Twelve years had gone by since I tied myself, temporarily as I thought, to the McClure venture. To my surprise, the longer I was with the enterprise the more strongly I felt it was giving me the freedom I wanted, as well as a degree of that security which makes freedom so much easier a load to carry. Here was a group of people I could work with, without sacrifice or irritation. Here was a healthy growing undertaking which excited me, while it seemed to offer endless opportunity to contribute to the better thinking of the country. The future looked fair and permanent.

And then without warning the apparently solid creation was shattered and I found myself sitting on its ruins.

Looking back now, I know that the split in the McClure staff in 1906 was inevitable. Neither Mr. McClure nor Mr. Phillips, the two essential factors in the creation, could have done other than he did. The points at issue were fundamental. Each man acted according to an inner something which made him what he was, something he could not violate.

Back of the difficulty lay the fact that at this time Mr. McClure was a sick man. The hardships of his youth and early manhood, the intense pressure he had put on himself in founding his enterprises had exhausted him. For several years he had been obliged to take long vacations, usually in Europe with his family, his staff carrying on his work in his absence. The enterprises were bringing him larger and larger returns and more and more honor; but that was not what he most wanted. He wanted to be in the thick of things, feel himself an active factor in what was doing. Above all he wanted to add to what he had already achieved, to build a bigger, a more imposing House of McClure.

“What he wanted was more money,” I have heard men comment.

They were wrong. I have never known a man freer from the itch for money as an end than S. S. McClure. Money for him meant power to do things, to build, to help others. On his way up he had gathered about him a horde of dependents with whom he was always ready to share his last dollar. He was reckless with money as with ideas.

In these years when he was practically living in Europe, though returning regularly to the United States, his chief interest was not in what his enterprises were accomplishing, but in adding something bigger than they were or could be. Only by doing this could he prove to himself and to his colleagues that he was a stronger and more productive man than ever. Nothing else would satisfy him.

His passion to build, to realize his ambitions, made him careless about laying foundations. What he did usually had the character of improvisation, frequently on a grand scale, sometimes merely gay spurts of fancy. I was myself caught in one of the latter when Mr. McClure in London suddenly ordered me in Paris to drop whatever I was doing and to hurry into Germany to collect material for an animal magazine.

Animals were an abiding interest with McClure’s. Rudyard Kipling laid the foundation in the Jungle tales. After that great series few were the numbers that did not have an animal in text and picture. It was as much a passion as baseball was to become in the latter days with The American Magazine.

I spent a lively month visiting zoos, interviewing animal trainers and hunters and keepers, buying books and photographs, turning in what I considered a pretty good grist of materials and suggestions. What became of it, I never knew, for I never heard a word of it after I came back to America. The only remnant I have now of that month is a powder box of Dresden china bought at the showrooms of the factory of the crossed swords, it being my practice when on professional trips to use my leisure seeing the town, guidebook in hand, and buying all the souvenirs my purse permitted.

It was in 1906 that Mr. McClure brought home from one of his foraging expeditions the plan which was eventually to wreck his enterprises. He had it cut and dried ready to put into action. Without consultation with his partners he had organized a new company, the charter of which provided not only for a McClure’s Universal Journal, but a McClure’s Bank, a McClure’s Life Insurance Company, a McClure’s School Book Publishing Company, and later a McClure’s Ideal Settlement in which people could have cheap homes on their own terms. It undertook to combine with a cheap magazine—which it goes without saying was to have an enormous circulation with the enormous advertising which circulation brings—an attempt to solve some of the great abuses of the day, abuses at which we had been hammering in McClure’s Magazine. He proposed to do this by giving them a competition which would draw their teeth.

By the time Mr. McClure got around to explaining his plan to me and asking my cooperation he had worked himself up to regarding it as an inspiration which must not be questioned. It seemed to me to possess him like a religious vision which it was blasphemy to question. Obsessed as he was, he was blind and deaf to the obstacles in the way. I am sure I hurt Mr. McClure by telling him bluntly and at once that I would never have anything to do with such a scheme.

In a recently published letter Lincoln Steffens tells how he saw Mr. McClure’s plan. To him it was not only “fool” but “not quite right.” Certainly it was not right. As organized, it was a speculative scheme as alike as two peas to certain organizations the magazine had been battering.

