by Kim Todd
It was the answer to those cold mornings on the Wisconsin farm, the monotonous existence she feared more than death by submarine: “A quiet life which was not life at all.”
Banks, a savvy adult woman who calculated risks, made her own decisions, and lived with the results, belied the constant worry over naive young girls taken advantage of by unscrupulous assigning editors. In many fictional short stories of the time, heroines like Jordan’s Miss Van Dyke abandon reporting for love of a man or family, but hundreds of flesh-and-blood women were making the opposite choice.
Proud of navigating the perilous yellow waters that lapped at her ankles, of standing up for herself (an ability she credited to her “self-assertive and combative disposition”), Banks finished up her series on $3 a week with satisfaction. Her next assignment seemed right up her alley, both meaty and decent. But it would threaten to drag her under.
On New Year’s Eve, 1897, the Journal funded a massive celebration. On January 1, all five boroughs would be joined together as one city: Greater New York. Flags, fireworks, clowns, horns, Chinese lanterns on sticks would pack the streets around City Hall and Newspaper Row. Searchlights and hot-air balloons would embellish the sky. As many as eight hundred singers would belt out songs. A 120-piece band would blare “The Star Spangled Banner,” “Auld Lang Syne,” and “Ode to Greater New York.”
On its editorial page, the Journal metaphorically rubbed its hands in glee. On December 3, the paper trumpeted its accomplishments, along with its philosophy: “Above the boards and councils and commissions stand the courts, and by the side of the courts stands the New Journalism, ready to touch the button that sets their ponderous machinery in motion.” It highlighted the paper’s mottoes: “While others talk the Journal acts,” and “What is everybody’s business is the Journal’s business.” Then, days later, it taunted Pulitzer. The World’s accomplishments were all in the past. The paper had become “timid and dull, as bankrupt in enterprise as it is in talent.” The editorial writer, clearly channeling Hearst if not Hearst himself, imagined that in the World’s shining dome “a sad and reminiscent and beaten lonely man will be sitting, listening to the Journal’s triumphant music and the applauding shouts of the city far below, in the world of the present.” It was personal. It was always personal.
Despite the Journal’s glowing predictions of clear skies and moonlight, New Year’s Eve was cold and rainy. The fireworks and colored lights lit up the clouds and reflected off the damp pavement. Gaps yawned in the parade where groups had dropped out. Some celebrants, drinking to keep off the chill, stumbled into the parade route, only to be herded back by police. The singing societies were hard to hear, but there was no lack of noise, with whistles and horns, and the bells of Trinity Church over it all. At midnight on the East Coast, the mayor of San Francisco, standing in California, pressed a button that unfurled the flag of Greater New York, marking the new city, but also the stretch of Hearst’s empire, from West to East.
But Pulitzer was not up in the dome, pulling out his hair at the sight of the Journal’s glory, wincing at every firework explosion, watching the parade with churning envy. He was in Bar Harbor, Maine, with his teenage daughter, Lucille, who had been battling typhoid fever. She seemed to be making a recovery, but at 6:16 p.m., just as crowds gathered and organizers were debating whether to call the whole thing off because of bad weather, Pulitzer’s secretary sent a telegram to the World’s manager. “Chief much broken,” he wrote. Lucille had died, and for once her father’s mind was not on the newspaper business.
Chapter 15
1898
All Together in New Bedford
Do you believe that “woman is the weaker sex”?
Do you believe that the Fates intended that woman’s scheme of life should be worked out in a place called Home, where she should rest secure from the hubbub and turbulent hurry of the working world?
If that is your idea of woman’s existence, pay a visit to New Bedford.
—Boston Post, January 23, 1898
January 1898 found Eva Valesh (formerly Eva McDonald, pseudonym Eva Gay) on her way north to New Bedford, Massachusetts. The city had a rich history as a lively whaling port. In Moby-Dick, New Bedford appeared as a prosperous town built on whale oil. The mansions “came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. One and all they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea,” according to Melville. With the decline of the shipping industry and the move away from whale-oil lamps, though, the city turned to textiles along with nearby Fall River. Massive stone factories lined the waterfront along Buzzard’s Bay, churning out fine cotton cloth. Nearby, ramshackle buildings housed immigrant mill workers. The bay shore bristled with piers, and, this time of year, ice crusted the water’s edge.
