The New Colossus

by Marshall Goldberg

  “Here is your ticket.”

  He placed a steamship ticket for Southampton on the desk. Southampton was the first stop she had planned herself. She stared at the ticket. The decision was not sitting well.

  “What will happen to Gilder?”

  “For now, nothing. I will look for an opportunity to ruin him, I promise you that. But it will have to be with something other than the matter of Emma Lazarus.”

  He leaned back in his chair and waited for her answer. They both knew what she would do. She had come too far, struggled too hard, to turn her back on an opportunity like this.

  “I need to make arrangements for my mother.”

  “I will hire someone to be her companion until you return. It is the least I can do.” The course was clear, but she felt sullied. She had lost her moral chastity, something she had clung to all her life. She had always prided herself on her integrity, but now she was crossing a threshold from which there was no return.

  “You say someone else is leaving tomorrow?”

  “Yes. In the afternoon.”

  She reached for the ticket.

  “Well, then, we don’t have much time.”

  Epilogue

  Nellie Bly made it around the world in seventy-two days, finishing on January 25, 1890, two weeks ahead of her competitor from the New York Cosmopolitan. In 1895, she married a millionaire industrialist forty years her senior, Robert Seaman, and retired from journalism. When he died in 1904, she went on to become one of the leading industrialists of her time. (The company she took over from her husband owned the patent and manufacturing rights to the fifty-five-gallon steel barrel.) She became active in improving the social organizations of the day, especially orphanages, and returned to journalism only to cover the Eastern Front during World War I. She died on February 17, 1922, at the age of fifty-seven.

  Richard Gilder continued as editor of Century magazine until his death in 1909. The magazine published nearly all the great American writers of the time, though Gilder did have a falling-out with Edith Wharton. He remained active in the cause of Confederate Civil War veterans. His 1903 portrait by Cecelia Beaux currently hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

  Charles DeKay was appointed Ambassador to Germany in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland. He served as arts critics of the Times for eighteen years and published minor literary works, most notably “The Love Poems of Louis Barnaval,” before his death in 1935. He co-founded the National Arts Club in 1898, and the New York Fencers Club a year later. In 2008, he was elected to the U.S. Fencing Hall of Fame.

  Helena DeKay Gilder remained editor of the Century until her death in 1916. Her close friend Mary Hallock Foote continued to write and illustrate from the West. Their relationship formed the basis of Wallace Stegner’s book Angle of Repose.

  Henry Hilton died on August 29, 1899. By 1896, the A.T. Stewart fortune that Hilton had inherited, estimated to be worth $50 million, had vanished under Hilton’s stewardship. As the Times put it in his obituary, “Stewart’s fortunes and the great commercial business he had founded had disappeared.” Nearly all the newspaper space at the time of his death was devoted to his business failings and his hatred of Jews.

  Jay Gould died on December 2, 1892, of tuberculosis. At the time, his fortune was estimated to be $72 million; he is ranked the ninth richest American in history. Once he sold the Manhattan Elevated, he retired. He is generally considered the greatest scoundrel in the history of American business. During the Great Southwestern Railroad Strike of 1888, he hired strikebreakers and was quoted as saying, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

  Joseph Pulitzer continued to be a successful newspaper publisher and founded both the Missouri School of Journalism and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism before his death in 1911. His legacy also includes a bequest for the Pulitzer Prizes, among the most prestigious in American letters. His favorite reporter was Nellie Bly, and he worked doggedly to return her to the fold when she left the paper. His failure to bring her back, he always said, was his greatest disappointment.

  The New York World continued to dominate newspaper publishing throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. Its battles with William Randolph Hearst’s New York Sun ushered in the era of yellow journalism. Following Pulitzer’s death in 1911, the World remained innovative, with the first crossword puzzle, regular columns by Heywood Hale Broun and James M. Cain, and a twenty-part expose of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1931, Pulitzer’s heirs went to court to sell the World, and the court decided in their favor. The final issue of the World was printed on February 27, 1931. On May 16, 2011, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism announced that it was launching an online publication named The New York World, in honor of the original New York World published by Pulitzer, the founder of the school.