The tragedy of the situation was that Mr. McClure did not see and could not understand the arguments of his associates that his plan was not only impossible but wrong. This failure of judgment was, I am convinced, due to his long illness. The mental and physical exhaustion from which he was suffering, and which he could not bring himself to understand or accept, explains the unwisdom of this undertaking, his contention that it was an inspiration, his stubbornness in insisting that it be accepted and set to work. Human reason has little influence on one who believes he is inspired.

The members of the staff were little more than outsiders when it came to the final decision. It was up to John Phillips to accept and do his utmost to aid in the grandiose adventure or patiently to wait while persuading the General that it was not the mission of the McClure crowd to reconstruct the economic life of the country, that we were journalists, not financial reformers. I think no man ever tried harder to keep another from a suicidal undertaking; and certainly no man could have been firmer from the start in his refusal to go along.

The struggle went on for six months, and no two men ever tried more honestly to adjust their differences; but they were irreconcilable. It came to a point where one or the other must sell his interest in the magazine. It was Mr. McClure who bought out his partner.

Although McClure’s Magazine is no longer on the newsstands, it does occupy a permanent place in the history of the period that it served, because it worked itself into the literary and economic life of the country.

It was a magazine which from the first put quality above everything else and was willing to chase checks around town in order to pay for it. For those who collect Kipling there are the first publications of many of his rarest poems, short stories, and such distinguished serials as “Captains Courageous” and “Kim.” Here first appeared Willa Cather and O. Henry.

It was a magazine which backed regardless of expense, one might say, the investigations and reports of men like Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens. For twelve years it encouraged with liberality and patience the work of which I have been talking in this narrative.

Mr. McClure had two editorial policies when it came to getting the thing he felt was important for the Magazine. First, the writer must be well paid and the expense money be generous. Second, and most important of all, he must be given time. He did not ask that you produce a great serial in six months. He gave you years if it was necessary. I spent the greater part of five years on “The History of the Standard Oil Company.” I was what was called a contributing editor; that is, I turned in suggestions as they came to me in my work around the country. I did occasional extra articles that seemed to be in my line. I read and took part in editorial counsels, but it was recognized that all the time I demanded should be given to the serial. I know of no other editor and no other publisher who has so fully recognized the necessity of generous pay and ample time, if he were to get from a staff work done according to the best editorial standard, and worthy of the magazine and the writer.

When it was finally decided that Mr. Phillips was to sever his long relation to McClure’s several members of the editorial staff resigned, including Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, John Siddall, the efficient young managing editor Albert Boyden, and myself. We could not see the magazine without Mr. Phillips.

The last day we left the office, then on Twenty-third Street near Fourth Avenue, some of us went together to Madison Square and sat on a bench talking over our future. We were derelicts without a job.

But not for long.

There was then in New York, though it was not generally known, a magazine group which wanted a change. The magazine was very old—long known as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Monthly, recently changed to The American Magazine. Its owner was Frederick L. Colver; its editor, Ellery Sedgwick (afterward editor of the Atlantic); its publisher, William Morrow (afterward the founder of William Morrow & Company, the book publishing house). Mr. Colver approached Mr. Phillips: “Why don’t you take it over?”

Finally in council assembled, our editorial group together with David A. McKinlay and John Trainor of the McClure business department, decided to incorporate the Phillips Publishing Company and buy The American Magazine. With what we could put in ourselves and money from the sale of stock to interested friends, we secured funds for the purchase and sufficient working capital.

We left McClure’s in March: six months later, October, 1906, appeared our first issue. The announcement shows how seriously we took ourselves, as befitted people who had seen something in which they deeply believed go to pieces. We had been too cruelly bruised to take anything lightly, but luckily we were able to make two additions to our staff, each man with a vein of humor not to be dried up or muddled by any cataclysms—William Allen White and Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley).

