by Kim Todd
But again, as in the suffrage meeting article, Bly didn’t seem to know what point she wanted to make. The ostensible purpose was to learn where the women would go when kicked out in a few days, but she focused more closely on their addiction to whiskey and willingness to trade everything—job prospects, family—for another sip. They were disheveled and didn’t seem to care. The reporter recoiled. Bly might have been particularly unsympathetic to alcoholism because of her violent stepfather, but here, too, was the echo of the wife of a rich industrialist rather than the open-minded reporter on the boat to the asylum.
The piece ended, though, with a glimpse of one final woman who stumbled in late. In her fifties, from Philadelphia, she seemed sober enough, just miserable. She said she’d never slept at the station house before and hoped never to do it again, but she’d lost everything. The final image was of this unhappy woman hunched on the board that would be her bed, sobbing, while the others, splayed around her, snored.
And one week later Bly interviewed Elizabeth Cady Stanton and focused on her ideas rather than the cut of her sleeves. Playing the piano when Bly arrived, the eighty-year-old Stanton had just published a Woman’s Bible, a translation by a female scholar with commentary about the role of women. Interpretations of Eve had long been used to define women as flawed and deserving of a subordinate role because she was only Adam’s rib. Stanton felt it was important to offer another view (though the National Woman Suffrage Association didn’t agree with this radical perspective and refused to endorse the Woman’s Bible at the convention).
“You know every time women wish to make any advance in the world the Bible is quoted against us,” Stanton said, adding that, in addition to seeking out improved versions of Genesis, women should also be taught about evolution. It was an alternate, more equal, origin story. As Bly was leaving, Stanton inscribed her a copy of the Bible: “Man and woman a simultaneous creation.”
Lest things get too slow, the next week, Bly trained an elephant at the circus. Her descriptions almost seemed to lampoon her more serious work. Of baby elephant Alice, rolling a barrel and crying, Bly wrote, “She fell from the see-saw the other day and sprained her ankle. It was never a slender, willowy ankle, but now it reminds one of dropsical patients I have seen in hospitals and tenement houses.” Alice followed her in the ring, and then Bly, characteristically, asked to command the adult elephants and ride one.
The article wrapped around a full-page illustration of Bly perched on an elephant’s back in a striped dress with enormous puffed sleeves and a wry expression.
Though ample, realistic images of Bly existed, this one showed a generic Gibson girl. Stunt reporters were being paid more than ever before, but they were becoming interchangeable.
“Nellie Bly as an Elephant Trainer” in the World, February 23, 1896
“Nellie Bly as an Elephant Trainer,” World, February 23, 1896 (University of Minnesota Libraries)
Pulitzer, rarely in the office, sent letters from across the globe, scrambling to keep a handle on the World from Maine, Germany, Barbados. In the spring, the World launched a midnight edition and cast about for other ways to check Hearst’s momentum, regardless of cost. It dropped the price to one cent, matching the Journal. While Pulitzer was impatient to crush his nemesis, he also had his doubts about the paper’s direction, sensitive to criticism that the sensationalism went too far. Rival papers began to grumble about the larger headlines, the focus on crime, the showy illustrations, the breathless tone. Comics increasingly included racial stereotypes. Articles detailed very dubious scientific theories, like the existence of butterfly women on the planet Venus. Pulitzer kept after Brisbane to chase Hearst without falling to his level. Avoid “freaks” and “froth,” he urged, “your old energy on new lines will assure you brilliant success & higher reputation.” Pulitzer requested a portrait of recently retired General O. O. Howard, who’d lost an arm fighting for the Union in the Civil War and helped found Howard University, on the front page of the Sunday World. But Brisbane, who feared the general would mouth clichés—very decent, very boring—wrote back: “Sorry we did not have that O. O. Howard picture and interview. Instead, on the front page, I had a wonderful picture of Kate Swan in the electric chair and circulation is up 15,000.”
Brisbane had tracked down Kate Swan McGuirk, the astute Washington DC reporter who’d made such a notable scoop with her Lizzie Borden interview. Or she had volunteered herself. Either way, the World hired her, and she became a key element of the publication’s reimagining.
