Siddall descendant Hampton Wilmot, who obligingly sent me the picture above, notes that it was likely taken on a Sunday, as James F. Siddall, the family patriarch and devout Quaker, refused to be photographed on that day.

He also wouldn’t read the Sunday paper; his sons chided him that he had it mixed up, he shouldn’t read the Monday paper which carried the Sunday news.

I’ve now put more of the Siddall genealogy online than I have of my own. It will likely stay that way, as what my mother has discovered about the family tree now fills several large notebooks, and is thus too big of a project to contemplate. Interestingly, we’ve managed the neat trick of being descended both from one of Jefferson Davis’s cabinet makers as well as the head of his Masonic Lodge. Who says the upper and lower classes don’t mix?

Today’s Siddall essay was one of his more popular; Don’t Get Anxious About New York: Let New York Get Anxious About You. Kind of has an eerie “advice to the Red-State voter” ring to it, doesn’t it?

However, it’s exactly the opposite, as Siddall advises all those out in the sticks to stay there if they’ve any reason to fear failure.

Note: For those of you who have managed to get this far, yet happen to be unfamiliar with this series of posts; John Siddall was a minor figure in the muckraking movement of early 20th century journalism–though he managed in one way or another to brush up against most of the major figures in journalism, politics and business of that era. Were a novelist to construct a historical fiction of that time, the central character would almost have to resemble Siddall in some form or another. Through sheer happenstance, I’ve ended up as his biographer. The first post in this (very occasional) series may be found here.

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Don’t Get Anxious About New York: Let New York Get Anxious About You

An old friend called to ask my advice the other day. He came to New York from a little Indiana town. He has a wife and four children?and a poor job. As I talked with him I kept picturing him where he belongs?back in the old home town. If he had stayed there he might have worked into a $1,000 or $1,200 job, which would have been sufficient to satisfy all his needs and most of his wants. He could have had a garden, a yard, a savings bank account and a membership in the local lodge. Evenings he could have sat on his porch and held converse with his neighbors. On the Fourth of July he could have been “some punkins” at the neighborhood picnic. He might have become a village councilman; and when the fall campaign arrived, he could have been on the committee to welcome the congressman when that great personage came to town in search of votes. In other words, he might have had a real place in the community.

Now what does he get in exchange for the $1,000 or $1,200 that he earns in New York? Well, I suppose he gets a measly little flat with dark bedrooms, a fine assortment of cheap lunches, two chances daily to hang by his eyelids in the subway, a great fund of loneliness and a woe-begone feeling of uselessness.

That is the trouble with these whaling big cities like New York and Chicago. They are all right for men of known ability?men of force and ambition who have learned how to direct their talents. But they are hard on untried men?men who have not yet found themselves. This is not said for the purpose of scaring venturesome and unattached young fellows of ability who want to try their muscles on the big town. There is no danger of scaring them. They cannot be scared. The morning trains are bringing them in by the hundreds? this very day?and all the printing presses in the world could not drive them back. But it is said for the purpose of causing every small-town man, with responsibilities, to consider carefully before coming whether he has a definite aim in coming, and whether he has faith and conviction that he really has something to give to the big town.

Don’t come just for the ride. Don’t come except from positive choice. Don’t come just because others are coming. The best rule of all is this?if you have no definite, compelling reason within yourself to come, don’t come until you are invited. Do your job well at home. If the big town wants you she will call for you. A hundred telegrams went out from New York today to various and remote parts of the United States carrying offers of good jobs to smart chaps who have done so well that New York has heard of them. Only last week I met a young man from Massachusetts who had just been offered an $8,000-a-year place in New York. He said he hadn’t the least idea how the thing started?except that he had done work that had been brought to the attention of several New York bankers, one of whom had looked him up and then flashed him the offer of a job.

