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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

To

Sarah A. Tarbell

My Sister and My Loyal Friend

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

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.”

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.

Rumors were exciting and grew in the telling. The nearer he came to Erie County, the bigger the well. He met men on foot and horseback making their way in. Something to look into before he started back to Iowa. He looked into it, not merely at Titusville with its first well, but down the stream on which the first well stood and where other wells were already drilling. Oil Creek, it was called. What if they continued to get oil? my father asked himself. Where would they put it? They would need tanks, tanks in numbers. He believed he could build one that would hold five hundred or more barrels. He said as much to the owner of a well drilling down the creek near the mouth of a tributary called Cherry Run. “Show me a model that won’t leak, and I’ll give you an order.” He lost no time in making his model and got his order.

Here was a chance for a business if oil continued to be found, a business with more money in it than he had ever dreamed of making. Moreover, he knew all the elements of that business, had had experience in handling them. Tank building called for his trade, that of the joiner. Iowa could wait.

By the summer of 1860 he had his shop going at the mouth of Cherry Run near the well for which he had received his first order. The shop running, he built what was to be my mother’s first home of her own, the one for which with infinite confidence and infinite pain she had been waiting since her marriage four years and a half before.

It was in October of 1860 that my father drove his little family over the Allegheny foothills some forty miles. There were two of us children now, for in July of 1860 my brother William Walter Tarbell, named from his two grandfathers, had been born. Close beside his shop father had built a shanty. It had a living room with an alcove, a family bedroom with trundle beds for us children, and a kitchen. A covered passage led into the shop, which was soon to be the joy of my life for here were great piles of long odorous curly pine shavings into which to roll, to take naps, to trim my gown, and in which to search day in and day out for the longest, the curliest.

But these shavings and my delight in them were a later discovery. My first reaction to my new surroundings was one of acute dislike. It aroused me to a revolt which is the first thing I am sure I remember about my life—the birth in me of conscious experience. This revolt did not come from natural depravity; on the contrary it was a natural and righteous protest against having the life and home I had known, and which I loved, taken away without explanation and a new scene, a new set of rules which I did not like, suddenly imposed.

My life in the log house had been full of joyous interests. There were turkeys and ducks and chickens, lambs and colts and calves, kittens and puppies—never could I be without playmates. There were trees and woods and flowers in summer—a great fireplace with popcorn and maple candy in winter, and I an only grandchild the center of it all. But what had I come to? As mother realized, a place of perils, a creek rushing wildly at the side of the house, great oil pits sunken in the earth not far away, a derrick inviting to adventurous climbing at the door. No wonder that warnings and scoldings and occasional switchings dogged my steps. Moreover, I was no longer the center of the circle: a baby filled her arms—“my” arms! A man still strange gave me orders and claimed her—“my” mother.

It was not to be endured, and so one November day just after my third birthday I announced I was going to leave. “Going back to Grandma.” “Very well,” my mother said. I knew the way the men went when they walked away from the shop, and I followed it, but not far. Across the valley in which we lived ran an embankment. To my young eyes it was as high as a mountain, and the nearer I came the higher it looked, the higher and blacker. And then suddenly as I came to its foot I realized that I had never been on the other side, that I did not know the way to Grandma’s. I knew I was beaten, and sat down to think it over. Never in all these years since have I faced defeat, known that I must retreat, that I have not been again that little figure with the black mountain in front of it, a little figure looking longingly at a shanty dim in the growing night but showing a light in the window.

Finally I turned slowly back to the house and sat down on the steps. It seemed a long time before the door opened and my mother in a surprised voice said:

“Why, Ida! I thought you had gone to Grandma’s.”

“I don’t know the way,” I said humbly.

“Very well. Come in and get your supper.”

Respect for my mother, her wisdom in dealing with hard situations, was born then. I was not to be punished; I was not to be laughed at; I was to be accepted. Years later she told me of the unhappy hour she spent watching me go off so sturdily, to come back so droopingly, watching with tears running down her cheeks, but determined I must learn my lesson. It was a bit of wisdom she never ceased to practice. My mother always let me carry out my revolts, return when I would and no questions asked.

In the three years we spent in the shanty on the flats there was but one other episode that had for me the same self-revealing quality as this revolt. It was my first attempt to test by experiment. The brook which ran beside the house was rapid, noisy, in times of high water dangerous for children. Watching it, fascinated, I observed that some things floated on the surface, others dropped to the bottom. It set me to wondering what would happen to my little brother, then in dresses, if dropped in. I had to find out. There was a footbridge near the house, and one day when I supposed I was unobserved I led him onto it and dropped him in. His little skirts spread out and held him up. Fortunately at that moment his screams brought a near-by workman, and he was rescued. I suppose I was spanked; of that I remember nothing, only the peace of satisfied curiosity in the certainty that my brother belonged to the category of things which floated.

What I really remember of these early days concerns only my personal discoveries, discoveries of the kind of person I was, of the nature of things around me which stirred my curiosity. Whether a childish experience was deep enough to etch itself on my memory or I only know of it from hearing it told and retold, I always decide by this test: if I really remember it, the happening is set in a scene—a scene with a background, exits, entrances, and properties. I know I remember my revolt and defeat because I always see it as an act on a stage, every detail, every line clear.

Of the pregnant, bizarre, and often tragic development going on about me I remember nothing; yet the uncertainties and dangers of it were part of our daily fare.

Whether there was oil in the ground in sufficient quantities to justify the prodigious effort being made to find it, nobody could know. If not, the shop and shanty were a dead loss—another long delay on the road to Iowa. All that winter of 1860 and 1861 my father was asking himself that question; but in 1861 it was answered when up and down Oil Creek a succession of flowing wells came in, wells producing from three hundred to three thousand barrels a day—“fountain wells,” “gushers,” “spouters,” they called them from the great streams which rose straight into the air one to two hundred feet, to fall in an oily green-black spray over the surrounding landscape.

Deadly, dangerous, too, as the Oil Region learned to its sorrow by a disaster almost at the doorsteps of our Cherry Run home. It was the evening of April 17, 1861. The news of the Fall of Sumter had just reached the settlement, remote as it was from rail and telegraph connections, and all the men of the town had gathered after supper at one place or another to discuss the situation. What did it mean? What would the President do? My father was sitting on a cracker barrel in the one general store. As he and his friends talked a man ran in to tell the company that a fresh vein of oil had been struck in a well on the edge of the town. Its owner, Henry Rouse, had been drilling it deeper; the oil was spouting over the derrick. Great news for the community still uncertain as to the extent of its field. Great news for my father. It meant tanks. Everybody jumped to run to the well when the earth was rocked by a mighty explosion. A careless light had ignited the gas which had spread from the flowing oil until it had enveloped everything in the vicinity. Before my father reached the place nineteen men, among them his friend the well—owner Henry Rouse, had been burned to death. How many had escaped and in what condition, nobody knew.

Late that night as my father and mother grieved they heard outside their door a stumbling something. Looking out, they saw before them a terrible sight, a man burned and swollen beyond recognition and yet alive, alive enough to give his name—one of their friends. My mother took him in—the alcove became a hospital. For weeks she nursed him—the task of the woman in a pioneer community, a task which she accepted as her part. Thanks to her care, the man lived. The relics of that tragedy were long about our household—comforts and bedquilts she had pieced and quilted for Iowa stained with linseed oil, but too precious to be thrown away.

But all this is as something read in a book, something which has become more poignant as the years have gone by and I am able to feel what those long weeks of care over that broken man meant to my mother.

The business prospered, the shop grew. Little do I remember of all this, or the increased comforts of life or moving into the new home on the hillside above the town by this time known as Rouseville. But the change in the outlook on the world about me, I do remember. We had lived on the edge of an active oil farm and oil town. No industry of man in its early days has ever been more destructive of beauty, order, decency, than the production of petroleum. All about us rose derricks, squatted engine-houses and tanks; the earth about them was streaked and damp with the dumpings of the pumps, which brought up regularly the sand and clay and rock through which the drill had made its way. If oil was found, if the well flowed, every tree, every shrub, every bit of grass in the vicinity was coated with black grease and left to die. Tar and oil stained everything. If the well was dry a rickety derrick, piles of debris, oily holes were left, for nobody ever cleaned up in those days.

But we left the center of this disorder, went to the hillside, looked down on it; and as for me I no longer saw it, for opposite us was a hillside so steep it had never been drilled. It was clothed with the always changing beauty of trees and shrubs, the white shadflowers and the red maples, the long garlands of laurel and azalea in the spring, the green of every shade through the summer, the crimson and gold, russets and tans of the fall, the frost- and snow-draped trees of the winter. I did not see the derricks for the trees. The hillside above our house and the paths which led around it became a playground in which I reveled. I was not the only one about to forget the ugliness of the Valley and remember through life the beauty of those hillsides. Years later I was to know fairly well one of the great figures in the development of oil, Henry H. Rogers, then the active head of the Standard Oil Company. We discovered in talking over the early days of the industry that at the very moment I was beginning to run the hills above Rouseville he was running a small refinery on the Creek and living on a hillside just below ours, separated only by a narrow ravine along each side of which ran a path. “Up that path,” Mr. Rogers told me, “I used to carry our washing every Monday morning, go for it every Saturday night. Probably I’ve seen you hunting flowers on your side of the ravine. How beautiful it was! I was never happier.” That reminiscence of Henry H. Rogers is only one of several reasons I have for heartily liking as fine a pirate as ever flew his flag in Wall Street.

Soon after we went to the home on the hill the oil country, at that moment suffering a depression, was stirred by the news that a great well had been struck ten miles from Rouseville at Pithole, an isolated territory to which the veterans in the business had never given a thought. The news caused a wild scramble. A motley procession of men with and without money, with and without decency, seeking leases, jobs, opportunity for adventure, excitement and swindling travelled on foot or horseback up the Valley of Cherry Run in full view from our house.

Father was one of the first to take advantage of the Pithole discovery, putting up his tank shops there and doing a smashing business during the short life of the field. Its “bottom fell out” in 1869. He rode back and forth from his shop on a little saddle horse—Flora, beautiful creature—usually with considerable sums of money in his pocket. The country was full of ruffians, and stories of robbery were common. When he was very late in returning mother would walk the floor wringing her hands. I could never go to bed those nights until he had returned, not because I felt her anxiety but because of the excitement and mystery of it. I carried a dramatic picture of him in mind, a kind of Paul Revere dashing along the lonely road, the rein on Flora’s neck, his pistol in hand. But he always came home, always brought the money he had collected, which he must keep in the tiny iron safe in his office annexed to the house until he could carry it to Oil City where he banked.

My life became rapidly more conscious now that I had left the flats behind, experience deeper. Here was my first realization of tragedy. It was the spring of 1865. Father was coming up the hill, mother and I were watching for him. Usually he walked with a brisk step, head up, but now his step was slow, his head dropped. Mother ran to meet him crying, “Frank, Frank, what is it?” I did not hear the answer; but I shall always see my mother turning at his words, burying her face in her apron, running into her room sobbing as if her heart would break. And then the house was shut up, and crape was put on all the doors, and I was told that Lincoln was dead.

From that time the name spelt tragedy and mystery. Why all this sorrow over a man we had never seen, who did not belong to our world—my world? Was there something beyond the circle of hills within which I lived that concerned me? Why, and in what way, did this mysterious outside concern me?

I was soon to learn that tragedy did not come always from a mysterious beyond. What a chain of catastrophes it took to teach the men and women who were developing the new industry the constant risk they ran in handling either crude or refined oil. They came to our very door, when a neighboring woman hurrying to build a fire in her cookstove poured oil on the wood before she had made sure there were no live coals in the firebox. An awful explosion occurred and she and two women who ran to her assistance were burned to a crisp. I heard horrified whisperings about me. The refusal to tell me what had happened aroused a terrible curiosity. I gathered that the bodies were laid out in a house not far away and, when nobody was looking, stole in to look at them. Broken sleep for me for nights.

The mystery of death finally came into our household. There had been a fourth child born in the house on the hill—“little Frankie,” we always called him—blue-eyed like my father, the sunniest of us all. For weeks one season he lay in the parlor fighting for life—scarlet fever—a disease more dreaded by mothers in those days than even smallpox. Daily I stood helpless, agonized, outside the door behind which little Frankie lay screaming and fighting the doctor. I remember even today how long the white marks lasted on the knuckles of my hands after the agony behind the closed door had died down and my clenched fists relaxed.

Little Frankie died, became a pathetic and beloved tradition in the household. My little sister, who had made a terrible and successful fight against the disease, told me how she could not understand why father and mother cried when they talked of Frankie.

“If they want to see him,” she thought, “why do they not put a ladder from the top of the hill up to the sky into heaven and climb up? If Frankie is there God would let them see him.”

I have said that my first recollection of Lincoln was the impression made by the tragedy of his death. That this was so was not for the lack of material on him in our household. My father was an ardent Republican. Back in ’56 he had written from his river trip, “Hurrah for Frémont and Dayton.” As soon as he had had more money than the actual needs of the family required, he had subscribed to Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, the New York Tribune, began to buy books. Of all of these I remember only the Weekly and Monthly. My brother and I used to lie by the hour flat on our stomachs, heels in the air, turning over the exciting pages of the War numbers; but none of it went behind my eyes—none concerned me. Only now when I go back to the files of those old papers there is a whispering of something once familiar.

