as they were perfectly

in step at the present moment, that instead of rhythmic labor, there was

a clash of disorder and revolt. Men and women refused not only to work

themselves, but to let other people work. Grain died in the fields,

threshing machines were destroyed, factories were seized, shops were

looted, railway trains ran as suited the crew. Sunday was a day, not of

rest, amusement, prayer, but of war; fêtes were dangerous, liable to be

broken up by raids. Instead of the steady balance, orderly action, so

conspicuous today, were the disorganization, anger, violence of a people

unprotected in its normal life: a people become the prey of a dozen

clashing political parties and not knowing where to look for a Moses to

lead it out of their Egypt. How could it be, one asked, that in so brief

a time a people should drop its clubs and pick up its tools?

There was only one answer: Mussolini. Already he was a legend, a name

everywhere to conjure with. I used it myself after I had talked with

him, on scared gentlemen to whom I had letters of introduction, and who

feared quotation: “But Mussolini saw me—talked with me.” Nothing too

much trouble after that.

But what kind of man was this dictator?

“You must go and see Mussolini,” our able and friendly Ambassador Henry

P. Fletcher told me one morning while I was working on the Embassy’s

voluminous records of what had gone on in Italy since the end of the

War. I balked.

“I am not ready with the questions I want to ask him.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Fletcher, “just go down and have a chat with him.”

With my notion of Mussolini gathered largely from English and American

as well as hostile Italian sources, the word seemed utterly incongruous.

Could one chat with this bombastic and terrifying individual who never

listened, told you what to think, to say? Impossible. But of course I

went.

The most exciting and interesting hour and a half I spent in Italy was

in an anteroom watching twoscore or more persons who were waiting to be

received, watching them go in so scared, come out exultant, go in

inflated, come out collapsed. There was no one of them but was anxious,

even the Admiral of the Fleet then at Ostia. He walked nervously about

while he was waiting, adjusting his uniform, and when his turn came

strode in as if marching in a parade.

Nothing I saw in Italy, as I have said, was more interesting to me.

Though I must confess that all the time there was an undercurrent of

nervousness. What I was afraid of was that my French would go to pieces,

provided he gave me a chance to speak at all—of which I had a doubt.

What if I should forget and say “vous” instead of “votre excellence”?

Should I be shot at sunrise?

It was all so different from what I had anticipated. I must have misread

and misheard the reports of interviews to have had such an unpleasant

impression of what was waiting me. As I crossed the long room towards

the desk Mussolini came around to meet me, asked me to take one of the

two big chairs which stood in front of his desk—and, as he seated me,

was apologizing, actually apologizing, in excellent English for keeping

me waiting. As he did it I saw that he had a most extraordinary smile,

and that when he smiled he had a dimple.

Nothing could have been more natural, simple, and courteous than the way

he put me at my ease. His French, in which he spoke after his first

greeting, was fluent, excellent. I found myself not at all afraid to

talk, eager to do so. If he had not been as eager, I think I should have

done all the talking, for luckily at once we hit on a common

interest—better housing. His smiling face became excited and stern. He

pounded the table.

“Men and women must have better places in which to live. You cannot

expect them to be good citizens in the hovels they are living in, in

parts of Italy.”

He went on to talk with appreciation and understanding of the various

building undertakings already well advanced, some of which I had seen in

different parts of the country. He talked at length of the effect on

women of crowded, cheerless homes. “A reason for their drinking too much

wine sometimes,” he mused.

He was particularly interested in what prohibition was doing to working

people in the United States. “I am dry,” he said, “but I would not have

Italy dry [_sec_].” And he amused me by quickly changing _sec_ to

_seche_. “We need wine to keep alive the social sense in our

hard-working people.”

Altogether it was an illuminating half-hour, and when Mussolini

accompanied me to the door and kissed my hand in the gallant Italian

fashion I understood for the first time an unexpected phase of the man

which makes him such a power in Italy. He might be—was, I believed—a

fearful despot, but he had a dimple.

I left Italy, my head alive with speculations as to the future of the

man. There was a chance, and it seemed to me a very good one, that he

would be assassinated. Three dramatic attempts were made on his life

while I was there, attempts known to the public. There may have been

others, the authorities kept quiet. As I was sailing there came a rash

attack on him at Bologna, the assassin being torn to pieces, so it was

said, by an enraged crowd. For months after my return I watched my

morning paper for the headline, “Mussolini Assassinated.”

Of course there was a chance—so far as I could see, it was what

Mussolini himself believed he could realize—to bring Italy to an even

keel economically, by thrift, hard work, development of resources and by

a system of legitimate colonization in the parts of the earth where he

could obtain land, by treaty or by purchase.

And there was a third possibility to one at all familiar with the course

of dictators in the world, particularly with the one with whom you

instinctively compare Mussolini—Napoleon Bonaparte—that the day would

come when he would overreach himself in a too magnificent attempt, an

attempt beyond the forces of his country and so of himself, and he would

finally go down as Napoleon went down.

Are Ethiopia and the alliance with Franco and the rebels of Spain to be

to Mussolini what Spain and Russia were to Napoleon?

I was glad to breathe the air of the United States. It was still free,

whatever our follies. There was at that moment no dictator in sight—no

talk of one. But it was not Mussolini or the Corporate State which

mattered to us: it was what was back of them. Why had parliamentary

government broken down in Italy, the Italy of Garibaldi, of Cavour,

Victor Emmanuel? Why had a dictator been able to replace it with a new

form of government? Could this happen in the government of Washington

and Lincoln? Those were the questions of importance to Americans. There

was where there was something to learn.

19

LOOKING OVER THE COUNTRY

My chief consolation in what I looked on as the manhandling of

democratic ideals and processes in all ranks of society, public and

private, was Abraham Lincoln. In spite of his obvious limitations and

mistakes he had won the biggest battle for freedom we have yet had to

fight. He had done it by taking time to figure things out, by sticking

to the conclusions he had reached so long as, and no longer than, they

seemed to him sound, by squaring his conduct always with what he

conceived to be just, moral principles. The more I knew of him, the

better I liked him and the more strongly I felt we ought as a people to

know about how he did things, not ask how he would solve a problem

tormenting us, but how he would go to work to solve it.

Feeling as I did and do about him, I have kept him always on my

workbench. There has never been a time since the War that I have not had

a long or short piece of Lincoln work on hand. The result has been five

books, big and little, and a continuous stream of articles, long and

short.

