Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  At the age of twenty-one Nellie Bly had proven herself resilient enough to subsist for months on a monotonous, unfamiliar diet, sleeping on mattresses infested with bedbugs; had overcome all the obstacles thrown up by a foreign language; had been astute enough, and courageous enough, to stand up for herself when crooked hotelkeepers and street vendors tried to cheat her. She was proud of herself for demonstrating, in her words, that “a free American girl can accommodate herself to circumstances without the aid of a man.” George Madden had now raised her salary at the Dispatch to fifteen dollars a week, but Bly simply could not bear the thought of returning to the women’s page; for three months after coming home she fought with the city editor over the stories assigned to her.

  Nellie Bly had once told Erasmus Wilson that she had four goals in life: to work for a New York newspaper, to reform the world, to fall in love, and to marry a millionaire. The first, at least, seemed immediately attainable. One day in April she simply did not show up for work; no one in the office knew where she was, until someone found the note she had left for Wilson. Dear Q. O., she had written,

  I am off for New York. Look out for me.

  BLY.

  ONE AND A HALF MILLION PEOPLE, MORE OR LESS, WERE THEN LIVING on the island of Manhattan, and the greater metropolitan area was home to roughly four and a half million people—about one-fifteenth of the population of the United States as a whole, or one out of every three hundred people then living in the entire world.

  Half of all the commerce that entered the United States came through New York, and three-quarters of the immigrants; the clerks of the city’s post office handled more than a billion letters each year, and another forty thousand tons of newspapers. Around Manhattan, local branches of the Western Union telegraph company were connected to the main office on Broadway by a series of pneumatic tubes. Every day at noon a ball was dropped from a flagpole in front of the Western Union office; a few minutes before that, a crowd of onlookers began to gather, all waiting to set their watches. On the streets everyone seemed to be late for an appointment. The opening page of a tourist guide to New York promised “the crush of carriages, drays, trucks, and other vehicles, private and public, roaring and rattling over the stone-paved streets; the crowds of swiftly-moving men walking as if not to lose a second of time, their faces preoccupied and eager.” Visiting the city, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer warned its inhabitants that “Immense injury is done by this high-pressure life” and counseled what he called “the gospel of relaxation.” The latest style of men’s canes had watches concealed in their handles. Few restaurants in commercial areas could prosper that did not offer the so-called quick lunch for their patrons, and recent years had brought an even more startling development: “lunches sent out,” as the new culinary fashion was called, meals delivered on trays directly to the work desk, so that a banker or broker might snatch a few quick bites of his sandwich without missing even a single minute of work. “A life-curtailing habit it is no doubt,” editorialized the Tribune, “but it illustrates the high voltage system under which business is done in this, the world’s busiest commercial centre.”

  Overhead, electric wires strung from poles formed an intricate web carrying power for the city’s lights, telephones, telegraphs, ticker tapes; the wires ran in heavy strands from pole to pole, giving New York the appearance of being permanently draped in black bunting. In the evenings, incandescent light poured from streetlamps, from hotel lobbies and the windows of department stores, the individual splashes of light pooling into a pale radiant haze that hung over Broadway from Union Square up to the midtown theater district. In less heavily trafficked areas, tall standards erected in the center of squares threw down beams of light that gave trees an eerie shimmer and turned the world the black and white of a photograph.

  From the streets came an incessant drumming of iron on stone, hooves pounding on paving blocks. Untold thousands of horses pulled the carts, carriages, hansom cabs, omnibuses, and streetcars of the city. When it rained, the horses’ manure slicked the cobblestones with a stinking brown ooze; in drier months the pulverized manure formed clouds of dust that blew through the air to join the blacker smoke produced by the engines of the Elevated Railway. What is there dirtier than some streets in New York? went the joke making the rounds. Why, other streets in New York, of course.

