by Kim Todd
Eva Gay promotion in the Saint Paul Globe, March 31, 1888
“Eva Gay’s Next Sketch.” Saint Paul Globe, 31 March 1888 (Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub, Minnesota History Center)
Political lecturing blended all of McDonald’s skills—elocution taught by the nun, acting instincts honed on the community stage, a fierce commitment to the working class and women’s rights, and a certain lawyerly fire. “The greatest little ‘Labor Agitator’ in the west,” a friend later wrote about her on-stage magnetism. “Maybe the best speaker I have heard.”
Though she held up the Shotwell strikers as an inspirational example, back in Minneapolis, the strike was collapsing. This was because Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman was collapsing. Financial troubles had surfaced early in the year, and the firm responded by understating its debt. By June, Theodore Shotwell was borrowing from one bank to pay another, writing checks in the hopes he could convince friends in the East to lend him money to cover them. By mid-June the company stopped paying its bills, and the Globe headline declared: “The Firm of Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman Embarrassed.” New York sources decribed debts much larger than previously thought. A bank account supposed to guarantee loans was empty. Shotwell, so distinguished with his gold-headed cane, so upstanding, head of the company the Tribune declared “one of the most responsible in the city,” appeared suddenly in a less flattering light. In early July, Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman were arrested.
By October, notices appeared in the paper advertising deep discounts on flannel, buttons, wool suits—all the “large Bankrupt Wholesale Dry Goods stock of Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman.” And the factory workers who hadn’t been able to find other jobs drifted back to the winds and big bluestem, sky blue aster, and buffalo grass of the prairie, and the farms carved out of it.
Throughout the rest of the year, McDonald continued her exposés (as well as running, and losing, a race to be the first woman on the school board). She had a job, elocution lessons, and the ability to make people pay attention to what she had to say. The Globe took pride in her reporting, calling the series “a crusade for women.” Increasingly, she left behind her younger siblings and explored her freedom. Shocked by her daughter’s latest splash and by her moving into a boardinghouse and wandering all corners of the city, her mother would say, “Well, we’ve come to a fine pass when I got to look at the morning paper to see where my daughter was yesterday.”
McDonald interviewed laundry workers who stood on damp floors, slogging through the winter in wet shoes. She visited another facility where the owner repeatedly “forgot” to pay his workers. She ate dinner with chambermaids at a hotel that featured ants in the sugar bowl and flies in the mustard. She charted further wage inequity, reporting that while female telegraph operators were paid $50 a month, males received $85. At a knitting factory, the girls warned that her notebook would reveal her identity as everyone was checked as they left to be sure they weren’t stealing. But once again, McDonald somehow slid by, and, as she noted, “joyfully made my escape.”
Chapter 4
1888
Hunger for Trouble
There is hardly an editor in New York who is not bothered with young women who want to disguise themselves and go into unusual places with the idea of making newspaper stories out of their experiences.
—Buffalo Morning News, 1888
The year Nellie Bly went into the asylum was a low point for the Chicago Times. A Democratic Party organ for decades, its criticisms of Lincoln and the Union cause in the Civil War were so aggressive that General Ambrose Burnside sent soldiers to stop the presses. The Times hewed relentlessly to the wrong side of history, referring to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as “silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances.” The publisher, Wilbur Storey, whose journalistic goal was to “print the news and raise hell,” pioneered an incendiary style. His paper was infamous for spewing inflammatory rhetoric and unearthing things best left buried. A former reporter summed up its early years this way: “Scandals in private life, revolting details from the evidence taken in police court trials, imaginary liaisons of a filthy character, reeked, seethed like a hell’s broth in the Times’ cauldrons and made a stench in the nostrils of decent people.”
At his death in 1884, suffering from dementia, Storey left a will that would be fought over for years, becoming the kind of news he loved to cover. His paper, enterprising and original, whatever else you might say about it, descended into a sorry rag with a front page overrun with ads—True Bay Rum, gentlemen’s underwear, Dr. Shephard’s London Toilet Water. The rest was wire stories written elsewhere, railway timetables, snoozy editorials.