The only fresh water in this Lincolnian stream was in a book I called

“In the Footsteps of the Lincolns.” Beginning with the first of the

family in this country—Samuel, who came in 1637—I traced them mile by

mile from Hingham, Massachusetts, where Samuel started, down through

Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, the

wilderness of Kentucky, southwestern Indiana, into Illinois, to the

final resting place. I ran down the records that had been left behind,

copied the inscriptions on gravestones, went over houses in which they

had lived, looked up the families into which they had married, the

friends they had made. When I finished my journey I felt that I had

quite definitely and finally rescued the Lincolns from the ranks of poor

white trash where political enemies had so loved to place them.

I have the satisfaction of knowing that this seven-generation pilgrimage

of the Lincoln family has been added to the itineraries which

enthusiastic students include in the cult of Lincoln now growing so

strong in this country. I have never had an honor which pleased me more

than a certificate from this group naming me Lincoln Pilgrim Number One.

My conviction that we needed in all our difficulties to familiarize

ourselves with good models, sound laboratory practices led me to publish

in 1932 a life of Owen D. Young. Mr. Young had impressed me as being

just what I called him, “A New Type of Industrial Leader.” And how we

needed one! I had first heard of him in connection with what was called

the President’s Second Industrial Conference. After what I regarded as

the cowardly retreat of the members of the President’s first conference

Mr. Wilson had called a second with the same objective, a distinguished

body of men, among them Owen D. Young.

The sessions of this conference were all secret—a contrast to the noisy

publicity which had surrounded the first gathering, and which had been

partly responsible for its failure, the political-minded conferees being

able in this way to speak to the country when they made speeches to

their fellows—a privilege they valued more than trying to understand and

cooperate with their fellows.

It was not long before I began to hear rumors of the satisfactory way

the second conference was going and to hear the name of Owen D. Young as

the man who as much as anybody else was leading to a broad, fair program

of recommendations. His fairness, based on his experience in industrial

relations, came as a surprise to not a few of the members of the

conference, for Mr. Young represented the General Electric Company.

Secretary Wilson, who was then at the head of the Federal Labor

Department, declared that Mr. Young had no fear and no prejudice as a

conferee, that he worked with an open mind. Attorney General Gregory

said of him that there was no man on the conference who was so

progressive in his philosophy of industrial relations. These opinions

from the inside of the conference, followed by its admirable published

report, with which I learned Mr. Young had had much to do, set me to

following his work in labor matters so far as it reached the public.

I was deeply impressed by the showing he made as a negotiator on the

Dawes and Young committees called to settle the thorny problem of what

reparations Germany should make to the Allies—the first sitting in 1924

and the second, in 1929—Mr. Young being the chairman of the latter.

He proved himself a negotiator of unusual quality. He knew the facts. He

kept his head under all circumstances. He had the warmest kind of human

sympathies as well as what one of his colleagues called “a superior

emotional sensitiveness,” which made him steer clear of danger points

before anybody else realized that they were near.

Such were the qualities, I told myself, needed in a leader to handle the

infinitely difficult tangle in labor relations that was more and more

disturbing industry.

All I could do was to say so in print, and that I tried to do in a book

that came out in 1932 and had the misfortune to collide with a

Presidential boom for Mr. Young which misguided friends were cooking up

contrary to his wishes. It was the last thing that he wanted. He had the

good sense to see that there were vastly important things for the good

of the public to be done inside his industry. He wanted to go on with

them. He was doing a good job and should have been left with it, I felt.

But numbers of admirers and interested politicians continued to cry for

him for President until finally Mr. Young came out flat-footed to say

that under no circumstances would he accept a nomination.

But here was my book coming out while this outcry was going on, and

naturally enough political-minded reviewers took it as intended for a

campaign biography. The point I had been trying to make, that here was

somebody with rare ability to lead in the labor struggle, was entirely

lost. I still believe that if we could have had him active in these past

years so disheartening for peaceful industrial relations, the years

which have set back so far the hope of genuine understanding cooperation

inside industry, we should have been saved the peck of trouble that we

are now in.

It was out of the stuff gathered in these various undertakings that I

was depending for security. But the return from the books and articles

of a free lance is more or less uncertain, particularly when they come

in so sober a form as mine and are always shaped to fit a self-made

pattern.

I saw that I must have an annual sure if modest money crop, and I found

it from 1924 on in lyceum work. My two seasons on the Chautauqua

platform had encouraged the lecture bureau to add me to its list of

“talent,” and it was arranged that I go out from four to six weeks a

year beginning around Lincoln’s birthday when dinners and celebrations

called for speakers, and running on into March—usually five engagements

a week, the local committees choosing the subject from the half-dozen I

offered.

These bookings covered the country from North to South and East to West,

long and erratic journeys. Frequently I occupied two different beds a

night, and now and then three. It was brutal, exhaustive business, but I

learned to climb into an upper berth without a fuss, to sleep on a bench

if there was no berth, to rejoice over a cup of hot coffee at an

all-night workmen’s lunch counter, to warm my feet by walking a platform

while waiting for a train. By the end of the first season I had

developed a stoical acceptance of whatever came. This, I argued, saved

nervous wear and tear. I think now a certain amount of indignant

protest, useless as it would have been, might have put more zest into my

travel, as well as my talking.

It was not only hard but lonesome business. From the day I started out I

felt myself a detached wanderer, one who had laid aside personality and

become a cog in the mechanism called a lecture bureau. My one ambition

was to fill the specifications of the schedule and have it over with. It

was not until I said good-bye to the last committee and was headed home

that I felt the joyful rush of reviving personality.

This is putting an unfair face on my experiences. These long railroad

journeys, these nights waiting in dreary stations were not without their

rewards. I carry no more beautiful pictures in my mind than those

flashed on me riding across this country: glittering snow mountains with

stars hanging over them as big as a moon; miles of blossoming redbuds

rising from the mist along an Oklahoma stream; the lovely rounded forms

of the Ozark Mountains stretched as in sleep across Missouri; amethyst

deserts; endless rolling prairies yellow with wheat or white with snow.

These journeys took me at one time or another into every state in the

Union, and there is no one of them in which some bit of remembered

beauty does not take the curse off the almost universal disorder, even

squalor of their towns and cities as I saw them going in and out by

rail.

