Sensational
Page 26
This catch-22 can be seen in the life of Willa Cather, who spent years as a journalist before writing groundbreaking novels about life on the plains—O Pioneers! and My Antonia, among others. After spending much of her childhood in Nebraska, she worked as a columnist for the Nebraska State Journal, then moved to Pittsburgh to edit the magazine Home Monthly in 1896, at the height of the stunt reporter craze. She couldn’t help but be aware of these writers and the mocking of them. She then became managing editor of McClure’s, the magazine famous for muckraking, which published some of her first fiction. After leaving journalism, Cather would go on to win the 1922 Pulitzer Prize, not for her inventive work about women but for One of Ours, a book with a patriotic male soldier as its hero. She was careful to keep her private world walled off from her writing. As Francesca Sawaya wrote of Cather’s attempt to destroy her letters and other evidence of her personal life: “On the one hand, that action conforms to her notion that her work was professional and should be evaluated impersonally; on the other hand, it reveals her sense that her work would not be read impersonally unless she erased all signs of the personal.”
Chapter 17
1898–1900
In the Wake
In the face of continual and massive discouragement, women need models not only to see in what ways the literary imagination has . . . been at work on the fact of being female, but also as assurances that they can produce art without inevitably being second-rate or running mad or doing without love.
—Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, 1983
On steamships from the South, after a disorienting boat ride of often more than twenty-four hours, young women, noise of clucking chickens still in their ears, arrived in this vast city. On the pier at the end of Beach Street, they blinked against the fish smell, the seagulls crying overhead, the sun sparkling off the water, a sea of unfamiliar faces. Stony roads led into Manhattan, lined with high buildings casting long shadows, the winds whipping between them.
Often, during the final years of the nineteenth century, Victoria Earle Matthews would be waiting, hoping to reach these young Black women before the others, also biding their time, who would pounce at the sign of insecurity flickering across a face or a repeated scanning of the crowd for someone who hadn’t shown up. These included hansom-cab drivers ready to charge huge fees for a ride around the block, or to load up a person’s luggage and run away with it; pickpockets running fingers over a jacket in search of a purse; pimps; agents of the employment service who would whisk them off to an apartment where they would sleep on the floor accruing debt for every night they didn’t pay rent.
Matthews and the others she recruited to wait in her place on the docks often felt as if they were doing battle for these rural young women, unguarded against New York scams. The second half of the century had been characterized by women stepping off ships, trains, carriages into the big city and hoping to make their fortune. Matthews wanted to be sure vulnerable Black women from the South were met by a friendly face. The rescue missions were harrowing, she declared, “so brazen and defiant were the agents and ignorant and timid the majority of women who came up, that a woman had little power against the insolent white agents (men).”
If the woman getting off the ship, sometimes holding a toddler or two, insisted her sister would be coming to meet her, Matthews and her coworkers would wait with her until darkness made it hard to see, and the dockworkers shooed the women away. If the new arrival was trying to find her husband, only knowing he was somewhere in Brooklyn, they helped her search for the scrap of paper with the address tucked somewhere at the bottom of a piece of luggage. And if no one ever showed up? Or the scrap had been torn away by a gust of wind? They would find the newcomers someplace to stay.
Victoria Earle Matthews
Quarter-length portrait of journalist and social worker Victoria Earle Matthews, 1903. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Used with permission.
For Matthews, articles about home decor had turned to lectures on human trafficking.
Her 1898 speech at the Hampton Negro Conference—“Some of the Dangers Confronting Southern Girls in the North”—warned against the duplicitous employment agencies: “Let women and girls become enlightened, let them begin to think and stop placing themselves voluntarily in the power of strangers.” The talk concluded with the suggestion that southern women might be better off staying in the South. But she argued against this position as well, writing a letter to the Sun: “The city does not need to throw back from her borders the flocking ignorant, but rather to bring to a sense of duty those whom her bounty, her patience, her indulgence has redeemed from the humdrum of rural common place.” Her mother had once been one of these women running to the North after all.
