Sensational

by Kim Todd

  Beatrice Webb, an English social reformer who went undercover in 1888 sewing trousers and wrote about it for Nineteenth Century, tried to articulate this internal conflict as she reflected (embarrassed) on her attitudes toward suffrage when she was young. The suffragists were off-putting with their repeated demands and grievances, she remembered feeling. Webb was thriving personally, so it was hard to see the larger argument for systemic change: “In the craft I had chosen, a woman was privileged. As an investigator she aroused less suspicion than a man, and, through making the proceedings more agreeable to the persons concerned, she gained better information. Further, in those days, a competent female writer on economic questions had, to an enterprising editor, actually a scarcity value. Thus she secured immediate publication and, to judge from my own experience, was paid a higher rate than male competitors of equal standing.”

  Another one who felt this ambiguity about the source of a woman’s power was Winifred Black. Still a San Francisco Examiner star, though married and a mother, she had covered the Woman’s Congress in the summer of 1895 and found the speakers distasteful. Their stridency and zealous focus on voting excluded things she felt were more important. Black hoped the “new woman” with her suffrage obsession was a passing phase: “She deals only with ballot boxes and conventions and grievances. She can’t touch the real things of life, and we shall go on loving and suffering and being happy quite as if she didn’t exist.”

  Though she expressed reservations about the suffragists’ demands, Winifred Black did, however, take particular care to investigate lecturer Anna Shaw’s claims that women owned nothing in a marriage—not their children, not money they’d earned, not their own bonnet. In fact, she went so far as to consult a lawyer, who assured her that under California law a woman had the right to all of these in case of a divorce.

  A few months later, Black’s musings on the subject of “the real things in life” would be put to the test. One sunny morning in fall 1895, as Black tended the roses, heliotrope, and calla lilies in her San Francisco garden and kept an eye on her three-year-old son, a messenger handed her a telegram. It was from Hearst, commanding her to come to New York right away. As she later commented in her memoir, “There are certain moments in life that stand out in your memory as if they had been etched upon your brain.” The lanky, blue-uniformed boy showing up with this explosive note was one.

  Despite her fond words about family, while she doted on her boy and relished quiet moments in front of a homey eucalyptus fire, when Winifred’s career hauled her out of the blooming garden, she didn’t hesitate. She packed her bags, hugged her son, and told him goodbye. At the docks, where limes from Mexico arrived, and cranberries, pomegranates, oranges passed through, though melons were almost gone, Winifred caught the ferry that would take her across the bay to the train that would send her hurtling three thousand miles toward Hearst’s unknown whim. In the station and then on board, she met the Examiner’s star cartoonist and sportswriter. They were in Omaha before they learned that Hearst had bought the New York Journal, the eight-page, rather tame paper formerly owned by Albert Pulitzer, Joseph’s brother.

  Hearst had spent eight years as a publisher, honing his sense of the market and readers’ tastes. Now he was returning to Newspaper Row, where he’d been so awed and inspired. He’d tried before, angling for the New York Times, the Record, and the Herald, but no sales had gone through. The Journal offices were located in the Tribune building, in the shadow of the World’s showy tower. But not for long. He was ready to challenge Pulitzer on his own turf. And he needed his prize woman reporter by his side.

  Chapter 13

  1895–1896

  Full Speed Ahead

  When [the Examiner’s] manager detailed women reporters to attend prize fights, to explore the slums, to exploit the inner depravities of society, and to interview convicts and thugs, we omitted comment on the subject, leaving to the tongue of public opinion the administration of a merited rebuke.”

  —San Francisco Call, December 12, 1896

  Hearst entered New York in his usual style—like a runaway freight train. And any obstacle in his way was dynamited with cash. Flush with a portion of the $3 million* from his mother’s sale of her share of the Anaconda Mining Company, Hearst set out to build the best paper he could, regardless of cost and at blistering speed.