  “The New Colossus” was memorialized in 1903 when a bronze plaque bearing the entire poem was placed on the inner wall of the pedestal at the Statue of Liberty. It is by far the most viewed poem in the world. Approximately four million people visit Lady Liberty, and read the poem, every year.

  Historical Notes

  Because the narrator in The New Colossus shared the same time and place as Nellie Bly, the reader was denied some interesting pieces of information. For instance, the city of “Pittsburg” was not misspelled. The “h” was not added until 1911—twenty-three years after the events in the story—in a community stab at respectability. A more omniscient narrator might have passed along the following:

  Chapter One

  Bellevue Hospital is the oldest hospital in the United States. George Washington was four years old when it was founded in 1736. Originally it was an alms house for the poor, and that remained its essential identity ever since, to the present day.

  Nellie Bly’s investigative stories spawned the muckrakers of the early twentieth century and generations of investigative reporters thereafter. Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, I.F. Stone, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and dozens of others can all trace their roots directly to Nellie Bly and the scandal at the Bellevue Women’s Asylum.

  Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Cochran, the favorite daughter of a well-to-do miller, Judge Michael Cochran, in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburg. Cochran’s first wife produced ten children but died shortly before the Civil War, and one year later he married a widow from nearby Kittanning, Mary Jane Hogan, and started a second family. That second family became the joy of his life and he pampered them to no end. He built the largest house ever seen in Apollo ten miles away, moved Mary Jane and their three young children there, and provided them with servants, a governess, and a cook. But Michael Cochran was a judge in name only, and his ignorance of the law proved calamitous to his second family when he died suddenly of heart failure, just after Elizabeth turned seven. Cochran left no will, and under the rules of intestacy at the time, none of a man’s property went to his widow—his entire estate was to be divided among his children. (The law in its infinite wisdom assumed that a man’s children would take care of his widow.) The children from Cochran’s first wife, however, were well into adulthood and insisted upon selling the Apollo home even though their father had clearly wanted his new family to live there. The proceeds of the sale were divided among the sixteen children, and little Elizabeth, her mother, and three young siblings were forced to move into a tenement in town with Mary Jane’s drunken sister, Lucy. The young children’s inheritance might have buffeted the transition, but the court placed it in trust with a local banker, Colonel Thaddeus Jackson, who embezzled the money and eventually filed for bankruptcy. The inheritance money meant for Elizabeth and her siblings was gone. Mary Jane and the children became penniless.

  At the Dispatch, Nellie produced exposés on a half dozen Pittsburg factories, most notably a Squirt bottling plant where women and children worked on icy cement floors for fourteen hours at a
stretch and wrapped rags around their feet to keep their toes from freezing. Her stories generated outrage from Dispatch readers and she developed a strong following—too strong, as it turned out, when the companies threatened to pull all advertising from the paper. The Dispatch editor-in-chief, so glad to have her initially, reassigned her to gardening and fashion stories, and refused to let her work on any more investigative pieces. At that point, she quit her job and moved with her mother to New York.

  The Bellevue Asylum story was not the first story Nellie wrote in New York. After four months of getting nowhere on the job front, she hit upon an idea. She informed her Dispatch readers that she had received a letter from an “ambitious young woman who wanted to be a journalist and wanted to know if New York was the best place to start.” She decided “to put the question to the newspaper gods of Gotham” and, as a reporter doing a reverential story for an out-of-town paper, was able to get around the guards and interview the powers that be in the New York newspaper world. She delivered a piece that pulled no punches. The publishing lords of New York were portrayed as arrogant and disdainful—“I cannot imagine a gentleman in all delicacy asking a woman to have anything to do with the normal class of news,” averred James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the Herald’s publisher. The story was such a compelling read—and New York and its financial and cultural power so thoroughly resented across the nation—that the piece was reprinted in newspapers and periodicals in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and elsewhere around the country. Excerpts of her interviews were even reprinted in The New York Mail and Express, where Nellie was hailed with customary condescension as “a bright and talented young woman who has done a great deal for the nation’s newspapers.”

