Sensational

by Kim Todd

  Hearst’s studying of Pulitzer paid off, though he had a distinctly more nativist bent. The Examiner advocated for continuation of the Chinese Exclusion Act, opened an employment agency for white applicants only, and referred to Chinese laborers as “the common enemy.” This was a noted difference from Pulitzer, an immigrant himself, whose paper raised money for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and touted its message of welcome. The same month it published Bly’s asylum exposé, the World hosted a debate between Wong Chin Foo, editor of the Chinese American newspaper, and Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant and labor activist, over the Chinese Exclusion Law. (Kearney was trounced.)

  For the next two years, Hearst and his staff explored how far a paper could go. Could it act as a police force? A rescue squad? A charity? The Examiner sponsored contests, threw parties. When reports came in that a fisherman was stranded on a rock near Point Bonita, his boat smashed and four companions dead, two Examiner reporters staged a rescue. One jumped into the heaving waves to bring the survivor a rope (though one of the boat’s crewmen actually got it to him). The subhead read: “The Examiner Does the Work of the Life Saving Service.” Reporter Allen Kelly headed into the coastal mountains to capture a live grizzly bear to prove the giants weren’t extinct in California. Kelly spent many fruitless months engineering and setting traps, building a series of enormous pens with pine trees as corner posts. Eventually, rumor that some rich San Francisco publisher would pay for a bear reached the high-country communities and a group of shepherds caught one. Kelly bought it, then faced the task of getting the massive, snarling, enraged animal four hundred miles to the Examiner. He did it, though. Hundreds came out to view the animal the first day it was on display in Woodward’s Gardens, a San Francisco zoo and amusement park. The bear, named “Monarch” for the paper that called itself “Monarch of the Dailies” was chained, thin, and covered with bare patches where ropes had worn away the fur, but he became another Hearst triumph.

  This was the environment of the Examiner office when Winifred Sweet showed up, all wild red hair and bluster. She was an experienced newspaperwoman, she assured the paper’s city editor, and she “would cover not only myself but the paper with glory if only he’d give [her] a chance.”

  He gave her a chance, but her copy revealed the lie. One of her first assignments was to cover a flower show, and, nervous, she stayed up all night before it appeared only to find that the printed version contained completely new opening paragraphs. She’d neglected to include the location, the organization, the prizewinners—all of the actual news. Other stories came back with paragraphs crossed out in blue pencil and critical notes written in the margins, including “Don’t moralize. Get at your story.” But she kept at it, gaining confidence, a sense for the telling detail, the ability to infuse an article with personality, until, one day, the editor asked if she’d like a regular job as a reporter for $15 a week.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and then, as she later described in a memoir, Winifred Sweet “walked out into the quiet of a sunny Sunday afternoon hardly knowing where I was or what I was doing.”

  Strangely, though peers described her as “wholesome and pink and white as an apple blossom” and “wholesome as a May morning,” Winifred Sweet fit right in to the Examiner’s alcohol-fueled, extended bachelor party. She liked the reporters; she liked the publisher. Covering a children’s celebration at Golden Gate Park, she watched a man in a light-gray suit and blue tie patiently entertain a boy who couldn’t find his parents. Back at the office, the man in the suit—tie askew and damp spots on the knees of his pants from kneeling to a child’s level—asked what happened with the lost boy. That was her introduction to Hearst, a man she described as “the best boss, the kindest friend, and the simplest-hearted, wisest, most understanding, most forgiving, most encouraging human being it has ever been my luck to know.”

  William Randolph Hearst

  William Randolph Hearst, c. 1904. (Library of Congress)

  She caught Hearst’s eye, too. Unlike East Coast editors who, as Bly discovered, could balk at the impropriety of hiring women, Hearst saw no obstacle. Whatever worked. The Examiner had tried using “girl stunt reporters” before, but the stunts were tame, and the narrators didn’t capture the public imagination. But now this forceful young woman had shown up with her lavish hats and fearlessness. She was self-deprecating on the page and possessed of a good sense of humor off it. In this neophyte, Hearst saw his answer to Nellie Bly.

