Sensational

by Kim Todd

  When Banks asked which male reporter would be sent along to keep her safe, the editor replied, “Men! . . . why, if I sent a man along with you, both he and you would be shot! Your only safety lies in your going by yourself.” Chivalry would protect her, he suggested.

  Banks’s faith in the chivalry of the American man had its limits. She declined that assignment, too.

  But she couldn’t continue saying no and keep her job. She had to come up with an alternate plan. Increasing concern over Cuba spurred interest in military technology. An inventor named John Holland was working on a boat that could attack an enemy from underwater: a submarine. Banks’s editor ordered her to be sure to be in it for the first test. Imagining plummeting to the bottom in a large metal coffin, without even time to type up a first-person piece on this novel kind of death, Banks tried a new strategy. As she had way back in St. Paul, she disguised herself as a “womanly woman,” shunning her usual practical skirt for a dress, frilly and white. Perfecting her “delicate, feminine appearance” in the mirror before she left, admiring the way the pale outfit made her face green and sickly, she set off for the Holland Torpedo Boat Company at the shipyards in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Looking at the fifty-foot tube lurking under the water’s surface, armed with not just a torpedo but two dynamite guns, Banks let fear play across her face. Ruffles trembling, she timidly asked Holland to let her step in the vessel and be submerged. Though Holland had full confidence in his invention, she got the refusal she wanted.

  “You would not die of the going down, but you would die of the fear! You would be actually and literally frightened to death!” he said. Then she got him to promise he wouldn’t let any other reporters go down either, and fluttered away.

  Even with these tactics, Banks stayed busy and employed. In between bringing stray kittens and injured dogs to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, she chased stories into the hospital, the jail, the morgue, smelling salts at the ready. She worked in a sweatshop, slept in a 15-cent-per-night lodging house, X-rayed her foot, interviewed a murderess.

  Though usually, as fit the genre, the writing featured a light touch, Banks’s chipperness could gloss over real turmoil. While in London, isolated, plagued with insomnia, in a state she later described as “breaking down under a very great mental strain,” she’d befriended journalist and reformer W. T. Stead, who let her recuperate at his property. And sometime during her stint at Pulitzer’s paper, a story unfolded that cut through the gloss to rage. A friend had introduced her to a girl from England who had come to America looking for employment. The woman had a child but no husband. She seemed pleasant and competent, and Banks found her a job as a governess with someone known for her charitable works. Then, one day, the employer burst into the newspaper office. She had discovered the out-of-wedlock child and kicked her governess out on the street at night. Did Banks know about this? she demanded. Banks demanded in turn where she thought her employee would go so late in a city that was strange to her.

  A Rescue Home, the woman answered. Banks exploded, all her feelings about hypocrisy, religion, charitable poses pouring out.

  I had forgotten that you were interested in those pathetically funny institutions—those places where they herd women together and tell them the story of Mary Magdalen, and pray over them, giving them to understand that the crime they have committed is the one that takes the largest amount of the blood of Christ to wash out, if it can be washed out at all, and then, branding them with a mark, send them out to work at such odds as few women can combat.

  The philanthropist, in turn, sneered that she should have reminded herself about the trashy publication where Banks worked. Then she left. No longer able to focus on her writing, “bitter hatred in my face and in my heart,” Banks stepped into the street to look for her friend. But she had no luck. Manhattan itself, sometimes so invigorating, set itself against her: “The great skyscrapers, the crowds of people, the loud jingle of the cable cars greeted me and seemed to laugh, in all their bigness, at me in my littleness and powerlessness.”

  The incident became a chapter in her autobiography called, in the English edition, “In the Name of Christ.” Perhaps daunted by the tone, the New York publishers requested she cut it from the American version, and she did.

  Hearst continued to needle the World. He’d hired away S. S. Carvalho, Pulitzer’s trusted publisher (and Nell Nelson’s husband), a few months after arriving in New York, and followed up by taking Arthur Brisbane, one of the World’s most dynamic editors, a year later.* He also doubled down on exuberant, pricy experimentation. Bringing Examiner successes to New York, Hearst ran endless contests. Journal readers could win prizes for the best hat design, the best breakfast menu, the best limerick, the best composition praising the Journal, the best name for a baby hippo at the Central Park Zoo. (Winner: “Iris.”) The paper offered $50 for deciphering a code in the Want Ads, $1,000 for the best solution to the serialized mystery “The Mill of Silence.”

  The Journal continued to push its nascent form of activist journalism into new realms. In the summer of 1897, when three boys swimming in the East River brought to shore a package wrapped in red and gold fabric that turned out to contain a man’s torso and arms, the city editor wondered whether it was a joke. But the next day, when a father hunting berries with his young sons found another piece of the man near the Washington Bridge over the Harlem River, and the two pieces fit together, the Journal assembled a team of thirty reporters (and one novelist), a “Murder Squad” devoted to solving the crime. Some members tested the tides of the Harlem River to see where a package thrown from the Washington Bridge might end up, some looked for stores that might have sold the cloth, one found a palm reader to interpret the severed hands, one consulted with a surgeon. Others rented a boat to drag the river for the head. The novelist wrote up possible scenarios.

