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All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography Flashcards

Ida M. (Ida Minerva) Tarbell · Public domain edition · 414 cards · 114 chapters

Ida Tarbell’s autobiography recounts her Pennsylvania childhood, her father’s oil business, and her later investigative work. This deck covers her family’s moves and early oil-industry memories, including the 1861 Rouse well accident.

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Chapter 1 · Question

Why was Ida Tarbell born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, rather than Iowa?

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Section 14 cards

Why was Ida Tarbell born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, rather than Iowa?
Her parents had planned to settle in Taylor County, Iowa, where her father secured a claim and built a house. But the Panic of 1857 closed every county bank in Pennsylvania, leaving no money to move her mother west. The panic also dried up Iowa's money supply, so the family lived by barter. She was born in her grandfather Walter Raleigh McCullough's log house on November 5, 1857.
Chapter 1
How did Tarbell's father finally reunite with his family in 1859?
After the fall and winter of 1857 and the spring and summer of 1858 passed with no money available, he started out in the fall of 1858 to teach his way back to them. Before finding a school he walked one hundred and eighty miles, until his shoes and clothes were worn and tattered. In the spring of 1859, when Ida was a year and a half old, he reached his wife in the Erie County log house.
Chapter 1
What did Tarbell's grandmother insist on regarding her granddaughters' conduct?
She was full of strict New England rules for training girls to be ladies. Living in a log house was acceptable, since many of the best families had done so while settling the country, but the girls must never forget who they were. She recited the family's ancestry—McCullough, Raleigh, Seabury, Welles—as a litany her four daughters all had to learn.
Chapter 1
Why did Tarbell's mother stay with her family instead of joining her husband in Iowa?
Her husband needed to earn money to take them back to Iowa, so her waiting continued. Although she had taught for a dozen years in Erie County district schools and a private school in Poughkeepsie, she was married and must stay with her family until her husband had a home ready. Tarbell notes her grandmother ruled this, full of strict New England rules for training girls.
Chapter 1

Section 24 cards

What business did Tarbell's father start after the Titusville oil discovery?
He built oil tanks. After seeing the well near Titusville, he reasoned that if wells kept producing, the oil would need storage. He offered to build a tank holding five hundred or more barrels; a well owner said, "Show me a model that won't leak, and I'll give you an order." He made the model, got the order, and by summer 1860 had a shop at the mouth of Cherry Run. Tank building used his trade as a joiner, so Iowa could wait.
Chapter 2
How had Tarbell's father known crude petroleum before the Titusville well?
From traveling the Allegheny and Ohio, he was familiar with crude petroleum. He had used it to grease creaking machinery and as a medicine—a general cure-all called Seneca oil—for colds, fever and ague, and the weak lungs that had afflicted him since boyhood. He also knew some believed rock oil, found in sufficient quantity, would make a better light than the coal and whale oils then in common use.
Chapter 2
Why did young Ida revolt against her new home near Cherry Run?
She called it the first thing she was sure she remembered—a revolt she deemed a natural and righteous protest against having a loved life and home taken away without explanation and new rules suddenly imposed. The log house had held animals, woods, a fireplace, and her as only grandchild at the center. Now there were perils, scoldings, a baby in her mother's arms, and a still-strange man giving orders.
Chapter 2
What happened when three-year-old Ida tried to run away to Grandma's?
Just after her third birthday she announced she was leaving, "Going back to Grandma." Her mother said, "Very well." Ida followed the path the men took from the shop but stopped at an embankment across the valley that looked mountain-high and black. Reaching its foot, she realized she had never been on the other side and did not know the way, so she sat down, beaten, looking at the shanty's lit window.
Chapter 2

Section 34 cards

How did Tarbell's mother respond when Ida returned, unable to find Grandma's?
Her mother asked why she had not gone, and when Ida said she did not know the way, simply told her to come in and get supper. Tarbell says no punishment, no laughter—she was accepted. Her mother later described watching her leave sturdily and return droopingly, weeping but resolved that Ida must learn the lesson. The author argues her mother always let her carry out her revolts and return without questions.
Chapter 3
What did young Ida's experiment with her little brother in the brook prove?
Watching the brook, she noticed some things floated and others sank, and wondered which category her brother, then in dresses, belonged to. She led him onto a footbridge and dropped him in; his skirts spread and held him up, and a workman rescued him when he screamed. She recalls only satisfied curiosity—certainty that her brother was among the things that floated.
Chapter 3
What happened at Henry Rouse's well on the evening of April 17, 1861?
News of Sumter's fall had gathered the town's men to discuss it when word came that a fresh vein of oil had been struck in Henry Rouse's well and was spouting over the derrick. As they ran to see it, a careless light ignited gas spread from the flowing oil, and the earth was rocked by an explosion. Nineteen men, including Rouse, were burned to death.
Chapter 3
What did Tarbell remember of the oil industry's effect on the landscape?
She writes that no early industry was more destructive of beauty, order, and decency than petroleum production: derricks, engine-houses, tanks, and earth streaked with pump dumpings; if a well flowed, trees, shrubs, and grass were coated with black grease and left to die; dry wells left rickety derricks and debris, since nobody cleaned up. Moving to the Rouseville hillside, she says she did not see the derricks for the trees.
Chapter 3

Section 54 cards

Why did Ida's father and mother, though Presbyterians, become and remain Methodists?
The vigilante men and women who decided to build Rouseville's first church agreed it should belong to the denomination with the largest number in the community. The Methodists had the numbers, so Ida's Presbyterian parents became and remained Methodists, supporting the church actively—attending class meeting, Sunday school (where both taught), prayer meeting, and every night of a revival.
Chapter 5
What first awakened Ida's interest in the stars, and who was responsible?
Her father's oil-farm partner, M. E. Hess, lived on a hill farm above Petroleum Center. Riding back to Rouseville at night, he would stop to name stars, trace constellations, and repeat legends. Ida says her first consciousness of space, its beauty and something more than beauty, came then—a counterbalance to the town below and the Police Gazette.
Chapter 5
What did Ida realize at the Mourners' bench, and what lasting effect did it have?
She went forward in her tenth or eleventh year not from guilt but because everyone else did. Kneeling, she was conscious that the crimson ribbons on her hat must look beautiful on her cream-colored coat. That realization of hypocrisy cut her to the heart; she then knew herself a sinner. She never confessed this, but it aroused self-observation and made her wary of strangers.
Chapter 5
How did Ida describe her piano training and her later role in Titusville High School?
A music teacher appeared in the community and she was set at five-finger exercises and kept at them for years, finding no joy in it—though she believes a different teacher might have touched a spring, since she is not without appreciation of music. She mastered the mechanics well enough to become a regular performer at Titusville High School's morning exercises, a memory she has only secondhand.
Chapter 5

Section 64 cards

What made the Tarbell family choose Titusville as their permanent home?
The author states that it was the Titusville schools which determined her father and mother to make the town their permanent home. Titusville, unlike mushroom oil towns, was a substantial pre-oil settlement that kept order and, after churches, gave schools the most attention, attracting families who wanted a town fit for their children.
Chapter 6
How did the Bonta House become the Tarbell home in Titusville?
After the Pithole boom collapsed around 1869, the Bonta House—said to have cost $60,000—was sold cheaply. The author's father paid $600, tore the building down, loaded its iron brackets, doors, windows, mouldings, and much timber onto wagons, and carted it ten miles to Titusville, where he built the family's home from it.
Chapter 6
How did Tarbell become a model pupil after being a truant?
At thirteen, unused to crowded rooms and feeling unrecognized by her teacher, she became a truant. The teacher spotted her and delivered a scathing lecture. Tarbell recalls feeling not ashamed but amazed, yet something in her asserted itself—she supposes a decent respect for the opinions of mankind was born—and she instantly became a model pupil.
Chapter 6
Which textbooks first awakened Tarbell's curiosity and desire to learn?
She describes being set to solve puzzles—mathematics and translations—without seeing their relation to her life, until certain textbooks became the sesame that freed her curiosity and set her working beyond them. These were a series she suspects a modern teacher might laugh at: Steele's Fourteen Weeks in Zoology, Geology, Botany, Natural Philosophy, and Chemistry.
Chapter 6

Section 71 cards

What did Tarbell realize when her school studies turned to plants, insects, and stones?
She had collected such things since childhood but had only learned their common names, never seeing them as subjects for study. When schoolwork turned to them, her pleasure became duty and school became exciting; she could justify her pre-breakfast tramps and collections, and she soon knew she was to be a scientist.
Chapter 7

Section 83 cards

What did Tarbell conclude about the rebate scheme from her father's talk?
She concluded the scheme was wrong, comparing it to someone crowding her off the road. Her father argued railroads ran through the valley by the people's consent and had a right of way, so giving one man privileges they denied another was wrong. She later rejected the claim that everybody took rebates, insisting it was fought tooth and nail and could not be universal by its nature.
Chapter 8
How did Dr. Amos Norton Craft differ from other ministers facing science?
Tarbell describes Craft, pastor of the Titusville Methodist Church, as a brilliant, indefatigable student who set aside $200 yearly for books. While most ministers took refuge in declaring scientific conclusions profane and godless, Craft accepted them and strove to fit them into the Christian system, announcing evening lectures on reconciling Genesis and Geology.
Chapter 8
What troubled Tarbell most about possibly leaving the church?
She felt she ought to leave because she no longer believed what she was supposed to believe, but she lacked any pride in emancipation. What troubled her most was having nothing to put in place of what the church gave her—summed up in 'Do as you would be done by,' the unwritten law of the Tarbell household. Miller and Spencer offered her nothing to replace it.
Chapter 8

Section 94 cards

Why did Tarbell reject the resurrection and personal immortality?
She could not accept the resurrection or the promise of personal immortality, a doubt that grew when she first felt the vastness of the universe. She concluded that immortality is not her business, that mortal life offers too much to attend to without overspeculating on the next world, and that assurance about the afterlife is not necessary to her peace of mind or usefulness. She adds that such assurance may be necessary for many others, and she does not scoff at their claimed revelations.
Chapter 9
What did Tarbell call the real tragedy of losing a six-day creation?
The real tragedy was not giving up heaven but the birth of doubt and uncertainty in her. Nothing was ever again to be final; when facing a problem, system, scheme, code, or leader she would ask, "How can I accept without knowing more?" She calls the quest of truth the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man's quests.
Chapter 9
How did the word "evolution" and a microscope change Tarbell's plans?
Groping and frightened, she found the word evolution: things grew, and she wanted to find their starting point and see how they grew into something else. To find the start of life she turned to the microscope, her first and greatest intellectual passion. She saved money for a small instrument, set it up in the Titusville house's tower room, and that microscope largely determined her decision to go to college and become a microscopist.
Chapter 9
What did the Fourteenth Amendment's word "male" provoke, and who led the response?
The Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 introduced the word "male" into the Constitution for the first time, outraging equal-rights advocates and many women who had not approved earlier agitations. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the greatest early leaders, failed to keep the humiliating distinction out and began a tremendous national crusade for woman's suffrage, marshaling splendid women in an intensive campaign meant to reach every woman. It reached Titusville and the Tarbell home.
Chapter 9

Section 104 cards

Why did Stanton and Anthony's alliances scandalize other suffragists?
The author recalls that Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony had a propensity for forming alliances shocking to their oldest and wisest friends. Before the war they had recklessly supported easier divorce, and in 1870 they brought Victoria Woodhull into their camp, prompting a considerable exodus of scandalized ladies. Woodhull's candidacy and her role in the Beecher-Tilton scandal further involved the two leaders.
Chapter 10
How did Tarbell describe Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin's careers?
The author says the sisters began as clairvoyants and became the two best known and best paid trance-physicians of their day. Victoria claimed to have raised a child from the dead; Tennessee reportedly earned enough to support thirty-five relations. Both frankly advocated free love. In the 1860s they entered Wall Street as the 'lady brokers,' building a profitable business, and Commodore Vanderbilt was said to have proposed marriage to Victoria.
Chapter 10
What two rights did Tarbell single out from the rights agitation?
Out of the agitation for rights as it reached her, the author says two rights worth going after quite definitely segregated themselves: the right to an education and the right to earn her living—education and economic independence. She grew more determined to be independent, saw teaching as the one way, and concluded she must go to college to fit herself for it.
Chapter 10
Why did Tarbell choose Allegheny College over Cornell?
Tarbell had chosen Cornell, first opened to women in 1872, intending to teach natural science and become a biologist. Then Dr. Lucius Bugbee, president of Allegheny College thirty miles away, stayed as an over-Sunday guest and painted its advantages: near home, a ward of her church, and open to women earlier. She felt a responsibility to be a pioneer and prove women wanted and could handle college education.
Chapter 10

Section 114 cards

What did Tarbell resolve about marriage, and why?
Tarbell decided she would never marry, believing it would interfere with her plan and fetter her freedom. She admits she did not fully understand what freedom meant, and later reflects that it exists only in the spirit, never in human relations. She notes her early prayer may have echoed the era's cry that woman was a slave in a man-made world.
Chapter 11
What did Tarbell bring to Allegheny College in fall 1876?
She brought a Purpose, spelled with a capital, plus an outline of the route to realize it. She says making outlines was the one fruit of her long struggle with grammar, rhetoric, and composition; outlines that held together cleared her mind and gave it something to follow. She calls this a sound beginning for one who would earn her living by writing.
Chapter 11
How did Timothy Alden fund and build Allegheny College?
Alden arrived in Meadville in 1815 to find a log courthouse for a schoolhouse and little money. In 1816 he went East and returned with $361 and books worth $1,642.26, given in small amounts by many donors. In 1819 William Bentley of Salem left his famous book collection to the college, which made Bentley Hall necessary; its cornerstone was laid in 1820.
Chapter 11
What did Bentley Hall and the library mean to Tarbell?
Bentley Hall was the first really beautiful building Tarbell had seen, a revelation she had never dreamed of; she calls it second only to Independence Hall as Colonial architecture in Pennsylvania. In Ruter Hall's top-floor library, holding the Bentley and Judge Winthrop collections, she found the companionship there is in the silent presence of books.
Chapter 11

Section 124 cards

When did Allegheny College vote to admit women, and how did it compare to other universities?
Allegheny voted to admit women in 1870, with some misgivings. That was the same year the University of Michigan opened its doors to women, and two years before Cornell did. Ten women had graduated in the six years before Tarbell entered, where she found two seniors, two juniors, no sophomores, and herself as the lone freshman among forty hostile or indifferent boys.
Chapter 12
What campus restriction did Tarbell encounter, and to what did she compare it?
Tarbell sat under a tree on the sloping campus green and was urgently called back by an upper-class woman, who told her only men went on that side of the walk. She compared this exclusion to the closing of the college green that Virginia Woolf describes in "A Room of One's Own," noting she had the same experience nearly fifty years before Woolf's book was written.
Chapter 12
Who was Jeremiah Tingley, and what teaching method did he bring from Agassiz?
Tingley was head of Allegheny's natural science department, about fifty, sparkling and informal, and had spent a summer with Louis Agassiz at the Penikese Summer School. He carried Agassiz's faith in observation and classification and his method of urging students to look outside the book. From Agassiz's stone exercise came the laboratory watchword: "It is not the outside, it is the inside of things that matters."
Chapter 12
What was the Memopomo Alleghaniensis, and why did it excite Tarbell?
The Memopomo Alleghaniensis, or mud puppy, was a creature twelve to fifteen inches long, peculiar to the valley's waters, with gills and one lung, able to live in water or mud as circumstances required. Tarbell called it slimy and loathsome yet worked over it with awe, since evolution, which she clung to determinedly, could only be established by discovering such links.
Chapter 12

Section 134 cards

What did Tarbell learn from Professor Jeremiah Tingley's enthusiasm?
Tarbell says Tingley's enthusiasm for the telephone was her most lasting college experience, more memorable than the telephone itself. She contrasts him with people she had known who treated work as a curse, per Puritan teaching. She argues enthusiasm has power to warm and illuminate, and that Tingley tried to stir students to share his joy in his job.
Chapter 13
What did Tarbell learn from George Haskins's contempt?
Haskins, holding the Latin chair, showed contempt for students' indifference, neglect, and slack preparation. Tarbell says this was new to her, since she had considered sparing others' feelings a superior grace. She credits Haskins with inspiring her contempt for shiftlessness and her determination to work regularly, keep hours, and study whether she liked a thing or not.
Chapter 13
How did Tarbell describe her social awkwardness before college?
Tarbell says she reached college at eighteen without ever having dared look fully into the face of any boy her age. She did not dance, since Methodist discipline forbade it, and was uninterested in games. She had secret passions for older individuals she never spoke to, and her delights were hills, drives, family doings, French reading, and evening walks.
Chapter 13
Why did Tarbell wear four fraternity pins to chapel?
Fraternities competed to put their pins on acceptable town and college girls, tagging them as Delta, Gamma, or Phi Psi girls. Tarbell resented being tagged and wanted friends in all fraternities, so she accumulated four pins and wore them all to chapel one morning. She says she nearly became a social outcast afterward.
Chapter 13

Section 144 cards

How did Tarbell later judge her four years at Allegheny College?
She regarded them as among the most profitable of her life, measured by what she got rather than what she did not get and had to learn later. She argues that for a sufficiently developed mind the classics are a fruitful field for seeing life as it is, though she admits she was not mature enough to absorb George Haskins' teachings on Cicero, Tacitus, and Livy.
Chapter 14
What position and salary did Tarbell take after graduating in 1880?
She signed a contract with the Poland Union Seminary of Poland, Ohio, an institution she had never heard of until negotiations opened, to serve as Preceptress at $500 a year 'and board yourself.' She was jubilant because it meant economic independence, which she called the first plank in her platform.
Chapter 14
How did the villagers of Poland react to Tarbell's arrival as Preceptress?
They stopped her on the street to say she was taking Miss Blakeley's place and to express how badly they felt about Blakeley resigning, noting generations had attended school to her. They told Tarbell she looked pretty young and lacked experience, making clear they did not regard her as an adequate substitute. Their insistence left her ready to resign within her first fortnight.
Chapter 14
What teaching load and institutional pressures confronted Tarbell at Poland Seminary?
She started with two classes in each of four languages—Greek, Latin, French, and German—plus geology, botany, geometry, and trigonometry. She also faced the two largest classes, 'verb grammar' and 'percentage arithmetic,' long run for district schoolteachers who spent one term a year there and insisted on them like a ritual. As the numerical backbone of the school, their satisfaction was deemed most important.
Chapter 14

Section 154 cards

What did Tarbell discover was the district schoolteachers' real weakness?
After two months, Tarbell learned that the district schoolteachers solved problems and parsed sentences not by principles but by memorized answers they had learned at the seminary, returning year after year to keep those solutions fresh. She then tested them with examples from outside their books, arguing the only important thing is knowing principles and being able to apply them.
Chapter 15
What advice did banker Robert Walker give Tarbell on the street?
Robert Walker, the local banker and the most important man in the Village, stopped Tarbell and told her she was following a fine teacher, then said not to worry and to keep a stiff upper lip. Tarbell says this advice, coming from him, restored her and made her resolve to master her district schoolteachers.
Chapter 15
Why did Tarbell and Mr. Lee agree she should resign from the seminary?
Mr. Lee wanted someone ambitious to make teaching a life work and to help preserve the school as a seminary, but Tarbell saw teaching as a mere stepping-stone in her plan of life. Her hope of saving money on five hundred dollars a year proved illusory, she had to borrow from her father, and so she resigned in June, 1882.
Chapter 15
Who was Clara 'Dot' Walker and what role did she play for Tarbell?
Clara Walker, called Dot, was Robert Walker's daughter and became one of Tarbell's dearest friends. Tarbell says Dot instigated her father's 'stiff upper lip' advice and, the first week of school, appeared at the seminary door to announce herself Tarbell's champion, making the two Poland years the happiest of her life to that point.
Chapter 15

