The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  For those and dozens of other high-drama stories, Annie Laurie became widely known. Time and again, Winifred arrived first on a scene, took exclusive interviews, put a high emotional spin on a story, and got it out fast over the wires before others even knew a good story was underway.

  Hearst loved her. And she adored the “Big Chief,” as she and his other reporters called him. He would whoop with delight at his desk when Winifred brought him a scoop. Her inside story on the horrors of the San Francisco city hospital didn’t only sell papers. It led to wholesale firings there, along with many other changes for the better.

  So when he invaded Pulitzer’s territory in New York, Hearst naturally brought Winifred with him. The chief didn’t even tell his handpicked San Francisco reporters that he’d bought a New York paper; he just sent them a telegram from that city, ordering them there. Winifred and three male colleagues boarded the cross-country train from San Francisco, wondering what was going on.

  At one stop, one of the men checked the wire service and returned to the car with the startling news that the Big Chief had bought the Journal. If she’d known that, Winifred always said, she never would have set foot on the train. But really she knew that whatever the Big Chief wanted, she would do.

  And it was back in New York that her career really took off. Hearst put Winifred on the campaign trail with his favored presidential candidate, the populist-influenced Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Winifred was in Bryan’s orbit at the Democratic convention in Chicago when the candidate thrilled the crowd with his famous “Cross of Gold” speech. She spent time with Bryan and his wife, and although she liked Bryan, she later admitted she never would have voted for him (if women had been able to vote). At Hearst’s behest, she nevertheless filed glowing story after glowing story on the perennially failed candidate and great orator, painting him as a savior of America.

  Then Hearst sent Winifred to Utah. From there she posted a series of scathing reports on Mormon polygamy, a practice Hearst hated and wanted to end.

  By 1900, Winifred Black had been all over the world for the Big Chief. She’d put the Journal’s huge stamp on current events while developing her uniquely emotional, first-person style as Annie Laurie. She helped make the Journal the most popular paper in New York, and then, through Hearst’s wire syndicate, one of the most influential in the nation. And Hearst, in turn, made Annie Laurie a star.

  Arriving in Houston to cover what looked like a routine flood story in Galveston, Winifred was surprised to find the city packed with what she thought of as sensation-seekers and sightseers. Her fellow newsmen had been arriving as well, and they were all frustrated and angry.

  Galveston was off limits. Martial law had evidently been declared on the island, and Houston was cooperating with it. Traffic across the bay was tightly controlled. Rail tracks were wrecked, and no boat could cross without official permission. Police and the U.S. Army were everywhere, vigorously enforcing the rules.

  Rumors flew. This was a disaster of historic proportions. But reporters couldn’t report it. They couldn’t make their way in.

  Getting to Galveston, Winifred thought, would be like going to Mars. This was turning into just her kind of thing. Not routine at all, the Galveston story was an Annie Laurie specialty.

  Right away, Winifred Black began using all the tricks of her trade. She never revealed how she did it—there must have been Hearst money involved—but soon she was fully disguised as a boy: red hair under a cap, face hidden under its visor. She wore work clothes and shouldered a pick. She joined a work gang heading for the island.

  Even trickier: the marshal in charge of the work gang was a friend of hers. As Winifred went down a gangway with the others toward a boat to cross the bay, he was in on her ruse. So were the two huge men to her left and right. She’d made them her confederates. They were doing their best to keep her hidden between them.

  Luckily, the other men in the work crew were yelling and cheering and pushing as they neared the boat. That helped Winifred stay hidden. She kept her head down as they approached sentries with crossed bayonets on the gangway. She hoped to slip by.

  Suddenly there was harsh light: pitch-pine torches held by two men. One of the armed sentries caught Winifred’s eye. She froze, sure she was sunk.

  In response, her allies beside her in the crew started a fake fight, yelling and shoving to distract the sentries. Her friend the marshal shouted at the sentries to intervene. The sentries, ignoring Winifred, tried to restore order among the men.