So leave your name and address with the local operator and go back to your knitting. New York is not tongue-tied. If she needs you she’ll wire. Of course, if you think you are a record-breaking genius you will probably take the first train for Broadway?and maybe it will be just as well for you to do so. A genius is just as unhappy one place as another. But, genius or no genius, there won’t be any brass band to meet you when you arrive at the Grand Central Station.

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Next: It Is Sometimes Better To Remain A Bore Than To Make Yourself Too Interesting

At this time, Miss Tarbell was running the editorial desk.

Steffens accepted the offer but insisted on first taking a long vacation. It was then May: he would come to work in October. So Ray Baker obligingly came east to manage the editorial desk until Steffens should be ready to take over.

Of the three muckrakers above, Steffans was the only one who had a less than positive view of Siddall, perhaps because Siddall filled the position soon after Steffens left it. It’s only human nature to view those that follow after on with a jaundiced eye. I’m saving his opinion for a future Siddall post, however. As thin on the ground as the Siddall pickings are, I wouldn’t make sense to cram them all into one post.

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Consider Your Ears–They Are Not Purely Decorative

Have you ever had a good dinner for nothing? I had one the other night. It was absolutely free. I don’t refer to the cost of the meal. I refer to the cost of the conversation.

From start to finish I gave nothing and received everything. The man with whom I dined started in with his business and his ideas and his s prejudices, and they were the only topics up for discussion throughout the entire evening. When he lagged in his monologue all I had to do was to prompt him with a question, and he was off again.

It was the easiest work I ever did. I got the most with the least effort. I say I got the most?and I did. For he is a wonderfully clever man. If I should name him, most of you would recognize him.

But in spite of all the interesting things he said, I must admit that I don’t regard him as really able?at least, I don’t think he is as able as he might be if he showed more curiosity about the facts and ideas that are in the possession of others. Putting it differently, I think he is a bad trader. He gives too much and receives too little in return. During this dinner I honestly think I got the best of him?simply because I gained a lot of useful information while he was getting nothing except vocal exercise and the satisfaction that comes from having an attentive listener. Perhaps, indeed, there was nothing of value to him in my point of view. But how did he know? He did not even try to find out.

The fact has frequently been impressed upon me that nearly all really able men are eager devourers of other people’s information and ideas. They are too good traders to be always giving and never receiving. They know better than to tap continually their reservoir of wisdom without setting a catch-basin for a new supply. Not long ago a journalist of my acquaintance went out to Chicago and had several extended talks with J. Ogden Armour in preparation for some articles. When he returned to New York one of the first things he had to say was that Armour had asked him more questions than he was possibly able to ask Armour. Theodore Roosevelt is a human question mark. Peter Dunne (creator of “Mr. Dooley,” and one of the wisest men on this planet) never lets any grass grow under his feet if he suspects that you have a new fact or a fresh point of view concealed on your person.

Ordinarily, the man who ceases to ask questions has ceased to learn. And when a man ceases to learn he grows complacent. Smugness sets in and he begins to deteriorate. The lack of curiosity in a man is a sign of age. You can be sure that you are getting old if you have lost curiosity. But old age?intellectually?comes on very early with some people, and with others it never seems to come. Many old people have younger and more eager minds than their children.
In New York recently, Willie Collier put on a show that has one extraordinary line in it. It is a line that might suggest a good New Year’s resolution for many people. One of the characters says to another “Say, don’t you know that you were given one mouth and two ears for a purpose?”

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Next: Don’t Get Anxious About New York: Let New York Get Anxious About You.

When I bring up the fact that the blog has been around for over two years now, she accuses me of keeping it alive just to annoy her.

She’s probably more right than she knows.

So, anyway, the pace of the Siddall posts had slackened, though if anyone had asked I would have said it was due more to a lack of available material than dwindling enthusiasm. The only sources left for information on Siddall’s life are in collections of papers located in out-of-state libraries–all of which want me to pay for access. I don’t mind researching John M.–rather like it, in fact, but having to pay for the privilege slows down the process somewhat. It also cut into the sheer enjoyment of it all.

