Sensational

by Kim Todd

  The World would offer a female story from a female perspective, advertisements claimed: “The woes of the 4,000 women who are warring against capital strikingly told by women writers. Startling statements by labor experts. All in the great New York Sunday World.”

  Though nothing much happened, initially, Valesh made the most of it. Finding the streets quiet rather than roiling, she wrote: “Grim Silence Everywhere.” Remembering the Journal style and her promise to Hearst, Valesh sought out examples of suffering, hoping to show the mill owners as villains. She visited a tenement with a large family short on food; the mother hadn’t been able to go back to the mill after giving birth and losing the baby. In another house, suffused with anguish, the mother had died of consumption only the week before. Valesh visited an old man, fired when his eyesight got too bad for loom work, and ate pea soup with a family unable to add meat because the father was an invalid and they lived only on the mother’s salary.

  A follow-up on New Bedford tenement life went even further. Valesh encountered an eighteen-year-old dying of consumption drawing “her ragged gown about her” and a four-year-old so neglected no one had bothered to give her a name. Valesh asked for a glass of water, only to find it had been shut off. In summary, though she’d seen the worst of Paris and New York: “The New England mill operatives can compass a blank despair and slow starvation not to be matched anywhere.”

  Other reporters offered images in a similar vein: The Boston Post reported on a mill worker’s pantry that contained only half a cabbage, a handful of potatoes, and some chicory coffee; O’Hagan described a tenement with plaster falling from the ceiling, calling the scene: “unutterable degradation—the degradation of dinginess, of forlornness, of poverty, of absolute hopelessness”; Rosen described sickly workers, with blue lips, in falling-down houses that “a howling wind might blow into the river.”

  But this presentation of laborers as helpless victims was at odds with much of Valesh’s previous work as an organizer. Her speeches had urged women to come together to use their power, and she always stressed that she had been a working girl herself and kept her membership in the Typographical Union current. Her early stories built on tips from young factory women who lived in the same boardinghouse she did. They were her friends. Like Bly, who got her first job because of the Pittsburg Dispatch’s desire to add the voice of a genuine working girl to its staff, she claimed to be the very kind of person she wrote about. Now, in an effort to meet the Journal’s expectations, Valesh faced accusations of being out of touch.*

  Local reporters in New Bedford and Fall River were disturbed by what they viewed as a New York invasion and an insult to their proud New England community. These two clashing portrayals—workers as victims and workers as heroes—didn’t escape their notice. What did this poverty have to do with the strike? they asked. The strike was only two days old. New Bedford reporters and editors pointed out that in much of the out-of-town reporting, the pictures and words didn’t match. About the Journal, one local journalist raged, “Yesterday’s story was mainly given up to women ‘with blanched faces and wasted figures’ who were dying here of cold and starvation. With the story was an alleged portrait of a woman who is a striking weaver. . . . The girl was superbly gowned in a walking suit which must have been made by a very skillful tailor and she wore a heavy boa of fur.” The image was of Valesh’s heroine, Harriet Pickering.

  New Bedford was, coincidentally, also the site of the Lizzie Borden trial, and memories of the press circus lingered. One local reporter objected to the mill workers of New Bedford being portrayed as “a few degrees lower, if such a thing were possible, in the societal and intellectual scale than the wretched and semi-civilized Huns and Slavs of the mining districts of Pennsylvania and the West.” New England reporters and editors were disgusted. Degradation? Worse than the slums of Paris and tenements of New York? The outrages of the Journal and World were endless.

  And they had the perfect term to sum it all up and discredit the New York reporters: “yellow journalism.”

  The weavers and spinners also pushed back against these renderings. From the days of the Lowell Mill women’s strike in 1836, factory workers had a tradition of standing up for themselves, of describing their own experiences, and they resented being painted by outsiders as pathetic victims. Alice Brierly had been profiled by the Journal as “the Oldest” striker, drinking cold tea, not wanting to light a fire because there was no food to cook, bemoaning her sixty years in the mills and wishing she were back home in England: “America’s a cruel country to the work people.” Not long after the article appeared, she and her husband arrived at the New Bedford Evening Standard offices, carrying the Boston Post and the Journal, which bore an unflattering illustration of an ancient crone. She was only fifty-seven, Alice pointed out, and rather than scraping the bottom of the tea canister, their home was one where her daughter played piano during the interview. Not to mention that their last name was misspelled.

  Valesh, maybe stung by the criticism, maybe wanting a comprehensive overview of underlying causes, maybe tired of the sharp elbows as all the New York reporters competed for interviews with the same sources, maybe wanting to cover the story in a way that played to her strengths, left the quiet streets of New Bedford for Washington DC after only a few days. The important decisions were made far from the waterfront shacks or even the mill owners’ mansions, she knew. She went to interview the president.

  In her report (including a large illustration of her talking with President McKinley, which made even this journalistic triumph seem vaguely stunt-like), she recorded his approval of arbitration between management and labor, the eight-hour day, and a current bill restricting immigration (using the logic that it would provide higher wages for laborers born in the United States).