  So it was that, with Winifred among them, the gang of workmen boarded the flimsy boat. When it cast off into Galveston Bay, all the other reporters were back in Houston, fuming and complaining. Once again Annie Laurie would get her scoop.

  What Winifred Black saw in only twenty-four hours in Galveston, and what Annie Laurie reported to the nation for William Randolph Hearst, galvanized the entire country. Without that early on-the-scene reporting, things might have gone very differently for Galveston.

  Hearst’s insatiable desire to boost newspaper circulation in far-off New York made news out of what had happened to people like Daisy Thorne and Chief Ketchum and Arnold Wolfram and the St. Mary’s orphans and so many other Galvestonians on that awful night. And it made news out of what was happening now in the grim city of burning corpses patrolled by Major Fayling’s men. The Galveston hurricane became the first national news story of the new century.

  In her time on the island, Winifred never stopped observing. She smelled the stink of rotting human flesh, saw the smoke of burning corpses that hung over the island. She marveled at the sheer scale of the destruction. She reported on the “ghouls” looting the corpses. She interviewed dozens of people—ordinary Galvestonians and Police Chief Ketchum, as well as Major Fayling, whom she quickly decided to make the hero of the piece.

  She collected individual storm stories, gaining a complete sense of what people had gone through on that horrific Saturday afternoon and Saturday night. She watched the corpses and body parts pulled from the pile and carted toward the pyres; she saw the grim, nauseated faces of the workers; she stared as the bodies burned.

  The veteran reporter had never seen anything like it. And she was still the only reporter here.

  Getting her story to the Big Chief without leaking it ahead of time, however, proved almost as tricky for Winifred Black as secreting herself onto the island. The story’s value, in yellow-press terms, lay in its exclusivity. Hearst needed to place the Journal’s intrepid reporter right in the midst of the action. He needed to make her lonely presence in Galveston a part of the story. That kind of thing not only sold copies; it boosted the paper’s brand, and it led to long-term victories in the circulation war with Pulitzer.

  So after twenty-four sleepless hours of constant reporting on an emotionally devastating scene, Winifred faced her first challenge: getting off the island and back to Houston without being arrested. The veteran reporter went on wheeling and dealing. She again enlisted the marshal who had helped her sneak in; he personally took her back across the bay in a small boat. With the marshal, Winifred then traveled by pumping a handcar up the tracks above the receding water all the way to Houston.

  Exhausted, deeply shaken by all she’d seen and heard, Winifred was filthy. All she wanted was to do was file her piece, take a bath, get some sleep, and get out of Texas. At 3:00 A.M., she arrived at the Houston telegraph office, carrying the only story by an outside reporter from inside Galveston.

  Yet even at that hour, she found the telegraph office a mob scene. Frustrated reporters, barred access to the island, had been pulling stories out of every Galvestonian refugee they could find or invent; now they were racing to file those stories by wire. To keep the wires open until they could find a real story, some reporters had been filing whole chapters of a popular novel. Bedraggled and dirty, and trying to keep a low profile, Winifred pushed her way through the bustling crowd toward the desk of the man who received copy.

  Now she had a new prob
lem. She had to keep the very existence of her story secret until it could get safely on the wire. And she had to cut the line, getting it in ahead of the others.

  Worse, if she tried to file the story directly with one of Hearst’s offices, the operator and the other reporters would notice where she was filing. Her secret would be out. The other cutthroat reporters would try to slow her down while stealing her news and reporting it as their own. The story’s value would disappear.

  She had one hope. There was a man back in Denver, the owner of a telegraph company, who had been bugging Winifred to steer some Hearst telegraph-news business his way. In a handy coincidence, that man’s last name, like Winifred’s, was Black.

  She quickly wrote Mr. Black the Denver telegraph operator a note. She told the man at the desk it was personal, but the real content was this: “Get my story on the wire within half an hour and you’ll open a wedge on the Hearst business.”