Section 164 cards

What did Tarbell say she witnessed on the night drive from the theater?
Returning from the theater through the furnace district, Tarbell saw the aftermath of a burst furnace: men had been trapped by molten metal, and their charred remains were being carried across the road. She calls it an unforgettable horror and says this was where she first learned of the terrible dangers in smelting ore.
Chapter 16
What did Tarbell observe about women during a mill shutdown protest?
Tarbell came upon a maddened, threatening crowd rushing toward the offices of mills that had been shut down without warning. It was led by big, robust, shrieking women with flying hair and disheveled clothes. She says this first challenged her faith in the universally peaceful nature of her sex and taught her the meaning of Maenads and Furies.
Chapter 16
How did the Walker farm handle miners during mine shutdowns?
Coal was mined as a side line of the farm, with little houses for miners near the shaft. When dull times came and the mine shut down, the farmers took on their care: slaughtering many pigs, putting down barrels of pork, smoking hams, and making sausages and headcheese. The hostess explained mining is unstable business, so they must see that miners have food.
Chapter 16
What did Tarbell say the Poland years showed her about industry?
Tarbell says that years later she realized those two years in Poland gave her a vivid picture of what happens to the farmer, his home, his town, and his children when industry invades his land. She describes industry conquering: destruction of beauty, breakdown of conduct standards, love of money for its own sake, and social problems from the inflow of foreigners and unstable work.
Chapter 16

Section 173 cards

How did Robert Walker financially back McKinley's early campaigns?
From McKinley's first congressional campaign in 1875, Walker advanced him $2,000 for expenses, repeating equal advances before each successive campaign. The understanding was that $1,000 a year would be paid on the debt. Walker was McKinley's chief, and for a time perhaps only, financial backer from the start of his political career.
Chapter 17
What did McKinley advise Robert Walker to do, and what happened?
McKinley encouraged Walker to establish a tinware stamping plant in Youngstown, Ohio, taking brother-in-law Andrew J. Duncan as partner, and gave Walker signed notes to use when he needed money. The plant started in 1890 amid the depression of the nineties; Walker soon had to use the notes, and the works closed in February 1893.
Chapter 17
How did McKinley's political friends explain his involvement in the Walker failure?
When the failure threatened McKinley's 1896 prospects, the Republican Committee raised the money rather than let him quit politics. Their public explanation, as Herbert Croly calls it, was that McKinley was the victim of "a man named Walker," who had deceived him about how much money he was raising on his notes. Tarbell reports Walker and his daughter denied any note was cashed without consulting McKinley, and that McKinley never denied the stigma placed on Walker.
Chapter 17

Section 184 cards

Why did Tarbell return home in June 1882 instead of pursuing higher studies?
She had decided her first step toward economic independence, the Poland venture, was a mistake. Asking her father to finance higher studies was out of the question in 1882: the country was entering the depression of '83 and '84, and the oil business was in a serious state for producers. Her home, however, was open to her.
Chapter 18
What did Tarbell's parents mean by keeping their home open?
They saw the home not as something belonging only to them for comfort and privacy, but as a place for any in the family procession who had no other place to go. Her mother's answer to a request to return was always "Of course, that is your right." Tarbell saw the same openness extended to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and grandchildren regardless of burden.
Chapter 18
How did Tarbell get her start at The Chautauquan?
The Tarbell household customarily entertained Methodist ministers who filled the pulpit. The winter after her return from Poland, the guest was Dr. Theodore L. Flood, a retired preacher who edited The Chautauquan in Meadville. He asked her to help out for a month or two in a new department, and she quickly accepted, glad to be useful.
Chapter 18
What did the Chautauqua platform offer, and what caught Tarbell there?
The platform brought stirring contacts with current intellectual life: great speakers on many subjects and fine concerts. Tarbell was caught by the scientific lectures, especially Dr. R. Ogden Doremus's platform experiments, assisted by two skillful women. Most of all she was aroused by microscope demonstrations in a side building, and dreamed of lessons from the women.
Chapter 18

Section 194 cards

What did Dr. Vincent announce at Chautauqua in 1878?
Dr. Vincent announced a four-year course of home reading under Chautauqua management, aimed at men and women who had missed a college education but desired knowledge and a college outlook. It was called the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. The author calls it his masterpiece, delivered in the finest inspirational talk she ever heard.
Chapter 19
How did Vincent handle audiences who walked out of outdoor meetings?
Outdoor audiences felt free to leave when bored or distracted. Vincent stopped the performance once or twice to 'give that lady a chance to go out without further disturbing the speaker.' Through such tactics the Chautauqua audience became one of the best-behaved out-of-door audiences in the country, learning to stay home or sit out the lecture.
Chapter 19
What mischief did the author admit to at Chautauqua?
The worst mischief she personally assisted in was playing tag up and down the relief model of Palestine along the lake, dotted with plaster-of-Paris towns from Damascus to Bethsaida. One rule: you could not be tagged if you straddled Jerusalem. The most serious vandalism she knew of, in which she had no part, was stealing models like Damascus, Nazareth, or Tyre.
Chapter 19
How did Chautauqua change physically under Vincent?
The author says Vincent made restrictions more endurable by adding fresh interest, and the community grew immediately. Hammers nailing flimsy cottages were never still; housekeeping improved from picnic style; a Promenade developed along the lake front with lathed and plastered cottages, wicker chairs, and meals at the Athenaeum Hotel. The Vincents lived in a tent de luxe with a real house behind it.
Chapter 19

Section 203 cards

What did Dr. Vincent propose to help Chautauqua readers lacking reference books?
Dr. Vincent suggested that The Chautauquan annotate the portions of the various texts to be read each month, explaining pronunciations, phrases, and people. Tarbell, the "some one" within reach when Dr. Flood received the suggestion, undertook the notes as a temporary trial, determined to make them as helpful as she could.
Chapter 20
What problem did the Chautauqua circle uncover that led to Tarbell's annotation work?
Hundreds of members who joined and bought the books had no dictionaries, encyclopedias, or explanatory helps, and lived too far away—on the Plains, in mountains, on distant farms—to reach libraries. Headquarters was inundated with questions about pronunciation, translation, and the identity of people and terms.
Chapter 20
What was the most important volume in the first year's course, and how did its sale affect publishing?
Tarbell judges Green's "Short History of the English People" the most important book save one the Circle ever included, the exception being Brownell's "French Traits." The sudden demand for so large and expensive a volume outside regular trade channels, followed by spectacular sales of other books, set the publishing world agog and raised the question of how to get in on the new market.
Chapter 20

Section 213 cards

Why did Dr. Flood's formal replies to readers' letters differ from Tarbell's?
Tarbell felt readers' appeals deserved personal, sympathetic letters, so she began writing them herself, signing Dr. Flood's name. She later admits she probably poured out ignorant sentiment. Dr. Flood's answers were courteous but formal; the author suggests he may have appreciated, as she did not, that formality offered safety.
Chapter 21
What did Tarbell's Patent Office investigation find about women inventors?
Disturbed that suffrage campaigners conceded women showed little creative power, Tarbell investigated Patent Office records. It was said women had taken out only about three hundred patents; she found over two thousand, convincing her that a woman with an idea and gumption had the same chance as a man to get a patent. Correspondence with women then patenting regularly confirmed it.
Chapter 21
What misquotation slipped past Dr. Finley in the Assembly Herald?
Tarbell headed her first column with a quotation, choosing James Thomson's line 'The meek-eyed Morn appears, mother of dews.' A copy thrown on her verandah at five in the morning revealed the printed version read 'The weak-eyed Worm appears, mother of dews.' Dr. Finley, who read her copy and proofs, let it slip by and still chuckles about it.
Chapter 21

Section 224 cards

Why did Tarbell secretly consider leaving The Chautauquan after six years?
The author explains that the work demanded a scattering of mind that she feared would unfit her for thinking anything through, and she had no program The Chautauquan cared about. She also realized she did not want to be an editor. Leaving meant sacrificing a secure berth, but she came to believe in the sterility of security and felt trapped by comfort.
Chapter 22
What did the Presbyterian minister shout that struck Tarbell about her situation?
Listening to a fine elderly Scotch Presbyterian minister whose congregation held many stable, secure citizens, she was startled when he leaned over the pulpit, shook his fist, and shouted, "You're dyin' of respectability." The author took this as a question about herself and saw that she could not go beyond a certain point on The Chautauquan mentally, socially, or spiritually.
Chapter 22
What happened to Meadville's banks after Wallace Delamater's defeat?
The author recounts that Delamater, a Meadville banker and Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, was defeated. Promptly the Delamater bank closed and, one after another, four banks of the town followed. There was a heavy run on the one remaining bank, where Tarbell had her deposit. She was ashamed of withdrawing her money in the panic, especially since her bank did not fail.
Chapter 22
How did Tarbell's interest shift from nature study to human beings?
The author argues her early absorption in rocks and plants veered to an intense interest in human beings, with the same passion to understand men and women and to collect and classify information about them. She finds proof in tattered notebooks begun soon after she settled into magazine work, where she applied the same classifying method she had used for leaves.
Chapter 22

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What did Tarbell say she realized about men and women compared to leaves?
Tarbell says she came to recognize that men and women were as well worth notes as leaves, and that there was a science of society as well as of botany. This realization marked a shift from her earlier aloofness toward the tumults and challenges of her day, which she felt increasingly compelled to take part in.
Chapter 23
What social and economic positions did The Chautauquan take in the 1880s?
The Chautauquan argued for high wages, calling the well-paid workman a large consumer and an important part of the economic foundation. It supported the eight-hour day, contracts binding labor and capital, and education and arbitration. It favored the Knights of Labor's program over force, backed cooperative housing, laundries and bakeshops, and advocated temperance while shying from prohibition as a political issue.
Chapter 23
What did Tarbell find most disturbing about the Oil Region struggle?
Tarbell says it was not the economic feature of the struggle that deeply disturbed her but what it was doing to people themselves—to her father, mother and their friends. She describes a divided town marked by suspicion, greed, bitterness, defeats and surrenders, and a product meant to bless men proving a curse to those who discovered and developed it.
Chapter 23
What did Tarbell abandon her novel for, and how did she describe it?
Tarbell secretly assembled a cast, outlined a plot and wrote two or three chapters of a novel about the Oil Region, then judged it poor stuff and gave it up, finding herself beyond her depth. She abandoned it more readily because she had conceived what she called a more fundamental research: a Science of Society illustrated by her own observations, framed from current discussions and filled with notes on people she knew or read about.
Chapter 23

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Why did Tarbell abandon her ambitious work on society after three chapters?
She concluded she could not construct society as it was without knowing more about woman, suspecting women had shaped society more than admitted. She rejected the view that society is entirely man-made, and refused a science of society that cast woman only as doormat, toy, and tool.
Chapter 24
Why did Tarbell hesitate to join the suffragists?
She doubted the argument that women would improve society with the vote, asking why they should do better than men. She reasoned women were human beings like men, with no experience of the tools they wanted to use, and believed experience counted and should be consulted in new ventures.
Chapter 24
What did Tarbell do after deciding to research women in public life?
She listed women worth reflecting on, focusing on women of the French Revolution. She wrote sketches of Madame de Staël, Marie Antoinette, and Madame Roland for The Chautauquan, then grew ashamed of their meager equipment, resolving to know more about Madame Roland especially.
Chapter 24
Why did Tarbell decide to go to Paris and leave The Chautauquan?
She believed sufficient research was impossible while her time and strength belonged to the magazine. She chose Paris to study Madame Roland and write, wanting freedom rather than a regular job or security, and ignored handicaps like being thirty-three and knowing nothing of publishing.
Chapter 24

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What did Tarbell hope to gain by immersing herself in French prose?
She had read French since her school days and translated articles for The Chautauquan. She believed living with the language might let her master what she saw as its essential qualities: soundness of structure, the way it holds together, and beautiful clarity of expression. She admitted she could at least try for them, hoping to learn to write.
Chapter 25
How did Tarbell's parents respond to her plan to leave The Chautauquan?
Her critical friends stayed frankly skeptical and indignant, but her father and mother backed her, though puzzled and fearful. Her father said he did not know what she could do, that it was for her, and that if she thought she could do it, she should try. She said it took all the grit she had to go ahead.
Chapter 25
What financial principles did Tarbell apply before and during her move to Paris?
She held that the art of spending money matters as much as earning it, and that earnings must cover expenses and leave a surplus for emergencies and expansion. She applied this to a Chautauquan salary never over $100 a month, enough to reach Paris with $150 in pocket to live on while pitching editors.
Chapter 25
How did the four women economize on food in the Latin Quarter?
They bought exact quantities at little shops—a single egg, one roll or croissant, a gill of milk—and learned to order at cheap, orderly restaurants, getting a sufficient meal of excellent food for a franc, about nineteen cents. Two francs were reserved for grand occasions. At first the close calculation shocked them as mean, but they learned to like it.
Chapter 25

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What quality did Parisian shopkeepers identify as Tarbell's chief asset?
They judged her a femme travailleuse—a hard worker—and used that as her recommendation when passing her to acquaintances. The author argues the French believe deeply in the value and dignity of hard work, and she was respected for it, though she notes she might have gone farther had she possessed beauty or charm.
Chapter 26
How did Tarbell's view of the poor differ from her earlier American assumptions?
She had belonged to the well-to-do and held the American notion that the poor's chief economic duty was to become well-to-do through saving and self-employment. Living in Paris brought her into daily contact with the poor as a permanent class, a segment she says the well-to-do are curiously unconscious of.
Chapter 26
What did Tarbell observe about French attitudes toward a fixed job?
Unlike the American contempt for being a hired man—which her father felt keenly—serious Parisian workers gave the job the loyalty Americans gave to businesses they owned. She found them not restless or generally envious, and says opportunity did not grow on every bush; a Frenchman weighed it, while at home one seized it trusting to luck.
Chapter 26
What sources did Tarbell use to illustrate her newspaper articles on Paris?
She read newspapers omnivorously, finding many carried captivating paragraphs about the Parisian scene. Her best source for illustrations surprised her: catalogues of recent French Salons, since many artists loved depicting Paris at her daily toil. She later found Chardin's paintings in the Louvre the best illustrations for her Madame Roland in her youth.
Chapter 26

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What did Tarbell learn from the 'Countess' and other poor of her Quarter?
She observed men and women past employing age living alone on tiny incomes from thrift, inheritance, or gifts. The Countess lived sous les toits, wore faded patched silk, and turned over garbage cans, yet was so gracious that tradespeople felt honored by her custom. Tarbell saw another standard than money: class, breeding, cultivation, the grand manner.
Chapter 27

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What did Burlingame's acceptance of Tarbell's story mean to her beyond money?
The author says the story's influence on her fortunes was out of proportion to its value. Most important was the courage it gave her: if a stranger like her could write something a great editor accepted, she might make it work. It also gave her something to show her family, easing her guilt at being abroad while they struggled.
Chapter 28
What two career paths did Burlingame's interest in the Roland biography help Tarbell choose between?
Tarbell had come to Paris to prepare for magazine work in historical and biographical lines, but near scholars she was seized with ambition to become a scholar and specialize in the French Revolution. Burlingame's word that Scribner was interested in the Roland project settled the struggle, which she calls proof her scholarly ambitions were shallow.
Chapter 28
How did McClure's Syndicate respond to Tarbell's article 'The King of Paris'?
The two-thousand-word article on Jean Alphand and his services to the city was promptly accepted, with a promise of $10 on publication and an invitation to submit other subjects. Tarbell sent more, and though they did not take everything, enough was accepted that she saw a stable market for short, timely articles.
Chapter 28
Who was Madame Blanc, and how did she help Tarbell's series on French women writers?
Madame Blanc, pen name Théodore Bentzon, introduced leading English and American writers to the French through the Revue des deux Mondes. A former lady-in-waiting at Napoleon III's court, she lived on a small income and earnings from writing. She started Tarbell on her rounds among French women writers, and Tarbell produced ten or a dozen pieces.
Chapter 28

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Why does Tarbell believe Judith Gautier was omitted from the Chicago Exposition list?
Tarbell concludes the committee left Judith Gautier off the list of living French women writers sent to the 1893 Chicago Exposition to punish her for defending Wagner's works. Gautier had publicly defended "Lohengrin" against bitter protests, and Tarbell saw this as her first realization that political hatred can influence judgment in matters of art.
Chapter 29
What did Tarbell resolve to write after befriending Madame Dieulafoy?
Tarbell decided to write the history of women from Eve onward, a plan she admits she took up despite already having enough on her hands. Madame Dieulafoy applauded the idea and offered many suggestions, but Tarbell says it never went beyond her few visits, which she calls more or less flirtations.
Chapter 29
How did the Egyptian students at Madame Bonnet's react to the Americans refusing to dance on Sunday?
When the Egyptian students invited the American women to dance in Madame Bonnet's salon, the women declined, saying they did not dance on Sunday, owing to their Methodist upbringing. Tarbell was pleased to hear the students whisper soberly to one another "très religieuses," thinking it a better first impression than the intimacy dancing might have suggested.
Chapter 29
What did Mr. Phillips infer about Tarbell from her handwriting?
Tarbell wrote all her articles by longhand, producing careful, painstaking copy, and worked long hours—often at her desk by eight and to bed after midnight. She later learned that Mr. J. S. Phillips, Mr. McClure's partner in the Syndicate, trying to estimate the possibilities of this correspondent bombarding them with articles, set her down from her handwriting as a middle-aged New England schoolteacher.
Chapter 29

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How did the Egyptians react to news of the Khedive Tewfik Pasha's death in January 1892?
Madame Bonnet told the women their friends were sorrowful and asked them to dine that night. Tarbell found the Egyptians very grave, insisting the Khedive was a good man and their friend. She took it they feared government changes that might make their own futures uncertain; they were uneasy and frightened and wanted the women to understand their anxiety. After dinner many compatriots arrived and the talk grew bitter, with cries of 'Down with England!'
Chapter 30

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What trade did Tarbell make with Madame A regarding Monsieur X?
Tarbell helped Monsieur X translate a large volume on the English system of handling the unemployed and the helplessly poor. In exchange, he secured reports and information on subjects she was interested in. She continued helping until the book was published and it was well received, even crowned by the Academy of Science.
Chapter 31
Why did Madame A want Monsieur X's book to succeed?
Tarbell discovered Madame A's interest in the book's success was to arrange a more profitable marriage for Monsieur X. His improved position from the book's success made him worth a much larger dot, so Madame A set out to find another wife. They succeeded and the affair was arranged.
Chapter 31
What did Tarbell believe was the only safe basis for a happy marriage?
The author argues the only safe basis for a happy marriage is a compound of physical harmony, capacity for companionship combined with understanding and acceptance of each other's ideals. She saw little chance where it was chiefly a matter of balanced income, and notes Madame A had no sympathy with her idealistic attitude.
Chapter 31
What did Tarbell find in Miss C's room that explained her stealing?
She found a pathetic collection of articles not worth stealing, mainly from bargain counters: at least seventy pairs of gloves in sizes and colors none of them would have worn, some fifty pen knives, half-bolts of ribbon and lace, spools of silk and cotton, packages of pins and needles. Miss C stole to hurt herself and distract from her original wound.
Chapter 31

