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Part 2: Justice Is the
Means to Our
Greatest Hope
In a recent
Aesthetic Realism
consultation we said to a young woman, Laura Key: "If you really
felt the main thing in
your life was to have
the world
seen truly by yourself and other people, you would feel unified."
This is the purpose in life which every woman needs to have, or there
will
be a constant, painful fight between two hopes in us--the hope to like
the world, which is our greatest hope, and the hope to have contempt
for
the world.
There was a desire in
Ida Tarbell
to have the truth seen by people, and the two books of permanent value
she wrote came from this desire in her. Ida Tarbell was 8 years old in
1865 when Lincoln was shot, and it affected her tremendously as it did
thousands of people across America. As a writer for McClure's
magazine when she was in her 30's, she began to research his life:
The more I
knew of him,
[she writes] the better I liked him and the more strongly I felt we
ought
as a people to know about how he did things....He had come to mean more
to me as a human being than anybody I had studied. I never
doubted
his motives.... The greatest regret of my professional life is that I
shall
not live to write another life of him. There is so much of him I never
touched.
This moved me very
much. It stands
for a hope women have had always--to meet a person in this world we can
truly respect in a very big way.
Ida Tarbell's
large respect
for Lincoln had a powerful good effect on her and encouraged her to
care
more for her whole country. "The four years I put in on The Life of
Abraham Lincoln," she writes, "aroused my flagging sense that I had
a country, that its problems were my problems." I believe it was
Lincoln's passionate fight against slavery that gave her the courage to
fight injustice she had seen growing up.
Miss Tarbell writes
of the outrage
in her father and many other people when they discovered that John D.
Rockefeller
had struck a secret bargain with the railroads to give Standard Oil
lower
rates and charge others much higher rates to transport oil. "In
walking
through the world there is a choice for a man to make," she writes with
honest passion:
He can
choose the fair and
open path which sound ethics, sound democracy and the common law
prescribe,
or choose the secret way by which he can get the better of his fellow
man...there
was born in me a hatred of privilege--privilege of any
sort...contradicting
as it did the principle of consideration for others...
The choice she is
describing here about
economics is the choice Aesthetic Realism describes every person has,
between
respect and contempt. Eli Siegel writes in TRO #262:
[W]e
solve our life problems
through the honoring of contempt or the honoring of respect.
Contempt
is easier in this world, though the results are hurtful. When
respect
is seen as not only more desirable, but in the long run also easier
than
contempt, we shall have a different world.
In 1902 Ida
Tarbell began the
series of articles for McClure's that would later be her book,
presenting
evidence of
the secret bargains
Standard Oil
made to control the supply and raise the price of oil. She wrote:
For many in
the world it
is a matter of little moment... whether oil sells for eight or twelve
cents
a gallon. It becomes a tragic matter sometimes, however, as in
1902-1903
when, in the coal famine, the poor... depended on oil for heat (and)
throughout
the hard winter...the price of refined oil advanced.
Her criticism of both
her country's
ethics and the cruel motives of the owners of Standard Oil was powerful:
We have
here in the United
States allowed men practically autocratic powers in commerce... the
price
of a necessity of life within the control of a group of 9 men...as
ruthless...
as any nine men the world has ever seen.
The History of
Standard Oil had
an immediate, far-reaching effect, and was respected and rightly
praised
by many. But Ida Tarbell would suffer because she didn't see that
"secret way by which he can get the better of his fellow man" was in
her,
too, as she criticized it so usefully in others.
To
Part 3: The Hope for Praise--and the Hope to Deserve It
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