When I first started the series, I had nothing more than a vague feeling that the Siddall essays, and practically everything else over a certain age in my library, should be put on the web–not that they had any great value to me, but because I had the idea that they were bound to have value for someone, somewhere, at some point in time. To me it was a close equivalent to putting a message in a bottle and tossing it out to sea, not because I needed help, but because I wanted some stranger to have the thrill of finding it. Everyone wants to find a message in a bottle, don’t they?

Everyone wants to, but no one expects to. Yet every now and then someone does. The thrill of finding a message in a bottle must be great indeed, but I wonder…Is it really a bigger thrill than knowing that someone has found one of yours?

Thank you very much for your comments and information on John Siddall, my great-great uncle (my grandmother’s uncle, my great-grandfather’s brother). Thanks to you I ordered and now have the best two of the three “Sid Says;” both my 88-year-old mother and I am enjoying his essays. I had made copies from the old American Mag in library stacks of many for my uncle, also a journalist. But the book is priceless. I had not known about the John Reed reference. Thanks again. I must read the Ida Tarbell biographies..have searched some for references.

There are relatively few Siddall descendants, but we are very proud of his life and legacy. Thank you for keeping them alive.

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Good Brains Don’t All Travel The Same Way

In their mental operations I see about me all the time two groups of men?the mosquito fleet and the elephant brigade. The mosquito boys think quickly, and dart to conclusions like lightning. You will get an opinion out of them instantly that will be superior to any they will be able to produce after consideration. The elephant boys take more time. They move slowly. They like to think things over. Ask them for an opinion, and they will do better if they meditate. There is no special choice between these two groups. In each group there are quantities of men of great ability. I can at this moment think of two wonderful Presidents of the United States?one a mosquito and the other an elephant.

As between men and women, it can be said in general that women are of the mosquito type. They pride themselves on their instinct for quick judgment. Men call it intuition. The “bright” boy at school is usually of the mosquito type. His intellectual performances are rapid and showy. He may or may not go on and succeed?but if he does make good he won’t get any particular credit for it from his schoolmates, simply because they “always knew he was smart.” It takes a successful elephant to go back to his class reunion and stir up enthusiasm. Nobody expected much of him, and consequently everybody is prepared to applaud his achievements.

It is amusing to watch these two kinds of men meet. The mosquitoes bother the elephants, and the elephants bother the mosquitoes. In games, especially, the irritation between the two reaches its height. If it is cards, the mosquito, with his leaping mind, knows in a second what he wants to do, while the elephant has to wait for his inspiration. Some games are better adapted to one of these groups than to the other. Take chess, for example?an admirable game for the elephant type of mind. There is a game which two elephants can enjoy for a week at a stretch.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to think himself an elephant when he is a mosquito, or a mosquito when he is an elephant. Some of the most terrible misfits in the world are misplaced elephants and misplaced mosquitoes. For example, a mosquito and an elephant can go into law practice to-gether and supplement each other’s talents beautifully. But the elephant had better keep out of court, where nimbleness of mind is peculiarly required.

Another point is that the mosquitoes ought never to tease the elephants to try to take on mosquito-like speed. Neither should the elephants tease the mosquitoes to try to take on elephantine deliberation. It can’t be done. Let every man work according to his own instinct. The minute he begins to imper-sonate somebody else he loses himself, and his judgments and decisions are of less value.

As a final observation, it may be well to record the fact that both classes of men are entirely satisfied with their equipment. The mosquitoes think there is nothing so greatly to be desired as agility, and the elephants pride them-selves on their deliberation, which is, I suppose, as it should be?for without self-appreciation man would surely perish.