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Who saved Miss C in court, and how?
Madame A won the case by addressing the judges in their own language, presenting the group as comme il faut, important, serious and rich, then stating candidly that Miss C was crazy and should be sent home to her friends. The judges fined her five hundred francs and ordered her to leave France within a week and never return.
Chapter 32
How did the group prepare the courtroom for Miss C's trial?
At Madame A's suggestion they dressed in their best clothes, bought new flowers for their hats and fresh gloves, and brought two or three handsome young women from the Champs Elysées Quarter. Madame A made a toilette even a judge would notice. She rejected dragging Monsieur X in, insisting instead on bringing the rich American idler, whose elegant clothes the judges eyed enviously.
Chapter 32
What doubts did the author have about women's freedom?
The author wondered whether this break for freedom and revolt against security, in which she herself took part, was a fatal adventure bound to injure the family, the one institution she believed in most. She feared it would produce wretchedness and abnormality, and that even the few successes she saw were paid for by a hardening of heart uglier than Miss C's case.
Chapter 32
Who were the American companions the author met in Paris?
They included Dr. John Vincent of Johns Hopkins' History Department and his wife, who copied canvases at the Luxembourg; Fred Parker Emery of MIT's English Department and his wife; and Charles D. Hazen, a Hopkins graduate who became a distinguished French historian and Columbia professor emeritus. These more experienced students joined the weekly excursions and dinners in the Quarter.
Chapter 32

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What did the Jersey vacation cost the group per day?
The group found lodgings on Jersey with rooms, a sea-view salon, and abundant fish, vegetables, and fruit. They feared the bill would be a fortune, but it came to just eighty cents apiece per day, covering the house, housekeeper, maid, and food. The trip gave a gay finish to Tarbell's first year in Paris.
Chapter 33
Why did Tarbell begin her second year in Paris in deep depression?
She had exhausted her reserve, returning from vacation with about twenty francs. Her American associates were gone or leaving, she had moved to a new address near the Panthéon, and she realized she needed at least two more years, not one, to finish her undertaking. Homesickness for her family, fed by their letters, had never eased.
Chapter 33
What did Tarbell treat as her only personal proof of telepathy?
On the first Sunday of June 1892, Tarbell was seized by unaccountable alarm and walked for hours unable to shake it. That afternoon she read in Le Temps that Titusville and Oil City had been destroyed by flood and fire, with about 150 dead. She called this her only personal proof of telepathy; a cable from her brother later read simply 'Safe.'
Chapter 33
How did Tarbell first meet S. S. McClure in Paris?
In summer 1892 McClure arrived by appointment at her Rue Malebranche address, bareheaded, watch in hand, breathless from climbing eighty steps. He announced he had ten minutes before leaving for Switzerland to see Tyndall. Tarbell found him simple, outright, enthusiastic, and captivating, so practical questions about subjects and payment dropped from her mind.
Chapter 33

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What did McClure want Tarbell to write for the new magazine?
Tarbell learned in her interview with Mr. McClure that the new magazine wanted articles on the achievements of great French and English scientists. Not history, literature, or politics, but science, discoveries, inventions, and adventures. She found her old enthusiasm for the physical world, first directed by Professor Tingley, was not dead but sleeping, and she worked for two years on popular scientific articles built on interviews with specialists.
Chapter 34
How did Pasteur's paralysis affect Tarbell's interview with him?
Tarbell realized only in the library that Pasteur was sadly crippled by paralysis of his left side, suffered twenty-five years earlier after three years of exhausting labor on silkworm diseases. He moved with difficulty and hesitated painfully over words, but his eyes were bright, curious, and interested. He and Madame Pasteur made the interview easy, bringing out old albums and delighting in the babyhood photographs.
Chapter 34
What maxim did Pasteur write for 'The Edge of the Future'?
Pasteur wrote: 'In the matter of doing good, obligation ceases only when power fails.' Tarbell collected it for McClure's 'Edge of the Future' feature, which gathered convictions about the world's future from leaders of science, industry, religion, and literature. Pasteur lost his first draft, was peevish as a child while rewriting, and told her to take her choice between versions.
Chapter 34
What was Tarbell's one rebuff during her science interviewing?
In two years of interviewing distinguished specialists, Tarbell met only one rebuff, and it was very contemptuous. It came not from a man but from a gifted American woman doing valuable special work in a great French scientific institution. Tarbell then told herself that scholarship hardens a woman rather than ripens her, but she adds that she knows better now: it happens, but by no means to all women, citing Dr. Florence Sabin.
Chapter 34

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What did the author notice about the French writer she visited, and what did he tell her?
The author describes him as agitated, confused, and sulky, surrounded by a cluttered collection of furnishings from many ages and countries. He talked violently about his enemies, defended his realism, hinted he was a latter-day Balzac, and gave her a sentiment reflecting his school: that war is the very life and law of the world, and that ideas of justice and peace are pitiful against implacable nature.
Chapter 35
Why did the author feel lucky about her daily walks in Paris?
She was researching the life of Madame Roland, and found that her walks to and from the National Library could pass through the quarter where Roland's father was a goldsmith, past her birthplace, the church of her first communion, the prison of her last days, and along her route to the guillotine. She marveled at how little had changed, noting the house on the Ile de la Cité still stands.
Chapter 35
How did the author's view of the French Revolution change while studying Madame Roland?
She came to see the Revolution as already underway when Roland was born, rising around her and using her until she tried to check its excesses, then throwing her over. The author argues it was only an unusually violent episode in Paris's lifelong struggle to remain a free individual, slave to no man or group, with revolution as her last resort against kings.
Chapter 35
What effect did the Panama scandal and anarchist bombings have in France?
The Panama affair disgusted self-respecting Frenchmen and stirred parties of every stripe, especially anarchists. The Independents acted alone; Jules Ravachol, a dyer about thirty-three, began blowing up houses, and similar outrages followed for two or more years, culminating in Auguste Vaillant's bomb in the Chamber of Deputies in December 1893, wounding several Deputies and eighty or more spectators.
Chapter 35

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What incident sparked the 1893 Latin Quarter student revolt?
The Annual Ball of the Beaux Arts scandalized Paris with an exhibit of a woman covered only by a mosquito net. Deputy Berenger proposed a restrictive law in the Chamber of Deputies, angering students who saw it as interference with their right to amuse themselves. They marched in monômes chanting against Berenger, the Chief of Police Loze, and puritans.
Chapter 36
How did the 1893 student revolt turn deadly and spread?
A squadron of police charged an unruly crowd at a café; in the mêlée someone hurled a heavy white match box that struck and killed an innocent spectator of twenty-two or twenty-three. Students then rioted for days, pulling up trees, knocking over kiosks, and breaking windows. Tarbell notes a popular disturbance rarely stays in the control of those who start it.
Chapter 36
How did Paris shopkeepers and police respond to the 1893 riots?
Shopkeepers, experienced from centuries of revolutionary outbreaks, put up heavy wooden shutters and closed doors before Monday night. Mounted police and soldiers moved steadily and quietly through the boulevards and Quarter night and day. The rioters never made a stand, and within a week kiosks were replaced, trees replanted, and normal life resumed.
Chapter 36
What does Tarbell argue about the nature of revolutions, using Madame Roland?
The author argues a popular disturbance never stays long in the control of those who start it; advocates of many causes seize it, and a students' revolt can become an anarchist raid. She asks whether Madame Roland, who lost her head wanting a Republic beyond the first Revolution, gained anything, and whether the corrupt Republic of her day was better than the court Roland helped overthrow.
Chapter 36

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Why did Tarbell persist with her Madame Roland project despite doubts?
She says she lacked a fixed political formula to resolve her muddle, and was questioning both her heroine's methods and motives and those of contemporary France. What kept her at the task, rather than abandoning Madame Roland for a study of revolution's roots, was the brilliant and friendly intellectual circle her quest led her into.
Chapter 37
How did Tarbell first gain access to the Marillier family papers?
James Darmesteter, husband of poet A. Mary F. Robinson, told her she must know Léon Marillier of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, a great-great-grandson of Madame Roland holding papers never made public. Darmesteter wrote a letter, which brought Tarbell a dinner invitation—the gate to a new social and intellectual world.
Chapter 37
What did Lucien Herr's reaction to the Vaillant bomb reveal about him?
Dining at Madame Marillier's, Herr arrived late and pale, describing the Chamber explosion and the wounded around him with no word of their suffering, only the deed's political bearings. When Seignobos protested, Herr said 'Cela ne me fait rien.' Tarbell concludes his opposition to bloodshed was intellectual, not emotional like Seignobos's.
Chapter 37
What did Seignobos believe about America's intellectual elite?
The author reports Seignobos saw America only through books and doubted it produced the intellectual elite on which he felt society's salvation depended—a group to think and plan for lesser men. He thought lesser men were rising in America, and when shown an impressive American woman, asked where she was born and educated, refusing to believe such quality native.
Chapter 37

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Why did Tarbell's French friends resist meeting her English friend H. Wickham Steed?
They believed the English were a stupid, bigoted race and wanted none of them in their circle. Seignobos first refused, saying "Never! The English are stupid." Tarbell argued Steed deserved the benefit of the doubt. After over an hour of merciless baiting, Seignobos conceded that "Mademoiselle Mees, your Englishman is intelligent," and Steed was welcomed thereafter.
Chapter 38
What was Steed's ambition and how did he prepare for it?
Steed aimed to become a foreign correspondent for the London Times. He knew this required familiarity with the languages, history, men, and politics of leading Continental countries. He began with roughly two years in Germany, then was studying French language, literature, politics, and leaders. Tarbell called him unusually sure of his goal and thorough in preparing for it.
Chapter 38
Why did Tarbell value her 1893 stay at Le Clos?
Madame Marillier invited her for a fortnight in spring 1893 to the Roland family estate in the Beaujolais, near Theizé. Tarbell saw it as a rare chance to observe her heroine in a different role—busy with domestic duties rather than as student, tuft-hunter, political diplomat, or Providence to a Nation. She added that she needed this natural setting because she was beginning to mistrust Madame Roland.
Chapter 38
What did Tarbell find at Le Clos that aided her research?
Her workroom held five hundred or more books, including a complete seventy-volume Voltaire, mostly with eighteenth-century dates and some bearing Roland's name. Madame Marillier's library held two thousand more, only "what was left" after gifts to Léon Marillier, Lapique, and Seignobos. Tarbell ransacked the volumes for marginal notes and searched old desks and bureaus for papers, finding small bits useful to her work.
Chapter 38

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What did the Revolution leave at Le Clos, and what happened to the furnishings?
The Revolution stripped Le Clos of its furnishings and all but ended the family, though the château itself did not suffer seriously beyond some slight scars. Books were about the only original possessions left. Madame Marillier told Tarbell it was still common to trace an old piece in a Beaujolais farmhouse back to Le Clos a hundred years later.
Chapter 39
How did Beaujolais residents show lingering anti-revolutionary feeling?
Tarbell reports outspoken antirevolutionary feeling remained abroad. In Theizé, the curé and municipal council would not permit the Marseillaise to be played or the 14th of July celebrated. In a neighboring hamlet, a bandmaster refused to lead the Marseillaise, and when the band voted to play it, he laid down his baton and left in a huff.
Chapter 39
How did Madame Marillier's introduction of Tarbell win over the peasants?
Her invariable introduction was that Mademoiselle came from the same country as their vines. The vineyards had been devastated by repeated phylloxera visitations and recovered only with American roots, so Tarbell was welcomed at once and treated as a benefactor. Most peasants she talked with placed America somewhere in Africa.
Chapter 39
What did Tarbell conclude about French geographical ignorance of America?
She found utter indifference to the geography of the rest of the world among French people high and low, and many educated people did not distinguish North from South America. In Madame Darmesteter's drawing room, cultivated people believed all Americans carried weapons and that Indians walked Chicago's streets; they smiled incredulously at her protests.
Chapter 39

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What did Tarbell use as collateral at the Mont de Piété, and what document secured the loan?
She pawned her sealskin coat, which was out of keeping with her otherwise shabby wardrobe. The pawnshop was suspicious of a foreigner and asked for credentials. Letters from publishers and her checkbook stubs made little impression, but her Allegheny College diploma did, and it was on that diploma that she made the loan that carried her through the bad months of 1893.
Chapter 40
What did Tarbell hope to conclude about women in public life, and what did Madame Roland show her instead?
She hoped to show women as steady, intuitive, dependable, opposed to violence, and gifted with inarticulate wisdom from centuries of handling human beings. Instead she found a politician with a Providence complex, and new proof of the natural law that the woman backs up her man: Roland was Royalist, Republican, or Revolutionist according to the man she loved, serving him with unyielding, intolerant conviction.
Chapter 40
What belief did Tarbell lose during her work on Madame Roland, and what replaced it?
She lost faith in revolution as a divine weapon, calling it the heaviest blow to her self-confidence since discovering the world was not made in six days. She had held revolution to be a noble and sacred instrument destroying evil and leaving men free. Now it seemed not something men used but something that used men for its own mysterious end, leaving the same relative proportion of good and evil as it started with.
Chapter 40
What plan did Tarbell make as she packed her Madame Roland manuscript to return to America?
She resolved to go through with the book, putting down what she found even though she had not gotten what she came for. Her new plan was laid down economically, professionally, and socially: go home, revise the manuscript, try to convince Scribners to publish it, enjoy a long visit with her family, and then return to Paris. She called it a new starting point.
Chapter 40

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Why did Hubbard reject Sherard's Napoleon text for his collection?
Mr. Hubbard insisted a suitable text he liked must accompany his Napoleon pictures. McClure had secured a well-written piece from Robert Sherard, a great-grandson of Wordsworth, but it was so contemptuously anti-Napoleon that Hubbard would not allow his pictures to go with it. With the first installment announced for November, McClure urgently called Tarbell to New York to write a life of Napoleon.
Chapter 41
What did Tarbell originally think the Napoleon Movement in Paris was?
Tarbell had followed the Napoleon Movement in Paris in 1892 and 1893, reading fresh reminiscences and journalism, especially in Figaro, and collecting Caran d'Ache cartoons. She looked on the Movement as political—an effort by Bonapartists to revive popular admiration for France's most spectacular figure, possibly capitalizing on revulsion against the Panama brand of republicanism. She found the idea of a popular American magazine writing a Napoleon life both amazing and amusing.
Chapter 41
What terms did McClure offer Tarbell to join his staff?
Passing through New York in June, Tarbell gave Mr. McClure the right to call upon her, promising to join his staff after her vacation. He offered forty dollars a week—more money than she had ever expected to earn. With care she could save enough to carry her back to Paris while learning more about the needs of the McClure organization. The forty dollars a week was, she says, a powerful argument.
Chapter 41
How did Tarbell justify accepting the Napoleon assignment?
Tarbell had been talking largely about devoting herself to French Revolutionary history, and reasoned that Napoleon, if not that exactly, was close. She also felt a terrific need to see France on her feet: Napoleon had pulled France out of the slough where she lay when Madame Roland lost her head, setting her there for a time and bringing back decency, order, and common sense. She agreed to try at McClure's expense but insisted she must return to Paris for material.
Chapter 41

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What resources did Tarbell find in Washington for her Napoleon sketch?
She found the latest books and pamphlets at Mr. Hubbard's, proofs from Paris of announced reminiscences, the full Napoleonic correspondence published by order of the French Government in the State Department, files of leading French newspapers of the period, and in the Congressional Library Andrew D. White's collection, including some fifty volumes of pamphlets made in Germany during the Revolution.
Chapter 42
How does Tarbell describe Ainsworth Spofford's aims as Librarian of Congress?
She says Spofford believed Congressmen generally needed educating, so he provided books for their committee work and speeches as quickly as possible. In return he wheedled and begged money from them for books, equipment, staff, and better accommodations. He held a vision of a national library educating not only Congress but the people, and she calls the new library building a monument to him more than any other man.
Chapter 42
How did Tarbell feel about writing the Napoleon sketch so quickly?
She wrote the first installment in six weeks with her tongue in her cheek, calling it impudence to write biography on the gallop. She kept herself going by repeating that a cat may look at a king and they could take or leave it. She expected only forty dollars a week and the satisfaction of following the drama, but was surprised to receive approval from people who knew the field, including John C. Ropes and William Milligan Sloane.
Chapter 42
What did Tarbell notice about Charles Bonaparte during her visit?
At a lunch in Baltimore with Charles Bonaparte, grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, and Mrs. Bonaparte, Tarbell was struck by his resemblance to Napoleon in a certain pose. Standing and talking unconsciously with hands behind his back and slightly stooped, he was the counterpart of Raffet's Napoleon, which she calls the most natural of them all. She also recalled Mrs. Bonaparte mentioning barrels of neatly rolled string in the garret.
Chapter 42

Section 433 cards

What did the author's Napoleon sketch change about her life plans?
The author says the Napoleon sketch overturned her earlier determination to stay footloose and never again tie herself to a position. It pushed Paris into the future and substituted Washington. She attributes this less to the security of a monthly wage than to the sense of vitality and adventure she felt being admitted on equal, comradely terms into the McClure crowd.
Chapter 43
How does the author characterize S. S. McClure's editing style?
The author describes McClure as eager as a dog on the hunt, never satisfied or quiet. He insisted creative editing was done in the field following scents, not at a desk, and he hated settled office routine. He brought back contracts with Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, and Kipling, and sought the Edge of the Future, including early articles on radium, the X-ray, and the Wrights.
Chapter 43
What drawback did McClure's enthusiasm have, and how did the author handle a dubious story?
The author says McClure's quick reception of new ideas had drawbacks: if a find was dramatic, he was impatient of investigation and wanted it in print fast. He pressed a story about Napoleon III opening Napoleon's tomb, which the author could find no authority for and believed a fake. She notes McClure nonetheless cared above all for the magazine's truthfulness, and had a partner to balance his excitements.
Chapter 43

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How was the false Napoleon tomb story caught before publication?
McClure's partner John S. Phillips quietly suggested that while McClure was in Europe he verify the Napoleon story, and the magazine would hold it until he heard back. A few weeks later McClure sent a postal card saying not to publish it because the tomb was never opened. The author presents this as Phillips saving McClure from a hoax.
Chapter 44
What did Phillips contribute to McClure's according to the author?
The author argues Phillips was the focus of every essential factor in making the magazine: circulation, finance, and editing. Daily reports of bank balances, subscriptions, advertising contracts, and books sold went into his roll-top desk, and he kept a digest of them in his head. His love of fine printing also led McClure's to set up its own plant in the late nineties.
Chapter 44
What was Mark Twain's remark on visiting the magazine's printing plant?
Watching the press, Mark Twain saw a sheet go awry; the press stopped and rang a bell for the pressman, who came and fixed it. Twain cried, 'My God, man! That thing ought to vote.' The author notes the plant was the first magazine plant of its kind in the country, and that it saved the money which finally balanced the budget.
Chapter 44
How does the author describe John Phillips as an editor?
The author calls Phillips no easy editor: he never wheedled or flattered but rigidly tried to draw out your best, quickly spotting weaknesses, especially in construction. He searched for the right word, sometimes sending penciled suggestions after you had given up, valued naturalness, and detested fake style, which he called a kind of disease. The author regrets the public never knew his role.
Chapter 44

