Sensational

by Kim Todd

  But here the layers of Banks’s disguise grew particularly thick. While the premise of the articles was to chide English girls for an obsession with class that kept them near starving for the sake of their “independence,” Banks elided her own background boiling potatoes and feeding chickens early mornings on her uncle and aunt’s Wisconsin farm, ironing and washing dishes to pay her way through college.

  “For myself, I knew little or nothing about housework,” she airily declared. The one time she tried to sweep, it blistered her hands. Her attempts to scrub a floor made up a long, comic scene of incompetence. Her inability to darn socks would reveal her disguise, she feared.* (This is one of the few places her exploits are met with incredulity. Does “there actually breathe a woman in whom the domestic instinct is so dead as this?” wondered a newspaper columnist.) In an article where she pretended to employers to be of a lower class than she was, she simultaneously pretended to her readers to be of a higher class than her background indicated. Admitting domestic skills would be somehow shameful. But that didn’t keep her from peppering her pieces with household hints: using a whisk broom on the corners, dunking dishes in hot water to better rinse them, installing a dumb waiter to keep maids from running up multiple flights of stairs.

  Confessing her age would be similarly damaging. At some point she shaved five years off, claiming to be born in 1870 rather than 1865, making the “American Girl” twenty-three in London rather than pushing thirty.*

  Readers talked over her articles but weren’t always sure what to make of them. First, Banks seemed sympathetic to servants who worked for demanding employers; then she defended employers taken advantage of by duplicitous maids. Undercover work was traditionally linked to reform efforts. Reporters often justified their deceptions by highlighting resulting improvements: Nellie Bly mentioned that her Blackwell’s Island piece prompted additional asylum funding; Winifred Black stressed the changes in hospital policy. But what reforms did Banks want?

  In the hubbub after the servant series, another woman writer pulled her aside at a social gathering:

  “Now, tell me exactly, what was your aim and object—your serious one, I mean,—in going out to service and writing about it? It is a question we are all asking.”

  “I did it for ‘copy,’” Banks said, “to earn my living, you know. I knew it was a subject that would interest everybody.”

  In the face of the writer’s surprise, Banks continued: “I’m not a hypocrite and won’t pose as a reformer. I did it to earn my living; but, of course, if my published experience helps others to earn theirs, I shall be very glad. I have done my best with this series and have been absolutely honest and impartial. I have taken no sides. I have simply told the truth.”

  As much as she tried to distance herself from that Wisconsin farm girl, a certain practicality was the soil in which she was rooted. When the other writer, dismayed, said she’d had never written anything without the goal of helping someone, Banks dug in: “Perhaps you have an income aside from your writing, which I have not.”

  Her response spread, and afterward, she found herself alienated from the circle of philanthropic female journalists. (Of course, needing the money is another kind of justification, for stunts, for writing at all, perhaps more acceptable than “I craved exciting and meaningful work.”)

  Banks continued her campaign against self-congratulation. The English prided themselves on valuing breeding and nobility, as opposed to those cash-obsessed Americans who just bought whatever they needed—class, society, status. This seemed a lofty, inflated claim, ripe for puncturing. Banks wrote a new ad:

  “A Young American Lady of means wishes to meet with a Chaperon of Highest Social Position, who will introduce her into the Best English Society. Liberal terms.”

  And then, taking care to bait the hook with a particularly juicy worm, she directed letters to be addressed to “Heiress.”

  Responses flooded in with offers of marriage and presentation at court, letting Banks conclude, “After all my investigations, my faith in the purchasing power of the ‘Almighty Dollar’ still remains unshaken.”

  After that, she hinted to editors that she might want to write more traditional stories. But, in the newspapers’ view, her breakthrough was the introduction of American stunt reporting to London, though she was very much working in the path of W. T. Stead (of “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” fame), who became a mentor and friend. She was an American girl, and American girls went undercover. Assignments to sell flowers, or sweep the streets, or pick strawberries piled up.