We had known Mr. White in the McClure’s office since the day of his famous editorial, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” After that came his Boyville stories, two or three of which McClure’s published, and then at intervals studies of political situations and political figures. It was not long before he began to come to New York. He was a little city-shy then, or wanted us to think so. As I was one of the official entertainers of the group, it occasionally fell to me to “take him by the hand,” as he put it, and show him the town. I could have hardly had a more delightful experience. He judged New York by Kansas standards, and New York usually suffered. His affection and loyalty for his state, his appreciation and understanding of everything that she does—wise and foolish—the incomparable journalistic style in which he presents her are what has made him so valuable a national citizen. His crowning achievement among the many to be credited to him has been remaining first, last, and always the editor of the Emporia Gazette. A staunch friendship had sprung up between Mr. White and Mr. Phillips, and it was natural enough that he interested himself in the new venture.

As for Peter Dunne, we went after him and rather to my surprise he came along, taking a desk in our cramped offices and appearing with amazing regularity. At this time he was some forty years old—the greatest satirist in my judgment the country has yet produced. He had a wide knowledge of men and their ways. There was no malice in his judgments, but a great contempt for humbuggery as well as for all forms of self-deception devoted to uplifting the world. However, he felt kindly towards our ardent desire to improve things by demonstrating their unsoundness and approved our unwillingness to use any other tools than those which belonged legitimately to our profession. He came out strongest in his contributions to the department of editorial comment, which Mr. Phillips had introduced under the head of “The Interpreter’s House.” We were all supposed to contribute whatever was on our minds to this department. Mr. Phillips and Mr. Dunne did the censoring and dovetailing. I did not often make “The Interpreter’s House,” much to my chagrin. Dunne said, “You sputter like a woman,” which I fear was true. If it had not been for him the first Christmas issue of “The Interpreter’s House” would have been bleak reading. We had each of us broken forth in lament for the particular evil of the world which was disturbing us, offering our remedies.

It seems to me [wrote Dunne, editing our contributions] that we are serving up a savory Christmas number ... a nice present to be found in the bottom of a stocking....

You cannot go to the Patent Office in Washington and take out a patent that will transform men into angels. The way upward, long and tedious as it is, lies through the hearts of men. It has been so since the founding of the Feast. Nothing has been proved more clearly in the political history of the race than this, that good will to men has done more to improve government than laws and wars.

... Let us close down our desks for the year. If you want to find me for another week I will be found in the wonderful little toy shop around the corner.

That editorial broke the tension which had made me think this was no time to go home for Christmas. I went.

Peter Dunne hated the pains of writing. His labor affected the whole office—sympathy with what he was going through, fear that his copy would not be in on time, eagerness to see it when it came, to know if it was “one of his best.” But Peter’s work was never what he thought it ought to be, and he sought forgetfulness.

Indispensable on the new editorial staff, seeing Peter through his birth pains, keeping the rest of us at our tasks, nursing new writers, making up the magazine, was Albert Boyden. He had come fresh from Harvard to McClure’s and had at once made himself a place by his genius for keeping things going and his gift for sympathetic friendliness. It was a combination which became more valuable and irresistible as time went on. Bert was everybody’s friend, whether editor, artist, or writer. “One can have friends, one can have editors,” Ray Stannard Baker was to write later, “but Bert was both.”

He was of the greatest value to the American in bringing together writers and artists who were attaching themselves to the new magazine. Bert was so fond of us all that he could not endure the idea that we did not all know one another, and he made it his business to see that we had at least the opportunity. He lived on the south of Stuyvesant Square, four flights up. There was no one in all that circle of distinguished contributors who did not welcome the chance to climb those stairs to Bert’s dinners and teas. And what a group of people came! They are recorded in his guest book: Booth Tarkington, Edna Ferber, Stewart Edward White, his wife and his brother Gilbert, Julian and Ada Street, the Norrises, the Rices and Martins of Louisville, Joe Chase, Will Irwin, and a dozen more, along with visiting celebrities, politicians, scientists, adventurers. What talk went on in that high-up living room! What wonderful tales we heard!

Bert was so much younger than the rest of us, so full of enthusiasm and hope, so much more vital and all-shedding, that it is still to me incredible that he should have left this world so much earlier than I. He died in 1925, but he lives in a little book which J. S. P. edited in his memory. How proud Bert would have been of that! “There is nobody like J. S. P.,” he used to say. Many of his big circle of friends contributed their recollections of him. I have never known another person in my life for whom quite such a book could have been written.

