CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Cast into Outer Darkness”

In this 1906 cartoon, Puck portrays “The Muck Rakers”—including Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker—in the aftermath of Roosevelt’s celebrated “Muckraking-Man” speech.

TO MCCLURE’S MATCHLESS TEAM OF journalists, the legislative record of the 59th Congress represented not a fait accompli, but the first successful skirmishes in a much larger war on the corrupt consolidation of wealth and power. “Signs everywhere now show a great moral awakening,” Baker told his father, “the cleaning out of rotten business & still more rotten politics. But we’ve only begun!” For the first time, Baker explained, “men were questioning the fundamentals of democracy, inquiring whether we truly had self-government in America, or whether it had been corrupted by selfish interests.” Most important, he continued, “this questioning came not alone from what one might call the working class,” but from middle America as well.

Investigative journalism, one historian has observed, had “assumed the proportions of a movement,” exerting an influence on the American consciousness “hardly less important than that of Theodore Roosevelt himself.” Magazines like McClure’s had become so politically significant that William Allen White quipped it was as if we had “Government by Magazine.” During these heady days, Finley Peter Dunne’s Irish bartender Mr. Dooley waxed poetic on the power of the printed word, noting that it had the strength “to make a star to shine on the lowliest brow” or to “blacken the fairest name in Christendom.” A mere three years before, Dooley explained, John D. Rockefeller had enjoyed the reputation of undiluted success and civic rectitude, until, “lo and behold, up in his path leaps a lady with a pen in hand and off goes John D. for the tall timbers.” More astonishingly, Dooley marveled, the same few years had seen a work of fiction rout the beef trust, and Ray Baker’s lead pencil produce “a revolution” in Congress, and “when a state [wanted] to elect a governor or a city a mayor,” it turned not to professional politicians but to Lincoln Steffens. “Yes,” decried Mr. Dooley, “the hand that rocks the fountain pen is the hand that rules the world.”

To outsiders, the solidarity of McClure’s enterprise appeared impregnable. By 1906, Sam McClure was considered among the ten most important men in America. His gifted writers operated more like an intimate team, an extended family, than the staff of a magazine. For Ida Tarbell, now in her twelfth year at McClure’s, the magazine provided freedom, security, and comradeship. “Here was a group of people I could work with, without sacrifice or irritation,” Tarbell later reflected in her autobiography. “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.” Ray Baker felt the same way, recognizing the “rare group” McClure had assembled—all “genuinely absorbed in life, genuinely in earnest in their attitude toward it, and yet with humor, and yet with sympathy, and yet with tolerance.” The magazine was “a success,” Lincoln Steffens recalled. “We had circulation, revenue, power. In the building up of that triumph we had been happy, all of us; it was fun, the struggle.”

In the spring of 1906, however, just when “the future looked fair and permanent,” Ida reminisced, “the apparently solid creation was shattered and I found myself sitting on its ruins.” Ray Baker’s memoir registers similar grief and disbelief: “The institution that had seemed to me as permanent as anything could be in a transitory world—I mean McClure’s Magazine—seemed to be crumbling under my feet.” The schism that ended McClure’s glorious era shocked the publishing world and devastated the staff.

Although McClure’s team had long been accustomed to the rapid mood swings that drove Sam McClure into alternating periods of manic energy and pathological torpor, his creative wizardry had always compensated for his mercurial behavior. “Never forget,” Ida Tarbell had counseled every time McClure riled the office with one of his outbursts, “that it was he & nobody else” who built the magazine, that all “the great schemes, the daring moves,” the ideas that had propelled his writers’ series and, finally, the writers themselves to national acclaim originated with him.

But in recent months the frenetic shifts from one grandiose plan to another had become more frequent, the melancholy periods infinitely darker. These radical vacillations in temperament compelled months of bed rest and even destroyed McClure’s interest in the work he had always adored. While still capable of brilliance, McClure exhibited increasingly erratic behavior that took a cumulative toll on his colleagues. One of Sam McClure’s escapades in the summer of 1903 had marked the first in a series of troubling events that became distressingly emblematic of the way his compulsions began to compromise the accomplishments and aspirations of his friends and colleagues at the magazine.

McClure had invited Ida to join him and his wife, Hattie, at Divonneles-Bains, the popular spa town in eastern France on the border of Switzerland. Worried that her grinding work on the Standard Oil project was impacting her health, McClure hoped she would join them for the entire summer season. “You are infinitely precious to me,” he told Ida. “I dreamed about you last night,” he revealed, and “awoke this morning very anxious about you.” If she found the pace of the series pressing her, he would gladly rein it in. “The truth is you have taken the forward place in my heart of all my friends,” he wrote. “I want to live near you & be much with you during the coming years.”

The prospect of a European vacation with Sam delighted Ida, but her work kept her in New York until July. In her absence, McClure invited a young poet, Florence Wilkinson, and a newly wed couple, Alice and Cale Rice, to accompany him to London and France. Wilkinson, a tall, dark-haired beauty, conducted poetry classes at her Greenwich Village studio. Four of her poems, at Sam’s direction, had recently appeared in McClure’s. The inclusion of Wilkinson’s slight romantic verse in a magazine that had published the poetry of William Butler Yeats and A. E. Housman puzzled the staff, who suspected that their editor’s fascination with the girl betrayed his usually impeccable judgment. The Rices would become well-known writers, but at the time Alice Hegan Rice had published her first novel and her husband had produced two slim volumes of poetry.

In London, McClure had arranged luxurious accommodations and memorable entertainment for his young friends, including a dinner at the Vagabondia with a circle of illustrious writers and an evening of theatre in the box of Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. After arranging British publishers for the three aspiring writers, McClure brought them to Divonne. A week later, while Hattie stayed behind seeking relief for her rheumatism, the ever restless McClure set out with Wilkinson and the Rices for Chamonix and Mont Blanc. At the Hôtel du Paris, he selected a suite for the Rices on the second floor, while he and Florence Wilkinson stayed on the third. By the time Florence left the group for Bellagio, the intimacy that had developed between McClure and the young poet was apparent to the Rices.

When Ida Tarbell joined McClure and the Rices in the Swiss village of Gletsch, the newly organized traveling party set forth on a walking tour of the Alps. In the course of three weeks, they trekked from the valley of the Rhône to Lucerne and Zurich, and then on to the Engadine Valley in Italy, stopping at small inns along the way. Their “rollicking adventure,” Alice Rice recalled, was directed by McClure, their “buccaneer leader,” who “went through life like a tornado carrying everything in its wake.” Reaching San Moritz in the late afternoon as fashionable carriages paraded along the thoroughfare, McClure was so exhilarated by the beauty of the mountain scene that he “lost his head completely,” challenging Cale to scale a hill and then somersault down its slope. “So,” Alice remembered, “to the utter amazement of the summer residents, taking their afternoon drive, two wild Americans came catapulting down the hillside, landing in the promenade almost under their horses’ feet.”

During that “never-to-be forgotten” European tour, Alice Rice and her husband forged a lifelong friendship with Ida Tarbell. Toward the end of their journey, the young couple, in all likelihood, confided the intimacy they had witnessed between Florence and Sam. Tensions grew until Ida could barely contain her tears when they parted, and McClure rightly feared that he had diminished himself in her eyes. “I have felt terribly sad since you left,” he lamented in a subsequent letter. “I have no friend like you & I cannot endure to have hurt you & forfeited any of your confidence,” he added, begging her forgiveness and promising never to “take another party to the Alps of any kind, just my family & you and other of my associates.”

Ida’s real distress was not driven by prudish disdain for his amorous entanglements; instead, she feared that Sam McClure’s recklessness could tarnish the magazine with hypocrisy. In article after article, McClure’s had exposed immoral businessmen and politicians. The authority of its painstaking investigations rested on the integrity of the writers and editors. Clearly, public scandal involving the magazine’s charismatic founder would be a valuable weapon for those seeking to demean all their efforts.

After returning to New York that fall of 1903, Ida had shared her apprehensions with John Phillips. When Sam departed alone for a two-month European stay in November, they feared he planned to meet with Florence. His letters home revealed a mood of exultation: “I feel sure of myself as I haven’t for many years. I am stronger on this trip than I was any time in ten years,” he wrote from Berlin. Sam’s buoyant tone persisted as he traveled through Germany and back to London. “I am so much keener & sharper than ever,” he boasted. “I feel my vision broadened and feel strong physically and mentally.” When McClure suddenly embarked on a solo holiday in the Appalachian Mountains in the spring, Tarbell and Phillips were convinced the sojourn was engineered to meet his lover.