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I suspect that the presidents Sidall mentions are Theodore Roosevelt (mosquito)and Woodrow Wilson (elephant), but that’s only a hunch. Were I to break down bloggers into elephants and mosquitoes, I’d start with USS Clueless and This Blog Is Full Of Crap respectively–more because of their style than any actual knowledge of their mental processes. For myself, I would claim to be a mosquito masquerading as an elephant–something I have a strong suspicion John M. would entirely disapprove of.

Next: Consider Your Ears–They Are Not Purely Decorative

I was barely five pages in when the itch to start scanning whole pages, then posting them to the web awoke within me.

Fortunately, I’ll not have to risk the ire of the publisher by doing so. Mr Harris has done my work for me.

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?

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.

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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You Can Go Farther If You Take Others With You

It is easy to understand how a man might be three or four or even ten times as successful in business as the general average of men. But when a man is a hundred or a thousand times as successful as his fellows we look on with amazement, and, because we cannot comprehend it, we usually say that he is a howling genius, and let it go at that.

But calling a man a howling genius does not get us anywhere. It does not explain anything. It is an unsatisfactory definition, because it contains no hint or help. Nobody knows exactly what a genius is.

Now, I am no diagnostician of greatness. I am just as much puzzled as anybody when it comes to defining the qualities that make for superlative achievement. Take, for example, Charles M. Schwab, whose story captivates the imagination of most men. I cannot take Schwab apart and show you why, starting as a day laborer without influence or a dollar to his name, he has turned out to be what he is?a giant in the business world. But I know his story through and through, and as I have considered it this thought has come to me:

There are probably dozens of men in the steel business who know almost as much about that business as Schwab knows. But where other men concentrate on their own personal contribution to the perfection of some part of the business, perhaps some technical part, Schwab takes an enormous interest in studying and developing men whose talents can be used in broadening and extending the business. You will find that note running all through his story?a curious watchfulness for the new man and almost childlike enthusiasm when he discovers him. Take his delight over Eugene Grace, for example. Grace was a switchman eight years ago, and now Schwab has made him president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation and his income is a million dollars a year. Schwab is so tickled over Grace that he can hardly hold himself in. He predicts that Grace will someday be the biggest industrial figure in America!

In otherwords, a man like Schwab, by finding and encouraging men, and by inspiring their loyalty, carries himself and all his associates on to a success which none of them could achieve alone. He establishes a long battle line of organization in which there are great numbers of men intelligently used and genuinely appreciated by a commander who realizes that his own success is manifolded by the work of his associates.

In business it is not the individual producer who gets the biggest or the surest rewards: it is the organization builder. And any man, no matter how small his business, ought to recognize that fact. Unless an employer is interested in finding, training, holding and dividing with good men, the business he is engaged in can never grow. It will remain the work of one man; and the work of one man is bound to be limited in size and profits.

You may think that you are in the shoe business or the shirt business or the furniture business?but you are mistaken. After all is said and done, we are all in the same business?the man business?no matter what we make or sell. Some of the “big fellows” see that point more clearly than the rest of us do–and multiply their power and profits accordingly.

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Next: Good Brains Don’t All Travel The Same Way

*The January 1903 issure of McClure’s exists in many places, the UNC Libraries among them. It does not, however, appear to be online in any fashion. Once I’ve finished with Siddall it might be something to consider publishing to the Net. However, to do the magazine justice would require posting large image files of each page rather than just the text–expensive in storage and bandwith terms.

So this time, instead of bothering her, I’ll enlighten the Internet with my recycled words of wisdom.

From Peter Lyon’s biography of S.S. McClure, Success Story, which I’m reading as part of my John Siddall research.

Indeed, any editor, to work at his best, must have much of the small boy alive in him, perpetually inquisitive, perpetually fresh-eyed, perpetually naive, perpetually finding all around him new and wonderful. It is a quality that can make a man a bore to his intellectual superiors, and it was bound to make McClure a puzzle or a figure of fun to many (but not all) of the writers with whom he dealt, since their eyes were fixed on different grails. But the best writers always recognize?as they did with McClure?the editor’s precious, if simple-minded, gift; they cherish and protect it even while they permit themselves, every now and again, a private, secret smile.