One of McGuirk’s first stunts for the paper tied in with the story of Maria Barbella (also called Barberi), who was on death row for slitting the throat of a man who promised, then refused, to marry her. She was scheduled to be the first woman to die in the electric chair. Brisbane, who had fainted when he witnessed an execution several years before, had taken a sympathetic interest in the Barbella case. Continuing to pursue questions, launched in the Borden trial, about the way a predominantly male justice system treated female criminals, McGuirk visited the prison and went through the experience of being walked from a cell to the electric chair and buckled in, aiming to show what it felt like to be a woman encountering the death penalty.
McGuirk dwelt on facing death surrounded by men, who would dress her, walk with her, and watch. She emphasized that to attach the electrode, the criminal would need to bare a knee. Talking with New York State’s head executioner afterward, she extracted from him the promise that he would never execute a woman. Having achieved this tangible result, she wrote, “I am not sorry that I endured all the strange agonies I did during my experience in the death chair.”
“Kate Swan in the Death Chair” in the World, February 16, 1896
“Kate Swan in the Death Chair,” World, February 16, 1896 (University of Minnesota Libraries)
A huge illustration, the one Brisbane gloated over, showed a woman shackled to the electric chair at wrists and ankles, leather strap over her eyes and across her chin, and a helmet with wires on her head. The paper had commissioned a noted fashion designer to create a dress that allowed for the electrode to be attached to her leg while the woman retained as much dignity as possible. Showing an execution itself would be taboo, and this toed right up to the line. It sold a lot of copies.
After the story ran, Pulitzer was gracious in defeat (and always happy about a circulation bump): “You know perfectly well I am blind, and must rely on you. Congratulations,” he wrote Brisbane.*
Though she’d always signed her pieces “Mrs. McGuirk,” the reporter now developed a second persona: Kate Swan. She was nothing like the upright Mrs. McGuirk, with her arch commentary on senatorial outfits. Kate Swan was youthful. Adventurous. Risqué. And, apparently, inexhaustible.
Over the course of a year, Kate Swan jumped into the surf from a rowboat at Coney Island to test the rescue capabilities of the Volunteer Life Saving Corps, wrapped herself in a boa constrictor, pedaled a $3,000 bicycle built for six, swung on a flying trapeze, had her heart X-rayed, drove a carriage in a horse race, floated the East River in an inflatable “Merman life-saving suit,” shoveled coal into a ferry-boat furnace, visited a burial vault at night, explored the inside of a whale skeleton to prove the impossibility of the literal truth of the story of Jonah and the whale, and judged a contest for the best-looking baby.
One night she stayed on Ellis Island, with those scheduled to be deported. This article worked in the sly way of some of the other stunt reporting pieces. Even though the reporter here was not in disguise, the opening proposed one kind of tale that turned out to cloak another one. Here her role was not that of a participant but of an active mind able to see things beyond the way they were usually framed. Guards detailed the dangers of these masses of immigrants: the knives they carried, the anger and restlessness in the crowds of men—most from Italy—waiting to be sent back across the Atlantic, the probability that some were escaped criminals. Wide-eyed, the reporter documented her fear for the first few paragraphs.
But the reader’s understanding shifted as the reporter detailed the “cages” where the deportees were kept, the 250 beds for a population of five hundred, the lack of ventilation. (Officials assured Swan that renovations were planned, but it would be months.) At some point in the evening, a man started to play a concertina and the music lured some of the dangerous deportees to waltz. After they settled down to sleep, many still in their boots, Swan (whose in-laws emigrated from Ireland; whose immigrant employer had devoted all the resources of his newspaper to raising money for the base of the Statue of Liberty) noted, pointedly: “The light from Liberty’s torch streams across the water and shines on the sleepers. That is the nearest some of them will ever get to the liberty they have come to seek.”