  Before long, she was back to placing newspaper ads:

  “A YOUNG WOMAN wants a situation in a large first-class Laundry, where she can learn the business. No wages.”

  But the laundry market was, apparently, more competitive, though she offered to work for free. She only got one reply, but that was enough.

  In the one large room of Y____________ and Z__________ Sanitary Laundry, shirts boiled in vats, and about thirty women ironed, starched, and folded clothes for hundreds of clients. Backs were stooped from long hours and repetitive tasks. Surveying the scene, Banks felt she needed some boatman to ferry her across the water sloshing in a river over the floor. If so, Janie, a seventeen-year-old with a dreamy expression and hair half braided and half loose, lame from a childhood accident, was her Charon, easing her way into the damp Underworld.

  “I’ll help you, Miss Barnes,”* she said when Banks (who applied under the name “Lizzie Barnes”) faced any of the many bewildering tasks. Janie set up an ironing board for a table and shared her bitter tea with her sister and Banks, patiently waiting for one of the two cups to be free before she drank her own. She also, perhaps with a bit of glee, scared the newcomer with stories of exploding boilers and fingers crushed in the wringer. One recent case required amputation, she confided as they sewed red numbers on each garment so it could be tracked back to its owner.

  It was a classic laundry stunt. Eva McDonald had done it, and then Nell Nelson. But Banks had a different take. Rather than charting the experience of the laundry girl, she positioned herself as an employer, sending out her own laundry to be cleaned at the same place she was working, cringing as the red numbers were coarsely stitched into her fine handkerchief. She had wondered about the condition of laundries where she shipped her clothes to be washed, Banks wrote. What if they were suffused with disease? (Meanwhile, her autobiography revealed that while in London she illegally did her washing in a hotel bathtub and almost got evicted for cooking in her room when the smell of her onions wafted down the hall.)

  But this time she had another purpose, too. England had just passed a series of Factory Acts, covering at what age children could be employed, mandating a clean and ventilated workplace, and limiting the number of hours per week. But the acts didn’t cover laundries. And some thought they shouldn’t. They reasoned that since the acts applied only to women and children, under the logic that they needed special protection, laundry jobs would go to men. So part of Banks’s mission was to see how the women felt about Factory Act protections, and whether they wanted them applied to their industry.

  So here she was at the laundry, with wet boots and a hacking cough, taking it all down.

  Though Banks’s refusal to link her work to a noble cause made her unpopular at parties, it paid off on the page. Another writer might have painted poor lame Janie as a pathetic victim with the scar on her forehead from falling into a fireplace and a finger mashed by chopping wood, a tool to a reform end, but Banks let her be complicated.

  Highly competent, Janie kept the laundry running, staying late, solving problems, and facing irate clients to explain mistakes. Banks found the laundry miserable, but Janie appeared to like it. Sundays are boring, Janie said. She’d rather work.

  Janie is a fully fleshed-out nonfiction character, like Tillie Mayard, the sick woman Bly met at the asylum. They are nuanced, well drawn, giving their stories lasting power in a way that transcends a more straightforward news
article about debates over the Factory Act or asylum funding. “I was beginning to get intensely interested in this strange species of laundry-girl,” Banks told her readers. And her interest was contagious.

  When Banks wanted to learn something besides stitching numerals into shirts, Janie convinced the boss to let Banks try ironing. In an effort to be chatty with the chief ironer, Mrs. Bruckerstone, known to be a prodigious gossip, Banks found herself embroidering the tapestry of her fictional life, adding in a soldier boyfriend named James, who was, alas, in Australia, her home country.

  At the end of three hours of ironing, Banks’s skin smarted with burns and she’d pressed only thirty-four handkerchiefs, which, at “a penny a dozen” would have earned her less than a cent an hour. She tried her hand at pinafores where she was competent but slow. One took two hours with frequent breaks.