The point cannot be too much labored, for writers and literary folk generally are prone to confuse the editorial with the critical function. If an editor seem a cut below them in literary spit and polish, if he relish an E. P. Roe or a Gene Stratton-Porter (to confine the examples to those safely dead), then the literary folk grow amused and supercilious, and commence to question the editor’s judgment. They want the editor to be a critic; but if, overnight, he were to become one he should forthwith resign, for the two functions are (or should be) quite distinct. The good critic reads discriminatingly, the good editor catholically. The good critic is gourmet, the good editor gourmand. The one sips and considers and touches his lips with double damask, the other gulps and smacks his lips and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. The one is fastidious, the other voracious. And, most significant difference of all, the editor plunks down his money to back up his judgement, but thus far no critic has appeared who is prepared to do the same.

Fascinating stuff, ain’t it?

Some years ago I wrote a series of articles for the American Magazine and I had the opportunity of talking with John Siddall, who was then in charge of the Interesting People Department.

Shortly after that, Siddall was made editor. The magazine then had a small circulation. Siddall did just what he said he would do. The response? It was over-whelming. The circulation figures climbed up to two hundred thousand, three, four, half a million. Here was something the public wanted. Soon a million people a month were buying it, then a million and a half, finally two million. It did not stop there, but continued to grow for many years. Siddall appealed to the self-interests of his readers.

The Siddall articles went the way of the hard drive for a time. Of the three computers in the guest bedroom, only one is both compatible and fast enough to connect to the scanner. As much as I like John, I’m not going to key in his stuff by hand.

I didn’t discover much about him during the downtime, either. None of his putative relatives have written back, the U of Montana is taking forever to mail me his Tarbell letters, and there’s not much written about him to begin with.

So, a number of the future Siddall Posts will be in effect “nude,” without much in the way of comment or contextual amplification on my part.

Oddly enough, that’s probably how John M. would have preferred it. Certainly that’s how they originally appeared.

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Some Poetry Is Made To Be Heard–Not Heeded

AFTER a lively day at the office I wedged into the subway the other evening, opened up a New York evening paper, and found on the editorial page the following inspiring and cheerful line:

Ambition has but one reward for all?
A little power, a little transient fame,
A grave to rest in, and a fading name.

I began to wonder why I had gone downtown in the morning if this was all I was going to get out of it. Then I tried to imagine what good it would have done me to stay at home and sit in a rocking chair all day. If my wife went out and rought me my evening paper, wouldn’t I be just as unhappy when I came upon the poet’s words? If poets are going to “kid” me when I work and relatives when I loaf, what can I do? I can’t sit off at one side on a star and ruminate on these matters. I have to mix around on earth, where life is real and creditors are earnest. Where shall I go and how shall I manage? What do you recom-mend, Mr. Poet? I don’t enjoy being a poor miserable worm any more than you enjoy seeing me one.

As a matter of fact, the “little power” and the “transient fame” which the poet complains of are first-class things to strive for. They are the best rewards in the market. To refuse to struggle for them is cowardly and unsportsmanlike. The human being who won’t play and take his part in the game of life is the most useless of creatures. Here we are on this earth NOW?not 100,000 years ago or 100,000 years hence, but NOW. And here are others like us. Here is work to do and here are pleasures to enjoy. It is up to us to take hold and accept those forms of satisfaction which are available. Perhaps we shall all meet again in another existence where the rewards of ambition are better or, at least, different. If so, go after them when you get there, would be my advice.

The poet who got up this dose of philosophy probably has not the slight- est idea of swallowing it himself. He had a fine time writing the lines, and probably he hopes that they will live! No doubt if you stole his poem and tried to palm it off as your own he would chastise you. You would not find him ready to have his name fade yet. He would fight for his rights, and fight to keep his work from being annihilated? which is what we are put in the world for.

