Sensational

by Kim Todd

  And so, on a drizzly Friday afternoon, January 17, 1890, Winifred Sweet slipped on a worn dress, put a dime and several help-wanted ads in an old purse, asked a doctor friend to administer belladonna eye drops to widen her pupils so she seemed ill, and got on a streetcar. Disembarking at Kearny and Market, she put her acting training to good use, weaving and pretending to feel weak. A police officer ignored her. A passerby suggested she head home. Staggering down the sidewalk, she eyed a cluster of men around a cigar shop, and a pile of boxes that might cushion her landing and keep her out of the mud. But she hesitated. As she wrote later: “I kept walking away from it and then back again. I thought I’d have to give it up—that I hadn’t the courage to do anything so dreadful. But I knew that it was my duty as a reporter to go through with it and that if I wasn’t ready for such things I had better choose another business.”

  As she wavered, one of the cigar-shop men asked if she was ill.

  “I am so sick—oh, my head,” she said, then took a breath, clenched her teeth, and fell. He caught her before she hit the boxes.

  The man carried her into a doorway, where a crowd gathered, trying to revive her. One offered to call a carriage. People generally took such good care of her, she worried she’d never make it to the hospital and the stunt would be ruined. But when the police showed up, they dragged her back outside and put her in a covered police wagon, the same one used to take prisoners to jail. The ride was uncomfortable, but she finally arrived at the Receiving Hospital. Here, though she followed Ada’s playbook, things began to veer from the script.

  At first, they checked for sobriety.

  “I can’t smell any whiskey,” said the policeman.

  “Say, did you take opium?” asked someone else.

  Smelling her breath and determining she wasn’t drunk, the medical student and nurse wondered whether she’d been poisoned. She should drink hot mustard water to throw up. Sweet resisted, but they held her nose and forced her head back against the chair until she swallowed some, leaving her teary-eyed and retching.

  The assistant police surgeon, Dr. Harrison, a tall man with a scarred face and surly expression, came in.

  “What’s the matter with her; is she poisoned?” Dr. Harrison asked.

  “We don’t know, Doctor. We’re just giving her an emetic on general principles,” one of the caretakers said. “But we can’t get her to take it.”

  “Give her a good thrashing and she’ll take it,” the doctor said. Then he gripped her head so hard she screamed, then grabbed her shoulder, scraping the skin off, and threw her down on a cot.

  “Let her lie there, and if she makes any fuss, strap her down,” he added, and left.

  If there’s any doubt about her sister’s invisible hand pushing her out into the street, there’s the name Winifred gave when asked for identification by hospital staff: “Annie Myers,” the same one used by Nora Marks in Chicago. Winifred’s article, with the byline “Annie Laurie” (like Bly’s pseudonym, taken from a song), ran under the headline “A City’s Disgrace.” Unlike Marks’s ambulance-focused story, though, Winifred’s article underscored the vulnerability of female public hospital patients at the hand of abusive male doctors.

  In the aftermath, Dr. Harrison revealed himself as even worse than Annie Laurie’s account described. When another journalist confronted Dr. Harrison about Sweet’s report, the doctor said, “She was treated right, and she’ll get the same treatment again if she comes here.”

  “For what was she treated?”

  “Hysteria,” Harrison said. When pressed, he added that forcing a patient to drink hot mustard and water was the proper treatment, “that or a good, strong cathartic or an injection of spirits of turpentine.” In the face of the reporter’s astonishment, he doubled down: “Yes, anything to give her something else to think about. . . . The best thing for a young woman like that is______.” Regarding the blank space, the reporter commented, “The suggestion that Dr. Harrison made is not printable. It was couched in language such as one would expect from an inmate of a drunk cell.”

  A rival paper, which knew the rumors of hospital abuses, editorialized that “all the numerous complaints made recently against the Receiving Hospital are to be visited on Harrison, who will be presented as a burnt offering to the indignant public.” Maybe so. When he showed up to the Examiner offices to question their motives in running the story, the city editor punched him in the face. After pressure from the governor and questions from doctors with more conventional methods of treating hysteria, Dr. Harrison was suspended and eventually dismissed. The police commissioners sent to Chicago for a single, used ambulance, which arrived several months later.