  But public embarrassment failed to move the publishers. Still no offers or even inquiries came her way. A less determined person would have slunk back to Pittsburg and spent twenty years writing gardening stories at subsistence wages. Instead Nellie Bly went to every sentry along Newspaper Row, showed him the Mail and Express article, pointed to where his boss was quoted by name and demanded to see the editor. Only Colonel John Cockerill, managing editor of the World, would see her.

  Chapter Three

  No doctor was a true cancer specialist in 1887. The scientific means of investigating the disease, aside from the invention of the microscope in the 1830s, simply weren’t available. Theories on cancer ranged from transmission through the bloodstream to the dominant explanation for all disease in the nineteenth-century—miasma, dirty particles that carried disease through the atmosphere. Nevertheless many who feared a diagnosis of cancer sought out the physicians at New York Cancer Hospital. Those doctors may not have known much about the disease, but most patients didn’t realize that.

  Meeting a doctor at a hospital or an office was unusual in the 1880s. Doctors ordinarily visited patients at their homes. In fact, the notion of “doctor” itself was far different in the 1880s from a century later. State licensing of the medical profession, for instance, did not begin until the early twentieth century. Anyone so inclined could call himself or herself a doctor, beholden to no one other than the marketplace.

  “Barker listened intently with only his ear, using no stethoscope.” Though the stethoscope had been invented decades earlier, it did not gain wide use until the early twentieth century.

  Chapter Four

  Out-of-wedlock trysts do not fit the image of Victorian morals, yet they were much more commonplace than people realized even at the time. Part of the explanation, of course, is massive self-deception. The prevailing view in academic circles, for instance, was that women had no interest in sex. “The majority of women (happily for them),” wrote the revered Dr. William Acton in the mid-1860s, “are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind … No nervous or feeble young man need, therefore, be deterred from marriage by an exaggerated notion of the duties required of him.” Women’s aversion to sex was thought to be so fundamental that the law in England guaranteed a man access to his wife’s body whether she desired it or not.

  In fact, however, free love societies were very much a part of women’s intellectual landscape in the 1880s. Although modern history books tend to focus on suffrage, for many women the more pressing issue was the disparate treatment with sexual behavior. Susan B. Anthony, the legendary founder of the women’s suffrage movement, argued that for the sake of a healthy society, men should be forced to adhere to the same moral standards as women. Victoria Woodhull, who with her sister published the Woodhull and Claflin Weekly with the masthead “PROGRESS! FREE THOUGHT! UNTRAMMELED LIVES!”, took it a step further, proclaiming that women should “live with the complete sexual freedom that men enjoy.” The subject of numerous liaisons in the New York papers, Woodhull pronounced that it was her “inalienable right” to have as many lovers as she pleased, and she did her level best to meet to that standard. Though some, including the conservative Mrs. Anthony, were horrified at such a display of lax morals, it struck a chord with many younger women, especially those who, like Nellie, ventured out on their own into the working world.

  Alan Dale, as the critic James Huneker once observed, founded “the school of literary criticism based on the flippant remark.” Critics around the country and in succeeding generations sought to match him, but none ever could. Dorothy Parker came the closest, offering such Dale-like bon mots as, “The House Beautiful is the play lousy.” In 1895, William Randolph Hearst hired Dale away from the World to the New York American and made him the leading critic in America for the next nineteen years, until Dale resigned because he “did not want to be part of an era of commercialism in journalism,” after Hearst agreed to a writer’s request for a different American critic to review his play.

  When people think of immigrants from Europe arriving in America, they usually think of Ellis Island, and well they should. Before it closed in 1954, twelve million immigrants had entered America through the federal processing center at Ellis Island, adjacent to the Statue of Liberty. But Ellis Island did not come into existence until 1892. Before then the main port of entry for European immigrants coming to America was Castle Garden, in Battery Park.

