Taking on the Trust by Steve Weinberg

Author:Steve Weinberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

McClure’s Magazine

Samuel Sidney McClure entered the world in 1857, the same year Ida Tarbell was born. The two would prove to be more than just contemporaries. McClure would become Ida’s often exasperating friend. More importantly, he would provide the platform from which she would publish some of her greatest works.

Born in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, McClure grew up poor but never starving. His parents, Elizabeth and Thomas, tended a small farm near family members; Thomas supplemented his farming income by working as a carpenter. Samuel McClure began his formal education at age four, attending a rural schoolhouse Monday through Friday and half-day Saturday, fifty weeks each year. He enjoyed his school lessons from the start, and his hunger for book learning never abated, as he attests in his autobiography, and as verified by biographer Peter Lyon as well as in the extensive personal papers McClure left behind for researchers.

At age seven, McClure experienced the collapse of his happy world. His father left home to work in the big city of Belfast, because farming and carpentry could not support his growing family adequately. A few weeks after his father’s departure, McClure’s youngest brother, eighteen months of age, died from diphtheria. Before the year ended, McClure’s father died too, after a freak accident in a Glasgow shipyard, to which he had been detailed by his employer. When he died, Thomas McClure was thirty-two years old. His wife was seven months pregnant. After her child was born, Elizabeth tried to support herself and her four sons by farming their nine acres, but without her husband’s income she could not provide enough. She moved the family to her mother’s home in another town. Samuel McClure, age eight, had to attend a different school, where he never felt comfortable intellectually or socially.

With her family’s charity strained and poverty looming, Elizabeth McClure decided she might escape a pauper’s existence by following her two sisters and two brothers to the United States. In 1866, when Samuel was nine, she gathered her children and started out for Indiana, where her siblings had settled, with money she had scraped together, primarily by selling the farm. They remained on the ocean for twelve days during the first portion of the journey, which involved passage to Quebec. Samuel Sidney alternated between seasickness and wonderment. On land, the seemingly interminable seven-day train ride to Valparaiso, Indiana, yielded little hope at first. They had used their meager savings for food on the ship and the train. Samuel Sidney and his family lodged with one of his aunts on a remote farm fourteen miles south of town. The small house already held his aunt and uncle, their six children, and his mother’s two unmarried brothers.

To relieve the overcrowding, S.S., as the child was called, and one of his brothers moved to the home of Elizabeth’s other married sister, north of Valparaiso. The only work Elizabeth could find was as a live-in servant at a household in town. S.S.’s aunt and uncle soon decided

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