Sensational

by Kim Todd

  “What’s he saying? What’s he saying,” asked the Sun reporter.

  “He’s saying that she’s innocent,” Jordan replied.

  As the trial wound down, the fact of Borden’s sex took center stage, both for the defense and prosecution. In the final days, crowds gathered on the verandas of surrounding houses, not wanting to miss the verdict. In closing arguments, a prosecuting attorney said, “A woman’s cunning devised how to cover up that dress.” In response, the defense concluded, “I ask you to consider this defendant as a woman, and to say to the Commonwealth, whom you represent, ‘It is unjust to hold her a minute longer.’” The judge’s jury instructions included the command, “you must consider the sex, size, and strength of the assailant.” He emphasized the fact that even if Borden’s testimony didn’t explain what happened, no one else’s did either: “The case is said to be mysterious; the defendant is not required to clear it up.”

  When the jury came in after deliberating less than two hours and declared Lizzie Borden “not guilty,” Borden collapsed in her seat, almost insensible, her head against the rail in front of her. Amid the applause and cheering, a reporter for the New Bedford Evening Journal recalled that during the announcement of the verdict, Kate Swan McGuirk was sitting behind him. The reporters knew one another as editors of rival high school newspapers, and when he turned to marvel with McGuirk at the outcome, he found her overcome with joy, weeping.

  Jordan, too, felt justice had been done. “Miss Borden’s vindication was clear, complete, and absolute,” she wrote in her report of the trial’s final day.

  But at least in her imagination, Jordan allowed for a different outcome. At the time of Borden’s arrest, Jordan continued to venture into fiction. In her short story “Ruth Herrick’s Assignment” a bold young reporter at the New York Searchlight, eager to prove herself with a scoop, is sent to get an exclusive interview with Helen Brandow, accused of poisoning her husband. Gossip declared Brandow—young, good-looking, and from a respected family—certain to be acquitted. But she refused to talk with the press. Ruth, though, impressed the warden with her credentials. He had read her articles and had seen the illustration of her face in the paper—and he let her in.

  Ruth Herrick was struck, almost immediately (as was McGuirk) by the distorted media image of the person in front of her. Brandow wasn’t beautiful. Had the male reporters even looked at her, or had they been describing a woman of their imagination? And she was composed to the point of coldness. The prisoner told the reporter she trusted her to represent her accurately—not overwrought and sobbing. Yet through their conversation, her composure began to crack.

  Her marriage, Brandow said, had been miserable. Within a month of the ceremony, she realized her mistake: “He spent his time devising ways of persecuting and humiliating me, and his efforts were eminently successful.” Her body was still marked by his beatings; she waited in her room at night in dread of his kicking at the door. When he attacked her mother, it was too much.

  “That night I killed him,” she told the astonished reporter.

  Jordan ably described Ruth Herrick’s quandary. The prisoner had handed her a scoop beyond her editor’s fantasies: a confession. The article would earn her applause and admiration. On the other hand, if she kept quiet, the woman would probably go free. As Herrick debated, she heard her internal voice as one of a lawyer: “Something within the reporter asserted itself as counsel for her and spoke and would not down.” Though she couldn’t serve on a jury, Ruth had the opportunity to mete out justice.

  “I am going to forget this interview,” the reporter told the prisoner.

  In doing so, she gestured at theories that wouldn’t be named until a century later, like battered woman’s syndrome and jury nullification. Ruth offered the woman a defense that the courtroom, as constructed at the time, wouldn’t provide.

  The 1894 story published in Cosmopolitan raised many eyebrows. The timing seemed suspicious. People imagined Jordan, one of the most high-profile correspondents to report the Borden trial, might have heard and suppressed a similar confession.

  “So, Ruth Herrick, that’s the kind of reporter you are, is it?” Jordan’s managing editor wrote her.