In spite of the gay unity of our group, the vigor and steadiness with which it began and continued its operation, I had suffered a heavy shock. I know now I should not have taken it as well as I did (and inwardly that was nothing to boast of) if it had not been cushioned by an engrossing personal interest. I had started out to make a home for myself.

I had already made three major attempts to establish myself—first in Meadville, then in Paris, then in Washington—and all had failed. When in 1898 it became evident that if I were to remain on the McClure’s staff I must come to New York, I was in no mood to adopt a new home town. New York might be my writing headquarters, but Titusville should be home. Finally I would return there, I told myself. But Titusville was five hundred miles away. There were no airplanes in those days. The railroad journey was tedious and expensive, week-ending was impossible. I soon grew weary of the week-end makeshifts of a homeless person in a city. I wanted something of my own. And at last by a series of circumstances, purely fortuitous, I acquired forty acres and a little old house in Connecticut.

I had meant to let the land and the house run to seed if they wanted to. I had no stomach, or money, for a “place.” I wanted something of my very own with no cares. Idle dream in a world busy in adding artificial cares to the load Nature lays on our shoulders.

Things happened: the roof leaked; the grass must be cut if I was to have a comfortable sward to sit on; water in the house was imperative. And what I had not reckoned with came from all the corners of my land: incessant calls—fields calling to be rid of underbrush and weeds and turned to their proper work; a garden spot calling for a chance to show what it could do; apple trees begging to be trimmed and sprayed. I had bought an abandoned farm, and it cried loud to go about its business.

Why should I not answer the cry? Why should I not be a farmer? Before I knew it I was at least going through the motions, having fields plowed, putting in crops, planting an orchard, supporting horses, a cow, a pig, a poultry yard—giving up a new evening gown to buy fertilizer!

Seeing what I was in for and fearing lest I should do as so many of my friends had done—go in deeper than my income justified, find myself borrowing and mortgaging in order to carry out the fascinating things I saw to do—I laid down a strict rule which I have followed ever since, and which I recommend to people of limited incomes who acquire a spot in the country, and want it to be a continuous pleasure instead of a continuous anxiety. I resolved that I would spend only what I could lay aside from income, that I would divide this appropriation into three parts—one for the land, one for the house, one for furnishing. As the budget was very small it meant that a thousand things that I wanted to do went undone, and still are undone. But it meant also that I had little or no financial anxiety.

If the call of the land had been unexpected and not to be denied, even more unexpected and still less to be denied was the call of the neighborhood. I was not long in learning that in the houses I could see in valley and on hillside centered the most genuine of human dramas, tragic and comic.

After the land and its background, the greatest gift of God to us (“us” including my niece Esther) was our nearest neighbors Mr. and Mrs. G. Burr Tucker, at the side of whose house swung a sign, “Antiques for Sale.”

But it was as neighbors, not as customers Mr. and Mrs. Tucker regarded us from the start. When Burr was not over helping us settle he was watching what was going on from his front porch. I have never had more pungent, salty, faithful friends. They had spent most of their lives on the corner, not always selling antiques. Mrs. Tucker had taught in the schoolhouse at the top of the hill for twenty-nine years, and Burr had had a varied and picturesque career as a salesman of pumps, fruit trees, any gadget that seemed to be useful to his country neighbors.

Not long before we moved in he had discovered by accident that there were people in the outside world who bought old spinning wheels, ancient chairs, ancient pottery. Burr knew the contents of every garret and woodshed for twenty miles around, and when he made his discovery he began systematically to buy them out. By the time I arrived on the scene he had an established business.

Not knowing whether we were going to like our new acquisition well enough to make it permanent, Esther and I had decided to furnish out of a department store basement. But in looking over Burr’s miscellaneous assortment my eye fell on an old-fashioned melodeon, charming in line, its bellows broken but easy to repair—$10. I couldn’t resist it, and so I became almost from the first day a customer of my nearest neighbor. It was a great day when Burr went “teeking,” as they called the hunt for treasures. We would watch for his return, and when his white horse and wagon loaded high with loot appeared down the road we were on the ground as soon as he was.

