All in the Day's Work — Chapter 13: Off With the Old - On With the New, Part 1

13 OFF WITH THE OLD—ON WITH THE NEW

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.

[Illustration: _First year of The American Magazine, 1907_ ] 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—. 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.

[Illustration: _From Lumière autochrome by Arnold Genthe, N. Y.

_ _Miss Tarbell in her garden at her Connecticut farm, 1914_ ] 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.