Still another episode found her leaning, close to midnight, over the railing of the elevated train station in the Tenderloin, watching customers stream in and out of the Internationale Apotheke, a pharmacy. A small round box smudged with opium sat in her jacket pocket. Opium addiction was rampant in 1896. The anarchist Emma Goldman, writing of a time when she was in charge of the jail dispensary at Blackwell’s Island, reported that most of the prostitutes she met there were suffering withdrawal. Finally, after watching a handful of women come up with boxes that seemed similar to hers, McGuirk walked down the stairs and went inside.
She started with a perfectly legal request for a disinfectant.
“Give me two ounces of a 4 percent solution of carbolic acid.”
When the pharmacist obliged, she flashed the box and a half dollar.
“Can I get that filled here?” she asked.
He took the box, went into the back, then returned:
“Who told you?” When she offered a name she had at the ready, he handed her the opium. She didn’t have a prescription, he didn’t record her identity, as the law required, and the box didn’t bear the mandatory poison label. Story complete, she turned the evidence over to the assistant district attorney and ended up testifying about illegal opium sales in front of a grand jury.
While some of Kate Swan’s articles, like those on illegal drugs and immigration policy, had a serious purpose, what lingered in some readers’ minds were the half-page illustrations of the reporter at work, hair billowing, eyes ablaze. These lodged the character of the “daring journalist” in the public imagination and set the stage for comic-book female reporters like Lois Lane and Brenda Starr. Meanwhile, the more proper “Mrs. McGuirk” kept writing, too. On the page, Mrs. McGuirk was the opposite of Kate Swan, keeping her distance, cool and skeptical, never illustrated. The two sides of Kate Swan McGuirk were so distinct, the paper had room for them both, and they often competed for space on the same page.
McGuirk, with her Washington DC savvy, covered the upcoming 1896 presidential election between big-city, big-business William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, the young populist hero of western farmers. After the low-key election of 1892, the contest gripped the politically minded: New York broke records on the first day of voter registration. McGuirk interviewed McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, a wealthy Ohio businessman, with wariness. Burnishing his importance, he kept her waiting then settled into a leather couch, a gold nugget dangling from his watch chain. Her interview revealed that his investments stood to benefit from government policies, that he wasn’t interested in China, didn’t care for travel, and, rich as he was, had never been to Europe. Could this really be the next ambassador to England? she wondered.
Bryan, too, she met with a raised eyebrow, highlighting his manufactured appeal to women, with his collar rolled down in a “Byronic fashion” and his constant references to his dear mother. He has a “profound respect for womanhood,” she commented, one that seemed based in a certain vagueness. And his western women supporters in turn were similarly vague on his policies. The whole piece appeared complimentary, about his warmth, his storytelling, his smile, yet not. Her conclusion: “Bryan would make a good dress-suit figure.”
McGuirk did have the occasional adventure. The much-hyped “Thrilling Hunt for a Wild Woman” took McGuirk into unaccustomed scenery, but she still represented a decent lady looking at the oddities of those beyond her sphere. Kate Swan would likely have played the wild woman herself, tramping through the trees, bedding down in the swamp, branches tearing at her hair. In fact, the same issue had her driving an electric engine through a tunnel at seventy-five miles per hour.
“Kate Swan Drives the Electric Engine” in the World, May 31, 1896
“Kate Swan Drives the Electric Engine,” World, May 31, 1896 (University of Minnesota Libraries)
Hearst continued his assault. Pulitzer tried to keep his distance from the day-to-day workings of the paper, but he couldn’t help himself. Particularly after the loss of so many of his staff, he worried about spies. Ideas dreamed up at the World seemed to appear in the Journal the next day. Pulitzer increasingly relied on a complex code to keep his moves secret from telegraph operators and others who might glimpse his communications. Codebooks helped staff decipher and encode messages. “Semaphore” meant that the previous communication had been read and understood. “Geranium” meant “The Morning Journal,” “Hearst” was “Gush” or, perhaps grudgingly, “Magnetic.” Pulitzer himself was “Sedentary.”
