Sensational

by Kim Todd

  Helen Dare promotion in the San Francisco Examiner, July 25, 1896

  “Flying the Flume,” San Francisco Examiner, July 25, 1896 (Newspapers.com)

  Then in October, a reporter from a rival paper revealed that Helen Dare was actually Elizabeth Tompkins, the noted horse-race writer who’d vanished on the way to the Chicago World’s Fair with her son and left her husband temporarily paralyzed with worry. She’d met a dashing representative of the California Jockey Club at Saratoga and had run off with him to San Francisco. But she was bored and lonely, even in the Pacific Heights apartment with the view and her now five-year-old boy. The pseudonym had allowed her to do the work she loved, while staying in hiding. And she kept doing it, false identity stripped away, exposed to public view and condemnation.

  Back on Park Row, stunt reporters continued to multiply. Throughout 1896, the World had so many, its Sunday magazine could barely contain the thrills. “Daring Deeds by the Sunday World’s Intrepid Woman Reporters”: the headline of March 8 spanned two pages of heart-stopping adventure. Dorothy Dare headed out in a pilot ship in a storm, another reporter (perhaps less daringly) took up shears as a barber, while Kate Swan McGuirk lived a childhood dream of balancing on a moving horse as a circus “fairy bareback rider.” Nellie Bly declared she would raise an all-female regiment to fight for Cuba. Since 1895, when Cubans had rebelled against Spanish control of the island, both the World and the Journal followed developments—the torching of the countryside by both rebel and Spanish armies, the relocation of rural people into urban concentration camps, the resulting disease and starvation—and agitated for United States intervention. And Bly, pictured sword in hand at the head of an army, was ready to lead the charge.

  Hearst’s answer to this flood of female reporters was the “Journal Woman.” It was an umbrella term covering several reporters, but the one who dominated the Journal’s Sunday pages was Kate Masterson. She profiled a Michigan town where women wore the trousers, literally and figuratively, conducted an interview with Edison, took a trip on a haunted schooner. Bly’s military bravado may have been inspired by reports of Cuban “Amazons” fighting with the rebels. Kate Masterson did her one better, traveling to Havana to interview Spanish military leader General Valeriano Weyler in the palace hung with red velvet curtains. Weyler, called “the Butcher,” denied her requests to visit the battlefield and prison but gave her a tour of his elaborate bathroom and bedroom. She asked him specifically about the stories of female soldiers, and he said they were true. In fact, one had been captured, wearing men’s clothes and holding a machete. “These women are fiercer than the men,” he told her.

  Circulation numbers spiraled up, but the sheer volume of stunt stories blurred the boundaries between one reporter and the next, flattened individual writers and their styles. When Nellie Bly first started writing for the World in 1887, the selling point was her voice. That was why headlines featured her name. But nine years later, the value of uniqueness was slipping away. Like the “Journal Woman,” the pseudonym “Meg Merrillies” covered more than one reporter. The way stunts and their performers became indistinguishable was underscored by the play Very Little Red Riding Hood, a show by the Mask and Wig Club at the University of Pennsylvania. In a tumultuous burlesque that included seventy-five student performers and a “Shakespearean ballet,” the show featured “a chorus of women reporters,” including actors dressed as Nellie Bly, Dorothy Dare, and Kate Swan. Besides the rare solo, a chorus contains few distinct voices. “Stunt reporters” was a more invigorating cliché than “domestic angels,” but it became a cliché nonetheless.

  “Dorothy Dare’s Wild Ride on the Snow Plough” in the World, March 22, 1896

  “Dorothy Dare’s Wild Ride on the Snow Plough,” World, March 22, 1896 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

  And as the popularity of stunt reporters grew, so did the objections. The Chicago Times-Herald (a merger of the Chicago Times and the Herald) railed against the contest between the World and the New York Journal, deploring “the furious exploitation of crime, vulgarity and squalid enterprises of women reporters.” Did New York contain multitudes of morbid readers who demanded this kind of thing? “The only alternative is that the directors of these papers are insane,” the Times-Herald concluded.

  Critics included women writers. Frances Willard, head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, warned against reputation-ruining assignments in her book Occupations for Women: “If any girl who reads this is ever tempted to make her entrance into newspaper work through this unclean path, let her put aside the temptation and give up her fondest hopes of becoming a newspaper woman if they are to be obtained at such a cost.”

  A column in the New Orleans Times-Democrat by playwright Lucile Rutland was a long howl of protest.

  Rutland particularly objected to the reliance on the first person, an unseemly bid for attention. She decried the way these reporters were “intruding their individuality on the public,” deploying “the first person singular.” In contrast, she praised a southern woman who’d written anonymously, displaying “an innate shrinking from public notice.” She saw it as a contest between the “New Woman” and the “True Woman.” She also disliked the way the writing was marked specifically as female: “If women have to do men’s work (and it seems inevitable), why, in the name of decency, can’t they do it like men? Why must they label everything with the vagaries of their sex?” She singled out, as egregious examples, Bly (“clever enough to know better”) and Kate Swan McGuirk (“short skirts, crocheted slippers, disheveled locks”).

  Did the editors who assigned these stories even care about the plight of female writers? Rutland wondered. She told the story of a New York woman who, like so many others, felt called to “Write!” But no one saw the value of her work, and she met only rejection. Unwilling to give up and accept her failure, she kept at it until she starved. “The paper that recorded her death, with a few paragraphs of post mortem justice, had a full-page illustration of Kate Swan exposing her shapely body to the revolting rites of electrocution, for the sake of new sensations to work up into several columns of hysteria and capital I’s,” Rutland wrote.

  Unlike most other stunt reporters, Kate Swan McGuirk used her real name, though she played with variants. For good or ill, that name, and her face (and calves and ankles), which graced so many Sunday magazine front pages, became a symbol of the World and this moment of its history.

  It was a risky move, rather like taking a turn as a fairy bareback rider, sweating in the glare of hot stage lights, wearing an itchy yet shiny costume, slowly rising on the spine of an unpredictable animal, toes clinging for balance.

  Part III

  Facing the Storm

  1896-Present

  Chapter 14

  1896–1897

  A Smear of Yellow

  The yellow journals incite them to do the things that get them into jails, though they do sympathize with them a great deal afterward and send their oldest girl reporters to draw touching pictures of how much they suffer in confinement after they have battered in somebody’s head or carved a man into pieces and thrown him around two counties.

  —Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 12, 1897

  In fall 1896, Elizabeth Banks disembarked the steamship St. Louis, back in New York City after four years in London. Accompanied by her big black dog,* she stepped onto the pavement of a shifted country, a shifted city, a shifted journalism landscape. The Vitascope allowed moving pictures to be projected on a screen, and audiences marveled at images of heaving surf. Bicyclists flew through the streets, on the cutting edge, but in peril: one had just died when hit by a train, another suffered internal injuries after being run over by a carriage. Hearst and Pulitzer’s frenzied competition continued unabated, with newsboys hawking dozens of “Extra” editions per day. Several weeks before, Kate Swan visited North Brother Island, New York’s leper colony, and a Journal Woman joined the hunt for alleged murderers in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. A flock of reporter
s awaited Banks’s arrival.

  She was a big name in Europe, with her undercover jaunts inspiring plays and poems* and, even better, a fair amount of controversy and scorching editorial commentary. Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London, her book filled with photographs of Banks in various disguises and details of her exploits, sold well enough in England to require multiple printings and was pirated in the United States. She’d covered a coal strike and conducted a rare and high-profile interview with the Chinese diplomat Li Hung Chang. One of Hearst’s reporters was among the first to approach her when she arrived in the States.

  But when the interviewer asked about her undercover reporting plans in America—hiring out as a servant? Advertising as an heiress angling for an introduction to high society?—Banks demurred.

