by Kim Todd
In this demographic turmoil, Pulitzer, an immigrant himself, saw the potential of a vast new readership. Understanding the potency of symbolism, he used the pages of the World to raise $100,000 for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, after state and local governments had refused to contribute, and the gift lay in pieces in wooden crates. When the statue finally went up in 1886, it was a monument to Pulitzer’s creativity and drive, as well as to the paper’s sympathy for the plight of newcomers specifically and the underdog in general. This positioning paid off, and circulation soared, jumping from thirty thousand in 1883, when Pulitzer took over, to almost two hundred thousand in 1887. His paper was so identified with the interests of the poor, readers would write in offering tips on corrupt businesses and, sometimes, just flat out asking for money.
And in the years since Bly had started at the Dispatch, the allure of New York journalism had only grown. “Newspaper Row,” across from City Hall, right near the courts, was the pulse of the city. Reporters sprinted down the sidewalk, toward fires and train wrecks. As soon as printing presses finished each morning, wagons piled with papers rattled over the bridge to Brooklyn and uptown to Harlem; newsboys scooped up the crisp sheets and scattered like pigeons in front of a streetcar. The press offices were right next to each other: the squat Sun with European gables in the roof; the New York Times, a cream-colored cube; the eleven-story Tribune with its flashy clock tower, like an English church, rising above the rest. The World’s reputation outshone its unimpressive home in the dingy Western Union Building. It was the ideal place to immerse oneself in cutting-edge journalism. Its increasing circulation and audacious self-promotion drew letters from eager job applicants (or sometimes from their mothers),* flinging themselves at the light. But how to get in? All along the row, gatekeepers kept an eye out for hopeful young people bearing newspaper clippings and shooed them away.
One of those who made it past the front door was the young William Randolph Hearst. Freshly ejected from Harvard and just a year older than Bly, he was distinguished by eerily pale eyes, hair in a center part, and expensive taste in clothes that ran to glossy top hats. While his mother pleaded with the college president and paid tutors to prep him for tests in the hope he could graduate with his class, Hearst’s mind was elsewhere. He was obsessed with the Examiner, the failing newspaper his father owned in San Francisco, and all the ways he might make it shine. He wanted it to be the World of the West, the kind of paper “which appeals to the people and which depends for its success upon enterprise, energy, and a certain startling originality and not upon the wisdom of its political opinions or the lofty style of its editorials.” If his father would only let him run it, he’d redesign it, showcase gripping illustrations, and advertise it up and down the coast. In anticipation of this opportunity, Hearst spent the spring of 1886 at the World’s offices, learning how to put together a front page and how to pace a sensational story, eyeing the machinery, breathing in all that fresh ink.
Bly arrived in New York in spring 1887, also full of dreams of journalistic glory. In her letter to Wilson declaring she was off to the big city, she suggested with bravado—“Look out for me.” But by early August, her money was running short, her plan to take Manhattan by storm going nowhere. The competition for the few reporter jobs was fierce. One desperate writer placed an ad: “Editor and popular author wants work; anything at any price.” Though she hoped to turn her back on the Dispatch, Bly sent articles to her old paper, having few other takers. These offerings seemed increasingly like she was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Finally, a few days after writing a piece detailing a couple milking an obstinate cow in an alley, she had an idea that might get her inside the seemingly impenetrable newspaper offices. She would write an article on women in New York journalism and request interviews with editors of all the major papers. It was easy reporting; all she had to do was walk down the blocks of Newspaper Row (and climb many stairs and ride the rare elevator).
And it worked. After a summer of fruitless effort, she found herself in the inner sanctum, face to face with Charles Dana, the white-bearded editor of the Sun and former assistant secretary of war. Standing on his soft carpet, peering at the bookshelves that covered the walls, she asked in her western Pennsylvania drawl what he thought about women in journalism.
“I think if they have the ability,” he said, encouragingly. But then he added that they rarely did: they lacked the right education, maintained only a loose relationship with the truth, and were constrained by the bounds of respectability: “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 1 o’clock in the morning to report at a fire or crime.”
The comment about lack of truthfulness stung, but she pressed on, circling closer to her real question, “How do women secure positions in New York?”
“I really cannot say,” Dana replied, clearly never having given it much thought.
At the World, she confronted Colonel John Cockerill. Physically imposing, he had a round face, brown eyes, and a vigorous mustache. Among his peers, Cockerill had a reputation for voluminous cursing, drinking to excess, and mocking whoever had just left the table. Pulitzer moved him to the World from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, partially for his editorial prowess, and partially because he’d killed a man. When a lawyer upset with the Post-Dispatch’s coverage of a political campaign stormed into the paper to complain, Cockerill shot him. He was exonerated, but the bad publicity depressed paper sales. The editor displayed a ruthlessness Pulitzer both despised and admired.
Cockerill looked up from his desk at the young interviewer and suggested she “get a bachelor and form a syndicate” of her own. Once again, here was the advice to leave journalism, marry (“form a syndicate” was a hokey metaphor, not a business plan), and busy herself with children. If she was frustrated, she didn’t show it, quipping later that she declined to “relate a tale of blighted affections,” and instead continued her mission, asking, “What do you think of women as journalists?”
Women didn’t like the kind of things they were suitable for, Cockerill said. “There are society events which no man can report as well as a woman; yet they always claim to hate that style of work.” Like Bly, other women reporters didn’t hide their scorn for these assignments. J. C. Croly, who reported for the World under the pseudonym “Jennie June” had written to Pulitzer, asking for a better beat, complaining, “I cannot write the utter rubbish that seems to be expected from women—or columns about nothing.” But with dozens of male applicants showing up each day, restless women weren’t Cockerill’s concern. The editor of the Mail and Express echoed these sentiments. Women were great for gossip, travel, dramatic criticism, but, he noted, “Their dress, constitution and habits of life keep them from the routine of a reporter’s work.”
Like Charles Dana, former Unitarian pastor George Hepworth of the Herald said he couldn’t send a woman to police courts to cover crime and criminals, and even if he did, no one would talk to her. They were unsuitable for the sensations and scandals the public craved. Women needed to be respectable, and respectability was boring. Until “the public demands a different kind of news . . . women will be unable to serve as all-around reporters,” he said. He added that with women in the office, men didn’t feel free. They couldn’t work in shirtsleeves, put their feet on their desks, or curse.
With Hepworth, Bly tried a different strategy, even more blunt and straightforward than she’d been with Dana.
“Dr. Hepworth, I want a position on the Herald.”
“Yes?” he said. “What can you do?”
And, in what would become her career-defining trait—a splash of bravado, a hint of desperation—she answered, “Anything.”
The Herald didn’t hire her. And the article resulting from her interview tour, which Bly wrote up for the Dispatch to inform young women who long for “the empty glory and poor pay” of a reporter’s life, wasn’t encouraging to anyone with the same dreams. No
ne of the male editors saw a place for women outside petticoat styles and party reports. Aspiring writers, mostly the qualified men whom editors preferred, were descending on the papers in thick flocks. No one offered her a job.
Nonetheless, these encounters provided food for thought. Though her interview subjects talked about education, experience, and writing ability, the front pages they published displayed a journalism that valued sheer nerve. The editors’ view of what a woman could do was narrow, framed by convention. What if she could enlarge it? The editor of the Telegram had said, “Woman understands women, as men never can; so why should she not be able to write of their ways and habits?” He meant that they grasped intricacies of weddings and waltzes, but wasn’t this true in other ways as well? Plenty of women crowded courts and jails; they just weren’t reporters. Cockerill claimed, “No editor would like to send a woman out in bad weather or to questionable places for news.” But what if the story was irresistible? Right in the middle of police stations and holding cells and other unseemly places? And what if it was something only a woman could do?
By September, Bly’s purse had been stolen. Her rent was overdue. Pride wouldn’t let her return to Pittsburgh and admit failure. She put on her lucky ring, a gold band around her thumb, and returned to Newspaper Row and the dirty, dilapidated building that housed the World. Somehow, she talked her way past the elevator operator up to the editorial department, saying she had an important story, and if the editor didn’t want to hear it, she’d take it elsewhere.
Face-to-face with Colonel Cockerill again, she said he could send her out in bad weather. That she had no objection to “questionable places.” That she wasn’t going to quit and get married. She told him her ideas, including traveling in steerage class from Europe and writing about the immigrant experience. He gave her $25 to keep her from going to another paper while he thought it over.
Bly must have appeared sufficiently bold, or sufficiently reckless. When she returned, Cockerill asked whether she thought she could fake her way into New York’s notorious insane asylum for women on Blackwell’s Island, past the doctors, keeping up her role without discovery to report on conditions there. It was an opening, and Bly took it.
“I don’t know what I can do until I try.”
“Well, you can try,” Cockerill said, “but if you can do it, it’s more than anyone would believe.”
Chapter 2
1887
Opportunity in Disguise
Calmly, outwardly at least, I went out to my crazy business.
—Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House
Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum for Women, a gleaming white building on an island in the East River, had been cloaked in rumors of beatings and neglect from the facility’s opening in 1839. It was one of a constellation of institutions on the island—a penitentiary, a workhouse, an almshouse, a charity hospital—designed to shelter those the city wanted out of sight. The rapid current offshore thwarted escape. Sewers emptied into the river, drawing rats. When Charles Dickens visited the asylum, he noticed a suicidal patient locked alone in the dining room before he fled from the “naked ugliness and horror.” The New York Times reported a girl forced to give birth while in a straitjacket.
A chill wind blew through New York City on September 23, 1887, as Bly headed toward a boarding house, the Temporary Home for Females, putting her plan in motion. The first step was to convince a group of strangers she should be committed. After practicing gazing wide-eyed into the mirror the night before, trying to capture what she imagined to be the vacant stare of the insane, she now adopted a different pose as she wandered down the street, and “assumed the look which maidens wear in pictures entitled ‘Dreaming.’”
In the rest of the city, the New York Tennis Club’s tournament went forward, despite the breeze. Dickens fans looked forward to a dramatic reading of The Pickwick Papers by the author’s son in Brooklyn. In the harbor, Alosia, a ship from Naples with six hundred passengers onboard, had landed, only to be immediately quarantined for cholera. The sick were sent to Swinburne Island, those without symptoms to Hoffman Island: defending against the disease was a constant concern; an epidemic had broken out at Blackwell’s Island not long before.
Illustration for Bly’s article in the World, October 9, 1887
“Nellie Practices Insanity at Home.” World, 9 October 1887 (University of Minnesota Libraries)
Once at the boardinghouse, a plain box with shuttered windows, Bly asked a surly blonde girl of about thirteen for lodging. She gave her name as “Nellie Brown,” disguising herself, but keeping her initials. Inside, women with jobs and those seeking them ate an uninspired lunch of boiled beef and potatoes, served by the same brusque girl, then gathered in the back parlor on rickety furniture. As Bly sat, mulling her campaign, the assistant matron asked what was wrong.
“I can see it in your face. It tells the story of a great trouble.”
“Yes, everything is so sad,” replied Bly. No time like the present to start her ruse. She looked around at the other women knitting, tatting lace, listlessly scolding their children, and declared, “Why, they look horrible to me; just like crazy women. I am so afraid of them.”
From there, she was off, saying she was afraid to go to bed, refusing to take off her gloves, claiming a headache and that she couldn’t remember anything, and asking repeatedly, “Where are my trunks?”
Persuaded to go to her room, Bly worried if she fell asleep, she would awake refreshed, all her work undone, so she forced herself to stay up. She thought back over the events of her life, dwelling on old friends “recalled with a pleasurable thrill.” Then she contemplated the future and whether she would “be able to pass over the river to the goal of my strange ambition.” What would she find at the asylum, and did she have the strength to face what she saw? Were all the reports of mistreatment true? And once inside, would her editors be able to get her out?
Meanwhile, her insanity act gave another woman nightmares. Down the hall, someone woke screaming, saying Bly had been coming after her with a knife. In the morning, increasingly wary of this fraught guest who refused to leave, the assistant matron fetched the police.
