Part 15

In my field of biography and history the Edge of the Future meant to Mr. McClure the “unpublished” or the so poorly published that its reappearance was equal to a first appearance. The success of a feature spurred him to effort to get more of it, things which would sharpen and perpetuate the interest. He was ready to look into any suggestion, however unlikely it might seem to the cautious-minded. He was never afraid of being fooled, only of missing something.

His quick taking of a hint, his warm reception of new ideas, new facts, had its drawbacks. If they were dramatic and stirring Mr. McClure was impatient of investigation. He wanted the fun of seeing his finds quickly in print. At one point in the publication of the Napoleon he caused me real anxiety by his apparent determination to print a story for which I could find no authority.

Among the contributors to the Syndicate at that time was a picturesque European with a title and an apparently endless flow of gossip. He pretended to have been a member of the Court of Napoleon III and in the confidence of the Emperor. This relation accounted for his having been invited to join a strange secret party made up by the Emperor, who was worried over a rumor that the body of Napoleon I did not lie under the dome of the Invalides. It was not known who did lie there or what had become of Napoleon. To reassure himself the Emperor decided to go with a few chosen friends and open the tomb. They gathered in the dead of night. The tomb was opened. There lay Napoleon, unchanged. The Emperor’s mind was at rest. He swore the group to secrecy, but took affidavits to be used in case of political necessity. The fall of the Empire seems to have made the gentleman feel that his oath was no longer binding, and that he could cash in on his adventure.

I did not believe the story, but when I expressed my doubt all I could get out of Mr. McClure was a severe, “What a pity you do not know something about Napoleon!” No new idea to me, since it was the first thing I was thinking every morning when I went to work. What I did not know, as I worried over the possible publication of what I believed a fake, was that in spite of his quick and enthusiastic acceptance of a good story, S. S. McClure cared above all for the soundness, the truthfulness of the magazine. Good stories—yes. But they must hold water, stand the scrutiny of those who knew. Moreover, he knew what I did not as yet, that he could go the limit in his enthusiasms since he had at his side a partner on whom he counted more, I think, than he then realized to balance his excitements.

This happened now. The story was in type, scheduled. Mr. McClure was going to Europe. “While you’re over there, Sam,” said his partner quietly, “you better verify that Napoleon story. We’ll hold it until we hear from you.”

A few weeks later came a laconic postal card. “Don’t publish the story of the opening of Napoleon’s tomb. It wasn’t opened.”

I never heard the matter referred to after that. By the time he returned he had forgotten what to me was a near tragedy, to him a joyful bit of editorial adventure.

I came later to feel that this quick kindling of the imagination, this untiring curiosity, this determination to run down every clue until you had it there on the table, its worth or worthlessness in full view, was one of Mr. McClure’s greatest assets; but it was an asset that would have landed him frequently in hot water if it had not been for the partner who had saved him from the Napoleon hoax, John S. Phillips—J. S. P. as he was known in the office.

Living in Washington as I had been doing, I had seen little of Mr. Phillips, only heard of him, for his name was the one oftenest on Mr. McClure’s tongue. His calm and tactful handling of the “General,” as the office called Mr. McClure, in the ticklish Napoleon story delighted me.

“Here’s a man,” I told myself, “who has a nose for humbugs as well as one who knows the power of patience when dealing with the impatient.”

[Illustration:

_At her desk in the McClure’s office, 1898_ ]

As time went on and I spent more and more of it in New York, finally settling there at the end of the decade, I had better opportunities to watch Mr. Phillips in action. I was not long in learning that he was the focus of every essential factor in the making of the magazine: circulation, finance, editing. Into the pigeonhole of his old-fashioned roll-top desk went daily reports of bank balances, subscriptions received, advertising contracts to be signed, books sold. I doubt if he ever went home at night without having a digest of those reports in his head. He knew their relation to the difficult problem of putting the undertaking on its feet.

It was largely Mr. Phillips’ love of fine printing and his habit of keeping track of the advances in printing processes that led _McClure’s_ late in the nineties to set up its own plant. It included all of the new miraculous self-feeding machines, automatic presses, folders, binders, stitchers.