Not only did the immediate vicinity yield rich and exciting material, but a little distance away there were people from the world we knew. There were the friends who had first shown me the country—Noble and Ella Hoggson, up the Valley, the center of a jolly and interesting group known as the “Valley Crowd.” A mile or so away was one of the most interesting women in the literary world of that day—Jeannette Gilder, sister of Richard Watson Gilder, a lively writer and editor.

Perhaps no woman in her time carried to more perfection the then feminine vogue for severe masculine dress: stout shoes, short skirt, mannish jacket, shirt, tie, hat, stick. They were the last word in style. They suited her as they did few, for she was large of frame, with strong, bold features and a fine swinging gait; but the masculinity was all on the surface. Esther came home one day shouting with laughter: “Miss Gilder is a fake. She wears silk petticoats and is afraid of mice.”

Soon after I acquired my farm the countryside was stirred by the news that Mark Twain was building only eight or nine miles away from us. Everybody seemed to know what was happening with the building, the settling, the life going on. That was partly because of our omnivorous curiosity and partly because Mark Twain was a friendly neighbor. He every now and then gave a great party, sending the invitations around by our peripatetic butcher, a member of one of our first families, a gentleman as well as a good tradesman.

I have a few treasured recollections of days when Jeannette Gilder and I drove over to tea or lunch with Mark Twain, heard great stories of the doings in his new home. It was from him that I heard the story of the famous burglary; it was from him I heard the story of one of the best practical jokes ever played—when Peter Dunne and Robert Collier sent him an elephant.

Not only was all this fun and excitement and novelty shared by my niece and those of my family who came to see what we were so excited about, but every member of the American staff sooner or later appeared at the farm to look us over. From the start our chief counselor had been Bert Boyden, who six months after I had taken the first option on the place had insisted on accompanying me to see whether I had better take it up.

Bert looked at the oaks, he looked at the gay little stream that ran across the land, and without hesitation said, “Buy it.” And buy it, I did. Having had a part in the purchase, Bert superintended henceforth all changes. He approved my plan of budgeting. He helped me select the wallpapers which were hung; he was interested in the larder for the winter.

In the summer when his family was at a distance J. S. P. came often to discuss the perplexities of the magazine and rest himself from the commotion of the office. The Norrises came, and Kathleen named my pig. Who but Kathleen would have called him “Juicy”? He looked it, fat as butter. The Siddalls came often, for in the summer we kept their famous cat, “Sammy Siddall.” The Rices, the Martins, the Bakers—all came to look on that rough land and shell of a house and wonder, I suspect, how I could be happy with anything so simple, be satisfied with no more pretentious plans than I had.

Among those who came in those early days was one who has left a crimson streak across the history of his time—Jack Reed. Jack, just out of Harvard, was giving half-time to the American, half-time to writing. We would invite him for the week end but he was never at the station when we drove over to find him. Likely he had missed his train, taken a freight—that was more fun. And late in the evening he would come walking over the hilltop demanding food and a bed, and we would sit long hearing the adventures of his day.

It was on one of these trips that Jack found near by a natural amphitheater. Before he had left he had planned to buy the place and worked out in detail a Greek theater. He started towards New York on foot, expecting to raise the money from friends en route. “I was all ready to put up money,” one of them told me not many years ago.

But when Jack was back at his desk in New York he forgot the theater—I never heard of it afterwards. That was the delightful creature Jack Reed was, up to the time that he discovered what is called life. He took it hard. Now his bones lie under a tomb in Moscow, one of the martyrs to Lenin’s great vision of the communal life.

All this was good for me, cushioned the shock I had suffered, convinced me that at least I had gotten my hands on something permanent, a fundamental factor in my future security—a home—a home capable of feeding me if the worst came to the worst. But while it was good for me it was not so good for my work on the magazine.

I had believed I could work better in the quiet of the country, but I was discovering that the country was more exciting than the town and the office as I knew it. Its attractions were proving too much for the difficult task which had been assigned me in the planning for the first year of the American. The task was nothing less than to write a history of the making of our tariff schedules from the Civil War on. It had been a natural enough selection for me after the experience with the history of the Standard Oil Company for the tariff was quite as much a matter of popular concern at the moment as the trust had been in 1900. There was a growing demand for revision. How could we get into the fight? A subject must be found for me. How about the tariff? Was a historical treatment possible? I thought so; at least I so despised the prohibitive tariff that I was willing to try if the magazine was willing to back me.