  Winifred hadn’t been working for the Examiner for long before Bly attempted one of the most audacious stunts to date. In November 1889, Bly volunteered to beat the time for circling the globe laid out in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days. She’d hatched the plan on a Sunday, brainstorming ideas for the World’s Monday editorial meeting, and fantasizing about a vacation. Somewhere far away, like the other side of the globe.

  “If I could do it as quickly as Phileas Fogg did, I should go,” she told herself. Maybe she could do it faster. That would be a story. When she proposed it—fact literally challenging fiction, a stunt to see whether what people could do might surpass what they could imagine—her editor put her off, saying the paper had already considered that idea and wanted to send a man, who wouldn’t need an escort or much luggage. But a year later, she got the go-ahead, if she could be off in two days. And she was, in a long plaid jacket, a snug cap like a newsboy might wear, with no chaperone and only a small satchel for her spare dress and a light raincoat.

  Just as Bly boarded a ship from Hoboken to England, Cosmopolitan magazine sent their own writer, Elizabeth Bisland, around the world in the other direction, speeding on a train from the East across the United States, in an attempt to beat Bly home.* You can almost feel the twist in Hearst’s gut. Why didn’t his paper have a girl racing around the world? The coupons where readers could guess the winning time? The prizes? The spectacle? It was everything he craved, yet someone else had dreamed it up.

  Nellie Bly in her traveling clothes

  Nellie Bly, c. 1890. Feb 21. (Library of Congress)

  The Examiner was stuck playing catch-up, like everyone else, but the editors made the best of it. The stormy, muddy day Bisland arrived in San Francisco, Cosmopolitan urged the steamship, the Oceanic, to leave immediately for Yokohama so she could be on her way, but the owners of the ship wouldn’t budge. Bly was speeding across the Atlantic, bearing down on Europe. But the Oceanic would launch as scheduled, stranding Bisland on land for a few days with nothing to do but watch the minutes tick by. Examiner editors invited her to take a much more leisurely train ride than her recent four-day bullet across the continent, through the western reaches of the city out to lunch at the Cliff House, perched at the edge of the Pacific. With nowhere to go, Bisland admired the flaring sunset, the fat sea lions, the witty male journalists. With the rest of her San Francisco stay, Bisland slept in the Palace Hotel, shopped for light blouses to wear in the upcoming heat, bought silk for “fancy work” for when she got bored on the long ship passage, and talked with a young reporter—Winifred Sweet. Here Winifred, a stunt-reporter-in-training, came face-to-face with an active practitioner, almost as if she was taking notes on what to do, how to be.

  If Sweet read other articles about the two racers, she would have gotten an education about the conflicting messages that swirled around stunt reporters. As Bly’s fame grew, so did the pushback against her and what she represented. Her previous work was described, tepidly, as “distinctive”; profiles highlighted her “peculiar personality” and rather straightforward face saved by her animated smile: “She is a plain every-day girl, with a wonderful head and warm heart.”

  Even Bly, who always seemed to be enjoying herself, had learned to adopt a tone of apology for her fame and her stunts, using the need to support her mother and younger sister as an excuse. She told one paper that two paths faced her as a young writer: “One was the regular routine of fashion articles and the namby-pamby duties usually assigned to women in newspaper offic
es, and the other lay in doing something always startling, if not always original. I foresaw that the latter involved many things distasteful to me, but that I could earn more money, and I had two persons dependent upon me. I fully realized the vulnerability of my vocation—the exposure to charges of indelicacy of both action and motive, but horrible as it was to me I swallowed that, resolved to do my duty according to my conscience.”

  Much easier to praise the more conventional career and beauty of Bisland, who, according to the Examiner, “has never done anything of the Bly order and a great deal of curiosity and surprise was shown here when it was known that she had started on a trip of this kind.” Bisland had been a literary editor and book reviewer. One reporter wrote, “Miss Bisland is universally regarded as one of the handsomest women in New York. [Hers] is a distinctively southern beauty, the soft eyes and long lashes which raise languidly to look at you, the full mouth, the gentle outline of her figure, her dainty small hands and feet all pointing to the South.”