To remedy problems she’d uncovered on her 1895 trip south, she had launched the White Rose Mission, a settlement house promising lodging and food, a chance to socialize, and a better start than the employment agencies offered. The mission provided a kindergarten and classes for adults, including a “race history” course taught by Matthews, featuring a bookcase for the use of her students. It contained a 1773 edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poems, a magazine featuring the Harper’s Ferry uprising, and an 1836 edition of Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans by Lydia Maria Child. As she told the Evening Telegram: “The White Rose Mission was organized for the single purpose of breaking up this traffic in Southern colored girls.”
It wasn’t smooth sailing. Money was a constant concern. Demand stretched the resources of the small building and volunteer staff. She would later use her ability to pass as white to rent a better facility. But at the docks, these concerns fell away as Matthews scanned the disembarking passengers for a woman wearing hope too nakedly on her face, eager to offer her a steady hand.
Matthews had long given up traditional journalism for activism, but as stunt reporting waned, other female journalists cast about for what to do, what role to play, in the new journalism landscape. The decline of the form that launched them, though few commented on it directly, presented a challenge. If they wanted to keep writing, they would have to find something that paid as well as the “sensational” articles previously in such high demand. With yellow journalism now out of fashion, could they turn their skills to new endeavors? For some, this involved parlaying their contacts into different jobs. For others, it meant personal reinvention.
In 1899, Elizabeth Banks did one last stunt. And it didn’t involve lying to anyone’s face or getting elbow-deep in a stranger’s laundry. It was a campaign waged by mail. Two years before, a rumor had begun to swirl about a Vassar student. Right before graduation, Anita Hemmings confided to a faculty member that the speculation was true—she was mixed race. Her roommate had discovered her secret and demanded a new room. After a flurry of meetings, administrators let Hemmings graduate but not without a lot of hand-wringing and newspaper headlines. Banks had noticed that while northern whites congratulated themselves on open-mindedness and condemned atrocities in the South, they often avoided associating with Black men and women themselves. She explored these disparities in a piece for Nineteenth Century: “Says the Northerner, ‘We have no place for the negro. We don’t like him. Take him away!’”
Then she wrote, “Oh no! I forgot! The Northerner does not say this! He thinks it and feels it.” So she put these liberal sentiments to the test. She wrote letters to several dozen colleges in the United States and England, presenting herself as a nineteen-year-old woman with light skin and blue eyes but with a Black ancestor. “Everybody took me for a white girl,” she insisted to the schools. Would they admit her?
Results were conclusive. Western colleges suggested she might be more comfortable in the East. Eastern colleges suggested she might fit in better in the West. Oberlin College, one of the first to admit Black students, proud of its abolitionist credentials, admitted her, then recommended a boardinghouse in town run by a mulatto woman. Couldn’t she s
tay in campus housing with the other students, Banks asked? She didn’t get a reply. Meanwhile, colleges in England welcomed Banks’s imagined student with the lack of prejudice Banks had noted when living there. In Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl,” she drew her Black maid, Dinah, in the broadest strokes as a stereotyped caricature who spoke in dialect. At the same time, when Dinah wanted to return to the States, Banks advised her against it. In London, she said, Black and white servants went shopping together, attended each other’s parties, shared sleeping quarters, something not possible in Alabama: “America is not a land of equality for the negroes, Dinah. You and I know that.”
The college letter was a perfect Banks stunt, designed to uncover hypocrisy. But the conclusion she drew from her experiment was grim. After revealing the hollowness of the northern attitudes and acknowledging the violence of the southern ones—the deeply imbedded notions of racial inequality, efforts at voter suppression, and lynchings (though she claimed Ida B. Wells-Barnett exaggerated)—her takeaway was that Black people would never be accepted in America and should move. In her mix of patriotism and critique of her home country, she recognized that many white people in the United States were prejudiced, and then admitted she shared those prejudices. The finished piece was called “The American Negro and His Place.”