Section 454 cards

How did Tarbell first gain entry to the McClure's circle?
She was admitted to the crowd of leaders by virtue of a hasty sketch of Napoleon Bonaparte done on order. She credits herself with sense enough to recognize three rare personalities and to know she was an unusually lucky woman to be accepted, rather than missing such associations out of stupidity.
Chapter 45
What did McClure's staff do for down-and-out authors?
The chapter says Mr. McClure could not resist a hard-luck story and brought derelicts into the overcrowded office for J. S. P. to place. Phillips was not far behind in sympathy: Tarbell watched him rescue an author who had taken to drink and landed in jail, bailing him out, paying debts, and giving him work.
Chapter 45
Why did Nicolay object to Tarbell's Lincoln project?
Nicolay told her there was nothing of importance to be had and advised her not to touch so hopeless an assignment. Later he protested that she was invading his field, saying a popular Life of Lincoln would decrease the value of his property. Tarbell was distressed at being thought a poacher and argued she was making readers for him, but he left unconvinced.
Chapter 45
Why did McClure believe readers wanted more about Lincoln?
McClure's insight told him people never had had enough of Lincoln, and he believed a large amount of unpublished reminiscences could be had for the seeking. He noted Lincoln had been dead only about thirty years, so hundreds who knew him still lived, including Cabinet members, editors, and men who rode the circuit with him.
Chapter 45

Section 464 cards

Why did Nicolay resent others touching his Lincoln field, per Tarbell?
The author argues Nicolay's tragedy was never finding a fresh field. Unlike John Hay, whose Lincoln secretaryship was one episode in a distinguished diplomatic and literary career, Nicolay had only Lincoln, so he looked on all who touched his field as invaders. His rebuff settled Tarbell's plan to start in Kentucky with the humble and unknown.
Chapter 46
What research plan did Tarbell adopt after Nicolay's rebuff?
She decided not to begin at the end with the great and known, but at the start in Kentucky with the humble and unknown, following the trail chronologically. She would reconstruct Lincoln's day from living men and women backed by published records, gathering documents, color, stories, recollections, pictures, and searching courthouses, county histories, and newspapers, hoping for unpublished letters or reminiscences.
Chapter 46
How did Tarbell meet Robert Lincoln, and what did he give her?
Through her Washington acquaintance Mrs. Emily Lyons, who promised to arrange a meeting in Chicago and did. Over tea, Lyons urged Robert Lincoln to give Tarbell something worthwhile. He said Herndon had taken his father's law-office papers (she thought he felt they were stolen) and the presidential correspondence was fully used by Nicolay and Hay, but he offered a never-published early daguerreotype.
Chapter 46
How was the early Lincoln daguerreotype received when published?
Tarbell made it the frontispiece of the first installment, and the office sent fine prints to people whose opinions mattered. Woodrow Wilson found it striking and singular, noting dreaminess and a familiar face without its sadness. Charles Dudley Warner called it the most outstanding presentation of the man he had seen. A common comment was that it looked like Emerson; Edward Everett Hale reported two young people asking if it was Waldo Emerson.
Chapter 46

Section 473 cards

Why did Robert Lincoln doubt the rumored letter from Abraham Lincoln to Queen Victoria?
Robert Lincoln had never heard of such a letter and doubted it was written. He said that if his father had done it and Charles Francis Adams, then minister to Great Britain, had learned of it, Adams would have resigned, because Lincoln knew all communication between governments must go through accredited ambassadors. The interview ended the office's search for "the letter to the Queen."
Chapter 47
Why did Robert Lincoln consider destroying his father's presidential papers?
He kept them in his bank's safety vault and refused access, saying nothing of his father's there was valuable since Nicolay and Hay had published everything. But letters to Lincoln, if published, might pain or discredit able men still living, since bitter things are written in wartime. Fearing misuse, he said he was thinking of burning them.
Chapter 47
What did Tarbell's appendix of "unpublished" Lincoln material actually mean?
By the time the work appeared in book form in 1899, Tarbell had an appendix of three hundred unpublished speeches and letters. "Unpublished" meant uncollected, not never printed, since many had appeared in newspapers or historical magazines. The collection generally stood expert scrutiny, though she believed she was swindled on at least one document, a forgery by a man recommended by an honest scholar.
Chapter 47

Section 484 cards

Why did Tarbell consider the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate the most important?
Tarbell says she always considered the fifth debate, held at Galesburg, Illinois, on October 7, 1858, the most important of the series. She argues it was there that Lincoln brought his argument down to what to him was the crux of the whole matter: that slavery was wrong and must be kept back or it would spread over the whole country.
Chapter 48
What did Tarbell learn about reporters at the Lost Speech?
Illinois men told Tarbell the Lost Speech stirred the audience so that reporters forgot to take notes. Skeptical, she looked up some of the reporters, and they all said that when Lincoln ended, they found themselves standing on, instead of sitting by, their writing tables—and without a note.
Chapter 48
How did Joseph Medill evaluate Whitney's version of the Lost Speech?
Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, had been a reporter at Bloomington in 1856 and ended on top of a table without a note. He wrote to McClure that Whitney reproduced with remarkable accuracy what Lincoln said, largely in identical language and partly in synonymous terms, close enough in thought and word to recall the speech delivered forty years ago.
Chapter 48
Why did some Illinois people insist the Lost Speech remained lost?
Tarbell says people in Illinois did not want to give up the tradition. To them the Lost Speech was greater because it was lost: as long as it was lost you could make it bigger than any speech any man ever made, and nobody could contradict you. So some still claim it is lost, and, she says, you can take it or leave it.
Chapter 48

Section 494 cards

Why did Tarbell's debunking of a legend earn only sour looks?
She says that despite collecting documents and evidence demolishing the episode, she reaped only sour looks and dubious headshakes because she had spoiled a good story. The author argues that a biographer who tries to break down a belittling legend meets with far less sympathy than one who strengthens or creates one.
Chapter 49
How did Tarbell come to ghostwrite Charles A. Dana's Recollections?
Dana, then active editor of the New York Sun, had served as assistant to Secretary Stanton from 1862 to 1865 and was called by Lincoln 'the eyes of the government at the front.' Tarbell feared Dana but wanted his Lincoln story; McClure arranged it, and Dana agreed if she would do the work and plan the interviews.
Chapter 49
How did the Dana interviews and publication proceed?
Tarbell came to the Sun office about four o'clock after press time, three times a week, with a stenographer and prepared questions, through the winter of 1896–97. Dana never saw the manuscript; he asked for proofs. He corrected only a few words of the first chapter, then died before reading more. The articles ran and became a book with no credit to the ghost.
Chapter 49
How did Carl Schurz's Reminiscences come about, and what was Tarbell's role?
Tarbell acted as editorial representative, not ghost. Schurz had refused Gilder of the Century, but she persisted, and McClure's handsome payment helped persuade him since he was not rich. He enjoyed the task and used material to suit the magazine. She recalls him at Lake George singing Wagner and improvising at the piano.
Chapter 49

Section 504 cards

What did Tarbell say was the greatest regret of her professional life?
Tarbell states that the greatest regret of her professional life is that she will not live to write another life of Lincoln. She explains that Lincoln had come to mean more to her as a human being than anyone she had studied, that she never doubted his motives and he never bored her, and that there was much of him she never touched.
Chapter 50
What effect did writing the Life of Lincoln have on Tarbell's sense of country?
Tarbell says the four years on the Life of Abraham Lincoln aroused her flagging sense that she had a country and that its problems were her problems. That sense had been strong during her years on The Chautauquan but had dimmed afterward. The renewed interest also helped wean her from her earlier plan to settle in France.
Chapter 50
What questions did Tarbell raise about the Civil War's aftermath?
Tarbell asked why the country had gone the way it had since the Civil War, and whether war loosens men's self-control so that charity and peaceful adjustment become impossible. She asked whether war always brings corruption and a thirst to punish and exploit the conquered, and whether war was even necessary to destroy slavery, since Lincoln thought slavery was already doomed economically and morally.
Chapter 50
How did Alexander Graham Bell come to develop the telephone, according to Hubbard?
Tarbell reports that Hubbard told Bell he must develop his telephone to a practical point or he could not have Mabel, Hubbard's deaf daughter, whom Bell had taught speech. Tarbell says probably no other argument would have persuaded Bell, since he was the type of inventor whose interest flags once a problem is solved, leaving development to others while he moved on to new discoveries.
Chapter 50

Section 514 cards

How did Alexander Graham Bell arrange his daily schedule in Washington?
Bell modeled his living to suit himself: he often slept through the day, when interruptions and telephone calls came, and played the piano at night if restless. His deaf wife could not hear, and his devoted children were undisturbed. He rose and began his day around four to six, and often hosted notable dinner guests, with scientists and public men gathering on Wednesdays after dinner.
Chapter 51
What did Langley's aerodrome achieve in May 1896?
Langley's machine weighed about twenty-five pounds, with rigid wings twelve to fifteen feet across and an engine of no more than seven pounds, which took four years to develop. Launched from a houseboat, on one day in May 1896 it rose to one hundred feet and flew in a big circle, landed perfectly, flew again over land and treetops, then settled quietly on the river when its power was exhausted.
Chapter 51
How did Tarbell obtain Langley's article for McClure's Magazine?
McClure was excited by the news and demanded an article from Langley himself, so Tarbell was commissioned to get it. She asked Langley for the whole story in language simple enough for her to understand, without scientific jargon. He consented, and she read his drafts and asked him to clarify passages she did not follow. A year after the machine first flew, McClure's published the full story.
Chapter 51
What did Langley say Byron stirred in him?
At a dinner after the Greco-Turkish War began in 1897, Langley joined men including Senator Hoar, Major Powell, and Edward Everett Hale in quoting Byron. Langley said with rare emotion that Byron first stirred in him an enthusiasm for man's struggles for freedom and a desire to join those who fight for it. He thought Byron opened England's eyes to its duty to oppressed Europe.
Chapter 51

Section 524 cards

What did Tarbell do to learn Washington beyond official duties?
She set aside time to learn the city, as she had in Paris. She found Washington thin, young, and awkward compared with Paris, lacking old palaces and hidden corners, but full of promise and proud of its achievements since John Adams moved into the White House. She also followed Lincoln's Washington from the White House to the War Department, Congress, the Arsenal, hospitals, the Soldiers' Home, and Arlington.
Chapter 52
Why did Richard Olney attend McKinley's 1896 Inaugural Ball?
Olney told Tarbell that outgoing Cabinet members are not expected to attend a new President's Inaugural Ball. General Miles, then head of the Army, asked him to go because of rumors of an attempt on McKinley's life: if McKinley and Hobart were both assassinated before a new Cabinet was appointed, Olney would be Acting President. Miles told him to walk with Mrs. McKinley and stay to the end.
Chapter 52
What did General Miles want to write about from his European trip?
Miles wanted to describe the sights he had seen, not armies and maneuvers, which he called shop. He mentioned Pompeii, Alexander's sarcophagus, the Parthenon, Moscow, the Tower of London, and the Louvre, and kept Baedekers, Britannica volumes, and travel books on his desk. Tarbell had to persuade him that McClure's wanted only his observations on military Europe.
Chapter 52
What did Tarbell find notable about General Miles's character?
She called him as kindly and courteous a gentleman as she had ever known, and certainly the vainest. One disappointment of his European visit was that the American uniform was so severe compared with the gold braid of lesser ranks on parade. For Queen Victoria's Jubilee he revolted and had special epaulets designed, then had Tarbell admire them when they arrived from London.
Chapter 52

Section 534 cards

How did Tarbell contrast General Miles's staff with Theodore Roosevelt during the Maine crisis?
Tarbell describes Miles and his staff as steady, at their posts, and routine-bound after the Maine blew up, with the General silent and his Chief of Staff murmuring pity. Roosevelt, by contrast, tore up and down the halls 'like a boy on roller skates,' bursting into Miles's office with excited questions and counsel while preparing his Rough Riders. The author argues fidelity to one's trust is a first obligation.
Chapter 53
What did Tarbell believe about McKinley's handling of the period before the war with Spain?
Through the two months between the Maine explosion and the declaration of war, Tarbell vacillated between hope that the President would prevent war and fear that the 'savage cries coming from the Hill' would prove too much for him, as in the end they were. She states she honestly believed then, as she did at writing, that he was doing his best—despite resenting his 1893 desertion of her Poland friends.
Chapter 53
How does Tarbell describe Senator George Frisbie Hoar and his Sunday breakfasts?
Tarbell portrays Hoar, close to seventy and twenty-six years in Congress, as embodying classic New England virtues: granite-ribbed loyalty, reverence for the Constitution, and passionate devotion to Greek, Roman, and English classics. At Mrs. Patterson's Sunday breakfasts he set formality aside, recited long passages in his sonorous voice, and avoided current events. He credited her codfish balls and coffee with loosening his tongue.
Chapter 53
How did Senator Hoar answer a critic who accused him of living on 'champagne and terrapin'?
Hoar wrote to the attacking Pennsylvania editor that the terrapin was 'all in my eye, very little in my mouth,' and that his chief carnal luxury was Sunday breakfast with an orthodox friend skilled at fish balls and coffee. He joked that all Philadelphia's terrapin and the Atlantic's soft-shelled crabs might pull at his trouser legs in vain.
Chapter 53

Section 543 cards

What did Hoar place at the head of his printed anti-imperialism speech?
At the head of the printed copy of his April 1900 speech, distributed by the Senate, Hoar placed these sentences: there is no right under the Constitution to hold subject states; to every people belongs the right to establish its own government in its own way; and the United States cannot with honor buy the title of a dispossessed tyrant or crush a republic.
Chapter 54
How did Hoar react when others tried to help him physically?
The author describes Hoar as hating anything that impaired his dignity or self-reliance. He fell into a rage if friend or stranger offered assistance. When a streetcar conductor seized his arm, he thundered 'Unhand me.' On the Berkshire trip, a rustic bench collapsed under him, and when the party ran to help, he roared, 'I decline to be assisted.'
Chapter 54
What did the author realize about her own citizenship during this period?
Watching Hoar's sense of public responsibility, the clash of personalities and ideals, the author began telling herself that she was part of the democratic system others were trying to make work, and asked whether she should use her profession to serve it. She suspected one attraction of France was having no responsibility as a citizen there, and concluded she must give up Paris.
Chapter 54

Section 554 cards

What ambition did McClure's have in its earlier years, before the Spanish-American War?
The author says McClure's early ambition was to be a wholesome, enlivening, informing companion for readers, offering fiction, poetry, and science of wide popular appeal. This ambition occasionally opened the pages to the cheap, though it rarely excluded the fine. New writers were eagerly welcomed, and the magazine touched public matters only as they became popular matters.
Chapter 55
How did the Spanish-American War change McClure's according to the chapter?
The author says the war yielded more interesting material than any other subject, so McClure's ran a great war number and a continuous flow of war articles. Having tasted blood, it could no longer be content with being merely attractive and readable; it became a citizen wanting to do a citizen's part, with a staff sympathetic to this new conception of the work.
Chapter 55
What qualities made Ray Stannard Baker an ideal staff member?
The author calls Baker an admirable craftsman and capital team worker with curiosity, appreciation, and respect for facts. He could not be ruffled or antagonized, took sudden reassignments with equanimity, and enjoyed the crowd's unconventional intimacies. He was the least talkative of the group, observant rather than garrulous, the best listener save Mr. Phillips, with a joyous laugh revealing his healthy inner self.
Chapter 55
What did Lincoln Steffens conclude about city graft and vice, and how did he approach it?
Steffens concluded that groups across police, politicians, law, city officials, business, church, education, society, and the press worked together, an organization loyal from fear or self-interest. Because of it, graft, vice, and crime were established industries; attacks since the Civil War slowed but never permanently deranged the system. He coolly traced its pattern to warn people of good will.
Chapter 55

Section 562 cards

How did McClure's staff develop article ideas before assigning them?
The author describes a process of "fingering" a subject: hints came from McClure's head and pocket, Phillips' notebooks, the daily mail, or a caller's chance word. Staff turned in pickings about contemporary life; an idea grew until fixed on someone, then continued according to reader response—no response meant no more chapters, a healthy response meant as many as the material justified.
Chapter 56
Why did Tarbell's Standard Oil history come about, and what shaped her view?
Trusts following the Spanish-American War disturbed people who believed free competition would prevent monopoly, and the Federal Antitrust Law seemed useless. The office chose the greatest trust as a typical example. Tarbell's childhood near the first oil well, the 1872 Oil Region events, her family's losses, and Henry D. Lloyd's "Wealth Against Commonwealth" shaped her view. She blamed not capitalism but capitalists' disregard of decent business ethics.
Chapter 56

Section 584 cards

What did the South Improvement Company contract give privileged refiners?
The chapter describes the South Improvement Company as the first attempt at a hard alliance between oil-bearing railroads and refiners. Under the contract, railroads gave privileged refiners a rebate on all their shipments and paid them a drawback on independents' shipments, plus full information about rivals' shipment quantities and destinations. The author says the Standard Oil Company as a monopoly grew out of this scheme.
Chapter 58
What did Tarbell learn about destroyed printed documents?
Tarbell was told the South Improvement Company investigation and the 1879 Hepburn investigation had been destroyed. She found the South Improvement pamphlet in a private collection, one of three she knew to exist. Adelaide Hasse located the Hepburn report in the New York Public Library, noting only one hundred copies were published and that railroad presidents had bought up and destroyed sets. Tarbell concluded that once a document is printed, a copy eventually turns up.
Chapter 58
What accusation did Henry Lloyd make about court testimony?
In the first edition of "Wealth Against Commonwealth," Henry Lloyd accused someone of spiriting incriminating testimony away from court files. The accusation disappeared from the second edition. When Tarbell asked why, Lloyd answered that the testimony was put back after his book first appeared. Tarbell still could not find the original of one document she wanted in the files.
Chapter 58
What qualities did Tarbell want in a research assistant?
Tarbell wanted a young man with college training and a year or two of reporting experience: intelligent, energetic, curious, and convinced his assignment mattered even if he didn't know why. He must find fun in the chase and be trusted to keep quiet. She tested three Cleveland candidates; two produced excellent reports but showed no interest, while John M. Siddall's excitement won her over.
Chapter 58

Section 593 cards

Why did Mark Twain contact McClure about Henry Rogers?
Rogers, described as the most conspicuous man in the Standard Oil group, asked his friend Mark Twain to find out what kind of history of the concern McClure's proposed to publish. McClure told Twain to ask Miss Tarbell, and Twain asked whether she would see Rogers. McClure was sure she would welcome it, and an interview was arranged for early January 1902 at Rogers' home on East Fifty-seventh Street.
Chapter 59
How did Tarbell and Rogers first connect at the interview?
Rogers asked when and where her interest in oil began. She answered, "On the flats and hills of Rouseville," and he exclaimed that he knew her father and could point to where Tarbell's Tank Shops stood. They set aside business and talked of early days on the Creek. Rogers recounted coming from New England, refining in Rouseville, and putting his first thousand dollars into a little white house adjoining hers.
Chapter 59
What does the chapter say about Rogers' role and the South Improvement Company?
Rogers called the South Improvement Company "an outrageous business" and said that is where the Rockefellers made their big mistake. Tarbell notes Rogers had fought that early raid, yet later joined the conspirators in carrying out the initial program point by point, though she did not throw it up to him. The author suggests Rogers may be regarded as the first public relations counsel of Standard Oil, forerunner of Ivy Lee, with herself the first subject of the new policy.
Chapter 59

Section 603 cards

Why did Rogers want the 1882 trust agreement?
Rogers told Tarbell that by 1880 he held stock in nearly all of the seventy or so absorbed companies, but their real status was unknown to the public. If he died, there would be practically no buyer except Flagler, Rockefeller, and a few insiders, so his heirs would not benefit. The trust agreement, he said, made the public realize the value of the trust certificate and guarded his estate.
Chapter 60
How did Rogers explain rebates and flouting the law?
When Tarbell confronted Rogers with the laws Standard Oil had flouted, he was unmoved. On testimony he admitted was not according to the facts, he said they had no business prying into his private affairs. On rebates he said somebody would have taken them if Standard Oil had not. He argued a competitor without scruples, however small, might grow.
Chapter 60
How did Rogers reconcile speculation with Rockefeller's opposition?
Rogers admitted he was never a favorite and called himself a born gambler. He recalled carrying on speculations for the Charles Pratt Company and telling Mr. Pratt, who lacked the nerve, to give him the money and he would furnish the nerve. He said he always played poker when the market was closed, often with John Gates. Tarbell contrasted this with her father, who thought speculation morally wrong.
Chapter 60