In May 1904, the office erupted into turmoil when McClure directed the poetry editor, Witter Bynner, to purchase yet another of Florence’s verses, this time a lover’s poem that seemed directed to McClure himself. McClure composed a letter announcing its imminent publication by the magazine. He then asked Bynner to present the announcement to Miss Wilkinson personally, accompanied by a lavish arrangement of fresh flowers. When Tarbell and Phillips learned of these instructions, they upbraided Sam “like a naughty child.” By this time, Hattie had learned about the affair, and turbulent days followed. A chastened McClure swore he would finally end the relationship and apparently informed Florence that they must sever all communication.

A week later, Sam left for Europe with his wife. Upon reaching Divonne, Hattie wrote Ida that something “very terrible” had come up during the ocean voyage: Sam had confessed to the existence of numerous letters written to Florence over the previous year. Immediately realizing “all the possibilities implied in that circumstance,” Hattie urged her husband to have John Phillips retrieve his correspondence, but Sam “was wild at that idea.” Instead, he sent off another letter to Florence, requesting the return of all his correspondence. “As the time approached when an answer could be expected,” Hattie confided to Ida, Sam “fell into a terrible condition. He lost flesh, nearly a pound a day for nearly a week.” Every day, he fretfully awaited the postman.

“I have so much to do right for,” the overwrought McClure confessed to Ida during this interval. “I couldn’t bear to lose you, not to speak of John or the others. . . . I am now at the bottom. I can go no further nor feel any sadder . . . I am about to take the desperate, but sure cure. Three weeks, in bed & milk.” Realizing that their friend was ill equipped to resolve the situation, Tarbell and Phillips decided they must intervene. The awareness of extant letters exchanged between the illicit lovers confirmed their worst fears. “The Lord help us!” Ida exclaimed. Concluding that they must approach Florence Wilkinson directly, Ida considered visiting the Finger Lakes, where Florence was spending the summer. There, Ida would “make an appeal for courage,” hopeful that the young woman would return the letters and refuse further contact with Sam. “I fear I would be hard on her,” she admitted to John, as they considered their options, “but I will honestly try to put that out of my mind and help the girl if she will let me.” In the end, Ida decided it might be wiser for Phillips to make the appeal, since it was “quite natural” that Florence should “feel resentment” toward her. The shy Phillips agreed to undertake the unpleasant task, meeting with Florence in upstate New York, where he secured her promise to return the letters and refrain from further communication with McClure.

Although Florence initially kept her part of the bargain, Sam could not keep his. “I have received six or seven letters and two cable messages,” Florence informed Phillips. The letters, she told him, “I have returned mostly sealed as they came. It hurts me more than words can say.” She had indeed sent a packet containing all McClure’s correspondence, but Florence could not bear to reject unopened all his new letters. “I think his health is suffering unnecessarily under the strain of absolute silence,” she wrote. “I think, too, he is in an agony of doubt as to my feelings toward him. I wish he could know that I love him as well as ever—though I am never to see him.” Despite Phillips’s concerns, she desperately wished to post one letter assuring Sam that “the love by itself is not wrong.” Phillips should understand that “it was not humanly possible for his side to snap off so suddenly,” though she would do her utmost to ease the situation.

McClure’s longtime friend and London office manager Mary Bisland reported to Ida that Sam could not stop talking about Florence, protesting that he had been “wretched & restless” since the separation and insisting that he had “not the very vaguest idea of giving her up,” though he feared she was now determined to end the affair. At times, McClure seemed to listen to reason, making “very solemn promises” to Hattie that he would devote himself to her and that she would once again work in the office by his side. But such pledges alternated with dark declarations that he would leave New York for a year or more, perhaps never to return. “He said he was a hurt animal who wanted to crawl into a hole and hide forever,” Hattie sadly told Ida. “My heart is broken to see how weak he is. . . . He must learn over again to live with me and do right.”

Yet even during his most depressed days in Europe, McClure never failed to follow every detail of the magazine’s progress, continuing to provide valuable input. Writing to Tarbell in June 1904, he captured the vision articulated in recent articles: “The struggle for possession of absolute power which you find in your work among capitalists & Steffens finds among politicians & Baker finds among labor unions, is the age-long struggle & human freedom has been won only by continual & tremendous effort.” Much as he admired Steffens’s articles on corruption, he warned Phillips that they were “full of dynamite, far & away the most terrible stuff we can handle.” Steffens “must never be rushed,” he further cautioned, and his use of invective must be carefully curtailed. In the article on Wisconsin, for example, Steffens had accused Senator John Spooner of bribing state legislators to obtain his Senate seat. “Unless Spooner was elected by bribery, we must clear him,” McClure instructed. “Either he or the magazine must be cleared.” The article on Nelson Aldrich would be equally “sensational” and “must be very understated and very accurate.” Compounding his unease, McClure intuited that the atmosphere at the magazine had become less collegial. He feared that with each writer “working in his own little cubicle, in his own little field,” each would fail “to get the inspiration or the information that would vitalize his work, from other departments.”

His perceptions were by and large astute, but Sam McClure also fired off a series of ill-tempered critiques that upset staffers in New York. They bristled at his particularly high-handed indictment of an internal advertisement extolling the magazine’s growing reputation. “The man who is responsible for this advt is relieved from further ad writing absolutely,” McClure haughtily ordered, complaining, “Why in the name of ordinary decency and modesty do we have to vaunt ourselves like this, saying we are the best. . . . We act like a spoiled, over-petted and over-praised, but ill-bred small boy.” He implored Hattie to write a separate letter conveying to everyone in the office the depth of his displeasure. Henceforth, he demanded, not a single ad should be run without his express approval. Put to bed under doctor’s orders to begin the dreaded milk cure yet again, Hattie reported, he had asked her to read some of the magazine’s recent short stories, which she had concluded were “very poor, trashy, empty things . . . far below the old McClure standard.” Future stories, he then insisted, should be sent to Divonne so Hattie could determine if they seemed “unworthy.” Phillips patiently answered Sam’s diatribes, but he began to wonder if his oldest friend would ever be healthy enough to return to full-time work.

Hattie’s determination to forgive her husband’s past indiscretions was severely tested in July 1904 when she received a shattering letter from Miss Wilkinson. Florence had learned that she was not the only “other” woman in Sam’s life. Her “dearest” friend, Edith Wherry, had revealed her own romantic relationship with McClure, which had apparently developed after the fateful European vacation. Florence had written Hattie in a fit of jealous anger, intending to injure Sam in his wife’s eyes. The distressing missive spurred Sam into belated recognition that he would have to take control of a quickly deteriorating situation. “Yesterday,” he wrote to Phillips, “Mrs. McClure received a letter from Florence that brought about a condition that resulted in my making a complete finis to the terrible affair & I have so written Miss W. You have done nobly & Miss Tarbell but now the matter is finished absolutely. . . . There is no possible chance for further troubles.”

McClure managed to convince his wife that Miss Wherry’s confession was a mere figment of the young girl’s imagination, and the troubled couple headed home with a commitment to resume their marriage. While Hattie admitted that her heart was still “wrung with the anguish of it all,” she told Sam that she was willing to leave everything in the past now that he had ended his “strange wanderings.”

Back home, Sam professed his resolve to abandon all distraction and philandering, insisting to Ida Tarbell that her devoted efforts had “saved” him. He was so “horrified at the awful course of the past year or two” that he dared not dwell on it, fearing he would “never again be first” in her esteem and affections. If he were unable to regain her confidence, he told her, that alone would serve as lasting “punishment” for all he had done. Despite his contrition, there remained a disagreeable postscript to the Wherry episode. When Sam was in Chicago months later, Edith Wherry sent a manuscript to Hattie with the alarming title “The Shame of S. S. McClure, Illustrated by Letters and Original Documents.” Miss Wherry claimed that she was determined “to live henceforth in truth & honor.” Accordingly, “the wall of lies” which had sheltered her liaison with Sam must be razed. Hattie brought the explosive manuscript to the office, seeking the counsel of Tarbell and Phillips. An urgent telegram was dispatched, urging McClure’s immediate return to New York. When he arrived the next day, the staff drew up a plan of financial compensation to suppress the manuscript.