  The hospital article ran the same day as “The Race Grows Exciting,” which hyped the approaching finish line of the round-the-world caper. After keeping pace with Bly almost the whole way, Bisland had just missed her boat from France by three hours and would have to take a much slower one.

  While the global contest was a boost for women’s sense of independence, it also turned Bisland and Bly into curiosities rather than authors with something significant to say. The power of stunt reporters had originally been that with their first-person focus they increased the number of female voices telling stories and female characters featured on the front page. But while Bisland and Bly would write books later, for the duration of the round-the-world stunt, they were almost exclusively written about rather than writing themselves, except for their brief telegraph dispatches. This pushed stunt reporting into increasingly uncomfortable territory, and Bly chafed at it. In a January 22, 1890, Examiner article documenting Bly’s arrival in San Francisco, she was figured as an inanimate object: “The most precious bit of freight that the Oceanic brought into this port yesterday morning came consigned to the Examiner. It was a package of Pretty Girl, with more brains than most girls who are not pretty and it was invoiced as One Globe-Trotter: Nellie Bly.” The reporter asked Bly whether she had the chance to write anything. She said no, and a bit of frustration seeped through: “What was the end of the Cronin trial?* I want to interview you. I don’t want to be interviewed.” Then she hopped on the Southern Pacific, a special bound for Chicago.

  The Examiner editorial page the same day outlined the stakes of the trip, saying that what might be most surprising to a European audience was “the fact that two young, unmarried women should start on a three months’ journey unchaperoned. That is a peculiarly American feature of the affair. It is not so much that they should be going around the world, although that, of course, is remarkable, but that they should be going some thousands of miles in any direction alone. But to Americans that is not strange at all.” And it offered a hint of things to come, adding, “If the Examiner’s Annie Laurie should be detailed to-morrow to go to Central Africa and interview Tippoo Tib, she would start off as soon as she could pack a valise and think nothing about it.”

  Part II

  Swashbuckling

  1890-1896

  Chapter 7

  1890–1891

  Under the Gold Dome

  But Mr. Dashwood rejected any but thrilling tales, and as thrills could not be produced except by harrowing up the souls of the readers, history and romance, land and sea, science and art, police records and lunatic asylums, had to be ransacked for the purpose. Jo soon found that her innocent experience had given her but few glimpses of the tragic world which underlies society, so regarding it in a business light, she set about supplying her deficiencies with characteristic energy.

  —Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1868–1869

  On January 25, 1890, as thousands of people thronged the Jersey City Depot, Bly disembarked. When her boots hit the New Jersey platform, stopping the clock, cannons fired. Roses and lilies, thrown from the crowd, pelted her. The three official timekeepers checked their pocket watches, determining she had circumnavigated the globe in seventy-two days, six hours, and ten minutes. Jersey City mayor Orestes Cleveland stopped her on the way to her carriage, welcoming
her, making a speech, though struggling to be heard over the din.

  “The American Girl will no longer be misunderstood. She will be recognized as pushing, determined, independent, able to take care of herself alone and single-handed wherever she may go,” he announced.

  Bly, once so isolated in small-town Pennsylvania, had chatted with Jules Verne in Amiens, gambled in an Egyptian city near the Suez Canal, visited a camel market in Aden, bought a monkey in Singapore. At some point, as Bly was speeding through the heartland, it became clear she was going to do it. The speeches had already begun as a special train carrying her mother and reporters from the San Francisco Examiner, the Boston Globe, and the New York World met her in Philadelphia to ride with her the last hundred miles. Behind on her sleep as she raced the clock all the way across the country, she still had enough energy to give an interview to a “little newspaper girl” from Nebraska, joke with the men of the Chicago Press Club, and pull off her cap and wave it at the crush of people at train stations from Fresno, California, to Dodge City, Kansas.

  Then police carved a path through the crowd so she and her mother could board the ferry for Manhattan, where she threaded through the packed streets of Park Row to the World offices to bask in the congratulations of friends and colleagues.

  Some sniped at her, at the unseemly self-promotion of it all. But if the admiring glances, and cheers, and heaps of flowers and congratulatory telegrams were any evidence, the trip was a triumph. Once again, she’d sized up a task that seemed impossible, taken a perilous leap, and landed on her feet with grace. Maybe this would make her career and her financial situation more secure. And she won. Elizabeth Bisland had missed a fast boat from Le Havre in France, then a German steamer from Bremen, and was bobbing somewhere in the Atlantic, on a slow ship from Liverpool, days from shore.

  But that spring, supposed to be on a victory tour, giving lectures to a crush of fans, Bly didn’t feel triumphant. After all the publicity she generated, the board games, the contest, the banner headlines from coast to coast, the World refused to pay her what she was worth. She’d fought with her editors before leaving for the West; it seemed the paper just wanted to squeeze all they could out of her and then toss her aside. Her love life was in turmoil. Rumors had her engaged to Frank Ingram, the assistant superintendent of Blackwell’s asylum who’d been kind to her there. Simultaneous reports had her engaged to James Metcalfe, an editor at Life magazine who’d shown up on the train at Philadelphia to escort her on the last leg of her round-the-world jaunt. She denied both commitments, and no marriage was forthcoming. Empty seats plagued her lectures. In late March, she missed her train from Chicago and had to pay $100 for a “special” out of her own pocket to make her scheduled talk at the Milwaukee Press Club.

  Nellie Bly game in the World, January 26, 1890

  “Round the World with Nellie Bly.” World, January 26, 1890 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

  So when a gushing young woman, all naive confidence, approached her in Milwaukee and confided that she was about to board a train herself to start a job at the World, then declared she wanted to write straight news, not perform stunts like Bly, perhaps the veteran reporter wasn’t in the mood to exhibit her trademark cheer. Bly was only a year older than the woman who waylaid her, twenty-five to her twenty-four, but had much more life experience, much less raw enthusiasm. Though the woman described Bly’s and Nelson’s exposés as “wonderful things,” she was pulling moral rank. While it had been a genre for only three years, stunt reporting was already considered not quite respectable. As the young woman remembered it, her chat with Bly took on “a delicate layer of frost.”

  Not long before, the woman, named Elizabeth Jordan, aspired to be a nun. Something about the quiet intensity of the life of the Convent of Notre Dame in Milwaukee, where she’d gone to school, called to her. The walled garden with its fountain. The trees and the paths that wound through it. The ritual by which the novices took vows to enter the cloistered order that shunned the public unless called to action. It drew her in.

  But not everyone was convinced. In the photography studio for her graduation picture, Jordan conveyed a certain sense of contradiction. Yes, she had dressed in all white, looped a cross around her neck, and wore a sober expression. But her jaw was still rounded with traces of childhood. Her dress, far from severe, featured a skirt of stacked ruffles, trailed lace at the sleeves. Holding a jaunty umbrella, an explosion of curling white plumes on her hair, Jordan looked more prepared to stroll a fashionable boulevard than sink to her knees on a chapel’s stone floor. Hearing her religious aspirations stated out loud could make her friends burst into laughter.

  Her parents were similarly skeptical. While Banks’s editor told her to be anything but a newspaper girl, Jordan’s parents had another problem altogether. Her father, a Milwaukee real estate developer, and her musician mother who made Jordan practice her piano for two hours a day, had other hopes for their bright, bubbly daughter. Please let her be anything, they thought, but a nun.

  One night, when she was seventeen and recently graduated from the convent school, her father sat at the desk in his study and made her a deal: if she would put aside thoughts of the convent for four years, he would bankroll her other dream—to be a writer—even as far as helping her to Chicago and New York, if that’s what she wanted. The hustle of a newspaper office would test her religious resolve. And his plan seemed to be paying off. In Milwaukee, she edited the women’s page for Peck’s Sun, then wrote for Chicago papers, and finally took a “vacation” to New York that found her in the editorial offices of the World, asking the gruff, foul-mouthed Colonel Cockerill for a job. And he agreed. Six months later, she was on her way.

  Like Chicago, in 1890, New York high society rested on top of a subterranean world of poverty. The wave of immigration throughout the previous decade meant that four-fifths of city residents were born elsewhere or children of those born elsewhere. And the city was straining to house them all. Whole families lived together in single rooms in tenement houses with little light or fresh air. Strangers paid 5 cents a night for space on a mattress or a corner to sleep in. Fire and disease were devastating in these closely packed quarters. In the summer, residents fled the stifling rooms and slept on the roofs. In the winter, homeless boys clustered around Newspaper Row, sometimes picking up work selling papers, sometimes just jockeying for space on the grates emitting heat from the underground printing presses. Narrow alleys offered space for gangs to gather, gangs that exploited the poor for economies of drugs and prostitution.

  Stunt reporters discovered creative ways to cover hazardous housing, and others followed. Jacob Riis, a police reporter for the New York News Association, had been documenting life in the tenements. In Dickens-inflected, apocalyptic language he described his encounters: “A horde of dirty children play on the broken flags about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it; it is the best it can do. These are the children of the tenements, the growing generation of the slums.”

  But his real innovation was photography. He often arrived in tenements unannounced and caught his subjects unawares. They frequently had surprised or bleary expressions, as if they’d just been jerked out of sleep. The technique wasn’t kind, but the resulting images felt very candid, very real. Since January 1888, when he’d compiled a hundred photographs and presented a slide show called “The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York” to the New York Association of Amateur Photographers, he had been offering wealthy New Yorkers a view into the homes of their less fortunate neighbors. Not long before Jordan came to Manhattan, Riis published an article in Scribner’s, soon to be a book, called “How the Other Half Lives.”

  When Jordan finally arrived in spring 1890, after dreaming of this moment for six months, she encountered the World in the middle of one of its biggest reinventions. No longer content with the dim, rented building where Bly talked her way onto the elevator, Pulitzer was constructing
the most grandiose structure he and his architects could conjure. The man himself was rarely on-site, roaming the globe, increasingly blind, constantly sick, sometimes with his wife and four children, often without. But he still wanted the polish on each marble column to reflect his vision of what journalism could be. It wasn’t there yet, though. Naked beams and a maze of scaffolding created a sense of disarray. And things felt ragged inside, too.

  Bly was away lecturing and, as a result of her blowup with management, wouldn’t be coming back. Her book Around the World in 72 Days would be out soon, and she had a contract to write serialized fiction for the New York Family Story Paper. Nell Nelson, who continued to produce a steady stream of articles, was distracted. Her younger sister had vanished. In March 1890, a headline in the Chicago Tribune read: “Miss Virginia Cusack Missing.” On Sunday morning, Virginia said she was going to church but never came home. Her family was particularly alarmed, because Virginia didn’t seem well, distraught over a disagreement with her principal that resulted in her reassignment to a new school. The next day, though, a telegram arrived from Niagara Falls, saying that, instead of showing up for her new class, Virginia had boarded a train to New York, where she was planning to stay with her journalist sister, Nell.

  Nelson at the time had been advocating for a New York State bill that restricted working hours of women to ten a day and provided for eight female factory inspectors to check for functioning fire escapes and bathrooms with running water. Inspectors also could keep an eye out for sexual harassment and child labor. Stunt reporters’ investigations showed the importance of women watching out for vulnerable populations. Their work inherently made the case for female doctors, prison matrons, factory inspectors. Nelson continued to cover other topics as well—a few days after her sister’s arrival, she wrote up a lecture advocating against corsets—but family troubles often occupied her mind. (Whatever ailed her sister Virginia, it must have been serious; she died at the end of the year.) Perhaps that’s why Jordan, who admired Nelson, described her as “cordial” but someone who “kept very much to herself and had no intimates.”