  Jordan insisted she thought of the story before she’d heard of Lizzie Borden, but her imagined interview has many similarities to McGuirk’s real one. And later, when Borden resolutely stayed in Fall River, instead of moving to Europe as Jordan thought she might, spent time with theater people instead of dutiful churchgoers, and seemed to revel in her newfound wealth, even Jordan experienced a whisper of doubt. Why, when her sister began to lose her mind, did Borden hold her close at home, where she could keep an eye on her? Children began to chant:

  Lizzie Borden took an ax

  Gave her mother forty whacks;

  And when she saw what she had done,

  She gave her father forty-one.*

  And people began to wonder whether the jury hadn’t been swayed by their inability to conceive that a wealthy, white Christian woman could do such a thing. Had the men been blinded by their lack of imagination? Perhaps. But no one suggested they weren’t fit to serve.

  If Kate Swan McGuirk wrote more about the Borden trial for one of her many employers, there is no obvious record of it. She spent at least part of the blazing June of 1893 working on a piece about “Summer Homes of the Washington Cabinet.” These straitlaced topics made it all the more surprising that three years after Borden’s acquittal, she would be considered the most notorious stunt reporter of them all. And she would be egged on by assignments from Elizabeth Jordan—who went to New York determined to avoid stunts—in Jordan’s role as editor of the World’s Sunday magazine.

  As the Borden jury sweated in Massachusetts in the summer of 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition opened seven miles south of Chicago. The vision of Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Daniel Burnham, the fair promoted the country’s triumphs in the slightly more than one hundred years of its existence. Otherworldly white buildings in the Beaux Arts style lined the Court of Honor, borrowing Grecian grandeur with their columns and arches. The vast Palace of the Mechanic Arts housed towers of electric lights, and telephones, both local (for eavesdropping on the German Village in the Midway) and long distance (for listening to conversations in New York). The thirty-acre Manufactures and Liberal Arts building showcased Japanese vases, Swiss carvings, Italian glassware, as well as clocks, embroidery, and lacquer boxes from all over the world. Water features wound their way through the grounds, and one might see a gondola floating by, or stumble on a wigwam. States and countries all had space to display their food, clothing, crafts. Cultures smashed up against one another in a disorienting yet tantalizing way. Visitors marveled at belly dancers on the “Street in Cairo” exhibit, clutched each other’s hands 250 feet above the ground on the first-ever Ferris wheel, sampled Cracker Jacks, and sipped a fizzy strawberry crush. Some days they picked their way through sticky mud; other days they luxuriated in the breeze off Lake Michigan. But they came. Over the course of its six-month run, 20 million visitors attended the fair, eight hundred of them journalists.

  Eva McDonald Valesh, formerly “Eva Gay” and now a union activist, lectured on “Woman Wage Workers,” representing Minnesota at the fair’s women’s congress. Kate Swan McGuirk had visited Chicago with a delegation of senators to report on fair preparations. Victoria Earle Matthews rode the elevated railway that looped through the grounds, past the Foreign Building and the Fisheries Building, recalling it as a “dream of beauty.” Ida B. Wells organized and distributed a pamphlet, “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exhibition,” drawing attention to the country’s brutal history regarding its Black citizens, and protesting their lack of representation at the fair.

  But the glitter of prosperity, like the gilded statue of a woman, arms aloft, representing the Republic, was a facade. Just as the fair opened in May, the stock market took a sickening plunge. Spooked depositors took their mone
y out of banks, which then failed: 642 by the end of the year. Unable to get credit, farmers couldn’t transport grain and cotton to market. Textile mills stopped production. Iron and steel companies locked their doors. Railroads went under. Unemployment soared. The pain rippled throughout the country. Elizabeth Jordan’s father, a real estate developer in Milwaukee, lost everything, leaving her parents financially dependent on their journalist daughter. She joined the ranks of reporters supporting family with their wages. Still, people flocked to the fair.

  On October 24, in the exposition’s last days, a sportswriter and stable owner stumbled into the Chicago Press Club and collapsed. A doctor found him unable to speak and paralyzed on one side. At the hospital, he recovered enough to say he was exhausted, having spent the past week walking the city, looking for his wife and his three-year-old son. They’d been visiting her mother in St. Louis and, on October 16 a letter arrived, saying they were on their way to Chicago and the fair. And then he heard nothing else. He tried to trace her route from the train station but couldn’t find any clues.