I suppose most of us have had at various periods of our life homemade remedies for the economic ills we see about us. When I was a girl in high school I looked on an eight-hour day of productive labor for everybody as the way out. I was much less worried by the hardships the long day brought working people than the mental and moral deterioration I imagined suffered by people who did not work. Idleness, not labor, was the scourge of the world. For me the eight-hour day was a save-the-idle day!

Before I left The Chautauquan I had concluded that there was a trilogy of wrongs—all curable—responsible for our repeated depressions and our poorly distributed wealth: discrimination in transportation; tariffs save for revenue only; private ownership of natural resources. I was still of that opinion when, largely by accident, I had my chance to strike at number one in my trilogy. Could I by the method I had followed in that case, and the only one I knew how to use, present a plausible argument against Number Two?

What had particularly aroused me was the way tariff schedules were made, the strength of what we now call pressure groups—the powerful lobbies in wool and cotton and iron and sugar which for twenty-five years I had watched mowing Congress down like a high wind. There was no concealment of the pressure. The lobbyists went at it hammer and tongs and battered down opposition with threats, bribes, and unparalleled arrogance. By these tactics they had overcome Mr. Cleveland’s famous tariff message of 1886, had passed the outrageous McKinley bill of 1890, had ruined the Wilson bill of 1893, had defeated the promise of McKinley and Dingley and Aldrich to lower duties in 1896, and had substituted the highest and most distorted schedules the country had yet seen. But it looked in 1906 as if the Day of Judgment was near, and I asked nothing better than to be on the jury.

I went into it blindly—on faith, certainly not on knowledge—and I had a handicap that I was far from realizing at the time: that was that, while in the case of the Standard Oil I had spent my life close to the events, the tariff and its makers had never touched my life. This was something that I had read in a book.

Another handicap was that my indignation was directed towards legal acts. Congress had adopted these schedules, under coercion if you please, but still it had adopted them. The beneficiaries had the sanction of law. It was a different case from challenging railroad discriminations, which were forbidden by law.

As I worked on the Congressional Record and related documents I looked up men still living who had had a part in the struggle on one side or the other. There were many of them scattered around the country, now out of Congress for the most part, but not averse to talking. As a rule I got little from them. The fight which seemed to me so important was a dead issue to them. They had lost or won. It was all part of a game. Fresh from reading the daily discussions in the Record, curious about this or that man or argument, I found them hazy, often not particularly interested. There was little of the righteous indignation which I thought I found in their recorded speeches. Had that been political, instead of righteous, indignation? I began to think so.

It was Grover Cleveland who put heart in me. He had lost none of his righteous indignation over the aid prohibitive tariffs were giving certain trusts, none of his alarm over the growing disparity between industry and agriculture they were fostering. He felt deeply the wrong of the prices they were inflicting on the farmer, the professional class, the poor. I got nothing but encouragement from him for the review I had planned.

Luckily I already had a pleasant working relation with Mr. Cleveland. It had come about in my last two years on McClure’s, when my chief editorial task had been trying to persuade him that it was his duty to write his reminiscences for us, incidentally offering myself as a ghost if he felt that he needed one.

As his letters to me at this time show he was not entirely unfriendly to the project:

I want to do the thing; and yet I am afraid the difficulties in the way of doing it are fundamental and inexorable. You see the project requires me to exploit myself and my doings before the public. I do not see how I can do this, though I am terribly vain and often bore my friends privately by tiresome reminiscence. And yet I cannot but think that there are incidents and results in my career, which, by their narration might be of service in stimulating those who aspire to good citizenship—“and there we are.” This latter consideration hints of duty; but then comes the fear that what seems to me duty is a mere fantastic notion, and thereupon the old disinclination resumes its sway.

I have frequently thought no one could help me so much as you; and it has seemed to me more than once that you and I might possibly “cook up something” in a summer vacation’s freedom from distractions.