  At one a.m., on June 29, a Journal reporter interviewed staff at a Turkish bath with a missing masseuse. After hearing a description of the man, and learning that a rival for his mistress’s affections had beat him not long before, the reporter went right then to interview the mistress. She seemed unconcerned about her lover’s disappearance. Employees of the bath identified the body at the morgue—that damaged index finger, the flesh removed from the chest just where his tattoo would have been. The next morning, the reporter visited the mistress again and found her packing her apartment, having told the landlord she was leaving immediately for Europe. The police arrested her later that day and her lover not long after.

  The solving of the mystery, played out over the course of a week, allowed the Journal to brag: “When the educated man of special training and habits of thought competes with the detective who graduated from a lazy life of patrol duty he wins easily.”

  Now that his reporters had mastered the role of detective, Hearst pushed them into another—revolutionary hero. The Journal was firmly on the side of the Cuban rebels and had been advocating for the United States to declare war against Spain. Now it had discovered a potent symbol of Spanish outrages in Cuba: an innocent maiden in the form of the dark-haired Evangelina Cisneros, locked in the tower of a Havana jail. Daughter of a rebel leader deported to an island off mainland Cuba, she’d caught the eye of a high-ranking Spanish official. Coordinating with insurgents, she agreed to invite him to her house, under the pretense that she returned his affections. According to the plan, the rebels would be waiting and, while his guard was down, capture him and take control of the garrison. She did her part, luring the official into her house, then shouting, “You, men, take care of the situation.” But her coconspirators were distracted by distant gunfire and missed their cue. She was arrested for treason and thrown into jail.

  Hearst launched a letter-writing campaign, gathering signatures from prominent women to plead with the pope and the queen regent in Spain for Cisneros’s release. Then, in October, using funds in part from the Cuban businessman Carlos Carbonell, he sent reporter Karl Decker to stage a rescue. Decker was well cas
t: strapping frame, bristling mustache. After secreting Cisneros a message about his plans, he rented a room next to the prison and sawed through the bars at her window. She drugged her fellow prisoners with laudanum in their coffee, then climbed through the window and over the roof. A few days later, disguised as a sailor, she boarded a ship to New York. Hearst was ecstatic, reveling in the celebration that greeted her arrival. His paper lauded the “shy, dark-eyed Cuban maiden, concerning whose beauty no dissenting voice has yet been heard.” She met with the president, while the World grumbled and suggested the guards might have been bribed to let her go. There seemed no limit to what a paper could do.

  In addition to solving murders and rescuing maidens, the New York Journal in 1897 profiled Victoria Earle Matthews in the haphazard way it often jumbled together items considered of interest to women. Her photo with the caption “Mrs. Victoria Earle Matthews who was once a slave, is now the chief organizer of the National Association of Colored Women, and is a clever writer” appeared on a page with pictures from a play and the article “The Real Swell Girl Wears Ten Pairs of Shoes in One Day.”

  Matthews’s life had taken a dramatic turn, leaving her searching for her own kind of purpose. Through the early 1890s, her career continued to bloom; she’d written well-received short stories and a play; a biographical sketch said that, among African American female journalists, “none are more popular than Victoria Earle.” She was deeply literary, both in her writing, which showed evidence of wide and careful reading, and her sense of the importance of including stories from Black Americans in the country’s canon. In a profile of Frederick Douglass, she described his life as “America’s great epic.” She defended reading novels (often scorned as a trivial pursuit), and her lecture at the First Congress of Colored Women in Boston impressed listeners with its meticulously detailed case for “The Value of Race Literature.”

  “We cannot afford any more than any other people to be indifferent to the fact, that the surest road to real fame is through literature,” she told the gathered crowd. “Who knows or can judge of our intrinsic worth without actual evidence of our breadth of mind, our boundless humanity.”

  Many of her nonliterary hopes were tied up in her son. When she’d met Frederick Douglass at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, where he was the representative of Haiti, they rode the railway through the grounds together. In a later letter, reminding him of that encounter, she asked if she could bring her son to visit him for a jolt of inspiration. She imagined the fourteen-year-old as a grown man, saying, “Yes I had seen The Hon. Frederick Douglass—heard him speak—his hand has rested upon my head.”

  But her son didn’t get a chance to grow into that man. He died in September 1895, at fifteen. At a loss for something to do with her grief, a state she described as “torn and disordered,” Matthews traveled to the South. She watched brickmaking at the Tuskegee Institute; she chaired the Resolutions Committee of the Congress of Colored Women of America during the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. Resolutions condemned lynching and railcars that separated passengers by race. Others praised the elevation of “motherhood and womanhood of the race” and requested “the same standards of morality for men as for women.”