Section 614 cards

Why did Flagler avoid Tarbell's questions about the South Improvement Company?
Instead of answering, Flagler told her repeatedly how he left home because his father was a poor clergyman earning $400 a year, and how he prospered after entering the commission business with Rockefeller in Cleveland. When pressed, he compared Rockefeller's reputation to how Christ was regarded in his lifetime. Tarbell concluded further questioning was hopeless.
Chapter 61
What did Rogers want Tarbell to conclude about the Buffalo refinery case?
Rogers wanted her to portray the three founders, all former Vacuum employees, as having started the independent enterprise solely to force the Standard to buy them out at a high price, meaning planned blackmail. Tarbell found the testimony showed little evidence of that, though it did show Vacuum managers made deliberate attempts to stop the Buffalo refinery.
Chapter 61
What did Tarbell conclude about the Buffalo case after her investigation?
She concluded Rogers's connection was indirect enough that his indictment was unwarranted, though there was ample reason to indict certain Vacuum board members; the judge dismissed charges against Rogers and two directors while sustaining those against operating heads. She also found the independents had bad faith but genuinely started a business, and four juries ruled against Standard Oil.
Chapter 61
Why did Rogers keep meeting Tarbell despite her critical articles?
Tarbell became convinced Rogers continued the interviews because of his interest in her presentation of the Buffalo case, which he called a sore point for himself and Archbold. He had secured the grand jury testimony at great effort and told his children it would vindicate his memory. He broke no ties even as her arguments appeared.
Chapter 61

Section 624 cards

What did Rogers claim the receiver's report proved about the lawyers?
Rogers argued the itemized receiver's report showed the five lawyers had taken the Buffalo case knowing they would receive no fees if the independent concern lost, then made exorbitant claims for services afterward, finally being allowed some thirty thousand dollars. He said this proved the lawyers were part of a blackmailing conspiracy and eager to convict the Standard, and that the bench was with them.
Chapter 62
How did Tarbell counter Rogers' charge that the lawyers were conspirators?
After studying the documents with a disinterested lawyer, Tarbell concluded Rogers' contention was unsound. She argued it is common for reputable lawyers to take cases they believe in when compensation depends on winning, since many clients with just cases could not otherwise afford counsel. Large claims are not proof of conspiracy absent evidence the lawyers doubted the case's merits.
Chapter 62
What did Tarbell find about interference with independent oil shipments?
Reviewing some thirty years of independent testimony, Tarbell found repeated complaints that shipments were interfered with, cars side-tracked en route while pressure was put on buyers to cancel orders, and freight clerks reporting independent shipments. She initially doubted it, but incontrovertible proofs arrived showing the follow-up system was letter-perfect and even made a matter of office bookkeeping.
Chapter 62
How did Tarbell and Rogers' friendly relations end?
After Tarbell sent Rogers her written conclusion rejecting his conspiracy theory, he replied that he had new material and wished to meet. But before the scheduled meeting, an article in her series was published which broke off their friendly relations. Earlier they had parted on good terms, even discussing religion and churchgoing after his accusation.
Chapter 62

Section 634 cards

How did Tarbell obtain the Standard Oil bookkeeping records?
A teenage office boy whose monthly duty was burning records recognized the name of a childhood friend and former Sunday-school teacher, an independent refiner, on the documents. Uneasy, he pieced the records together, gathered a full set, and secretly gave them to the friend. That refiner, convinced by the McClure's articles that Tarbell was fair and trustworthy, brought them to her.
Chapter 63
What did the records show the Standard concern was doing?
The documents showed the concern was obtaining from railroad offices full information about every shipment its competitor made, and was writing to its representative in the destination territory, 'Stop that shipment—get that trade.' Tarbell found the bookkeeping records explained every accusation made in the investigations and lawsuits, and they fit the scattered testimony.
Chapter 63
How did Tarbell use the documents without exposing their source?
Together with the refiner she worked out a plan by which the various forms and blanks could be reproduced with fictitious names of persons and places substituted for the originals. She also refused to tell Rogers where the material came from when he demanded it, noting his face was white with rage and that the article ended her visits to 26 Broadway.
Chapter 63
How did Rogers respond when Tarbell asked about tracking shipments?
Rogers said, 'Of course we do everything we legally and fairly can to find out what our competitors are doing, just as you do in McClure's Magazine,' but called any system of tracking and stopping shipments nonsense, asking how they could do it even if they would. He said he had nothing more than he had already told her.
Chapter 63

Section 644 cards

Why did Tarbell's planned second interview with Rogers never happen?
Rogers told her to call Miss Harrison in a week or ten days for a new appointment, but it was never made. The author says the following months were too difficult for Rogers: his business affairs stayed complicated and his market invincibility was weakened. She also doubts that he or his associates, embittered by the Government suit, thought it wise for him to talk to her further.
Chapter 64
What was Rogers' complaint against Tarbell, and how did she respond?
The author says Rogers' complaint was that she could never submerge her contempt for Standard Oil's illegitimate practices in her admiration for its organizational genius. She states her contempt increased rather than diminished as she worked. She never objected to their size, wealth, or corporate form, only that they never played fair, which ruined their greatness for her.
Chapter 64
How did suspicion of her Rogers association affect Tarbell's access to sources?
Critics and enemies of Standard Oil suspected she would become its apologist. The author says at least two important people refused to see her, and Henry D. Lloyd warned them not to talk or show her papers. His association with her was upset for a time, though her first article reassured him. The suspicion cut her off for about two years from Lewis Emery, Jr.
Chapter 64
Why did Lewis Emery, Jr. refuse Rogers' offer to join Standard Oil?
Emery told the author that he couldn't do it even if he wanted to, because the Oil Region would mob him if he went back on them. The author says they would not actually have mobbed him; they would have ostracized him, which for a man of his temperament and passion for free action would have been worse.
Chapter 64

Section 654 cards

Why did Tarbell decline Rockefeller's annual invitation to join his party in Peru?
She declined because of the photographs he sent her showing unprotected swaying bridges suspended from mountain side to mountain side, hundreds of feet above rushing rocky streams. She says she had not the head for that, and so gave up what she was sure would have been one of the most amusing adventures that ever came her way.
Chapter 65
How did Tarbell arrange to observe John D. Rockefeller in October 1903?
John Siddall arranged it after Rogers's suggestion that she see Rockefeller could not be carried out. Learning Rockefeller would say good-bye to his Cleveland Sunday school before leaving for New York, Siddall had them attend Sunday school and church with seats giving a full view. Tarbell went, feeling a little mean since Rockefeller had not wanted to be seen.
Chapter 65
What physical and behavioral impressions of Rockefeller did Tarbell record?
She saw awful age in his face, yet great power: a big head, high broad forehead, fresh skin, a thin sharp nose, no lips, and a mouth with teeth shut hard. His eyes darted from face to face, never quiet. When he spoke his voice was clear and sincere, not quavering, and he preached dividends of righteousness.
Chapter 65
What feeling did Tarbell's two hours of studying Rockefeller leave her with, and why?
She was sorry for him, a feeling time has intensified, concluding that no companion is so terrible as fear. Despite the conscious power in his face, voice, and figure, she told herself he was afraid of his own kind. She contrasted him with her friend Lewis Emery, Jr., who was free and happy priding himself on being a victim.
Chapter 65

Section 664 cards

How did Frank Rockefeller contact Tarbell about his documents?
Frank Rockefeller, brother of John D. Rockefeller, sent word to Tarbell by a circuitous route that he had documents he thought should be made public, offering them if she would secretly come to his Cleveland office. Tarbell knew of the 1893 family quarrel over property but had avoided it as a family affair until it was laid on her desk. She went to Cleveland, and John Siddall arranged her entry without anyone suspecting her identity.
Chapter 66
What were the bare facts behind Frank Rockefeller's grievance against his brother?
Frank Rockefeller and James Corrigan held substantial Standard Oil stock from early Cleveland operations and later built a Lakes shipping business and Cleveland iron and steel furnaces. In the eighties they borrowed from John D. Rockefeller, putting up the stock as collateral. After the panic of '93 they could not meet obligations, and John foreclosed, taking the stocks. They charged he gave them no time to recover, though their later success proved they could have paid.
Chapter 66
How did Tarbell explain John D. Rockefeller's foreclosure on his brother?
Tarbell says she could see John Rockefeller's point: Frank was an open-handed, generous trader more interested in the game than the money, fond of good horses and free spending. From John's view he was not safe to handle money and did not reverence it. So John foreclosed as a kind of obligation to the sacredness of money, strictly within his legal rights and what Tarbell supposes he called his moral right.
Chapter 66
How did the planned series grow, and how did Rockefeller respond to the book?
The plan Tarbell took to McClure in fall 1890 called for three papers, possibly twenty-five thousand words, but before publication McClure and Phillips ventured on six; the series stretched to twelve and ended at nineteen articles. The book appeared in fall 1904 in two volumes with appendices of documents. Rockefeller reportedly said 'Not a word about that misguided woman,' denied the charges, and said Standard policy was silence under attack.
Chapter 66

Section 674 cards

How did Tarbell respond to the charge that her History was irrational?
She rejected the charge, insisting the practices she had proved were far more dangerous to economic stability than airing them, even in the excited fashion the review alleged. She framed the struggle as between Commercial Machiavellism and the Christian Code, and continued to stand by her findings rather than accept the review's characterization of her work.
Chapter 67
What did Tarbell observe about the distribution of Montague's and Hubbard's pro-Standard pieces?
Montague's book, which separated business and ethics, was sent with the publisher's compliments to libraries, ministers, teachers and prominent citizens; librarians suspected Standard Oil was paying. Later Elbert Hubbard's essay extolling centralization was reportedly printed in five million pamphlets ordered by Standard Oil and distributed to teachers, journalists and preachers. Tarbell received copies as jokes.
Chapter 67
Why did Roosevelt call Tarbell and other writers 'muckrakers,' and how did she answer him?
Roosevelt, uneasy at the press's growing criticism of business and political abuses and fearing it fed revolutionary fever and socialism, accused the writers of dwelling only on the 'vile and debasing,' likening them to Bunyan's man raking straws and dust. Tarbell argued he misread Bunyan, since that man raked riches the Interpreter despised. She told him McClure's dealt in facts, not revolt; he replied they were not 'practical.'
Chapter 67
Why did Tarbell defend Rockefeller against the 'tainted money' outcry?
Though critics like Dr. Washington Gladden urged refusing gifts from fortunes built on illegal practices, and some credited her with opening Rockefeller's purse, Tarbell said in print that this was unfair. He had given steadily since boyhood, ten percent of his income, and had donated some thirty-five million dollars in the fifteen years before 1904. Larger gifts, she argued, matched larger earnings, not a response to public revolt.
Chapter 67

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How did Kansas react when the Standard Oil Company took charge of its oil?
Kansas rose in revolt. The Populists inveighed against the trust with their old fervor, women's clubs and political parties took it up, and bills were introduced to control railroad rates, pipe-line rates, and competitive marketing. The governor himself presented a bill for a state refinery, and the legislature agreed to let the penitentiary run an oil refinery.
Chapter 68
What did Tarbell see on her ten-day drive through southeastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma?
She wanted to see whether the oil fields were as rich as advertised. She called it about as exciting a journey as she ever made, and on one trip she saw her first dust storm: dark rolling clouds filled the sky, the air was thick and unbreathable, and fine black dust packed close to the hubs of the buckboard wheels.
Chapter 68
What scheme did Tarbell encounter involving two anxious-faced boys?
As a joke, the two lads sent out a flamboyant letter offering stock in a mythical oil field. It reached scores of innocents in the East, and schoolteachers, clergymen, and women with little money poured in subscriptions. Tarbell found them with a suitcase full of checks and money orders and not a foot of land leased, fearing the penitentiary.
Chapter 68
How was Tarbell received in the oil regions, and how did she feel about it?
Standard Oil sympathizers regarded her as a spy and denounced her as an enemy to society, while independent oilmen and radical editors called her a prophet. She found the role unfitting: she was fifty, fagged, and wanted to be let alone while collecting trustworthy information. She notes a woman of twenty-five would have reveled in the experience.
Chapter 68

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Why did Governor Hoch sponsor a state oil refinery in Kansas?
The author says Hoch, a firm believer in the competitive system and no socialist, wanted the state refinery to serve as a "measuring stick." He wanted to settle what refinery profits in Kansas actually were, since only experts knew and would not tell, and force private industry—meaning the Standard Oil Company—to sell at a reasonable price.
Chapter 69
What did Tarbell tell Kansans their real problem was after passing oil laws?
She told them their problem now was to do business. Good laws and free opportunity alone do not build a business; unless they were as efficient, patient, and farseeing as their great competitor, they would not succeed. They had to become as good refiners, transporters, and marketers as the Standard Oil Company. The author notes the speech was unpopular.
Chapter 69
How did Tarbell avoid giving an impromptu speech to the Tulsa band?
She had never made an impromptu speech and was horrified at the request. Her happy idea was to send for two boxes of the best cigars in town and pass them around to the band players, then to the bodyguard. She says they preferred the cigars to a speech, and one Indian player remarked, "He all right."
Chapter 69
What national effects did Tarbell attribute to the Kansas oil disturbance?
She says it aroused legislatures of other oil-producing Southwestern states to enact similar laws, though she does not remember a state refinery sponsored elsewhere. There was wide demand that Congress place the pipe-line system under the Interstate Commerce Commission, and most important, it gave popular backing to Theodore Roosevelt's trust-busting campaign, already under way with Northern Securities and the Bureau of Corporations.
Chapter 69

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What did the Bureau of Corporations report in 1906 about Standard Oil?
The Bureau of Corporations reported in 1906 that the Standard Oil Company was receiving preferential rates from various railroads and had been for some time. This finding followed the Bureau's establishment and Roosevelt's assignment of the petroleum industry investigation as its first task.
Chapter 70
What was the outcome of the Standard Oil suit before Judge Landis?
The Standard was found guilty by Judge Kenesaw Landis and fined twenty-nine million dollars, known as the "Big Fine." The country gasped at its size, though the Bureau of Corporations argued the maximum penalty could have exceeded a hundred and sixty million dollars. In 1908 Judge Peter Grosscup of the Circuit Court of Appeals in Illinois upset the fine.
Chapter 70
Why did the author say the split in the McClure staff was inevitable?
The author argues the 1906 split was inevitable because neither Mr. McClure nor Mr. Phillips could have acted differently; the points at issue were fundamental, and each man acted according to an inner something he could not violate. Behind the difficulty lay the fact that McClure was a sick man, exhausted by hardships and pressure.
Chapter 70
What did the author say motivated S. S. McClure, contrary to common opinion?
The author argues that men who said McClure wanted more money were wrong. She never knew a man freer from the itch for money as an end; for him money meant power to do things, to build, to help others. He was reckless with money as with ideas, sharing his last dollar with dependents.
Chapter 70

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What did McClure's new company charter propose beyond a Universal Journal?
It provided for a McClure's Bank, a McClure's Life Insurance Company, a McClure's School Book Publishing Company, and later a McClure's Ideal Settlement offering cheap homes on people's own terms. It also combined a cheap magazine with an attempt to solve the great abuses of the day by giving them competition that would draw their teeth.
Chapter 71
How did Tarbell explain McClure's failure of judgment about his plan?
The author argues it was due to his long illness. She says the mental and physical exhaustion he suffered, and could not understand or accept, explains the unwisdom of the undertaking, his contention that it was an inspiration, and his stubborn insistence that it be accepted. She notes human reason has little influence on one who believes he is inspired.
Chapter 71
What two editorial policies did McClure follow to get important work?
First, the writer must be well paid and expense money generous. Second, and most important, the writer must be given time; McClure did not demand a great serial in six months and gave years if necessary. Tarbell spent most of five years on 'The History of the Standard Oil Company' and calls him unmatched in recognizing generous pay and ample time.
Chapter 71
Why did staff members resign after Phillips was forced out?
When it was decided Phillips must sever his long relation to McClure's, several editorial staff resigned, including Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, John Siddall, managing editor Albert Boyden, and Tarbell herself. They could not see the magazine without Phillips. On their last day they sat on a Madison Square bench, derelicts without a job, but not for long.
Chapter 71

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What did the editorial group decide to do after leaving McClure's?
The editorial group, with David A. McKinlay and John Trainor of the McClure business department, decided to incorporate the Phillips Publishing Company and buy The American Magazine. Using their own contributions and money from stock sold to interested friends, they secured funds for the purchase and enough working capital. They left McClure's in March, and their first issue appeared in October 1906.
Chapter 72
Which two men joined the new magazine's staff, and what did each contribute?
William Allen White and Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley) joined, each with a vein of humor. White, known for 'What's the Matter with Kansas?' and the Boyville stories, judged New York by Kansas standards and remained editor of the Emporia Gazette. Dunne, whom the author calls the country's greatest satirist, contributed to 'The Interpreter's House' and did the censoring and dovetailing with Mr. Phillips.
Chapter 72
How did Dunne's Christmas editorial affect the author?
The staff had each written laments about particular evils and offered remedies for 'The Interpreter's House.' Dunne edited their contributions into a Christmas number, arguing no patent can transform men into angels and that good will has done more to improve government than laws and wars. The author says this editorial broke the tension that had made her think it was no time to go home for Christmas, and she went.
Chapter 72
What role did Albert Boyden play on the new editorial staff?
Boyden was indispensable: seeing Dunne through his writing pains, keeping the rest at their tasks, nursing new writers, and making up the magazine. Coming from Harvard to McClure's, he earned his place through a genius for keeping things going and sympathetic friendliness. Ray Stannard Baker wrote that one can have friends or editors, but Bert was both. He hosted dinners and teas at his Stuyvesant Square flat and died in 1925.
Chapter 72

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Why did Tarbell acquire a farm in Connecticut?
Tarbell had made three failed attempts to establish herself—in Meadville, Paris, and Washington. When she had to move to New York in 1898 for McClure's, she intended Titusville as home, but the 500-mile distance made week-ending impossible. Weary of homeless week-end makeshifts, she acquired forty acres and a little old house in Connecticut through purely fortuitous circumstances.
Chapter 73
What financial rule did Tarbell set for her farm, and why?
Fearing she would go deeper than her income justified, as many friends had done, Tarbell resolved to spend only what she could lay aside from income. She divided the appropriation into three parts: land, house, and furnishing. The small budget meant many wants went undone, but it also meant little or no financial anxiety. She recommends this rule to people of limited incomes.
Chapter 73
Who were the Tuckers, and how did Tarbell become their customer?
Mr. and Mrs. G. Burr Tucker were Tarbell's nearest neighbors, with an 'Antiques for Sale' sign on their house. Mrs. Tucker taught school for twenty-nine years; Burr sold pumps and fruit trees before discovering outsiders bought old spinning wheels and furniture. He bought out garrets and woodsheds for twenty miles around. Tarbell, planning to furnish from a department store basement, bought a $10 melodeon from him.
Chapter 73
What did Tarbell learn about Jeannette Gilder's masculine dress?
Jeannette Gilder, sister of Richard Watson Gilder, was a lively writer and editor living about a mile away. She carried to perfection the feminine vogue for severe masculine dress: stout shoes, short skirt, mannish jacket, shirt, tie, hat, and stick. But the masculinity was all on the surface—Esther came home laughing that Miss Gilder was 'a fake,' wearing silk petticoats and afraid of mice.
Chapter 73