Don’t order your life on the plans and specifications laid down by a poet. Remember that what a poet writes must rhyme. Often a perfectly well-intentioned and optimistic poet wanders off into the gloom factory looking for odd sizes in metrical feet. A poet would rather scan well than be President.

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The above appears to be one of the most blog-like to my eye. John read something in the paper he didn’t care for, then went home and wrote about it.

Next: You Can Go Further If You Take Others With You

The Siddalls came often, for in the summer we kept their famous cat “Sammy Siddall.”

I wonder if there wasn’t a slight bit of jealousy there. John had basically been at Ida’s beck and call for almost two decades, and now was under the direction of another female. Not that Ida would admit anything of the sort. She vowed at 14 never to marry, and there is not the slightest hint of a romantic entanglement in her entire autobiography.

I’m also wondering how the Sammy the cat came to be famous. I suspect that the answer, if there is one, is found somewhere in the 8 years back issues of the American Magazine Siddall edited. Given the relative popularity of cat stories on the Internet, I suspect that there has been an audience for such for thousands of years. At some point we’ll realize all of Minoan A is about the cute things Patches did with the mouse today.

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Strive as We Will–Our Brows Slope Gently Downward

One of the most amusing facts of life is that “Bud” Fisher, maker of newspaper comics, should get for his work fully ten times as much per year as ex-President Eliot of Harvard ever got.

Bud” makes $150,000 a year, and, although Dr. Eliot never confided in us about personal matters, we can make a mighty good guess that he never saw more than $15,000 a year in his life.

Let’s be frank. Ex-President Eliot is a wonderfully smart man. We all respect him and feel that we are way below him. We know that he thinks deep thoughts and knows how to write them down. We realize that if it were possible to measure a man’s brains and ability by dollars he would start in at about $10,000 a week and get a raise before the end of the month. But Dr. Eliot doesn’t get the money. He can’t get the money. He can’t bring it into the box office.

Now the joke, if there is one, is not on Dr. Eliot: it is on us. You and I are the ones who decide how much Dr. Eliot shall have and how much “Bud” shall have. What is the explanation? The explanation is that we won’t pay anything like as much for the dignified impersonal expression of principles and wisdom as we will pay for wisdom served, as “Bud” serves it, with “pep” and personalities.

There is still another way to get at an understanding of “Bud.” Take the cartoonist of the old school, who caricatures public men and public events. Why does that kind of cartoonist have to be satisfied with less than “Bud’s” income? The answer runs about this way:

Human beings think first of themselves. They can’t help it. They are built that way. In this fact is found the reason why the modern newspaper comic strip is more popular than cartoons of public men or events. The newspaper comic, such as “Bud” and Goldberg draw, is about you and me. The old-fashioned cartoon is about somebody else?Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt, for example?and, while you and I regard Wilson and Roosevelt as interesting, we cannot honestly say that we are as much interested in them as we are in ourselves. The newspaper comic maker, either instinctively or by design, has discovered this truth. So, instead of giving us a picture of Wilson or Roosevelt, he gives us a picture of a comical happening right in our own home or our own office. There in the picture is you?and there am I?and over there is that bonehead we know, who acts just that way. We have seen him do that a thousand times! Oh, what an idiot he is!

And so, wedged into the New York subway, or on a Euclid Avenue car in Cleveland, we look first at these pictures and chuckle over them. After which, with diminished enthusiasm, we proceed to a solemn consideration of the news of the day and the editor’s discussion of liberalism in Russia.

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Next: Some Poetry Is Made To Be Heard–Not Heeded

The third young man came, short and plump, his eyes glowing with excitement. He sat on the edge of his chair. As I watched him I had a sudden feeling of alarm lest he should burst out of his clothes. I never had the same feeling about any other individual except Theodore Roosevelt. I once watched the first Roosevelt through a White House musicale when I felt his clothes might not contain him, he was so steamed up, so ready to go, attack anything, anywhere.