These long rides, these night waits, brought unforgettable looks into

human lives. Strange how travelers will confide their ambitions, unload

their secrets, show their scars to strangers. Never have I been more

convinced of the supreme wisdom of the confessional of the Catholic

Church than by the confidences poured into my ears in these brief and

accidental meetings. Memorable and poignant though these experiences are

of the country’s beauty as well as of its human tragedy and comedy, they

are little more than a blur. The rapid and crowded succession of events

left no time to follow up, digest, get at the meaning, the solution.

This was particularly tantalizing when it came to the actual filling of

the engagement, for here you were for a time in close contact with a few

people, your committee, and you had an hour or more facing an audience

representative of a community.

The committee represented authority. It was my business to follow its

instructions, please it if I could. Its chairman was the first person I

sought on arrival—that is, the first after checking up on how and when I

was to get away from the place at which I had just arrived.

To be sure, I had careful routing, but was the train by which I was

ordered to leave still running? Had there been a flood or blizzard or

accident to make a detour necessary? Sometimes it was an exciting

detour. More than once I had to go fifty or a hundred miles by car over

flooded or snowbound roads which the pessimistic declared impassable,

and which only an adventurous youth for a good round sum would undertake

to negotiate. In one of these hold-ups I traveled two hundred miles in a

freight car behind an engine, the first to go over the snowbound road in

a week. More than once on these exciting detours I felt that probably I

should not come out alive; but I always did and always found, however

late my arrival, my audience was waiting me. As a matter of fact those

little adventures were highly stimulating after hours and hours of the

benumbing comfort of trains.

When I knew how I was to get away, I looked up the committee. So far as

I was concerned, the point at which I most frequently found a serious

conflict in a committee was the subject on which I was to talk. That was

supposed to have been settled—I had their letter for it. But not

everybody wanted me to talk on so-and-so. Usually I found it was because

somebody feared I might be too radical. They didn’t want anything said

on their platform which would antagonize the well-to-do conservative

sponsors of the course or encourage the town’s social and economic

rebels.

I remember times when, after an exciting discussion behind the scenes, I

stood in the wings waiting for the signal to come onto the platform

while behind me the discussion went on. Only at the last moment did the

chairman say begrudgingly, “Well, talk on so-and-so.” But the chief

objector meeting me after the lecture said, “I would so much have

preferred to have heard you on so-and-so.”

But the indecision of the committee was not the only trying experience

before I was actually on my feet and at my job. There was the

introduction. You never knew exactly what was to happen. As a matter of

fact the introduction should and frequently does give opportunity for

repartee, for anecdote—an easy way for putting yourself at once on terms

of friendliness with your audience. But I was never happy at that kind

of thing. On the Chautauqua circuit the fashion has been for the speaker

to go out as soon as the music was over, take his stand and begin.

Nobody said, “This is So-and-So who will speak on so-and-so.” Nobody

told them anything about you—you stood up and said your piece.

The ritual on the lyceum platform was different. There they made the

most of me, as a rule. It sometimes seemed to me that each successive

committee had a different way of presenting me. Sometimes I marched out

with the master of ceremonies, a man or woman, and was placed in an

armchair while the chairman made remarks about me which were often

bewildering. I have been introduced as the author of George Kennan’s

Siberian books and of Edna Ferber’s Emma McChesney stories. I have heard

a long explanation of why I had never married. Once I was called a

notorious woman by the speaker, he evidently thinking that the word was

flattering. Often I had a bodyguard made up of important women of the

community—a tribute to my sex.

One of the most peculiar fashions, as well as the most trying, was

having a scene arranged behind the drop curtain. The stage was turned

into a pleasant sitting room, and a half-dozen of the leading women of

the town in their best gowns were seated about in informal fashion. When

we were all ready the curtain went up. There would be music, and then

the chairman would tell them who I was, and why I was supposed to be

worth their attention. While this was going on the audience was locating

the different persons of importance on the stage and criticizing the

setting and the costumes.

One going as a lecturer to the most remote parts of the country that

support a lecture course may think he will be a treat, but if he has any

sensibility he will soon discover that, far from that, he usually has a

critical audience. It is interested in what he has to say, treats him

with courtesy and respect; but it has also had experience with scores of

lecturers in past years and compares his matter and his manner with

theirs. I have been in towns in the Middle West where they had heard

Thackeray and Dickens read, had listened to Emerson and Bronson Alcott,

and had heard every popular lecturer in all the years since their day.

Your real opportunity to judge of the intelligence and alertness of the

community comes while you are speaking. Look for an hour or more into

the faces of a group of men and women who, whatever they may think of

you, are courteous enough to give you their attention, and you know soon

what certain individuals think of what you are saying. Always I found

myself speaking to someone who I knew heartily disagreed with me,

someone I felt I would like to convince. Always I knew that there was a

man waiting to challenge me. Usually these challenges came from

Socialists or Single Taxers. If an opportunity was given to ask

questions after my talk (something which I always encouraged), they were

the first on their feet. The community knew them and knew what their

questions would be, and frequently laughed at them. But a really good

audience enjoys seeing a speaker heckled a bit and the speaker, if he is

really interested in his business, is glad to take the heckling. I know

nothing better for a lecturer who is going over the same arguments night

after night than to know that there will probably be somebody in his

audience who will seize the first opportunity to pick on a weak point,

challenge his generalization, his facts. If that happens you always go

away from your lecture better equipped than you came to it.

In the twelve years in which I regularly made an annual lecture trip—I

gave up the work in 1932, finding it too much for my strength—in all

those twelve years I everywhere found the liveliest absorption in

national policies. People told you how they felt about an undertaking,

how it was working out in their particular community—important, for here

you had the test of the pudding in its eating. It was what I saw of the

workings of prohibition in the 1920’s that drove me to do one of the

most unpopular things I ever did—that was to tell bluntly how I saw it

working in hotels from one end of the land to the other, disheartening

evidences of its effect on the young, the unexpected dangers it brought

to a woman traveling alone at night, both in stations and on trains. I

set down what I had seen over a wide range of territory, what I had

heard from the mouths of men and women who had been ardent

prohibitionists, and who were appalled by the things that were happening

particularly to youth in their own communities.