Of the Monthly I have more distinct recollections. It was in these that I first began to read freely. Many a private picnic did I have with the Monthly under the thorn bushes on the hillside above Oil Creek, a lunch basket at my side. There are still in the family storeroom copies of Harper’s Monthly stained with lemon pie dropped when I was too deep into a story to be careful. Here I read my first Dickens, my first Thackeray, my first Marian Evans, as George Eliot then signed herself. My first Wilkie Collins came to me in the Weekly. Great literature—all pirated, I was to learn much later. My friend Viola Roseboro tells me that at this time she was reading Harper’s pirated paper-bound copies of Dickens. It was much later that they came my way.

However, all the reading I was doing was not so respectable. On the sly I was devouring a sheet forbidden to the household—the Police Gazette—the property of the men around the house, for we had men around the house, men of various degrees of acceptability to my mother, but all necessary to my father’s enterprises. The business had grown; it meant a clerk, bosses, workmen. In a pioneer community like ours it was hard to find comfortable living quarters for single men. My father and mother, both brought up on farms, accepted as a matter of course the housing and feeding of hired men. So it was in line with their experience as well as with the necessities of the case that our household was arranged to take care of a certain number of men connected with my father’s business. For sleeping quarters a bunkhouse was built on the hillside; mornings and evenings, they sat at the family table. This accepting men of whose manners and ways she often heartily disapproved was distasteful to my mother; but she had not been a schoolteacher for nothing, and she applied her notions of discipline. She would not have swearing, drinking, rough manners, and certainly she would not have had the Police Gazette in the house. But the men had it, and now and then when my brother and I played about the bunkhouse it was easy for me to pick up a copy and slip it away where my dearest girl friend and I looked unashamed and entirely unknowing on its rough and brutal pictures. If they were obscene we certainly never knew it. There was a wanton gaiety about the women, a violent rakishness about the men—wicked, we supposed, but not the less interesting for that.

One reason the Police Gazette fascinated me was that it pictured a kind of life I knew to be flourishing in a neighboring settlement, a settlement where my father had shops run by a boss who, as well as his sister, was a family friend, and where I was often allowed to visit. This settlement, Petroleum Center, had by something like general consent become Oil Creek’s “sink of iniquity.”

The discovery of oil, the growing certainty that it was the beginning of a new industry, that money was flowing into the Oil Region quickly brought an invading host of men and women seeking fortunes. It was a new and rich field for tricksters, swindlers, exploiters of vice in every known form. They were soon setting up shops in every settlement and, to the credit of the manhood of the Oil Region, usually being driven out by self-directed vigilantes.

At Rouseville a “joy boat” which made its way up the Creek that first winter and tied up near my father’s shop was cut loose in the middle of the night after its arrival. Its visitors found themselves floating down the Allegheny River the next morning and obliged to walk back. From that time open vice shunned the town. But when wealth poured out of the ground at Petroleum Center there was too great excitement to think of order, decency. Before it was realized, the town was alive with every known form of wantonness and wickedness. By the time I was allowed to visit our friends there, I saw from the corner of my eye as I walked sedately the length of the street saloons, dance halls, brothels; and I noted many curious things. The house where I visited stood on a slope overlooking one of the most notorious dance halls of the Oil Region—Gus Reil’s. Often I left my bed at night and watched that long low building from which rose loud laughter, ribald songs, shouts, curses. Later horror was added to Gus Reil’s fascination, for here a Rouseville boy was shot one night.

If Petroleum Center was giving me an opportunity to feed my curiosity about things in the world of which I was not supposed to know, it happened also to be the indirect means of awaking my interest in the stars, one of the most beautiful interests of my youth. My father had seen the early passing of the wooden oil tank, the coming of the iron tank, and had used his capital to become an oil producer. One of his first investments had been in an oil farm on the hills above the wicked town which so excited my curiosity. His partner in this venture, M. E. Hess, lived on this farm with his family. In that family was a daughter about my age and bearing my name—Ida. We became friends and visited back and forth as chance offered. My chance came often when Mr. Hess, riding with a companion over the hills to Rouseville to consult with father, dropped his companion and took me back with him, usually at night. A fine pair of saddle horses he had—“High Fly” and “Shoo Fly.” My first experience in horseback riding was following him on “Shoo Fly” over the hills after dark.

Mr. Hess was an altogether unusual man, educated, with a vein of poetry in him. As we rode he would stop every now and then to name the stars, trace the constellations, repeat the legends. My first consciousness of space, its beauty, its something more than beauty, came then.

Not a bad counterbalance for what I was gathering in the town below the farm on the hill and seeing reproduced in the Police Gazette, which so perfectly pictured its activities.

But there were other correcting forces at work on me. The men who formed the vigilante committee to make Rouseville difficult for commercialized vice (my father one of them) set themselves early to establishing civilizing agencies—first a church.

It was decided by the men and women who were to build and support this church that it should be of the denomination of which there were the largest number in the community. The Methodists had the numbers, and so my father and mother who were Presbyterians became and remained Methodists. Their support was active. We did not merely go to church; we stayed to class meeting; we went to Sunday school, where both father and mother had classes; we went to Wednesday night—or was it Thursday night?—prayer meeting. And when there was a revival we went every night. In my tenth or eleventh year I “went forward” not from a sense of guilt but because everybody else was doing it. My sense of sin came after it was all over and I was tucked away in bed at night. I had been keenly conscious as I knelt at the Mourners’ bench that the long crimson ribbons which hung from my hat must look beautiful on my cream-colored coat. The realization of that hypocrisy cut me to the heart. I knew myself a sinner then, and the relief I sought in prayer was genuine. I never confessed. It wasn’t the kind of sin other converts talked about. But it aroused self-observation; I learned that often when I was saying the polite or proper thing I was thinking quite differently. For a long time it made me secretly unhappy thinking that in me alone ran an underground river of thought. Later I began to suspect that other people were like this, that always there flowed a stream of unspoken thought under the spoken thought. It made me wary of strangers.

A side of my life which moves me deeply now, as I think back, was the continuous effort of my father and mother to give me what were called advantages, to use their increasing income to awaken and develop in me a taste for things which they had always been denied. They wanted music in the household and our grandest possession became a splendid Bradbury square piano—a really noble instrument—with one of the finest, mellowest tones that I have ever heard in a piano.

A music teacher turned up in the community and I was at once set at five-finger exercises, and I was kept at them and all that follows them for many years; but I found no joy in what I was doing. It is possible that with different teachers from those available there might have been a spring touched, for untrained as I am I am not without a certain appreciation of music.

I mastered the mechanics of piano playing well enough, however, to become later one of the regular performers in the high school in the town to which we were to move—Titusville, Pennsylvania. I remembered nothing of this until two of my old friends in Titusville, school chums, told me that I was one of the three or four who played the piano for the morning exercises, that I sometimes played my show pieces, and that on one occasion I was an actor in a scene which they recalled with glee. They told me I was playing a duet with a classmate. We either lost our place or did not agree as to time—stopped entirely, argued the matter out, began over, and this time went through without dissension; but I have only this secondhand memory of my contribution to the musical life of the Titusville High School.

I remember the efforts of my father and mother to show me something of the outside world much more clearly than I do those to awaken my interest in books and music. There were little trips, once as far as Cleveland—the whole family—the marvel of the “best hotel,” of new hats and coats and armfuls of toys. There were summers at the farm, only thirty miles away. Best remembered and most enjoyed were the all-day-excursion picnics. No one can understand the social life of a great body of the American people in the latter part of the nineteenth century without understanding the hold the picnic had on them. The Tarbell household took the picnic so seriously that it had a special equipment of stout market baskets, tin cups and plates, steel knives and forks, tin spoons, worn napkins (the paper ones were then unheard of). The menus were as fixed as that for a Thanksgiving dinner: veal loaf, cold tongue, hard-boiled eggs—“two apiece”—buttered rusks, spiced peaches, jelly, cucumber pickles, chowchow, cookies, doughnuts (we called them fried cakes), and a special family cake. And you ate until you were full.

Our grandest picnic excursions in those days were to Chautauqua Lake, a charming sheet of water only some fifty miles from home. Near the head of the lake lay an old Chautauqua County town, Mayville; at its foot, Jamestown where my father for several years had been a student in the Academy, and from which in vacations he had gone on his annual trips down the Ohio. Loaded with big baskets of lunch, we took an early train to Mayville, changed there to a little white steamer: zigzagged the length of the lake, twenty or so miles, stopping at point after point. We ate our lunch en route, and at Jamestown went uptown to drink a bottle of “pop.” And then came the slow return home, where we arrived after dark exhausted by pleasure.

Three or four miles from Mayville on the west side of the lake jutted a wooded promontory—Fair Point—the site in those days of a Methodist camp meeting; and here we sometimes stopped for the day. We never liked it so well as going to Jamestown; neither did father.

2
I DECIDE TO BE A BIOLOGIST

Five years went by in the house on the hill, and then in 1870 when I was thirteen I found myself in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in a new house my father had built. How characteristic of the instability of the oil towns of that day, as well as of the frugality of my father, was this house! From the beginning of the Pithole excitement he had, as I have said, made money—more than he could ever have dreamed, I fancy; and then about 1869 practically without warning the bottom fell out, as the vernacular of the region put it. The end shut up my father’s shops there, but it also gave us the makings of a home. In that rapid development, only four years long, a town of some twenty thousand had grown up with several big hotels—among them, one called the Bonta House. It had features which delighted my father—long French windows, really fine iron brackets supporting its verandahs, handsome woodwork. The Bonta House was said to have cost $60,000, but its owners were glad to take the $600 father offered when the town “blew up.” He paid the money, tore down the building, loaded its iron brackets and fine doors and windows, mouldings and all, and I suppose much of its timber, onto wagons and carted it ten miles away to Titusville where, out of it, he built the house which was our home for many years.

Titusville was not like Rouseville, which had suddenly sprung from the mud as uncertain as a mushroom of the future. It had been a substantial settlement twenty years before oil was found there, small but sturdy with a few families who had made money chiefly in lumber, owning good homes, carefully guarding the order and decency of the place.

The discovery of oil overran the settlement with hundreds of fortune seekers. They came from far and near, on foot, horseback, wagon. The nearest railroad connection was sixteen miles away, and the roads and fields leading in were soon cut beyond recognition by the heavy hauling, its streets at times impassable with mud.

The new industry demanded machinery, tools, lumber—and the bigger it grew, the greater the demand. Titusville, the birthplace of all this activity, as well as the gateway down the Creek, must furnish food and shelter for caravans of strangers, shops for their trades, offices for speculators and brokers, dealers in oil lands and leases, for oil producers, surveyors, and draftsmen—all the factors of the big business organization necessary to develop the industry. In 1862 the overflow was doubled by the arrival of a railroad with a connection sixteen miles away with the East and West. The disbanding of the Army in June of 1865 brought a new rush—men still in uniform, their rifles and knapsacks on their backs. Most of this fresh inflow was bound to the scene of the latest excitement, Pithole.

Stampeded though she was, Titusville refused to give up her idea of what a town should be. She kept a kind of order, waged a steady fight on pickpockets, drunkards, wantons; and in this she was backed by the growing number of men and women who, having found their chance for fortune in oil, wanted a town fit for their families. After churches, the schools were receiving the most attention. It was the Titusville schools which had determined my father and mother to make the town their permanent home.

But school did not play a serious part in my scheme of things at the start. I went because I was sent, and had no interest in what went on. I was thirteen, but I had never been in a crowded room before. In a small private school the teacher had been my friend. Here I was not conscious my teacher recognized my existence. I soon became a truant; but the competent ruler of that schoolroom knew more than I realized. She was able to spot a truant, and one day when I turned up after an unexplainable absence she suddenly turned on me and read me a scathing lecture. I cannot remember that I was ashamed or humiliated, only amazed, but something in me asserted itself. I suppose that here a decent respect for the opinions of mankind was born; at least I became on the instant a model pupil.

A few months later I passed into high school; and when at the end of the year the grades were averaged at a ceremony where everybody was present I stood at the head of the honor roll. Nobody could have been more surprised. I had not been working for the honor roll: I had simply been doing what they expected me to do as I understood it, and here I was at the top. I remember I felt very serious about it. Having made the top once, I knew what would be expected of me. I couldn’t let my father and mother or my teachers down, so I continued to learn my lessons. It was a good deal like being good at a game. I liked to work out the mathematics and translations—good puzzles, but that they had any relation to my life I was unconscious. And then suddenly, among these puzzles I was set to solve, I found in certain textbooks the sesame which was to free my curiosity, stir desires to know, set me working on my own to find out more than these books had to offer. The texts which did all this for me were a series I suspect a modern teacher might laugh at—Steele’s Fourteen Weeks in Zoology, Geology, Botany, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry.

Here I was suddenly on a ground which meant something to me. From childhood, plants, insects, stones were what I saw when I went abroad, what I brought home to press, to put into bottles, to “litter up the house.” The hills about Rouseville were rich in treasures for such a collector, but nobody had ever taught me more than their common names. I had never realized that they were subjects for study, like Latin and geometry and rhetoric and other such unmeaning tasks. They were too fascinating. But here my pleasure became my duty. School suddenly became exciting. Now I could justify my tramps before breakfast on the hills, justify my “collections,” and soon I knew what I was to be—a scientist. Life was beginning to be very good, for what I liked best to do had a reason. No doubt this uplift was helped by the general cheerfulness of the family under our new conditions of life.

Things were going well in father’s business; there was ease such as we had never known, luxuries we had never heard of. Our first Christmas in the new home was celebrated lavishly. Far away was that first Christmas in the shanty on the flats when there was nothing but nuts and candy and my mother and father promising, “Just wait, just wait, the day will come.” The day had come—a gorgeous Christmas tree, a velvet cloak, and a fur coat for my mother. I haven’t the least idea what there was for the rest of us, but those coats were an epoch in my life—my first notion of elegance.

