Books: Journalist

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ALL IN THE DAY'S WORK—Ida M. Tarbell—Macmillan ($3.50).

Few contemporary periodicals have had such an exciting career as McClure's Magazine. It launched the muckraking movement, first printed O. Henry and Willa Gather, popularized Stevenson, Kipling, Conan Doyle in the U. S., published the first magazine articles on the Xray, radium, Marconi's wireless, the Wrights' flying machine, paved the way for modern, big-circulation magazines.

McClure's greatest sensation was Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company. This week Miss Tarbell, now 81, tells the story in a benign, careful, unsensational autobiography which contains the best account to date of McClure's great days. She was freelancing in Paris in 1892, when a slight, restless, sandy-haired young man bounded up the 80 steps to her apartment, announced that he was Samuel Sidney McClure, said he could stay only ten minutes, talked over plans for articles for hours, rushed off to Switzerland after borrowing $40 from his future star contributor.

As an editor, McClure was a trial, but a stimulating one. A meteoric traveler, he returned to the office with despairing laments that the magazine was dying (its circulation climbed from 8,000 to 750,000 in twelve years), that the staff could not understand him. Reading the files of a rival publication, he exclaimed, "Not a Lincoln article! It is not a great magazine!" Thereupon he set Ida Tarbell to writing her enormously successful Life of Lincoln. Editor Lincoln Steffens was bewildered by the passion with which McClure ran staff meetings, spouted good and bad ideas—one of them, that Steffens could not edit a magazine in an office. To get away, Steffens traveled through the Middle West, wrote his sensational The Shame of the Cities.

Ida Tarbell planned three articles on the Standard Oil Company, wrote 19, worked five years on them. Standard Oil officials sometimes secretly aided her, radical associates whispered that she was "going over to the Standard." Henry Flagler, Standard official, complained of John D. Rockefeller: "He would do me out of a dollar today," then caught himself and added hastily, "that is, if he could do it honestly." McClure's flourished as the articles appeared, went on growing until McClure announced his biggest idea: a chain of commercial companies, a model community. Steffens, Tarbell, a McClure partner, several staff members, resigned in a body. McClure's never recovered. But Ida Tarbell implies that the staff members never functioned quite so well working for themselves or for less trying editors.