At the same time as Banks was sending out her applications in fall 1898, Ida B. Wells-Barnett reentered the fray, though only months before, the birth of her second son prompted her to publicly declare she was staying home to commit herself to motherhood. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, who had offered her a job after she determined she couldn’t return to Memphis, called a meeting to give new energy to the Afro-American League. He wanted Wells-Barnett to attend, and she did, leaving the baby with a grandmother while Wells-Barnett stayed with Susan B. Anthony in her redbrick house in Rochester, New York. The two maintained a relationship, though Anthony’s organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, was increasingly adopting racist rhetoric in an effort to woo southerners to the cause.
Wells-Barnett noticed an odd tone in Anthony’s voice as she pronounced “Wells-Barnett,” one she interpreted as distaste.
“Miss Anthony, don’t you believe in women getting married?”
“Oh, yes,” Anthony said, “but not women like you who had a special call for special work. . . . I know no one better fitted to do the work you had in hand than yourself.” The suffragist added that Wells-Barnett’s activism and writing had fallen off since she’d married and, rightly so, as her thoughts were probably with her children. It was, Anthony said, necessarily a “divided duty.”
Ida B. Wells-Barnett with her son in 1896
Ida B. Wells with her first son, 1896 (Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.) Used with permission.
What Wells-Barnett felt she couldn’t say in response was that organizations hadn’t been able to fund her activism as Anthony had been funded. On her trip to Washington to advocate for the family of the postmaster who had been lynched, she’d run out of money, and she and her husband covered the expenses themselves. She needed more support, so an organization like the Afro-American League seemed like a good idea. At the meeting she was elected secretary, and commented, sounding both resigned and energized, “despite my best intentions, when I got back home to my family I was once again launched in public movements.”
First, the tool to measure wind speed blew away. Then the rain gauge went. Then everything on the roof. The Local Forecast official watched in increasing anxiety as his instruments vanished, one by one. Sunshine recorders, thermographs, clocks—all gone. At John Sealy Hospital, patients grabbed their bedding to keep it from floating away. Winds stripped the roof off the Tremont Hotel and tossed bricks and stones “like they were little feathers,” according to one guest.
In the first few hours after the hurricane tore through Texas’s barrier islands in September 1900, killing six thousand people, it was “as easy to get into Galveston . . . as to Mars,” according to Winifred Black, who had rushed to the scene to report for Hearst. Journalists were banned. But she tucked her hair under a boy’s cap, stepped into boy’s shoes, heaved a pick on her shoulder, said she was a construction worker, and climbed into a small boat headed from the mainland across the bay.
On the deck, they moved over the water, now calm and eerily quiet with stars overhead. As the boat approached Galveston, bodies floated by. When it landed, the city was dark, the ground “slimy with the debris of the sea.” Picking her way past pools in the middle of streets and the campfires of the newly homeless, holding her breath against the smell, Winifred talked to the survivors. She expected tears, but everyone seemed numb. At a hotel, the clerk mechanically repeated there were no rooms, then someone else said there were plenty of rooms, just no water.
Her dispatches, the first from the wrecked city, showed the country the flooded homes, the drowned children. She reported on the official response, interviewing a US marshal, who admitted there was nothing they could do with the bodies but stack them in piles and burn them. The city was under martial law, and he had stationed men on street corners to shoot looters. (Disconcertingly, she repeated his assertion that none of the looters were Americans, but rather “negroes” and southern European immigrants.) She interviewed the mayor, who commandeered some able-bodied residents for cleanup and sent others to feed themselves at relief stations. She talked with a general who was dismayed at the appearance of a woman on the scene. He requested she ask her readers to donate money and disinfectants. Most of all, she reported the shock in the wake of a large-scale natural disaster. At the Aziola Club across the street from the hotel, she met a man who had been stuck under a pile of debris for four hours while friends walked past: “He told us what he was thinking about as he lay there with a man pinned across his chest and two dead men under him. He tried to make his story amusing and we all tried to laugh.”
After filing her stories in the middle of the night through a telegraph office in Houston, Winifred Black returned to her hotel, where stacks of telegrams awaited her, detailing the supplies that were on their way. Now that she’d dressed as a man and reported on a disaster, Hearst asked her to organize the relief effort. And she did, rallying to his cause as ever, arranging for cots in a high school to house the homeless, buying dishes, meeting doctors from Chicago at the Houston train station. It was a new century, coming at the country like a wall of water set to unmoor the past, requiring roles as yet unimagined, and she was ready to take them on.
Chapter 18
1900–Present
Vanishing Ink
Our journalism has accomplished more than can now be estimated; in fact not until careful biographers make special studies drawn from the lives of the pioneer journalists, shall we or those contemporary with them ever know the actual meed of good work accomplished by them under almost insurmountable difficulties.
—Victoria Earle Matthews
In 1965, a hundred years after Elizabeth Banks, Elizabeth Jordan, and Kate Swan were born, Truman Capote stunned readers with the story of two men who killed an entire family in Kansas for a profit of only a few dollars. The series started with the Clutters going about an ordinary day—baking a cherry pie, feeding a horse an apple core—on a collision course with two disgruntled men who’d heard jailhouse rumors of a rich farmer and his full safe. Magazines throughout the 1950s and ’60s, flush with cash in the way New York newspapers had been in the 1890s, paid reporters to do in-depth, risky, expensive stories, and Capote launched the years-long project with New Yorker money. He called the book that resulted, In Cold Blood, a “nonfiction novel,” a genre that applied journalism to “a serious new art form.” He interviewed the convicts extensively in prison and watched their execution, taking many of the techniques of sensational nineteenth-century journalism and rebranding them as art.
In Cold Blood begat a New Journalism, tinged with amnesia, and not just in the reuse of an old journalistic term. It
relied on many innovations of the late nineteenth-century reporters without acknowledging they’d even existed. In a 1972 article for Esquire (“The Magazine for Men”), reporter Tom Wolfe expressed his frustration with an establishment journalism promoted by journalism schools with their focus on distanced objectivity. He found it staid and boring. The writers he liked, by contrast, were taking on what literary novelists of his day avoided: the social life of the great cities. They seized the mantle of realist authors like Dickens to capture the popular imagination: “By trial and error, by ‘instinct’ rather than theory, journalists began to discover the devices that gave the realistic novel its unique power, variously known as its ‘immediacy,’ its ‘concrete reality,’ its ‘emotional involvement,’ its ‘gripping’ or ‘absorbing’ quality.” The writing he most admired could be termed “stunts”: John Sack going through army infantry drills, George Plimpton training with the Detroit Lions, Hunter S. Thompson hanging out with the Hells Angels. But Wolfe did what the stunt reporters could never do—called this kind of work literature, called it good. In his nonfiction manifesto the next year—The New Journalism—he outlined the attributes he thought of as central to this form—a story told in scenes, a distinct point of view, ample dialogue, and use of status detail (which he defined in the Esquire piece as “the everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration” that his subjects used to mark their social rank). It was the kind of writing Bly did so well.
One of the authors he held up as an example was Joan Didion, whose reporting on the Haight in San Francisco during the late 1960s had similarities to that of Nelson and Valesh as they visited tenements in New York and New Bedford. The stunt reporters’ language isn’t as rich—Didion pens an unmatched sentence—but the approach is similar. In 1895, in one of her first stories for the New York Journal, Winifred Black wrote of a five-year-old dying of alcoholism—a ruined liver—in the hospital: “Lucia stood and watched the nurse with lack-lustre eyes. When I rose to go she held out her little hand. It shook like the hand of a man in the palsy.” Black then visited the family in their tenement home and summarized the conversation. The parents said, about the children: “Why should they not have a little sup of good wine now and then, eh, to warm the blood? . . . Too much, that is bad, but who would give a baby too much whiskey? A drop now and again to soothe it? Ah, yes, that was without a doubt, the best.” In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion wrote about a California five-year-old: “I see a child on the living-room floor, wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only thing off about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick.