by Kim Todd
Suddenly, everybody wanted to hire one.
Or be one.
Chapter 3
1888
Detective for the People
Detective: B. n. One whose occupation it is to discover matters artfully concealed.
—Oxford English Dictionary
All across the country, throughout late 1887 and 1888, girls took notice. They opened the paper as they ate their eggs, read headlines as they stood in line at the corner store to buy butter, glanced at a father’s desk as they tidied it, or grabbed an abandoned page on a street-car seat.
One of these was Eva McDonald, a voracious reader in Minnesota with a rebellious streak, who would discover the potential of stunt reporting as an activist tool. Small with a dark fringe of bangs, McDonald had a round, pale face and thick, ink-swipe brows. A bout of diphtheria when she was nine left her heart weak, but she was anything but frail. If there was a beehive to be poked with a stick, McDonald wasn’t going to stand around eating store-bought honey. On some women, the frills and ribbons of the time flowed naturally, but photographs show McDonald stuffed uncomfortably into puffed sleeves and lace collars. With her cropped hair, even at twenty-one she looked like a twelve-year-old boy, more likely to be whitewashing a fence for Tom Sawyer than writing newspaper articles.
McDonald lacked polish, and she felt it. When her mother, who claimed aristocratic roots and had high-class aspirations for her daughter, sent McDonald to a nun for piano lessons, student and teacher quickly agreed she was hopeless. Declaring her “a terrible tomboy,” the nun offered to teach her elocution instead. And her pupil agreed, sensing that speaking well might come in handy to accomplish what she wanted to do, though she wasn’t yet sure what that was. She told herself that if her family had only stayed in Maine rather than moving to Minnesota, she would have gone to college like her friends, maybe even become a lawyer, stunning the courtroom with her arguments. But now, her education disrupted, that avenue was closed to her. When she tried to get a job as a teacher, the school board rejected her as too scrawny and told her to “go do something else for two or three years until you grow up.” She had a talent for recitation, particularly comic poems, but there wasn’t much money in that. Typesetting paid well but was tiring.
She knew what she didn’t want to do, though, which was take care of any more siblings. One of eight with five younger brothers, two younger sisters, and a mother who doted on the latest baby but left the others to McDonald’s care, she was overwhelmed and resentful. Minnesota was full of things to do. Sledding, ice-skating, swimming in the lakes and rivers—it all happened just outside the window, and she wanted to be out in it. Or haunting the library in pursuit of religious histories to fuel arguments with her Catholic-school teachers. Or making forays into union organizing as a member of the Ladies’ Protective Association, Local Assembly 5261, Knights of Labor. McDonald also belonged to the Typographical Union. But, as the oldest, she was usually stuck inside, trying to read while rocking a cradle-bound baby to sleep.
So when an editor for the St. Paul Globe showed up at her house, saying he’d seen her in a local theater production—maybe as Mother Foresight in Danger Signal or Mrs. Arabella Blowhard in The Persecuted Dutchman—and asked if she’d like an assignment where she could put her talents to good use, she said yes, thankful that her mother wasn’t home. He wanted her to investigate conditions for working women by sneaking into factories. It was hardly proper, and her mother would have disapproved. Her carpenter father, indifferent, said she could do what she liked. Here was a chance to get out of the house, escape the sticky fingers and tidying, earn money, and turn her political convictions into action.
Eva McDonald
Eva McDonald, c. 1885. (Minnesota History Center)
So March 1888 found McDonald picking her way through treacherous downtown Minneapolis, pursuing her first newspaper story. The late-winter blizzards had stopped, leaving icy ruts and ankle-deep pools of slush. Textile warehouses and flour mills powered by St. Anthony Falls lined the railroad tracks along the Mississippi. Boardinghouses, some cheap and run-down, others more spruce, housed the women who came to town from the cornfields and prairies that rippled over much of the state. They were drawn by the promise of regular wages and the excitement of city life. Like them, McDonald was increasingly interested in standing at the center of things.
At the Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman clothing factory, one of her first stops, McDonald took the freight elevator up. A little over a year before, Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor Marx, had visited town to lecture on socialism. Facing a packed crowd, she used female Minneapolis factory workers as an example of those abused under the current system. Some earned $1.50 to $2 a week for ten-hour days, she said. The audience and the newspapers scoffed at her claims—wages couldn’t possibly be that low—but McDonald herself knew stories about mistreatment at factories throughout the city, and Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman in particular. In January, an exposed sewing machine mechanism installed in the floor of Shotwell caught a woman’s skirt and dragged her to the ground, causing permanent injury.
Wage details could be hard to come by—some companies posted guards at the factory doors or enlisted supervisors to eavesdrop on those who might be complaining to reporters or union representatives. The women themselves were reluctant to talk, afraid of being fired or embarrassed by their meager pay. Going undercover was a way in, and McDonald adopted the pseudonym “Eva Gay.”
At Shotwell, more than two hundred women hunched over sewing machines at long tables, making overalls, jeans, and wool pants—sturdy clothing for miners and farmers. Neat paint on the walls couldn’t hide the sewage smell or sweltering temperature of the overheated room. A woman with a German accent explained that the water rarely ran in the toilets, and they couldn’t open the windows because of the cold. When McDonald, feeling woozy, asked if it made the girls sick, the woman said every day some of them requested a pass from the foreman to step outside for fresh air. McDonald asked why they couldn’t go out without permission and got a suspicious glance in return.
“Don’t know. What do you want to know for anyhow?”
McDonald moved on.
As she conducted more sly interviews, McDonald found wages even lower than she expected. A girl sweating over a pile of calico shirts earned 3.5 cents per shirt—the ones the boss didn’t rip up as subpar—about $1.75 a week at a time when a week’s lodging alone might cost $3. Women were paid as though their income was a bonus, supplementing that of husband or father, but many provided their family’s only money and had younger siblings to support. And wages were only going down. Cuts had come in January, and the company threatened more. A girl sewing overalls who used to receive 12 cents per pair now earned only 7.
But more than the smell and the wages and the long hours, the women at Shotwell objected to their boss. The superintendent, H. B. Woodward, begrudged them pleasure and seemed to relish their humiliation. If he met an employee in the street wearing a nice dress, he’d sneer that she imagined herself a lady. Clearly, she earned too much, he’d say, and suggest cutting her wages even more. Violent, he threatened to kick one employee down the stairs. When men in other departments leered at the women, Woodward ignored it. He hired one candidate to work as a supervisor, then never gave her the promotion. The woman would say later, hinting at what couldn’t be stated outright, that she wasn’t sorry “when she learned some of the qualifications necessary outside of skill.”
“If your foreman insults you, why don’t you complain to the proprietors?” McDonald asked.
“What’s the use?” another replied. “If we don’t want to put up with the way we’re treated, we are told we can leave. They can find plenty glad to get a chance to work at any wages.”
The mid- to late 1880s were a charged time for American labor. In 1885, the Knights of Labor, the first national industrial union in the United States, had established its power by striking and forcing railway companies to rescind a wage cut. The organization
threatened another strike in the fall when railroads planned to lay off union activists, and the company backed down again. These high-profile successes led to Knights of Labor’s membership increasing from 104,000 in July 1885 to 703,000 the next year. Unlike the competing organization, the American Federation of Labor, the Knights admitted women. They, and other unions, were gaining momentum. But in spring 1886 in Chicago, a nationwide protest in favor of the eight-hour workday spilled out of control. On May 3, police shot strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works. The next day, at a rally in Haymarket Square, someone threw a bomb, and, in the rioting afterward, eleven people were killed, including seven police officers. Known anarchists, several of whom had been elsewhere at the time, were rounded up, tried with little evidence, and hanged.
In some minds, unions became associated with criminality, dynamite, and explosions, even if they hadn’t been directly responsible for the Haymarket violence. In light of the bad publicity following the anarchists’ trial, Knights of Labor membership declined. Union issues, like the eight-hour day and the promotion of strikes, became increasingly polarized. And the question of women in factories performing physically demanding work became a particular focus. In the fall of 1886, a year and a half before McDonald became Eva Gay, Helen Stuart Campbell’s series for the New-York Tribune, “Prisoners of Poverty,” had detailed the lives of garment industry workers, paid by the piece for such low amounts that they struggled to feed themselves and support their families. Campbell didn’t wear a disguise, but she conducted interviews of the women trying to make ends meet by hemming shirts and sewing buttonholes. Campbell had the heart of an economist and pointed out that the cheap, fashionable clothing heaped on bargain counters came at the expense of the poor who made it, in airless conditions, for pennies. Campbell also highlighted women’s particular plight: They had little leverage. Because they couldn’t vote, politicians didn’t even have to pretend to care about their troubles or opinions.
But the power of exposure was a tool available even to those without access to the ballot box, a particularly potent one when backed by a newspaper with a large circulation. In New York, Bly continued to use smooth talking and costumes to ferret out corruption. In March, she posed as the wife of a patent medicine manufacturer. A bill in the state legislature would force makers of these concoctions (many useless, some dangerous) to file a list of ingredients with the Board of Health. She met lobbyist Edward Phelps at his Albany hotel and offered him $2,000 to kill the bill. He said he’d do it for $1,125, then ticked off the names of six politicians whose votes could be bought. Needless to say, as the Buffalo Times (which called Bly a “petticoat detective”) declared: “Statesmen Shaking at the Knees and Red with Rage Denouncing a Metropolitan Newspaper.”
In their use of deception and disguise, stunt reporters echoed another phenomenon of the time: the rise of the private detective, particularly as embodied by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, an organization with origins in 1850s Chicago. The Pinkertons, an extensive network of investigators, worked mostly as corporate spies. Railroads used Pinkertons to eavesdrop on disgruntled conversations and then break unions. Streetcar companies hired them to ride the lines and catch conductors who let passengers slide without paying a fare. Stunt reporters, like the Pinkertons, infiltrated organizations, looked for clues, ferreted out secrets, and interviewed witnesses. But the reporters presented themselves as sleuthing from the other side—investigators for the people—catching businesses as they acted unethically and thwarted laws. Along with the Buffalo Times, papers like the Times-Picayune pointed out similarities between the jobs, responding to Bly’s exploits by objecting to “the spectacle of a brilliant young woman in the role of a private detective.” And one of the appeals of stunt reporting to its readers was its similarity to detective novels. The first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” came out the same year Nellie Bly published her initial investigation for the World.
Though clearly inspired by Bly (the headline of her first story echoed language from a Bly article published several months earlier), McDonald took her own approach. Her writing style was spare, mostly records of conversations, but she doggedly pestered reluctant subjects to talk. Bly loved to chart her elaborate cover stories. McDonald made only the faintest pretense of seeking work. Her preferred technique was to slip onto the factory floor while the superintendent was distracted, ignoring NO HANDS WANTED and NO ADMISSION signs, then wander through, sidling up to anyone who looked willing to talk. Scrawniness had its uses.
McDonald’s sensibility was different than Bly’s, and the results were different, too. McDonald’s piece sparked not a governmental investigation but a strike. This was another power available to those without the vote. Despite worker demands, Shotwell had refused to return wages to 1887 levels and then owners cut wages again—by an average of 17 percent. While the St. Paul Globe suggested ministers and charitable donors get involved, on April 18, less than a month after McDonald’s first Globe article, Shotwell’s female workers stood up from their sewing machines and walked out.
Later in the afternoon, they returned to the factory at First Avenue South and Second Street, to collect their pay. The door was locked. When it finally opened, only a few were let in at a time, leaving a mass of women on the sidewalk. As they waited, they felt damp drops down their collars, in their hair. But it wasn’t spring rain. They looked up to find their male colleagues, several stories up, pelting them with wadded-up bits of paper, cemented with spit.
Over the next few weeks, strike organizers raised money for women out of work, sought support from other local unions, held meetings to plot strategy. They wanted higher wages, but they also wanted Superintendent Woodward fired. As one worker commented, “If we do go back it will be with the understanding that the dude clerks shall stop ogling us and trying to mash us when we go to and from work. We call ourselves respectable and want to be treated as if we were.”
