All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

Enamored as I was of the city, no work could have been more satisfying than that I had laid out for myself. My little self-directed syndicate concerned itself with the practical everyday life of the city. One is always keen to know all the common things about the thing or person one loves. How did Paris keep herself so clean? What did she eat and drink, and where did she get it? How much did it cost her? Where did she go for fun? How did she manage it that even her very poor seemed to know how to amuse themselves, that her beggars were a recognized institution? There were a multitude of things I thirsted to know about her. And if I could get my bread and butter in finding out, what luck! What luck!

At once I became an omnivorous reader of the newspapers, and I found to my joy that many of them felt as I did about the Parisian scene. They carried paragraphs as captivating as those that our New Yorker unearths for its fascinating editorial department on the city to which it belongs. Another discovery which surprised me was that my best source for illustration was the illustrated catalogues of the French Salons of recent years. I wanted pictures of markets, of rivers, of beggars, of marriages, of all the things that people were doing as they went about their business. And what rejoiced me was that many French artists seemed to love the streets and what went on there in much the same way that I did. They loved to see Paris at her daily toil, meeting her daily problems, and every year they turned out pictures showing her at it.

Later I was to discover that this daily life of the Parisians of different classes has always been material for able artists. The best illustrations I found for my Madame Roland in her youth were those of Chardin in the Louvre.

My manner of living, the contacts and circumstances attending the gathering of my material for my newspaper articles brought me for the first time in my life into daily relations with that greatest segment of every country’s population—those whom we call the poor, and of whom if we are well-to-do or if we are rich we are so curiously unconscious. I had belonged all my conscious life to the well-to-do, those who spent a dollar without seriously weighing it. Society had seemed to me to be chiefly made up of such people. Of course there were the rich, but they were so few in number as to be negligible—at least they had never counted in my life; nor had the poor counted as a permanent class. I had the American notion that the chief economic duty of the poor was to become well-to-do. The laborer, the clerk, the man who worked for others should save his money, put it into the business, or start out for himself, no matter how hard, how meager the return. Dignity and success lay in being your own master, owning your own home—I am sure my father would rather have grubbed corn meal and bacon from a piece of stony land which was his own than have had all the luxuries on a salary. One of his complaints against the great oil trust was that it was turning the men of the Oil Region into hired men—mighty prosperous hired men, some of them, but nevertheless taking orders, even orders as to what to say, for whom to vote.

To his way of thinking this was failure for an American. I suspect his philosophy working in me was at least partially responsible for my revolt against the kind of security I had achieved on The Chautauquan. I was a hired girl.

But in the society where I found myself in Paris there was no such contempt for the fixed job. On the contrary, it was something for which you were responsible, to which you owed an obligation. Serious workers in Paris seemed to me to give to the job the same kind of loyalty that serious men and women in America gave to the businesses they owned. You respected yourself and were respected in proportion to your fidelity to it. You might be advanced, but more probably not. Opportunity did not grow on every bush as at home, and if it came a Frenchman’s way he weighed it—at home you seized it, trusting to luck. Here luck seemed to me to have little or no standing in a business enterprise, big as it counted in the lotteries in which everybody took part. To my surprise I found these people, working so busily and constantly, were not restless like the Americans; nor were they generally envious. I had a feeling that my concierge, who never had been across the Seine to the Right Bank, who lived in a room almost filled by her huge bed and its great feather puffs, who must have looked long at a sou before she spent it, would not have changed places with anybody in Paris. Were not the lodgers on whom she kept so strict a watch kind, generous, and regular with fees? Had she not friends in the street? Might she not win a slice of a fortune one day from the fraction of a lottery ticket which she annually found a way to buy? And who had so magnificent a cat? The pride of the House. What more could she ask?

Certainly there was more interest in the tasks, less restlessness, less envy, than in the same class in America. Was it my father’s philosophy which made the difference? Was it your duty if you were poor to struggle to be well-to-do, and if well-to-do struggle to be rich? It meant you were always trying to be somebody else. If it was your duty to be discontented, could you escape envy? Was it not necessary, if you were to keep yourself up to the effort, to feed yourself on envy as in war men must be fed on hate if they are to kill with vigor and gusto?

It was too much to believe that the content, the fidelity to the job were universal. Nevertheless, it was sufficient to cement the laborious poor into a powerful and recognized class, a class with traditions, customs, recognized relations to other classes, having its own manner of homes, amusements, worship; a class self-respecting, jealous of its prerogatives, and able in need to protect itself.

But the multitude of hard-working and fairly satisfied men and women were not all the poor with whom I came close. There were those who could find no work; there were many of them, for the long world depression of the nineties was on its way. The winter of ’91 and ’92 was a cruel one, and the museums, libraries, lecture rooms, churches where I went about my daily duties were swarmed with poor souls trying to deceive the guardians into thinking that they had come to study pictures, read books, listen to lectures, to confess their sins or listen to mass. The guardians only saw them when they became a crowd or attempted to camp for the day. Most pathetic to me were their efforts to make furtive toilets, taking a comb from a pocket to smooth tangled hair, scissors to cut the fringe from a frayed cuff.

There were soup kitchens to keep them from starving, though many a one starved or froze or ended his misery in the Seine that winter. At one of these kitchens I officiated for a brief time. It was run by the McAll Mission in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. I was not there as a Samaritan but as a reporter looking for copy. What could I do for them but tell Americans what a few Americans were doing in Paris to ease the vast misery? It might bring a few sous for soup. I believe it did.