  Building on what had worked in San Francisco, he imported the chaos of the Examiner to the Journal. One editor found himself finalizing his contract to oversee the Journal’s editorial page on Saturday, only to show up to work on Monday to an office where no one knew who he was. His only contact was gone, and Hearst was out of town. The man was at a loss, until he remembered the name of an acquaintance at the paper who led him to the compositing room and told him to get to it. No one seemed to acknowledge or care he was there, but he made up the pages and the paper came out. As he wrote a friend back home, “I had secured very remunerative employment in a lunatic asylum.” It was more than the organizational structure that gave him this impression. Though Hearst himself didn’t drink, several of his best reporters drank heavily and occasionally disappeared, needing to be hauled back from Europe or South America to write their sparkling prose. Hearst, still in his early thirties, liked to get up late, go to the opera, then saunter into the newspaper offices well after midnight and change headlines and rewrite editorials.

  And, as it had in San Francisco, his method worked. One of his editors commented, “It seemed to some of us who day after day inhaled the fumes of his burning money, that he was mad, but he was only, as a matter of fact, shrewd and daring.” In the first weeks of 1896, he hired away almost the entire staff of the Sunday World at stupendous salaries. Pulitzer had done the exact same thing to his brother, Albert (to Albert’s astonishment and pain), when he entered the New York newspaper market a little over a decade before, but the knowledge didn’t ease the sting. Pulitzer and Carvalho schemed to lure the reporters and editors back, but the moment it seemed like they had, Hearst countered with even more money, and prevailed. Hearst’s entry into the New York market ended up boosting salaries at all the newspapers. It was a good time to be in the business.

  The World was left reeling, facing the loss of many of the creative minds that fueled a decade of journalistic invention and market dominance. In an attempt to rebuild his depleted staff, Pulitzer promoted Arthur Brisbane to editor of the Sunday World. As London correspondent for the Sun, Brisbane made his name with his coverage of Jack the Ripper—an in-depth investigation that included a memorable tour through the poverty of Whitechapel, interviews with doctors about the criminal mind, and visits to the morgue that resulted in detailed, stomach-turning descriptions of the dead. He had been working at the World for a number of years, but now was his chance to shine. The ever-competent Elizabeth Jordan stepped in as assistant editor.

  She’d already been overseeing artists and writers and editing copy for the Sunday edition in an unofficial capacity, but the new title gave her the chance to shape the direction of the paper. And Jordan found that, for her, the real adventure was in the newsroom. Writers rushed in, scribbled sentences longhand or clattered them out on typewriters. Editors ripped out paragraphs and stitched together a narrative with a slashing blue pencil. Illustrators sketched tiger snarls, a fraught glance on the face of an interview subject, gears of a pioneering machine. Crumpled drafts littered the floor. Rooms smelled of sweat, tobacco, and ink.

  As an editor, she was responsible for not just the content but the look of the pages. Before the World adopted linotype machines, Jordan spent hours in the composing room. Brisbane, though smart and energetic, didn’t know much about typesetting, as quickly became apparent.

  “Can I help you with the make-up, Mr. Brisbane,” she recalled asking him when he took the job.

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “All of it.”

  Alongside a hundred compositors, she set type into wooden frames by hand, working off dummy sheets t
hat showed article placement, the dominant headline. Fingers moved as fast as they could, then swapped type out and started again when a reporter with new information plummeted in and the story evolved. Past midnight, exhaustion crept in. Metal plates were cast of each full page, curved to fit over printer rollers. Down in the World’s basement, the press gobbled paper and sped it through wheels with raised words on them. One plate rolled the news onto the front of the paper. Then the next stamped the news on the back. The machine cut the sheets and folded them. Stacks landed with a thump in front of newsboys, who spread the latest edition to all corners of the city.