I had never been a prohibitionist in principle. My whole theory for the

improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the

education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the

sake of right doing. I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed

from the top by ordinances and laws. I believed that the country was

gradually learning temperance. But if prohibition could be made to work

I was willing it should be tried. But what I saw in these years had led

me by 1928 to feel that something unexpected and very disastrous was

going on, and that it must be faced, not hidden. It was the most

important observation that my crowded lecture days yielded, but as I say

it brought me bitter criticism and now and then an intimation from some

indignant woman of power and parts that I had sold myself to the liquor

interests. One lady even intimated that if she had known that my pen was

for sale she would have bid for it. This kind of criticism, however, is

one of the things that one who says what he thinks must be prepared to

meet. It is very difficult to believe that those who disagree with you

are as convinced of the right of their point of view as you are, that

they are not being bribed or unduly influenced, have no selfish purpose

as you are sure you have not.

Two generalizations topping all others came out of this going up and

down the land in the years between 1920 and 1932. The first is the

ambition of our people to live and think according to what they

conceive to be national standards. They adopt them whether they suit

their locality or not, and often in adopting them destroy something

with individuality and charm. For the traveler it begins with the

hotel, spick and span, and as like as two peas to the one in

A-ville—B-ville—and so on. Over the way is a sturdy stone building

dating from the days of the coach and four. You may sigh for its great

rooms and for a sight of the old lithographs sure to be on the wall,

but you know it is run down. The town cannot support two, and it

prefers the smart and comfortable commonplace to modernizing its fine

old inn.

Look out your hotel window and you will see opposite a smart, little

dress shop, a duplicate of one you have been seeing everywhere you have

halted, a duplicate of many a one you have seen on New York avenues.

Next door is a standardized beauty parlor, and the pretty girl who waits

on you at the table, the daughter probably of some solid and

self-respecting townsman, has the latest coiffure and blood-red nails.

She is struggling to look as she supposes girls do in Chicago or New

York.

When the committee takes you out to drive it is to show their one high

building, a high building on a prairie with limitless land to occupy, or

a country club as fine as the one in the nearest city. The pride is in

looking like something else, not themselves. The growth of this progress

in imitation can be traced in the change that has come over the local

postal card. All my life I have been a buyer of postal cards, largely on

account of my mother, to whom I always sent pictures of the localities

through which I was passing. Mother died in 1917, but up to this day I

rarely go through a station that I do not say to myself, “I must find a

card for Mother”—and turn away with a pang. In the years between 1920

and 1932 the postal card grew steadily less interesting. Once there were

pictures of a near-by fort, the earliest house, a local celebrity, a

rare view, but now it is all of high buildings and new blocks. They give

of course the pictures of the Zoo and the parks, and even the Zoo and

the parks pride themselves, like the country club, on their resemblance

to those of the nearest large city.

The growing evidence that nationalization is blotting out local

individuality, destroying the pungent personality of sections, states,

communities, struck me with new force after the months I spent in Italy

in 1926. In Italy I had found that, however deeply unionism might be

written in the hearts of some men, you were a Roman, a Perugian, a

Venetian, a Neapolitan before you were an Italian. The long arm of

Fascism was reaching into the provinces and the towns, but it did not as

yet disturb their ways of life. Mussolini had shown, up to that date,

rare knowledge of his Italians. He had left them their ways. Sure of

them, they did not worry so much about the change in government. Most of

them could see about them the proofs of two thousand years of change;

they could show you records and scars of a long succession of emperors,

kings, consuls, dictators. It did not seem to make a vast difference to

them what the government was if they could go on being themselves.

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the

notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the

surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse

above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic

ideals.

The second of my two generalizations was slower in its making. It came

when I began to scratch below the surface of the imitative life so

conspicuous. Then I found a stable foundation of people who stayed at

home and went about their business in their own way and without much

talking. These were people who in spite of droughts and dust storms

stuck to their farms, making the most of good years, saving enough to

carry them through the evil ones, adding a little, year by year, to

their possessions in town and country, supporting schools, churches, and

incidentally lecture courses. They were people who believed in freedom

to work out their own salvation and asked from the state nothing more

than protection in this freedom. It was the business of government, as

they saw it, to keep off the plunderers and let them alone.

Democracy to them was not something which insured them a stable

livelihood. It was something which protected them while they earned a

livelihood. If they failed it was their failure. If the Government did

not protect them from transportation plunderers, manipulations of money,

stock gambling in goods which they raised to feed the world, it was the

Government’s failure. Then they had the right to change the Government,

hold it up to its duty. That was their political business.

This was about what I found, the country over. When once I had learned

to look beyond the restless imitative crowd, to hunt out people who were

going about their business steadily, and for the most part serenely, I

began to breathe more freely and to say: “Well, perhaps, after all, the

men and women of this country as a whole do know what they are about.

They do know what democracy means, and in the best way that they can

under many hampering circumstances they are trying to live it.”

Some such conclusion I always brought back with me from my annual swings

around the country, my dozens of nights in dozens of different

places—the high spot of which always was the hour of searching the faces

of the men and women who came to listen to what I had to say, and who, I

knew, sized me up for just about what I was worth. I might be fooling

myself but not them.

20

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

Here then is the record of my day’s work still unfinished at eighty.

Nobody can be more surprised than I am that I am still at work. Looking

forward at life at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, generally finding myself

tired and a little discouraged, having always taken on things for which

I was unprepared, things which were really too big for me, I consoled

myself by saying, “At seventy you stop.” I planned for it. I would

burrow into the country, have a microscope—my old love. I knew by this

time that was not the way for me to find God, but I expected to have a

lot of fun watching the Protozoa and less anguish than watching men and

women.

But I discovered when seventy came that I still had security to look

after. I could make it by seventy-five, I thought, but I did not. And I

have come where I am with a consciousness that, so long as my head holds

out, I shall work. More important, I am counting it as one of my

blessings. In spite of the notion early instilled into me that the place

of the aged is in the corner resignedly waiting to die, that there is no

place for their day’s work in the scheme of things, that they no longer

will have either the desire or the power to carry on, I find things to

do which belong to me and nobody else.

It is an exciting discovery that this can be so. Old age need not be

what the textbooks assure us it is. Shakespeare is wrong. Cicero, dull

as he is in comparison, is more nearly right. More, it can be an

adventure. My young friends laugh at me when I tell them that, in spite

of creaking joints and a tremulous hand, there are satisfactions

peculiar to the period, satisfactions different from those of youth, of

middle life, even of that decade of the seventies which I supposed ended

it all.