But after declining profits prompted a 10 percent wage cut, almost ten thousand textile workers had walked out—a strike that some feared would spread throughout New England. On the first day, as strikers jostled outside the shuttered mills, boys threw rocks at one of the factories, breaking windows. Rumors swirled that the owners might bring in Pinkerton detectives to act as private security, that a riot was imminent. And just as in her very first reporting job in Minneapolis, Valesh, now on assignment for Hearst’s New York Journal, was headed toward the heart of it.
As she braced herself for the tumult on the streets, Valesh was coming off her own tumultuous year. For one thing, her marriage of seven years was failing.
She had met Frank Valesh back in the Twin Cities, organizing for the eight-hour-day campaign. Frank, who had emigrated from Europe when he was nine, had drooping light eyes, a drooping mustache. A portrait showed him in a white hat and a bow tie, giving the impression of a clerk pressed into cattle-roping duty. There was no East Coast slickness about him.
And at the start, all this appealed. They shared political convictions, a love for books; they critiqued each other’s lecture style. Eva Valesh wrote giddy newlywed letters to her reporter colleague Albert Dollenmayer, also a newlywed. She addressed him as “Friend Doll,” saying that “marriage opened so full and new a life to me” and describing the “utter wretchedness” at being apart from her husband. Even though Dollenmayer seemed similarly happy, she wondered whether he could truly understand as, she noted, “I hardly think marriage makes the difference to a man that it does to a woman.”
But even then, she could sense domestic life might conflict with other desires. With her marriage only a month old, she was already far away, in western New York on a lecture tour to promote the formation of a third political party. The People’s Party aimed to support farmers and laborers and wrest power from large corporations, and she was the state lecturer for the Farmer’s Alliance. Building her skills, speaking alongside senators, rallying the crowd, the work grew more fascinating all the time.
“It is a hard struggle,” she wrote to Dollenmayer. “I hate to leave him and I’m unhappy all the time away, yet I can’t bear to let slip the opportunities to get to the front.” Her companions were impressive but not overshadowing: “I think without egotism that I could stand side by side with them and hold my own. Of course my ambitions are confidential.”
Her ambitions may have been confidential, but they were, in fact, clear to everyone around her. She and Frank fought over whether she should return to the lecture circuit after giving birth to her son in the spring of 1892, a pregnancy that almost killed her. When Dollenmayer planned to stop by to offer congratulations, Frank wrote to say that she wasn’t well enough to come downstairs. Would he mind postponing several weeks? (By then, he added, not only might his wife be better but the “baby being then considerably older will appear more intelligent hence more of a credit to this family.”) As soon as Valesh was able, she arranged for her mother-in-law to help with childcare and went back to writing and politics.
They also clashed about where to live. She loved the East and missed the landscapes of her Maine childhood, the green lushness, the buttercups. While in New York State, sh
e wrote to Dollenmayer, “I don’t think I shall ever be content to live in the prairies again.” But Frank seemed perfectly happy with Minnesota life. Like other journalists of her generation, Eva married young with one set of expectations of what life might offer, and then grew into another, more expansive, reality.
Finally, after years as a labor activist, in the summer of 1897, against the advice of many, including colleague and American Federation of Labor leader Samuel Gompers, she took her son, Frank, with her younger sister to look after him,* and moved back East to seek work as a reporter. Friends warned that some of these jobs were perilous for women. Assignments required haunting criminal courts. Subject matter might cause a “loss of self respect.” But New York journalism once again dangled its lure, and she wanted to give it a try. She’d started to tell people her husband was dead, though he was alive and well, making cigars in the Midwest.
Now she was a reporter for Hearst.
The circulation battle between the World and the New York Journal was growing more heated, but the life wasn’t as bad as people had said. Rather than dangerous and degrading tasks, she found, like other hopeful women before her, a lack of good assignments. Her stack of St. Paul Globe columns didn’t have much weight. The Journal hired her as a “space” writer, paid by the article rather than a staff salary, the kind of position that left Elizabeth Banks broke before she signed on at the World. Colleagues poked fun at her unfashionable black lambskin coat. She worked from noon to midnight and found herself scrambling, always with the threat of being fired, under an editor who didn’t have much use for women in the newsroom.