  Because both names on the transmission were Black, the harried and distracted man receiving copy believed the note was indeed personal. He jumped it ahead of the line to his general manager.

  The manager and the operator paid no attention to the contents. Winifred’s wire went to Denver, to Mr. Black’s telegraph company, not to the Hearst organization. And Mr. Black didn’t tarry: within only twenty minutes, he’d sent the story from Denver to Hearst.

  Shortly, to the outrage of other reporters clamoring in the Houston telegraph office, the story was in the Journal and on Hearst’s syndication wire: an exclusive from inside Galveston.

  The competition had been scooped, yet again. The “lady journalist,” as Winifred was sometimes known, had done her job.

  Now for some sleep. Or so she thought.

  Hearst wasn’t relying only on his star reporter Annie Laurie to make the Galveston disaster, like the invasion of Cuba, another circulation booster starring his own paper. Heart-tugging reporting was important to that effort, of course—but Hearst was also prepared, as usual, to raise and spend a lot of money to place himself and the Journal at the center of the story.

  The Journal had the impact and the scope to inspire donations, big and small, on a national level. Via the paper and his national wire service, Hearst immediately began raising money and organizing help for Galveston.

  Hearst and his people created a relief fund. They vigorously recruited doctors, nurses, and aides, paid by the fund, to go to Houston and Galveston and save lives. They bought vast supplies of medical equipment. They identified means of getting food and water to the stranded island.

  And they chartered trains to carry all that personnel and material toward the gulf. Hearst’s relief trains didn’t leave only from New York. They also left from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

  Meanwhile, in New York City, Hearst hosted a glittering fundraiser, inviting the entire New York upper crust. He called the event the New York Bazaar for Galveston Orphans; it drew large sums from the wealthy New York cohort. The Big Chief himself made a personal contribution of $50,000 (almost $1.5 million in today’s money).

  Inspired by Hearst’s big-scale relief efforts, other great industrialists and business titans began kicking in. Andrew Carnegie, for example, gave $10,000.

  Ordinary people across America quickly began contributing too. Headline writers at the Journal naturally picked up on the more grotesque bits of Annie Laurie’s report. Since the storm had opened up a graveyard, the headline read in part “Even the Graves Give Up Their Dead.” That was yellow press in a nutshell.

  But sensationalism went hand in glove with flat-out, first-person appeals by Annie Laurie. She directly asked her big and loyal readership, from coast to coast, to provide help for Galveston.

  “But, oh, in pity’s name, in America’s name,” Annie Laurie begged her public, “do not delay help one single instant! Send help quickly, or it will be too late!”

  And in America’s name, the century’s first great national effort now began. Americans of every kind responded to Galveston’s tragedy.

  Joseph Pulitzer, Hearst’s stalwart competitor in New York, was not to be outdone by his young rival in the newspaper wars. Pulitzer’s New York World began raising contributions for Galveston too.

  And Pulitzer had his own secret weapon—a very different one from Hearst’s star reporter Winifred Black: Clara Barton. Founder of the American Red Cross, she commanded far greater veneration than any reporter ever could and had long been the international face of humanitarian relief. Clara Barton’s arrival on the scene of any disaster had become a cause for hope.

  But Miss Barton was seventy-eight now. Some within the Red Cross said she was growing too old to travel to disaster sites. Some said that like many an aging founder, she was now holding back the very organization she’d begun. Her management style was dictatorial, people claimed, unsuited to bringing the Red Cross into the twentieth century. It was time for her to retire.

  Clara Barton wasn’t one to give credit to others’ ideas about her fitness, or her management style. Twice in her early career she’d been denied key opportunities because she was a woman. In 1851, she opened a school—the first free school in New Jersey. After growing its enrollment to over 600 students, she had found herself replaced by a man.

  Then she rose up the ranks of the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. Soon she became the first-ever full-fledged female clerk—only to be busted down to copyist when some men objected to women working in government service.