When Siddall once understood what I was up to he jumped at the chance?went to work with a will and stayed working with a will until the task was ended. He was a continuous joy as well as a support in my undertaking. Nothing better in the way of letter writing came to the McClure’s office. In time everybody was reading Siddall’s letters to me, whether it was a mere matter of statistics or a matter of the daily life in Cleveland of John D. Rockefeller, the head of the Standard Oil Company. If anything in or around Ohio interested the magazine the office immediately suggested, “Ask Sid.” And Sid always found the answer. Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips began to say, “We want Sid as soon as you are through with him.” Sid saw the opportunity, and as soon as I could spare him in Ohio he joined the McClure’s staff.

The above was taken from Ida’s autobiography, All In A Days Work, which now sits on my nightstand alongside three other Tarbell biographies. Almost all there is to know about John Siddall is inside them, other than a few letters at the University of Wyoming. From the description of them on the Net, they would appear to be part of the series that Ida mentions above, and thus at least as historically important as any of the other Gutenberg posts. The librarian at the U of W tells me they are on the way.

The muckraker movement was the scion of others, but John Siddall was one of the midwives that birthed it. He’s unknown to history, and to his present day relations, as far as I can tell, but the roots of modern journalism were shaped in part by his research on Standard Oil.

This Is A Want Ad For A World-Beater

I wonder when it is going to he easier for people to get through this world without being bored. The capacity of human beings to bore and be bored is enormous.

Think of all the school children who are being bored. There they are?millions of them?bottled up in schoolhouses patiently learning the art of trying to look interested in something that doesn’t interest them. When they get out of school they take up post-graduate work along the same line. They go into the law, when they have real love for the dairy business, and into music, when they are born hardware dealers. Schooled to believe that they ought to like this or that, they are ready to try what is “expected” of them?to adopt other people’s ideas of what would be a reputable and proper calling for “one of your position,” and so on through a lot of foolishness. Anyway, they get off on the wrong tack and stay there.

No wonder the world is filled with people who talk and talk about the good time coming when they can retire. To hear them complain about their work you might think they were in jail. They are.

Every employer is familiar with this great Army of Misfits. They are honest. They try. But they haven’t the joy of the game in their eyes. And to save your life you cannot tell how to release their powers and give them wing.

Apparently educational systems are the crudest of all human institutions. The necessary genius has not yet arrived?the man who can show us how to take a boy, start with his best inclinations, and work out his education, holding his interest, making him proud rather than ashamed of his enthusiasms, turning his enthusiasms to good account, yet cultivating discipline and self-control. A big job! No wonder the man needed is hard to find, and slow in boarding what Herbert Quick calls “this good ship, earth.” But he will arrive. There are rumblings.

In the meantime children are listening for the three-o’clock bell, and wondering whether the teacher’s cold may not keep her home tomorrow.

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But John would not have needed a suffragette relation to influence his take on the matter. He’d been affiliated with progressive causes for years.

John McAlpin Siddall was hired in 1903 by the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell as a researcher for her expose on Standard Oil. He was working in Cleveland as an associate editor of The Chataquan magazine at the time, the publication that Tarbell helped to create and had written for 20 years earlier. He remained a prot?g? of hers for the rest of his life, following Tarbell first to McClure’s magazine, then to the American Magazine. With her help he became editor of that magazine in 1915 and remained in that position until 1923, when I suspect he learned of the cancer that would kill him. He died that year.

Ida Tarbell said this about John Siddall in her autobiography, All In The Day’s Work.

“I have never known any one in or out of the profession with his omnivorous curiosity about human beings and their ways. He had enormous admiration for achievement of any sort, the thing done whatever its nature or trend. His interest in humankind was not diluted by any desire to save the world. It included all men. He had a shrewd conviction that putting things down as they are did more to save the world than any crusade. His instincts were entirely healthy and decent. The magazine was bound to be what we call wholesome. Very quickly he put his impress on the new journal, made it a fine commercial success.”