  Two days later, Valesh tracked down Representative Nelson Dingley of Maine in the Hamilton Hotel. The Dingley Act, passed the previous July, hiked tariffs on many kinds of cloth, china, and sugar. In Dingley’s analysis, New England mill owners had bought cotton relatively high and prices had dropped, leaving them with overstock and an inability to pay workers what they demanded. But southern competition was the real trouble, Dingley stressed, with southern weavers and spinners willing to work longer hours in worse conditions.

  “Could you suggest any other plan by which the difficulty might have been tided over?” Valesh asked. Dingley proposed a reduction in hours with the mills running only a few days a week until the financial picture improved.

  It was a very technical, wonky interview, and it’s clear Valesh relished every minute. Suicide might have been her Journal beat, but labor policy was her forte.

  Other reporters, though they started out following an expected script, also found their own perspectives, pulling away from the stunt reporter’s increasingly generic tone. In response to Valesh championing Pickering, Anne O’Hagan offered Jane Gallagher. Gallagher, a weaver who’d also emigrated from Lancashire, demonstrated a quieter kind of resistance than Pickering, who shouted down her critics in the lecture hall. “Her bravery is not the Boadicean sort, that arms itself with sword and shield and goes out to battle with its foes. It is the rarer, more significant kind that resists oppression strenuously and steadily, and that, without any sounding of cymbals, announces its intention never to yield to injustice,” O’Hagan wrote.

  In O’Hagan’s telling, when Gallagher handed in a piece of cotton cloth to receive the $1.17 she was due, she was fined 58.5 cents for a flaw. Rather than complaining, Gallagher declared: “I will not be fined.” And when the mill’s representatives laughed in her face, she walked out and then took them to court.

  This offered an opportunity for the Journal to swoop back in. In keeping with its motto of “Journalism that acts,” the paper offered to pay for Gallagher’s lawsuit, previously funded by the Weavers’ Union.

  Ever the contrarian, Elizabeth Banks also developed her own approach. Her arrival in New Bedford met both praise and pushback. In a newspaper i
mage announcing her assignment, Banks stared challengingly out at the audience, a set mouth softened by a cloud of wavy hair, above two smaller pictures of Banks dressed as a maid and a street sweeper. To modern eyes, it looks like a movie poster. She is touted as the correspondent with the most “interesting and unique personality,” one who “roused all England by her campaigns of curiosity.” Meanwhile, the New England papers looked askance at the idea that the stunting young woman “who obtained situations in the homes of the families of the English nobility that she might write up the members” would be paying them a visit.

  Banks determined to provide the opposite of the expected gloom. She rebelled against the assumption that, because of the World’s reputation as “a friend of the poor workers,” she would automatically side with the strikers. Her early articles were aggressively cheerful, going out of their way to laud positive aspects of the strikers’ lives. She visited their homes and noted that, though the women might make only $7 a week: “such clean houses they keep . . . and such an amount of comparative comfort as they manage to extract from it!” She continued, “I never saw such an intelligent looking and really pretty set of working girls as are now on strike in New Bedford.”

  Illustration of Elizabeth Banks, announcing her presence in New Bedford

  Elizabeth Banks illustration (Harry Beetle Hough Scrapbooks, Widener Library, Harvard University)

  The vice president of the Weavers’ Union, William Foley, told her outright, “Write up some of the happy things in New Bedford. . . . Don’t you go painting this town blacker than it is.” So Banks complied, covering the church, Foley’s lovely home, and his mother (“one of the happiest and brightest of old woman I have ever met”). A boy making mud pies in an alley was “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” She toured some of the poorer families, taking on Valesh directly, commenting, “To compare their homes and the streets in which they reside to the slums of London and New York is to libel them and bring out their just resentment.” The headline? “Jolly Strikers Who Don’t Whine at Woe.”

  Once she put aside her boosterism, though, Banks offered some of the most valuable straight reporting on the strike; her articles are where one would turn to find out what was happening day by day. Banks also painted a nuanced portrait of New Bedford, a place where local women created a community-subsidized nursery for the babies whose mothers worked at the mill; one where the library hosted fifteen-year-old boys devouring the news from Cuba, readers demanding books on economics, and a gaunt man refining his poetry. When Banks received a letter from Staten Island offering a place as a servant for a suffering mill girl, she recorded the polite refusals of the young women who, though hungry, didn’t want to leave tight-knit families. They saw such work as demeaning, just like their London counterparts.

  Banks stayed at the strike longer than almost anyone else, offering increasingly complex analysis. It was the kind of reporting opportunity she’d been waiting for.

  Kate Swan McGuirk, heroine of dozens of the World’s Sunday-page adventures, hewed to what she knew best: an undercover exposé. An advertisement for a new self-feeding loom claimed to eliminate health hazards of the traditional system where a weaver, when loading a new bobbin, put his or her mouth on the shuttle, and sucked the loose end of the thread through a small hole. The ad outlined the risks: “Weavers on all common looms choke their lungs with cotton fibre. When the filling is colored the effect is more or less poisonous, and in either case the health is undermined.” McGuirk decided to see whether the old method was still in use and whether it posed a danger.

  The factories in Fall River were still running, unlike those in New Bedford, so McGuirk waited outside in the cold dawn. The lit mill glowed against the dark sky. It wasn’t that strange a scene; her family had been in Fall River for generations, and her grandfather had worked in the mills until late in his life. McGuirk asked one of the weavers streaming in with their lunch pails to take her inside and teach her the trade. She watched amid the clatter as a mother and two children tended sixteen looms. McGuirk tried threading the shuttle, inhaling, wondering about disease that might spread from equipment that touched multiple mouths each day. The resulting article in the Sunday World showed a lovely young woman, raising a shuttle to her lips, under the headline: “The Mill Weaver’s Kiss of Death.”

  The local papers scorned the doomsday premise and the scaremongering. They warned readers, “One newspaper woman couldn’t find enough here to keep her busy, so she went to Fall River, and has secured employment in a mill where she is learning weaving.”

  But actually, she was right. Many women in mill families in New Bedford suffered from tuberculosis. The disease ran through weaving communities at higher rates than elsewhere. Decades later lung problems that weavers suffered from inhaling cotton fiber would be given an official name—“byssinosis.” In 1911, Massachusetts banned the use of the “suction shuttle,” effectively putting an end to the “Kiss of Death.”

  It’s easy to share the frustration of the local journalists, to dismiss the New York reports as bumbling fabrications from clueless out-of-towners. And there’s no doubt that New York editors sought out the angles most likely to infuriate their New England counterparts, to the point of saying the situation of textile workers in New Bedford, a city proud of its abolitionist history, was worse than plantation slavery. But the New Bedford reporters had their own reasons for wanting their town to look good. Perhaps they hadn’t fully embraced the shift in their city from one with a noble whaling tradition to one where factory workers lived in substandard conditions. To call a piece of writing “yellow journalism” could be a legitimate critique. It could also be the equivalent of deeming an unflattering report to be media bias or manipulation.

  The World’s Minnie Rosen defended her writing to a doubtful reporter’s face. Against the accusations that those she profiled were perpetually drunk or lazy rather than strike victims, she said she hadn’t met anyone like that: “These good people claim New Bedford’s honor is smirched by its being known how bad off many operatives are. It is far worse to defame the hard-working women whom I have met by charging them with intemperance.” She hadn’t encountered lazy drunks; she had, however, met someone whose scalp had been badly torn by machinery and was unemployed as a result.

  “There may be cases which have been exaggerated in the newspapers,” she added, “but those which came under my observation are no newspaper tales, but stern realities, and in each case they are sadly in need of help, not sympathy,” she added. Her articles aimed to trigger action, not emotion.

  Though journalists were viewed as having clout, perhaps too much, women on the ground still struggled to marshal actual power. As the strike wore on, soup kitchen lines lengthening, daily rumors percolating either that the strike was spreading or about to collapse, Harriet Pickering’s control began to slip. She wanted to organize the women whose interests—like fining—she saw as divergent from the men’s. The union leaders were incompetent, she thought, to the point that mill owners refused to meet with them. She planned a meeting just for women, but on the chosen day, both sexes crowded the audience. And as she headed toward the front of the room, the janitor took her table away. She tried to talk over the yelling, catcalling, and hissing, but it was futile. The meeting was over in five minutes.

  She tried again, this time at City Hall. Pickering had an idea about how to stop the fining. What if workers called the manufacturer’s bluff? If an employee was bad, fire her. If not, pay her the wages she earned.

  Pickering stepped on the platform and faced the restless crowd of three hundred.

  “I have called you together to act upon a proposition of appointing a committee of women to wait upon the mill-owners in reference to the abolition of the fining system. I move that a committee of five be appointed,” she started.

  “I move we don’t do nothing of the sort! It’s the men’s business to attend to such things. We must act in harmony with the union, and I move your motion don’t be seconded, that’s
what I do,” someone shouted from the audience.

  “I am in harmony!” Pickering said. “None of you has worked so hard as me in the union. But I say if we women don’t get to work and do something the men will lead us into a ditch. If the mill owners are to be approached we must approach them!”

  Then, once again, her hoped-for meeting descended into chaos. Cries of “Order” and “Stop fightin’” echoed through the room. Chocolate caramels, passed out by Pickering as appeasement, didn’t settle the crowd. Some threw them on the floor.

  Eventually, unable to make herself heard, Pickering said, “If you don’t appoint a committee, I’ll go and wait upon the manufacturers myself!”

  Outside the fractious meeting, a representative of silk-weaving mills in New Jersey waited. He was looking for weavers to train for positions that paid up to $20 a week, he said. This was better than chocolates. The women clustered around.

  Banks, amused as she watched the whole fracas, noted, “Can one woman lead hundreds of other women? Not in New Bedford.”

  A while later, not far away in Boston, where girls threw snowballs at the statue of George Washington in the Common and papers reported gold in the Yukon, Valesh walked into the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill, a grand structure of redbrick and white columns, topped, like the World Building, with a shiny gold dome. Buildings with historic significance appealed to her. Giving a speech in an Illinois courthouse where Lincoln had spoken had been an inspiration.