This family blossoming was characteristic of the town. Titusville was gay, confident of its future. It was spending money on schools and churches, was building an Opera House where Janauschek soon was to play, Christine Nilsson to sing. More and more fine homes were going up. Its main street had been graded and worked until fine afternoons, winter and summer, it was cleared by four o’clock for the trotting of the fast horses the rich were importing. When New Year’s Day came every woman received—wine, cakes, salads, cold meats on the table—every man went calling. That is, Titusville was taking on metropolitan airs, led by a few citizens who knew New York and its ways, even spoke familiarly of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, both of whom naturally enough had their eye on us. Did not the Erie road from which they at the moment were filling their pockets regard oil as one of its most profitable freights? We were grain for their mill.

There was reason for confidence. In the dozen years since the first well was drilled the Oil Creek Valley had yielded nearly thirty-three million barrels of crude oil. Producing, transporting, refining, marketing, exporting, and by-products had been developed into an organized industry which was now believed to have a splendid future.

Then suddenly this gay, prosperous town received a blow between the eyes. Self-dependent in all but transportation and locally in that through the pipe lines it was rapidly laying to shipping points, it was dependent on the railroads for the carrying of its crude oil to outside refining points and for a shipping of both crude and refined to the seaboard—a rich and steady traffic for which the Oil Region felt the railroads ought to be grateful; but it was the railroads that struck the blow. A few refiners outside the region—Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia—concocted a marvelous scheme which they had the persuasive power to put over with the railroads, a big scheme by which those in the ring would be able to ship crude and refined oil more cheaply than anybody outside. And then, marvelous invention, they would receive in addition to their advantage a drawback on every barrel of oil shipped by any one not in the group. Those in the South Improvement Company, as the masterpiece was called, were to be rewarded for shipping; and those not in, to be doubly penalized. Of course it was a secret scheme. The Oil Region did not learn of it until it had actually been put into operation in Cleveland, Ohio, and leaked out. What did it mean to the Oil Region? It meant that the man who produced the oil, and all outside refiners, were entirely at the mercy of this group who, if they would, could make the price of crude oil as well as refined. But it was a plan which could not survive daylight. As soon as the Oil Region learned of it a wonderful row followed. There were nightly antimonopoly meetings, violent speeches, processions; trains of oil cars loaded for members of the offending corporation were raided, the oil run on the ground, their buyers turned out of the oil exchanges; appeals were made to the state legislature, to Congress for an interstate commerce bill, producers and refiners uniting for protection. I remember a night when my father came home with a grim look on his face and told how he with scores of other producers had signed a pledge not to sell to the Cleveland ogre that alone had profited from the scheme—a new name, that of the Standard Oil Company, replacing the name South Improvement Company in popular contempt.

There were long days of excitement. Father coming home at night, silent and stern, a sternness even unchanged by his after-dinner cigar, which had come to stand in my mind as the sign of his relaxation after a hard day. He no longer told of the funny things he had seen and heard during the day; he no longer played his jew’s-harp, nor sang to my little sister on the arm of his chair the verses we had all been brought up on:

Augusta, Maine, on the Kennebec River,

Concord, New Hampshire, on the Merrimack, etc.

The commotion spread. The leaders of the New York Petroleum Association left out of the original conspiracy, and in a number of cases (as was soon to be shown) outraged chiefly for that reason, sent a committee to the Oil Region to see what was doing. The committee was joyfully welcomed, partly because its chairman was well known to them all. It was my Rouseville neighbor, Henry H. Rogers.

Mr. Rogers had left the Creek in 1867 and become a partner in the Pratt firm of refiners and exporters of Brooklyn, New York. He and his associates saw as clearly as his old friends in the Oil Region that—let the South Improvement Company succeed in its plan for a monopoly—everybody not in the ring would be forced to go out of business. The New York men seem to have been convinced that the plans for saving themselves which the organized producers and refiners were laying stood a good chance of success, for back in New York Mr. Rogers gave a long interview to the Herald. He did not mince words. Cleveland and Pittsburgh were “straining every nerve to create a monopoly.” They would succeed if their control of the railroads continued. He and his fellows felt as the men in the Oil Region did, that the breaking up of the South Improvement Company was a “necessity for self-existence.” They were as bold in action as in words, for when a little later the president of the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller (to date, the only beneficiary of the South Improvement Company), sought an interview in New York with Mr. Rogers and his committee he was treated cavalierly and according to the newspapers retreated after a brief reception “looking badly crestfallen.”

Thus was the Henry H. Rogers of 1872.

Out of the long struggle begun as a scrimmage came finally a well developed cooperative movement guaranteeing fair play all around. It was signed by the Standard Oil Company’s representative and all the oil-carrying railroads. The railroads indeed were the first to succumb, knowing as they did that what they were doing was contrary to the common law of the land, and being thundered at as they were by the press and politicians of all the country. “I told Willie not to go into that scheme,” said old Commodore Vanderbilt; and Jay Gould whined, “I didn’t sign until everybody else had.”

Out of the alarm and bitterness and confusion, I gathered from my father’s talk a conviction to which I still hold—that what had been undertaken was wrong. My father told me it was as if somebody had tried to crowd me off the road. Now I knew very well that, on this road where our little white horse trotted up and down, we had our side, there were rules, you couldn’t use the road unless you obeyed those rules, it was not only bad manners but dangerous to attempt to disobey them. The railroads—so said my father—ran through the valley by the consent of the people; they had given them a right of way. The road on which I trotted was a right of way. One man had the same right as another, but the railroads had given to one something they would not give to another. It was wrong. I sometimes hear learned people arguing that in the days of this historic quarrel everybody took rebates, it was the accepted way. If they had lived in the Oil Region through those days in 1872, they would have realized that, far from being accepted, it was fought tooth and nail. Everybody did not do it. In the nature of the offense everybody could not do it. The strong wrested from the railroads the privilege of preying upon the weak, and the railroads never dared give the privilege save under promise of secrecy.

In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make. He can choose the fair and open path, the path which sound ethics, sound democracy, and the common law prescribe, or choose the secret way by which he can get the better of his fellow man. It was that choice made by powerful men that suddenly confronted the Oil Region. The sly, secret, greedy way won in the end, and bitterness and unhappiness and incalculable ethical deterioration for the country at large came out of that struggle and others like it which were going on all over the country—an old struggle with old defeats but never without men willing to make stiff fights for their rights, even if it cost them all they ever hoped to possess.

At all events, uncomprehending as I was in that fine fight, there was born in me a hatred of privilege—privilege of any sort. It was all pretty hazy to be sure, but still it was well, at fifteen, to have one definite plank based on things seen and heard, ready for a future platform of social and economic justice if I should ever awake to my need of one. At the moment, however, my reflection did not carry me beyond the wrongness of the privilege which had so upset our world, contradicting as it did the principle of consideration for others which had always been basic in our family and religious teaching. I could not think further in this direction, for now my whole mind was absorbed by the overwhelming discovery that the world was not made in six days of twenty-four hours each.

My interest in science, which meant for me simply larger familiarity with plants and animals and rocks, had set me looking over my father’s books. Among them I found Hugh Miller’s “Testimony of the Rocks,” and sat down to read it. Gradually I grasped with a combination of horror and amazement that, instead of a creation, the earth was a growth—that the creative days I had so clearly visualized were periods, eons long, not to be visualized. It was all too clear to deny, backed as it was by a wealth of geological facts. If this were true, why did the Bible describe so particularly the work of each day, describe it and declare, “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” etc., and end, “and he rested on the seventh day”? Hugh Miller labored to prove that there was no necessary contradiction between Genesis and Geology. But I was too startled to accept what he said. A Bible that needed reconciling, that did not mean what it said, was not the rock I had supposed my feet were on; that words could have other meaning than that I had always given them, I had not yet grasped.

I was soon to find that the biblical day was disturbing a great part of the Christian world, was a chief point of controversy in the church. I had hardly made my discovery when Genesis and Geology appeared in the pulpit of the Methodist Church of Titusville, Pennsylvania. Filling this pulpit at that time was a remarkable and brilliant man, Amos Norton Craft. Dr. Craft was an indefatigable student. It was told of him to the wonder of the church that he laid aside yearly $200 of his meager salary to buy books. Like all the ministers of those days, he was obliged to face the challenges of science. Many of his fellows—most of them, so far as my knowledge went—took refuge in heated declarations that the conclusions that science was making were profane, godless, an affront to divinity. Not so Dr. Craft. He accepted them, strove to fit them into the Christian system. He startled his congregation and interested the town profoundly by announcing an evening course of lectures on the reconciliation of Genesis and Geology. The first of the series dealt with the universe. I had never known there was one. The stars, yes. I could name planets and constellations and liked nothing better than to lie on my back and watch them; but a universe with figures of its size was staggering. I went away from those Sunday night lectures fascinated, horror-stricken, confused—a most miserable child, for not only was my idea of the world shattered, not only was I left dizzily gyrating in a space to which there was no end, but the whole Christian system I had been taught was falling in a general ruin. I began to feel that I ought to leave the church. I did not believe what I was supposed to believe. I did not have the consolation of pride in emancipation which I find youth frequently has when it finds itself obliged to desert the views it has been taught. Indeed, I doubted greatly whether it was an emancipation. What troubled me most was that if I gave up the church I had nothing to put in place of something it had given me which seemed to me of supreme importance; summed up, that something was in the commandment, “Do as you would be done by.” Certainly nothing which Hugh Miller or Herbert Spencer, whom I began to read in 1872 in the Popular Science Monthly, helped me here. They gave me nothing to take the place of what had always been the unwritten law of the Tarbell household, based as I knew upon the teachings of the Bible. The gist of the Bible, as it had come to me, was what I later came to call the brotherhood of man. Practically it was that we should do nothing, say nothing, that injured another. That was a catastrophe, and when it happened in our household—an inarticulate household on the whole, though one extraordinarily conscious of the minds and hearts of one another—when it happened the whole household was shadowed for hours and it was not until by sensitive unspoken efforts the injured one had been consoled, that we went on about our usual ways.

This was something too precious to give up, and something for which I did not find a substitute in the scientific thinking and arguing in which I was floundering. The scientists offered me nothing to guide me in human relations, and they did not satisfy a craving from which I could not escape; that was the need of direction, the need of that which I called God and which I still call God. Perhaps I was a calculating person, a cautious one. At all events I made up my mind to wait and find out something which better took the place of those things which I so valued. It cost me curious little compromises, compromises that I had to argue myself into. The chief came in repeating the creed.

I could repeat, “conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,” because for many years I did not know what that meant. It was the resurrection that disturbed me. I could not accept it, nor could I accept the promise of personal immortality. That had become a grave doubt with me when I first grew dizzy with the consciousness of the vastness of the universe. Why should I expect to exist forever as a conscious mind in that vast emptiness? What would become of me? I did not want to think about it, and I came then to a conviction that has never left me: that as far as I am concerned immortality is not my business, that there is too much for me to attend to in this mortal life without overspeculation on the immortal, that it is not necessary to my peace of mind or to my effort to be a decent and useful person, to have a definite assurance about the affairs of the next world. I say this with humility, for I believe that some such assurance is necessary to the peace and usefulness of many persons, and I am the last to scoff at the revelations they claim.

And yet it was hard to give up heaven. Among the books on our shelves—many of them orthodox religious books—was one that had a frontispiece which I had accepted as a definite picture of the heaven to which I was to go. Jehovah sat on a throne, cherubim and seraphim around him, rank upon rank of angels filling the great amphitheater below. I always wondered where my place would be, and whether there would be any chance to work up in heaven as there seemed to be on earth, to become a cherub.

But giving up this heaven was by no means the greatest tragedy in my discovery that the world was not made in six days of twenty-four hours each. The real tragedy was the birth in me of doubt and uncertainty. Nothing was ever again to be final. Always I was to ask myself when confronted with a problem, a system, a scheme, a code, a leader, “How can I accept without knowing more?” The quest of the truth had been born in me—the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man’s quests.

It was while groping my way, frightened like a lost child, I found a word to hold to—evolution. Things grew. What did they grow from? They all started somewhere. I was soon applying the idea. Nothing seemed to matter now, except to find the starting point of things and, having that, see why and how they grew into something else. How were you to go to work to find the start of life? With a microscope. And I soon was in the heat of my first intellectual passion, my first and greatest—that for the microscope. With a microscope I could perhaps get an answer to my mystification about the beginning of life, where it started; and then, I believed, I should find God again.

I was a practical person apparently, for I at once began to save my money and soon had enough to put into a small instrument. The house in Titusville, like many of its period, had a tower room, a steep staircase running up to it. This room was surrounded on three sides with big double windows. I begged to have it for my own. Here I was allowed to set up shop; here I had my desk, my papers, and my microscope; here I was alone with my problems. That little microscope had a good deal to do with my determination to go to college. If I was to become a microscopist—I had already adopted that word—I must study, get an education.