I have been finding it a surprising adventure, if frequently

disillusioning and disturbing, to review my working life, to pick out

what seems to be the reason for my going here and not there, for

thinking this and not that. It has been a good deal like renewing

acquaintance with a friend I had not seen since childhood. Probably the

reason for this is that I have never stopped long enough after any one

piece of work to clean up, valuate what I had done. Always a new

undertaking was on my table before I was finished with what went before.

Packing boxes and letter files of badly classified material still

clutter up my small space with the physical evidence of the

incompleteness of every piece of work I have undertaken.

This explains why telling my story has been so full of surprises. “I did

not realize I felt that way,” I have told myself more than once. “I had

forgotten I did that.” “I cannot imagine why I thought that.”

I took on self-support at the start that I might be free to find answers

to questions which puzzled me. After long floundering I blundered into

man’s old struggle for the betterment of his life.

My point of attack has always been that of a journalist after the fact,

rarely that of a reformer, the advocate of a cause or a system. If I was

tempted from the strait and narrow path of the one who seeks for that

which is so and why it is so, I sooner or later returned. This was

partly because of the humor and common sense of my associates on

_McClure’s_ and _The American Magazine_, and partly because the habit of

accepting without question the teachings and conventions of my world was

shattered when in girlhood I discovered that the world was not created

in six days of twenty-four hours each. That experience aroused me to

questioning, qualifying even what I advocated, which no first-class

crusader can afford to do.

I have never had illusions about the value of my individual

contribution! I realized early that what a man or a woman does is built

on what those who have gone before have done, that its real value

depends on making the matter in hand a little clearer, a little sounder

for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is

a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain. One of our gravest mistakes

is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.

In our eagerness to prove we have found the true solution, we fail to

inquire why this same solution failed to work when tried before—for it

always has been tried before, even if we in our self-confidence do not

know it.

We are given to ignoring not only the past of our solutions, their

status when we took them over, but the variety of relationships they

must meet, satisfy. They must sink or swim in a stream where a multitude

of human experiences, prejudices, ambitions, ideals meet and clash,

throw one another back, mingle, make that all-powerful current which is

public opinion—the trend which swallows, digests, or rejects what we

give it. It is our indifference to or ignorance of the multiplicity of

human elements in the society we seek to benefit that is responsible for

the sinking outright of many of our fine plans.

There are certain exhibits of the eighty years I have lived which

particularly impress me. Perhaps the first of these is the cyclical

character of man’s nature and activities. If I separate my eighty

years—1857 to 1937—into four generations, examine them, compare my

findings, I find startling similarities in essentials. Take the effort,

to create, distribute, and use wealth. How alike are the ups and downs

that have marked that effort!

I was born in the year of a major panic. The depression which followed

it was smothered in war. That war over, quickly there followed in 1866 a

serious depression—world-wide. In 1873 came a major panic. When this

first period came to an end in 1877 the country was still deep in the

clutch of the unhappy depression which followed that panic.

Each of my three successive generations beginning in 1877, 1897, 1917,

has featured a “major” panic followed by five to seven years of

depression. Then has come a brilliant short-lived recovery ending in

what we euphoniously call today a recession.

My fifth generation, just opening, promises well to duplicate its

predecessor. If I live ten years longer I no doubt shall see another

major panic, and one still more difficult for the productive individual

or group to handle because the practice of following the provident ant’s

example and storing up in the good time reserves to meet the bad has

been made a political offense.

Each generation repeats its leaders. Each sees men endowed with superior

inventiveness, energy, and genius for business, inspired by love of

power and possession, launch selfish schemes—Carnegies, Rockefellers,

Goulds. If each of these strong men left something sinister behind, each

also contributed to higher living standards and hurried on the

nationalization of the country. The public without whom they could not

have lived a day saw in their greedy grandiose undertakings whatever was

for its benefit, and took it while ordering its government to control

whatever was sinister.

And while they built and served and exploited, other men endowed with

far greater idealism than practical sense planned new forms of

government, new laws, advertised panaceas, all guaranteed to produce

security and justice. Each generation has had its Henry George, its

Bellamy, its Bryan, intent on persuading mankind that he had found the

way, could lead men to the good life.

In each generation employer and employee have faced the decision—war or

cooperation. If war has been the answer in the majority of cases, there

have always been those who have gone ahead building up a great mass of

evidence of what men inspired by good will, free from suspicion and

self-interest, can do in industry by patient cooperative experiments.

Side by side with these exhibits have gone magnificent governmental

attempts to correct abuses, to make man’s life in the Republic freer,

securer, more just, efforts to carry out the avowed purpose of the

government we started a hundred and fifty years ago. And these efforts

are alike in essentials—the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, the New

Freedom of Woodrow Wilson, the Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt, the

fight for a larger freedom of opportunity of Grover Cleveland, the

struggle to wipe out slavery of Abraham Lincoln.

Again and again in these generations have we seen the great airship of

democracy lift from the ground, stagger, gather itself together, soar,

sail, while those who had chosen the pilot and loaded in his cargo

watched the flight with confidence and exultation. This time their dream

had come true.

But the ship has always come back, its journey unfinished, and doubters

have jeered at those who believed in it, cried out that it would never

fly, that freedom, equal opportunity were only foolish fancies; men,

they gloated, function only under strong single rulers. Dictatorship

alone makes efficient government—national power and glory. The state,

not the individual, is the end.

There is no denying that these repeated failures or half-successes have

made cynics of many who have had a hand in the flights, or at least been

sympathetic watchers.

It has been sickening to see hopes grow dim under the hammering of

reality, to see a generation lose its first grand fire and sink into

apathy, cynicism. One asks oneself if man has the staying power ever to

realize his ideals. One is inclined when this hour of futility comes to

agree with Arthur Balfour that human life is but a disreputable episode

on one of the minor planets. As far as I am concerned that smart and

cynical estimate never could stand a good night’s sleep.

If I find little satisfaction or hope in examining and comparing one by

one my four successive generations, I find considerable in looking at

them as a whole. When I do that, I see not a group of cycles rolling one

after another along a rocky and uneven road but a spiral—the group moves

upward. To be sure it is not a very steady spiral, but I am convinced

that is the real movement.

Could there be greater evidence that this is true than that the world as

a whole has today come to conscious grips over that most fundamental of

problems: Shall all men cooperate in an effort to make a free, peaceful,

orderly world, or shall we consent that strong men make a world to their

liking, forcing us to live in it? more than that, train us to carry it

on?