Into this chaos rode a white knight with a saintly backstory who bought a majority interest in the Chicago Times for a million dollars. At twenty-nine, James J. West presented himself as a self-made man. A poor boy with aspirations to be a minister, he started work at the Western Publishing Company at a salary of $500 in the hopes of raising money for his education. Three years later, he was a full partner and oversaw the publication of a book that sold more than a million copies. He had the erect posture, strong jaw, and straight nose of Greek statuary, an impression only slightly marred by a plaid bowtie. Still part pastor at heart, West claimed never to drink anything stronger than lemonade.
Despite the desperate situation of the newspaper, the ugly front page, the general aura of neglect, West determined that it would soon be “one of the ablest and handsomest journals in the world” and cast about for ways to make that happen: new type; thrilling fiction by the British adventure writer H. Rider Haggard; a Times-sponsored plan to find bison in Texas, domesticate them, and save them from extinction. A writer would file exclusive reports by carrier pigeon.
West hired away the Chicago Tribune’s star reporter, Charles Chapin, who’d tracked opium smugglers across the Canadian border. Chapin had written an exposé of a gang of virtue vigilantes who dragged adulterous couples out of their houses and whipped them. In his latest feat, he’d been on the scene, conducting an interview, when a wife shot and killed her cheating husband. Chapin disarmed the woman, went for the doctor, and wrote up the murder in gripping prose. That was the kind of initiative West was looking for. A week after the story ran, he offered Chapin the position of city editor, a promotion he couldn’t refuse.
Nothing worked to boost the Times, though, until Chapin hired a schoolteacher-turned-reporter named Helen Cusack, pseudonym “Nell Nelson.” (“Nell” recalled Bly and was also a nickname for “Helen.”) For some reporters, a stunt was their first assignment, a cannonball into the profession. But Nelson was an experienced journalist. In addition to preparing lessons, she wrote for the Inter Ocean, the Herald, and the New York Evening Telegram. In 1885, she served as vice president of the newly formed Illinois Woman’s Press Association. She and her two younger sisters, Marcella and Virginia, all teachers and close in age, lived together during much of the 1880s. She was known for looking after her family, possessing a regal bearing, and wielding “a particularly caustic pen.”
Nell Nelson in the Journalist, January 26, 1889
Nell Nelson portrait, The Journalist, 1-26-1889 (University of Minnesota Libraries)
Stunt work represented a new opportunity. In July 1888, Nell Nelson donned a shabby frock, arranged her brown veil, swept her hair back in a twist called a “Psyche knot,” and went looking for a job. It was a rainy, humid summer, with reeking trash piling up. Headed down State Street, she applied at two feather factories and three corset makers without any luck before going upstairs to the Western Lace Manufacturing Company. Here, in a lobby displaying samples of hand-crocheted products—doilies, collars, pillow covers—she took a seat and waited to submit an application. The lobby was watched over by a young man with a mustache. Nelson described him as the “pretty blonde secretary.” His good looks, though, were spoiled by a constant scowl.
A girl brought in a dozen crocheted mats and asked for her pay. The accountant is out, the secretary told her. She’d need to wait. Nel
son chatted with the girl, named Martha, and asked to see her contract. Perhaps as befits a teacher, Nelson focused on the math. The contract specified, in order to start manufacturing lace, an employee needed to pay $3–$2 for “lessons” and $1 as a “deposit” to be returned once $15 had been earned. After six months of crocheting at roughly 60 cents a week, and paying 10 cents each way in streetcar fare every time she needed to deliver the goods, Martha finally made her $15. Now, as the minutes ticked by, she wondered whether she would ever get paid at all.
While Martha waited, Nelson inquired about a position. The secretary handed her a flyer with all the details, and she proceeded to grill him.
“What’s the $3 for?”
