To put John Siddall in context, I’ve had to learn a lot about the muckraking movement, and the founder of the magazine that began it, S.S. McClure.
On December 31st, 1902, there was no muckracking movement. A month later, there was, though the epithet itself did not exist until Teddy Roosevelt began using it 4 years later. The January 1903* issue of McClure’s contained the third installment of Ida Tarbell’s Standard Oil expose, Lincoln Steffan’s The Shame of Minneapolis, and Ray Stannard Baker’s story on the United Mine Workers. It was, and is still, considered one of the most important issues of a magazine ever published in the U.S.
And McClure knew it.
How many of those who have read through this number of the magazine noticed that it contains three articles on one subject? We did not plan it so; it is a coincidence that the January McClure’s is such an arraignment of American character as should make every one of us stop and think. How many noticed that?
The leading article, “The Shame of Minneapolis,” might have been called “The American Contempt of Law.” That title could well have served for the current chapter of Miss Tarbell’s History of Standard Oil. And it would have fitted perfectly Mr. Baker’s “The Right to Work.” All together, these articles come pretty near showing how universal is this dangerous trait of ours.
Miss Tarbell has our capitalists conspiring among themselves, deliberately, shrewdly, upon legal advice, to break the law so far as it restrained them, and to misuse it to restrain others who were in their way. Mr. Baker shows labor, the ancient enemy of capital, and the chief complainant of the trusts’ unlawful acts, itself committing and excusing crimes. And in “The Shame of Minneapolis” we see the administration o? a city employing criminals to commit crimes for the profit of the elected officials, while the citizens - Americans of good stock and more than average culture, and honest, healthy Scandinavians - stood by complacent and not alarmed.
Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens - all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it? The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in this country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some “error” or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand.
There is no one left; none but all of us. Capital is learning (with indignation at labor’s unlawful acts) that its rival’s contempt of law is a menace to property. Labor has shrieked the belief that the illegal power of capital is a menace to the worker. These two are drawing together. Last November when a strike was threatened by the yard-men on all the railroads centering in Chicago, the men got together and settled by raising wages, and raising freight rates too. They made the public pay. We all are doing our worst and making the public pay. The public is the people. We forget that we all are the people; that while each of us in his group can shove off on the rest the bill of today, the debt is only postponed; the rest are passing it on back to us. We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end the sum total of the debt will be our liberty.
John Siddall played a important part in the birth of the muckraking movement, though admittedly it is an easily overlooked one. In battle, Generals aren’t much good without a staff to organize things, though the staff gets precious little recognition at the end of the campaign. Staffers are integral, but overlooked.
So it was with Siddall, as this longish passage from the McClure biography, Success Story, illustrates;
The best-grounded, most careful, most substantial, and most devastating contribution made by the muckrakers to the general enlightenment was by Miss Tarbell. Her History of the Standard Oil Company, at first planned as a series of three articles and extended to six on the basis of her preliminary research, reached a total of nineteen before she was done. Few if any serials in American magazine history have had so great an impact on their period.
At the time she was writing, Standard Oil enjoyed almost a complete monopoly. The company refined nearly eighty-five per cent of the country’s crude oil, most of which was still produced in the Oil Regions of Pennsylvania; it owned nearly all the forty thousand miles of pipe lines and carried through them virtually all the crude oil produced; it manufactured more than eighty-six per cent of the country’s illuminating oil; its control over the price of all types of oil was absolute. This monopoly, so cordially detested at the time, so respectfully admired in retrospect, was the more remarkable because the wells it owned produced less than two per cent of the total. Standard Oil’s strangle hold had been applied at the expense of the producers; it was maintained at the expense of the consumers. Most remarkable of all, John D. Rockefeller and his associates had constructed their monopoly in less than twenty years. It was the story of this commercial exploit that Miss Tarbell had undertaken to tell.
She set out to write a balanced study, to be neither apologist nor critic but only dispassionate historian. She conscientiously sought out those Standard Oil officials who would talk to her?notably Henry Rogers, the suave and courtly chairman of the company’s manufacturing committee, and Henry Flagler, who had been one of Rockefeller’s earliest partners?to check the accuracy of her material and to solicit the company’s point of view. She used terms of the highest praise for the company’s “perfection of organization” and for the “ability and daring,” the “extraordinary intelligence and lucidity,” and the “indefatigable energy” of its officers. It was, she wrote, “the most perfect business machine ever devised.”
But in the course of her thorough, painstaking inquiry, Miss Tarbell was bound to form a bias. It was inescapable. Each fact she found?each affidavit, each of the many legislative investigations into the burgeoning monopoly, each of the many judicial proceedings mounted against it?served to deepen her cold contempt for the Standard’s “illegal and iniquitous” policies, for its “huge bulk, blackened by commercial sin,” for its “contemptuous indifference to fair play,” for the “greed [and] unscrupulousness” of its officers. It was the logic of those facts that set her against the Standard and ranged her on the side of the independent producers.
To dig up the facts was not easy, for Rockefeller and his associates had been at pains to conceal their methods. Secrecy was second nature to the officials of Standard Oil. But Miss Tarbell found a valuable research assistant, John Siddall, a short, plump, excitable youngster who was anti-Standard by background, by temperament, and by conviction. Siddall had been born and raised in the bitterly anti-Standard Oil Regions, and when Miss Tarbell hired him he already had the crusader’s zeal, for he had served as secretary of the Board of Education in Mayor Tom Johnson’s reform administration of Cleveland. At Miss Tarbell’s request, Siddall went on the payroll of McClure’s and was later put to work as a desk editor in New York.
McClure was by all accounts a genius, and generous to boot. He was also notoriously… not unstable, exactly, but prone to alternating fits of optimism and despair. We’d be quick to label him a manic-depressive today, I suspect.
But he helped launch or popularize the the careers of hundreds of people–among them Arthur Conan Doyle, Willa Cather, Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Dreiser and Jack London. The list could easily go on. Though the editorial below is ostensibly about Charles Schwab, one can easily picture Siddall reflecting back on his years at McClure’s when he wrote it.
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