  It was during the Civil War that Clara Barton found what was to be her true calling, not only as a hands-on worker but also as sole, indispensable boss. Having raised money to buy and transport nursing and medical supplies for wounded Union soldiers, she finally got government and army permission to work just behind the front lines of horrifically bloody battles like Antietam and Fredericksburg.

  Many found it hard to believe that this slight, unmarried woman from Massachusetts, barely five feet tall, could handle it all. Not only did she actively tend with her own hands the most grotesque injuries of that war. She also briskly managed the logistics of relief. So effective was Clara Barton in running field hospitals that she was named the official “lady in charge” of the Army of the James. Her legend began to grow.

  After the war, she hit the lecture circuit, one of the biggest entertainment media of the day, competing with the theater and the opera. Barton wore black silk and discussed her relief efforts. She commanded fees as high as those paid the most famous male speakers.

  She came to know other great social reformers. Among her friends and allies were the feminist Susan B. Anthony and the former slave and eloquent civil rights activist Frederick Douglass. She took up both of their causes.

  Then, traveling in Europe, she helped the Swiss Red Cross set up military hospitals during the Franco-Prussian War; she was decorated by Prussia for those efforts. Learning of Europe’s Geneva Convention, which protected noncombatants and set humane rules for warfare, she brought that treaty home and presented it to President Garfield. The U.S. Senate ratified the Geneva Convention in 1882, during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur.

  Amid that success, Barton founded the organization first known as the U.S. Red Cross of the Geneva Convention. Clara Barton sought to establish a permanent, politically impartial, centrally organized policy of relief for wounded and devastated people, whereas prior to the Red Cross such efforts had been coordinated on the fly and then disbanded as soon as the immediate need was met.

  And yet political will in the United States to support large-scale war relief had dwindled. Never again, received opinion declared, would there be a war like the Civil War. So as early as 1881, Miss Barton convinced President Arthur that hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and fires posed threats to civil society equal to the horrors of war. The American Red Cross would make its name by serving not only in military theaters but in disaster areas as well.

  By September 1900, when word of the Galveston disaster began to spread by wire, Clara Barton had ably br
ought massive aid to Ohio during floods, to Florida during yellow fever. She’d traveled to Russia to feed victims of famine. She’d negotiated intensely with the Ottoman Turks to let her into the Armenian provinces after the massacres there.

  In the spring of 1889, when a series of heavy rains lifted many rivers in the northeastern United States well past the flood stage, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, washed away in one of the worst floods ever to occur in the country. The Potomac too had risen, and Clara Barton left Washington with water running two feet deep on Pennsylvania Avenue to live in Johnstown for five months straight in a series of mud-filled tents. A U.S. general in charge at Johnstown called her “a poor, lone woman.” Barton rejected his gallant offers of protection, and she brought about in Johnstown what was then the biggest relief effort in U.S. history.

  All of that took not only unremitting compassion for victims and a highly personal touch in tending to their needs, but also a thoroughgoing operational toughness. Clara Barton left others in awe.

  And yet there were the murmurings about her management style, the hints that she was too old to travel. She had to report to a board now. Money was tight, too: the American Red Cross had just completed its work in Cuba after the Spanish-American War, building hospitals and orphanages. There was competition from both the White Cross and the New York Red Cross. In 1900, Miss Barton was eager to take another important trip to shore up the reputation of the organization she’d worked tirelessly to create.

  Joseph Pulitzer’s World had offices in the building that also housed the New York offices of the Red Cross. In September 1900, via the New York Red Cross office, Pulitzer proposed a deal by telegraph to Miss Barton in Washington.

  His World would establish a fund for Galveston donations. The paper would steer all of the money and supplies it raised exclusively to the Red Cross—if Miss Barton herself would travel to Galveston to distribute the money and supplies. And she would travel on a train handsomely outfitted, at World expense, escorted, of course, by a World correspondent. The paper would get exclusive coverage of Red Cross efforts in Galveston.