Nothing came at this time, 1904, of the “Tarbell-Cleveland fantasy,” as Mr. Cleveland gaily dubbed it, and two years later the project was dismissed, but in a letter so friendly that I cannot resist quoting from it:

I do not believe a man who has turned the corner of sixty-nine years, is any less vain and self-satisfied than when he was a youth. At any rate here I am, in this sixty-nine predicament, delighted with the generous things you say of me in the goodness of your heart, and more than halfway deluding myself into the notion that I deserve them. I want to be very sensible and hard-headed in this affair; but in any event I am entitled to rejoice in your good opinion of me, and your hearty wishes for my welfare and happiness.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for them; and I shall gratefully remember them as long as I live. Somehow I have an idea that you know me well—and surely I need not afflict myself with the fear of vanity if I have found a friend in you.

With those letters in my files I felt free, when I undertook the tariff work for the American, to ask Mr. Cleveland to talk to me about the making of his tariff message in 1886, and the failure of the Wilson bill in 1893. He was most generous, and when I had completed my story of the two episodes I asked him to read the manuscript and give me a candid judgment and of course his corrections and his suggestions. The chief suggestion that he made showed a sensitiveness to his literary style in public documents which I had not suspected. Charming letter writer as Mr. Cleveland was, in his public documents he was ponderous. I must have enlarged a little on this, for I find this paragraph in his letter with which he sent back the proofs:

I have ventured to suggest a little toning down of your characterization of my style—thinking perhaps you would be willing to make an alteration to please me if for no other reason. You know we are all a little sensitive on such a point.

There was another paragraph in that letter which touched me deeply:

Your article has caused me to feel again the greatest sorrow and disappointment I have ever suffered in my public career—the failure of my party to discharge its most important duty and its fatuous departure from its appointed mission.

But lean as heavily as I dared on Mr. Cleveland, work as I would and did on the tariff debates of Congress (I can wish my worst enemy no greater punishment than reading them in full), I could not put vitality into my narrative. It was of the Congressional Record—it was secondhand.

It was the making of the Payne-Aldrich bill in 1909 that finally gave a certain life to my narrative. Here was something belonging to the present, not something of the past. By all the signs Theodore Roosevelt should have been the St. George to lead in the revision the public was calling so loudly for, particularly after the panic of 1907. Few of his party leaders paid attention.

“Are not all our fellows happy?” Speaker Joseph Cannon asked as the demand for revision became louder.

Roosevelt himself heard it, but frankly said to his intimates that he did not know anything about the tariff. He did not and he would not take the time to learn. He hammered at the effects of privilege, pursued “malefactors of great wealth,” but was not willing to do the hard studying of the causes which produced the malefactors.

Mr. Taft, who followed Roosevelt, had no choice. The platform on which he was elected called “unequivocally” for tariff reform, and as soon as he was inaugurated he called a special session to do the work. My chagrin was great when I realized at once that all the ancient technique I had been trying to discredit was repeating itself. It is, I told myself, the same old circus, the same old gilded chariots, the same old clowns. So far as arguments were concerned they might have been taken from the hearings of ’83, of ’88, of ’93, of ’96. Figures were changed, and nobody could deny that these figures of growth were impressive; but they came from interested men.

“They are incapable of judging,” Mr. Carnegie told the committee. “No judge should be permitted to sit in a cause in which he is interested; you make the greatest mistake in your life if you attach importance to an interested witness.”

The process which “Sunset” Cox back in the seventies characterized as “reciprocal rapine”—buying votes for the schedule their constituents wanted by voting for schedules they could not justify—was in full swing.

Never was the tariff as the “cause of prosperity” worked harder. It was the answer of the prohibitive protectionist to the charge that the tariff was a tax. In all the early years they had called it so—a tax to produce revenue, encourage new industries, protect higher wages, a better standard of living. But Mr. Cleveland had called it boldly “a vicious, inequitable, illogical tax,” and illustrated his adjectives tellingly. The effect of his attack was so disastrous that the supporters of prohibitive duties went into a huddle to find a new name. “The cause of prosperity” was the euphemism they produced.