  Bisland herself stressed her feelings of ambiguity at such a high-profile role. Papers spent paragraphs detailing the reporters’ appearance and outfits. She told Winifred, of the trip, “I didn’t realize what a public character it would make me when I started, but everything has its drawbacks, they say. Does it always rain this hard in San Francisco?” And then, with the speed that characterized the whole trip, she was off to Japan to catch Bly, who was racing toward London.

  Back in Illinois, Winifred’s sister Ada had become an even more passionate advocate for improving Chicago, campaigning for cleaner streets and a ban on child labor, among other causes—and would soon be referred to as “The Star-Eyed Goddess of Reform.” Spurred by Nell Nelson’s articles, she planned a Women’s Club lecture on “Influence of the Daily Press.” She saw how newspapers and activists could collaborate to spark change.

  Nelson’s old paper, the Chicago Times, wasn’t going to be much help, though. The paper was crumbling. Rather than reporting scandals, it was the scandal. Rival papers trumpeted the downfall of James J. West, the self-made millionaire who rescued the Times, sent Nelson into the factories, and gave the Girl Reporter a list of suspect doctors. In January 1889, a scant few weeks after the abortion exposé, the paper accused police officers of fencing stolen goods. The officers sued West for libel and had him arrested, though he soon was out on bail. Private detectives guarded the Times office. Editors and reporters carried guns. Things spiraled out of control. On a trip to Washington in the summer of 1889, West showed up at the hotel of his former city editor, Charles Chapin. According to Chapin, the panicked West carried a suitcase full of cash and begged Chapin to flee with him to Europe. Chapin convinced him to go back to Chicago, where he was arrested again, this time for issuing duplicate stock certificates, and writing checks backed by the paper for his own expenses. In late 1889, a judge sentenced West to five years in jail and a $5,000 fine, but this only launched a series of courtroom defeats and victories until he left the publishing business to try his luck in overseas gold mines.

  While West scrambled to stay ahead of the law, Eleanor Stackhouse of the Chicago Tribune continued her investigations as “Nora Marks,” sometimes in disguise, sometimes out. She had great potential as a partner in Ada Sweet’s scheming, and the women knew each other because Ada occasionally served as the Tribune’s literary editor. Like other reporters doing stunts, Marks was in her mid-twenties, courageous, and curious about the hidden side of her city. One slushy January weekday in 1889, she stopped in at the Cook County jail. In the absence of any juvenile facility, young boys were kept there for weeks until they had a trial, or even after, if they weren’t old enough or their crimes serious enough to be sent to reform school. Since the county jail housed only men, she couldn’t trick her way in, so she walked up to the jailer with a letter of introduction.

  Nora Marks promotion in the Chicago Tribune on October 12, 1888

  “Where has ‘Nora Marks’ Been?,” Chicago Tribune, October 12, 1888 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

  “Well, what do you want?” The man with a large ring of keys stared her down.

  “To see the boys in here and get your opinion of their being here.”

  “O, they’re all right. This is the place for them. They’ve been bad.”

  Unimpressed with his level of concern, Marks requested a tour, and followed him through the barred door.

  Here a teacher stood in front of twenty boys with messy hair and ragged clothes, trying to pretend they weren’t curious about the reporter. It seemed clear the boys housed with adult criminals had more opportunity to pick up bad habits than to master grammar and arithmetic. Marks caught the teacher’s eye.

  “You don’t approve of this?”

  “It’s a disgrace to the City of Chicago,” the teacher said.

  Marks noticed a ten-year-old with only a beginner’s book.

  “Haven’t you got further along than that?” she asked.

  “I can’t read,” he volunteered, but added that it didn’t hold him back from his job selling newspapers. He learned the news of the day at the office. And if he forgot, he just yelled something about fire, a murder, or anarchists, and the papers sold.