One day, after struggling at the Journal for months, she was sent to uncover the identity of a woman who killed herself by drinking carbolic acid on the sidewalk along Fourteenth Street. Unidentified bodies often had absorbing stories behind them, but they were hard to get. Young women drawn to the city (as she had been) often didn’t have nearby families to claim them. Valesh considered it “an impossible assignment,” designed to get rid of her. On viewing the corpse at the morgue, she got sick and, stomach roiling, sped back to her apartment. But after she recovered and tidied up, her luck broke.
On her way back to the street, she—always up to talk—chatted with the boy selling papers. She mentioned her hopeless task, adding, bleakly, “I’m getting nowhere.”
“Oh,” the boy said, “I know something about that girl. Go in and ask the druggist at the corner here. She tried to buy the carbolic there, but he wouldn’t sell it to her. I’m sure that’s the girl. Then she got it at a drug store down the street.”
Not only did the druggist know her—Mamie Donahue—he knew where she was from. Donahue was one of a group of young women who hung out at the Florence Crittenton Mission, a house on Bleecker Street that held night religious services and offered rooms to young women, many of them prostitutes. Tired of a life Valesh characterized as filled with a “terror of work, of monotony, of subjection to authority, of the hospital, of waning beauty, of hunger, of contempt” and covetous of the flower- and hymn-filled funerals the mission provided, about a dozen girls, after a night of drinking, had cooked up the idea for a “Suicide Club.” They drew lots, and the one who got the skull and crossbones had to kill herself by drinking carbolic acid before the next meeting. Two had already died.
At the mission, Valesh confirmed the woman’s identity with the assistant matron then accompanied her to the morgue. If it’s Mamie Donahue, Valesh told her, pinch me, but don’t say the name out loud.
“I want an exclusive story,” she said.
A Suicide Club, featuring a dead girl on a slab, body displayed for the writer and reader to peer at without shame, was just the thing to please the Journal. “She has good looks to recommend her. Even her dead face, showing as it does the burns of acid on lips and chin, is handsome. The features are regular and feminine, without conspicuous marks of dissipation, the hair is thick and the eyebrows are superbly arched,” wrote Valesh.
She didn’t receive a byline, but she established her worth, kept her job, and earned a reputation as the “suicide editor,” a regular beat, though a far cry from the labor journalism she loved. As she commented later of Journal reporting: “It was gruesome work.”
She weighed the pros and cons of staying. On the one hand, perhaps the constant emphasis on crime promoted crime, including copycats for particularly gory acts. Unlike in the Twin Cities, where reporters would wait for stories to land on their office desks, the cutthroat nature of New York journalism demanded going out and finding a story even when there was no obvious news. Reflecting on her experience later, Valesh wrote that readers expected the kind of drama that happened only in novels, so she and her peers faked details of clothing and facial expressions, keeping in mind that “these things must be done artistically.”* On the other hand, the Journal’s motto, “Journalism that acts,” echoed Valesh’s own philosophy: “a great paper has a duty toward the country in critical times.” Such a paper “may wield an enormous influence if the proprietor desires to spend the money and take the trouble to do so.” For someone who shifted between journalist and activist from her very first assignment, it was a perfect fit.
But then in January 1898, she faced a new opportunity. Hearst himself called Valesh into his office to say he was sending her to cover the textile strike in New Bedford.
The summer before, more than one hundred thousand coal miners in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, frustrated by eroding wages, struck in dramatic fashion. A group of miners near Hazelton, Pennsylvania, protested, in particular, a new tax of 3 cents per day on employers hiring immigrants, a fee the owners passed on to the workers. The men walked out and marched from mine to mine, urging others to join them. A sheriff and his men opened fire on the strikers, killing at least nineteen men, all unarmed immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Journal, eager to align with sympathies of its readers and to support labor, reported on the dire poverty of the workers, the violent suppression of their protest, and the union’s ultimate (rare) victory in extracting concessions from the owners. Perhaps things were changing for labor. New Bedford had the potential to be similarly explosive.