MCCLURE’S RETURN TO THE MAGAZINE seemed to revive him. Bursting with new concepts, he proposed that Steffens embark on an investigation of life insurance companies and that Tarbell take on the U.S. Senate, predicting that “the whole future” of the country would be determined by “that most powerful ruling body.” During a trip through the Midwest in the summer of 1905, he stopped in Emporia to visit William Allen White and reported that he himself was “getting along splendidly” in both “his work and learning” and that he was poised “to do greater editing than ever before.”

Relieved to witness the lift in McClure’s spirits, Phillips and Tarbell nevertheless mistrusted his leadership after the enervating months of crises. Not only did Tarbell ignore his suggestion to study the Senate; she had also, McClure sorrowfully noted, neglected to write to him during his travels. “I thought when I came back,” he told her, “I could stand the years of waiting until I earned your confidence and regained my place with you & Mr. Phillips.” Now, McClure feared that things “would never be the same,” and that realization placed “a heavy, heavy load” on his heart.“My mind constantly dwells in the past & more especially the first four years of the magazine,” he plaintively confided to Ida. “They were the golden years of my life . . . I often dream of being back with you all. I feel also how much I have done to destroy the most precious possession of my life.”

Impelled by a feverish desire to reclaim the affection and respect of his colleagues, McClure spent days and nights developing an elaborate plan for a new monthly companion magazine to McClure’s. Transported by manic excitement, the publisher convinced himself that it would be “the greatest periodical ever published in America.” Once his staff understood the brilliance of the scheme, he exulted, they would acknowledge that he was “a stronger and more productive man than ever.” In late November 1905, he sent the finished prospectus to Tarbell. He was sharing “a tremendous secret,” he wrote, which he hoped would mollify any anxieties she might continue to harbor.

McClure’s Universal Journal, the second monthly he envisioned, would be larger than the current magazine, attracting the most famous novelists and short story writers in the world and featuring serious articles about current issues. Single copies would cost but five cents, one third the price of McClure’s magazine. The lower price would be accomplished by utilizing less expensive paper and relying on pen-and-ink illustrations instead of costly copperplate engravings. McClure predicted a net yearly income of $2 million and proposed to found the company by issuing nearly $13 million in stock. The staff of McClure’s would manage both the current magazine and the new journal.

But Sam McClure’s extravagant ambitions were not confined to the publishing world. The new monthly would be affiliated with four interlocking, profitable enterprises that would help solve pressing social problems: a People’s Bank; a People’s Life Insurance Company; a People’s University to issue textbooks on all subjects and develop correspondence courses; and a Universal Library to supply the public with affordable copies of great works of literature no longer covered by copyright. In addition to these boggling schemes, McClure planned to purchase 1,000 acres of land upon which to build a model community with affordable housing.

Far from being intrigued, Ida Tarbell considered McClure’s grandiosity a manifestation of his illness, a manic projection that eclipsed the gratification of real accomplishment. His compulsion to “build a bigger, a more imposing House of McClure” would only jeopardize the magazine to which she had devoted her best years. McClure’s Universal Journal would inevitably compete for the same readers as McClure’s magazine, diminishing the value of her stock in the magazine and destabilizing the entire enterprise. Most troubling of all, whether the product of megalomania or the most beneficent of motives, McClure’s scheme of consolidating different enterprises under the same roof echoed the very trusts against which she and her colleagues had waged war. Her instincts told her that this was “the plan which was eventually to wreck his enterprises.”

When John Phillips saw McClure’s prospectus, he understood more clearly than Tarbell that the company’s finances would never support a venture of this magnitude. As the largest minority stockholder and managing editor during Sam’s repeated absences, Phillips had “all the different branches of the work in his hand”—the advertising department, the editorial section, the book publishing arm, the printing press, the art department. Over the years, Sam’s traveling expenses had been a continuing drain on the treasury. In his expansive moods, the publisher would impulsively purchase twice as many articles as the magazine could possibly use. He had signed deals to extend the company’s operations that ultimately had to be abandoned at heavy cost. He had rewarded his writers and artists with money and generous gifts. Though the magazine itself continued to flourish, the company was under stress.

For more than a decade, the steadfast Phillips had anchored the magazine. While Sam wandered through Europe, the quiet editor remained at his desk from early morning until late at night, managing the business details and working intimately with each of the writers. Ray Baker later said that he had never known an editor “who had so much of the creative touch, a kind of understanding which surprised the writer himself with unexpected possibilities in his own subjects.” An “uncompromising” critic, Phillips told his writers exactly why their articles did not work, often recommending remedies and suggesting “felicities of expression which the author would have liked to think of first.” William Allen White declared that without Phillips, the staff “would not know where to go or what to do.”

The dynamic between Phillips and McClure had been established for a quarter of a century: when McClure was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, John kept the paper running while Sam disappeared for days at a time; in Boston, Phillips edited the bicycling magazine, theWheelman, while Sam traveled around New England in search of writers and ideas; in the early days of their New York syndicate, Phillips managed operations while McClure crossed the ocean to meet with Kipling, James Barrie, and Conan Doyle. When they were young, John had so admired Sam’s energy, his “push and business ability,” that he would readily have changed places with him. As Sam’s mood swings intensified over the years, Phillips willingly assumed more and more of his partner’s responsibilities. Finally Phillips’s vaunted patience snapped—the combined impact of the Wilkinson affair, the vituperative letters from Divonne, and Sam’s preemptive hiring of a high-salaried art director for the new venture proved too much.

After that rash hiring decision, Tarbell and Phillips quickly resolved to work in tandem and persuade McClure to abandon his scheme. During the Wilkinson crisis, the two had formed a close bond. Faced with this new catastrophe, they spent many hours together, strategizing over lunches in the city and dinners in each other’s homes. The affection and trust Tarbell had once reserved for McClure was now claimed by Phillips. “He is certainly the rarest and most beautiful soul on earth,” she told Albert Boyden, McClure’s managing editor. In mid-January 1906, craving respite from the office maelstrom, Tarbell joined John and Jennie Phillips on a trip to Kansas, Colorado, and the Grand Canyon. In Emporia, they stayed with William Allen White, who accompanied them for the remainder of the trip.

“It has been a glorious trip,” Tarbell wrote cheerfully to Boyden. Their buoyant mood was soon spoiled when they received a series of letters forwarded from the office indicating that “the Chief” had defied their objections and moved ahead in their absence to incorporate the McClure’s Journal Company. Phillips “as usual is an angel & has written [McClure] a beautiful letter,” Tarbell reported to Boyden, but conditions in the office had reached a “diabolical” stage, requiring a unified action to stop the madness.

McClure informed Phillips that his letter had come the very morning that the new journal’s art director arrived at the office. The distraction “thoroughly unfitted me for the work with him,” Sam peevishly objected. “I’m engaging upon a tremendous task, a noble and splendid one. I have the greatest idea for a periodical ever invented, and am entering upon an enterprise that will benefit everyone also tremendously, and nothing but a large recovery of my original calmness of mind, and what at one time was unruffable good nature, will enable me to stand what are really petty and useless annoyances and opposition.” As “one of the most successful business organizers in this country,” he continued, “it never occurred to me that having founded one business I could not found another.” McClure went on to assert that his mind was “settled.” He would not only launchMcClure’s Universal Journal, but would create a weekly magazine in the near future. Phillips, McClure suggested, had “a tendency to look upon the dark side of things.” He recommended that his oldest friend take a two-year paid vacation to gain perspective on his “ridiculous” concerns.

Additional letters from anxious staff members soon reached the vacationers, pleading with them to return before the enterprise suffered irreparable damage. “All S.S. wants is sympathy and a recognition of his genius,” Dan McKinley wrote. Their editor, he continued, “feels he is not master in his own shop; he feels that his opinions and ideas are no longer considered worthy of serious thought.” Albert Boyden acknowledged that those who remained in the office could no longer cope with the situation. “I wish we did have the brains and wisdom and patience to work it out without you,” he wistfully wrote, “but we have not.”

