LETTER: Typed letter signed, to Charles Ferguson.
A NEW PROGRESSIVE MAGAZINE
Tarbell, Ida. Typed letter signed, with autograph emendations, to Charles Ferguson,
December 19, 1907; one leaf, one page, The American Magazine letterhead.
Tarbell, whose 1904 exposé of Standard Oil had made her one of the nation’s best-known
muckraking journalists, declined Charles Ferguson’s offer to join his new publication – despite
her obvious attraction to the project – due to contractual obligations. The “Mr. Baker” to whom
she refers is most likely the famous Chicago muckraker Ray Stannard Baker, who had joined
Ferguson’s Newsbook. In full (italics ours):
Forgive me for the time I have held your letter of December 5th. It did not come to me
directly, and since I have received it, I have been going up and down my obligations to
see whether there was any sort of loop-hole to enable me to do what you ask me to do;
but there is none. I am under contract to the American Magazine to give my entire time to
it for a period of five years. As you know, I have your enterprise very much at heart. We
want to do in our own way here, I take it, very much the same kind of thing that you are
trying to do through the Municipal University. I know our ideals are similar, even though
our way of working them out may by different. I am already committed to this group. It is
going to take all our time and energy to make the thing go. You see we have got to take
care of the money side of the thing, and because of that it is even more necessary that we
do not divide our force. Under the circumstances, I know it will be impossible for me in
any way to contribute to The Newsbook, much as I should like to do it, deeply as I
appreciate your object, and glad as I should be to be associated more intimately with you.
I shall watch you with the greatest interest, and I feel sure the American will be able
indirectly, if not directly, to aid you in what you are after. We shall look forward with
great interest to seeing Mr. Baker’s article, and it may be that after that there will be
something else open that we can do for the enterprise.
Believe me, dear Mr. Ferguson, I put aside this opening to a direct co-operation with you
with great regret, but there is no other way; I must do it. Will you not accept from me my
very best wishes for a happy New Year? …
Tarbell writes to Charles Ferguson, a Unitarian pastor in Kansas City who had previously worked
as a lawyer and journalist. He believed in Progressive causes, but rejected legislative initiatives to
bring about social change, instead preferring to used “the three sociological professions—the
Law, the Church, and the News” to improve social ills. In 1906, he conceived of a “Municipal
University” designed to establish a new intellectual and spiritual order that would create “a
world-wide republic of the arts and sciences.” He would eventually outline these ideas in his
book, The University Militant, in 1911.
In 1906 and 1907, he was more interested in petitioning the federal government to help him
create his university in the deserts of the American Southwest. To further this endeavor, he
convinced George Creel, a successful investigative journalist and publisher of the Kansas City
Independent, to turn the Independent into Newsbook as the “mouthpiece of a national movement,
according to historian Alan Axelrod. Axelrod notes that Newsbook attracted some of the bestknown
Progressive thinkers and Muckraking journalists of the day. The public, however, was less
convinced, and Creel was forced to abandon Newsbook after only three and a half months of
publication.
(#4657102)
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