  “Oh, no; I am not going to do any sensational work here,” she said.

  That was all in her past, she insisted, touching the bracelet of coins she earned as a housemaid. She’d paid her dues, and now she’d gone straight. Her heroine, Aurora Leigh, dreamed of being a poet, not a stunt girl. With visions of respect and safety (no more fear of losing fingers in the mangle), she’d written one essay for the journal Nineteenth Century and hoped to do more, delving into what she considered legitimate topics of intellectual inquiry.

  “I am merely going to write up the curiosities of a political campaign in America,” she told the Journal reporter.

  Assignments came easy at first. Telegrams wafted in with requests for interviews and features. She spent a few months writing inoffensive (and dull) articles about the English man versus the American man. After McKinley won the battle with Bryan, she featured his family in “The Home Life of the American President.” But though writing as a special correspondent paid up to four times the usual amount, it was still freelance work: feast and famine. Before long, suffering a “financial catastrophe” that made her London poverty pale in comparison, Banks once again found herself broke.

  On Newspaper Row, “sunlight, sparkling on a dome of gold” kept catching her eye. The sensational papers seemed to be printing money along with their front pages. Both owners were conspicuously wealthy and paid more than anyone else. As a result, the smartest, most talented reporters worked there. A staff position could provide the $40 a week she needed.

  And they offered genuine opportunity for those of her sex. Under the World’s glittering roof, in the Hearst office pandemonium, Banks knew that “the most difficult, the most enterprising, the most sensational and the most original work on this class of papers is done by women.” Hearst, though he didn’t pontificate about women in journalism, would do whatever it took to win. Female writers equaled sales. As a result, he hired a lot of them. As a journalist wrote years later, of Hearst and women: “Hundreds of them passed through his doorways, some to lose their jobs with staggering swiftness; others to build up big syndicate names and draw down the highest salaries in the profession.” But that style of journalism still left a bad taste in Banks’s mouth. Stunt reporting and writing about the body had been a liberating choice for many, but it was becoming an imprisoning expectation. Banks had a hard time finding a well-paying assignment that didn’t involve, for example, getting arrested as a prostitute in the Tenderloin and spending the night in jail. At the beginning, stunt reporters often came up with their own ideas, but now that the demand was so great, did they have the chance to say no? At what point did opportunity become exploitation?

  From its earliest days in the late 1880s, one strain of stunt reporting had been more sexual than public-spirited. Some of Nora Marks’s first ventures for the Chicago Tribune involved applying to work for a publisher of pornographic books and then as an artist’s model for a man who turned out to want to take and sell seminude photographs. An aspiring writer who arrived in Chicago as early as 1881 (she hoped to write literary essays until a magazine editor said she’d never make a living that way: “You’ll have to write about something you have seen, can describe, something no one else has done”), she was assigned to interview a train full of prostitutes and found herself mistaken for one. Female journalists whispered among themselves the story of a Chicago editor who requested that a new reporter marry a Mormon and send dispatches from Salt Lake City.

  Banks wasn’t the only reporter who thought this kind of work risked damaging, not furthering, women’s careers. Florence Finch Kelly, who’d reported for the San Francisco Examiner, found the stunts embarrassing. The “clamour of the stunting sisterhood” and the headlines that shrieked “its daring and unsavory exploits to be everywhere talked about” made established writers pause before recommending journalism as a profession. She worried these antics would cause male editors to think twice before hiring women at all.*

  And then there was the lack of originality. To be a stunt reporter seemed more and more to be one of a troupe of anonymous women performing the same tired tricks, and Banks felt her value as a writer was her unique perspective. Later, when discussing her autobiography with her agent, Banks insisted her individuality was a selling point. When he positioned the book as one about the tough lives of newspaperwomen in general, she reminded him that the manuscript’s significance was that it told the story of “the American Girl in London” who had lit the Thames on fire:

  “My book will not go because it is by a woman journalist but because it is by ME!”