It was the first magazine plant of the kind in the country and had many visitors. Among them was Mark Twain. Mr. Phillips tells an amusing story of his visit. As they stood watching the press perform, a sheet went awry on the bed. The press at once stopped and rang a bell calling for the pressman, who immediately came and helped the big automat out of its plight.

“My God, man!” cried Mark Twain, “That thing ought to vote.”

It did more than cast votes for _McClure’s_. It saved the money which finally balanced the budget—and then some.

To those of us on the inside it was always a marvel that John Phillips found time to be an editor, as well as a focusing center for everything that went on. At the bottom of his constant editorial supervision was, I think, a passion for the profession. He was unmistakably the most intellectual, as well as the best intellectually trained, person in the office. After graduating at Knox College in Illinois he had taken a degree at Harvard and later spent two years studying literature and philosophy in the University of Leipzig. When he came to the magazine he put all his training into the professional problem.

He was an invaluable aid to the group of staff writers the magazine was building up. He was no easy editor. He never wheedled, never flattered, but rigidly tried to get out of you what he conceived to be your best, taking it for granted that you wanted to make the most of your piece and it was his business to help you. I never had an editor who so quickly and unerringly spotted weaknesses, particularly in construction. He had a fine feeling, too, for the right word, took the trouble to search for it, often bringing in a penciled memo of suggestions long after you had decided to let it go as it was. He knew the supreme value of naturalness, detested fake style. “A kind of disease,” I have heard him say, quoting somebody.

It always disturbed a few of us that nobody outside of the office knew what an important part in the making of _McClure’s_ John Phillips played. He had that rare virtue—the willingness and ability to keep out of the picture if thereby he could make sure the picture was not spoiled in the making.

The one member of the staff besides Mr. McClure whom I knew, when I began to find myself so to speak absorbed, was already by virtue of his unusual gift for comradeship a friend as well as a species of boss—that was Auguste F. Jaccaci, a brilliant artist and art editor as well as one of the most versatile and iridescent personalities I have ever known. I first met Jac, as he was called by everybody, in Paris, when as an advance agent of the new magazine he was sounding out possibilities for writers and illustrators. He took me out to dinner and paid the _addition_. We talked until late, then he simply put me on my omnibus and let me go back to the Latin Quarter alone. Here was established the _modus operandi_ for our frequent visiting in the future, in Paris, in New York, in Washington—with one revision. After that first dinner I paid my share of the check, save on special occasions when Jac, a knowing epicure, selected the dinner and treated me.

It was he who showed me the first copy of _McClure’s_, that of August, 1893, showed it to me at five-thirty in the morning, at a café across the square from the Gare Saint-Lazare where he had ordered me by cablegram from London to meet him. For nobody in the world excepting a member of my family should I have been willing at that hour to cross Paris. But I couldn’t afford to show a lack of interest. Moreover, I must confess that this preposterous order flattered me a little. It was taking me man to man, I said to myself. And so I was there. He had to bully the garçon to get a table out on the sidewalk and make us coffee.

All this was a good basis for a comradeship which lasted to his death. It lives in my memory as something quite apart in my relations with men. Jac had a certain superior appreciation and wisdom never quite put into words, but which you felt. I for my part was always straining to understand, never quite reaching it. Part of his charm was his confidence in his own superiority and his anxiety lest we didn’t quite realize it. And then there were his rages. They came and went like terrible summer thundershowers. He would roar down the corridor of the office while I sat and watched him enthralled. Those rages, whether directed at me or somebody else, never made any other impression on me than that of some unusual natural phenomenon.

Here then were the leaders in the crowd to which I had been admitted by virtue of a hasty sketch of Napoleon Bonaparte done on order.

Thank God I had sense enough to realize that here were three rare personalities, and that to miss such associations would be sheer stupidity. Also to know that I was an unusually lucky woman to be accepted.

Then there was the magazine they were making. There was something youthful, gay, natural about it which captivated me. Often, too, it achieved a most precious thing. Mr. Phillips called it a “lift.” To be youthful, gay, natural with a “lift”—that was an achievement.