Officers escorted Bly to the police station house and from there to the Essex Market Police Court. Rival newspapers, trolling the courthouse for human interest stories, took note of the well-spoken young woman, wearing a black sailor hat with an illusion veil and gloves, alternately calling herself Nellie Brown and Nellie Morena, claiming to have been raised in Cuba and educated in a convent in New Orleans. She had only 33 cents and a notebook in her purse. Her dress might be wrinkled, but it was good enough quality, in both material and cut, to prompt curiosity. “Who Is This Insane Girl?” asked the Sun, describing her as “pretty, well dressed,” and able to speak Spanish.
The presiding judge, the man who would decide her fate, was also taken by her outfit and her speech.
“Poor child,” Justice Duffy said, “she is well dressed, and a lady. Her English is perfect, and I would stake everything on her being a good girl. I am positive she is somebody’s darling.”
The courtroom erupted into giggles. There were two types of woman and, despite playing insane, it was important for Bly, as a prisoner and a reporter, to remain on the right side of the line, the side of chastity and respectability. It was the constant lesson of novels, Sunday school sermons, parental lectures, and etiquette books: a fallen woman was ripe for abuse. Duffy’s words implied that she had slipped to the wrong side of the line, that she was “kept.” Bly stifled a guffaw in her handkerchief, making light of the comment, but maintaining her pure status was integral to her safety. And to her ability to experiment. As another undercover reporter would put it: “A good woman can do without blemish to herself many things that a doubtful or foolish one would blacken herself by trying to do.”
“I mean she is some woman’s darling,” Duffy backtracked. “I am sure some one is searching for her. Poor girl, I will be good to her, for she looks like
my sister, who is dead.”
Here Bly’s hewing to the line of “good girl” and Duffy’s compassion for someone he recognized as his class—his symbolic adoption—almost undid all of her effort to get committed. When one of the policemen suggested, “Send her to the island,” the matron of the woman’s home, who had escorted her to court, answered, “Don’t! She is a lady and it would kill her.”
Judge Duffy waffled, asking the matron if she could keep Bly a few more days until the court could find her relatives, but the matron refused, and Duffy reluctantly referred Bly to Bellevue Hospital for more evaluation. From there, if doctors declared her insane, she would be sent to the asylum.
At Bellevue, her status started to fall in earnest. The hospital sat on a bleak street, populated by the destitute, diseased, and mentally ill, those waiting to see the doctors or waiting at the end of East Twenty-sixth Street for the ship to Blackwell’s Island. Some, in despair after a Bellevue stay, went straight to the pier to jump off it. Bly was now a woman without relatives to protect her, exiled from mainstream society. A doctor saw her (feigned) distress and offered to accompany her to the office, where he turned in her paperwork. But when she was sent to the insane ward, and a burly man dragged her away, the doctor, despite her pleading, said he was needed at an amputation and left.
After evaluating Bly, Bellevue doctors remained puzzled. Maybe she had been drugged or suffered from depression or melancholia. At least one, though, determined she had “hysterical mania.”
With this diagnosis, the doctors tapped into a centuries-long debate over women’s health. Based on an ancient malady, cited by Hippocrates and Plato and centered on the notion of a “wandering womb” afflicting various parts of the body where it settled, hysteria in the second half of the nineteenth century had evolved into a unique strain. Symptoms included fits, nausea, vomiting, headaches, self-centeredness, sadness, laughter, depression, and yawning. Subcategories encompassed “neurasthenia,” or nervous exhaustion; “green-sickness,” which today might be recognized as anemia or anorexia; “nymphomania,” which struck, in particular, the small, dark, and buxom, as well as young widows and women married to cold men who lacked vigor. Hysteria’s risk factors included taxing the intellect, “the sight of licentious paintings,” “frequent visits to balls or the theatre,” “the too assiduous cultivation of the fine arts,” and living in cities. The most popular treatment had been dreamed up by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who advocated bed rest without any distractions (like books), forced feeding, and electric shocks.