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Who advised Tarbell to buy the farm, and what role did he then play?
Bert Boyden was her chief counselor. Six months after she took the first option, he insisted on seeing the place with her, looked at the oaks and the stream, and said, "Buy it." After the purchase he superintended all changes, approved her budgeting plan, helped select wallpapers, and took an interest in the larder for the winter.
Chapter 74
What task was Tarbell assigned for the American's first year?
She was to write a history of the making of U.S. tariff schedules from the Civil War onward. The magazine chose it because the tariff was as much a matter of popular concern as the Standard Oil trust had been in 1900, and there was growing demand for revision. Tarbell, who despised the prohibitive tariff, agreed to try if the magazine would back her.
Chapter 74
What handicaps did Tarbell identify in her tariff work?
She says she went in blindly, on faith rather than knowledge. Unlike the Standard Oil case, where she had spent her life close to the events, the tariff and its makers had never touched her life—it was something she had read in a book. Also, her indignation was directed at legal acts: Congress had adopted the schedules, under coercion perhaps, but still adopted them.
Chapter 74
What did Tarbell conclude from interviewing former congressmen about the tariff fight?
She found them hazy and often uninterested; the fight that seemed so important to her was a dead issue to them, part of a game they had lost or won. She saw little of the righteous indignation she thought she had found in their recorded speeches, and began to think that indignation had been political rather than righteous.
Chapter 74

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What did Grover Cleveland encourage Tarbell to write about the tariff?
Cleveland gave Tarbell encouragement for a planned review of the tariff. He retained his righteous indignation over the aid prohibitive tariffs gave certain trusts and his alarm at the growing disparity between industry and agriculture. He felt deeply the wrong of the prices inflicted on the farmer, the professional class, and the poor, and gave her nothing but encouragement for the project.
Chapter 75
How did Cleveland react to Tarbell's characterization of his public-document style?
Tarbell had described his public documents as ponderous, though he was a charming letter writer. In returning the proofs, Cleveland asked her to tone down her characterization of his style, writing that he hoped she would alter it to please him if for no other reason, since everyone is a little sensitive on such a point.
Chapter 75
Why did the Payne-Aldrich bill of 1909 finally give life to Tarbell's tariff narrative?
Tarbell could not put vitality into her narrative using the tariff debates of Congress, which she found secondhand and of the Congressional Record. The making of the Payne-Aldrich bill in 1909 belonged to the present rather than the past, and that finally gave a certain life to her narrative.
Chapter 75
What did Tarbell observe about the arguments in the 1909 tariff debate?
Tarbell saw the ancient technique repeating itself: the same old circus, gilded chariots, and clowns. The arguments might have been taken from hearings of 1883, 1888, 1893, and 1896. Figures changed and growth was impressive, but they came from interested men; Carnegie told the committee that no judge should sit in a cause in which he is interested.
Chapter 75

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Why did insurgent Republicans form a fighting band against the Payne-Aldrich tariff?
They had largely forced the promise of tariff reform into the party platform. When they found there would be no reform if lobbyists and their friends in Congress could prevent it, they crystallized into one of the most vigorous and intelligent fighting bands seen in Congress in years. They were called Insurgents; La Follette led, though his interest was railroad reform rather than the tariff.
Chapter 76
What did Senator Dolliver discover about Schedule K, and what happened to it?
Dolliver, given Schedule K (wool), found he had voted for years for duties he could not understand when he read the schedule. He concluded they were a mixture of tricks, evasions, and discriminations, intended to be so. After months of night work he mastered the subject and dissected the schedule on the Senate floor without a manuscript, yet the Senate passed it and the President signed it.
Chapter 76

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Why did Ida Tarbell refuse President Wilson's invitation to join the Tariff Commission?
Tarbell refused for several reasons: her obligations to her profession, which she could not abandon for a temporary connection; her own unfitness, since she was an observer and reporter, not a negotiator, and not a good fighter in a group; and primarily her hopelessness that a Tariff Commission could accomplish anything, since its findings would stand no chance in Congress against the wool, iron and steel, or sugar lobbies. She called a Tariff Commission hamstrung from the start.
Chapter 77
How did Tarbell respond to Jane Addams's plea to accept the post for the sake of women?
Tarbell did not feel women were served merely by an appointment to office. She argued that women, like men, serve in proportion to their fitness for office and to having something actual to contribute. She believed harm is done all around by undertaking technical jobs without proper scientific training, and that the cause of women is not advanced by putting them into positions for which they are untrained.
Chapter 77
What did Tarbell identify as the self-defeating consequences of prohibitive tariffs?
Tarbell argued that the combined prohibitive tariff industries were digging their own grave. They needed foreign markets but refused to buy from those they wanted to sell to, which practically forced non-industrial nations to industrialize and copy their methods. These nations soon succeeded so skillfully that, despite repeated tariff boosts, foreigners continued to undersell the United States. She also noted industrialists taught organized labor the power of political pressure, a weapon that might be turned against them.
Chapter 77
Why did Tarbell's guilty conscience lead her to write about the golden rule in industry?
While gathering material on bad factory conditions in protected industries, Tarbell found substantial efforts in both protected and unprotected industries to improve conditions, raise wages, shorten hours, and humanize relations. Her conscience troubled her: was it not as much a reporter's business to present this side as the other? She asked whether muckrakers should rake up the good earth as well as the noxious, and whether a good example had as much driving force as an evil one.
Chapter 77

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What range of industries did Tarbell cover during her four years of factory visits?
From 1912 over four years, Tarbell traveled from Maine to Alabama and New York to Kansas, studying iron and steel around Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Duluth; mines in West Virginia, Illinois, and Wisconsin; paper boxes, books, and newspapers; candy in Philadelphia; beer, tanneries, and woodwork in Wisconsin; and shirts, collars, and shoes in New York and Massachusetts. She never counted the factories, though some fifty-five major concerns appear in her book.
Chapter 78
What did Tarbell conclude about workers' attachment to their trades?
After long observation, Tarbell became convinced there is no trade without its devotee, citing sayings like "Once a miner, always a miner." Miners told her they stayed because they were brought up to it, liked it, or found it quiet, and dismissed danger as no worse than railroading. She concluded the percentage of workers disliking their work was probably no larger than among white-collar occupations.
Chapter 78
What did Tarbell identify as the most distressing feature of mills and factories?
Tarbell found the most distressing thing to be the atmosphere of suspicion accumulated from years of appeal to force. She felt it immediately in certain plants—everyone watching her: the guide, the boss, the men at the machines. She also argued that both unions and employers relied on force rather than education and arbitration during unrest, weakening what they all lived by.
Chapter 78

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What did the boarding-house woman say about strikes harming men?
During the Roosevelt fertilizer strike, the woman who fed Tarbell said she was for the union but that it does not see what a strike it could avoid does to men: it turns them into tramps who leave their families and take to the road. She thought women often prefer this so they won't have more babies. She still asked what else the men could do given their wages and conditions.
Chapter 79
What improvements did Thomas Lynch make for his miners and their homes?
Thomas Lynch, president of the Frick Coke Company, originated the slogan "Safety First" and said "Damn rescue work—prevent accidents." Believing a good worker needs a good home, he moved some 7,000 company houses off slag heaps onto tillable land, giving each woman kitchen water and a garden plot. In 1914, 6,923 of 7,000 homes had gardens yielding an estimated $143,000 in vegetables.
Chapter 79

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What reason did Henry Ford give Tarbell for mass production?
Ford told Tarbell that mass production exists "to give people everything they want and then some." He argued there is no reason everyone shouldn't have what they need if business isn't afraid of making too much, and that more money lies in making things cheap for everybody than in keeping them dear for a few. He wanted the car cheap enough that every workman in his shop could own one.
Chapter 80
What did Ford say about the five-dollar day and high wages?
Ford told Tarbell that high wages pay because people do more work. He said the company never expected to get the five dollars a day back and hadn't thought of it; they simply thought something was wrong when so many were out of work with no savings, and that they ought to divide. But they got it all back right away, letting them make the car cheaper and hire more men.
Chapter 80
What was the Ford sociological department and what did it enforce?
It was made up of about eighty men drawn from the factory's eighteen thousand workers, chosen on Ford's theory that qualified people could always be found "down there." It reorganized workers' home lives: men had to be clean, and cleanliness was carried into the home with wives' cooperation. No man who drank could keep his place, but he was not thrown out—he had to reform.
Chapter 80
How did the company treat former prisoners and derelicts?
Tarbell found strong sympathy throughout the factory for derelicts. Four hundred men at Ford's when she was there had served prison terms. Nobody knew them, but each had a special guardian, and she said no mother ever looked after a child more carefully than these guardians looked after their charges.
Chapter 80

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Why did Frederick Taylor choose the American Magazine over the Atlantic Monthly?
Taylor told a protesting friend he wanted to reach the men actually doing the manufacturing and construction work of the country, employers and employees, rather than professors and literary men interested in abstract theory. He was also influenced by his high opinion of editor Ray Stannard Baker, whom he called the most thorough and enthusiastic in analyzing the subject.
Chapter 81
What did Louis Brandeis tell the railroads in the shippers' suit, according to the chapter?
Acting as counsel for certain shippers suing the railroads, Brandeis told the defendants they could afford lower rates if they reorganized their business along the lines of scientific management as Frederick Taylor had developed it. He argued they could lower rates and raise wages at the same time. John Phillips read this and sent Baker to find out who Taylor was.
Chapter 81
What outward and human signs marked a factory using Taylor's system?
Outwardly, order and routing were first laws: cluttered shops with scattered material and dump heaps became models of classified order, with things placed to take the fewest steps. In human atmosphere, management planned and controlled the day's work, office and shop intermingled, and men realized mutual dependence, learning to respect each other and to value intimate and friendly cooperation.
Chapter 81
What five principles did Tarbell draw from Taylor's science of management?
She listed: find out what others have done and begin where they left off; question and prove everything; tackle only one variable at a time; hold surrounding conditions constant while experimenting; and work with all men against no one, making them want to go along. She called this the best code she knew for progress in human undertakings.
Chapter 81

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What did Tarbell say produced success in the industrial experiments she followed?
She held that where the experiments succeeded, they did so by unconsciously following Taylor's stiff principles: patient training, stern discipline, and active cooperation alone produced safety, health, efficient workmen, and abundant cheap honest output. She called these the foundation of genuine social service, and believed the desired goods followed as they became part of the nation's habit of life, reaching its lowest depths.
Chapter 82
How did Tarbell answer critics who said she gave comfort to the enemy?
She said she had no quarrel with corporate business so long as it played fair, and none with men of wealth who could show performance untainted by privilege; it was unfairness she feared and despised. She added that the enemy often disliked her industrial reporting even more than her muckraking, taking it as backhanded muckraking that threw established methods of force into damaging relief.
Chapter 82
Why did Lincoln Steffens resign from The American Magazine?
Steffens objected to the editing of his articles and demanded they run as written. The editorial board applied the same principles to his work as to other contributors—principles he had himself applied and submitted to at McClure's—and, deciding the policy could not change, accepted his resignation. Tarbell saw behind it his growing dissatisfaction with journalism's restrictions.
Chapter 82

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What warning did Mr. Kennan give about memorized lectures?
Kennan warned that no two sentences should end with the same words. In his Siberia lecture he used identical endings near the opening and closing; one tired night he picked up the words following the second sentence instead of the first, ending his lecture when he had only just begun. He saved himself, but thereafter avoided identical or even similar sentence endings.
Chapter 84
How did Tarbell approach delivering her Chautauqua lectures?
Realizing she was no orator, Tarbell built a logical framework and draped it afresh daily, thinking aloud and experimenting. She soon found a fresh beginning every day too demanding under travel conditions and foolish when an opening arrested attention. Illustrations suited to articles failed with audiences, and she switched her line of argument for the platform. She worked constantly, and personal interest in her material carried her through.
Chapter 84
What surprised Tarbell about the physical side of the circuit?
Tarbell had prided herself on being superior to physical surroundings, but soon found them playing an enormous part in her day. She inquired about hotels and bathrooms, worried about food, night noises, and drafts, and was amazed that the bed took a disproportionate place in her mind. Afterward she could diagram any room she had slept in, remembering beds when she did not remember the hotel.
Chapter 84
How did Tarbell's first Chautauqua audience change her attitude?
Tarbell was not conscious of the large percentage of condescension in her attitude until her first audience revealed it. Speaking in a steel town, she saw crowds of serious, hard-working men and women flocking to the electric-lit tent, heard the blast furnaces, and recalled bitter labor struggles. Her hopeful tales seemed flimsy, and she felt the tragedy of having no more to give them. No later audience impressed her so deeply.
Chapter 84

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How did the American Magazine plan to answer Theodore Roosevelt's pro-war views?
The magazine believed it could not counter Roosevelt by promoting organized efforts or by preaching. Instead, it decided it must prove him wrong. This led to interest in David Starr Jordan's educational effort against war at Stanford University, and Tarbell was sent to investigate, hoping there might be material for an article or two.
Chapter 85
What did Tarbell find when she arrived at Stanford to study the peace course?
She found the most exciting course offered was a six-week program on war and peace, with the big assembly room packed for public lectures. Advanced students included Bruce Bliven, Robert L. Duffus, and Maxwell Anderson. Students did intensive work on special themes: war slogans, comparisons of declarations of war invoking God, tables of armament cost increases from 1890, and economic losses from war.
Chapter 85
What did Tarbell and Jordan plan together, and what became of it?
Unable to find the definite something the American needed, Tarbell took her discouragement to Dr. Jordan, and together they planned a collaborative series of articles titled "The Case Against War." According to Jordan's autobiography, the scheme was overtaken: "crowding events permitted war to frame its own case." In August 1914 the machinery peace lovers had counted on collapsed.
Chapter 85
How did Tarbell explain her 1914 prediction that the United States would enter the war?
John Siddall called her a prophet for saying in August 1914 that before it ended the United States and the world would be in. Tarbell denied being a prophet; she said it was the logic of her conviction that the world is one, and that isolation of nations is as fantastic as isolation of the earth from the solar system or the universe.
Chapter 85

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What did Ford propose to do with the Peace Ship?
Ford told Tarbell they were chartering a Peace Ship and would go to Europe to "get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas." He then led her to a room where Madame Rosika Schwimmer and Fred Howe argued the case; Jane Addams was not present. Tarbell resisted, and Ford gently told the others, "Don't bother her—she'll come."
Chapter 86
What did Ford's November 24 telegram ask Tarbell to do?
It invited her as his guest aboard the Oscar II of the Scandinavian-American Line, sailing from New York December 4 for Christiania, Stockholm and Copenhagen. Ford said leading Europeans were being cabled to join and establish an International Conference for a just settlement of the war, and that a hundred representative Americans were invited, with Jane Addams, Thomas Edison and John Wanamaker said to have accepted.
Chapter 86
What did Ford's November 27 letter claim about the war and peace?
Ford wrote that the carnage, already costing ten million lives, could be stopped through a mediating conference of six disinterested nations—Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Spain—plus the United States. He claimed envoys had found a universal peace desire that could not be expressed publicly until one side was defeated or both exhausted, and that people, not governments, wanted peace.
Chapter 86
How did Tarbell respond to Ford's appeals?
Tarbell refused. She described the hour with Schwimmer and Howe as one of the most difficult of her life, saying only "I can't see it" and feeling like a poor worm. She kept no copies of her replies but believed their gist was a heavy-hearted "I can't do it, Mr. Ford." She also doubted Ford ever saw the telegram and letter, noting the letter's signature was not his.
Chapter 86

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Why did Jane Addams not sail on Henry Ford's Peace Ship?
Tarbell recounts that the night after her hotel visit, Addams was taken to Chicago and hospitalized, gravely ill, so she did not go. Years later Addams told Tarbell she certainly would have gone otherwise, since she took every chance for human relief. Tarbell adds that had Addams gone, she, not Madame Schwimmer, would have been in command.
Chapter 87
What did Tarbell call the Peace Ship, and what comparison did she draw?
The author argues the Peace Ship was a tragedy of hasty action, attempting a great end without proper preparation. She says Ford would never have built a new type of automobile engine the way he tried to handle the unbridled passions of men organized to kill one another. She notes the ship failed, but so did under-cover official efforts pushed by the President and his sympathizers.
Chapter 87
What did President Wilson tell Tarbell about war at the Daniels dinner?
Wilson said he never went to bed without realizing he might be called up by news meaning war, possibly before morning. He said it was harder because reports must be kept secret, and that hasty action or indiscretion might plunge the country into danger when a little care would change things. His great duty, he said, was not to see red. Tarbell left with strengthened confidence in him.
Chapter 87
What did Tarbell observe about how a town responds to the threat of war?
Tarbell argues you can count on people for any effort or sacrifice they believe necessary, and that a country's response to war's threat is revealing. In a Pennsylvania town of not over twenty-eight hundred, one hundred and thirty-five boys left for Mexico. The whole town gathered quietly; old soldiers led the procession, and the little stone Civil War monument suddenly took on dignity and power.
Chapter 87

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What did Tarbell find most impressive about the Western people's response to the threat of war?
Tarbell writes that the quietness and naturalness of the proceedings struck her deeply. Compared with the agitations and hysteria the East had shown over two and a half years, she found the dignity, immediate action, and willingness to see it through gave her a solemn sense of the people's power and trustworthiness. She said this realization more than repaid her forty-nine nights in forty-nine different beds.
Chapter 88
How did a small-town woman explain her shift to supporting war?
The woman, who kept a dingy house near a railway junction, had read full details of the European trouble in the Chicago Tribune and Record Herald. She said she had not been for a war until 'they went back on their word.' That settled it for everybody out there, she said, and now there was nothing else to do. Tarbell heard those words often in the following days.
Chapter 88
Why was the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense created?
Tarbell says the Administration wanted an official group to which it could refer zealous, importuning women who wanted to 'help,' and the organizations already mobilizing women. Rivalry among those groups was growing embarrassing. The committee was cleverly organized to spike this rivalry by including presidents of leading national groups: the National Suffrage Society, Women's Federation of Clubs, National Women's Council, Colonial Dames, and National League for Women's Service. Tarbell alone had no organizational tie.
Chapter 88
Why did Dr. Anna Shaw resent the committee's position under the Council?
The committee was not independent but a subsidiary of the Council of National Defense, headed by Walter Gifford, whom Tarbell describes as intelligent, sensible, and amazingly self-controlled and patient. Tarbell says having to go to men for orders irritated Dr. Shaw from the start. Shaw felt women should decide for themselves what women should do, or at least that she, as head, should sit on the Council. Tarbell thinks Shaw never quite forgave the Administration for subjecting the committee to men's direction.
Chapter 88

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What did the Woman's Committee conclude it must do with its recommendations?
The committee concluded it must find a way to get its recommendations to the women of the country. Doing so required coordinating the various agencies represented in the body, enlisting others, and creating a channel for the Government's requests and orders. The author describes this as organization, and credits Dr. Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt as the most experienced and successful women organizers in the country.
Chapter 89
How did the Woman's Committee's role in food work change after Hoover's appointment?
The committee assumed it would handle the food problem, and by midsummer its organizations were planting and hoeing, with dehydration and canning following. When Herbert Hoover returned from feeding Europe and was put at the head of the American Food Administration, the committee was made an auxiliary despite Dr. Anna's bristling opposition. The author became liaison officer, passing food headquarters' requests on to women.
Chapter 89
What did Jane Addams predict about the war's effect on social legislation?
Jane Addams told the author at the beginning of the War that everything gained in social legislation would be destroyed, throwing women back where they were twenty-five years ago. The author did not think this was necessary or the way things were already going, and describes efforts to protect and educate women entering industry instead.
Chapter 89
What was the Woman's Committee's most useful service, according to the author?
The author argues the committee's most useful service was growing activity in preventing the machinery of daily life from rusting in the storm of war. Through bulletins and reports, notably Agnes Nestor's, it spread information on labor standards to women who had likely never heard of them, aiming to make women conscious of the needs of sisters at the machine.
Chapter 89