This determination of mine to get an education, go to college, was chiefly due, no doubt, to the active crusade going on in those days for what we called woman’s rights. Ours was a yeasty time, the ferment reaching into every relation of life, attacking and remodeling every tradition, every philosophy. As my father was hard hit by the attack on his conception of individualism in a democracy—freedom with strictest consideration for the rights and needs of others—as I was struggling with all the handicaps of my ignorance, with the nature of life, a search for God, so my mother was facing a little reluctantly a readjustment of her status in the home and in society. She had grown up with the Woman’s Rights movement. Had she never married, I feel sure she would have sought to “vindicate her sex” by seeking a higher education, possibly a profession. The fight would have delighted her. If she had gone to Iowa she surely would have soon joined the agitation led there in the late fifties by Amelia Bloomer, the inventor of the practical and ugly costume which still carries her name, the real founder of dress reform. We owe it to Amelia Bloomer that we can without public ridicule wear short skirts and stout boots, be as sensible as our feminine natures permit—which is not saying much for us when it comes to fashions. But my mother found herself a pioneer in the Oil Region, confronted by the sternest of problems which were to be settled only by immediate individual effort and good will.

The move to Titusville, however, soon put my mother in touch with the crusade for equal political rights which was taking the place of the earlier movement for woman’s rights. The Civil War had slowed up that agitation; indeed, many of its best talking points had been conceded and were slowly going into practice. Most of the militants had thrown themselves into war work and, after the war, into the campaign for negro suffrage; but the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, for the first time introducing the word “male” into the Constitution, aroused a sense of outrage, not only in the advocates of equal rights but in many women who had not approved of previous agitations. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the greatest of the early leaders, failing to keep the humiliating distinction out of the Amendment, began a tremendous national crusade for woman’s suffrage. They marshaled a group of splendid women and undertook an intensive campaign meant to reach every woman in the country. It reached us in Titusville, even reached our home where my father and mother, always hospitable to crusaders, opened their doors to them. I remember best Mary Livermore and Frances Willard—not that either touched me, saw me; of this neglect I was acutely conscious. I noted, too, that the men we entertained did notice me, talked to me as a person—not merely as a possible member of a society they were promoting. There was Neal Dow—father by this time was a prohibitionist—who let me show him our Dante with Gustave Doré’s pictures. Men were nicer than women to me, I mentally noted.

As the struggle for equal rights grew in heat I became aware that it was far from a united struggle, that as a matter of fact leaders and followers were spending almost as much time disapproving of one another’s methods as fighting for their cause. The friction came largely from the propensity of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony to form alliances shocking to many of their oldest and wisest friends. Before the war they had, rather recklessly from a political point of view, supported easier divorce. As one of their friends wrote them, they had in so doing broken the heart of the portly Evening Post and nearly driven the Tribune to the grave. Time had not cooled their ardor for strange bedfellows. They made an alliance now of which I heard no little talk by my mother and her friends; it was with the two most notorious women in the eye of the public at the moment. “Hussies,” conservative circles in Titusville, Pennsylvania, called them—Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.

It was not difficult for even a girl of fifteen to pick up some idea of what these women were, so well did they advertise themselves, and so delightedly did the press back them up in their doings. Beginning their careers as clairvoyants, they had developed professionally their undoubted powers until they were in the sixties—the two best known and best paid trance-physicians of their day. Victoria claimed to have raised a child from the dead, and Tennessee, the harder worker of the two, made enough money to keep thirty-five relations in comfort. “If I am a humbug sometimes, look at the dead beats I have to support,” was her answer to those who accused her of abusing her talents. Both women frankly advocated free love, and so it was believed quite as frankly practiced it.

With this equipment they entered Wall Street in the eighteen-sixties as consultants. The “lady brokers,” they were called. They quickly built up a profitable business. Old Commodore Vanderbilt was so tickled by their combination of beauty and effrontery, talents and ambitions, that he is said to have proposed marriage to Victoria. He was more valuable as a friend. She kept his picture on the wall of the salon where she received her clients, and under it the framed motto, “Simply to thy cross I cling.”

In 1870 Victoria Woodhull announced herself as a candidate for President in 1872. So successful was she in attracting and holding big audiences, and so brilliantly did she present the arguments for equal rights, that Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony threw scruples to the wind and took her into their camp—from which promptly there was a considerable exodus of scandalized ladies. Not only did Victoria win the countenance of these two great leaders, but she involved them in the Beecher-Tilton scandal, which for months she worked steadily to force before the public.

The reverberations of the conflict inside the suffrage party, together with what I picked up about the Beecher trial (I read the testimony word by word in our newspapers), did not increase my regard for my sex. They did not seem to substantiate what I heard about the subjection of women, nor did what I observed nearer home convince me. Subjection seemed to me fairly divided. That is all: I saw there were “henpecked men,” as well as “downtrodden women.” The chief unfairness which I recognized was in the handling of household expenses. Women who must do the spending were obliged to ask for money or depend on charging. My mother had not been trained to live on as generous a scale as was now possible, but my father never said, “We have so much and no more to spend.” They worked often at cross purposes. So I gathered as I listened to intimate talks between women, listened to suffrage speakers, read the literature; so did many American husbands and wives. I felt no restraint myself, for I always had at least a little money and I, too, could charge. This foolish practice led me into funny expenditures.

I had no sense of the appropriate in clothes. Often I had an ardent desire for something fitted only for grown-ups, and I always had a keen ambition to fit myself out for occasions. Some time in the early seventies Clara Louise Kellogg came to town. My father and mother were in the West, but they had arranged that I was to hear her. It seemed as if some kind of regalia was necessary, so I charged a wide pink sash and a pair of yellow kid gloves.

Out of the agitation for rights as it came to me, two rights that were worth going after quite definitely segregated themselves: the right to an education, and the right to earn my living—education and economic independence.

The older I grew, the more determined I became to be independent. I saw only one way—teach; but if I was to teach I must fit myself, go to college. My father and mother agreed. I had a clear notion of what I wanted to teach—natural science, particularly the microscope, for I was to be a biologist. I made my choice—Cornell, first opened to women in 1872; but at the moment when the steps to enter Cornell were to be taken, there appeared in the household as an over-Sunday guest the president of a small college in our neighborhood, only thirty miles away, Allegheny. Among the patrons of that college was the Methodist organization known as the Erie Conference, to which the Titusville church belonged. I had heard of it annually when a representative appeared in our pulpit, told its story and asked for support. The president, Dr. Lucius Bugbee, was a delightful and entertaining guest and, learning that I was headed Cornellward, adroitly painted the advantages of Allegheny. It was near home; it was a ward of our church. It had responded to the cry of women for educational opportunity and had opened its doors before the institution I had chosen.

Was not here an opportunity for a serious young woman interested in the advancement of her sex? Had I not a responsibility in the matter? If the few colleges that had opened their doors were to keep them open, if others were to imitate their example, two things were essential: women must prove they wanted a college education by supporting those in their vicinity; and they must prove by their scholarship what many doubted—that they had minds as capable of development as young men. Allegheny had not a large territory to draw from. I must be a pioneer.

As a matter of fact the only responsibility I had felt and assumed in going to college was entirely selfish and personal. But the sense of responsibility was not lacking nor dormant in me. It was one of the few things I had found out about myself in the shanty on the flats when I was six years old and there was a new baby in the family.

The woman looking after my mother had said, “Now you are old enough to make a cup of tea and take it to her.” I think, in all my life since, nothing has seemed more important, more wonderful to me than this being called upon by an elder to do something for mother, be responsible for it. I can feel that cup in my hand as I cautiously took it to the bed, and can see my mother’s touching smile as she thanked me. Perhaps there came to her a realization that this rebelling, experimenting child might one day become a partner in the struggle for life so serious for her at the moment, always to be more or less serious.

But to return to Dr. Bugbee and his argument; before he left the house I had agreed to enter Allegheny in the fall of 1876. And that I did.

What did I take with me? Well, I took what from my earliest years I had been told was necessary to everyone—a Purpose, always spelled with a capital. I had an outline of the route which would lead to its realization. Making outlines of what was in my mind was the one and only fruit that I had gathered so far from long terms of struggle over grammar, rhetoric, composition. Outlines which held together, I had discovered, cleared my mind, gave it something to follow. I outlined all my plans as I had diagramed sentences. It was not a poor beginning for one who eventually, and by accident rather than by intention, was to earn her living by writing—the core of which must be sound structure.

One thing by choice left out of the plan I carried from high school was marriage. I would never marry. It would interfere with my plan; it would fetter my freedom. I didn’t quite know what Freedom meant; certainly I was far from realizing that it exists only in the spirit, never in human relations, never in human activities—that the road to it is as often as not what men call bondage. But above all I must be free; and to be free I must be a spinster. When I was fourteen I was praying God on my knees to keep me from marriage. I suspect that it was only an echo of the strident feminine cry filling the air at that moment, the cry that woman was a slave in a man-made world. By the time I was ready to go to college I had changed my prayer for freedom to a will to freedom. Such was the baggage I carried to college, where I was soon to find several things I had not counted on.

3
A COEDUCATIONAL COLLEGE OF THE EIGHTIES

When I entered Allegheny College in the fall of 1876 I made my first contact with the past. I had been born and reared a pioneer; I knew only the beginning of things, the making of a home in a wilderness, the making of an industry from the ground up. I had seen the hardships of beginnings, the joy of realization, the attacks that success must expect; but of things with a past, things that had made themselves permanent, I knew nothing. It struck me full in the face now, for this was an old college as things west of the Alleghenies were reckoned—an old college in an old town. Here was history, and I had never met it before to recognize it.

The town lay in the valley of a tributary of the Allegheny River—French Creek. Its oldest tradition after the tales of Indians was that George Washington once drank from a spring on the edge of the campus. Certainly he passed that way in 1753 when he came up the river valley from Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh), following the route which led to Fort Le Bœuf near Lake Erie. He comments in his diary, published the year after his trip, on the extensive rich meadows through which he had passed, one of which “I believe was nearly four miles in length and considerable wider in some places.” To this particular “rich meadow” a few years later came one David Mead and laid out a town and sold land. Here soon after came the representative of the Holland Land Company, colonizers of first quality. Good men came, distinguished names in Pennsylvania’s history, and they wanted a college. The answer to their wish came in 1815 when one of the most scholarly men of that day, Timothy Alden of Massachusetts, heard their call and, picking up all his worldly possessions, made the two months’ trip by coach and boat to the settlement called Meadville.

Timothy Alden, like many of his fellows, was fired by a deep belief that through Christian democracy alone could men arrive at the better world towards which he, scholar that he was, knew they had been groping from their earliest beginnings. But men could only come to an understanding of their individual and collective responsibilities to democracy through education. Therefore, as men spread westward he and others like him must follow them with education.

But once in Meadville how little he found with which to carry out his project—a log courthouse for a schoolhouse, and little or no money, though of what they had men gave freely. Now Timothy Alden knew that throughout the East were men of scholarly traditions convinced as was he that democracy would work only if men were trained to understanding and sacrifice. He believed that they would help his Western venture. In 1816 he went East to find out. He was not wrong in thinking there would be sympathy for the young college. Out of their meager store men gave—this one, fifty cents; that one, five dollars; few, more—and men gave books, one, two, five. The list of donors now in the college archives shows many of the best known names of the day—Lowell, Adams, Tucker, Parkman, Channing in Boston and twenty-nine fine New York names. Friends were made for Allegheny in every town and city where its brave story was told. Timothy Alden came back with $361 in money and with books, more needed than money, estimated to be worth $1,642.26.

From that time he kept the undertaking steadily before the East, promoted it by every method known to the times. A great response to his passionate effort came in 1819 when the college world of the East was shocked by learning that William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, had left his famous collection of “classical and theological books, dictionaries, lexicons and Bibles” to a college in the wilderness of northwestern Pennsylvania, a college without a home, still doing its work in a log courthouse. That gift, long a bitter drop in the cup of Harvard, it is said, made a home of its own necessity for Allegheny, and in 1820 the corner stone of Bentley Hall, named for the donor, was laid. It took many years to complete it; but, when done on the lines Timothy Alden had himself laid down, it was one of the most beautiful buildings in the country. Today it easily stands after Independence Hall as the most perfect piece of Colonial architecture in the state of Pennsylvania. For me Bentley Hall was an extraordinary experience. It was the first really beautiful building I had seen, a revelation, something I had never dreamed of.

Fifty-six years had passed since the corner stone of Bentley Hall was laid, and not one of them without disappointments and sacrifices. More than once it had seemed as if the brave attempt must fail. Two buildings only had been added in these years: Culver Hall, a frame boarding house for men; Ruter Hall, a grim uncompromising three-story rectangular brick structure, fifty by ninety feet in size, a perfect reflection of the straitened period to which it belonged. The “Factory” was our slighting name for Ruter Hall, but in this stern structure I was to find a second deep satisfaction—the library; in a room on the top floor, ninety feet long and at least sixteen in height was housed not only the splendid Bentley collection, but one even more valuable, that of Judge James Winthrop of Cambridge, Massachusetts, rare volumes from the great presses of Europe, three tons of books brought overland in wagons by Boston teamsters in 1822. They lined the great unbroken inside wall, as well as every space between openings. From the window seats one looked out on the town in the valley, its roofs and towers half hidden by a wealth of trees, and beyond to a circle of round-breasted hills. Before I left Allegheny I had found a very precious thing in that severe room—the companionship there is in the silent presence of books.

Allegheny did not of course admit women at the start; but the ferment caused by the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment making it clear that only men were to be regarded as citizens stirred the Allegheny constituents mightily. Its chief patron, as I have said, was the Methodist Church. Now the Methodist Church was a militant reformer. The greatest of its bishops, Matthew Simpson, had backed Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony and their colleagues at every step. Leaders among Methodist women had been abolitionists, aggressive temperance advocates, and now they became militant suffragists. Their influence began to tell. In 1870, with misgivings in not a few minds the admission of women was voted. This was the same year that the University of Michigan opened its doors to women, and two years before Cornell. In the six years before I entered ten women had graduated. When I came there were but two seniors, two juniors, no sophomores. I was a lone freshman in a class of forty hostile or indifferent boys. The friendly and facetious professor charged with the care of the “young ladies” put it that I was “Lost in the Wilderness of Boy.”

