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Part 3: The Hope for Praise--and the Hope to Deserve It
The largest question
people have,
Eli Siegel said in an Aesthetic Realism class, is "can we be just to
ourselves
without being just to what is not ourselves?" In Aesthetic
Realism
he answered this question clearly for the first time, and in this class
he said with compassionate intensity: "If you can't feel you are just,
you have to feel bad. If this were known and really seen, how
much
torture and agony would not have been." The kind and tremendously
important thing Aesthetic Realism shows is the world is in us,
insisting
we be fair to it. There is a conscience in every woman that doesn't
rest,
and I'm so glad Eli Siegel showed me I had it--he showed people how
beautiful
it was, how strong it was, he honored and encouraged it. He writes in Self
and World:
We want to
be praised, to
have power, but we also want to deserve this. There is such a
thing
as the ethical unconscious...if we praise ourselves and we know we have
been unfair to outside reality in doing so, there is a troubling
conflict
in us...to love ourselves really we have to want to know outside
reality;
that is the outside form of ourselves, or the world.
At the time Ida Tarbell
had reason to
be truly proud of herself for fighting injustice, she was not.
She
describes her disappointment that powerful people in government and
business
attacked her book:
I had
hoped the book might
be received as a legitimate historical study....This classification of
muckraker, which I did not like, helped fix my resolution to have done
for good and all with the subject which had brought it on me.
Ida Tarbell was too
ready to give up
the fight for justice because she had another self that felt the way to
take care of herself was to get the praise of the rich and powerful who
seemed to run the world. She decided to prove she was not a
muckraker,
and began a series of articles to show there were owners of industry
who
wanted to "improve the lot of workers." She writes:
I had taken
satisfaction
in picturing the worst conditions I could find, badly ventilated and
dangerous
factories,unsanitary homes, underfed children. But in looking for this
material I found...substantial and important efforts making to improve
conditions, raise wages, shorten hours, humanize relations....Was it
not
as much my business as a reporter to present this side of the picture
as
to present the other?
It was not owners but
working people,
organizing into unions and fighting, some dying, for every bit of the
improvement
she mentions. She herself saw something of the wrong she was doing,
when
she gave series of lectures to workers on these "improvements":
I was not
conscious that
there was a large percentage of condescension in my attitude. My first
audience revealed my mind to me with painful definiteness, and humbled
me beyond expression. It was a steel town... face to face with these
men,
within the sound of the heavy panting of the great furnaces, within
sight
of the unpainted, undrained rows of company houses...the memory of many
a long and bitter labor struggle that I had known of in that valley
came
to life, and all my pretty tales seemed now terribly flimsy. They were
so serious, they listened so intently to get something; and the tragedy
was that I had not more to give.
Ida Tarbell had a
conscience, but she
did not sustain what she felt here--she did not see how crucial it was
for her life. We can never like ourselves unless we are proud to
see where we are wrong and change. This is what Aesthetic Realism
consultations make possible.
4.
The Hope to Know Versus the Desire to Own
In 1924, Miss
Tarbell accepted
$20,000 from Elbert Gary, the head of U.S. Steel, to write a praising
biography
of him and his company. Gary's union-busting, strike-breaking policies
included having mounted police club and run down people who were simply
walking the streets of their towns, people who had to work an inhuman
12
hours a day.
I grew up largely
unaware of the
cruelty and injustice of the Profit System--the private ownership of
the
means by which people live. I liked the imagined feeling that having
money
and owning things made me superior.
Eli Siegel was
passionate about what
every human being deserves. "While any child needs something he hasn't
got the Profit System is a failure, " he said: "Only contempt could
permit
a man to make money from the work of another, as man has done these
hundreds
of years. Only contempt for other people could bear the idea that
another man might work only if oneself were the means of his
employment..."
The desire to be
powerful through
owning and managing the world, the admiration for other people who
owned
and controlled land, industry and people in America, made Ida Tarbell,
who had written so passionately about ethics, hard and cold to other
people's
feelings. It also affected how she saw men and love. I believe there
was
a desire to dominate people that made her unyielding. Most of her life
she lived with members of her family whom she supported, and she never
married. She said with great arrogance, "I never met a man I would want
always by my side night and day, and I am sure I will not." There
is an increasing aloofness and sadness in her autobiography, written in
1939 when she was 82. Her last chapter is titled "Nothing New Under the
Sun," and she writes:
Looking
forward at life
at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, generally finding myself tired and a
little
discouraged, having always taken on things for which I was unprepared,
things which were really too big for me, I consoled myself by saying,
'At
seventy you stop.'
Ida Tarbell never
knew what her
greatest hope was. She had the chance to know Eli Siegel--she wrote
articles
in the early 1930's that appeared in the same issues of Scribner's magazine
as Eli Siegel's book reviews, many of which have been reprinted in the
journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. In them, as
Ellen Reiss writes in her commentary, "is that seeing of the world,
art,
people, which would come to be Aesthetic Realism."
"What is the
greatest desire
in woman?" Eli Siegel asked in an Aesthetic Realism class in 1974, "to
be complete, or seemingly happy?" And he asked me, "What is your
complete self?" I said, "A person wanting to know." "Can
you
put it another way?" he said--"'My complete self wants to like the
world'?"
Studying Ida Tarbell's life makes me feel so deeply the good fortune
that
came to me. It is the honor of my life to try to express how Aesthetic
Realism meets the hopes of women and all people.
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