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What did the Woman's Committee do for the Children's Bureau under Julia Lathrop?
The committee turned its machinery to supporting the Children's Bureau after Julia Lathrop reported its work falling behind—playgrounds given up and maternity work shut down. Women in districts where the bureau was unknown were aroused to establish nursing centers, look after maternity cases, and take fresh interest in children. Lathrop said the bureau's work had been extended more in the few months of this promotion than its own machinery could have done in as many years.
Chapter 90
What did Tarbell propose to Secretary Lane about the Woman's Committee's future?
Tarbell proposed continuing the Woman's Committee after the War in the Department of the Interior, under a woman assistant secretary, as a channel to carry to women in the country's last outposts knowledge of what government departments were doing for health, education, and training—doing for peace what it did for war. Lane was interested, but the committee showed little response; Dr. Anna dismissed it as too limited a recognition, wanting a Cabinet representative instead.
Chapter 90
Why did Tarbell and Mrs. Lamar want the committee to avoid suffrage work?
Tarbell says she and Mrs. Lamar, widow of Justice Lamar, saw eye to eye and both felt the committee should keep out of suffrage work. Tarbell had always resented militant suffragists belittling women's past work, picturing woman as a meek 'doormat,' and refusing credit for women's social and economic work in building America. She believed the committee's restraint was sound politics and helped bring Congress to accept the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919.
Chapter 90

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Why did Tarbell's book title upset her militant friends?
Tarbell says the title "The Business of Being a Woman" was like a red rag to many militant friends. She argues woman had a business assigned by nature and society more important than public life. Her friends were disturbed by the idea, and even if it were true, they did not want it emphasized.
Chapter 91
How did Tarbell's view of democracy differ from suffragists'?
Tarbell says most people treat democracy as machinery whose motive power is the ballot, and most suffrage advocates expected regeneration through laws and systems. She saw democracy as a spiritual faith, interpreted in laws but deepening only as the spirit grows. She feared women would substitute the letter for the spirit.
Chapter 91
What did Tarbell fear women would do in democracy?
Tarbell feared women would substitute the letter for the spirit, weakening the strategic place Nature and society had given them for keeping the spirit alive in democracy: elevating it to the head of the procession of life and training youth for its place. She felt her arguments had no emotional appeal beside the suffragist program.
Chapter 91
How did Tarbell describe the country's mood in early 1918?
Tarbell confesses she was unprepared for what she met early in 1918 traveling in the South, Middle West, and Southwest. The country was no longer quiet or reflective; everywhere people were fighting the War watchfully, suspiciously, determinedly. Platforms were swathed in flags, and newsstands replaced local postcards with soldiers and war books.
Chapter 91

Section 924 cards

How did Texans react to the Zimmermann note, according to Tarbell?
Tarbell reports that Texans met the Zimmermann note with contempt rather than anger. Some country newspapers didn't bother printing the German official's name, calling him "Zim." The impression she received was that Texans believed a German-Japanese attack on the Southwest border would be simple for them to clean up, asking only that Uncle Sam keep his hands off.
Chapter 92
What did Tarbell observe about young soldiers' attitudes toward danger, such as the Tuscania sinking?
Tarbell says the boys' interest in what lay ahead was unflagging and they were not afraid to talk about the worst. When the Tuscania went down, those bound for sailing points were not fazed by the danger of the passage; she felt more than once that the tragedy had whetted their desire to get at the enemy. She also notes the total impression was of bigness, freedom, and exultation.
Chapter 92
How did Tarbell describe the pressure applied during the Third Liberty Loan among German settlers?
Tarbell describes a fierce determination to carry out every Government suggestion. In a section with many German settlers, a woman told her that the town's one German family, after being waited on by five leading citizens, took $10,000 of Liberty Bonds. Tarbell notes she didn't know if the citizens carried ropes, but she did see a detachment parading with ropes on their saddle pummels and banners marked "Beware."
Chapter 92
How did Tarbell respond when a Missouri citizen asked if she was a pacifist?
Tarbell parried that she was for winning the war. When he produced a prewar peace society list bearing her name, headed by Jane Addams, whom he called "that woman," Tarbell said she was proud to be classed with her, calling Addams one of the world's greatest, and said if the world had heeded her counsels the boys would not be dying in France. She left by train under black looks.
Chapter 92

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What did Tarbell conclude about Americans' resolve to see the war through?
Tarbell states that her observations across twenty-five states strengthened her conviction that, whatever it cost, the country would insist on seeing the war through. She says that conviction was never stronger than when the Armistice was suddenly signed. She acknowledges some private pacifist dissent but says it was infrequent and never voiced publicly, since saying it openly would endanger a person's life.
Chapter 93
What did Tarbell observe about most people's interest in postwar arrangements?
Tarbell observed that people generally had little interest in what would happen after the war ended. They took for granted that Germany would be driven back, and that was what they worked for. How adjustments would be made did not deeply concern them. What they wanted was to have it over, get the boys back, forget, and pay the bill, but with no more of this senseless business in the world.
Chapter 93
Why did Tarbell sail to France in January 1919, and what did she bring Madame Marillier?
Tarbell went to France for the Red Cross Magazine at the request of her old editor John S. Phillips, who wanted a fresh eye on the organization's rehabilitation work in France. She agreed to try. Sailing in January 1919, she was inspired by a fellow passenger's ham to buy an enormous jambon for her friend Madame Marillier, hauling it from Bordeaux to Paris in her saddlebags.
Chapter 93
What did the doughboy slogan on the camion express, and how did Tarbell describe it?
Tarbell saw a legend on a camion crossing the Place de la Concorde: 'We have paid our debt to Lafayette. Now who in hell do we owe?' She was told a scandalized officer tore it down and forbade its future use. Tarbell says it expressed the doughboy's opinion, as she got it, better than anything else she saw or heard in Paris.
Chapter 93

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What did Tarbell find when she visited her old Left Bank quarter in Paris?
She found great gaps in the circle around the Panthéon and in the Boulevard Saint-Michel skirting the Luxembourg, showing what the quarter had endured. The laiterie where she once bought eggs, milk, and cheese was gone, its space boarded up. Neighbors told her the cheerful Madame she had enjoyed had died with the building.
Chapter 94
Why had nothing been mended in Paris for three years, according to Tarbell's friend?
Her friend explained that nothing had been painted, mended, or replaced because craftsmen and tradesmen were in the trenches or in their graves. Tarbell notes that many people she had known — those who served her or were her comrades — were dead, and Madame Marillier showed her a roster of the dead from her Wednesday dinners.
Chapter 94
What did Tarbell discover about the 'pretty girl of Lille' wax bust at Lille?
The gallery was closed, but she was permitted to visit and saw unopened boxes of pictures the Germans were carrying off when stopped, each labeled with the picture's name and its assigned German museum. She spotted the 'pretty girl of Lille,' but the curator winked and said it was a replica; the real one was safe and would stay there until he was sure 'they' wouldn't return.
Chapter 94
How were children raised in trenches near Laon described, and what did the sisters find difficult?
Tarbell found a half-dozen children brought up in the trenches, being civilized by two French sisters who said it was difficult to teach them to use handkerchiefs. The children were remarkably healthy, having eaten the invaders' food and lived in the earth like young animals. They knew nothing of books but everything about war, and criticized her Red Cross uniform as 'pas chic.'
Chapter 94

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What did Tarbell find most perplexing about the devastated regions?
Tarbell found the silence of the devastated regions even more perplexing than the stripping of the towns. She eventually realized she saw and heard nothing alive—no cat, no dog, no hen—all had disappeared. When animals began returning, the rejoicing resembled the return of beautiful things to the cities, and peasants wept over an imported hen that laid an egg.
Chapter 95
How did Tarbell describe the stages of land restoration after debris was cleared?
After the first layer of war debris was cleared—largely by German prisoners and soldiers from French colonies—the heavy task of leveling the land followed, since it was often deeply riddled. Then came tractors plowing the land, and finally seeding. Tarbell saw short stretches along the highways between Paris and Lille in one or another stage of this orderly redemption.
Chapter 95
Why did Tarbell think French restoration work mattered most?
The author argues the French work mattered most because it was their own business and they understood their people—what they could and could not expect them to do. They succeeded in getting individuals to do what they had always done in the way they had always done it. American workers, though marvelous, wanted to reform French life, favoring sanitation and chintz curtains over community tractors and sewing machines.
Chapter 95
What did Tarbell propose the Red Cross do with its stored garments?
Tarbell urged that the Red Cross turn over its millions of stored garments—shirts, drawers, pajamas, scarfs, sweaters from sewing and knitting circles nationwide—to the French sewing circles rapidly forming, sending sewing machines with them if possible. She wanted the distribution general and systematic rather than desultory, so garments could be refitted for people lacking decent clothes.
Chapter 95

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What did the Armenians hope the United States would do for their country?
The Armenians at the Paris Peace Conference hoped the United States would take the mandate for Armenia. Tarbell describes a delegation at the Hôtel de Vouillemont, including a woman with a beautiful and tragic face, whose members had suffered atrocities that paralyzed their country. Tarbell became a determined advocate of that solution and says she would have worked for a mandate for Armenia had the United States joined the League of Nations.
Chapter 96
What did Tarbell identify as the one concrete thing amid the confusion?
Tarbell says that in the confusion and discouragement the one concrete thing she found was the International Labor Conference. She traces it to the International Association for Labor Legislation, organized in 1900 as a hope of pacifists like Dr. Jordan and Jane Addams, carried on without much help from labor until the War brought a loud demand for international action. She was glad to see Gompers, Mary Anderson, and Rose Schneiderman in Paris.
Chapter 96
What replaced the will to peace as the Conference went on, according to Tarbell?
Tarbell says that as the days went on the will to peace, strong and taken for granted at the start, passed, and hate replaced it. Disappointed suppliants joined political malcontents who talked in cafés and at dinner tables, and these groups absorbed bewildered people getting no answers. She recalls a Brittany shrine called 'Our Lady of the Hates,' whose symbolic figures portray the devils that torment men and prevent peaceful living.
Chapter 96

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Who led the labor committee of the American delegation, aiding Tarbell?
Dr. James T. Shotwell was the active head of the labor committee of the American delegation. Tarbell credits his intelligence and patience as of the utmost help in getting the final agreement adopted early in April in a full session, and says his generous explanations let her follow what was going on.
Chapter 97
How did Tarbell view the League of Nations Covenant adopted April 28?
The author argues the Covenant was the largest and soundest joint attempt the world had ever seen to end war, and she believed in it with all her heart. Yet she saw threats in its make-up: some were certain war was ended, some sneered as they signed, and stolid ones accepted without understanding.
Chapter 97
What did Tarbell identify as the key to world peace, and who voiced it?
The author argues sacrifice is the key to peace — sacrifice of the strong to meet the needs and urges of the weak. Clemenceau was the only man at the Peace Conference she heard use the word, telling his people the Covenant meant sacrifices for all. She suggests the League's failure to grapple with this at the start mattered.
Chapter 97
Why did Tarbell believe the United States stayed out of the League?
The author argues it was the failure patiently to listen to political objections coming from the United States and openly to meet them that kept America out of the largest and soundest joint attempt the world had ever seen to end war. She calls getting something all thirty-one nations would sign creative statesmanship of the highest order.
Chapter 97

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What did Tarbell find surprising about the Mormons she encountered in Utah?
She was surprised to discover that Mormons were like Gentiles, and she felt toward them exactly as she did toward different religious sects at home. She found the attempts of taxi drivers, hotel clerks, and baggagemen to convert her disconcerting at first, but soon came to expect them and to find interest in their arguments.
Chapter 98
Why did many Northwesterners oppose the guarantee France sought from Britain and the US?
Tarbell found most people against it because they would not run the risk of having to help France again. She, by contrast, favored granting the guarantee provisionally and for a limited period, believing it would quiet what she felt was one of the real dangers of the after-war situation: the near hysteria of France.
Chapter 98
How did Tarbell explain American failure to understand France's fear?
The author argues America could not grasp the years of horror France had suffered, the devastation of centuries of labor, and the loss of three and a half million of her best youth. She also says America failed to realize what France clearly did: that the Great War was the latest expression of centuries of Central European determination to reach the sea.
Chapter 98
How did William Jennings Bryan limit Tarbell's speaking on the circuit?
Bryan, long the Chautauqua platform's brightest star, was given the evening hour. Tarbell was told to cut her time to forty minutes and go on a half-hour earlier. When Bryan learned she had pleaded for guarantees an hour before he condemned them, he told her she must not present views opposed to his where he was speaking.
Chapter 98

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What did Tarbell want to see done with privileges men had snatched?
The author argues that privileges men had snatched should all be gradually scrapped, cost what it might economically. She saw these privileges as a threat to honest men, to sound industry, and to peaceful international life. She listed ending privilege as first and most important in the pattern of work she wanted to pursue through writing and speaking.
Chapter 99
How did Tarbell characterize Woodrow Wilson's place in history?
The author argues Wilson was the first leader in history to treat the ancient dream of a peaceful world as more than wishful thinking, and the first willing to stake all in drawing nations together for a just and lasting peace. She notes that in Paris in 1919 he persuaded leaders of most of the earth's nations to help build a machine for such peace.
Chapter 99
Why did Tarbell see her Connecticut home as her strongest security?
At sixty-three with only a small accumulation of material goods, Tarbell had to work to live. She had never let her home become a financial burden, so she could afford it and felt she could retire there and raise all the food she needed if free lancing petered out. It had also become the family home, hallowed by joys and sorrows.
Chapter 99
How did Tarbell describe Lincoln's approach to public affairs?
The author argues Lincoln took time to understand a thing before speaking, knowing that hurry and acting before being reasonably sure usually make a mess of even good intentions. He wanted to know what he was about before acting, and wanted those he depended on to know it too. He acted without malice, accounting for men's limitations and asking no more of anyone than they could give.
Chapter 99

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Why did Tarbell find her new freelance freedom expensive and lonesome?
She gave up a regular salary and, more painfully, the daily editorial contacts she had enjoyed for twenty years. Without an office she had to pay her own secretary, telephone, and stationery, and she lost the lunch-table gossip about new manuscripts and writers. The author argues freedom proved both expensive and lonesome.
Chapter 100
Why was Tarbell's planned third Standard Oil volume delayed for years?
She dropped the story in 1904, and the 1911 dissolution left her needing to assess the new setup. Attorney General Wickersham advised her not to hurry, suggesting about ten years. Then the War made oil a matter of government control and international rivalry, so the dramatic events had to settle into orderly procedure before she could write.
Chapter 100
What prompted Tarbell to begin the third volume in 1922?
Not Wickersham's dictum but an unexpected piratical attack: with the two-volume edition exhausted, a rumor spread that Standard Oil had bought and destroyed the plates, and prices soared. A cheap new edition appeared, printed in England, probably from German plates. Her publisher promptly reprinted the two volumes, the pirated edition vanished, and the episode set her to work.
Chapter 100
Why was the third Standard Oil volume abandoned before publication?
Tarbell had about twenty thousand words written when the revived McClure's Magazine, her financial backer, was suspended, casting the volume out before publication began. She then took the first work offered for security. The author reflects that repeating herself is doubtful practice and suspects a slight mustiness in work built on pre-War material.
Chapter 100

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Why did Tarbell initially refuse to write Judge Gary's biography?
Tarbell refused because she feared being unable to uncover the truth in an enormous industrial labyrinth, and worried she would face the same experience she had with H. H. Rogers. She also knew that if she wrote fairly, groups she largely sympathized with would accuse her of whitewashing, since they saw Gary only as Scapegoat Number One.
Chapter 101
What did Tarbell tell Gary she suspected about him?
Tarbell told Gary she did not know if she wanted to write his life, and that if she found practices against public policy she would have to say so. She said she appreciated his efforts to improve labor conditions, but that it did not follow she could endorse his financial policies: it was not his humanitarianism but his ethics she suspected.
Chapter 101
What was the Gary Code, and how was it received?
The Gary Code was Judge Gary's new code of fair practices, jeeringly named in Wall Street. It barred asking or accepting special favors from railroads, sent full yearly financial reports to the public as early as to directors, ending insider advance information, and attacked predatory competition from within. Gary also supported Theodore Roosevelt's efforts to control business, which many Big Business colleagues treated as treason.
Chapter 101
How did Tarbell judge whether the Gary Code was actually followed?
Tarbell concluded that Gary's code was applied as completely and rapidly as he could persuade or drive his frequently doubting and recalcitrant associates to it, which took time and frequent battles. She noted he more than once came close to losing his official head fighting for a plank. The code and the effort to practice it reconciled her to the task.
Chapter 101

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How did Judge Gary guard against being misquoted in interviews with Tarbell?
Gary always had a secretary present at their interviews who took down in shorthand everything he said and everything Tarbell said. Tarbell made her own longhand notes, dictating them once back at her desk. She recalled that no question of misunderstanding of meaning ever came up between them.
Chapter 102
How did Tarbell explain Gary's willingness to preach Sunday-school morals to Wall Street?
The author argues Gary never outgrew his early upbringing: he never got over believing in the soundness of what he learned and later taught in Sunday school. Unlike peers raised the same way, he insisted those precepts of honesty, consideration for others, and fair play be preached on weekdays and in the board room, not just Sundays and church.
Chapter 102
How did Gary respond to radical criticism and radical meetings, according to Tarbell?
Criticisms Tarbell brought him never fretted or irritated Gary; he enjoyed analyzing them and never dismissed radical opinions as nonsense. During her year with him, he read all the speeches from the many public radical meetings in New York and commented on them intelligently and with good humor. He said they must know about Lenin and Mussolini, calling them great forces trying new forms of government.
Chapter 102
Why did Tarbell face criticism for writing about Judge Gary, and how did she defend it?
A newspaper ran "The Taming of Ida M. Tarbell," saying she had become a eulogist of the kind of man she was sworn to oppose. She replied that Gary was not that kind of captain of industry: he had fought, at frequent risk to his position and fortune, many of the privileges and practices she objected to. She called writing his life the only time she deserved to be called courageous.
Chapter 102

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Why did President Wilson call the 1919 Industrial Conference?
Wilson believed that at the end of the War the immediate domestic problem was establishing common ground for industry, wanting a covenant by which employer and employee could work out problems as cooperators rather than enemies. The labor world was in an uproar, and a steel organizing effort was under way.
Chapter 103
Who were the four women representatives at the Industrial Conference?
Wilson named Ida Tarbell as one of four women representatives, alongside Lillian Wald, head of the Nurses' Settlement in New York City; Gertrude Barnum, assistant director of the investigation service of the U.S. Department of Labor; and Sara Conboy of the textile workers' union.
Chapter 103
What ultimately ruined the Industrial Conference?
It was not Gompers' steel strike resolution but the inability of labor and employer representatives to agree on a definition of collective bargaining. Employers and some of the public group feared it meant a closed shop; labor suspected the employer definition encouraged company unions. Suspicion governed both groups, and after two weeks labor walked out.
Chapter 103
How did the public group respond to Wilson's request to carry on?
After labor and a group of employers walked out, Wilson asked the public group of about twenty-five to carry on. Though it included able men who had offered wise suggestions, Tarbell says they had been outmaneuvered, lost heart, and refused. Tarbell pleaded with them to stick to it and make some report.
Chapter 103