  The hypnotic rhythm of late nights; the job that changed from day to day with the news; language, whittled to its sharpest and most compact: she loved it. Jordan, warm and charismatic, made friends easily. The World was now large enough that she wasn’t the only woman in the office, as might be the case at a smaller paper in a smaller city. An 1890s photo shows her at her desk, surrounded by female colleagues, one of whom cradles a kitten. One of her newspaper-room short stories showcased the bond of these women, making their own way. In “A Point of Ethics,” female writers and editors relaxed at an apartment. One idly played the piano. Another stretched out on a rug in front of the fire. A third sprawled in an easy chair.

  Jordan liked her male coworkers, too. Brisbane was a charmer with fine features and ruddy hair.

  Arthur Brisbane

  Arthur Brisbane portrait, Brisbane Family Papers (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)

  A noted ladies’ man, he was rumored to have had an affair with Bly. (He denied it, saying their relationship was entirely professional, though he would prove to be a great friend when she needed it most.) And he did have a not particularly secret affair with Pulitzer’s wife, Katherine. Brilliant and mercurial, enthusiastic then depressed, friendly then mean, he was described by Jordan as “by turns fire and ice.” Jordan denied a crush—“I have sometimes wondered why I did not fall in love with him”*—though she gave him an entire chapter in her memoir and recalled fondly coming in each morning to find a blizzard of notes on scraps of envelopes and scratch paper, suggestions about reporting and editing that he’d pinned to the roll top of her desk. They were very good at their jobs.

  Together, Brisbane and Jordan redesigned the Sunday paper, paying particular attention to the stand-alone Sunday Magazine. They added more pages, and then even more. The section was crafted explicitly for women, though not in the bonnet-and-frock way of the women’s pages (which still existed at many papers). Instead, interviews featured suffragists and women in unconventional careers, like cowboys. A “bicycle department” covered races and new designs. Ample, sprawling illustrations often showed men with their shirts off, including a large feature on modern athletes mimicking Greek statues of wrestlers. The journalistic purpose was unclear, though it was a fine display of muscles.

  This era is supposed to be the beginning of the end of Pulitzer’s dream, as his paper was sucked into Hearst’s vortex of disrepute. But at least to this reader, the World of 1896, full of sea snakes, and X-rays, and arctic voyages, is enchanting. The world, as reflected in the pages of the World, seems rich and exciting. It is also beautiful. Illustrations had evolved since the coarse sketches that accompanied Bly’s asylum writing in 1887. In one article, wind pushes a hot-air balloon across the page. In another, a skyscraper stretches from top to bottom. Five baby lions, recently born at the zoo, huddle at the top of a third. Reproductions of sheet music and handwritten notes enliven the text. Other images bear the marks of the recent invention of the motion picture, with its rapid series of photos capturing second-by-second shifts in a hand or face. The narrow columns crammed with small type of less than a decade before were only a gray smear of memory.

  As part of their efforts to build circulation in the face of the Journal’s competition, Brisbane and Jordan brought back Bly. Bly had become part of the paper’s mythology of itself. The edition commemorating the World’s ten-year anniversary with Pulitzer at the helm included illustrations of Bly in the asylum, exposing Edward Phelps’s corruption, going around the world—stories not just notable because of the subject matter but because they were written by Nellie Bly. They needed her, and she needed them.

  Bold illustration in the World, February 16, 1896

  “To the North Pole by Balloon,” World, February 16, 1896 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

  Married life wasn’t all she might have imagined. Late one night, in an unseasonably warm November marked by dense fogs, Bly sensed someone tracking her movements. She’d tried to lose the tail at the Imperial Hotel, to no avail. Riding in a hansom cab at Thirty-Fourth near Broadway, she leaped out, confronted a police officer, and pointed to a vehicle across the street. “Officer, there is a man in that cab who has been following my cab about all day. . . . I want you to arrest him.” At the police station, the man, Henry Hanson, said he’d been hired by her husband.

  “Oh, that is all I wanted to know,” Bly said.

  Her husband, Robert Seaman, bailed out the private detective, who had been the manager of his Catskills property.

  In court the next day, Bly told the judge that men had been following her for weeks, even rattling the doorknob of her private chamber in her house. Her jealous husband didn’t trust her. But since no one ever talked with her or touched her, the judge said there was nothing he could do. After court, in the lobby, Hanson approached Bly.

  “If I have done anything wrong, I want to apologize. I did not try to break in your door and I never followed you before last night,” he said.

  “You have followed me before and you know it,” Bly responded. “I see that I can get no redress from the court for this shameful piece of business, but I give you fair warning that it will not be tolerated by me any longer. If you continue in your despicable spying you will find that I will take the law into my own hands.”

  Over the next few days, Seaman claimed to reporters that Bly no longer dined at the house and that he had just wanted to see where she was eating. Bly, in turn, said he’d refused to honor the pre-marital pact where he agreed to support her mother and sister. (Since the early days of the break with her stepfather, Bly had looked after her mother. Letters between them showed a close, protective relationship, with Bly urging her mother to buy warm winter clothes and take care of her own needs before anyone else’s: “Learn to think only of yourself. Selfishness is the only thing which gains in this world.” She still signed with her childhood nickname, “Pink.”) Both Bly and Seaman denied wanting a divorce, but things were not going well. Tensions weren’t eased by the revelation printed in the papers two weeks later: Seaman had paid a hefty settlement to a woman who claimed to be his common-law wife.

  So, maybe to control her own finances, or maybe to splash something on the front page besides her marital troubles, Bly signed onto the World once again.

  Her resulting coverage was all over the map, sometimes infused with the humor and spirit linked to the character of “Nellie Bly,” sometimes hampered by blinkers of money and a new social status. In late January, Bly covered the National Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington DC. After the high-profile defeat in New York, the suffrage movement was scrambling for purchase, celebrating smaller victories: Utah’s admission to the union with suffrage for women; four recently elected female members to the Board of Education in Lexington, Kentucky. But Bly’s take on the significance of the meeting was an odd one. Her keen observation skills didn’t fail her; she noted the lack of young women and the fact that there was only one Black delegate. Bly spent most of her space, though, running down the suffragists’ clothes, charting out-of-date styles and ill-fitting skirts she found “frightful,” dinging them for speaking with their hats on. “I really believe women will never be emancipated until they abolish the handkerchief from sight,” Bly wrote, brittle and cranky.

  But then, she found her way back to the insightful questions and human connections that ha
d always characterized her reporting. With her irreverence and instinct for the compelling detail, she set out to interview the seventy-five-year-old Susan B. Anthony. The reporter drew out Anthony’s past, concerns about women being paid less than men, her blossoming public profile. But then she changed tactics, giving in to the fact that, as Bly said of herself: “I adore the little peculiarities of people.” She asked Anthony whether she feared death. And then,

  “Do you pray?”

  “I pray every single second of my life,” Anthony answered. “I never get on my knees or anything like that, but I pray with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men.”

  Cautiously, Bly pressed on.

  “Were you ever in love?” asked the reporter. At the time, Bly knew how tangled these passions could be. She was still dodging detectives sent to spy on her and James Metcalfe, her rumored suitor.

  “Bless you, Nellie! I’ve been in love a thousand times!”

  “Really!” The reporter said, looking at the white-haired woman in her rocking chair.

  “Yes, really. But I never loved anyone so much that I thought it would last. In fact, I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper.”

  On Sunday, February 9, 1896, Bly had the lead story in the World’s Sunday magazine. Theodore Roosevelt, the recently appointed police commissioner, had been swept into office on a wave of reform after an investigation revealed the deep corruption of the force. Roosevelt had decided to clean up New York’s Oak Street Station House and stop allowing homeless women to sleep there. In the guise of a representative of a charitable association, Bly went to investigate the impact. Wood boards rested against the walls so women could take them and lay them on an iron grate on the floor for their beds. Water dripped constantly; it smelled terrible. The ground was covered with slush, and the women had barely enough clothes to cover themselves.