From the first I was dimly conscious that I was an invader, that there was abroad a spirit of masculinity challenging my right to be there, and there were taboos not to be disregarded. My first experience was that of which Virginia Woolf speaks so bitterly in “A Room of One’s Own”—the closing of the college green to her at Oxbridge. Nearly fifty years before her book was written I was having at Allegheny the same experience.

The sloping green of the campus below Bentley Hall was inviting. Between classes I made my way one day to a seat under a tree only to hear a horrified call from the walk above, “Come back, come back quick.” An imperative summons from an upper-class woman. “You mustn’t go on that side of the walk, only men go there.”

It was not so simple to find a spot where you could go and be comfortable. If Bentley Hall, where all the classes were held, was a beautiful piece of architecture, its interior could hardly have been more severe. The rooms were heated with potbellied cast-iron stoves, seated with the hardest wooden chairs, lighted by kerosene lamps. In winter (and the winters were long) the snow tracked in kept the floors wet and cold. Often one wore a muffler in chapel. But of all that I was unheeding. My pioneer childhood served me well. Moreover, I realized at the start that I had found what I had come to college for, direction in the only field in which I was interested—science. I found it in a way that I doubt if Cornell could have given me at the moment, shy and immature as I was: the warming and contagious enthusiasm of a great natural teacher, one who had an ardent passion for those things which had stirred me and a wide knowledge which he fed by constant study and travel—Jeremiah Tingley, the head of Allegheny’s department of natural science.

Professor Tingley was then a man of fifty, sparkling, alive, informal. Three years before, he had been one of the fifty chosen from many hundred applicants to spend the summer with Louis Agassiz on the island of Penikese in Buzzards Bay. Agassiz had planned with enthusiasm for the Penikese Summer School, and for those privileged to enter who could understand and appreciate it was an unforgettable experience; certainly it was for Jeremiah Tingley. He carried there Agassiz’s faith in observation and classification, as well as his reverence for Nature and all her ways. For both men the material world was but the cover of the spirit. Professor Tingley would quote Agassiz sometimes: “Nature always brings us back to absolute truth whenever we wander.”

This fervent faith had a profound and quieting effect on my religious tumult. I learned a new word: Pantheism. Being still in that early stage of development where there must be a definite word by which to classify oneself, I began to call myself a pantheist—and I had a creed which I repeated more often than the creed I had learned in childhood:

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand

Little flower—but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

It reassured me; I was on the right track, for was I not going to find out with the microscope what God and man are?

Professor Tingley’s method for those he found really interested in scientific study was to encourage them to look outside the book. There was where I had already found my joy; but I suspected it was the willful way, that the true way was to know first what was in the books. Here in Professor Tingley’s classes you were ordered to go and see for yourself. He used to tell us a story of his first experience at Penikese. A stone was put before him, a round water-washed stone, on which he was to report. He looked at the stone, turned it over. There was nothing to report. “It is not the outside, it is the inside of things that matters,” said Agassiz. And in the laboratory that became our watchword: Look inside.

Discovering my interest in the microscope, I was not only allowed, I was urged to use the magnificent binocular belonging to the college, was given the free run of the laboratory along with a few as crazy as myself. Here my most exciting adventure apart from what I found under the microscope came from actually having my hands on a “missing link.” Evolution, to which I was clinging determinedly, could only be established, I realized, by discovering the links. There was one peculiar to the waters in our valley, the Memopomo Alleghaniensis, a creature twelve to fifteen inches long with gills and one lung, able to live in the water or mud as circumstances required. The mud puppy, as it was appropriately called, was slimy, loathsome, but I worked over it with awe. Was I not being admitted into the very workshop of Nature herself—seeing how she did it?

Professor Tingley took his little group of laboratory devotees into his home circle. He and Mrs. Tingley were housed in a wing of Bentley Hall—big rooms built for classrooms. They had no children, and in the years of their study and travel they had gathered about them things of beauty and interest. The atmosphere of those rooms was something quite new and wonderful to me. It was my first look into the intimate social life possible to people interested above all in ideas, beauty, music, and glad to work hard and live simply to devote themselves to their cultivation.

And such good talks! Much of it was concerned with fresh scientific thought, the inventions and discoveries which were stirring the world. An omnivorous reader of the scientific publications of Europe and America, Professor Tingley kept us excited, not only by what had been done but what it might mean. There was the telephone. I had been in college but a few weeks when my father asked me to go with him and my brother to the Centennial Exposition of 1876. President Bugbee, who had made me his special care for a time—Mrs. Bugbee even taking me into their home until an appropriate boarding place could be found—was heartily in favor of my going. I went, and when I returned Professor Tingley’s first question was, “Did you see the telephone?” I hadn’t even heard of it. Two exhibits only of that exposition made a deep enough impression on me to last until today—my first Corot and the Corliss engine. Professor Tingley was greatly disappointed, and I did not understand why until a few weeks later he called the student body together to explain and illustrate the telephone by a homemade instrument. “You’ll talk to your homes from these rooms one day,” he told us. “New York will talk to Boston.” He didn’t suggest Chicago. “Dreamer,” the boys said. “Dreamer,” my father and his Titusville friends said a little later when an agent of the Bell Associates, the first company to attempt putting the new invention within reach of everybody, came to town selling stock. How often I heard it said later, “If I’d bought that telephone stock!”

Years later I told Alexander Graham Bell of my introduction to the telephone. “Nobody,” he said, “can estimate what the teachers of science in colleges and high schools were doing in those days not only to spread knowledge of the telephone but to stir youth to tackle the possibilities in electricity.”

What I best remember is not the telephone but Professor Tingley’s amazing enthusiasm for the telephone. This revelation of enthusiasm, its power to warm and illuminate was one of the finest and most lasting of my college experiences. The people I had known, teachers, preachers, doctors, business men, all went through their day’s work either with a stubborn, often sullen determination to do their whole duty, or with an undercurrent of uneasiness, if they found pleasure in duty. They seemed to me to feel that they were not really working if they were not demonstrating the Puritan teaching that labor is a curse. It had never seemed so to me, but I did not dare gloat over it. And here was a teacher who did gloat over his job in all its ramifications. Moreover, he did his best to stir you to share his joy.

But while I looked on what I was learning in the laboratory as what I had come to college for, while each term stiffened my ambition to go deeper and deeper into the search for the original atom, science was not all that interested me. The faculty, if small, was made up largely of seasoned men with a perspective on life. There was not only deep seriousness but humor and tolerance, and since we were so small a college the student was close enough to discover them, to find out what each man as an individual had to offer him. As I learned the power of enthusiasm from Jeremiah Tingley, I learned from another man of that faculty the value of contempt. Holding the chair of Latin was one of the few able teachers I have known, George Haskins, father of that sound scholar of international repute, the late Charles Homer Haskins, at the time of his death Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at Harvard University. What deep satisfaction his career gave his father, himself a man of many disappointments!

George Haskins labored, usually in vain, to arouse us to the choiceness of Latinity, the meaning of Rome’s rise and fall, the quality of her men, the relation of that life to ours. Professor Haskins’ contempt for our lack of understanding, for our slack preparation, was something utterly new to me in human intercourse. The people I knew with rare exceptions spared one another’s feelings. I had come to consider that a superior grace; you must be kind if you lied for it. But here was a man who turned on indifference, neglect, carelessness with bitter and caustic contempt, left his victim seared. The sufferers lived to say, some of them at least: “I deserved it. He was never unjust, never inappreciative of effort.”

“Cherish your contempts,” Henry James advised me once when he had drawn from me a confession of the conflict between my natural dislike of saying anything unpleasant about anybody and the necessity of being cruel, even brutal, if the work I had undertaken was to be truthful in fact and logic. “Cherish your contempts,” said Mr. James, “and strength to your elbow.” If it had not been for George Haskins I doubt if I should have known what he meant; nor should I ever have become the steady, rather dogged worker I am. The contempt for shiftlessness which he inspired in me aroused a determination to be a good worker. I began to train my mind to go at its task regularly, keep hours, study whether I liked a thing or not. I forced myself not to waste time, not to loaf, not to give up before I finished. If I failed at any point in this discipline I suffered a certain mental and spiritual malaise, a dissatisfaction with myself hard to live with.

In spite of my painful efforts to make a regular worker out of myself, life at college was lightened by my discovery of the Boy. Incredible as it seems to me now, I had come to college at eighteen without ever having dared to look fully into the face of any boy of my age. To be sure, I had from childhood nourished secret passions for a succession of older individuals whom I never saw except at a distance, and with whom I never exchanged a word. My brother and his friends, my father and his friends—these I had always hobnobbed with; but those who naturally should have been my companions, I shunned. I was unable to take part in those things that brought the young people of the day together. I did not dance—the Methodist discipline forbade it. I was incredibly stupid and uninterested in games—still am. I had no easy companionable ways, was too shy to attempt them. I had my delights; the hills which I ran, the long drives behind our little white horse, the family doings, the reading of French regularly with my splendid friend Annette Grumbine, still living, still as she was then a vitalizing influence in the town and state for all that makes for a higher social life—these things and my precious evening walks, the full length of Titusville’s main street, alone or with some girl friend while we talked of things deepest in our minds.

But in all this there was no boy. I was not long in discovering him when I reached Allegheny, for the taboos I encountered at the start soon yielded under the increased number of women, women in college, in special courses, in the Preparatory Department. They swept masculine prohibitions out of the way—took possession, made a different kind of institution of it, less scholastic, gayer, easier-going. The daily association in the classrooms, the contacts and appraisements, the mutual interests and intimacies, the continual procession of college doings which in the nature of things required that you should have a masculine attendant, soon put me at my ease. I was learning, learning fast, but the learning carried its pains. I still had a stiff-necked determination to be free. To avoid entangling alliances of all kinds had become an obsession with me. I was slow in laying it aside when I began to take part in the social life of the college, and because of it I was guilty of one performance which was properly enough a scandal to the young men.

There were several men’s fraternities in the college; most of the boys belonged to one or another. It was an ambition of the fraternities to put their pins on acceptable town and college girls. You were a Delta girl, or a Gamma girl or a Phi Psi girl. I resented this effort to tag me. Why should I not have friends in all the fraternities? And I had; I accumulated four pins and then, one disastrous morning, went into chapel with the four pins on my coat. There were a few months after that when, if it had not been for two or three non-Frat friends, I should have been a social outcast.

I spent four years in Allegheny College. Measured by what I got instead of by what I did not get and was obliged to learn later, I regard them as among the most profitable of my life. I find often that men and women accuse the college of not opening their minds to life as it is in the world. For a mind sufficiently developed to see “life as it is” I cannot conceive a more fruitful field than the classics. If I had been sufficiently mature I could have learned from George Haskins’ teachings of Cicero and Tacitus and Livy more than I know today about the ways of men in their personal and their national relations, more of the causes of war, of the weaknesses of governments. But I was not ready for it. Life is the great teacher, and she leads us step by step. It is not the fault of the human teacher that his pupil must learn to climb by climbing.

It was in the spring of 1880 that I graduated. I still carried the same baggage with which I had entered—a little heavier to be sure, a little better packed, a little better adapted to the “Purpose.” The only difference which threatened disturbance was that I had added an item which I had refused to bring with me in 1876. Then I was not willing to believe I would ever marry—now I thought possibly some day I might; but the item was not heavy, not heavy enough at least to prevent my rejoicing over the fact that I was graduating with a job. I had signed a contract with an institution of which I had never heard until the negotiations leading to it opened. After frequent communications with the faculty a representative of the Poland Union Seminary of Poland, Ohio, with some misgivings had employed me to serve as its Preceptress—$500 a year “and board yourself.” I was jubilant. It meant economic independence—the first plank in my platform. I would use my leisure to work with the microscope; I would save my money; I would one day go abroad and study with some great biologist. I would never abandon my search for the beginning of life, the point where I expected to find God.

It was then with entire confidence in the future that I started out in August of 1880 for the town of Poland on the Western Reserve of Ohio, to begin what women were then talking of in more or less awed tones as a Career.

4
A START AND A RETREAT

If I had been going on my honeymoon I should scarcely have been more expectant or more curious than I was in August of 1880 when I left home to take my first position: “Preceptress of Poland Union Seminary, Poland, Mahoning County, Ohio—$500.00 a year and board yourself”! Poland was not a long journey from my home—four or five hours.

I found the village delightful. It had the air of having been long in existence, as it had. Here there was no noise of railroads, no sign of the coal and steel and iron industries which encircled it but had never passed its boundaries. Here all people seemed to me to live tranquilly in roomy houses with pleasant yards or on near-by farms where there were fine horses and fat blooded sheep, and where planting and harvesting went ahead year in and year out in orderly fashion.

The chief and only industry of Poland was its seminary, now about thirty years old. It was a community enterprise started in 1848 by Mr. B. F. Lee, the financial agent who had hired me. Everybody in the village had subscribed to its endowment, practically every church had at one time or another been its patron. The long depression of the seventies had crippled its finances sadly; but times were better now, and the well-to-do Presbytery of Mahoning County had agreed to take it under its care. But I was soon to learn that Poland Union Seminary in spite of the patronage of the Presbytery lived on a narrow and worn shoestring. Moreover, I at once divined, kind as were those who were responsible for my being there, that I had been injected into a situation of which Mr. Lee had given me no hint strong enough to penetrate my inexperience. It was serious enough, as on the very day the school bell first rang for me the villagers began to let me know. Men and women would stop me on the street to say:

“So it’s you that’s taking Miss Blakeley’s place. You have no idea how badly we feel about her resigning. I went to school to her, my father and mother went to school to her. I had hoped all my children would go to her. She was a wonderful teacher, a beautiful character. You look pretty young; you haven’t had much experience, have you?”