  In the summer of 1881 a journalist for Scientific American magazine reported that during a single day in the city he had made a dozen office visits, all but one of which required the use of an elevator; by the end of the day, he calculated, he had been lifted sixty-two stories, or more than eight hundred feet into the air. The invention of the elevator had changed everything in New York (sometimes in unpredictable ways: a currently debated etiquette question was whether a gentleman should remove his hat in an elevator in the presence of a lady), and the city, which from its inception had spread inexorably across the land mass of Manhattan Island, was now extending itself into the as yet unconquered geography of the sky. Slender, extravagantly decorated skyscrapers—sky-piercers, as they were sometimes called then—rose in hues of red and brown and white, their shafts clad in sandstone and marble and granite, stones dug from the earth and piled ever higher into the air.

  Along Park Row, the heart of New York’s newspaper district, a line of tall buildings, many of them topped by mansard roofs, seemed to form the dark battlement of a medieval fortress. The Tribune Building’s clock tower soared 285 feet into the sky, higher even than the steeple of Trinity Church, the quaint spire that had long dominated the downtown skyline. Nearby, at the Times, the paper’s owners wanted a taller office tower; not finding an available location that was as desirable as the present one on Park Row, they decided to build the new tower around the old one. It was a highly impressive feat of engineering, made all the more so by the fact that the paper had kept on publishing all the while, not missing a single day’s issue in the process. The Sun’s offices were in an older five-story building on the corner of Spruce and Nassau Streets, but the relative modesty of the structure was at least partly compensated for by its legacy as the former clubhouse for Tammany Hall. Near the end of 1889 Joseph Pulitzer’s four-year-old son, Joseph Jr., would dedicate the cornerstone for The World’s new office building on Park Row, one destined to reach the never-before-seen height of eighteen stories, its brick and sandstone body topped by a gilded copper dome that could be seen for miles in any direction. From his sickbed in Wiesbaden, Joseph Pulitzer sent a message that The World’s soaring tower was an ideal representation of a newspaper “forever rising to a higher plane of perfection as a Public Institution”; a rather less elevated notion came from the editors working on the building’s eleventh floor, who delighted in the fact that they could lean out a window, if they ever felt like it, and spit on the Sun.

  Park Row in the 1890s. The World Building, with its golden dome, is at the left of the photo; the Tribune Building is at the center, and the New York Times Building at the right. (Illustration Credit 2.1)

  IN THE SPRING OF 1887, wearing a flowered hat she had bought in Mexico, Nellie Bly arrived in New York. She took a small furnished room in a building on West Ninety-sixth Street; it was at the upper reaches of settled Manhattan, where Broadway was known as Western Boulevard, a name that befitted the frontier feel of the neighborhood. This far north the boulevard was just a dirt road that the city would not get around to paving for another three years; the skyline was low and distinctly gap-toothed in appearance, forlorn houses poking up between vacant lots where goats foraged among the rocks. For the first time in her life, Bly was living by herself; she had left her mother behind in Pittsburgh, with the promise that she would send for her when she found regular work in New York.

  Her room on Ninety-sixth Street was about as far from the newspaper district in lower Manhattan as it was possible to be. The trip downtown began with a half-hour ride aboard one of the steam locomotives of the Ninth Avenue Elevated Railway, from the Ninety-third Street station six mi
les south to Barclay Street; from there she still had a long walk due east to Park Row, the little street that ran diagonally northeast from lower Broadway, fronted on its western side by the greenery of City Hall Park. (A one-sided street, the city’s wags liked to remark, provided the perfect home for one-sided newspapers.) She had with her a letter of introduction from Edward Dulzer, a Pittsburgh acquaintance whose influence could not have been as great as Bly had hoped, for despite all her efforts she didn’t manage to obtain even a single interview with anyone connected with a New York newspaper. Her savings, and her hopes, began to dwindle. She spent much of the summer supporting herself as best she could by writing freelance articles for the Dispatch, precisely the type she hated most: Sunday style pieces on the latest fashions worn by the women of New York. One day she received a letter forwarded to her by the Dispatch; it had been sent by a young woman in Pittsburgh who hoped to become a journalist and wondered if New York was the best place for a woman to do so. Nellie Bly knew that she had nothing but discouragement to offer her correspondent. Was there in fact a place for a woman journalist in New York? Pondering the question, she was struck by an idea for a story and suddenly felt the twinge of excitement, at one time so familiar to her, that she had not felt in a long while: presenting herself as the Dispatch’s New York correspondent, she would arrange to meet with the editors of the city’s six most influential newspapers to interview them on that very subject. She wanted, as she would later write, “to obtain the opinion of the newspaper gods of Gotham.”