  For her part, Janie was starting to wonder what was to be done with this delicate, well-spoken, yet dismayingly uneducated (by her own account) woman who seemed so very bad at laundry work. Her incompetence worried the other women, too. If she failed at laundering, what would she do? They set to finding her a job. An accountant? A server in a coffeehouse? A barmaid? A nurse?

  “Hospital patients are too cross and fidgety. I wouldn’t like to be a nurse,” Banks declared.

  Mrs. Bruckerstone lost her temper at this, insisting that if she was too weak for the laundry and too bad at math for accounting, nursing was the only option.

  Finally, Janie announced she had the perfect position for this odd, weak Australian who’d washed up on the shores of the laundry: a clerk at a candy store, pushing peppermint sticks and caramels.

  After a few more days, Banks quit before she was fired, telling the owner, “I’m afraid I’m not strong enough for this sort of thing, Mrs. Morris.”

  “Miss Barnes is going to a confectioner’s,” Janie added, in an effort to make everyone feel better.

  But Banks didn’t bury herself in chocolate creams. She dug in and pursued all angles. To flesh out first-person experience, she dressed as a journalist again and visited Acton, nicknamed “Soap Suds Island” because it had so many laundries, and interviewed female workers about Factory Act amendments. She visited smaller establishments in the East End, where Banks found that the laundrywomen married young to keep from being old maids, but then continued working. Like Janie, they liked it, though they were eager to hear about changes that might better their situation. (Their mothers, on the other hand, often approved of long work hours as a way to keep their daughters out of trouble.)

  After a meeting of the Working Girls Club, a gaggle of young women walked Banks to the train station. The lively pack offered safety in numbers that the few women in any given newspaper office weren’t able to provide, along with a constant stream of conversation. When boys outside a bar threw pebbles at them, they yelled and hurled one back. It might not have been ladylike, but it was effective, and Banks admired their nerve.

  As the train pulled away, one hollered after her, “Say, miss, don’t forget to make them give us that Act you told us about.”

  There was plenty of room for improvement, Banks reflected. Water could be drained from the floor, fans could provide circulation, machinery could be fenced so it wouldn’t catch skirts. Working six a.m. to nine p.m., as some did, made for a long, wearying day, even for those heartier than Banks claimed to be. She mused: “If the hours of the young girls, at least, could be reduced so that their day would commence at eight and end at six, then night-schools might be established in the neighbourhoods of the large laundries, and from eight until ten the girls could be instructed and amused.”

  One might have thought she was trying to do some good.

  Chapter 12

  1894–1895

  Girl No More

  “She pulled out a small notebook and with a dainty pencil put down the memorandum in a rather shy way as I thought. But that is what I liked about her—nothing mannish, not the least. Though it’s deuced rare among girl reporters.”

  “Why don’t you say women reporters?” put in Bunzie, on whose fine ear “girl” grated.

  “Because this one was nothing but a girl, and a slip of a girl at that. And then you never heard of a woman reporter did you?

  They’re all girls.”

  —Frank Bailey Millard, “The ‘Shield’s’ Girl Reporter,” 1892

  The panic of 1893 bled into 1894, increasing unemployment, depressing wages. Back in Chicago, those who had hired on at the Columbian Exposition now paced the sidewalks looking for work or, homeless, took refuge in remnants of the glorious White City. Those who worked for the Pullman Company in Illinois—which made luxurious sleeping cars—saw their paychecks drop by as much as 35 percent, but the rent in their Pullman-owned factory town remained the same. In early May, a committee of laborers went to ask company owner George Pullman for higher pay or housing relief. When they were turned away and then fired, workers voted to strike. They were soon supported by the huge American Railway Union, headed by Eugene Debs. The ARU ultimately refused to handle any trains with Pullman cars. This decision swept 250,000 workers into a boycott and confounded railways throughout the West. Passenger trains were stranded in the mountains. Produce rotted in freight cars left sitting on the tracks.