At one meeting, 175 women showed up drenched from the pouring rain. The organizing committee had met with the company and shared its report: Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman would only hire one hundred women back, and Woodward threatened more rules for those who returned—no talking during working hours, 9.5-hour work days, the firing of women who couldn’t sew fast enough to make $6 a week. In response, the women threatened a boycott. Union men, who supported the strike, were a big market for overalls and jeans.
They pitched their case to the public at another meeting. With a theatrical flourish, strikers decorated a drop curtain with overalls and shirts and pinned two numbers to each, a comparison of pay at Shotwell to a comparable factory in St. Paul. A blouse bore the labels SHOTWELL, CLERIHEW & LOTHMAN, 6 CENTS and ST. PAUL 9 CENTS. A lecturer from a local home for unwed mothers warned that girls who couldn’t earn living wages “have only the option of ruination or destruction.” (This was a common line of reasoning, one that McDonald embraced early on then left behind as old-fashioned. The argument went: without good working conditions, women would become prostitutes, as if the only reason to treat them fairly was to preserve their virtue.) A minister said he refused to preach about angels when laborers, like these women, lacked basic necessities. Attendees voted to request that the firm put the matter of pay to arbitration.
These wide-ranging strategies built support, which the women desperately needed. The firm didn’t sit idly by. It pushed back from several angles. The Jobbers Association wrote up a report saying the girls were actually well paid—one girl making $6.96 for cheap shirts, another $9 a week for jeans. In addition, the investigators reported that “charges of ungentlemanly conduct on the part of the superintendent were completely groundless.” Several workers wrote to the paper, complaining that the strike leaders hadn’t distributed donated funds fairly. A man named Christian Tingwold claimed to have heard the strike leaders insult the coworkers who had returned to Shotwell, saying they had “no character, no principle.” These strategies drove a wedge between women ostensibly on the same side. The stri
ke ground on, and more and more workers slipped back to their sewing machines.
The Minneapolis Tribune, the Globe’s competition, found the Jobbers’ report particularly convincing, lauding it as “made by a body of men who could not be trifled with, and in language too plain to be misunderstood.” The workers at the factory were happy, the Tribune suggested, until “along comes a St. Paul newspaper interloper, [who] begins a series of tirades against the horrid condition of working women of Minneapolis.” McDonald’s articles, the paper argued, “practically became the direct cause of the strike.” The Tribune called the reporter a “walking delegate,” implying she was a union representative bent on agitation.
The strike leaders denied all of it. The president of the Jobbers Association, they pointed out, was Clerihew of Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman. Tingwold, like the Jobbers report, was an industry plant, they suspected.
But the Tribune was onto something. The charge of “walking delegate” was apt; McDonald knew the strike leaders well; they sat on union committees together, including the reception committee for the Painters and Decorators Protective Association Ball. As early as January 1888, McDonald had given a speech urging factory women to organize. Whatever the St. Paul Globe’s purpose in hiring McDonald, she had her own agenda. She used the character of “Eva Gay” to educate readers about tactics and labor terms. Gay was much more naive about strikes than union-member McDonald must have been, asking innocently at one point, “What is a boycott?”
Just as all this unfolded—as the company refused to budge, as more women returned to making shirts, as the list of firms agreeing to boycott grew longer—McDonald traveled north to Duluth to give her first major union speech on the shore of Lake Superior. At the same time she’d been writing, she’d been learning to lecture. The talk on “Labor Organization” started off inauspiciously. Poor weather kept many away, and only four of the attendees were women, the very group she hoped to inspire. But she spoke anyway, transforming the observations she’d made as a reporter into a rallying cry. Women often worked not just ten-hour days but twelve- to fourteen-hour days and for much lower pay than men. The best they could hope for, if they spent all this time laboring and “never indulging in laughter,” was $4.25 a week and a $25 annual bonus. Their efforts to improve their lives were undermined because they “do not ask for what they want or, if they do, they ask in the wrong way,” McDonald said. If they cooperated and organized, like the men, like the Shotwell strikers, they might get what they wanted.