I was not long in learning that the devotion of the community to Miss Blakeley was deserved. The village was right in honoring her, in mourning her. It no doubt felt a certain satisfaction in letting me know at the start it in no way regarded me as an adequate substitute. Its insistence was such that, before the end of my first fortnight, I was ready to resign.

My morale would hardly have been so quickly shaken if I had not at once discovered to my consternation that there was an important part of my duties which was in danger of proving too much for me. The worst of it was that it concerned the largest block of pupils in an institution where every pupil counted, where Mr. Lee regarded it as of vital importance that every pupil be given what he wanted. Here he advertised you could prepare for college, here you could have special advanced work in anything you wanted. And Mr. Lee was right if the seminary was to live as a cog in the country’s educational wheel.

Somebody ought to write, perhaps somebody has written of the passing of this once valuable institution. It came before the college and the high school and for a time did the work of both; but when the high school began to prepare students for the college and the colleges added preparatory departments and at the same time offered special courses the seminary slowly realized that it must either go out of business or combine with one or another of its healthy growing rivals.

In a few places, as in Poland Village, the seminary was hanging on tenaciously, trying to demonstrate that it was still a better man than these new undertakings, these high schools, these colleges with their preparatory schools.

The faculty which was to make the demonstration at Poland was made up of three persons: in order of rank, the President, the Preceptress, her assistant. The acting President insisted on all the perquisites of his title. His chief duty he regarded as conducting the chapel with more or less grandiloquent remarks. When my assistant and I complained of too much work he would scowl and say that his executive duties made it impossible for him to take on more classes. The result was that I started out with two classes in each of four languages—Greek, Latin, French, and German, as well as classes in geology, botany, geometry, trigonometry. In addition there was my threatened Waterloo, the two largest classes in the school: one in what was called “verb grammar,” the other, “percentage arithmetic”—so named from the points in the textbooks where the term’s work began. From time immemorial these two classes had been conducted in the interests of the district schoolteachers of the territory. It was the custom for these teachers to spend one term a year in the seminary, where, regardless of the number of years they had been teaching, the number of times they had treated themselves to a period of study, they always (so I was told) insisted on their verb grammar and their percentage arithmetic. It was like a ritual. As they were the numerical backbone of the institution, there was nothing so important in the judgment of management as their satisfaction.

It was a killing schedule for one person, but I was so eager, so ridiculously willing, so excited, and also so fresh from college that I did not know it. Indeed, as I look back on it I think I did fairly well, all things considered. I should have had no great alarm about my success if it had not been for the grammar and the arithmetic. From the first day I realized I was on ground there which, once familiar, was now almost unintelligible. I could and did teach my geometry and “trig” with relish; I could and did pilot fairly advanced classes in four languages so that the pupils at least never discovered that in one of them I was far beyond my depth, and that in all of them I at times knew myself to be skating on thin ice; but these district schoolteachers, several of them older than I, were not to be deceived or bluffed. They had had experience—I had not; and like the villagers of Poland they proposed to make me realize that no college diploma could make up for inexperience. Experience in “percentage arithmetic” and “verb grammar” came from doing the same examples and diagraming and parsing the same sentences year after year and going back to teach them in their communities. Many of these examples were tricky. Many of the sentences were ambiguous. They had learned solutions for both, solutions which had the backing of tradition. I was soon terrified lest I be trapped, so scared I would wake up in the night in cold sweats. This was my state of mind when one day the most important man in the Village, Robert Walker, the local banker, stopped me on the street.

“Sis,” he said—he was to always call me Sis—“Sis, you are following a fine teacher.” I could have wept—the same old story. “But don’t worry, what you must do is keep a stiff upper lip.”

“Oh, thank you, sir,” I said as I hurried on lest I cry in the street.

But that “keep a stiff upper lip,” coming from the man it did, restored me; and I resolved, cost what it would, to find a way to master my district schoolteachers. True, it took me two months to discover the weak place in their armor. Finally I learned they were solving problems and parsing sentences not according to principles but according to answers they had learned. The reason they insisted on going over them year after year at the seminary was to keep the solutions in their memory. I had no skill in solving puzzles, but I did know something about the principles and determined to try them on problems and sentences that were not in their books or any books to which they had access.

And so one day, luckily for me before they had a chance to demonstrate my incapacity as two or three of them I am confident were expecting to do, I casually put on the board two or three rather tough examples from outside arithmetics, two or three not simple sentences from grammars I felt sure they had never seen. I always recall with satisfaction the perplexity with which the two or three young men I most feared looked at what I had set for them, their injured protest. “But those examples are not in our books.” “What difference does that make? The only important thing is that you know the principles. If you can’t apply them, why learn them?”

After a month of excursions into territory unfamiliar to them I had them humbled and slowly grasping certain new ideas. I knew I was regarded with respect. It was the one conquest in the two years I spent as the Preceptress of the Poland Union Seminary of which I was proud.

Before these two years were up Mr. Lee must have realized he would never get from me the help he needed in his ambition to preserve the school as a seminary, that I would never become another Miss Blakeley. He wanted some one ambitious to make teaching a life work. I was not. Teaching was a mere stepping-stone in my plan of life, and at Poland Union Seminary it had proved a slippery stone. From the time I bounded out of bed in the morning—for in those days I did bound out of bed—until I dropped into it at an early hour, dead tired, I had no time for my microscope. It had become dusty on the table, but the passion for it and what it might reveal was still strong in me. My confidence that I could save money to continue my studies on five hundred dollars a year had proved illusory. I found myself coming out short, obliged to borrow from my father. There came to be a mutual, if unspoken, agreement between Mr. Lee and me that I should resign. Neither of us was getting what he had hoped, and so at the end of the second year, June, 1882, I gave up teaching as a stepping-stone.

So far as I could then see or did see for a long time, this first effort at an independent self-directing life was an interlude which had no relation to what I wanted at the time to do or what, as it turned out, I did do.

The most lasting impressions and experiences in this Poland interlude had little or nothing to do with my work in the seminary. They came from the friendships I formed while that work went on, centering in the family of the understanding gentleman who had at the outset stopped me on the street to say, “Keep a stiff upper lip.”

I was soon to realize that this shrewd bit of advice was instigated by his daughter Clara, who was to become and who remains one of my dearest friends. Indeed, it was due to her understanding and affection that my two years in Poland, quite apart from the professional disappointment in them, were the gayest, most interesting, and in many ways the happiest of my life up to that time.

Clara Walker, or “Dot,” as high and low in and about Poland called her, was a fine example of the out-of-door girl of the eighties, the girl who had revolted against lacing, high heels, long skirts, and substituted for them an admirable uniform of independence—tailor-made coat and skirt, high-neck shirtwaist with four-in-hand tie, flat heels. This outfit suited Clara Walker’s sturdy figure, her vigorous and free movement. Her eyes suited her costume, for they were grey, direct, merry, looking unwaveringly on everybody and everything.

Dot was close-mouthed, but when she sensed possible unfairness in a situation which interested or concerned her she had her own wordless way of dealing with it. It was she who realized the determination of the villagers of Poland to make me feel that I never could fill Miss Blakeley’s place to their satisfaction. She was loyal as they to the old teacher, but she wanted me to have my chance and, the first week of school, announced herself my champion by appearing at the door of the seminary as I was making my weary way out at the end of the day.

“Wouldn’t you like to take a drive?” she said.

And there stood her smart turnout. What an escape from verb grammar and percentage arithmetic and my growing inferiority complex! From that time she never lagged in her determination to help me conquer my problem by taking me away from it. She apparently took real pleasure in showing me the country. Never a week that we did not go somewhere: Into town for the theater—the first time I saw Mary Anderson, then the most beloved actress as well as the most beautiful woman in the country, was in Youngstown in “Pygmalion”; to big farms with great flocks of blooded sheep and horses and ponies; to coal mines and iron mills; to little old towns and run-down settlements skipped, like Poland, by the invasion of industry.

Clara peopled all these various places with the unadorned realistic tales of living and dead men and women. She had been born and had grown up in Mahoning County. She had a widely scattered family connection, but most important was her genuine interest in all human beings and theirs in her. She was a perfect listener, never prying. People liked to talk to her; she never forgot, related things, judged shrewdly and kindly, with the result that she had in her mind a map of the human life of the country, quite as reliable as a road map—a map in warm humorous colors.

Years later I realized that in those two years in Poland I had had under my eyes a vivid picture of what happens to the farmer, his home, his town, his children when industry invades his land.

This Mahoning country had been so rich, so apparently stable. The men and women so loved what they and their forebears had done that they yielded slowly to the coal miner and the mill man, but they were giving way in the eighties. The furnace was in the back yard of the fine old houses with their ample barns; and the shaft of the coal mine, in the richest meadows. The effort to reconcile the two was making, but industry was conquering: the destruction of beauty, the breaking down of standards of conduct, the growth of the love of money for money’s sake, the grist of social problems facing the countryside from the inflow of foreigners and the instability of work—all this was written for him who could read. I could not read then, but I gathered a few impressions which I realize now helped shape my future interests and thinking.

It was on these long drives I first learned that not cities alone but all communities have dregs, slums. Strange that it should be in such a place as Poland, but here it was—a disreputable fringe where a group of men and women had long been living together with or without marriage. You heard strange tales of incest and lust, of complete moral and social irresponsibility, and they were having a scandalously jolly time of it. Why I was not more shocked, I do not know; probably because incest and lust were almost unknown words to me in those days.

And there were indelible impressions of the industrial world. When we drove into Youngstown, ten miles away, we passed between iron furnaces lying along the Mahoning River. After the long depression of the seventies they were again busy, and into the valley were coming hundreds and hundreds of foreigners brought from Europe by the news that there was once again work in the United States. It was in passing through the very heart of this furnace district one night returning from the theater that I first learned of the terrible dangers that lie in the smelting of ore. A furnace had burst; men had been trapped by the molten metal, and their charred remains were being carried across the road. Unforgettable horror.

And it was on one of these chance drives that I first saw what women can do in moments of frenzied protest against situations which they cannot control, first had my faith challenged in the universally peaceful nature of my sex. I learned the meaning of Maenads, Furies, as we came upon a maddened, threatening crowd rushing towards the offices of the mills which had been shut down without warning. It was led by big robust shrieking women, their hair flying, their clothes disheveled. It was a look into a world of which I knew nothing, but like the charred bodies carried across the road as I rode from the theater it was an unforgettable thing.

There were other introductions to the industrial world less horrifying. It was while in Poland that I first went into a coal mine—a deep old-fashioned coal mine, a subsidiary to a farm. Under some of these great farms with their blooded sheep, their fine orchards and fields, their horses and ponies, coal had been found. And it was being mined as a side line of the farm, a new kind of crop. Near the head of the shaft were little houses for the miners; and when dull times came and the mine was shut down the farmers took on their care. There was a slaughter of an immense number of pigs, the putting down of barrels of pork, the smoking of an incredible number of hams, the making of sausages and headcheese.

“But why, why all this?” I asked.

“Oh,” said my hostess, “mining is unstable business. When there are long shutdowns we must help the miners out, see that they have food.”

The intimacy with Dot Walker gave me a home. Mrs. Walker treated me as a daughter, and as for Robert Walker, who still called me “Sis,” he liked to have me around and to give me a word of wise counsel now and then. It is because, in those months, I learned him to be as kindly, shrewd, honest, simple-minded a man as I have ever known that I must interrupt my narrative long enough to put in here the story of one of the cruelest episodes of which I personally have known in the fifty years that I have been a more or less understanding observer of our national political life. The story is of Robert Walker and his one-time friend William McKinley, the twenty-fifth President of the United States.

When I became an intimate of the Walker household a person I often heard mentioned by its head was “the Major”—Major McKinley. Now it was not in 1880 a name unfamiliar to me. I had met it already at Allegheny College, where McKinley had once been a student. When the Civil War broke out he had joined the exodus of students who volunteered at the first call. He had come out of the war a major, studied law, and settled in Canton, Ohio, only sixty or seventy miles from Poland and in the same Congressional District. Here in 1876—the Mahoning district as it was called—had sent him to Congress. It was a matter of interest in Allegheny in my time to have one of its former students turn out a Congressman, its usual crop being teachers, preachers, and missionaries.

When I came to Poland I learned quickly that McKinley had lived there as a boy, had attended the seminary, and was their proudest example of “the boy who had made good.” For four years he had been their Congressman. How they boasted of him! How solidly they voted for him!

I was not long in the Walker household before I sensed something more in Robert Walker than a citizen’s pride in McKinley. It was that species of adoration a modest, honest-minded man often has for his leader—his leader who can do no wrong. I realized this when I first saw them together. The Major had come to our seminary commencement in June of 1881. I remember nothing at all of the speech he made, but the scene on the wide green in front of the village church after the exercises were over remains vivid. Scattered about were scores upon scores of girls and women in the frilly white gowns, the long white feather boas, the flower-trimmed hats, the gay parasols of the period; and in and out wound the Major, shaking hands, smiling, exchanging friendly greetings—all together at home, no back slapping, no kissing of babies. It was all so gentle, so like a picture of an English garden party where the politics are hidden beneath the finest of social veneers. And there was Robert Walker almost effulgent.