In one typical letter to his business manager, Pulitzer started, “I hope you are satisfied with my abstention from business and general non interference,” then offered a list of suggestions, labeled “a” through “e,” and then three more pages of notes, numbered 1 through 10. The World should be an entertaining paper that is still truthful, not all pictures and horror stories: “freedom of thought and public interest would make up for any lack of features of size or splash.” And then, written in pencil “—let us hope.” In another letter, he warned staffers not to underestimate their adversary: “Geranium has brains and genius beyond any question, not only brains for news and features, but genius for the self advertising acts which have no parallel.”
The Hearst-Pulitzer battle could be exhilarating, brainstorm upon brainstorm. In early summer, the World empaneled a “jury” of all women, including a lawyer, a principal, and a Tolstoy translator, to mull over a case where a woman was accused of poisoning her mother by putting arsenic in her clam chowder. It was likely the brainchild of Elizabeth Jordan, who was one of the “jurors.” The female jury weighed in over the course of the trial, and the series had a specific political purpose: “to prove a conspicuous experimental illustration of the theory that a woman should be tried by a ‘jury of her peers.’”
It could also be exhausting for those watching from the outside. Charles Dana’s Sun editorialized: “There was never before anywhere on earth such a rivalry, and, God willing, there never will be again after Mr. Pulitzer is dead or has gone mad, or after Mr. Hearst is tired out or has reluctantly come to his senses.”
Though she didn’t object to a little vicious competition, Winifred Black wasn’t relishing her time in Manhattan writing for Hearst’s Journal. Life in the city seemed relentlessly grim, peopled by those grinding out their lives in utmost poverty, packed into dark tenements, standing in soup kitchen lines, shivering out on strike in thin shawls. The scorching summers and freezing winters exacerbated the misery. Those with money spent their energy fretting over clothes and social status. There was no natural beauty like the moon over the Pacific or wild roses or crates of oranges at the dock to blunt the bleakness. Like Kate Swan McGuirk, she developed two literary characters, in order to cover the maximum number of stories in multiple styles. When the San Francisco Examiner ran her articles, they appeared under the established name “Annie Laurie.” In the New York Journal, she wrote under her own name: “Winifred Black,” chasing human interest stories from police station to the alcohol-soaked Bowery, with little time to do anything but report and type. “I used to go to my hotel at night absolutely dizzy with the pressure of life that beat and surged up and down those dark and narrow streets like a tidal wave rising to engulf us all,” she
wrote. A few days after she settled into a New York routine in the fall of 1895, her husband and son came to join her.
As happy as she was to see her little boy, her feelings about her domestic life were mixed. Back in 1892, when she’d been married for a year, she’d hidden in a wooden box with a slit in it so she could watch a boxing match and not be observed. The men, some acquaintances, were transformed, howling like beasts. A doctor she knew gave a “guttural snarl” and a lawyer followed the fight blow by blow with his fists. Her article read like anthropological fieldwork. “I saw that I was looking on a race of beings I had never seen before.” The race was men. She wrote, of the faces in the crowd, “They told a wonderful story of repression, of dissimulation. Since I saw them I know that women never see men as they are. Women do not know anything about men. They see them, they talk with them, they love them, they fear them, they laugh at them, but they do not know them.”
Perhaps it goes without saying that her husband was not what she’d hoped for. For a number of years, paid generously by Hearst, a big draw for both of his papers, she supported their family. Her husband had been withdrawing her money without telling her, breeding mistrust. Something would have to give.
While Winifred Black buttressed the Journal in New York, readers of the San Francisco Examiner who craved adventure followed the exploits of “Helen Dare.” Stunting with a particular California flair, she rode forty miles down a log flume in the Sierra mountains, a feat her paper called the “Wildest Ride Ever Made by a Woman.” (These flumes inspired amusement park “log rides.”) As with many of these reporters, though her name was dashing, she did other kinds of journalism, too. As well as picking hops with migrant workers, she wrote about threats to California forests—highlighting human-caused fires—on the same page that featured an interview with John Muir, who blamed sheep and poor logging practices. She also conducted a humanizing series of interviews with prisoners in San Quentin.