And then I found the place so warmly and often ridiculously human. Mr. McClure was incapable of standing up before a hard-luck story, with the result that he brought into that overcrowded office a string of derelicts ranging from autocratic scrub ladies to indigent editors—brought them in and left them for J. S. P. to place. But J. S. P. was not far behind in his sympathy for those who were down and out. I watched him more than once rescue an author who perhaps out of sheer discouragement had taken to drink and landed in jail. Mr. Phillips saw that he was bailed out, his debts paid, work given him. I never ceased to wonder that these two men loaded with work and responsibility should seemingly consider it part of their daily job to rescue the wastrel and the disheartened.

There was reason enough for me to stay with _McClure’s_.

9 GOOD-BYE TO FRANCE

The Napoleon sketch had not been finished before Mr. McClure was urging me into a new job—not writing this time, but editing, editing according to his recipe. “Out with you—look, see, report.” Abraham Lincoln was the subject. My heart fell. “If you once get into American history,” I told myself, “you know well enough that will finish France. It will also finish your determination to solve the woman question and determine the nature of revolutions. They will go the way of the microscope and your search for God. Are you to spend your life running, now here, now there, never follow a path to its end?” Or was I taking my ambitions too seriously? It seemed probable. However, I was to have five thousand a year if I went along. There was no question in my mind but it was my duty to earn that money.

Lincoln was one of Mr. McClure’s steady enthusiasms. I once saw him, in puzzled efforts to find the reason for the continued life of a certain great American magazine, going through the file from the Civil War on, solely to find out what attention had been given to Lincoln. “Not a Lincoln article in this volume, nor in this,” he cried. “It is not a great magazine, it has overlooked the most vital factor in our life since the Civil War, the influence of the life and character of Abraham Lincoln.”

His insight told him that people never had had enough of Lincoln. Moreover, he believed that there was to be had for the seeking a large amount of “unpublished” reminiscences. It was on this conviction that he started me off.

He was right about “unpublished” material. Lincoln had been dead only about thirty years, and hundreds of those who had known him in one connection or another were still living. His secretaries Nicolay and Hay had finished their great documentary life of their chief. They should have personal material not in their volumes. There were members of his Cabinet still living, members of Congress of his time, editors like Joseph Medill of the Chicago _Tribune_, Horace White of the Chicago _Tribune_ and later of the New York _Evening Post_, Colonel McClure of the Philadelphia _Inquirer_. There were scores of men in Illinois towns who had traveled the circuit with him, for whom he acted as counsel, scores of people who had as a youth heard the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and had been stirred to say, “Lincoln’s got it right.” They had followed him in his fight against the extension of slavery and later into the war to save the Union. There was indeed no point of his short trail from birth to death where living men and women had not known him as colleagues, friends, opponents, critics.

Also, there had never been a time from the day he had become a Presidential candidate to the hour of his assassination that his life had not been under scrutiny. Yet it had been difficult to find out much about him. “There is not much of me,” he told a friend searching for biographical material. But there had been enough always to touch deep springs in American hearts and consciences. Men like William Dean Howells and J. G. Holland, later to occupy high places in our literary life, had written campaign lives of him. Hardly was he in his coffin before his brilliant, if unstable, law partner William Herndon was gathering from all sources reminiscences, estimates, documents on his life up to the Presidency; and from his gathering Herndon made a story of extraordinary vitality and color. Most important—always to remain most important—was the collection of his Letters and Speeches and the ten-volume “Abraham Lincoln: A History” by Nicolay and Hay.

Why do more? What was there to be had? Mr. McClure insisted that there was plenty if one searched.

I went to talk it over with John Nicolay, who as well as his fine daughter Helen was an honored member of the famous old Washington Literary Society where I was a frequent guest. I told him what Mr. McClure proposed. Did he not have something he could give me? He was emphatic in saying there was nothing of importance to be had. The collection of letters and speeches he and Mr. Hay had made was complete; they had told all there was worth telling of Lincoln’s life. He would advise me not to touch so hopeless an assignment. I think Mr. Nicolay never quite forgave me for going ahead. Later when the results of my search began to appear and gradually to shape themselves into a Life of Lincoln he came to me one evening to protest. “You are invading my field. You write a popular Life of Lincoln and you do just so much to decrease the value of my property.”