“Can’t you read?” The secretary answered. “The $2 is to pay for the samples and instruction and the $1 as a security for our material. I don’t know who you are and if I gave you the thread I might never see you again.”
But she knew how to crochet and didn’t want the sample, Nelson persisted. Could she start work without the deposit? No. She asked to see a list of customers and pointed out there weren’t many. The Chicago market didn’t seem overwhelmed with a desire for handmade crocheted goods.
The blond secretary grew increasingly flustered and finally refused to talk with her anymore.
“Why? Is it a secret organization, a sort of Masonic—?”
But eventually she let him be. She turned her attention to the employees, peppering them with questions. None made more than 20 cents a day. When she wrote up the episode, under the headline “City Slave Girls,” Nelson commented: “I learned that many women paid $3 and gave up the work when they saw it was not possible to make the $15 necessary for the rebate.” She called the business “a concern legally incorporated to grind the life out of the women and girls unfortunate enough to patronize it.” With her focus on the economics, she uncovered an early model of a multilevel marketing scheme, like Herbalife or essential oils, where the real profit is made not from consumers but from those who think they are employees.
In factories and sweatshops, over the course of weeks, she stitched coats and shoe linings; interviewed her fellow workers in sweltering, unventilated spaces; and continued reckoning. At the Excelsior Underwear Company, she was handed a stack of shirts to sew—80 cents a dozen—and then was charged 50 cents to rent the sewing machine and 35 cents for thread. Nearby, a forewoman scolded an employee for leaving oil stains on chemises. She’d have to pay to launder them. At one facility, Nelson was told she’d need to work six weeks for free to gain experience.
The summer of 1888, Nelson was in her late twenties. Perhaps age and experience gave her confidence. Inspired by Eva McDonald’s stories for the Globe, Nelson had a distinct style, wisecracking and intrigued by human nature, much more sophisticated than McDonald’s. Like the best stunt reporters, her personality was an integral part of the story. (Unlike others, Nelson didn’t leave any writing besides her newspaper articles, so it’s hard to gauge the distance between how she presented herself in public and what she confided in a private letter or journal entry.) She never let a good digression slip by. At the Never-Rip Jersey factory, when a young woman at her table mentioned her hopes that her telegraph operator boyfriend would propose, Nelson offered tips on ways to catch him. They hatched a plan to be deployed, over chocolate cake, at a picnic in a park that evening. Nelson was confident in the recipe for commitment, though admitted she’d never tried it.
Like Bly, Nelson wrote from a close, first-person perspective, pulling readers into her bodily experience.* She included intimate details: the corsets hanging on nails, removed so the women could move more freely; the cold pancakes employees packed for lunch; a girl so tired she fell asleep in the filthy bathroom. When Nelson tried her hand at making dusters, she ended up covered in feathers: “They stuck in my woolen waist, got between my teeth and into my mouth and eyes till I could see nothing but flukes and stems.” Like McDonald, Nelson wrote overtly about sexual harassment. One day, she forgot her streetcar fare and borrowed it from a well-dressed stranger. When she hopped off near a vest maker she wanted to investigate, he followed, asking where she was going, if she worked in the neighborhood, and eventually pressing so close, as she described it, “the sleeve of my ‘never-rip’ jersey was pressed against the waist-line of his light grey suit.” She tried to shake him off, saying if he would give her a card, she’d be sure to reimburse the fare. When he finally offered one and asked for her contact information in return, she wrote, “Reporter, The Times,” on the reverse and handed it back.
“Didn’t think it was so late, have an engagement at 9:45,” he said, and walked off, briskly.
The revelation that one has been underestimated is one of the pleasures of undercover reporting, particularly for young women, so often underestimated: “You thought I was part of your story, but really you are part of mine.” It’s a moment, like the ones where Nelson confronted employers in ways an employee might not be able to, that gave female readers a vicarious thrill.