  Banks also wondered about the cost of these adventures to the women who performed them. Some of the assignments risked physical harm. The peril was genuine. As one aspiring reporter asked her editor, when he suggested she sail from Europe to New York and let herself be taken in by one of the gangs that preyed on immigrant girls: “But one thing troubles me. Won’t there be real danger in it?”

  The larger culture echoed her unease. Banks had been in town only a few months when the New York Press coined the term “yellow-kid journalism” in January 1897. The phrase referred to a comic-strip character popular in the World then scooped up by the Journal (while the World continued to run an imitation). The term implied cartoonish, accessible, vulgar, like the slang-speaking Yellow Kid himself. It may have had roots in the dismissive phrase “yellow-covered literature”: cheaply printed adventure novels marked by, not surprisingly, their yellow covers. Beyond the Kid’s bright shirt, the color also brought to mind diseases like yellow fever. The Indianapolis Journal in February 1897 quoted the Press under the title: “Gotham’s Great Epidemic.” It continued, “After an attack of yellow-kid journalism, New Yorkers are not going to worry about the Bombay plague.” Certainly, there seemed something feverish in the approach.

  This then became “yellow journalism,” meaning everything outrageous, crowd pleasing, colorful and—the implication was—false. Other terms clung to “yellow journalism” like flies to fly paper: “lurid,” and “prurient” and “sensational.” “Lurid,” with its roots in the Latin color “luridus,” means a pale yellow, like the skin of someone who is ill, a sickly slice of sky before a storm. Or reddish, like a flame against darkness or smoke. Metaphorically, it means to look at something in this unsettling light, a tint that distorts. “Prurient” refers to itching with lust or curiosity, particularly that “dangerous curiosity” mentioned by clergyman Josiah Tucker as “that prurient desire of knowing where lies the exact Boundary between Virtue and Vice.” “Sensational,” unsurprisingly, is knowledge rooted in the senses, which brings readers back to their troublesome bodies.*

  By March, the categorization “yellow journalism” was being used to boot the World and the Journal from libraries. The Newark Public Library led the charge. When the Union Club voted to eliminate the papers as well, the Sun commented, approvingly, “In many institutions where the World and Journal are still admitted they are and have been for some time excluded from the libraries and reading rooms, and are kept under lock and key, to be brought out on the express demand of adults only.” Other libraries followed suit, including the Ansonia Public Library in Connecticut, which banne
d “yellow journalism” from the reading room to limit access to “pernicious and unclean newspapers.”

  Pulitzer struggled to maintain control, impeded by his distance and blindness. It must have been hard to feel the pulse of events without being able to see the excitement or indifference when a given edition hit the streets. Did commuters miss a train to read the headlines, or use the front page to wipe mud off their boots? Circulation numbers were the only way to track this, so he pressed for them, endlessly. Writing to his business manager, he stressed that the World needed to recover “the respect and confidence of the public” and destroy “the notion that we are in the same class with the Journal with recklessness & unreliability.” He worried the code had been cracked.

  The criticism didn’t bother Hearst at all.

  Other New York papers sought to distance themselves from the yellow stain, advertising their unsoiled brands. The New York Times moved its newly minted, rather prim, slogan to the front page: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” If simply reading these papers was indecent, what did it mean to edit one, as the convent-educated Elizabeth Jordan did? Or to write for one?

  But still, the World beckoned. Eventually, Banks went in.

  It was as she feared. After she refused to be arrested as a prostitute, the editor assigned her to take a train, then a mule, into “the wilds of Virginia,” where a group of whiskey distillers had recently attacked government officers trying to arrest them. It was an echo of Elizabeth Jordan’s journey to the South, where she interviewed a backwoods preacher years earlier, but with much higher stakes. If Banks pretended to be lost, with her delicate appearance, she could get access to their headquarters. An interview with the gang leader would be quite the tale. Could she leave in half an hour?