  Originally erected as Fort Clinton to protect the harbor back in the 1600s when New York was New Amsterdam, and then serving as the largest theater in New York in the 1830s and 1840s, Castle Garden became the arrival point for eight million immigrants from 1855 to 1890—about the same yearly influx as Ellis Island. But unlike Ellis Island, all the immigrants who arrived at Castle Garden were free to walk off the boat and into the New World without permission from any immigration officers.

  The scale of the Jewish exodus from Russia exceeded the Hebrews leaving Egypt in Moses’ time and matched European Jews fleeing the Nazis fifty years later. Three million Jews lived in Russia and Poland in 1880, and one million of them took flight to the West following Alexander II’s death.

  Chapter Six

  There is actually more to the story of Mrs. Astor and the Metropolitan Opera House. With her sycophantic ferret from Savannah, Ward McAllister, she developed “Mrs. Astor’s 400,” a list of the families blessed enough to be invited to her annual ball at her mansion at Thirty-Fourth and Fifth Avenue, and whose own invitations she might descend from her lofty perch to accept. Mrs. Astor and her 400, as mentioned, had no use for the nouveau riche of nineteenth century New York, lowlifes such as the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Rockefellers, and anyone else who made their fortunes through the world of business.

  But after the Met opened to great success, Mrs. Vanderbilt was still not satisfied. She wanted more than victory, she wanted surrender: an invitation to Mrs. Astor’s yearly ball, the true acknowledgement of one’s rightful place in New York society. It was Mrs. Astor’s last line of good taste, one she vowed to defend to the death. Alas, she underestimated Mrs. Vanderbilt’s resourcefulness. Three months after the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House, Mrs. Vanderbilt planned a $3 million masquerade ball to celebrate her newly constructed Fre
nch chateau on Fifth Avenue, but she failed to extend an invitation to Mrs. Astor’s daughter Caroline. Young Caroline was terribly hurt and demanded to know (through an intermediary, of course) why she had not been invited.

  Mrs. Vanderbilt responded, “Why, I don’t know her mother.” Caroline begged her mother to go calling on Mrs. Vanderbilt; it would be dreadful, unacceptable, to miss the Vanderbilt ball. Mrs. Astor, good mother that she was, swallowed hard and called on Mrs. Vanderbilt with an invitation to her annual January ball. Mrs. Vanderbilt graciously accepted, and invited both mother and daughter to her masquerade ball. A precedent was shattered, the nouveau riche flooded New York society, and Mrs. Astor’s role as doyeness faded away into history.

  Chapter Seven

  Laboratories as we know them today did not even come into existence until the early twentieth century. The lab Nellie and Ingram saw was state of the art for the time: Bunsen Burners (invented thirty years before), thick glass beakers and flasks made of blown glass (pyrex would not be invented for another thirty years), electric lights, and copper piping (the Anaconda copper mine had begun producing at an incredible rate only eight years before).

  Chapter Eight

  The law of defamation in 1888 was far different from what it would become. From the mid-twentieth century forward, America has prized freedom of speech above all else. The era was defined by New York Times v. Sullivan, where the Supreme Court held that a newspaper was free to write whatever it wanted about a public figure, no matter how damaging, as long as it wasn’t a deliberate lie. Eventually that principle was expanded to any matter of public interest—write whatever you please, as long as you believe it is the truth. But Colonial and nineteenth century America were less concerned with speech and much more concerned with reputation. A man’s most valuable commodity was his reputation, and besmirching him was tantamount to ruining him. (A woman’s reputation, while also important, was a less complicated matter: question a woman’s chastity and you went to jail, paid financial damages, or lost your life in a duel.) In a land based on opportunity and second chances, an attack on a man’s reputation was an attack on America itself. In fact, in the early-1800s a person could be thrown into jail for harming a man’s reputation even if the statements made were entirely truthful. Gradually, though, freedom of speech became more valued by American society, newspapers became more powerful politically, and by 1850 truth had become a valid defense in criminal defamation cases—you could no longer be thrown in jail for telling the truth. But Cockerill was rightly concerned with the World’s legal exposure: in 1888 no court was yet willing to say that a newspaper publishing a hard-hitting but accurate story would be protected from libel damages in court. That would not come for another thirty years.