Robert Todd Lincoln --The vitals

[Rob Wick]

Kerry,

For the past three or four years now I have done detailed studies of Ida Tarbell's work on Abraham Lincoln for a book I hope to get finished before I end up joining the choir invisible. In addition to studying Tarbell's Allegheny College papers I have studied her papers in several other archival institutions, along with detailed conversations with Kathleen Brady, author of the only full-length biography of Tarbell. I would like to clear up some things in your posting.

Quote:Ida Tarbell's work is mostly good. She worked to get to the bottom of things. But even her Springfield stuff is iffy

If by "iffy" you mean incorrect, I have to heartily disagree with your characterization. Tarbell was a very careful researcher throughout her life as was her Springfield researcher, J. McCan Davis. Indeed, Davis found so many things that changed public perception on Lincoln that he received author's credit on the first book Tarbell wrote on Lincoln, which was a collection of her McClure's Magazine articles reprinted.

However, if by "iffy" you mean confusing, then I can go along with that. Tarbell at times was led astray by her sources and in a few instances by her own belief in what she was presented with. The two best examples I can offer for that would be her writing on Lincoln's "Lost Speech" in Bloomington and her initial acceptance of the Wilma Minor letters. She went to her grave believing that Henry Clay Whitney had provided the closest thing to a detailed account of what Lincoln had said in 1858. As for Minor, she let her own desire that Lincoln and Ann Rutledge be in love cloud her judgment.

Quote:I think Tarbell got so many conflicting stories she stayed away from writing much about Mary.

Again, I can't agree with that. In the first place, Tarbell wrote as much as she felt necessary about Mary. Much of her hesitation before 1926 in what she wrote came from her desire not to upset Robert Todd Lincoln, whose donation of the first known picture of Abraham was the frontispiece for the first McClure's article. Because he gave that picture, it brought the initial series much more publicity,

Tarbell did not like Mary. She said so in numerous letters and she felt that with RTL still living her dislike for Mary would come through even in what most would recognize as a benign comment. It should tell you something that Tarbell waited until after RTL died in 1926 before she accepted an offer from Ladies Home Journal to write a two-part series on Mary, which the magazine published in February and March of 1928.

Even before then, however, Tarbell often considered writing, even in a glancing way, about Mary. In the early 1920s, Tarbell was asked by William Briggs, editor of Harper's, to look over the manuscript for Orville Hickman Browning's diary to see whether or not it would make sense for the company to publish it. The Browning heirs made it a condition for negotiations that information about Mary that Browning wrote would have to be left out. In a memo Tarbell wrote to herself on April 29, 1921, she mentioned talking with Briggs about that. "Discussed whether or not the material in regard to Mrs. Lincoln should be used. Told him I want as soon as Robert Lincoln is dead to write a sketch, that it doesn't seem to be quite nice..." Unfortunately, the next page that completes that thought is lost from Tarbell's papers. But even that short paragraph shows that Tarbell was hesitant to write anything as long as RTL was still alive.

As an aside, Harper's never published anything as the Browning heirs sold the diary to the state of Illinois, which published in the diary in two volumes minus the Mary material. That material wasn't published until Michael Burlingame did so some years ago.

As for the barrel stave story, Tarbell used it in a story she wrote for Good Housekeeping in February 1929 called "Lincoln and the Youth of Illinois" and the reason it didn't appear in book form after that was due to its insignificance to the entire Lincoln story. In my own research on Tarbell I've come up with about 15 or 20 stand-alone articles that could be written that are of interest yet tell little about my subject at hand. Tarbell used it to illustrate the story only.

Best
Rob