  The first newspaper she went to was the Sun. Bly climbed a spiral staircase up a lightless shaft to the third-floor city room, where Charles A. Dana, the paper’s powerful editor and publisher, had his office. To an unsuspecting visitor the city room seemed a kind of bedlam, a thunder of loud conversations and barked epithets; the band of worried-looking office boys rushing from editor to reporter and back again gave the scene the frantic topsy-turvy of a music hall farce. At inclined tables, reporters wrote out their stories longhand, in pencil, seemingly oblivious to the commotion swirling around them. Sunlight from the overhead windows was refracted through a blue haze of cigar smoke. Nearly everyone, it seemed, wore a hat, a tradition dating back to New York journalism’s more raffish early days, when wearing one’s hat at all times was the surest method of preventing it from being stolen. In deference to the summer heat, suit coats and vests had been removed to the backs of chairs, revealing white shirts with high celluloid collars and dark trousers held up by white suspenders. The older men wore beards, the younger ones mustaches; there were no women in the city room. Charles Dana preferred men for the Sun, and not just any men but college men, and ideally college men with a classical background. “If I could have my way,” he once remarked, “every young man who is going to be a newspaper man, and who is not absolutely rebellious against it, should learn Greek and Latin after the good old fashion.” He believed he could find no better man to cover a prizefight or spelling bee than one who had read Tacitus and Sophocles and could scan the odes of Horace. Abhorring nothing as much as a typographical error, he sought to make his newspaper stand as a daily testimonial to correct English usage. Once a writer for another paper sent him a sheaf of his best articles, in hopes of obtaining a job at the Sun; later the writer was surprised to find that the editor had returned the copy unmarked and uncommented upon, other than a single thick black line inscribed under the offending phrase none are.

  Charles Anderson Dana was sixty-eight years old, with a bald head and the long white beard of a biblical patriarch. Ushering Nellie Bly into the relative quiet of his office, he offered her a rickety wooden chair and then took a seat in his own leather-bound one. The room was small and cluttered with the emblems of responsibility. The top of the black walnut desk was nearly hidden beneath piles of articles and correspondence yet to be attended to; it held an inkpot and pen, a pair of scissors, and a revolving bookcase for handy consultation of reference books, atop which stood, incongruously, a large stuffed owl. There was an umbrella rack, a Turkish rug, and a horsehide-covered lounge chair in the event the editor ever felt the need for a nap. Above the mantel hung portraits of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln.

  Dana regarded Nellie Bly carefully from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. Seven years after this interview, he would tell a group of students at Cornell University that the problem with hiring women, especially pretty ones, was that too often they got married and quit—“and there the poor editor is left, helpless and without consolation.” Now the editor considered the question that Bly had put to him. “I think if they have the ability,” he said slowly, “there is no reason why they should not do the work as well as men. But I do not think they can, as a class, do equally good work, for the very reason that women have never been educated up to it in the same manner as men.”

  Bly asked, “Are you opposed to women as journalists, Mr. Dana?”

  “No. If a woman can do assigned work as well as a man, there is no reason why there should be discrimination to her disfavor. And yet, while a woman might be ever so clever in obtaining news and putting it into words, we would not feel at liberty to call her out at one o’clock in the morning to report at a fire or a crime. In such a case we never hesitate with a man. That is why the latter is preferable.”

  To this Nellie Bly made no reply. She could feel the room tremble with the vibrations of printing presses working beneath the street. “Accuracy,” Dana continued expansively, “is the greatest gift in a journalist. It is difficult for most people, when told that two and two make four, not to write that they make five, or three, or anything except the exact truth. Women are generally worse than men in this regard. They find it impossible not to exaggerate.”

  “Have you many women applicants for positions on the Sun?”

  “Not very many. We have a great number of men, but not women.”

  “Then you think women have a chance in the journalistic field?”