“Well, Sis,” he asked me later, “what do you think of the Major?” A remark to which he expected no answer. What answer other than his could there be?

What I did not know then was that from the beginning of William McKinley’s political career Robert Walker had been his chief—and for a time, I think, his only—financial backer. Beginning with his first campaign for Congress in 1875 Mr. Walker had advanced the Major $2,000 for expenses. He continued equal advances before each successive campaign, the understanding being that $1,000 a year was to be paid on the debt.

Along with this financial support went a staunch support of all the Major’s political ideas. These ideas were those of the Republican party, and for men like Robert Walker the party was hallowed. It was “the party of Lincoln.” Loyalty to Lincoln required loyalty to all that was directly or indirectly connected with him.

“Is Robert Lincoln a dude?” one of my Mahoning County acquaintances asked me years later when I told him that I had been talking with Robert Lincoln about his father.

“Is he a dude?”—by which he meant, as I took it, a kind of Ward McAllister.

“No, no, not that,” I assured him.

“Well,” he said reflectively, “even if he was a dude I would vote for him for President because he is Abraham Lincoln’s son.”

The chief test of loyalty to the party of Lincoln in Ohio was the degree of support given to the high protective tariff. William McKinley’s support was devout and unqualified. He looked on a duty so low that it allowed importations as a species of treason. There was tin plate, for example.

The year that I went to Poland, 1880, McKinley first espoused a duty on tin plate. There was strong opposition among iron and steel manufacturers. They felt they already had all they could look after in Congress; but when they told this to McKinley his answer was that unless they supported tin plate he would not support their tariffs. Naturally they yielded, and tin plate was added to their list of protégés. McKinley felt so sure of ultimate victory for the duty that he evidently did not hesitate to advise his friends to get ready for its coming. At all events he encouraged Robert Walker, suggested to him in fact that he establish in Youngstown, Ohio, a stamping plant for the making of tinware, taking with him as partner his brother-in-law Andrew J. Duncan. As Andrew Duncan had no money to invest the Major gave to Mr. Walker a sheaf of signed notes to be used whenever he had need of money.

Now Robert Walker was not a manufacturer; he was a farmer and a good one—a coal operator—the banker of the Village of Poland and the surrounding country, but it was not in Robert Walker’s nature to refuse to help the Major or his relatives in their ambitions, as he had already frequently proved. Indeed, at that time he was backing McKinley’s brother Abner in a business venture which was soon to fail with loss of all he had put in. But Robert Walker’s faith in McKinley’s wisdom was such that he could not conceive of failure in anything he advised.

The plant was started in 1890. There could not have been a more unlucky moment to launch a new industry. The long depression of the nineties was beginning. Iron and steel were already seriously affected. Money was tight. Robert Walker found himself almost at once forced to use the Major’s notes. He found only too soon that he had embarked on a hopeless undertaking, and in February of 1893 the works were closed.

Now at that moment Mark Hanna and his colleagues on the National Republican Committee were counting on William McKinley to win the Presidential election for them in 1896. The announcement that he was involved in the Walker failure to the tune of some one hundred thousand dollars, more than the combined fortune of himself and wife, was a cruel blow to their plan. McKinley was straightforward with them. He had signed the notes; he must give up politics, go back to the law, and pay his honest debts. But that could not be permitted. He was too important—one hundred thousand dollars was a small sum compared to what the Republican Committee expected from his election. The money was raised—not so quietly. It became necessary to explain how McKinley had become involved to this amount, and the explanation which McKinley’s political friends put out was that he was a victim of “a man named Walker,” as Mark Hanna’s able biographer, Herbert Croly, calls him—a man whom he had trusted, and who had deceived him as to the amount of money he was raising on his notes. That is, the Republican committee deliberately put on Robert Walker the stigma of fraud, presented him to the public as a man who had betrayed confidence, and William McKinley never denied their presentation.

I have it from Robert Walker and from his daughter that no note of William McKinley was ever cashed without consulting him, and I believe them. Moreover, Andrew Duncan was in this enterprise and knew what was going on. It is an interesting fact that when my friend Clara Walker, who kept the accounts for the McKinleys and her father, went the morning after the announcement of the failure to her office in Youngstown, all her books had disappeared along with many papers which belonged to the firm.

I had been living abroad for two years when all this happened, but just before I had left America I had talked with Robert Walker about his venture—the money he was trying to raise on McKinley’s notes. His confidence was untarnished.

“The Major knows, Sis. He will see this thing through. I’d do anything to back him.”

And he did. When on my return I went to see my friends I found they had given up practically everything, and Robert Walker himself was utterly broken by the ignominy heaped on him.

I begged him to give me his side of the story, let me tell it, told him I would never rest until I had an opportunity to put down what I knew of his long support of the Major’s ambitions, what I believed of him as a man of unselfish integrity. He absolutely and finally refused. “Nobody would ever believe the Major could do anything wrong. I didn’t.”

But the Major had allowed the oldest and most loyal friend he had in his public life to be ruined not only in fortune but in reputation. Now that Robert Walker and Mrs. Walker are both gone and reviving the episode can no longer give them pain, it gives me a certain solace to put down the story as I believe it.

I was leaving Poland, but what was I to do? Today, with my passion for the microscope still undimmed, I would naturally seek a place in one of the many laboratories now open to women. Hundreds of women in the country bent on scientific research are now in industrial, institutional, or governmental laboratories, but in 1882 there was almost nothing of that kind open to women. The change is due, first, to the tremendous advance in scientific research; second, to the way women have proved their adaptability to laboratory work. No doubt the great majority of them are, like the majority of women in offices, laboratory wives, but we have inspired workers among them; probably, all things considered, as large a proportion as among men.

If things had been as they were in 1876, when I asked my father if he could put me through college and he had so cheerfully and happily, I think, agreed, I could have asked to be financed for higher studies. But things were not as they had been, and it would have been quite out of the question in 1882, when I decided that my first step towards economic independence was mistaken, for him to finance me—the country was coming into a new depression, that of ’83 and ’84, and the oil business was in a serious state for those who produced the oil.

But my home was open, wide open. I think it was this fact that is at the bottom of my strong conviction that the home is an essential link in the security of men and women. After one has gone forth on his own there frequently comes a time when he is shelterless as far as his own resources go. To have a refuge of which he is sure is one of the most heartening and stabilizing experiences in a life. If my Poland venture was a failure professionally it did not throw me on the street; I had a place to go and think it over. When I asked my mother if it would be all right for me to come home, her answer was what it always was to be in the future when I was obliged (more than once) to make the request: “Of course, that is your right.” That is, my father and mother looked on the home they had created not as something belonging only to them—a place they had for their comfort and privacy, it was a place for all of those in the family procession who had no other place to go. In turn I saw that home opened to grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles, children and grandchildren, quite regardless of the extra burden it put on their resources, limitations on their space, the irritations and complications that are always bred by the injection of extra persons, however beloved and close, into a settled group.

It was in June, 1882, that I went back home, dusted my desk in the Tower room now shared with my sister’s playhouse and dolls—set up my microscope and went to work on the Hydrozoa. But not for long.

5
A FRESH START—A SECOND RETREAT

It was the custom of the Tarbell household to do its part in entertaining the Methodist ministers and presiding elders who periodically “filled the pulpit” of our church. In the winter after my return from the Poland venture we had a guest, an important local personage, Dr. Theodore L. Flood, a preacher who had retired from active ministry to take the editorship of a magazine called The Chautauquan, published in the town thirty miles from Titusville where I had so recently spent four years—Meadville, the home of Allegheny College.

On this visit Dr. Flood asked me to “help him out” for a month or two in a new department in his magazine. I was quick to accept, glad to be useful, for I had grown up with what was called the Chautauqua Movement. Indeed, it had been almost as much a part of my life as the oil business, and in its way it was as typically American. If we had a truer measure for values we would count it more important.

This Chautauqua Movement had grown out of a Methodist camp meeting held annually at Fair Point on the pleasant lake which in my childhood had been the terminus of our most ambitious all-day excursions. The president of this Association by 1870 was a man justly respected in all that part of the world for his good deeds, as well as his business acumen—Lewis Miller, a manufacturer of Akron, Ohio. Mr. Miller was to be known nationally as the father-in-law of Thomas Edison, but old-time Chautauquans put it the other way: “Edison is Lewis Miller’s son-in-law.” That was enough recommendation for Edison in their minds.

Lewis Miller’s interest in Chautauqua went beyond the annual camp meeting. He saw the opportunity to build up there a summer home where parents could give their children healthy out-of-door amusement, protection from the evil ways of the unregenerate, and sound modern instruction in the Bible. Sympathy with this program induced a half-dozen families in the Titusville Methodist Church to join in the purchase of a lot on the outskirts of the grounds and start a Titusville settlement—a cottage with a mess hall and a few rooms—tents serving as sleeping quarters for extras. Father joined the colony soon after we moved to Titusville. We had a tent and a flat-bottomed boat.

Through the years I have been recalling, the years in high school, college, as Preceptress of Poland Union Seminary, part of all my summers had been spent at Chautauqua. Lewis Miller’s laudable attempt to furnish attractive instruction in the Bible meant little or nothing to me at first; the flat-bottomed boat meant a great deal. But in 1874 something happened that dragged me away from the water. Lewis Miller had persuaded the most eminent advocate of the Sunday school in America, Dr. (afterwards Bishop) John H. Vincent, to select Fair Point as the home of a National Interdenominational Sunday School Institute which he and those who saw with him had been for some time planning. The first session of this new organization was held in 1874 under the name of the Chautauqua Assembly. It was recognized at once as a revolution upsetting the old order.

The most spectacular feature of the revolution was the Chautauqua platform, making as it did stirring, challenging contacts with current intellectual life. There one heard the great speakers of the day on all sorts of subjects. There fine concerts were given. It was the scientific lectures which caught me, particularly those of Dr. R. Ogden Doremus of New York. His platform experiments, in which two skillful women assisted, excited me as I had never been before. But what aroused me most were certain demonstrations with a magnificent microscope which they were giving in a little building at one side. Nothing in the world seemed to matter to me so much as to be able to talk with these women, to ask their advice about the work I was beginning with the little instrument bought with my own carefully saved money. Perhaps, oh, perhaps, I dreamed, they would let me look through the great beauty they handled so deftly, focus it, watch the life which went on in its field. So one day I hung around after the talk was over, slipped up to them, steeled myself to tell them that I was going to be a microscopist, begged them to give me a few lessons, advise me. The two ladies smiled down from their height, so plainly showing they thought me a country child with a queer behavior complex. “Quite impossible,” they said, and turned back to their conference with Dr. Doremus.

Abashed, humiliated, but luckily too angry to cry I made my way back to my flat-bottomed boat. I would show them, I resolved, clenching my fists!

It was years before I attempted again to get from a Chautauqua undertaking more than it was offering to the public at large. There were many of these undertakings. Dr. Vincent saw to that. A man better fitted by experience, conviction, and personality to persuade a half-asleep, wholly satisfied community to accept a new order could not have been found in the America of the eighties. John Vincent was forty-two years old when he came to Chautauqua—handsome, confident, alert, energetic, radiating well-being. And he was an orator, and orating at Chautauqua made men tolerant even of heresy. He went about his business of organizing the work of the Assembly with a skill which commanded the admiration of everybody, even those hostile to the secularization of their beloved camp meeting. As a platform manager I never have known his equal. He had magnetism, but he knew when and how to turn it on; he was shrewd, cunning, pungent. He pricked bubbles, disciplined his audience. The Chautauqua audience came to be one of the best behaved out-of-door audiences in the country. The fact that we were out of doors had persuaded us that we were free to leave meetings if we were bored or suddenly remembered that we had left bread in the oven, or that the baby must have wakened. When the performance had been stopped once or twice to “give that lady a chance to go out without further disturbing the speaker” we learned to stay at home or to sit out the lecture.

There is only one word to describe what Lewis Miller and Dr. Vincent now did to Chautauqua, and that is “electrification.” The community was made up mainly of hard-working men and women who wanted a vacation in surroundings where they would not “have to worry about the children.” Certainly if high fences with gates through which you could not pass in or out after ten P.M.—never pass without your ticket, and not even with one on Sundays—if watchful guards and ten o’clock curfew, if a mass public opinion on the part of elders in support of these restrictions, could have suppressed all the mischief and lawlessness in the youth which swarmed Chautauqua, parents were right in sleeping tranquilly. As a matter of fact I never knew of any serious offenses, though there probably were many which I was still too much of a little girl to recognize. The worst mischief in which I personally assisted was playing tag up and down the relief model of Palestine, which skirted the lake as Palestine does the Mediterranean. It was spotted with plaster-of-Paris models of towns from Damascus to Bethsaida. I remember one rule of our game was that you could not be tagged if you straddled Jerusalem. The most serious vandalism of which I knew and in which I had no part was stealing Damascus or Nazareth or Tyre and carrying it away bodily.

Dr. Vincent did not change the restrictions, but he made them more endurable by the fresh interest he put into our lives. His effect on the community physically was immediate. It began to grow. The sound of the hammers nailing together the, for the most part, flimsy cottages was never still. The result was very like what Mark Twain found in the summer colony of Onteora in the Catskills in its first year—“the partitions so thin you can hear the women changing their minds.”

Housekeeping improved. It had been as sketchy as the cottages—picnic housekeeping. You saw them at it, out in the rear of their cottages, over an old wood stove or stone fireplace, the men in their shirt sleeves, the women in big aprons, if not wrappers. Planks on sawhorses for tables, mats (we had not learned to say “doilies” yet), benches for seats. The natural practice of bringing discarded furniture from home to furnish the cottages led to the only distinctive piece of Chautauqua furniture I recall—a long high-backed bench made from an old-fashioned four-post bedstead. There were few garrets in all the country about Chautauqua that did not harbor one or more such bedsteads. They had been hidden away when families could afford the new-styled quartered-oak or walnut bedroom suites. Some ingenious mind had seen that by shortening the sidepieces of a four-poster to seat width, using the headboard for a back, you had a commodious and, with cushions, a comfortable seat, even couch. They were scattered all over the place.

With the coming of Dr. Vincent, Chautauqua rapidly developed a Promenade along the south end of the lake front. Cottages here were lathed and plastered, had wicker chairs on their verandahs, and the residents soon were taking their meals at the really stately Athenaeum Hotel. It was in this front row that Dr. and Mrs. Vincent came to live in a tent, a tent de luxe with a real house—so it looked to us—behind it.

Sometimes when we were properly dressed and shod we walked past the hotel and the cottages housing our aristocrats, and if by chance we saw Dr. or Mrs. Vincent or, best of all, the “Vincents’ little boy”—George, we later learned his name to be—why, then we boasted of it at the supper table as one might say today, “I saw President Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt, Sistie, Buzzie.”

Dr. Vincent kept the place on its toes not only by the steady improvement of its platform, its amusements, in the quality of the people who came to teach and preach, but by a steady flow of new undertakings. He planned incessantly to stir not only our souls but our minds. We came to expect new ideas at each successive session and were never disappointed if sometimes a little bewildered. Behind all these various undertakings was the steadying hand of Lewis Miller, the silent partner, who had begun by spying out the land, establishing a community, laying the foundations for the Institution as it exists today—a center of democratic, Christian culture.

Dr. Vincent’s masterpiece, as I always thought, came in 1878 when he laid before his Chautauquans a plan which had been long simmering in his never quiet mind. He did this in the finest of what we call inspirational talks that I ever heard—at least it stirred me so deeply that I have never forgotten the face of the orator nor, more important, the upturned faces of his hearers. He announced a scheme for a four-year course of home reading under the direction of the Chautauqua management adapted to men and women who had missed a college education, but who felt a deep desire for knowledge and were willing to adopt any practical plan which would give them a college outlook. It was to be called the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

Now this does not sound exciting; but as a matter of fact it was deeply exciting, for the speaker was pouring out his heart. He had never had a college education; he had never ceased to feel the lack of what he believed it would have given him. He had struggled to make up for his loss by persistent, systematic daily reading and study. Establishing the habit as a boy, he had never abandoned it. It had given him deep satisfaction, supplied, he thought, the college outlook. He believed there were thousands of men and women in the United States, scores, possibly hundreds, in his audience, who had been forced, as he had been, to sacrifice their early ambitions for education. They had hidden the hunger in their hearts where at times it still gnawed. He was offering them the same help he had found, and confidently, glowingly, he outlined the course of home reading which Dr. John H. Finley has so aptly named the American Adult Education Pioneer.

The uplifted faces all about me told the story, particularly the faces of the women of thirty or more. Women of that generation had had their natural desire for knowledge intensified by the Woman’s Rights movement, in which the strongest plank had been a demand for the opportunity for higher education. These women were now beyond the day when they could go to college, but here was something which they saw intuitively was practical.

The immediacy of their response was in a degree accounted for by their devotion to Dr. Vincent. I suppose most of the women who frequented Chautauqua were more or less in love with him, the worship a man of overflowing sentiment receives from the benches, but most of his audience would have preferred to die rather than reveal their secret passion.

Well, it was a great emotional experience with large and immediate practical results, for, before the summer session was over, eight thousand people had joined the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

They had joined, and they were buying the books chosen. The most important volume in that first year’s course was Green’s “Short History of the English People”—in my judgment the most important book save one that the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle ever included, that exception being W. C. Brownell’s “French Traits.” The sudden demand for so large and expensive a volume as Green’s History, outside of regular trade channels, followed as it was by spectacular sales of other books from which neither publisher nor writer had expected anything out of the normal, set the whole publishing world agog, and naturally raised the question, “How are we to get in on this new market?”

There were many approaches, all legitimate enough so far as I know. I found a rather amusing proof of one not long ago in Marjorie Wiggin Prescott’s fine collection of manuscripts and rare books—a volume of Lew Wallace’s “Ben Hur” enriched by a letter to the publisher, signed by Mrs. Wallace and dated November 24, 1884. The letter, which is self-explanatory, is reproduced here with Mrs. Prescott’s permission.

Crawfordsville, Nov. 24, 1884.

Dear Sir

Because of inquiries of correspondents as to the number of wives Gen. Wallace has had, I have thought best to instruct you to add to the dedication of Ben-Hur, making it:

To

The Wife of My Youth

who still abides with me

This with Gen. Wallace’s consent.

Several literary clubs have made it a handbook for study in connection with Roman History. If by some means you could have it adopted by the Chautauqua Club, which numbers twenty thousand members, it might be worth while to try. Pardon the suggestion.

May I ask you to furnish me a report of the sales of Ben-Hur, year by year, from the beginning?

With high regard,

Very truly yours

Susan E. Wallace.

As the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle grew, there came increasing necessity of a steady sympathetic administration. To help in this task it was decided in 1880 to establish a monthly organ—The Chautauquan, it was to be called—in which portions of the required readings could be published more cheaply than in book form, and through which by counsel and suggestions the leaders could keep in closer touch with the readers—better meet their needs. Dr. Vincent was quick to sense weak places in the organization, and ingenious in devising ways to take care of them. It was to try out one of his devices that Dr. Flood was now asking my temporary help.

Here was the situation that had been uncovered—hundreds of those who had joined the great circle and bought its books were without dictionaries, encyclopaedias, explanatory helps of any kind, and they lived too far away—on the Plains, in the mountains, on distant farms—to reach libraries. Headquarters were inundated with questions: How do you pronounce this word, translate this phrase? Who was this man, this woman? What does this or that mean?

“Could not The Chautauquan take care of this difficulty,” suggested Dr. Vincent, “by annotating the portions of the various texts to be read in that particular month? Let some one try it out.”

As I happened to be the “some one” within reach when Dr. Flood received the suggestion, the attempt was put up to me—temporary trial, I was made to understand. Now I had known from childhood homes and towns where there were practically no books beyond the Bible and the children’s spellers. As books had always come after bread in our household I naturally pitied those who did not have them; so I undertook the notes with the determination to make them as helpful as I could.

To my surprise and delight Dr. Vincent sent word to me that I had caught his idea, and that he had advised Dr. Flood to ask me to prepare similar notes each month.

“Will you do it?” asked Dr. Flood.

I jumped at the chance, calculating that it would take not over two weeks of my month, give me pin money, and leave time for the microscope—that my future was in it, I did not dream.

But my task required better equipped libraries than Titusville offered; Meadville, only thirty miles away, headquarters for The Chautauquan, had them, and so I arranged to do my work there, remaining until I had read the proofs—an exacting job which never ceased to worry me. What if the accent was in the wrong place? What if I brought somebody into the world in the wrong year? Something of the kind happened occasionally, and when it did I quickly discovered that, while there might be many Chautauqua readers who did not have books of reference, there were more that did and knew how to use them.

Once in touch with the office of The Chautauquan I began to see things to do. Dr. Flood had little interest in detail. The magazine was made up in a casual, and to my mind a disorderly, fashion. I could not keep my fingers off. A woman is a natural executive: that has been her business through the ages. Intuitively she picks up, sets to rights, establishes order. I began at once to exercise my inheritance, proved useful, was offered a full-time job, and threw myself heartily into an attempt to learn how to make up a magazine in the way I suspected a magazine should be made up.

When the long-suffering foreman of the printing office discovered I was in earnest he undertook my education, taught me the vocabulary—the only galley I had heard of up to that time was a war vessel of the Middle Ages—suggested dummies, and offered a model. He installed a proper respect for the dates on which copy was to be in, and forms closed: showed me the importance of clean copy by compelling me to see with my own eyes the time it took to make a correction, trained me until I could stand over the closing of the last form and direct the necessary changes to be made in order to make room for a three-line advertisement which had just arrived, and which, such was the need of The Chautauquan for advertising, must under no consideration be thrown out. When I could do that nonchalantly I felt as if I had arrived. And this training I owed to as fine a craftsman as there was in the trade at the time; as well, he was a courteous and patient gentleman—Adrian McCoy, long the head of the pressroom where The Chautauquan was printed.

My willingness to take on loose ends soon brought to my desk much of the routine office correspondence—letters to be answered by a more or less set form, signed with Dr. Flood’s name and mailed without troubling him to read them.

In this grist were many letters from readers, women chiefly, who laid their troubles and hopes on our shoulders, confident of understanding and counsel. Dr. Flood’s answers to such communications were courteous but formal. Probably he appreciated as I did not that there lay safety. I felt strongly that such an appeal or confidence should have a personal, sympathetic letter, and I began producing them, pouring out counsel and pity. I shudder now to think of the ignorant sentiment I probably spilled. But my career as a professional counselor was checked suddenly by the unexpected result of a series of letters to a contributor. This gentleman, a foreign lecturer and teacher, had been chilled by the lack of understanding by Americans of his ideals. And all of this he was expressing in letters to the office after our acceptance of one or two of his articles. I was deeply touched by his outpourings and answered in kind—of course signing my editor’s name. Then one day Dr. Flood received a letter saying that on such a day the gentleman would be in Meadville. He must see the one who so understood him. And come he did. Poor Dr. Flood did not know what it was all about.

“But these letters,” the visitor exclaimed. “Oh,” Dr. Flood said, “Miss Tarbell wrote those. We’ll speak to her.”

And so he was presented—letters in hand—Dr. Flood looking sternly at me and leaving me to my fate.

“Did you write these letters?” the bewildered and disappointed stranger asked.

All I could say was, “Yes, I wrote them.”

“And Dr. Flood never saw them?”

“No,” I said, “he never does.”

“I might have known it was a woman,” he groaned, and fled. And that was the last we ever saw or heard of him. But it made a vast difference in my editorial correspondence.

I was not satisfied, however, with setting things to rights and counseling the unhappy. Having convinced my editor-in-chief that I could keep his house in better order than he had been interested in doing, I became ambitious to contribute to its furnishing, to extend its field beyond matters purely Chautauquan. I began by offering contributions to what was called the Editor’s Table—the Editor’s Note Book. I began to write articles, even went off on trips to gather information on subjects which seemed to me to be fitting.

The first and most ambitious of these undertakings was an investigation made in the Patent Office in Washington of the amount of inventing the records showed women to have done. I had been disturbed for some time by what seemed to me the calculated belittling of the past achievements of women by many active in the campaign for suffrage. They agreed with their opponents that women had shown little or no creative power. That, they argued, was because man had purposely and jealously excluded her from his field of action. The argument was intended, of course, to arouse women’s indignation, stir them to action. It seemed to me rather to throw doubt on her creative capacity. Power to create breaks all barriers. Women had demonstrated this, I believed, again and again while carrying on what I as an observer of society was coming to regard as the most delicate, complex, and essential of all creative tasks—the making of a home. There was the field of invention. At the moment it was being said in print and on the platform that, in all the history of the Patent Office, women had taken out only some three hundred patents.

I had seen so much of woman’s ingenuity on the farm and in the kitchen that I questioned the figures; and so I went to see, feeling very important if scared at my rashness in daring to penetrate a Government department and interview its head. I was able to put my finger at once on over two thousand patents, enough to convince me that, man-made world or not, if a woman had a good idea and the gumption to seek a patent she had the same chance as a man to get one. This was confirmed by correspondence with two or three women who at the time were taking out patents regularly.

These dashes into journalism, timid and factual as were the results, gave my position more and more body, began slowly to arouse my rudimentary capacity for self-expression. At the same time my position was enriched by a novel feature of our undertaking, one that any editor of a monthly journal can appreciate. We published but ten issues, suspending in July and August in order to get out on the grounds at Chautauqua an eight-page newspaper—the Chautauqua Assembly Daily Herald. This meant moving our Meadville staff bodily to the Lake late in June.

I was soon contributing two columns of editorials a day to the Herald, comments on the daily doings of the Assembly, and making many stimulating acquaintances in doing it. Among them I valued particularly Dr. Herbert B. Adams and Dr. Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins University, men who were stirring youth and shocking the elders by liberal interpretations of history and economics. We felt rather proud of ourselves at Chautauqua that we were liberal enough to engage Dr. Adams and Dr. Ely as regular lecturers and teachers, and that our constituency accepted them, if with occasional misgivings.

It was not only the faculty of Johns Hopkins which was adding to my friends. One who remains today among those I most value came from its student body—Dr. John H. Finley. Dr. Finley gave several summers to the Assembly Herald, reading its copy and its proofs among other things. It was he who read my two columns and, no doubt, kept me out of much trouble; but once there did slip by him a misquotation over which he still chuckles when we talk of Chautauqua days. I made it a practice to head my first column with a digest of the day’s happenings—a line to an event and, as a starter for the paragraph, a quotation. I had been rather pleased one day to select a line from James Thomson:

Office staff of The Chautauquan, 1888: Miss Tarbell at left, sitting

The meek-eyed Morn appears, mother of dews.

A copy of the paper was always thrown on the verandah of my upstairs room around five o’clock in the morning, and I hopped out of bed to see what had happened to my column. That morning something dire had happened, for my quotation ran:

The weak-eyed Worm appears, mother of dews.