An American Marriage

[Rob Wick]

Dave,

Let me answer your question this way. Ida Tarbell burned hundreds, if not thousands, of personal letters from her 86 years of living. This includes letters from when she went to college in the 1870s, when she worked at The Chautauquan in the 1880s, and letters to and from her parents and her sister, and her brother. In this, I CAN assign a motive to Tarbell. She wanted to take her secrets to the grave with her. She even told prospective biographers that under no circumstances did she ever want a biography written about her. Writing a biography without personal or intimate material can still be done, but isn't quite as easy, as I am finding out now.

Personally, I find the action of burning papers abhorrent. Tarbell even worked to lobby Robert Todd Lincoln not to burn Abraham's papers, so for her to burn her own papers is the height of irony. In the preface to my book, I say as much.

In the 1920s, when Wilma Minor hoodwinked The Atlantic Monthly with her spurious letters between Anne Rutledge and Lincoln, Tarbell was one of the experts that Atlantic editor Ellery Sedgwick called on to help verify their authenticity. If you look in Tarbell's papers, there are absolutely no letters even mentioning the Minor Affair at the time it happened and only an oblique reference to it in the notes she used for a course she taught on the writing of biography several years later.

The only way I was able to get Tarbell's perspective was to go to Sedgwick's papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society and read the letters she wrote him. In those letters, Tarbell admits that her desire for the story to be true could have adversely influenced her viewpoint.

In my book, I could say that she burned the Minor letters in her own papers (Tarbell kept carbons of just about every letter she wrote) because she was embarrassed at believing the letters to be genuine, but I couldn't' prove it without having the letters she wrote to Sedgwick.

The point I'm trying to make is that someone could look at my saying that Tarbell burned her letters because she was embarrassed at what they contained as an ax to grind because I hate the thought of anyone destroying letters. Had there been no letters to or from Sedgwick available explaining why she felt like she did about the Minor letters, that point would have had merit.

To say that Burlingame has an ax to grind against Mary suggests that he purposefully set out to destroy her reputation and not, as I believe, came to his conclusions based on his interpretation of the evidence. His interpretation could very well be wrong (as many supporters of Mary point out), but to question his motivation is unfair without proof.

Best
Rob