By the time the entire staff reconvened in New York, Phillips had reached a desperate resolution: If he could not persuade McClure to abandon his vainglorious scheme, he would resign. “It was a momentous decision for a man of forty-five to make,” Phillips wrote in an unpublished memoir. “The impelling reasons were personal, almost spiritual . . . I felt that I could not submit to being wrenched into courses and proposed undertakings that would arouse inner dissension with no prospect of peace. As soon as the decision was made, there was a great calm, a serene contentment.”

When McClure learned of Phillips’s decision, he summoned Tarbell to his office and demanded to know whether “anybody else is going.” She informed him that she, too, would resign. Staying on without Phillips, she insisted, “would be like living in a house with a corpse.” At the prospect of her desertion, McClure broke down. “You, too, Ida Tarbell,” he accused. Tarbell recorded in her diary that night that as McClure railed against their departure and reiterated his abiding love for her, all she could think of was “Napoleon at Fontainebleau.” Her attempts to explain to McClure that for Phillips it was a question of “his own soul”—that it was no longer possible “to live in such humiliation as he has had to endure”—failed to penetrate his hysteria. Finally, she wrote, McClure “sprang up & flung his arms around me & kissed me—left weeping & I sat down sobbing hysterically but am more convinced than ever that we are right.”

In the immediate aftermath of their declared intention to resign, a compromise was nearly reached. Phillips and Tarbell agreed to stay if McClure would “democratize” the management of the magazine by creating a board of directors and putting a portion of his stock into a trusteeship administered by Tarbell, Phillips, Steffens, and Baker. When McClure acquiesced, the three of them went off for an awkward lunch together. McClure returned to the office looking “cheerful” for the first time in weeks. An agreement was drawn up.

Then, just as swiftly as McClure had agreed, he changed his mind. The notion that the magazine had become an institution “beyond the ability of one man” to run, he now told Phillips, was “utterly absurd.” Though he traveled a great deal, such excursions had always proved invaluable to the magazine. “My facilities for getting to know public opinion and the opinion of able thinkers is vastly greater than it was ten years ago,” he insisted. “The management of this magazine is probably not one-thousandth as difficult as Abraham Lincoln’s job; but Lincoln could never have managed his job had it not been for the extraordinary facilities that went with his position for sensing public opinion.”

The more he contemplated the matter, the more he realized it would be “utterly impossible” for him to accept a lesser role in the magazine. “When you read history,” he proclaimed, “you find that kings who have come to the end of their tether, as a rule would suffer death rather than give up part of their power.” By grandiose analogy, he would rather sell his majority interests than relinquish control. Tarbell and Phillips immediately offered to purchase his McClure’s stock. Even as this new document was generated, however, McClure again rescinded the decision. “I cannot leave the magazine,” he declared to Tarbell. “I would soon lose my mind.” Discussion then shifted to the possibility that he would buy out both Phillips’s and Tarbell’s stock, enabling them to start their own magazine.

Throughout these negotiations and reversals, Albert Brady’s brother Curtis recalled, “the entire office was embroiled in the turmoil.” Members of the staff “were compelled to take sides whether or not they wished to do so, but some did it secretly—afraid to express their opinions aloud. It was not unusual to see small groups of men, with their heads together, speaking in undertones, and then busy themselves when someone else came along.” It soon became clear that the majority of the staff backed Phillips and Tarbell, including Steffens, Baker, Boyden, and John Siddall.

Explaining his decision to resign in a letter to his father, Steffens observed that McClure had been away for months, “playing and getting well.” Then, upon his return, he had embarked upon “a big, fool scheme of founding a new magazine with a string of banks, insurance companies, etc., and a capitalization of $15,000,000. It was not only fool, it was not quite right.” Indeed, it seemed “a speculative scheme,” designed to extract money from investors that would never be repaid, much like the schemes McClure’s magazine had been reporting on over the years. “Having built upMcClure’s, given it purpose and character, and increased its circulation so that it was a power as well as a dividend-payer,” Steffens maintained, “we did not propose to stand by and see it exploited and used, even by the owner.”

During this tumultuous period, Ray Baker had been absent from the office completing his railroad articles. Warned of the situation by a stream of alarming letters, he confided to his wife on March 9 that McClure had “become so utterly unbalanced & unreasonable that he is almost past working with.” A week later he grimly concluded that “dynamite, nitroglycerine & black powder” had been laid and could not be defused. When the time came, Baker decided to join his departing associates, who, as he told his father, “are not only my friends, but who have contributed largely to whatever success I have attained.” The departure left him painfully adrift: “I was left with no certainty, at the moment anyway, of continuing to do the work to which I was most deeply devoted; I was lost in a fog of contention and antagonism.” Recalling the discord years later, Baker acknowledged that “in the afterlook these ills seem trivial enough: at that time, they were all but catastrophic.”

AS RUMORS SPREAD ABOUT THE impending breakup at McClure’s, many in the press mistakenly attributed the schism to a memorable address that President Roosevelt delivered that same spring. Exasperated by a sensationalist attack on the U.S. Senate in a magazine owned by his hated political rival, William Randolph Hearst, Roosevelt denounced investigative journalists as muckrakers, bent on relentless negativity and dispiriting exploitation of the nation’s ills. “In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,” he began, “you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward.” Bunyan’s muckraker, he suggested, “typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing.”

The coincidence of this speech and the first reports of dissension at the magazine led reporters to speculate that McClure had responded to the president’s denunciation of muckraking with a decision to soften future exposés. According to such accounts, Tarbell, Steffens, and Baker, unwilling to accept the change in policy, had deserted to form their own magazine. McClure unequivocally rejected reports that Roosevelt’s speech had in any way “affected his views of what a magazine ought to be.” McClure’s, he insisted, would continue to “report the activities of contemporary life,” as it had always done. Nonetheless, the lingering implication that the editor had planned “to muzzle his writers” exacerbated McClure’s distress.

“The Treason of the Senate,” the explosive series that aroused Roosevelt’s ire, was conceived by William Randolph Hearst, who had long targeted the trust-dominated Senate in his newspapers. During Hearst’s short career as a Democratic congressman from New York and throughout his failed presidential run in 1904, the flamboyant publisher had agitated for a constitutional amendment stipulating popular election of senators. A democratic process, he argued, should replace the current system of election by state legislatures. The 1905 purchase of his first monthly magazine,The Cosmopolitan, provided an ideal forum to continue his campaign. He offered David Graham Phillips, the best-selling progressive novelist, a handsome price and substantial research help to undertake an investigation of the Senate’s betrayal of the public interest. The first of nine monthly installments appeared in March 1906, just as Roosevelt was battling to secure Senate approval of his signature bill to regulate the railroads.

“Treason is a strong word,” the David Graham Phillips series began, “but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous; interests that manipulate the prosperity produced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few.” In the course of the series, Phillips would sketch individual biographies of eighteen Republican and three Democratic senators. Each portrait revealed “a triangulation” between the senator’s eagerness to assist corporations, the increase of his personal wealth, and the expansion of his influence in Washington. Though criticism of the Senate’s hostility to progressive reform was not new, the scathing language and focused attack on the most powerful Republican leaders (including Lodge, Aldrich, Elkins, and Knox) attracted widespread attention. The circulation of The Cosmopolitan doubled overnight. Throughout the country, small daily and weekly newspapers reprinted individual articles. “Little wonder,” the historian George Mowry observes, “that Theodore Roosevelt feared a general discrediting of his party, the national legislature, and indeed the administration if the effects of such charges were not somehow dissipated.”

New York senator Chauncey Depew, who had nominated Roosevelt for governor in 1898, was targeted in the first piece. “For those who like the sight of a corpse well beaten up,” one newspaper editorialized, this “mean” portrait deserved “the championship belt.” Under a picture of Depew, the caption announced: “Here is the archetypal Face of the Sleek, Self-Satisfied American Opportunist in Politics and Plunder.” Railroad barons Cornelius and William Vanderbilt were identified as the men who first enlisted Depew in “personal and official service. . . . And ever since then have owned [him] mentally and morally.” Throughout the article, charges of “boodler” and “robber” were leveled, alongside the labels “coward” and “sniveling sycophant.” Although he never accused Depew of outright venality, Phillips argued that the New York senator, like many of his colleagues, was thoroughly beholden to the campaign contributions of the special interests.