The harassment Nelson uncovered was pervasive. At one company, where both sexes worked together, the men constantly jostled against the women, and Nelson observed the resulting exhaustion and anger. A “miserable bullet-headed sapling” tipped over a box where she was sitting. At a cigar factory, she walked in to find a big boy chasing the female employees around the room, aiming to tickle them. At a coat factory, frustrated by lack of instructions on how to sew and the unwillingness of the forewoman to tell her how much she’d be earning, she got in a fight with one of the owners. He raised a fist to hit her before she ducked out. A seamstress told her she’d rather work at home than in a factory because of all the abuse.
“I don’t think I can tell you how many ways there are to insult a girl. I have had a foreman just give me a look as I passed in to my machine or handed in my sewing that made me wish I was dead,” she told the reporter.
In her travels, Nelson also encountered those far too young for factory work. In a rough part of the city, on a pitted road lined with garbage, she found thirteen-year-olds sewing frantically at a long table. In another sweatshop, a girl of about twelve brought seamstresses water. “But worse than broken shoes, ragged clothes, filthy closets, poor light, high temperature, and vitiated atmosphere was the cruel treatment by the people in authority,” she wrote. Her series, “City Slave Girls,” went deep into August. Businesses grew increasingly wary. One, armed with her description, refused to hire her and quickly dispatched a representative to the paper to contradict anything she might say about her brief time on the premises. When the Times sent a male reporter to take her place, even he was met with raised eyebrows.
“Aren’t you from the Times?” a woman at a book bindery asked him.
“Do I look like a woman?”
“You might be Nell Nelson disguised in pants for all I know,” she answered.
Demand for the Chicago Times soon strained the capacity of the printing presses. West must have been thrilled. What did it matter that the Never-Rip Company sued the paper for libel, asking $50,000?* Letters to the editor praised “the true knight errant of today . . . a lady reporter for THE TIMES.” The editorial pages hosted a robust debate about the situation of factory women, offering a variety of solutions. They should unionize, or rely on higher tariffs. Many told young women to hire themselves out as servants in the country, suggesting they were only drawn to Chicago by a desire for frivolous entertainment. “If they prefer working at starvation wages in the city . . . let them stay and work. They won’t get my commiseration,” one man wrote in.
This prompted a reply from a woman who’d been a servant on country farms. The wages were terrible, she reported. Sexual harassment was no less rife in rural areas. She had to leave one situation because the master “made himself obnoxious to me,” she reported, and another where one of the sons became “insolent.”
One letter writer delicately pointed out how many proprietors with Jewish last names Nelson frequented. He warned the paper
against leading “an anti-Semitic crusade under the pretense of assisting poor working girls,” and offered to take reporters to many establishments run by Christians. The dominance of Jewish last names lessened a bit.
If editors hadn’t already been intrigued by undercover possibilities, Nelson’s stunt proved their potential. The Globe congratulated itself that Eva McDonald’s articles had been influential—“The highest compliment paid them was in the duplication of their character and scope by such newspapers as the Chicago Times”—but Nelson’s made a much bigger splash. The Times’s rival, the Chicago Tribune, hired Eleanor Stackhouse, another teacher turned reporter, who took the name “Nora Marks,” to do stunt after stunt throughout the fall of 1888, including testing out employment agencies and working in a meat-packing plant.
Reporter Eliza Putnam Heaton took up the challenge that Cockerill deemed too dangerous for Bly—she traveled from Liverpool to the United States in steerage, documenting the experience of immigrants coming from Europe, an account that appeared in papers, including the Brooklyn Times, in October. In the cramped, claustrophobia-inducing lower deck on the Aurania, she met a miner’s wife on her way to join her husband in Pennsylvania, a youth in a cowboy hat with his heart set on Texas, a bevy of Irish girls aiming to work as servants in Boston and New York. Despite arriving exhausted, hollowed out from seasickness, and desperate for fresh fruit, she found the experience a positive one: “I think I shall always be a better American citizen for my emigration. This is still the land of promise.” The piece was subtitled “A Sham Emigrant’s Voyage to New York.”