Part 6

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!