  His wife, Elizabeth A. Tompkins, was a writer, too, specializing in knowledgeable stories about horse racing. The job had taken her to London not long before. She’d just written a glowing report about the Saratoga track, the lush lawns, the bright shirts, the holiday atmosphere. And yes, they’d fought about whether she should keep writing (her preference) or quit to take care of their son (his preference). But he was sure something had gone amiss. Like the actual cities of San Francisco and New York, Chicago’s fairgrounds, dubbed the “White City,” tempted young women with promises of glamour and excitement. And sometimes they never came back, for reasons that could be quite sinister.

  Or not. Her mother soon received a letter in St. Louis, saying it might be a long time before Tompkins got in touch again, but “no news is good news.” Once again, the expected story—a girl lured to ruin by bright city lights—was perhaps not the real one.

  In New York that winter, during a period of bitter cold, the impact of the financial panic on the poor was exacerbated by a moral crusade. In early December, police pounded on brothel doors in New York’s Tenderloin and told the women living there they had one day to get out. Rev. Charles Parkhurst had been preaching against prostitution and condemning the police for turning a blind eye. Parkhurst and others from the Society for the Prevention of Crime had been visiting brothels that flourished through the city, taking notes, upping the pressure. Finally, the police conducted a raid.

  Residents scrambled for trunks, stowing shawls and hairbrushes. They hired cabs to take dressing tables and sofas to storage. Then they set out to find somewhere to live, some lying to get access to “respectable” apartment buildings, others sleeping at the police station. Hard economic conditions became all the harder. The next day, the brothels were dark and empty.

  And the temperature was dropping. A bitter wind raced between buildings, and New Yorkers pulled out their heaviest coats. Ice crusted the Hudson. The parade of women out on the streets, some who hadn’t found a place to stay even days later, seemed a sign of viciousness rather than virtue. In a front-page cartoon in the Evening World, reformers and police battled each other while, overlooked, a woman lay collapsed in the snow. The caption read, “The Usual Result.”

  The police, Parkhurst concluded, staged the raid in this dramatic way to make him look bad, to cast blame on him for homelessness. He invited women to his house, printing his address in the paper, where he would try to find them shelter—provided, of course, they would swear to reform and “lead respectable lives.” They started to show up, more than fifty a day.

  Bly, back at the World after her attempts at fiction foundered, interviewed Parkhurst a week after the brothel closures, commenting on his youthful looks, the “merry twinkle” in his eyes. But over the course of five hours, she grilled him. Wouldn’t campaigning against high prices and tainted food be a better way to help the poor? she asked. And “don’t you think that if ministers were to learn a little more about life and take broader views of subjects that they would be more fitted to be preachers and leaders of congregations?” And the question that always consumed her: “Is not one of the great difficulties with the reformation of these women their lack of ability to work?” And then she signed off with a gracious nod to his perseverance.

  Chapter 11

  1893–1894

  Across the Atlantic

  If acting the part of spy or detective in this way is considered by anybody as a dishonorable feature of journalism, the attention of such a person is directed to the fact that Charles Dickens, in order to obtain the material for “Nicholas Nickleby” assumed a character not his own, in order that he might better investigate the miserable Yorkshire schools.

  —Reading Times, February 27, 1889

  After several years writing for papers in the Midwest and the South, and a brief stint as personal secretary to the US envoy for Peru, Elizabeth Banks tried her luck in London. In England, she settled in to become the writer she imagined, following the lead of her personal heroine, Aurora Leigh, the title character of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem she had read obsessively during solitary days on her uncle’s Wisconsin farm. If not a poet, like Aurora Leigh, Banks aimed least to be a real journalist. She didn’t want to be tied to the women’s page as she had been in the United States. She felt strongly, though, that she didn’t want to be a do-gooder either, like many of the writers who claimed to improve society with their work. Any orthodoxy made her wince, and it was a pose that seemed like a luxury. As soon as Banks felt the embrace of an expectation of what she should write or why, she wriggled to escape.