I was deeply distressed. He thought me a poacher. I told him I believed he was mistaken. I pleaded that if I could write anything which people would read I was making readers for him. To know a little of Lincoln was for the serious a desire to know more. He and Mr. Hay had written something that all students must have. I could never hope to make an essential lasting contribution. But he went away unconvinced.

Mr. Nicolay’s point of view, if not generous, was certainly honest. I understand it better now than I did then. He had lived through the great years of the Civil War always at Lincoln’s elbow. He had been the stern, careful, humorless guardian of a man who carried his mail in his hat and a laugh on his lips. His reverence for him was a religion. He had given years of conscientious hard labor to the editing of the “Complete Works” and the writing of the history, and now he was retired. Lincoln was his whole life. We all come to rest our case on the work to which we have given our best years, frequently come to live on that, so to speak. When the time comes that our field is invaded by new workers, enlarged, reshaped, made to yield new fruit, we suffer shock. We may put up a “No trespassing” sign, but all to no use.

Mr. Nicolay’s tragedy was in not having found a fresh field. How different it was with his colleague John Hay, whose secretaryship with Lincoln had been an episode in a diplomatic career of unusual distinction and usefulness! In 1894 everybody recognized that he had a greater future before him. His part in the Life of Lincoln had been but one of many contributions to the literature of his day. His social circle was the choicest, and he was rich. Hay had everything; Nicolay, only Lincoln, and he looked on all who touched his field as invaders.

Mr. Nicolay’s rebuff settled my plan of campaign. I would not begin at the end of the story with the great and known, but at the start in Kentucky with the humble and unknown; I would follow the trail chronologically; I would see for myself what sort of people and places those were that had known Lincoln, reconstruct the life of his day as far as living men and women backed by published records furnished reliable material. I would gather documents as I went, bits of color, stories, recollections; I would search in courthouses and county histories and newspapers; I would pick up pictures as I went, a picture of everything that directly or indirectly touched on what I was after. I would make sure if among these people who had known him there might not be letters not in the “Complete Works”; and, if I were lucky, somewhere on the trail I might turn up the important unpublished reminiscences which Mr. McClure was so certain existed. It was a gamble, the greater because I was so profoundly ignorant of American life and history.

It was in February of 1895, the Napoleon work still unfinished, though far enough ahead to give me a month for a preliminary survey, that I started for the Lincoln country of Kentucky to begin work on this program. It was characteristic of Mr. McClure, as he saw me off in the deadly cold, to take sudden alarm for my comfort. “Have you warm _bed socks_?” he asked anxiously. “We’ll send you some if not. It will be awful in those Kentucky hotels.” It was—Louisville aside—awful in more than one hotel and train in my first month of Lincoln hunting.

The results were not exciting. They were too fragmentary: bits of unrecorded recollections, a picture, a letter, a newspaper paragraph, a court record which had passed notice. What was to be done with them? Here was no smashing new contribution such as an article of unpublished recollections from Mr. Nicolay might have been, but here were bits of value if you were to enlarge and retouch the popular notion of the man Lincoln. It was soon clear to Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips that what I was collecting must be dovetailed into the published records; and that, they told me, was my business. Before I knew it I was writing a Life of Lincoln, though the first three chapters carried the legend, “Edited by Ida M. Tarbell.” The office seemed gradually to conclude that the editor had become the author, though I think they were ahead of me in this decision.

We had a lucky break at the start which launched the undertaking even better, I think, than the big article we were looking for. Among my Washington acquaintances was a delightful Chicago woman, Mrs. Emily Lyons. She belonged to the group of early settlers who were still at this time in the thick of the exciting struggle to make the city the richest, the finest physically and socially in the country. Their energy, their daring, their confidence, their eagerness to learn, to adapt, was one of the social phenomena of the day. Now Mrs. Lyons’ husband was important in the wealth-producing class as she was in the social. She knew practically everybody. When she learned that I was interested in new material on Lincoln she said at once: “Come to Chicago. I’ll see that you meet Robert Lincoln, and I’ll see that he gives you something.” Too good to be true. But Mrs. Lyons kept her promise when I reached Chicago on my first expedition, producing Mr. Lincoln at once.

“Now, Robert,” she ordered as she filled our cups, “I want you to give her something worth while.”