The tone of the piece appalled Roosevelt. He told his journalist friend Alfred Henry Lewis that while he had the “heartiest sympathy and commendation” for responsible attacks on corruption, “hysteria and sensationalism” would fail to produce “any permanent good,” and the country would conclude that “the liar is in the long run as noxious as the thief.” The series produced outrage in the conservative press. The Critic accused Phillips of “sowing the seeds of anarchy.” The New York Sun asserted that debasing an institution created by the founding fathers was tantamount to “playing with matches in dangerous proximity to a powder magazine.” Speaking in defense of the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge declared: “Slander and misrepresentation directed against individuals are not of much importance, but wise institutions and free systems of government, painfully wrought, tried in the fires of sacrifice and suffering, should endure.”

Concerned that the “epidemic of Congress-baiting” would jeopardize his regulatory program, Roosevelt devised a clever counterstroke. On March 17, 1906, at the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, an informal assembly of reporters, editors, cabinet officials, and leaders in business and academia, Roosevelt delivered his own piece of propaganda. After a series of humorous skits, the president spoke without notes for forty-five minutes, railing against “muckrakers,” who saturated magazines and newspapers “with sensational articles,” dredging all that was bleak and corrupt while “ignoring at the same time the good in the world.” He had initially planned to indict David Graham Phillips, but Elihu Root persuaded him that a personal attack would only fuel the writer’s celebrity. By avoiding a direct condemnation of the “Treason” series, however, Roosevelt inadvertently left the audience speculating about his intended targets.

In truth, the president’s attack on the muckrakers reflected more than momentary anger at Hearst and David Graham Phillips. His exasperation with the proliferation of increasingly sensational and shoddily investigated exposure journalism had been slowly building. Although “the masters” at McClure’s typically invested months and even years of careful research in their studies, a host of less meticulous and principled “imitators” had followed in their wake. In the competition for “hot stuff,” politicians and businessmen were being “tried and found guilty in magazine counting rooms before the investigation is begun.” The carefully documented quest for truth had been supplanted by slapdash, often slanderous accusations. Even when the articles rested on solid documentary evidence, Roosevelt feared that an incessant fixation on corruption had begun “to produce a very unhealthy condition of excitement and irritation in the public mind,” leading to an “enormous increase in socialistic propaganda.”

As usual, Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley trenchantly captured public agitation. There once was a time, the Irish bartender opined, when reading popular magazines calmed the mind. Readers came away feeling that life was a “glad, sweet song.” Indeed, one could drape his “watch on the knob” on an unlocked door, confident it would be there in the morning. Now, however, a reader turning the pages of any magazine would discover that “everything has gone wrong.” Corruption and double-dealing today were so rampant that “the world is little better,” Dooley concluded, “than a convict’s camp.” Roosevelt “immensely” enjoyed Mr. Dooley’s outlook. “I get sick of people who are always insisting upon nothing but the dark side of life,” he told Dunne. “There are a lot of things that need correction in this country; but there is not the slightest use of feeling over-pessimistic about it.”

National fatigue with the ubiquitous literature of exposure had already set in when Roosevelt spoke to the Gridiron Club. “The public cannot stand at attention with its eyes fixed on one spot indefinitely,” the literary critic Edwin E. Slosson shrewdly observed. “It is bound to get restive, and seek diversion in other interests.” A Wisconsin municipal court judge expressed the resentment of many: “It is getting so nowadays that the man or corporation that accumulates property to any extent is made the subject of these attacks.” Nor, a fellow Wisconsin citizen observed, should a man be considered “a criminal simply because he holds a public office.”

THE MORNING AFTER THE GRIDIRON speech, Lincoln Steffens called on the president. “Well,” Steffens reproached, “you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you.” Roosevelt insisted that he had not intended a general indictment of legitimate reporters like Steffens. He was simply defending “poor old Chauncey Depew” against a terribly unfair portrait in the Hearst press. Steffens remained unconvinced, correctly sensing the president’s growing impatience with the never-ending exposés—even as he relied on them to mobilize public opinion.

In fact, on several occasions the previous year, Roosevelt had directly criticized Steffens for his tendency to “repeat as true unfounded gossip of a malicious or semimalicious character.” It was “an absurdity,” he had scolded Steffens, to claim that Senator Aldrich was “the boss of the United States.” Such a preposterous claim carried “a sinister significance,” for “[we] suffer quite as much from exaggerated, hysterical, and untruthful statements in the press as from any wrongdoing by businessmen or politicians.” Roosevelt had also decried Steffens’s characterization of Postmaster General Henry C. Payne as the ringleader of a corrupt effort to fix legislators and thereby destroy Governor La Follette’s legislative program. “Poor Payne is sick either unto death or nigh unto death,” Roosevelt had complained to Lodge, two days before Payne died. “This attack on him in McClure’s Magazine by Steffens was, I think, the immediate cause of breaking him down; and I am convinced that it is an infamously false attack.”

Nevertheless, Steffens had continued to enjoy unusual access to the White House. When he arrived in Washington to investigate whether the corruption uncovered in city and state governments extended to the federal level, Roosevelt offered to help. The president provided the celebrated journalist with a card inscribed: “To any officer or employee of the Government, Please tell Mr. Lincoln Steffens anything whatever about the running of the government that you know (not incompatible with the public interest) and provided only that you tell him the truth—no matter what it may be—I will see that you are not hurt. T. Roosevelt.”

The resultant syndicated series, however, nettled Roosevelt. To Steffens, the signal question America faced could not be answered with the passage of railroad regulation or food and drug laws, but only with fundamental change to the corrupt system that invested special interests with undue power at the expense of the people. “I’d rather make our government represent us than dig the canal; the President would rather dig the canal and regulate railway rates. So he makes his ‘deal’ with the speaker and I condemn it.”

Roosevelt was especially angered by reformers’ accusations that he was too compromising in his efforts to remedy the abuses of capitalism. “In stating your disapproval of my efforts to get results,” he wrote Steffens, “which of course must be gotten by trying to come to a working agreement with the Senate and House and therefore by making mutual concessions, you have often said or implied that I ought to refuse to make any concessions, but stand uncompromisingly for my beliefs, and let the people decide. As a matter of fact I have come a great deal nearer getting what I wanted than, for instance, Governor La Follette.”

Roosevelt grumbled that Steffens and his friends failed to understand the requisites of practical leadership—a sense of when to move forward, when to hold back, when to mobilize the public, when to negotiate behind closed doors. Leadership that led to genuine progress depended upon an acute sense of timing, a feel for both the public and the congressional pulse. Yet in recent months it had seemed that crusading writers were intent on usurping his authority, creating the intolerable impression that rather than “summoning,” Roosevelt “was being dragged.”

All these frustrations had informed Roosevelt’s decision to castigate the “new journalism” at the Gridiron Club Dinner. Remarks at the informal club meeting were traditionally off the record, but word of the president’s dramatic condemnation “spread like wildfire,” along with speculation that he was referencing progressive writers such as Lincoln Steffens, Ray Baker, David Phillips, and Upton Sinclair. When Roosevelt announced his intention to reiterate his Gridiron message in a public address, Baker was dumbfounded, concerned that “such an attack might greatly injure the work which we were trying honestly to do.” He finally decided to write a frank letter to the president. “I have been much disturbed at the report of your proposed address,” Baker began. “Even admitting that some of the so-called ‘exposures’ have been extreme, have they not, as a whole, been honest and useful? and would not a speech, backed by all of your great authority, attacking the magazines, tend to give aid and comfort to these very rascals” whose activities were being exposed by hardworking journalists? Moreover, he warned, “the first to stop the work of letting in the light and air will be those who have been trying honestly to tell the whole truth, good and bad, and leave the field to the outright ranters and inciters.”

Roosevelt was undeterred. “One reason I want to make that address,” he replied the next day, “is because people so persistently misunderstand what I said.” The president confided in Baker that “Hearst’s papers and magazines” were his intended target and promised his speech would clarify that he abhorred “the whitewash brush quite as much as of mud slinging.”

Roosevelt delivered his formal “Muckrake Man” address on April 14, 1906. That he seriously considered Baker’s concerns is evident in his carefully measured speech. He cautioned that his words must not be distorted, insisting “at the risk of repetition” that the fight against corruption and exploitation must continue. Every word of reproach against the crusading journalists was counterbalanced with a word of commendation. He termed their investigations “indispensable,” yet explained that when muckrakers penned “sensational, lurid and untruthful” articles, they became “potent forces for evil.” In the end, however, Roosevelt’s vivid portrait of the muckraker eclipsed his positive remarks about investigative journalism. His speech was widely received as an indiscriminate attack on all reform journalists.

Commentators reflected that the president could not publicly speak “upon a question which is shaking the country from center to circumference without exercising a powerful influence upon one side of the other.” And despite his “almost nervous dread” of misinterpretation, Roosevelt had “put into the hands of every trust magnate, every insurance thief, and every political corruptionist a handy weapon which will be used unconscionably for their defense.” All such interests, one journal predicted, would “now plead not guilty, point to the ‘muck rake’ and seek shelter behind the portly figure of the President.”

Baker read the speech as a profound betrayal. He noted sadly that while Roosevelt had indeed employed his “familiar balance of approval and disapproval,” he had failed to distinguish between the sensationalist yellow press and the responsible journalists. “He did not ‘think it worthwhile’ to acknowledge the service of those men who had been striving to tell the truth, honestly and completely, whose work he had repeatedly approved, and for whose help he had again and again expressed his appreciation,” Baker later wrote. Instead, the indelible image of the muckraker “classed all of us together.”

Baker’s alarm proved well founded: McClure’s magazine, the most illustrious journal, was “singled out” for a devastating satire in Life magazine. Each of the writers of “McSure’s” magazine—Ida Tarbarrell, Ray Standard Fakir, Sinkem Beffens—was viciously mocked in turn. “I’m giving my whole life to breaking the butterfly of a John Rockefeller upon the wheel of my ponderous articles,” Tarbell/Tarbarrell was quoted as saying. ‘’He’s got too much money. If that isn’t a shame, I’d like to know what a shame is!” In another scathing send-up, Steffens/Beffens humbly submitted to a supposed interview: “I’m not really great. I’m only eminent, unparalleled, superlatively remarkable.” Pondering such achievement, the interviewer highlighted Steffens’s process: “With only his suit-case and his gold rake studded with diamonds, he can take the morning train for an unknown city, rake off in a few hours the thick slime of municipal corruption and have a shame-shrieking article ready for McSure’s by night.”

“These satirical jabs cut [Baker] deeply,” his biographer claims. “The bubble of devoted public service that had developed around his work had been irreparably punctured.” Deeply demoralized to find his name among those “cast into outer darkness,” Baker would never forgive Roosevelt. “I met the President many times afterward and there were numerous exchanges of letters,” he recalled, “but while I could wonder at his remarkable versatility of mind, and admire his many robust human qualities, I could never again give him my full confidence, nor follow his leadership.”

In the wake of the president’s speech, morale among conservatives and corporate interests rallied. The New York Sun proclaimed that the muckrakers’ era of exposure had come to an end: “It was a great day while it lasted, but it became too hot. The Muck-rakers worked merrily for a time in their own bright sunshine, and an unthinking populace applauded their performance. Now there are few to do them reverence.” It was said, only partly in jest, that “rebaters and bribers” were “beginning to walk abroad with the old smile,” sensing that “the tidal wave of magazine reform” was finally abating.

Progressives mounted an impassioned defense of the magazine crusaders. One supporter argued that these journalists numbered among “the loftiest and purest of living patriots, who have taken their professional and political lives in their hands that they might serve as ‘soldiers of the common good.’ ” Their “long, laborious work” had initiated the “inspiring movement” for honest government; no fair-minded citizen could deny the “astonishingly great” influence of Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, or Ray Baker. “The day will come,” one sympathetic commentator correctly predicted, “when the ‘muck rake’ will be borne through the streets as a triumphant emblem of reform,” when the epithet “muckraker” would become “a badge of honor.”

ON MAY 11, 1906, FOUR weeks after the president’s speech, the New York Times confirmed that Phillips, Tarbell, Steffens, Baker, and Boyden were leaving McClure’s. Furthermore, it was understood that the five journalists were “quietly planning to start a magazine venture of their own.”After weeks of turmoil, McClure had finally agreed to buy out Phillips and Tarbell, whose combined stock was worth $187,000. He also promised each of them six months salary at full pay. “I am certain that it is not in my power at the present time adequately to reward them for their services, which no money could pay for,” McClure told a business associate. “They leave me retaining my deepest love and affection and esteem and confidence. I think I may say that it is the greatest tragedy thus far of my life to lose them.” With Baker and Steffens, he was equally generous, continuing their salaries while they completed work on already contracted projects. “I wish you all good fortune,” he told Baker. “I have always enjoyed working with you and your work has been very successful in the magazine, and I am very sorry to lose you.” Moved by his publisher’s remarkable magnanimity, Steffens observed: “There was nothing mean about S. S. McClure.”

In the aftermath of the schism, McClure lost not only his star writers but his partner, managing editor, and three top business executives as well. While some in the publishing world wondered if he could survive the loss of the inimitable team that had given the magazine “its chief features of life and popularity,” Sam McClure proved surprisingly resilient in the face of catastrophe. Necessity compelled him to abandon his “colossal scheme” and focus all his energies on rebuilding the magazine. “I have really to look after almost every department,” he told Hattie, “and am getting up material for the fall prospectus. I am standing it splendidly; I rarely get tired.” Without Phillips to maintain daily operations, he could no longer escape responsibility and found himself “working harder” than ever before. In the office by 8 a.m., McClure remained at his desk long past midnight, sustaining himself on “three or four quarts of milk a day.” After midnight, he retired to an apartment on a floor above the magazine’s offices to read “masses of manuscripts,” including portions of an autobiography by Mark Twain which his syndicate had agreed to publish.

In a matter of weeks, McClure managed to assemble an almost completely new roster of talent. Of the original team, only the poetry editor Witter Bynner, the manuscript reader Viola Roseboro, and Albert Brady’s younger brothers—Curtis, Oscar, and Ed—remained. To replace Ida Tarbell, he relied upon Willa Cather, a little known fiction writer who would become a world-class novelist. He hired Will Irwin, a distinguished reporter from the New York Sun, as managing editor. Two first-rate investigative reporters, George Kibbe Turner and Burton Hendrick, joined the staff full time, along with Ellery Sedgwick, the future editor of the Atlantic Monthly. “The very name, McClure’s Magazine, had an irresistible attraction for any young man,” Sedgwick explained. Much as Tarbell, Baker, and Steffens had described their Chief in happier years, Sedgwick was mesmerized by McClure’s “burning force,” explaining how “everyone about him caught fire and he would inflame the intelligence of his staff into molten excitement.”

Though his eager new writers lacked the renown of the original team, McClure reasoned that before long he would “be able to repeat the process” that had made Tarbell, Steffens, and Baker household names. The newly constituted group did indeed produce a number of significant investigations in the months that followed; but the tenor of the magazine, reflecting the temper of the nation, had changed. Even before Roosevelt delivered his “Muckrake Man” speech, McClure had sensed that public interest in the parade of public and private misbehavior was waning. “To go on now with the heavy exposure articles,” he told his stockholders, “would not convert those who disagree with us, and those who agree with us don’t need conversion.”

Furthermore, the new staff members brought differing sensibilities and strategies to McClure’s. Although Ellery Sedgwick had applauded the early efforts of the crusading journalists, he believed the time had come “to halt and to think soberly.” Too many editors, he charged, had lost “all sense of responsibility” in the race for circulation. Ida Tarbell’s replacement, Willa Cather, also had a profound influence on the magazine’s direction. She edited a superb series on the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy; but Cather’s real genius lay in literature, in historical narratives rather than accounts of present-day political struggles and economic analyses. Consequently, while the quality of fiction and poetry in McClure’s remained high, the impact of the investigative pieces diminished. McClure’s was not alone; a similar shift took place in popular publications across the country, a literature “of distraction” gradually replacing the literature of “inquiry.”

If “an exhilarating sense of excitement and adventure” permeated the revivified magazine in the early months, it was not long before McClure’s mercurial temperament produced unbearable tensions within the newly organized staff. As managing editor, Will Irwin found it impossible to deal with the endless intrigues McClure manufactured. “As a curb on genius,” he acknowledged, “I was not a success.” Sedgwick reported that “the staff worked under some natural law of desperation. The chief was forever interrupting, cutting every sequence into a dozen parts.” The dynamic had become frustrating: “A week in the McClure office was the precise reversal of the six busy days described in the first chapter of Genesis. It seemed to end in a world without form and void. From Order came forth Chaos.” In fifteen months, both Sedgwick and Irwin were fired.

McClure soldiered on. For years, the fiction and poetry that he scouted and commissioned would continue to set the literary standard for American magazines. He published early stories by Damon Runyan and Joseph Conrad, introduced A. E. Housman’s Shropshire Lad to the American public, and provided a forum for the new work of William Butler Yeats and Moira O’Neill. The company eventually foundered, hampered by the costs of buying out the departing writers and constructing a new printing plant on Long Island. Forced to economize, McClure could no longer continue his penchant for liberal spending to attract the most gifted writers. Nor could he afford to keep his book publishing arm, which he sold to Doubleday, Page & Company. The magazine never recovered the strength or influence it had exerted during its heyday.

Public disenchantment with sensationalist journalism and Theodore Roosevelt’s dramatic caricature of the muckrakers may have conspired to diminish the stature and power of McClure’s. The real corrosion of the magazine’s intensive energy happened from within, however, precipitated by the same force that had made the enterprise great: the outsized personality and manic power of S. S. McClure himself.

THE SHIFTING PUBLIC MOOD ALSO presented difficulties for Phillips and the rest of the departing team. They had initially planned to launch their own venture, but when The American Magazine, a monthly “of good reputation,” was offered for sale, they pooled their resources to meet the $400,000 price tag. At the time, The American was “just about holding its own, financially.” By re-creating the publication as a writer’s magazine, built upon their own good names, they hoped to raise the circulation and “make it profitable within a comparatively short time.”

“All of us had plunged into the enterprise with astonishingly little regard for the future,” Baker recalled. “No one of us had much money: we put into the common fund all we had and more.” In addition, the friends decided to heavily cut their own paychecks until they turned a profit. If the magazine failed, Baker acknowledged, he stood “to lose everything.” Still, he told his father, there was nothing “so dizzily stimulating” as building a new enterprise, “resting in complete confidence upon one’s friends, devoted to what one considers high purposes, each sacrificing to the limit for the common cause.”

For Steffens, too, trepidation mingled with excitement. “I feel as if I were at the crisis of my life,” he wrote. “We are buying an old magazine which we propose to make the greatest thing of the kind that was ever made in this world—sincere, but good-natured; honest, but humorous; aggressive, but not unkind; a straight, hard fighter, but cheerful.” Though Ida Tarbell seemed to Baker “the most dauntless of the adventurers,” she fully recognized what was at stake. Each of them had “seen something in which they deeply believed go to pieces,” she recalled. All of them “had been too cruelly bruised to take anything lightly.”

William Allen White followed his friends to The American Magazine. Though not party to the bitter final months in the McClure’s office, White had nevertheless determined long before that despite Sam McClure’s “spark of genius,” the magazine’s stability and success had always relied upon the ballast of John Phillips. White chose to help finance the The American but maintained that he bore absolutely no ill will toward McClure or his magazine, where he had received “nothing but the kindest treatment.” Indeed, even as he cast his lot with the new venture, he reached out to McClure. “You may draw on me whenever you will for whatever you will,” he assured the editor.

Everyone recognized that creating cohesion, building a trusting yet playful atmosphere, would foster the success of The American. When Phillips and Tarbell persuaded Finley Peter Dunne to join the group, Baker was thrilled: “Everything amused him! We were youthful and dead in earnest—and he was wise.” Dunne proved himself a great companion, who “loved so much to talk” that he could entertain his office mates for hours. “He had a wide knowledge of men and their ways,” Tarbell recalled. Whenever conflict arose within the team, “Mr. Dooley” could be relied upon to lighten the heavy mood. As managing editor, Albert Boyden “made it his business” to foster camaraderie among his writers and contributors at the new magazine. At his fourth-floor walk-up on Stuyvesant Square, he hosted regular dinners for a revolving group of novelists, artists, politicians, and scientists. “What talk went on in that high-up living room!” Tarbell recalled. “What wonderful tales we heard!”

The press assumed that with “all the muckrakers muckraking under one tent,” The American Magazine would provide “a helpful experiment” to determine whether the public appetite for exposure journalism had truly atrophied. “Their muck-raking has been of the convincing rather than the frenzied variety and they have reputations for literary honesty to be maintained,” the Omaha Evening World-Herald observed. “This is undoubtedly the most notable combination that has ever launched any publication.” The Boston Journal of Education expressed certitude that the pioneers of authentic investigative journalism would produce an outstanding magazine.

Although the new publishing team proudly proclaimed that they would “not be deterred by adjectives or phrases,” their first public announcement nevertheless reflected anxiety about the shift in popular sentiment: “We shall not only make this new American Magazine interesting and important in a public way, but we shall make it the most stirring and delightful monthly book of fiction, humor, sentiment and joyous reading that is anywhere published. It will reflect a happy, struggling, fighting world, in which, as we believe, good people are coming out on top. There is no field of human activity in which we are not interested. Our magazine will be wholesome, hopeful, stimulating, uplifting, and above all, it will have a human interest on every page.”

The statement provoked a wave of positive commentary in the press, accompanied by pointed advice. “Reformers need relaxation,” The Outlook observed, “and it has sometimes seemed of late as if, in his endeavor to secure greatly needed righteousness, the ardent and patriotic American might lose his ability to be at ease in a world in which there are so many sources of pleasure as well as of pain.” William Allen White, whose cheerful temperament had never really suited him for muckraking, offered similar counsel. “It seems to me the great danger,” he told Phillips, “is that of being too Purposeful. People will expect the pale drawn face; the set lips and a general line of emotional insanity. You should fool ’em.”

In the end, the new enterprise suffered not from a surfeit of purpose but from a lack of direction. Pressure to fill pages in the early months led to a publication without the focused passion and clear vision of the old McClure’s. “We are editing in a very funny way,” Boyden acknowledged. “We rush in every good thing every month and trust to the Lord to send more.” Phillips implored each writer “to look into his literary cupboard” for half-finished work and send it pell-mell to New York. Consequently, those early issues comprised a miscellany: Tarbell submitted articles on Abraham Lincoln and John D. Rockefeller as she began a long series on the tariff; White contrasted Emporia and New York in one article, and the altruistic and egoistic spirit of man in another; Steffens profiled William Randolph Hearst and produced admiring portraits of several prominent progressives or “Upbuilders,” including the timber fraud prosecutor Francis Heney and the idealistic millionaire Rudolph Spreckels; and Baker, while investigating the problem of race in America, contributed a long series of articles on the pastoral joys to be found outside the nation’s growing cities.

The country life series proved a much-needed tonic for Ray Baker’s life and career. “Utterly beaten down with weariness” following the disintegration of McClure’s, he had returned to the “safe haven” of his country home in East Lansing, still a small village surrounded by farmhouses and “stretches of wilderness.” Just as the rugged Arizona landscape had once provided solace during an earlier period of depression, so Michigan’s “natural beauties” now absorbed his attention. For hours each day, he split cordwood, mulched fruit trees, and planted shrubs. Such “hard physical work” began to restore his body and mind.

When he received Phillips’s request to rummage his literary cupboard, Baker turned to the private journals he had been keeping for nearly a decade. In these pages, he had recorded not only his thoughts on politics and economics but daily observations of rural life. Reading over these entries, he conceived the idea of a fictional alter ego: an educated, successful man who had abandoned his frenetic city life for the rigors and simple pleasures of life on a farm. When Baker sat down to organize his thoughts, memories of his childhood in the frontier town of St. Croix and winters working as a schoolteacher in small Michigan farming communities mingled with his recent experiences in East Lansing. Writing “more easily” than ever before, Baker completed six potential installments for the magazine in three weeks. Anxious that the portrait of country life would confound readers accustomed to his hard-hitting investigative journalism, he chose to solicit an opinion of his new work using the pen name “David Grayson.” Swearing Phillips and the staff to secrecy, he mailed out the manuscript with a note: “Take care of my child.” Though he later acknowledged how “ridiculous” his request must have appeared, this more intimate mode of writing was “something utterly different” from his previous successful work. Finally, after restless days spent rambling through the countryside, the editorial judgment from Phillips arrived by telegraph: “Manuscript a delight. Bully boy. Send more chapters.”