“Of course, we are a bit sensational,” the soft-voiced, yet intimidating editor said. At thirty-four, he was still youthful, still with the center part in his hair, though his dandyism had been tempered by time. “Do you understand enough of the way we run our papers to be able to give us the sort of a story we want?”
She certainly did. She had been racing from Harlem to Jersey City to Brooklyn for months, tracking down details of contentious divorces and ferreting out dress styles of corpses. Even though Valesh knew she got the chance only because his star reporters were off covering Cuba, where rebel forces were making headway against the Spanish with much encouragement from the Journal, she was not one to let any opportunity slip away.
“Yes, sir,” Valesh said.
In New Bedford, Valesh rushed to find scenes and interview subjects, as her New York experience trained her to do. She quickly recruited a heroine in Harriet Pickering, a thirty-three-year-old weaver originally from Lancashire, England. She had many traits Valesh valued, including courage and a seriousness of purpose. A widow, she was raising her twelve-year-old son to be a lawyer, a career Valesh imagined for herself, if her circumstances had been different. And when Pickering wasn’t weaving, she studied economics and lobbied state politicians for labor-friendly legislation, often hauling a satchel of papers to support her arguments.
Valesh saw Pickering in action at the meeting of the Weavers’ Union, not long after she arrived. The central issue in the strike was the 10 percent pay cut, but some weavers wanted to include reform of the “fining” system in their demands. While weavers worked for set prices per piece, like sweatshop seamstresses, if the cloth showed any damage, the weaver would be fined, her pay drastically cut for that item: even for an oil stain that could be cleaned off and the fabric sold as perfect; even for an error that occurred
before the yarn reached the weavers’ looms. In theory, the practice was outlawed by an 1892 statute. In practice, the law was ignored. And women, maybe because managers thought they wouldn’t object, were fined much more frequently than men. “A man, you see,” explained the treasurer of the New England Federation of Weavers, “has more ways of standing up for his rights. There’s the ballot-box, for one.”
Pickering stood up confidently and argued that objection to fining should be part of the protest. Tall and thin, pale from hours in the mill, Pickering preferred a severe black dress with white collar and cuffs, but it didn’t lace in her spirit. If there was anything Valesh prized, it was the ability to give a good speech.
“Sit down!” a man yelled at Pickering.
“Not I,” she replied. “Your Executive Committee know I am right, but they have grown timid.”
Ultimately, though some complained the fining issue would complicate matters, her resolution carried, and Valesh made the debate the centerpiece of her early reporting.
Pickering wasn’t the only woman the Journal highlighted in the strike’s early days. All of a sudden, after being denied so much as a byline, Valesh’s identity was integral to the story. The January 19, 1898, Journal splashed a large illustration of Valesh on the front page, showing her strong-jawed and serious, detailing her labor past, touting her as “the Journal’s special commissioner to the cotton strike.” Three smaller pictures showed her in alternate guises: “labor agitator,” “shop girl,” “reporter.” Her background gave her authority.
Eva McDonald Valesh
Eva McDonald Valesh (listed as 1886, but likely 1890s) (Minnesota History Center)
The strike offered Hearst and Pulitzer another battlefield and created a new opportunity for female reporters. In addition to Valesh, the Journal sent Anne O’Hagan. Not to be outdone, the World put its own women on the job: Kate Swan McGuirk, who grew up in nearby Fall River, and labor leader Minnie Rosen, an organizer with the Women’s Branch of the United Brotherhood of Tailors, a Russian Jewish immigrant who lived in a tenement. A World reporter heard Rosen give a talk at the YWCA and offered her a job covering the strike, rushing her to Grand Central Station to board a New Bedford–bound train. Rosen’s introduction to readers emphasized that she worked long days in a sweatshop and that her family members spoke only broken English, counterbalancing Valesh’s expertise. Elizabeth Banks, done with living on $3 a day, also set out for New Bedford. Suddenly, instead of being the only woman covering a given story, all these reporters who’d slipped into the newsroom through the door of stunt journalism converged in one place.