What intrigues me is that Siddall has the air of the lead character in a historical novel, a man who rubs shoulders with the famous but leaves no mark on history of his own. Due to his association with Tarbell, he would have been an intimate of the most famous turn of the century muckrakers, as they were dubbed by Theodore Roosevelt, and his 8 years at American Magazine would have put him in touch with almost an entire generation of American writers. His photo was taken by one of the most famous photographers of his day, Arnold Genthe, and an entire stanza of a poem was devoted to him by John Reed, a notorious radical poet and journalist, a personal friend of Lenin’s, and subject of the 1981 Warren Beatty film Reds.

Comes SIDDALL with a cynic lip up-curled,–
SIDDALL, our dormer window on the World!
Kind-eyed behind his glasses, best of friends,
With the World’s foibles at his finger-ends.
Roars out a jest, and praises with a damn,
And pricks our bubbles with an epigram;
SIDDALL, as sensible as he is keen,–
The high-brow low-brow of the Magazine;
“The SPORTING EDITOR has joined the bunch”
Cries he “Here’s NORRIS, and it’s time for lunch.”

Yes, I know a little bit more about John Siddall today than I did yesterday. But that’s almost everything that is known about him, and none of it is collected into one place. I seem to have become his biographer by default.

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Let’s Break Away from Granddaddy
By John M. Siddall
October, 1915

I am for woman suffrage, or almost any kind of suffrage. I would have just as many voters as possible. There are too few, rather than too many.

The whole human race is given over to the granddaddy theory: “Now just you leave everything to me. I know best, and I will decide. You are not smart enough, or you are a woman, or you are a foreigner, or you haven’t had the experience. Anyway, I am your grandpa, and I know what is what and I will tell you what to do.”

Everybody wants to do that. We all do: we all want to boss. We all want to keep other people from sharing authority with us. We all want fifty-one per cent of the stock. We want control.

And what is the result? The women and all the rest who do not enjoy the suffrage have an everlasting “alibi.” They have an excuse. They would have done things differently if they had had the say. No, sir! I would give them all a chance?if for no other reason, just to find out for once how little the whole crowd, acting together, really knows. It might teach the human race a little humility. Out of the experience there might grow a more enlightened body politic. I would give the suffrage freely just as an educational aid. I would say: “There it is! Take it, if you want it. If you can do anything with it, all right. All the tools for your improvement in the world are at your disposal.”

Frankly, I presume that an extended suffrage might mean a worse world for the time being. I have an idea that things might grow worse before they got better. But what of it? It seems to me that unless there is something inherently wrong in the ballot it is foolish to keep it away from this person and give it to that person. Why not give it to all who want it?who express a desire to use it? It seems to me that it comes right down to this point of the inherent right or wrong of it. If it is inherently right, a good thing in itself, how can you predict who will make the best use jof it? If it is aimed to benefit all those who are using it, why might it not benefit others?

In conclusion, let us refer to one other granddaddy idea: Granddaddies of all kinds have the notion that the young or the inexperienced or the minority
stockholder or the outsider is going to grab a new instrument for the purpose of killing himself. Ridiculous! The old forget the self-preserving instinct of the young. The young have no idea of destroying themselves. Of course they make mistakes, but on the whole they strive to improve themselves, to save their own skins. If the young were as untrustworthy with their own hides as some of their elders foolishly believe, Broadway would be strewn every morning with the dead bodies of young men and women who have come to the great city from the country.

But it isn’t. And such an instrument as the ballot is not going to be used by women or by anybody else for purposes of general, or self, destruction. A greater danger lies in the possibility that the ballot will interest too few.

I should like to see the world really try sometime to find out what all the people can and will do. Everybody talks about democracy, but nobody wants to try it.

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