Citizen Reporters

[Rob Wick]

Stephanie Gorton, Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America (New York: Harper Collins, 2020)

A review.

One of the things I hate about going to a movie with someone well-versed in the historical background of a subject is that the next 90 minutes to two hours is often interjected with “that never happened” or “there’s no way he or she could have done that.” The reality of Hollywood is that one is often required to suspend belief in facts and accept that a kernel of truth remains in the story even if the details are either speeded up or completely ignored.

Of course, books are a different subject altogether. An author must adhere to the facts as known, even though his or her interpretations of those facts are often questioned. Readers accept that, as do authors. Yet, when I first heard that Stephanie Gorton was going to publish a book on S.S. McClure and Ida Tarbell, I felt a nervous twitch in my stomach. Having spent the last several years as virtual contemporaries, especially with Tarbell, I was afraid that Gorton would present a picture of Tarbell and McClure foreign to me. After completing Gorton’s book I can gladly say I was wrong. This is an excellent book.

Gorton’s writing style is cinematic and vivid. Given that very few books exist on either Tarbell or McClure (Kathleen Brady’s superb biography of Tarbell first appeared in 1984 although it remains available thanks to the University of Pittsburg Press; Peter Lyon’s biography of McClure was published in 1967 and is about as wispy to modern readers as McClure himself), it is a welcome addition to the literature along with Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Bully Pulpit and Steve Weinberg’s Taking on the Trust. Yet there are issues with Gorton’s work, none of which are fatal, but remain nonetheless frustrating.

First and foremost is that Abraham Lincoln is a hidden figure to Gorton, and hardly appears at all. In the 288 pages of text, Lincoln appears but a handful of times, none of which are very detailed or descriptive. Given that Tarbell’s international fame rests solely on her investigation of John D. Rockefeller, Gorton gives her reader chapter and verse on that. However, the reader who knows more about Tarbell is disappointed, especially when Tarbell herself said that the work that brought her much more pleasure was the time she spent with the 16th president. Why Gorton didn’t approach Tarbell’s early work on Lincoln (which she continued through her death in 1944; her work on Rockefeller, while often talked about, was never updated while she was living) is confusing.

Gorton obviously scoured the archival sources available on Tarbell as is evident from the 56 pages of notes and detailed bibliography that appears in her book. Given that noted Lincoln scholars of today like Allen Guelzo have termed Tarbell as the most important Lincoln biographer of her time (far outstripping, at least in this reviewer’s opinion, works by William E. Barton and Albert J. Beveridge), Gorton’s omission of more detail about her Lincoln work is mystifying.

The reader hungers to find out exactly how Tarbell approached her work on Lincoln and biography in general. Gorton doesn’t explore what the country was going through at the time of The Early Life of Abraham Lincoln and how that affected Tarbell’s work. She doesn’t show exactly what Tarbell faced being a woman attempting to enter what most saw as a man’s field, evidenced by the comment of Century Magazine editor Richard Watson Gilder, who sneered that McClure “got a girl to write a life of Lincoln,” or how Tarbell faced roadblocks from Lincoln’s secretary John G. Nicolay, who feared that Tarbell and McClure’s plans would lower the value of his own work.

The picture that Gorton paints of Tarbell, McClure and the others who made their journalistic home there (Gorton paints satisfactory portraits of John Phillips, Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens) is satisfying as far as it goes. Detailed here is McClure’s near-manic behavior that his staff learned to live with until the point they could no longer. McClure’s two affairs, which caused his staff to fear that their investigative work would be overshadowed by McClure’s indiscretions if they ever emerged into public knowledge, are also handled in sensitive detail.

Another problem with the book is Gorton’s insistence that her subject’s lives after 1906, when Tarbell, Baker, Steffens and Phillips jumped ship to form The American Magazine, was anti-climactic and missed something only to be found at McClure’s. Tarbell, as Gorton rightly notes, was always sentimental for her time with McClure’s, but she remained cognizant that it was but one stop on the journey of her life. To be sure, McClure continued in a slow downward spiral that started after the 1906 rupture that saw him eventually lose control of his namesake magazine and enter a period of financial instability to the point he had to accept handouts from those who had previously worked for him (one is amazed that despite the breach in 1906, McClure engendered enough good will that those people were willing to donate).

Yet Tarbell was hardly sedentary. Gorton notes that Tarbell had to keep busy not only for her own survival, but since she was taking care of her sister and brother, who had suffered a nervous breakdown that made it impossible for him to work. But the picture that the reader feels from Gorton’s intensely interesting prose is that everything after McClure’s was a letdown to everyone who shot through his orbit. Tarbell’s best work came when she was out from under the shadow of anyone but herself. Her best work on Lincoln came in the 1920s when she published In the Footsteps of the Lincolns, and she maintained a strong hand in the business and social conversations of the nation long after John D. Rockefeller died.

There are very few factual errors in the book, although one silently grates at Gorton’s referring to The American Magazine as The American. Also, one is left to wonder why Gorton puts the publication date of Tarbell’s biography of Madame Roland in 1916 instead of 1896. Both are minor errors and do nothing to take away from Gorton’s obvious love for her subject.

Gorton’s book should find a place on the shelves of those interested in the history of American journalism and the magazine. Given that S.S. McClure was rightfully seen as a genius in not just catering to the reading tastes of the American public, but in shaping those tastes, and Ida Tarbell was the brightest star in his literary firmament, this book will stand for a long time as one of the best popular accounts of a time long since passed. Given the current political temperament in the country, it’s a fascinating object lesson to know that there is indeed nothing new under the cultural or political sun. It’s doubtful that too many people not already interested in the subject will pick up the book, but if they don’t it’s their loss.

Best
Rob