  The boys mocked the reporter’s aspirations for them, hollering out their crimes as if they were career paths: That boy stole a lead pipe because he wanted to be a plumber, this one stole pants so he could be a tailor. But she launched into a story about her recent stunt in the stockyards, describing the techniques for making cans, wheel by wheel, belt by belt, and they fell silent, awed by the complex machinery.

  Marks thought of herself as a vehicle for reform, the kind of “inconvenient individual who keeps abreast of the moral sentiment of his age and pushes his nose ahead of reform into existing institutions.” Others viewed her this way, too. A month and a half later, the mayor declared the West Madison Station would be repurposed as a separate house of detention for boys. The Women’s Club launched a campaign to raise money for the Norwood Park School, a privately funded industrial school that Marks visited and praised as a good place for boys to learn career skills.

  Ada Sweet had her eye on Marks and on the need for an ambulance in Chicago. She asked the Women’s Club to raise money for the cause, welcoming an amount as little as one cent. But she didn’t stop there.

  A month after Bly and Bisland set out, in December 1889, as Bly sampled curry in Ceylon and Bisland heaved on a storm-tossed ship headed to Hong Kong, the Chicago Tribune featured a new stunt. Nora Marks stepped off a streetcar and pretended to faint, falling into the chaotic intersection of Madison and Halsted, crowded with commuters, ringing with streetcar noise, blazing with electric lights. When bystanders attempted to rouse her, they got no response. Checking her purse, they found no clue to her identity, only change and a handkerchief. She was taken on a bone-shaking ride in a patrol wagon to Cook County Hospital. At the hospital, Marks collected herself enough to declare her name was “Annie Myers,” and request her employer be sent for. Then, when the staff didn’t do it immediately, she emphasized how worried her friends would be in her absence (and revealed how little she wanted to spend the night at the county hospital).

  When the “employer” showed up to take her home, it turned out to be Ada Sweet. The activist played the scene with a gusto that her sister Winifred, the former actress, would have applauded.

  “I can’t see that there is anything the matter with her,” the doctor told Ada. “She may have fainted—she acts a little peculiar.”

  “She is a little odd sometimes,” Ada agreed.

  Ada Sweet had teamed up with Nora Marks to pull off an exposé to raise awareness of the need for an ambulance. Nora would fake an illness that would result in her being transported to the hospital, and Sweet would get her out. And then, to drive home the point, Ada wrote a piece on the same page as Nora’s story (which was entitled “All Jolted Alike”), explicitly advocating for better transportation: “The city should at once organize within the Police Depart
ment an ambulance corps, its members to be trained and drilled in the temporary care, handling, and transportation of sick and injured people. Squads detailed from this corps should be stationed at certain central police stations throughout the city, where they could be reached by the police alarm telephone service.”

  Proud of her work, Ada must have clipped the article and sent it to her sister. A suggestion? A script.

  As it turned out, San Francisco also needed an ambulance. Hospital trips in the police wagon featured wrenching bumps. A carriage ride might take an hour. On Christmas Day 1889, a man hit his head on the cobblestones on Montgomery Street. By the time he got to the City Receiving Hospital, he had to go to the morgue instead. The next day, another man had a fit and died on the way to the hospital. A week into the New Year, timbers fell on a third man, who suffered internal injuries and broken bones. He didn’t make it to a doctor. Neither did a fourth, who had shot himself.

  But if they had survived, more trouble awaited them at this particular hospital, an emergency facility next to the jail. Rumors suggested things were particularly bad for women. Like those locked in an insane asylum, nameless patients were at the mercy of the system—often unconscious or too sick to advocate for themselves. A local doctor, “simply sick of hearing these things continually related of the Receiving Hospital,” kept dropping in unannounced, but couldn’t catch anyone misbehaving. Some contacted the newspapers, relating “queer doings” suffered by a friend. Other times, the victims approached the Examiner themselves. As usual, the precise nature of the problem was obscured. “Young girls wandered in with ugly stories,” Winifred Sweet recalled.