It is well that the issue should be clear, so clear that each of us must

be forced to choose.

Even more hopeful, if not so clear to many people, is the increasing

knowledge that we are getting of man as an individual and as a mass,

coming to us particularly from men of science. What we have yet to find

out, apparently, is what we can expect of man under this or that

circumstance, what words and what promises stir him, what persuades him

to cooperation or to revolt, why he follows a particular type of leader

at a particular time and how long he can be counted on. Once we know

better what we can get out of man under particular circumstances we can

plan our action with something like the certainty with which the

electrician plans his machine. He knows the nature of the current, what

it will do and not do. He puts no strain on it which experiment has

proved fatal.

When we reach that knowledge and control of human forces we shall know

why the League of Nations works so badly, why we have before us the

terrible and apparently uncheckable shambles of Spain and China, why an

intolerable outbreak of racial and religious prejudice should shame us

at this period of our history, why we must be prepared to meet the

savage outbreaks of men and peoples still contemptuous of contracts,

unamenable to ideals of honor, peace, and conciliation.

One consolation in any effort to socialize and democratize our plans of

life is that the mass of men want a simple world. In every country they

ask little more than security, preferably of their own making, freedom

to build in the way they like so far as possible. They will follow any

system or any leader that promises them that. Politicians would do a

better job for men if they wrote fewer constitutions, devised fewer

automatic cures, gave more attention to disciplining and training common

men and women the world over to honest labor, to cooperation with their

fellows, to sacrifice when necessary, keeping alive in them their

natural spark of freedom.

How are we going to do it? That is the gravest question we face. In 1921

I went to Washington to report Secretary Hughes’ Conference on the

Limitation of Armaments. It seemed to me that I had better do some

preliminary reading on the problems, so I went to a wise man at the

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for advice. He turned out to

be a philosopher.

“First,” said he, “read ‘Don Quixote’: he will tell you what they cannot

do. Then read Aesop’s Fables: that will tell you what they can do. But

above all read the King James Version of the Bible, which tells you that

peace on earth is promised only to men of good will.”

There you have it. If we want peace we must make men of common sense,

knowing what can be done and what cannot be done, also men of good will.

How are we to do that? I see no more promising path than each person

sticking to the work which comes his way. The nature of the work, its

seeming size and importance matter far less than its right relation to

the place where he finds himself. If the need at the moment is digging a

ditch or washing the dishes, that is the greatest thing in the world for

the moment. The time, the place, the need, the relation are what decide

the value of the act.

It is by following this natural path that new and broader roads open to

us, moments of illumination come. There is the only reliable hope of the

world. It takes in all of us but puts it up hard to each of us to fit

the day’s work into the place where we stand, not crowding into

another’s place: no imitation, no hurry, growth always, knowing that

light and power come only with growth, slow as it is.

Madame Curie so saw it. Asked what a woman’s contribution to a better

world should be, she replied that it began at home, then spread to those

immediately connected, her immediate friends, then the community in

which she lived; and if the work proved to meet a need of the world at

large it spread there. But the important thing was the beginning, and

that beginning, Madame Curie insisted, was in the home, the center of

small things.

Work backed by such a faith makes life endurable. I doubt if I could

have come into my eighties with anything like the confidence I feel in

the ultimate victory of freedom, the ultimate victory of man’s

self-respect, if I had not groped my way through work into some such

faith.

I know I should find this end of life less satisfactory if it were not a

working end, conditioned as it must be by certain concessions to years,

easements necessary if I am to keep vigor for my two or three hours a

day at my desk and, once accepted, becoming more and more enjoyable.

No one can imagine what a satisfaction it is to me to find that I need

not go to conferences and conventions and big dinners. That job belongs

to youth. It alone has the appetite, the digestion, the resilience for

the endless talk and late hours of those functions, also the confidence

that salvation is to be reached through them.

Still more satisfactory is the acceptance of the fact that I have not

the strength to run about on trains and give lectures. That, too, is the

job of young people, and the best I can hope for them in carrying it on

is that they will learn as much about people as I think I did. The

humility which that will engender will be all to their good.

A discovery which has given me joy, and which had something of the

incredible about it, is the durability of friendship born at any period

in one’s life. I have enlarged in this narrative only on professional

friendships, those that belong legitimately to my day’s work, but this

discovery does not cover them alone but all the range from childhood to

now.

Circumstances, time, separations, may have completely broken

communication. The break may have been caused by complete divergence of

opinion, differences as grave as those which caused the breaking up of

our old McClure crowd, as grave as the ghastly separations that war

brings; but you pick up at the day when the friendship was—not broken

but interrupted.

One of the most beautiful personal demonstrations I have had of this

unbreakable quality in friendship was a birthday party which S. S.

McClure gave Viola Roseboro, John Phillips, and myself when he was

seventy-eight, and I close to it. Miss Roseboro had stayed with Mr.

McClure when the rest of us left him. That had never made a rift in

anybody’s relations with her, and now we all sat down together as once

we had sat down in the old St. Denis, the old Astor, the old Holland

House—lunching places that marked the stages by which _McClure’s_ worked

itself successively into better quarters, went uptown. And we talked

only of the things of today, as we always had done. We sat enthralled as

in the old years while Mr. McClure enlarged on his latest enthusiasm,

marveling as always at the eternal youthfulness in the man, the failure

of life to quench him.

One of my great satisfactions has been a revival of curiosity. I lost it

in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. Human affairs seemed to me to be headed

for collapse. War was not over, and men were taking it for granted it

was. The failure of the hopes of previous generations had taught us

nothing. The sense of disaster was strong in me. What I most feared was

that we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our

standard of character. If you believed as I did (and do) that permanent

human betterment must rest on a sound moral basis, then our house would

collapse sooner or later.

It was taking a longer view, looking at my fifty years as a whole, that

revived me. I thought I saw a spiral, was eager to prove it.

Once more I am curious. It is an armchair curiosity—no longer can I go

out and see for myself; but that has its advantages. It compels longer

reflection, intensifies the conviction that taking time, having

patience, doing one thing at a time are the essentials for solid

improvement, for finding answers. Perhaps, I tell myself, I may from an

armchair find better answers than I have yet found to those questions

which set me at my day’s work, the still unanswered questions of the

most fruitful life for women in civilization, the true nature of

revolutions, even the mystery of God. It is the last of the three which

disturbs me least. The greatest of mysteries, it has become for me the

greatest of realities.

INDEX

Adams, Dr. Herbert B., 76

Addams, Jane, 273, 279, 305, 309, 310, 312, 313, 322, 334, 349, 354

Agassiz, Louis, 41, 42

Alber, Louis, 300

Alden, Timothy, 37–39

Aldrich, Esther Tarbell (niece), 264, 265, 359

Allegheny College, 34–47, 58, 64, 89, 142

American Federation of Labor, 82, 371

_American Magazine, The_, 255, 259, 261, 265–267, 270, 274, 276, 281,

282, 288, 292, 293, 297–300, 306, 307, 327, 350, 353, 359, 365, 399

Anderson, Mary, 55, 323, 349

Anderson, Maxwell, 307

Anthony, Susan B., 31–33, 40, 327

Archbold, John D., 220, 221, 232

Baker, Ray Stannard, 196, 197, 242, 258, 261, 266, 274, 279, 282, 292,

299, 350

Barton Lincolniana, 170, 171

Beecher-Tilton scandal, 33

Bell, Alexander Graham, 44, 147, 181–184

Bellamy, Edward, 83, 401

Bentley, William, 38, 39

Berkman, Alexander, 126

Blanc, Madame (Théodore Bentzon), 100, 101

Bliven, Bruce, 307

Bloomer, Amelia, 31

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 130, 146–153, 155, 156, 159, 161, 164, 205, 384

Bonnet, Madame, 90, 103–106, 110, 112, 114, 116–118

Bonta House, 19, 205

Borgeaud, Charles, 131, 145, 350

Boyden, Albert, 258, 261, 262, 266, 300

Bryan, William Jennings, 355, 356, 401

Bugbee, Dr. Lucius, 35, 43

Burlingame, Edward L., 98–100

Burroughs, John, 308

Catt, Carrie Chapman, 320–322, 326

Chautauqua Assembly, 65–72

Chautauqua Circuit, 300–305, 314, 329, 352–356, 388–397

Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, 69–71, 81

_Chautauquan, The_, 64, 71–79, 81–83, 85–89, 94, 98, 179, 204, 211, 268

Cherry Run, 4, 5, 8, 10

Claflin, Tennessee, 32, 33

Claude, Monsieur, 97

Cleveland, Grover, 83, 149, 268–272, 402

Coppée, François, 122, 123

Corrigan, James, 237, 238

Craft, Amos Norton, 27, 28

Dana, Charles A., 174–177

Darmesteter, James, 131

Daudet, Alphonse, 122, 126, 127

Delamater, Wallace, 79, 80

Dieulafoy, Madame, 101, 102

Doremus, Dr. R. Ogden, 65, 66

Duffus, Robert L., 307

Dumas, Alexandre, 122

Duncan, Andrew J., 60, 61

Dunne, Finley Peter (Mr. Dooley), 259–261, 265, 300, 361

Edison, Thomas A., 64, 310

Ely, Dr. Richard T., 76

Emery, Fred Parker, 114

Emery, Lewis, Jr., 231–234, 236, 237, 252

Fairchild, David, 183

Finley, Dr. John H., 70, 76, 77, 171, 172

Fisk, Jim, 22

Flagler, Henry, 217–220

Fletcher, Henry P., 382

Flood, Dr. Theodore L., 64, 72–75, 87

Ford, Henry, 287–293, 296, 309–312

Gary, Judge Elbert H., 285, 364–374

Gautier, Judith, 102, 103

Gautier, Théophile, 102

George, Henry, 83, 401

Gifford, Walter S., 320, 325

Gilder, Jeannette L., 265

Gladden, Dr. Washington, 243

Gompers, Samuel, 285, 349, 371–373

Gould, Jay, 22, 25

Grayson, David, 197. _See also_ Baker, Ray Stannard

Grosvenor, Gilbert II., 183

Grumbine, Annette, 46

Hanna, Mark, 60, 61

Harding, Warren G., 375

Haskins, George, 44–45, 47

Hasse, Adelaide, 209

Hay, John, 162–164, 166, 169

Haymarket riot, 82

Hazen, Charles D., 114–116, 145, 330

Heinze, F. Augustus, 228, 229

Henderson, Josephine, 89

Henry, Mary, 89, 90, 98

Herr, Lucien, 132, 133, 145

Hess, Ida, 15

Hess, M. E., 15

“History of the Standard Oil Company, The,” 202, 206, 239–241, 244,

258, 361–364

Hoar, George Frisbie, 190–195

Hoch, E. W., 249

Hoggson, Ella, 265

Hoggson, Noble, 265

Holland Land Company, 37

Hoover, Herbert, 321, 375, 376

Howe, Frederic C., 309

Hubbard, Gardiner Green, 147, 149–152, 180–182, 185

Hubbard, Mrs. Gardiner Green, 149, 150, 180, 181, 190

Jaccaci, Auguste, 158, 159, 337, 340, 350, 352, 379

James, Henry, 45

Janssen, Pierre Jules César, 120

Jewett, Rutger B., 364, 365

Jordan, David Starr, 306, 307, 349, 354

Kellogg, Clara Louise, 34

Kennan, George, 302, 391

Langley, Samuel Pierpont, 183–185

Lapique, Louis, 145, 350

Lathrop, Julia C., 324

Lee, B. F., 49, 50, 53

Leigh, William R., 172

Lincoln, Abraham, 8, 11, 12, 59, 161, 175, 177–180, 186, 205, 282, 288,

357, 360, 384–386, 402

Lincoln, Robert Todd, 59, 165–170, 172

Livermore, Mary A., 32

Lloyd, Henry D., 204, 209, 210, 214, 231, 233, 240

Lynch, Thomas, 286, 287, 291, 292

Lyons, Mrs. Emily, 165–166, 168

_McClure’s Magazine_, 121, 124, 126, 141, 145, 147, 153, 154, 157–160,

177, 184, 186, 187, 190, 195–198, 202, 206, 211, 212, 225–227, 231,

240, 242, 254–259, 261, 262, 269, 282, 288, 297, 299, 353, 363, 364,

399, 406

McClure, S. S., 118–123, 141, 146–150, 151, 154–156, 158, 160–165, 168,

173, 175–177, 184, 188, 196, 199, 200, 202, 205, 206, 210–212, 215,

239, 254–258, 363, 406

McClure’s Syndicate, 100, 103, 118, 155, 175

McCoy, Adrian, 73

McCullough, Esther Ann (mother), 1–3, 5–13, 16, 17, 20–22, 31, 32, 34,

35, 63, 98, 116, 117, 144–146, 203, 357, 395

McCullough, Walter Raleigh (grandfather), 1, 3

McKinley, Abner, 60

McKinley, William, 58–62, 186, 187, 189, 207, 268

Mahaffy, Dr. J. P., 77, 78

Marillier, Madame Cécile, 132, 133, 135, 139, 141, 142, 145, 337, 339,

350

Marillier, Léon, 131, 132, 138

Marx, Karl, 135

Mead, David, 37

Meadville, Pa., 38, 64, 72, 74, 76, 79, 141, 262

Medill, Joseph, 173

Miles, General Nelson Appleton, 186–190

Miller, Hugh, 27, 28

Miller, Lewis, 64, 65, 67, 69

Montague, Gilbert Holland, 240, 241

Morse, John T., 167, 168

Mussolini, Benito, 368, 377, 378, 380–384, 395

Nestor, Agnes, 322, 323

Nicolay, John G., 162–166, 169

Norris, Kathleen, 266

Oil City, Pa., 11, 117

Oil Creek, 4, 8, 13, 14, 244

Pasteur, Louis, 120–122

Pasteur, Madame Louis, 120–122

Perry, J. Leslie, 175, 176

Petroleum Center, 14, 15

Phillips, John S., 103, 119, 141, 156–160, 165, 175, 197, 199, 202,

205, 210, 211, 215, 229, 239, 254, 257–260, 262, 266, 274, 281, 292,

297, 300, 336, 406

Pithole, 10, 19, 20, 204, 205

Poland Union Seminary, Poland, Ohio, 48–59, 62–65, 81, 85

Pure Oil Company, 204, 231

_Red Cross Magazine_, 325, 336, 350

Reed, Jack, 266, 267

Robinson, A. Mary F., 131, 140

Rockefeller, Frank, 237, 238

Rockefeller, John D., 25, 211, 214, 215, 217, 219, 220, 233–240, 243,

251, 362, 372

Rogers, Henry H., 10, 24, 25, 211–232, 234, 365

Roland, Madame, 85, 86, 93, 99, 100, 112, 124, 125, 130–132, 136–140,

143, 144, 146, 148, 153

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 67, 369, 402

Roosevelt, Theodore, 189, 190, 211, 229, 241, 242, 251, 252, 271, 272,

275–277, 306, 366, 367, 369, 402

Roseboro, Viola, 13, 197, 198, 406

Rouse, Henry, 8

Rouseville, 9, 10, 14, 15, 19, 21, 24, 135, 213

Sabin, Dr. Florence, 120

Schurz, Carl, 177, 178

Schwimmer, Madame Rosika, 309, 313

_Scribner’s Magazine_, 97, 98, 118, 124, 144, 145, 153

Seignobos, Charles, 132–136, 138, 145, 337, 349, 350

Shaw, Dr. Anna H., 318–322, 326–329, 336

Sherman Antitrust Law, 252

Shotwell, Dr. James T., 349

Siddall, John M., 211, 234–237, 258, 266, 299, 307, 308

Simon, Jules, 123

Sloane, William Milligan, 152

South Improvement Company, 23–25, 208, 214, 218–220, 227

Spofford, Ainsworth, 150, 151

Standard Oil Company, 10, 24, 25, 83, 202, 203, 206–212, 214–216,

218–223, 225, 226, 228–232, 234, 237–241, 243, 244, 249–253, 267,

268, 299, 362–364;

“History” of, _see_ “History”

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 31–33, 40, 327

Stanton, Theodore, 99

Steed, H. Wickham, 135, 136, 204, 350

Steffens, Lincoln, 198–202, 256, 258, 274, 282, 297, 298

Tarbell, Franklin Sumner (father), 1–6, 8, 10–22, 24, 25, 27, 31, 32,

34, 43, 46, 53, 63, 65, 88, 93–95, 98, 104, 116, 118, 144–146, 203,

207, 213, 218, 245

Tarbell, Franklin Sumner, Jr. (brother), 12

Tarbell, Sarah A. (sister), 12, 24, 63, 98, 121, 144, 145, 359

Tarbell, William Walter (brother), 5, 12, 14, 46, 98, 118, 121, 145,

203–205, 231, 345

Tariff Commission, 278, 279

Taylor, Frederick W., 292–295, 360

Tingley, Jeremiah, 41–44, 120

Titusville, Pa., 4, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 27, 30–32, 46, 64, 65, 72, 79,

83, 89, 90, 97, 98, 117, 141, 146, 205, 218, 262

Tucker, G. Burr, 264

Tucker, Mrs. G. Burr, 264

Tupper, Clara Tarbell (niece), 359

Tupper, Tristram, 359

Twain, Mark, 67, 68, 157, 211–213, 265, 369

Vacuum Oil Company, 220, 221

Vanderbilt, Commodore, 25, 33

Vincent, Dr. John H., 65–72, 114–116, 145

Walker, Clara, 54, 55, 57, 61

Walker, Robert, 52, 57–62

Wallace, Lew, 71

Wallace, Susan E., 71

White, William Allen, 200, 259, 260, 282, 337, 338, 350

Whitney, Henry C., 173, 174

Wickersham, George W., 362, 366

Willard, Frances E., 32

Wilson, Woodrow, 167, 278, 279, 313–318, 320, 322, 328, 331, 346, 348,

350, 351, 356–358, 362, 371, 374–376, 386, 402

Winthrop, Judge James, 39

Woodhull, Victoria, 32, 33

Woolf, Virginia, 40

Young, Owen D., 386–388

Zola, Emile, 122, 123

------------------------------------------------------------------------

ALL IN

THE DAY’S WORK

_An Autobiography_

_by_

_Ida M. Tarbell_

_author of “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” “The Life of

Abraham Lincoln,” etc._

“I don’t know how this book will come out,” Miss Tarbell explained to

reporters on her eightieth birthday. “I am putting down the things I

have seen, the men and women I have known in five stirring decades.

Always there have been exciting things going on, things that upset

me—wars, depressions, bloody rows.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.

2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.

3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.