All in the Day's Work

Part 1

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED TORONTO

Photograph by Alfred Cheney Johnston

At 70 ]

ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK An Autobiography

BY IDA M. TARBELL

NEW YORK

The Macmillan Company

1939

Copyright, 1939, by THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

All rights reserved—no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.

FIRST PRINTING.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AMERICAN BOOK—STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK

SARAH A. TARBELL My Sister and My Loyal Friend

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE 1. MY START IN LIFE 1

2. I DECIDE TO BE A BIOLOGIST 19

3. A COEDUCATIONAL COLLEGE OF THE EIGHTIES 37

4. A START AND A RETREAT 49

5. A FRESH START—A SECOND RETREAT 64

6. I FALL IN LOVE 89

7. A FIRST BOOK—ON NOTHING CERTAIN A YEAR 124

8. THE NAPOLEON MOVEMENT OF THE NINETIES 147

9. GOOD-BYE TO FRANCE 161

10. REDISCOVERING MY COUNTRY 179

11. A CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY SEEKS MY ACQUAINTANCE 202

Part 2

12. MUCKRAKER OR HISTORIAN? 231

13. OFF WITH THE OLD—ON WITH THE NEW 254

14. THE GOLDEN RULE IN INDUSTRY 280

15. A NEW PROFESSION 301

16. WOMEN AND WAR 319

17. AFTER THE ARMISTICE 336

18. GAMBLING WITH SECURITY 359

19. LOOKING OVER THE COUNTRY 385

20. NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN 398

INDEX 409

ILLUSTRATIONS

AT SEVENTY Frontispiece

PAGE EARLIEST PORTRAIT 2

OFFICE STAFF OF THE CHAUTAUQUAN, 1888 76

AT McCLURE’S, 1898 156

AT THE AMERICAN, 1907 258

IN A CONNECTICUT GARDEN, 1914 266

AT RED CROSS HEADQUARTERS, PARIS, 1919 338

POSING AS A GARDENER, 1925 360

ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK

1 MY START IN LIFE

If it had not been for the Panic of 1857 and the long depression which followed it I should have been born in Taylor County, Iowa. That was what my father and mother had planned. In fact, however, I was born in a log house in Erie County, Pennsylvania, on November 5, 1857. It was the home of my pioneering maternal grandfather Walter Raleigh McCullough. No home in which I have ever lived has left me with pleasanter memories of itself. It was a Cape Cod house, a story and a half high, built of matched hewn logs, its floors of narrow fitted oak planks, its walls ceiled, its “upstairs” finished, a big fireplace in its living room. There were spreading frame outbuildings to accommodate the multiple activities of a farm which was in my time a going concern. I remember best the big cool milk room with its dozens of filled pans on the racks, its huge wooden bowl heaped with yellow butter on its way to the firkin, its baskets piled with eggs, its plump dressed poultry ready for market.

Like all young married people of pioneer ancestry and experience having their way to make, my parents wanted land. Land of their own, combined with what my father could earn at his profession as a teacher and his trade as a joiner, meant future security. It was the proved way of the early American.

After much looking about in northwestern Pennsylvania where the families of both were settled, they had decided that the West offered greater opportunity and so in the spring of 1857, a year after his marriage, my father, Franklin Sumner Tarbell by name, started out to find a farm. He had but little money in his pocket, and the last one hundred fifty miles of his search were made on foot. How enthusiastic he was over the claim he at last secured! His letters tell of the splendid dome of sky which covered it, of the far view over the prairie, of marvelous flowers and birds, of the daily passing along the horizon of a stream of covered wagons, settlers bound for California, Pikes Peak, Kansas, Nebraska; and some of them, he found, were earlier Iowa settlers, leaving the very state which for the moment seemed to him the gate to Paradise.