  Along with her typewriter, Banks brought a big, black poodle named Judge across the ocean. Though Banks’s writing hailed the many gallant men she encountered through her reporting, from the coworkers who brought her offerings of candy and pencils to the artist who sketched a picture to accompany her story and offered it to her for free, no one compared to Judge. In childhood, reading Sunday newspaper stories, she fantasized about being “surrounded with dozens of lovers, any of whom would cut his head off at my command,” but it was Judge who rescued her “from getting too lonely and thinking too much about myself.”* The poodle wore a colorful scarf around his neck and could fetch newspapers by title. In a photo of the two of them, the dog perches by her side, face right next to Elizabeth’s. What stands out is Banks’s expression—there’s heat behind it as she stares off the lower edge of the portrait, as if she’s just heard a loud noise but doesn’t want to show surprise. The poodle is relaxed, panting, seemingly happy, long ears covered with silky black curls.

  In addition to pet and machine, she brought the lenses she’d used on American society, focused on the workings of class. One day, after she’d been in London a few months, Banks was mulling the fact that many girls she met in the city ground their lives away sewing for long hours and low pay, subsisting on boiled rice or crackers. Their situation brought to mind the hypnotic rhythm of “The Song of the Shirt” written by English poet Thomas Hood in 1843.

  Stitch! stitch! stitch!

  In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

  And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

  She sang the “Song of the Shirt.”

  The poem charted the life of a factory worker, wearing out her indoor days, like worn-out linen, while free-flying swallows with sun on their backs mocked her with the spring.

  Pitying their discomfort, Banks wondered why the women didn’t become servants. Maids and cooks were in high demand; they earned better pay than factory employees and had room and board provided. Traditionally, in many working-class families, daughters would go into “service” for a few years between young adulthood and marriage. The arrangement provided money for their relatives and taught them wifely skills. But when Banks suggested this to one seamstress, she was met with indignation. Young women in England as well as the United States were warming to an expanded sense of possibility.

  “I wear caps
and aprons, those badges of slavery! No, thank you. I prefer to keep my liberty and be independent,” the seamstress informed her.

  Of course, the issue of what one might be willing to do to make a living may have been on Banks’s mind. Before long, she had spent most of her moving-to-Europe money. In 1892, when she just arrived, she’d earned early fame as “the American Girl in London,” after Rudyard Kipling wrote an article in the London Times critiquing Americans, and she’d replied in the same paper with a spirited defense of her country. He had interpreted all of America by his encounter with New England, she wrote in a piece subtitled “An American Girl’s Reply to Rudyard Kipling.” He should consider occupants of Illinois, Minnesota, and Montana as well as people from different classes: “in the city whistles are blowing for 6 o’clock, and employer and [employee], counting room clerk and day laborer, the woman journalist and the typewriter girl are hurrying home from their hard but well-paid work. And these, all these, are the Americans.” The Kipling retort brought notoriety but not more assignments. In 1893, when that same seamstress told her she earned only one and sixpence a day, Banks felt a throb of pity but was brought short by the thought that she herself was not currently earning that much.

  Perhaps remembering Eva McDonald’s series for the Globe when they’d worked there together, with its descriptions of society women coddling their pugs, Banks put an unconventional ad in the Situations Wanted section of the paper, one that sounded more like the opening of a novel than a request for employment:

  Elizabeth Banks

  Elizabeth Banks, Campaigns of Curiosity, frontispiece, 1894 (University of Michigan)

  “As Housemaid, Parlourmaid, or House-Parlourmaid.–A refined and educated young woman, obliged to earn her living, and unable to find other employment, wants situation as above. Expects only such treatment as is given to servants. Will wear caps and aprons, but would not wish to share bed with another. Thoroughly reliable and competent. References; town or country. Wages, £14.”