  “Anyone with ability has a chance. There is always a demand for people who have ability or talent, and I presume it would be appreciated in a woman as well as a man; but men are preferable because they are educated up to the business.”

  Finally Nellie Bly came to the question with which she herself had been struggling all summer. She asked, “How do women secure positions in New York?”

  At this she observed that Dana’s eyes seemed to twinkle behind his glasses, as though amused by the absurdity of the question. “I really cannot say,” was his only reply.

  The editor of the Herald, the Reverend Dr. Hepworth, informed Nellie Bly that the public was unfortunately interested in scandal and sensation, and “a gentleman could not in delicacy ask a woman to have anything to do with that class of news.” Mr. Miller of the Times said that he could not with any accuracy describe the feelings of the profession regarding female journalists, because during his years at the paper he had never discussed the matter with his colleagues. “Women are invaluable to a newspaper,” insisted Mr. Coates of the Mail and Express; although their dress, habits, and constitution prevented them from the routine work of reporting, they were perfectly suited for “society, fashion, and general gossip.” This point was echoed by Mr. Morris of the Telegram. Women, he acknowledged, were more ambitious than men, and had more energy, but an editor couldn’t very well send a woman out on an emergency story, where she might have to slide down a banister or run up several flights of stairs four steps at a time: “That’s where a man gets the best of her as a New York reporter.”

  At The World, John Cockerill explained that the problem, as he saw it, was that women didn’t want to do the sort of work they were most suited for—fashion and society reporting. “What they are fitted for,” he said, “is so limited that a man is of far greater service.” He hastened to add, however, that The World did have two women on its staff—“So you see we do not object personally.”

  Later, Nellie Bly would sum up the views of the newspaper editors she had interviewed that day. “We have more
women now than we want,” she wrote. “Women are no good, anyway.”

  NELLIE BLY’S ARTICLE for the Dispatch, entitled “Women Journalists,” earned an approving mention in The Journalist, the industry’s trade magazine, which noted that “Miss Nellie Bly … came here from Pittsburg[h] where she made name and fame and cash.” In New York, however, Bly could not find work. The low point arrived in a single, heart-stopping moment in September, when she discovered that her purse had been stolen. The purse contained one hundred dollars, her entire life’s savings. She stood still for a moment, trying to regain her bearings. The sun beat down; a white haze rose from the pavement like a wraith. She knew she could not return to Pittsburgh, admitting by her presence that the great city of New York had proven unconquerable. There was a maxim by which she had always tried to live, Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything, and now, at her lowest ebb, the saying rose again into her mind. Rallying herself, she walked home, borrowed ten cents’ carfare from her landlady, and then rode all the way back downtown to the World Building at 31-32 Park Row. On the thumb of her left hand she wore a slender gold ring; that ring, she had always believed, brought her good luck, something she was very much in need of now.

  Somehow Nellie Bly managed to get past the security guard at the front door—“I had to do a great deal of talking,” was all she ever said about those desperate moments—and into the building’s lobby, where an elevator carried her up to John Cockerill’s office. But his door was closed, and the clerk who sat outside it informed her in no uncertain terms that the editor in chief was not to be disturbed. Bly, though, would not be denied; she took a seat in the outer office and waited. Somewhere below her was a large room where a hundred compositors converted columns of manuscript into columns of lead; in a subterranean chamber ribbons of paper unspooled from immense cylinders into presses that dropped out printed sheets as smoothly as grains of sand in an hourglass; on a loading dock, mailbags were being tied up for delivery to the Post Office, the hulking gray structure that loomed over the park and threw the World Building into shadow each afternoon. Nearby, in a silk-curtained atelier, artists with steel-tipped pens were bringing crime scenes to life. Men hurried past her brandishing important-looking pieces of paper; these were, she knew, telegrams, cabled in to the office from the paper’s correspondents around the world. Still she sat. She had a very important story to propose, she insisted to the clerk, and if the editor of The World would not see her, then she had no choice but to go to some other paper and give it to them. Perhaps Bly added a bit of spurious veracity by mentioning the names of the editors she had recently interviewed; in any event, the threat succeeded, for at last the door was opened and she found herself standing before the desk of The World’s editor in chief.