  At the urging of the railroad companies, President Cleveland sent troops to Illinois and issued an injunction against the boycott, the first federal involvement in labor issues on this scale. Soon two thousand armed men entered Chicago with the goal of ending the strike. In response, crowds overturned trains and set them on fire; troops shot indiscriminately, killing protesters and bystanders.

  Nellie Bly went to Chicago, arriving amid newspaper reports of mobs, destruction, and rioting. Labor’s reputation for violence had only grown with bloody altercations at recent strikes in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. But when she visited the Pullman town, she found a distinct lack of murderousness. Instead, there was mainly sadness and frustration, and a funeral was underway for a striker shot in the head by a deputy. She approached a man sitting on a porch, told him she was from New York, asked in her faux naive way when the rioting would begin.

  “Do you think we’re as bad as that?” he asked.

  “Oh yes,” she answered. “We are all frightened to death. We think you are all bent on burning down, blowing up and assassinating.” Invited into the house, she talked with the man and his friend, drawing out the problems with the company town. One of the main sticking points was the lack of freedom that came from living in a place where your employer dictated every rule. A man from Rosedale, a town next to Pullman but not factory-owned, laid out the comparison:

  “I have a lot of 90 feet front by 124 feet deep. I have a house of eight rooms. I have a garden, where I raise all my vegetables and I have my own chickens and eggs and I only pay $12 per month rent and $3 a year water tax. Compare that with this five-roomed house with no garden for $17 a month and 71 cents a month for water.”

  When Bly asked the Pullman man why he didn’t move to Rosedale, he said job priority went to those in Pullman properties. If he moved, he would have been unemployed. She talked with women and children in Pullman, bringing to life complicated family dynamics, humanizing the strikers. Readers encountered the German immigrant, consumed by her rage, who declared “Curse America”; a wife who hated the union her husband needed to join; and those stretching food and keeping tiny spaces tidy, doing their best in a bad situation.

  Taking another tack, Bly went to Springfield to interview the beleaguered Illinois governor. After asking him whether he was an anarchist (no) and believed in women’s suffrage (dodged), to warm him up, she pressed him on the strike. Federal troops had made things worse, he said, and Pullman workers were too much at the company’s mercy. “Their only hope is to stand together, but at the same time keep within the law,” he told Bly.

  By early August, it was clear the strike had failed. The Pullman Company reopened, only rehiring those who swo
re never to join a union. It was another high-profile labor defeat, an intimidating display of corporate muscle, and a cause of popular disillusionment with Grover Cleveland’s Democratic Party.

  For Bly, it was an eye-opening summer, leading into a fall and winter of good, intense reporting. A St. Paul newspaper editor noted, after watching her cover a northern Minnesota fire that killed more than four hundred people, her single-minded focus on journalism: “While it occupies her she hasn’t room for anything else, not even a dinner.” She traveled through Nebraska and South Dakota, visiting homesteaders freezing and starving in sod houses during a blizzard that followed a crop-killing summer drought. Increasingly sympathetic to the labor cause, she interviewed American Railway Union president Eugene Debs, jailed in Illinois for violating a court injunction against the Pullman strike, and defended striking streetcar operators in Brooklyn, documenting their bandages from ill treatment by police. Socialists began sending her letters, hoping to recruit her.

  The start of 1895, though, found Bly in an increasingly bleak frame of mind. Sidewalks filled with trash caught her eye, as did the slush that soaked women’s skirts as they climbed the stairs to the elevated railway. Her dog—a favorite—had recently died. Liars and frauds seemed to dominate society. Even organizations bent on doing good just seemed to talk and talk, never getting anything done. These thoughts unspooled in her Evening World column, “Nellie Bly Says,” offering a glimpse behind the chipper facade of most of her first-person reporting. One essay began simply: “Life is growing worse every day.”

  Still, Nellie Bly continued to inspire. A racehorse, a steamer, and a gold mine had all been named after her. Young women continued to show up to newspaper offices, make their pitch to editors, and use stunt reporting for their own ends.