He set himself gaily at breaking land, building the house for mother, working in a sawmill to pay for the lumber. He did it alone, even to the making of window frames and doors. I know how he did it—whistling from morning till night, mischief and tenderness chasing each other across his blue eyes as he thought of my mother’s coming, their future together.

The plan they had made provided for her going west with their household goods in August. The money was arranged for, so they thought; but before it was taken from the bank the panic came, and every county bank in Pennsylvania was closed. There was no money anywhere, nothing for my mother to do but stay where she was while my father struggled to earn by teaching and carpenter work the money which would bring us on. But the panic reached Iowa, dried up its money supply. People were living by barter, my father reported. What a heartbreaking waiting it was for them, coming as it did after an engagement of six years every week of which they had both found long!

The fall and winter of 1857, the spring and summer of 1858 passed. Still there was no money to be had, and then in the fall of 1858 father started out to teach his way to us. Before he found a school he had walked one hundred and eighty miles—walked until his shoes and clothes were worn and tattered. It was “shabby and broke,” as he had written it would be, that he finally in the spring of 1859, when I was a year and a half old, made his way back to my mother still living in the log house in Erie County.

According to the family annals I deeply resented the intimacy between the strange man and my mother, so far my exclusive possession. Flinging my arms about my mother, so the story went, I cried, “Go away, bad man.”

Part 3

Esther Ann McCullough Tarbell and Ida Minerva Tarbell, November 5, 1858 ]

The problem for my father now was to earn money to take us back to Iowa, for my mother to continue her patient waiting. For a dozen years before her marriage she had taught in district schools in Erie County, as well as in a private school of an aunt in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was a good teacher, but she was married! She must stay with her family then until her husband had a home ready for her; so ruled my grandmother, chock-full as she was of the best and severest New England rules for training girls to be ladies. You might live in a log house. You were reminded loftily that many of the “best families” had done that while “settling the country,” but you must “never forget who you are!” “Remember that your father is a McCullough of an ancient and honored Scotch clan, his mother a Raleigh of Sir Walter’s family, that I am a Seabury, my great-uncle the first Episcopal Bishop in the United States, my mother a Welles, her father on Washington’s staff.” It was a litany her four daughters all had to learn!

Exciting employment waited my father. For six or seven years before his marriage, when he was earning his way through the Academy of Jamestown, New York, he spent his summers running a fleet of three or more flatboats of merchandise to be delivered at trading points on the Allegheny and the Ohio River—always as far south as Louisville, sometimes even up the Mississippi. “Captain Tarbell,” his small and jolly crew called him. The River was the chief highway of a great country. To its waters came the pioneer and trader, the teacher, the preacher, the scientist, the prophet, as well as every species of gambler, charlatan, speculator, swindler, cutthroat. My father’s stories of what he saw were among the joys of my childhood: a great fleet of steamboats burning at Pittsburgh, a hanging, river churches and preachers and show boats, children who never knew other homes than a boat, towns, cities, and what he loved best of all—nights floating quietly down the great Ohio, the moon above. Not strange that after those cruel months of working his way back to us he should have seized this opportunity again to take charge of his Jamestown friend’s river enterprise.

The trip went well, and at the end of August, 1859, he turned back, money in his pocket to take us to Iowa. But as he journeyed eastward he was met everywhere by excitement. A man had drilled a well near a lumber settlement in northwestern Pennsylvania—Titusville it was called—drilled for oil and found it, quantities of it. My father, like most men who traveled up and down the Allegheny and Ohio in those days, was familiar with crude petroleum. He had used it to grease creaking machinery and, too, as a medicine, a general cure-all, Seneca oil; used it for the colds, the fever and ague, the weak lungs which had afflicted him from boyhood. He knew, too, that there were those who believed that if rock oil, as it was called, could be found in sufficient quantities it would make a better light than the coal and whale oils then in common use. The well near Titusville producing twenty-five to one hundred barrels a day—nobody knew how much—proved that if other reservoirs or veins could be opened by such drilling there would be oil to light the world.

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