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What did Tarbell say was the Conference's first principle about crises?
The Conference laid down as a first principle that "The time to act is before a crisis becomes inevitable." Tarbell called this an official recognition that business moves in cycles—boom followed by slump—so common sense demands preparedness. She used it as the text of a lecture she gave after the Conference was dismissed.
Chapter 104
How did Tarbell propose government, industry, and individuals prepare for slumps?
Government at every level—federal, state, county, community—was to hold reserve plans and money for non-essential work, released when a slump began. Private industry was to save surplus in good times to keep plants and laboratories ready. Employees were to be protected by employment insurance, and householders were to hold back needed repairs for the day of need.
Chapter 104
Why did interest in Tarbell's unemployment-preparedness lecture fade by 1926?
Tarbell lectured for two years with conviction, but audiences dwindled once the slump passed and good times returned. People asked why plan for the future when the bad dream was over. By 1926 no audiences remained for talks on preparing for unemployment, and even Hoover, the Conference's efficient chairman, apparently forgot the program.
Chapter 104
What did Tarbell conclude about herself from her government service?
Tarbell found her excursions into public service discouraging and disillusioning, though they convinced her she was right to decline Wilson's Tariff Commission. She concluded she was an observer and reporter, not fitted for commission or conference work. What interested her was watching members in action—Hoover's wariness, political lineups, and objectives fading into party ambition.
Chapter 104

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Why did Tarbell accept the assignment to go to Italy?
She says the real reason was that she was offered so large a sum she thought she could not afford to refuse. She also vaguely hoped to learn lessons about how free government is undermined, but she frames the money as the actual motive, not the research interest.
Chapter 105
What warnings did friends and officials give Tarbell before Italy?
A Washington undersecretary said she would probably be arrested, claiming Americans there drink and talk too much and attack the government. Paris friends warned she would be searched, must not carry opposition letters or anti-Mussolini books, would find only pro-regime newspapers, must use the Fascist salute, and must not speak French.
Chapter 105
What did Tarbell actually find on arriving in Rome?
By the end of her first day she found nobody had searched her bags, she had spoken French all day, she saw no one using the Fascist salute, and kiosks carried French and English papers beside Italian ones. Over four to five months none of the dire prophecies came true and her mail was not interfered with.
Chapter 105
How did Italians explain accepting Mussolini despite disliking his methods?
Tarbell found bitter critics of the regime in Palermo, Milan, Florence, and Turin, but says even good parliamentarians accepted Mussolini. Men told her he had saved the country: they did not accept his methods or believe in dictatorship, but considered it better than the anarchy that preceded it.
Chapter 105

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What did Tarbell find most interesting during her visit to Mussolini?
The author says the most exciting and interesting hour and a half she spent in Italy was in an anteroom watching the many people waiting to be received by Mussolini—observing them go in scared and come out exultant, or go in inflated and come out collapsed. Even the Admiral of the Fleet at Ostia waited nervously, adjusting his uniform before striding in as if marching in a parade.
Chapter 106
What common interest did Tarbell and Mussolini immediately find?
They quickly hit on better housing. Mussolini became excited and stern, pounding the table and saying men and women must have better places to live, since you cannot expect good citizens in the hovels of parts of Italy. He discussed building undertakings already advanced, the effect of crowded, cheerless homes on women, and his interest in what prohibition was doing to American working people.
Chapter 106
What three possible futures did Tarbell foresee for Mussolini?
The author saw three possibilities: that he would be assassinated, noting three known attempts while she was in Italy and watching her morning paper for that headline; that he could bring Italy to an even economic keel through thrift, hard work, resource development, and legitimate colonization by treaty or purchase; or, like Napoleon, that he would overreach himself in a too magnificent attempt and go down as Napoleon did.
Chapter 106
Why did Tarbell think Mussolini's rise mattered to Americans?
The author argues it was not Mussolini or the Corporate State that mattered to Americans but what was behind them. She asks why parliamentary government broke down in Italy—the Italy of Garibaldi, Cavour, and Victor Emmanuel—why a dictator could replace it, and whether this could happen in the government of Washington and Lincoln. There, she says, was something to learn.
Chapter 106

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What did Tarbell aim to accomplish with 'In the Footsteps of the Lincolns'?
Tarbell traced the Lincoln family across seven generations, from Samuel's 1637 arrival in Hingham, Massachusetts, through Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, Kentucky, southwestern Indiana, and into Illinois. She ran down records, copied gravestone inscriptions, visited their houses, and studied the families they married into. She says the journey left her feeling she had rescued the Lincolns from the 'poor white trash' label political enemies had favored.
Chapter 107
Why did Tarbell publish a life of Owen D. Young in 1932?
Tarbell believed the country needed good models and sound practices, and she called Young 'A New Type of Industrial Leader.' She had followed him since the secret President's Second Industrial Conference, where Wilson, Gregory, and others praised his open-minded, progressive approach to industrial relations. She also admired his negotiating on the Dawes and Young reparations committees, the latter in 1929 with Young as chairman.
Chapter 107
How did the 1932 presidential boom affect Tarbell's book on Young?
A boom for Young, cooked up by misguided friends against his wishes, coincided with the book's release. Political-minded reviewers took it as a campaign biography, so Tarbell's point about his rare ability to lead in labor struggles was lost. Young finally stated flatly that under no circumstances would he accept a nomination. Tarbell still believed his active involvement would have spared the country a peck of trouble in industrial relations.
Chapter 107
Why did Tarbell take up lyceum lecturing from 1924 onward?
Freelance income from her books and articles was uncertain, especially since her sober, self-shaped work sold modestly. She wanted an annual, sure if modest, money crop, and found it in lyceum work. Her Chautauqua seasons led a lecture bureau to book her four to six weeks a year, starting around Lincoln's birthday, usually five engagements weekly, with local committees choosing from a half-dozen offered subjects.
Chapter 107

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How does Tarbell describe her state of mind while touring as a lecturer?
She calls it hard and lonesome business, feeling herself a detached wanderer who had laid aside personality and become a cog in the lecture bureau mechanism. Her one ambition was to fill the schedule's specifications and have it over with; only after saying goodbye to the last committee and heading home did she feel the joyful rush of reviving personality.
Chapter 108
What scenic rewards does Tarbell say the railroad journeys gave her?
She recalls glittering snow mountains with stars hanging over them, miles of blossoming redbuds along an Oklahoma stream, the Ozark Mountains stretched across Missouri, amethyst deserts, and prairies yellow with wheat or white with snow. The journeys took her into every state, and she says some remembered beauty takes the curse off the towns' disorder and squalor.
Chapter 108
What conflict did Tarbell often face with local committees over her lecture subject?
Although the subject was supposedly settled by letter, she often found committees divided, usually because someone feared she might be too radical and antagonize well-to-do conservative sponsors or encourage the town's rebels. Sometimes after behind-the-scenes discussion the chairman begrudgingly allowed her topic only at the last moment, and an objector later said he would have preferred another subject.
Chapter 108
What does Tarbell say about the audiences she faced on the lecture circuit?
She argues that a lecturer going to remote towns may think he will be a treat, but if sensible he discovers a critical audience. It is interested, courteous, and respectful, but has heard scores of lecturers and compares his matter and manner with theirs. She cites Middle West towns where audiences had heard Thackeray, Dickens, Emerson, and Alcott.
Chapter 108

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What did Tarbell find most valuable about being heckled during lectures?
The author argues that hecklers—usually Socialists or Single Taxers—who challenge a speaker's weak points, generalizations, and facts are beneficial. She encouraged questions after her talks, and says a lecturer going over the same arguments nightly benefits from someone seizing the chance to pick on flaws, leaving the lecture better equipped than when he came.
Chapter 109
Why did Tarbell publicly criticize prohibition in the 1920s?
Though never a prohibitionist in principle, she was willing for it to be tried. But what she saw of its workings across the country—effects on the young and dangers to women traveling alone at night in stations and on trains—convinced her by 1928 that something disastrous was happening and must be faced, not hidden. She reported what she had seen and heard.
Chapter 109
What two generalizations did Tarbell draw from her 1920–1932 travels?
First, the author argues Americans ambitiously adopt what they conceive to be national standards, even when unsuited to their locality, often destroying something individual and charming—seen in standardized hotels, dress shops, beauty parlors, and postal cards. Second, she observed lively absorption in national policies, with people reporting how undertakings worked in their own communities.
Chapter 109

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What does Tarbell say standardization does to democracy?
The author argues that standardization is the surest way to destroy initiative and to benumb the creative impulse, which she calls above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals. She links the national ambition to standardize with the mistaken notion that democracy means standardization.
Chapter 110
How did the stable people Tarbell found define democracy and government's role?
They believed democracy protected them while they earned a livelihood rather than insuring them a stable livelihood. Government's business was to keep off the plunderers and let them alone. If government failed to protect them from transportation plunderers, money manipulation, or stock gambling in goods they raised, they held it responsible and could change it.
Chapter 110
What did Tarbell expect to do at seventy, and what did she find?
She had planned to stop at seventy, burrow into the country, and use a microscope to watch Protozoa, expecting more fun and less anguish than watching men and women. When seventy came she found she still had security to look after, and she concludes that so long as her head holds out she shall work, counting it a blessing.
Chapter 110
How does Tarbell describe her own role and each person's place in history?
She calls her point of attack that of a journalist after the fact, rarely a reformer or advocate of a cause, and says she lacked the unquestioning habit a first-class crusader needs. She holds that nobody begins or ends anything; each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain, and a grave mistake is persuading ourselves nobody has passed this way before.
Chapter 110

Section 1114 cards

What does Tarbell blame for the failure of many reform plans?
The author argues that many fine plans sink outright because reformers are indifferent to or ignorant of the multiplicity of human elements in the society they seek to benefit. Solutions must survive a stream where human experiences, prejudices, ambitions, and ideals clash and mingle, forming public opinion—the current that swallows, digests, or rejects what is offered.
Chapter 111
How does Tarbell describe the economic pattern across her four generations?
She divides 1857–1937 into four generations and finds each features a major panic followed by five to seven years of depression, then a brilliant short-lived recovery ending in what is called a recession. She notes her own birth came in a panic year, and predicts her fifth generation will duplicate the pattern.
Chapter 111
What does Tarbell say about strong business leaders like Carnegie and Rockefeller?
The author argues each generation repeats its leaders—men of superior inventiveness, energy, and business genius inspired by love of power and possession, who launch selfish schemes. She holds that while each left something sinister behind, each also contributed to higher living standards and hurried nationalization; the public took the benefit and ordered government to control what was sinister.
Chapter 111
What overall pattern does Tarbell see when viewing her generations as a whole?
Though comparing generations one by one offers little hope, the author argues that viewed as a whole they form not cycles on a rocky road but a spiral that moves upward, if unsteadily. She cites the world's conscious struggle over whether all men cooperate in a free, peaceful world or strong men impose their own.
Chapter 111

Section 1123 cards

What did the wise man at the Carnegie Endowment advise Tarbell to read before the 1921 conference?
He told her to read 'Don Quixote' to learn what men cannot do, Aesop's Fables to learn what they can do, and above all the King James Version of the Bible, which says peace on earth is promised only to men of good will. She concludes that peace requires men of common sense and good will.
Chapter 112
According to Tarbell, what makes a person's work valuable, regardless of its size?
The author argues that the nature and seeming importance of work matter less than its right relation to where a person stands. If the need is digging a ditch or washing dishes, that is the greatest thing for the moment. Time, place, need, and relation decide the value of the act, and following this path opens broader roads.
Chapter 112
What did Tarbell discover about the durability of friendship across her life?
She found friendships born at any period endure despite circumstances, time, separation, or grave differences of opinion, such as those that broke up the old McClure crowd or the separations war brings. She says you pick up at the day the friendship was interrupted, not broken, citing McClure's birthday party for Roseboro, Phillips, and herself.
Chapter 112

Section 1134 cards

What magazine did Tarbell write for before and during her muckraking years?
The index lists McClure's Magazine with page references spanning 121 to 406, covering her early work through the Standard Oil articles. It also lists The American Magazine, where she later worked, and The Chautauquan, an earlier outlet. These entries trace her career across several publications.
Chapter 113
Which figures does the index connect to the women's suffrage movement?
The index lists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, Dr. Anna H. Shaw, and Jane Addams, among others. Anthony and Stanton appear with early page ranges, while Catt and Shaw cluster in later sections on suffrage organizing. The entries show Tarbell's contact with multiple generations of suffrage leaders.
Chapter 113
What major work on Standard Oil is attributed to Tarbell in the index?
The index lists "History of the Standard Oil Company, The" with page references 202, 206, 239–241, 244, 258, and 361–364. It is cross-referenced under the Standard Oil Company entry as "History." The index also lists the Sherman Antitrust Law and the South Improvement Company alongside Standard Oil material.
Chapter 113
Which European thinkers and socialists appear in the index?
The index lists Karl Marx, along with French scholars Charles Seignobos and Charles Borgeaud, and Lucien Herr. It also lists Madame Roland and Madame Cécile Marillier, reflecting Tarbell's research and friendships in France. These entries cluster around her biographical and historical writing.
Chapter 113

Section 1144 cards

What does the index entry for Titusville, Pa., suggest about its role in Tarbell's life?
The index lists Titusville, Pennsylvania, with an unusually long run of page references spanning from page 4 to page 262. This concentration indicates the town recurs throughout the autobiography, reflecting its importance in Tarbell's early life and later narrative, rather than appearing in a single episode.
Chapter 114
Which figures does the index associate with Tarbell's early education and mentors?
The index points to Dr. John H. Vincent at pages 65–72, 114–116, and 145, and to Jeremiah Tingley at pages 41–44 and 120. These repeated references suggest both men figured substantially in Tarbell's formative years and later recollections, though the index alone does not describe the nature of their influence.
Chapter 114
How does the index reflect Tarbell's connection to Woodrow Wilson?
The entry for Woodrow Wilson carries the longest string of page references in this index, running from page 167 through page 402. This density indicates Wilson appears repeatedly across the autobiography, suggesting sustained attention to his career and presidency rather than a single passing mention.
Chapter 114
What does the index reveal about Mark Twain's presence in the autobiography?
Mark Twain is indexed at pages 67, 68, 157, 211–213, 265, and 369, with a notable cluster at 211–213. The scattered but recurring references suggest Twain appears in several distinct episodes of Tarbell's recollections rather than in one continuous section.
Chapter 114

Source and licence

Text used: Project Gutenberg eBook #63754 (Public domain in the United States). Generated from the full text; cards paraphrase the source.

Version: Public domain edition. Retrieved 2026-10-26. Cards reviewed 2026-10-26.

These cards paraphrase the text for study. They are not a substitute for reading the book, and they do not reproduce long passages.

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All questions and answers

Why was Ida Tarbell born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, rather than Iowa?

How did Tarbell's father finally reunite with his family in 1859?

What did Tarbell's grandmother insist on regarding her granddaughters' conduct?

Why did Tarbell's mother stay with her family instead of joining her husband in Iowa?

What business did Tarbell's father start after the Titusville oil discovery?

How had Tarbell's father known crude petroleum before the Titusville well?

Why did young Ida revolt against her new home near Cherry Run?

What happened when three-year-old Ida tried to run away to Grandma's?

How did Tarbell's mother respond when Ida returned, unable to find Grandma's?

What did young Ida's experiment with her little brother in the brook prove?

What happened at Henry Rouse's well on the evening of April 17, 1861?

What did Tarbell remember of the oil industry's effect on the landscape?

Why did Ida's father and mother, though Presbyterians, become and remain Methodists?

What first awakened Ida's interest in the stars, and who was responsible?

What did Ida realize at the Mourners' bench, and what lasting effect did it have?

How did Ida describe her piano training and her later role in Titusville High School?

What made the Tarbell family choose Titusville as their permanent home?

How did the Bonta House become the Tarbell home in Titusville?

How did Tarbell become a model pupil after being a truant?

Which textbooks first awakened Tarbell's curiosity and desire to learn?

What did Tarbell realize when her school studies turned to plants, insects, and stones?

What did Tarbell conclude about the rebate scheme from her father's talk?

How did Dr. Amos Norton Craft differ from other ministers facing science?

What troubled Tarbell most about possibly leaving the church?

Why did Tarbell reject the resurrection and personal immortality?

What did Tarbell call the real tragedy of losing a six-day creation?

How did the word "evolution" and a microscope change Tarbell's plans?

What did the Fourteenth Amendment's word "male" provoke, and who led the response?

Why did Stanton and Anthony's alliances scandalize other suffragists?

How did Tarbell describe Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin's careers?

What two rights did Tarbell single out from the rights agitation?

Why did Tarbell choose Allegheny College over Cornell?

What did Tarbell resolve about marriage, and why?

What did Tarbell bring to Allegheny College in fall 1876?

How did Timothy Alden fund and build Allegheny College?

What did Bentley Hall and the library mean to Tarbell?

When did Allegheny College vote to admit women, and how did it compare to other universities?

What campus restriction did Tarbell encounter, and to what did she compare it?

Who was Jeremiah Tingley, and what teaching method did he bring from Agassiz?

What was the Memopomo Alleghaniensis, and why did it excite Tarbell?

What did Tarbell learn from Professor Jeremiah Tingley's enthusiasm?

What did Tarbell learn from George Haskins's contempt?

How did Tarbell describe her social awkwardness before college?

Why did Tarbell wear four fraternity pins to chapel?

How did Tarbell later judge her four years at Allegheny College?

What position and salary did Tarbell take after graduating in 1880?

How did the villagers of Poland react to Tarbell's arrival as Preceptress?

What teaching load and institutional pressures confronted Tarbell at Poland Seminary?

What did Tarbell discover was the district schoolteachers' real weakness?

What advice did banker Robert Walker give Tarbell on the street?

Why did Tarbell and Mr. Lee agree she should resign from the seminary?

Who was Clara 'Dot' Walker and what role did she play for Tarbell?

What did Tarbell say she witnessed on the night drive from the theater?

What did Tarbell observe about women during a mill shutdown protest?

How did the Walker farm handle miners during mine shutdowns?

What did Tarbell say the Poland years showed her about industry?

How did Robert Walker financially back McKinley's early campaigns?

What did McKinley advise Robert Walker to do, and what happened?

How did McKinley's political friends explain his involvement in the Walker failure?

Why did Tarbell return home in June 1882 instead of pursuing higher studies?

What did Tarbell's parents mean by keeping their home open?

How did Tarbell get her start at The Chautauquan?

What did the Chautauqua platform offer, and what caught Tarbell there?

What did Dr. Vincent announce at Chautauqua in 1878?

How did Vincent handle audiences who walked out of outdoor meetings?

What mischief did the author admit to at Chautauqua?

How did Chautauqua change physically under Vincent?

What did Dr. Vincent propose to help Chautauqua readers lacking reference books?

What problem did the Chautauqua circle uncover that led to Tarbell's annotation work?

What was the most important volume in the first year's course, and how did its sale affect publishing?

Why did Dr. Flood's formal replies to readers' letters differ from Tarbell's?

What did Tarbell's Patent Office investigation find about women inventors?

What misquotation slipped past Dr. Finley in the Assembly Herald?

Why did Tarbell secretly consider leaving The Chautauquan after six years?

What did the Presbyterian minister shout that struck Tarbell about her situation?

What happened to Meadville's banks after Wallace Delamater's defeat?

How did Tarbell's interest shift from nature study to human beings?

What did Tarbell say she realized about men and women compared to leaves?

What social and economic positions did The Chautauquan take in the 1880s?