  And based on disturbing observations, she channeled her grief into an investigation of the conditions of those who remained in rural areas of the South. Matthews had deep-set dark eyes, strong features, thick bangs. With her light skin and straight hair, many thought she was white—a notion she took pains to dispel, often announcing her background at the start of lectures: “When I speak of the colored people, I speak of people of whom I have my maternal origin. I speak of my brother, or my sister.” In letters she implied her father might have been the man who enslaved her mother. But in this instance, she may have taken advantage of the ability to disguise herself as a different race.* In Alabama and Georgia, the state where she’d been born, Black women and children mired in poverty languished on plantations, eager for any education that could help them. Prison reform was essential: the lack of any juvenile justice system meant that children labored on chain gangs alongside adults.

  Matthews’s first impulse was to stay in the South, where she seemed so badly needed, to create a model home where she could teach life skills, but a minister urged her to use her energies to help young Black women drawn to New York under false pretenses. So she turned her attention to fraudulent employment agencies, based in Richmond, Norfolk, and other southern cities, those that tempted inexperienced young women with the lure of jobs in the North. The agencies promised to loan recruits money for boat fare, meet them at the dock, and provide housing until they found work. All the girls needed to do was to sign a contract giving an agency their wages until the debts were paid. It was, essentially, indentured servitude.

  The southern women found themselves sleeping on the floor in filthy boardinghouses, racking up more debt as time ticked by. The situation of Black women looking for work was complicated by discrimination. They were barred from some factories because white employees refused to work with them. Nursing schools were closed to them. So when they were offered employment, finally, it was often the kind that would bar them from polite society (like Bly, like all the others, Matthews understood the importance of staying on the right side of the line, the safe side)—serving beer in bars and gambling houses, working as prostitutes.

  Matthews had a very different sense of New York and its dangers than that reflected in the World and the New York Journal. The major charities at the time focused more on the needs of Eastern European immigrants than on those of Black Americans migrating north. For Matthews, concrete activism, beyond airy conference resolutions, was becoming more appealing than writing articles or short stories. Helping these girls and publicizing their plight was something she could do.

  As 1897 came to an end, a little girl wrote to Santa requesting the Round the World with Nellie Bly board game. Ida Wells-Barnett debated a preacher in Boston who thought lynching was sometimes justifiable. Helen Dare went to the Yukon for the Examiner. Winifred Black filed for divorce. At the Journal, she’d been her husband’s boss, which he resented. When she corrected his work, he assaulted her, and it wasn’t the first time. Things had gotten very ugly, with Orlow Black claiming their son wasn’t his. The divorce was granted.

  And Elizabeth Banks took a different tack on the working-girl stunt. Rather than charting the conditions of employees in the factory, she would experience their lives at home. Like so many did, she would live on $3 a week. When she announced her plans in the paper, a dour note arrived from a working girl, predicting her demise: “If you are going to try to exist on $3 a week I advise you to leave your order with the undertaker in advance.”

  The first day, Banks worried over making her rental apartment cheerful and comfortable, priding herself on creating a shelf from a box top, wishing she could sew a calico cushion for her chair. But soon, her focus shifted entirely to food. She thought about it all the time. By the end of the second day, she was already down to $1 and hungry, needing another loaf of bread. She spent three hours looking for a chicken within her budget, and when she tried to cook it, it was painfully tough. Like so many stunt reporters, her body offered proof of her claims: “My head aches and my eyes ache with poor food and worrying over it.” Meager breakfasts sapped her energy and, when she got home from work, she was often tempted to go to bed rather than cook a meal. By the fifth day, she declared, “No working girl can live comfortably on $3 a week. . . . It is a shame to ask a girl to do it.” By the end of her experiment, all but two cents of her money was gone, leaving her nothing for an emergency doctor visit, a new plate to replace the one she’d cracked, or more oil for the stove if a cold wind blew in. On the final day, she accepted an invitation to dinner with a “girl bachelor” who bought a more expensive chicken that tasted much better. In addition, the paper held a contest with the prize being Banks’s humble apartment, the one she’d obtained and furnished for the story,
with three months’ rent paid.

  Banks insisted she hated this kind of reporting, found it “loathsome.” Certainly, it would be hard to admit you liked something so universally condemned. And yet.

  This life was more free than almost any other option. In the morning, a reporter might put on a corset, pull on stockings, lace up practical boots that could take her from Central Park to City Hall, step into a wide-bottomed cotton skirt that allowed for jumping on streetcars or chasing down an interview and wouldn’t be ruined by contact with a little dirt. A short jacket went over an unfussy striped shirtwaist. A silk tie, like a man would wear, could be tied around the neck. She might put her hair up and back, and pin on a straw sailor hat that could provide shade and take a battering. Then she’d be ready to take off, like a tennis player, or a bicyclist, or the other modern women who peppered the World’s pages.

  As she wrote in Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl” about her New York reporting:

  As the days and the weeks went on I could even feel myself growing, growing in grace, growing in charity, putting aside such narrow creeds and prejudices as had been a part of my up-bringing, and were, perhaps, in their place and time, good and wholesome for the girl, but cramping, distorting, warping to the woman. Life! Life! Seething life was all about me. The life of a great city, its riches, its poverty, its sin, its virtue, its sorrows. . . . I entered it and, while I studied, became a part of it, learning how akin was all humanity, after all, and how large a place had environment and circumstance in the making a character and the molding of destiny.