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, the Wheelman, 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 launch McClure’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 up McClure’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.”