A repeater that had figured in every tariff bill was the answer of the priests of the dogma to the argument that the poor should be considered. According to the pictures they drew there were no poor in the United States. This refusal to recognize poverty was no more discouraging in the making of the bill of 1909 than the indifference to the effect high tariffs were having on the cost of the necessities of life. In this they ran true to historical precedent. From the time the business man took charge in the late seventies any attempt to call the attention at hearings to what a duty would do to the price of a necessity of life was ignored or jeered.

Justice Brandeis, then plain lawyer Brandeis, was before a committee considering the Dingley bill.

“And for whom do you appear?” he was asked.

“For the consumer,” he answered.

The committee, chairman and all, laughed aloud, but they were good enough to say, “Oh, let him run down.”

This old indifference to the effect of higher prices on the living of the poor stirred me to the only article in my series which seemed to “take hold.” I called it, “Where Every Penny Counts.”

The worth-while thing, from my point of view, was that it reached women. “I never knew what the tariff meant before,” Jane Addams wrote me.

Here was something which touched those in whom she was interested—wage earners. She knew from actual contact what the increase of a cent in the price of a quart of milk, a spool of thread, a pound of meat, meant to working girls with their six or eight dollars a week. She knew that every penny added to the cost of their food, clothes, or coal gave less warmth, less covering. It was not difficult to show that what they were trying to do in Washington in the making of the Payne-Aldrich bill was just that—a tariff that would add to the cost of things that must be had if people were to live at all.

To my deep satisfaction this effort to make the new tariff bill in the good old way was promptly met by a rousing challenge from a group of progressive Republican Senators, men who had been largely responsible for forcing the promise to reform into the party platform. When they discovered that there would be no reform if the lobbyists and their friends in Congress could prevent it, they crystallized into one of the most vigorous and intelligent fighting bands that had been seen for many years in Congress. Insurgents, they were called.

The leader in the revolt, interested in railroad reform rather than the tariff, was La Follette of Wisconsin. Others were Beveridge of Indiana, Cummins and Dolliver of Iowa, Borah of Idaho, and Bristow of Kansas. They were already familiar figures at the American along with certain members of the House, particularly the salty and peppery William Kent of California—Phillips, Baker and Steffens being in frequent communication with them.

The most brilliant and witty, as well as the most thoroughly informed of the tariff insurgents was the amiable Senator Dolliver from Iowa—twenty years in Congress—always regular—always stoutly supporting the tariff bills turned out by the committee.

“What ails you now?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “I had been going on for twenty years taking practically without question what they handed me; but these alliances between the party and industrial interests have at last set me thinking. I began to understand something of the injustice that was being done to the consumer. And then we promised to reform the tariff.”

When the insurgents divided up the schedules for study, Schedule K—wool—the most difficult and the most important politically, fell to Senator Dolliver. He found he had been voting for years for duties which, when he sat down to read the schedule, he could not understand. He discovered they were a mixture of tricks, evasions, and discriminations—intended to be so, he believed. He determined to master them.

And master them he did by months of the severest night work. He pored over statistics and technical treatises. He visited mills and importing houses and retail shops. He sought the aid of experts, and in the end he knew his subject so well that he went onto the floor of the Senate without a manuscript and literally played with Schedule K, and incidentally also with Senator Aldrich, who was said to fly to the cloak room whenever Senator Dolliver rose to speak. When he had finished his clean, competent dissection, Schedule K lay before the Senate a law without principles or morals; and yet, just as it was, the Senate of the United States passed it, and the President of the United States signed it, and it went on the statute books.

Why? Neither Mr. Taft nor Mr. Aldrich defended the wool schedule which made the bill odious. They both were frank in explaining that it was politically necessary, not at all a question of the fairness of the schedule, but a question of what powerful interests demanded. The wool interests could defeat the bill if they did not get what they wanted.

My conviction about the inequity of Schedule K was so strong that when the Outlook published a long defense of it, plainly an advertisement but not so marked, I protested in a personal letter to its vociferous contributing editor, Theodore Roosevelt, with whom by this time I was on fairly friendly terms. Just what I said in my letter about the Herald which so stirred his wrath I do not remember, but his answer to my comment is so typically Rooseveltian in temper and reasoning that I think it should be preserved: