All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

These bookings covered the country from North to South and East to West, long and erratic journeys. Frequently I occupied two different beds a night, and now and then three. It was brutal, exhaustive business, but I learned to climb into an upper berth without a fuss, to sleep on a bench if there was no berth, to rejoice over a cup of hot coffee at an all-night workmen’s lunch counter, to warm my feet by walking a platform while waiting for a train. By the end of the first season I had developed a stoical acceptance of whatever came. This, I argued, saved nervous wear and tear. I think now a certain amount of indignant protest, useless as it would have been, might have put more zest into my travel, as well as my talking.

It was not only hard but lonesome business. From the day I started out I felt myself a detached wanderer, one who had laid aside personality and become a cog in the mechanism called a lecture bureau. My one ambition was to fill the specifications of the schedule and have it over with. It was not until I said good-bye to the last committee and was headed home that I felt the joyful rush of reviving personality.

This is putting an unfair face on my experiences. These long railroad journeys, these nights waiting in dreary stations were not without their rewards. I carry no more beautiful pictures in my mind than those flashed on me riding across this country: glittering snow mountains with stars hanging over them as big as a moon; miles of blossoming redbuds rising from the mist along an Oklahoma stream; the lovely rounded forms of the Ozark Mountains stretched as in sleep across Missouri; amethyst deserts; endless rolling prairies yellow with wheat or white with snow. These journeys took me at one time or another into every state in the Union, and there is no one of them in which some bit of remembered beauty does not take the curse off the almost universal disorder, even squalor of their towns and cities as I saw them going in and out by rail.

These long rides, these night waits, brought unforgettable looks into human lives. Strange how travelers will confide their ambitions, unload their secrets, show their scars to strangers. Never have I been more convinced of the supreme wisdom of the confessional of the Catholic Church than by the confidences poured into my ears in these brief and accidental meetings. Memorable and poignant though these experiences are of the country’s beauty as well as of its human tragedy and comedy, they are little more than a blur. The rapid and crowded succession of events left no time to follow up, digest, get at the meaning, the solution. This was particularly tantalizing when it came to the actual filling of the engagement, for here you were for a time in close contact with a few people, your committee, and you had an hour or more facing an audience representative of a community.

The committee represented authority. It was my business to follow its instructions, please it if I could. Its chairman was the first person I sought on arrival—that is, the first after checking up on how and when I was to get away from the place at which I had just arrived.

To be sure, I had careful routing, but was the train by which I was ordered to leave still running? Had there been a flood or blizzard or accident to make a detour necessary? Sometimes it was an exciting detour. More than once I had to go fifty or a hundred miles by car over flooded or snowbound roads which the pessimistic declared impassable, and which only an adventurous youth for a good round sum would undertake to negotiate. In one of these hold-ups I traveled two hundred miles in a freight car behind an engine, the first to go over the snowbound road in a week. More than once on these exciting detours I felt that probably I should not come out alive; but I always did and always found, however late my arrival, my audience was waiting me. As a matter of fact those little adventures were highly stimulating after hours and hours of the benumbing comfort of trains.

When I knew how I was to get away, I looked up the committee. So far as I was concerned, the point at which I most frequently found a serious conflict in a committee was the subject on which I was to talk. That was supposed to have been settled—I had their letter for it. But not everybody wanted me to talk on so-and-so. Usually I found it was because somebody feared I might be too radical. They didn’t want anything said on their platform which would antagonize the well-to-do conservative sponsors of the course or encourage the town’s social and economic rebels.

I remember times when, after an exciting discussion behind the scenes, I stood in the wings waiting for the signal to come onto the platform while behind me the discussion went on. Only at the last moment did the chairman say begrudgingly, “Well, talk on so-and-so.” But the chief objector meeting me after the lecture said, “I would so much have preferred to have heard you on so-and-so.”

But the indecision of the committee was not the only trying experience before I was actually on my feet and at my job. There was the introduction. You never knew exactly what was to happen. As a matter of fact the introduction should and frequently does give opportunity for repartee, for anecdote—an easy way for putting yourself at once on terms of friendliness with your audience. But I was never happy at that kind of thing. On the Chautauqua circuit the fashion has been for the speaker to go out as soon as the music was over, take his stand and begin. Nobody said, “This is So-and-So who will speak on so-and-so.” Nobody told them anything about you—you stood up and said your piece.

The ritual on the lyceum platform was different. There they made the most of me, as a rule. It sometimes seemed to me that each successive committee had a different way of presenting me. Sometimes I marched out with the master of ceremonies, a man or woman, and was placed in an armchair while the chairman made remarks about me which were often bewildering. I have been introduced as the author of George Kennan’s Siberian books and of Edna Ferber’s Emma McChesney stories. I have heard a long explanation of why I had never married. Once I was called a notorious woman by the speaker, he evidently thinking that the word was flattering. Often I had a bodyguard made up of important women of the community—a tribute to my sex.