The David Grayson stories instantly resonated with the reading public. Fan letters arrived by the thousands. “You have sublimated the real but commonplace experiences of life that we all enjoy,” one admirer wrote, “but never take the time or have the talent to write about.” David Grayson clubs sprang up in all sections of the country. Women dreamed of marrying a gentleman like David Grayson, a philosopher-farmer with a well-stocked library who had found happiness and peace in growing things, farm auctions, country fairs, schoolhouse meetings, and neighborly conversations. “David Grayson is a great man,” Lincoln Steffens told Baker. “I never had realized there was in you such a sense of beauty, so much fine, philosophic wisdom and, most wonderful of all—serenity.” Under such titles as Adventures in Contentment and Adventures in Friendship, the collected Grayson stories continued for decades, filling six books that sold over 2 million copies. Not until years later, when he discovered that imposters were presenting lectures and readings across the country under the name of David Grayson, did Baker finally claim Grayson’s work as his own.

While Phillips delighted in the acclaim given the Grayson stories, he had advised Baker even before the series began that “people will be expecting something from you over your own name—something that is timely and notable and distinguished.” The industrious Baker had no sooner completed his first Grayson installments than he embarked for San Francisco in early August 1906. There, he documented the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and fire of the previous spring before embarking on what critics considered his best magazine journalism, a “pioneer” study of “the Negro in American life.”

His interest had been awakened by two previous articles on lynching he had produced for McClure’s. Baker traveled extensively throughout the South and the North, talking with people, gathering statistics, reading local papers, and assembling data. Everywhere, he worked “to get at thefacts,” to create a dispassionate portrait of African-American life, of racial prejudice and Jim Crow, of southern moderates and northern philanthropists. Three decades later, in preparing An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal relied on Baker’s twelve-part series as “a major source.” Still, this new work could not match the concrete impact of his earlier series on labor and the railroads. “The Riddle of the Negro” provided only the nebulous hope that “a clear statement of the case” would nudge Americans toward substituting “understanding and sympathy for blind repulsion and hatred.” One Pennsylvania newspaper observed matter-of-factly that The American was “reporting the negro problem with no effort to solve it.” The issue of race in America, the Bedford Gazette agreed, was simply “too complex to solve.” In the first decade of the twentieth century, a fair-minded discussion of the racial problem represented a significant step forward. The issues containing Baker’s series sold throughout the country. “Your work has been a wonderful thing for us,” Tarbell assured Baker, “and I am proud of you.” Phillips appreciatively told Baker that people everywhere were talking about his articles on race, with the consensus that they were “the best things running now in any magazine.”

If Baker contributed disproportionately to the first issues of the new magazine, Lincoln Steffens seriously disappointed his colleagues. Initially inspired by the idea of a writer’s magazine, Steffens soon chafed at the “consensus editing,” allocation of space, demand for proof against libel, and hurried deadlines. “It does not matter,” Phillips told Steffens, “how hard you work and write, if we don’t get the material into the magazine when it needs it.” The new magazine simply did not have the working capital McClure’s had enjoyed to cover false starts or years of travel and research. Frayed by the production schedule, Boyden had little patience with Steffens’s constant complaints that his articles were given less space in The American than they had been granted in McClure’s. “You are crazy, Stef,” Boyden testily replied, enclosing a comparison to show the griping was unfounded. Meanwhile, Boyden reminded Steffens, he had failed to answer a request for pictures to accompany one of his articles. “We don’t need any sleeping partners in this concern,” Peter Dunne grumbled.

Steffens shot off a resentful letter to Phillips, enumerating his grievances. “It is very difficult for me to write calmly after receiving a letter such as yours,” Phillips responded. “It seems to me not only unsympathetic but unmanly. It repudiates all the terms of our association in its tone and its temper. It seems to me that you cannot stand on the threshold and speak spitefully through the door: that you should either come in or go out. . . . I could very easily by comparison show that you have had more out of this magazine than anybody else in proportion to what you have put in.” Indeed, he pointed out, the magazine was covering not only Steffens’s traveling expenses but those of his wife and her elderly mother. Most disappointing of all, Phillips rebuked his longtime friend and colleague, “you haven’t confidence in us, and that is everything!”

Steffens remained oblivious to the vexation of the other staff members. He had money, celebrity, lecture invitations, and a new seaside estate near Cos Cob, Connecticut. “My husband has become famous,” Josephine Steffens reflected sadly, “but at a high price.” Steffens had issued a sanctimonious ultimatum to his partners: “Either I am to write as I please without being edited; or I quit.” Six months later, he resigned from the magazine. At the time of his departure, Steffens argued that he must sell his stock in order to meet expenses while he sought a new position. His partners agreed to buy him out, further diminishing the working capital of the new enterprise.

Through all the hurly-burly at The American, Ida Tarbell remained the same stabilizing force she had always been at McClure’s. Only later did she acknowledge how disorienting the transition had been. “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,” she recalled. Although her New York apartment had served as her “writing headquarters” for years, Ida had yearned for a country home. During the turbulent spring of 1906, she finally purchased an old farmhouse situated on forty acres of land in Redding Ridge, Connecticut. Initially, she planned to use the abandoned property as a retreat, doing only the most necessary maintenance. But soon she was tempted to start “borrowing and mortgaging” to fix the roof and wallpaper the rooms, taking on extra freelance work to pay for furniture, rugs, and antiques. Before long, Tarbell turned her energies to the land: she pruned apple trees, planted crops, created a new orchard, and bought chickens, a cow, a pig, and two horses. Ever practical, she reallocated money set aside for an evening gown to purchase some much-needed fertilizer for the garden. Encouraged by the warmth and camaraderie of her rural neighbors, she learned what Baker had already discovered—that “the most genuine of human dramas” could be found in the trials and triumphs of the surrounding countryside.

“All this was good for me,” Ida reflected of her rural homemaking, “but while it was good for me it was not so good for my work on the magazine.” Preoccupied with the engaging task of furnishing her new home, she found her research on the tariff increasingly tedious. By pursuing the subject in her first big series for The American, she had hoped to expose the special interests that lay behind the complicated schedules for wool, iron ore, coal, sugar, or flax. She loathed protectionism and intended to “get into the fight” for revision. Nevertheless, after months in Washington studying every issue of the Congressional Record since the Civil War, Tarbell could not render the subject engaging or alive. Though she talked with senators and congressmen who had taken part in earlier tariff struggles, the debates that appeared “so important” to her were “a dead issue to them.”

Tarbell’s six-part series, “The Tariff in Our Times,” ran from December 1906 through June 1907, with three additional installments published two years later. Critics lauded the “comprehensive and careful accumulation of chronological information,” but most found the cumulative effect uninspiring. Tarbell dealt “exhaustively (and at times exhaustingly)” with events, one reviewer noted, yet the whole remained “invertebrate.” She was the first to admit that her early installments lacked “vitality” and that she relied too heavily on “secondhand” material. The series had no “cohesive force,” William Allen White told her candidly. “It is not written around the progressive narrative; it continues but doesn’t get anywhere, there is no beginning, climax and end.” It seemed to White that the project required exactly what McClure had prescribed as Tarbell researched the Standard Oil Company: “a central figure” that would “hold the reader.” While Tarbell’s series would eventually build momentum during the fiery debates over the Payne-Aldrich Tariff in 1909, her initial contribution did little to buoy the struggling fortunes of The American Magazine.

On July 1, 1907, Tarbell wrote a long letter to Bert Boyden offering her assessment of the magazine’s first year. Something was missing, she conceded, “a certain hustle, ingenuity—a generalizing effort such as we used to get out of S.S. It’s a talent—a genius, and we haven’t it in the staff.”

Uncannily, Ida Tarbell received a letter that same day from her old friend and former Chief. “I dreamed of you,” McClure told her. “I thought I was telling you how I found out that by speaking slowly & calmly and acting calmly I found I had much greater influence on people (I am actually doing this) & I thought that I was standing by your chair & you drew me down & kissed me to show your approval. When you disapproved of me it nearly broke my heart,” he confided, offering a final touching confession: “I never cease to love you as I have for many, many years. I wish you had not turned away.”