by Kim Todd
A new arrival, Jordan found herself caught between two editors, the veteran Cockerill, who hired her, and the upstart Ballard Smith, who was edging Cockerill out as circulation slipped. Smith had little time for a Cockerill protégé like Jordan. Struggling to get into print, Jordan was given trivial assignments, which, often as not, went nowhere. Before long, Jordan was ejected from the main office and sent to write about Long Island summer resorts for the World’s Brooklyn edition. The demotion, after all her big plans to awe the city with her journalistic prowess, was humiliating.
“I was out of New York almost as definitely as if I were working in China,” she commented.
Though the job wasn’t the kind she’d dreamed about, it wasn’t unpleasant. She wrote well and quickly received a raise for what didn’t seem like much work. Her mother, out for a visit, was pleased to see that her daughter’s life consisted of sampling resort after resort. And then, a meaty story fell into this idyllic beat and she resolved to use it to prove her mettle. President Harrison’s family was vacationing at an ocean-side cottage at Cape May. The cottage stirred controversy because it was a $10,000 gift to Harrison’s wife from a syndicate owned by a Philadelphia department store magnate. Some suspected it was a bribe. If the whiff of criminality wasn’t enough, the nation was obsessed with Harrison’s toddler grandson, Baby McKee, and clamored for news of him. No reporters had been able to get in. Jordan showed up at the door in a white linen suit and charmed Mrs. Harrison into inviting her for a conversation in the cool cottage rooms, simply appointed with cane furniture and throw rugs. Jordan emerged with columns full of house details and the antics of Baby McKee, in a report both lighthearted and rigorous. (Mrs. Harrison claimed not to know who had paid for the house, but Jordan interviewed donors in Philadelphia who seemed to view it as much more than a token of affection.) After this scoop, Jordan was called back to the World’s main office. And the president paid back the $10,000.
Back to the jostling, the cursing, the cigar smoking, the company of the best reporters the country had to offer. Legendary editors pushed her prose; she learned by reading the stories selected for praise and posted on the wall, by seeing which papers sold many copies, by reading recommended authors, by watching what phrases or sentences lit a fire in the editor’s eyes.
A letter from the Sunday World editorial department to Commander Robert Peary, the polar explorer, showed the kind of articles they prized. The paper had hired Peary’s wife, Josephine, for $1,000 to write a series about going north as her husband made another attempt to reach the North Pole. Peary suggested topics like features of the country and lives of the inhabitants. But an editor wrote back detailing how it should be done:
“The first story should deal with Mrs. Peary’s own feelings regarding the upcoming trip.” It should be told in her unique voice. Her confidence compared with the last journey north. Her thoughts about her husband’s polar ambitions. Her clothes. Her planned meals. In short: “every little detail calculated particularly to interest women.” Articles should include enough facts about the sweep of the expedition to be newsworthy but, the editor stressed, the whole thing should be “distinctly from Mrs. Peary’s own point of view and expressed in her own way.”
Though she insisted she wanted no part of stunt reporting, Jordan leaped at the chance to go on horseback into the mountains of Virginia and Tennessee and report on what she found there. The framing—warnings of the danger that she cheerfully ignored, the stress on her being a woman doing something unconventional—was very similar to the setup of a stunt, but she saw it as something distinct but still thrilling: “To me the southern mountain assignment was merely a high adventure; and a high adventure it remained from start to finish.”
Jordan took the train to Bristol in Virginia. In the city, everyone told her not to venture into the long, narrow mountains that rippled across the state. Hiring a guide and ignoring the advice, she pressed beyond Big Stone Gap, a small town clustered at the side of the Powell River, crossing streams and tramping through muddy ravines on horseback. Good thing the horses have more sense than the riders, her guide commented. Finally, they arrived at the rustic, one-room log cabin of the Baptist preacher Joseph C. Wells, surrounded by a rail fence. Again relying on her ability to put strangers at ease, whether wives of presidents or backwoods preachers, Jordan was invited in.
The intense quiet and slow pace was far from the pressure of New York and the rush for the newest, most entertaining, most shocking thing. The stars felt near; animal cries echoed in the dark. Newspapers existed as an illustration to be tacked to the wall, a bit of art to brighten the room, along with the red calico curtains. Here was a man living not far from where he was born, on $30 a year, spending his days walking over mountains to marry, bury, and preach. There seemed a bit of regret for the prayer-filler road not taken when Jordan mused: “In the nineteenth century there are comparatively few of us who are laying all our treasures up above.”
The piece was more than a quaint sketch. It was a eulogy for this way of life. Coal and iron deposits drew outsiders to the area; meadows and forests were being turned into mining camps. Prospectors squinted, and in the narrow valley and dirt roads could make out a new Pittsburgh. Train routes competed to pass through town. None had reached it yet, but they were coming.
And the preacher, whose life to this point had such a small radius, whose birthplace might be turned into a hotel, was going to have to move. Maybe to Tennessee, he said. This portrait, her gameness in going after it, and her general stamina cemented her place on the staff.
But the World wasn’t all literary heaven. Lewd suggestions and abusive treatment by sources, editors, and fellow reporters could wear a writer down. Newspaper offices weren’t immune from the kind of harassment Nelson documented in factories. Men made passes, winked, said degrading things that hollowed out Jordan’s confidence. She felt that “the comments not only smirched one but that, in a way, I might be responsible for them. Possibly something in me drew them out!” It wasn’t until Jordan had lunch with older writers, heard their stories of harassment and saw how it distressed them, that she began to think it wasn’t her fault.
Jordan started to write short stories about newspaper life in which she puzzled out some of these thoughts. In one a young, naive, convent-educated reporter, Miss Van Dyke, aware that a new editor found her stories colorless, volunteered to go to a rowdy neighborhood to report on a post-election victory celebration, despite the fact that she was bound to be jostled in the streets and witness bad behavior. When she returned, colleagues back at the office who had always treated her with care taunted her and dropped liquor bottles and cigarettes on her desk. She garnered no more respect than the brassy-haired, heavily made-up woman who “did sensational stories.” The cruel teasing didn’t let up until she finally quit and got married to a fellow reporter to save her reputation.
Nights were their own challenge. Newspaper Row, with its posh editors’ offices, was adjacent to the Bowery, with its brothels and bars. The staff stayed late to get the freshest news for the morning papers, often finishing up past midnight. At some point, the typewriters stopped and the rooms fell silent. Generally unmarried, with families (if they had them) far away, female reporters faced the question every day: How were they going to get safely home?
The streets were often lit—where they were lit—by gas lamps that didn’t do much to illuminate shapes in darkened doorways. The walk to the elevated train, or streetcar, or horse carriage was marked by uncertainty. Was that noise the suck of mud on carriage wheels or something more sinister?
Once, at her first job in St. Paul, Elizabeth Banks had stayed so late that the cable cars stopped running. When her editor asked for a male reporter to get her to her house safely, the one who grudgingly volunteered commented that female reporters were “nothing but nuisances in a place like this at midnight. While I’m walking home with her, I’ll ask the young lady to marry me, and that’ll put an end to all our troubles.” Accepting help cle
arly meant submitting to humiliation. Banks rejected the offer and started walking by herself, terrified, until she met a policeman who escorted her. It became a pleasant routine, until he asked to marry her, too.
And Jordan worked later than most. At times, she wouldn’t be done until three or four in the morning. One night, she got off at the elevated railroad near Midtown and started walking fast, as was her habit. On an isolated, ill-lit street, the driver of a cab gestured to her. A man was already inside.
“Get in, Miss,” the driver said. “It’ll be worth while.” Flooded with foreboding, she sprinted toward Broadway, the cab following, until she reached the blazing electric streetlamps of the large street and made her way home, “safely inside, with that door barred against the universe.”
But, unlike her short-story heroine, she persisted. Jordan neither quit nor got married. The moral of the story was not her moral. (And Miss Van Dyke’s realization at the end—“After all, a woman’s place is in a home!”—was not something Jordan believed.) Ballard Smith and her male colleagues gradually came around to accepting her—to the point of staging a formal ceremony to urge her to throw off the habit of the nunnery, the good manners and politeness, the “I beg your pardons.” It was a marriage to words and grime and scandal, the inverse of the ritual she’d admired where novices took vows to enter the cloistered order. Would she, they asked, “drop the damned formality and the convent polish and be a regular fellow like the rest of them?” Jordan agreed she would, and they all went out to celebrate at a French restaurant known for fine wines.
By December 1890, the Pulitzer Building was complete. Dwarfing competitors on either side, like a broad-shouldered soldier in a gold helmet looming over the peasants, it was the tallest office building in the world. At an opening celebration, politicians flooded in to offer congratulations. Dozens of carrier pigeons were released from the dome, clapping blue-gray wings and bearing the paper’s messages of self-congratulation wired to their tails. Lights at the crest ensured the towering structure was visible for miles. The World touted the building’s superlatives, not overlooking the smallest details: 375 feet tall! 26 stories! 16 miles of steel beams! 1,000 windows! 15,650 feet of water pipes! 57 urinals!
The Pulitzer Building
Pulitzer Building, New York City, c. 1909 (Library of Congress)
Unable to attend, Pulitzer sent a telegram from Germany, read by Cockerill at the ceremony: “God grant that this structure be the enduring home of a newspaper forever unsatisfied with merely printing news—forever fighting every form of Wrong—forever Independent—forever advancing in Enlightenment and Progress—forever wedded to truly Democratic ideas—forever aspiring to be a Moral Force—forever rising to a higher plane of perfection as a public institution.”
His influence announced itself, as well, in a sign posted in the offices: “Accuracy! Terseness! Accuracy!”
And Jordan felt complete, too. After months of striving, she had finally arrived, able to walk through the high-arch entrance of the World, under a balcony with four statues representing “Art,” “Literature,” “Science,” and “Invention” and a gilt sign declaring PULITZER BUILDING, into a rotunda with a floor of white marble, past the windows for dropping off payments and buying newspapers, and into the publication office. Underneath it all, the dragon in the lair, the presses roared and shuddered in the basement, printing up to three hundred thousand copies an hour. The public could watch the long strips of white paper be stamped with the day’s news from a special viewing gallery.
From the high observation deck on top of the building, rather than contemplating God in a walled convent, Jordan could survey the entire city, the sharp spires, the stacks puffing smoke, the tenements leaning tiredly into one another, the elevated train reaching deep into the nest of uptown, the post office, the people, the rooms all squirming with secret lives, the Brooklyn Bridge over the ship-packed East River, the distant Hudson, and as far beyond as a hungry eye could go.
The World’s audacity continued to spread across the country. Out in San Francisco, Winifred Sweet had none of Jordan’s reservations about sensational reporting. She slipped into the stunt-girl costume with ease, diving into oceans of trouble and gleefully paddling around. In the months since fainting at Market and Kearny, “Annie Laurie” visited a leper colony in Hawaii, sought a divorce from unscrupulous lawyers and testified in the resulting libel trial, interviewed a murderer, and canned fruit for low wages.
Later, writing about her affection for the city, she highlighted quiet pleasures: the hummingbirds that visited her garden, fig trees, and the view of Mount Tamalpais across the bay. But she savored the chaos, too.
In a single day, Sweet later recalled, she reported on “a minister’s meeting from ten to twelve; interviewed Lottie Collins, the famous ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay dancer; went to see a Russian Bishop of the Greek Church and asked him if it were true that he burned an orphan asylum full of children to get rid of some incriminating papers; and went down to the morgue to try to help identify a poor girl who had found the sweet delirium of youth suddenly turning into somber tragedy.”
Winifred Sweet as “Annie Laurie” in the San Francisco Examiner, August 17, 1890
Annie Laurie in a Cannery, San Francisco Examiner, August 17, 1890 (Newspapers.com)
Throughout 1890 and 1891, the paper trumpeted her name, building the brand. The Examiner reprinted a column by Arthur McEwen that referred to her as “the ‘Nelly Bly’ of San Francisco” but insisted she was even better: “I have not met Nellie Bly, but my impression of her, from what I have read and heard, is that she is a chipper, kittenish and perhaps somewhat hoodlumesque young person—just the sort of newspaper female you’d rather not know. Annie Laurie is not of this variety at all.” McEwen praised Laurie for being unobtrusive, wearing subdued clothing, and needing days to recover her nerves after one of her courageous feats.* He suggested she turn her skills to novel writing—“a womanly book and a pure one.” The message was clear to aspiring female journalists: be anything but “hoodlumesque.” It was, confoundingly, the opposite of the advice Jordan received—that she needed to lighten up and forget her convent ways.
Though she got her start echoing a Nora Marks stunt, Sweet also experimented with new material, exposing false advertising aimed at women. In one report, she described an acquaintance, her nose an odd tint of white, her cheeks smeared with purple, who happily showed off her $7 haul of bottles and tins labeled “Face Bleach,” “Freckle Lotion,” and “Wrinkle Unguent.”
“Just wait till you read about ’em,” the young woman crowed and handed Sweet the pamphlet “How to Be Beautiful” by Gervaise Graham, the “Beauty Doctor.”
Sweet sent the collection to a chemist, then published the products’ extravagant promises alongside his analysis (including an illustration of his letter, giving the piece a documentary feel). The Wrinkle Unguent was lard and wax scented with almond oil. The Freckle Lotion and Face Bleach contained corrosive sublimate (now known as mercury chloride, which the expert called “a most virulent poison”; modern chemists would agree). The Cucumber and Elder Flower Cream was cottonseed oil and almond oil. The value of each, he estimated, was less than 2 cents. Sweet’s friend deflated as she listened to the report and finally tore the booklet to shreds. The title of the article was “Valueless and Poisonous,” with the subhead “‘Annie Laurie’ Exposes the Dangers of Quack Cosmetics.” With this, Sweet risked offending advertisers and the whole beauty industry that propped up the women’s pages.*
As Sweet expanded her range, she caught the eye of one of her Examiner coworkers. He was not physically overbearing, but handsome and chivalrous. On nights when everyone had to stay late, he would put on his hat and coat and escort female colleagues to their cab or streetcar. A writer himself, he traveled with hobos and worked alongside fruit pickers, but he was more known as an encouraging editor. Despite the many warnings about the dangers awaiting young women leading public lives, Winifred apparently responded to his atten
tion. And despite the admonishments that office flirtation would lead to dismissal of a female reporter as being “pretty and coquettish” and having a reputation as a “fool,” Winifred married Orlow Black in June 1891. Her son was born seven months later.
Chapter 8
1892
Exercising Judgment
From the eagerness of woman’s nature competitive brain-work among gifted girls can hardly but be excessive, especially if the competition be against the superior brain-weight and brain-strength of man.
—William Withers Moore, The Lancet, 1886
In the tiny jail cell, in Taunton, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1892, reporter Kate Swan McGuirk perched on a provided chair, prepared to interview the inmate, and took in the room. Friends of the prisoner had attempted to decorate; a table held flowers, books, and a fruit dish. But these small reminders of the prisoner’s wealth and status couldn’t erase the stark white paint; the narrow bed; the bucket; the high, barred window that offered a glimpse of trees on the jail’s manicured grounds and ivy that smothered the walls.