Lincoln A Contemporary Portrait

[Rob Wick]

Anita,

Thanks for the information. I do have Fornieri's books and had planned to consult them for the article.

As for your question on Tarbell and Turner, I don't think a case can be made that Tarbell was directly influenced by Turner. I've never seen any references to him by her in her papers (realizing, of course, that much of her McClure's correspondence was destroyed in 1917 when the magazine moved offices) but there was no personal correspondence in her papers either.

As a preview, here's portions of what I've written in the article.

Ida Minerva Tarbell was born November 6, 1857, in the northwestern Pennsylvania community of Hatch Hollow. She recalled in her autobiography, All in the Day’s Work, that had the Panic of 1857 not occurred, she would have been born in Iowa, where her parents, Franklin and Sarah Tarbell, planned to move. “Like all young married people of pioneer ancestry and experience having their way to make my parents wanted land,” Tarbell wrote. “Land of their own combined with what my father could make at his profession as a teacher and his trade as a joiner, meant future security. It was the proved way of the early American.” In the wake of the panic, Tarbell’s mother was forced to remain in Pennsylvania.
The aborted move was Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis in practice. Although each pursued different paths in obtaining their Progressive credentials—Tarbell with the journalist’s pen and Turner in the role of the academic—both believed Lincoln embodied a spirit of democracy peculiar to the Northwest Territory. Tarbell and Turner held a shared belief as to what the frontier meant to Lincoln’s development as a man, first in Kentucky where no one ever fathomed that Lincoln could end up in the White House; then to the heavy woods of Indiana where Lincoln grew from boy to young man, and finally to Illinois, where, thanks to those frontier influences, Lincoln became the man who would lead the country through its most divisive time.

And later

Both also saw Lincoln’s frontier experience through an economic prism. In 1903, Turner wrote in the Atlantic Monthly a comparison of the pioneer life of Andrew Jackson and Lincoln. “Jackson’s democracy was contentious, individualistic, and it sought the ideal of local self-government and expansion.” Lincoln’s on the other hand, could thrive only on the development of industry and the rise of communities, Turner argued.
“To widen the area of the clearing, to contend with one another for the mastery of the industrial resources of the rich provinces, to struggle for a place in the ascending movement of society, to transmit one’s offspring the chance for education, for industrial betterment, for the rise in life which the hardships of the pioneer existence denied to the pioneer himself, these were some of the ideals of the region to which Lincoln came,” Turner wrote.
Lincoln, Tarbell noted, was committed to the use of capital by all levels of society. For Lincoln, capital was not “brewed in a bowl by bankers and brokers” only for themselves. Rather, Lincoln, whom Tarbell argued knew very well what she termed “the dignity of labor,” believed that capital was subservient to labor and was an equal benefit for all those on the frontier who attempted to work their way into prosperity by the sweat of their brow or, as in Lincoln’s case, by the development of their mind. These sentiments, Tarbell noted, became evident to Lincoln as he studied the world around him growing into manhood on the Indiana frontier.
It becomes evident that the lens that Turner and Tarbell viewed both their own world and the world that Lincoln inhabited was sharpened by their own Progressive beliefs. While Turner and Tarbell accepted the role capitalism played in American society, both expressed concern with the rise of the industrial baron and his effects on American democracy. For Turner, the vast resources that America enjoyed “has produced the rise of those captains of industry whose success in consolidating economic power now raises the question as to whether democracy under such conditions can survive.” Turner worriedly asked “is there in reality evolving such a concentration of economic and social power in the hands of a comparatively few men as may make political democracy an appearance rather than a reality.”
Tarbell, who published her two-volume history of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company a year after Turner’s article appeared, was blunter in her assessment of the nation’s current economic leaders and their effect on democracy. Calling the period in which Turner’s article on democracy appeared “an Age of Banditry,” Tarbell credited big business for having the far-sightedness to see what would be necessary to control the newly-discovered wealth of ore, coal and oil, but noted they only exploited what others had discovered, i.e., the “hundreds upon hundreds of prospectors, with knap sacks on their backs and picks in their hands, hundreds and hundreds of wildcatters, drilling holes in the ground” who found the wealth, which then was seized by the “bandits.”

Realize, of course, that this is just the first draft and I imagine things will be changed, added or deleted.

Best
Rob