Sensational

by Kim Todd

So Florence Noble? Without her identity, her series is less like a novel and more like one of Jacob Riis’s photographs from How the Other Half Lives. For his flash photography, he would barge into a dark tenement room, wake the residents, sprinkle magnesium powder on a frying pan. The circumstances had to be just right: maybe a cub reporter foolishly brave; a newspaper with nothing to lose; an industry reinventing itself; a community of doctors and midwives willing to buck a recent law. Then open the shutter, touch flame to powder, and get a burst of illumination.

  I returned to Chicago frequently as I was working on this project, searching along State Street in the rain for the location of the doctor’s offices the Girl Reporter visited, standing outside the rough-hewn stones of the hotel where Nellie Bly dined with her husband-to-be, looking up at the new sign declaring “Ida B. Wells Drive.” The archivist had told me my quest was a search for a “needle in a haystack.” What I found, though, was more like a gleaming pile of needles. The real discovery of my search for the Girl Reporter was how many courageous journalists there were in the decade after Nellie Bly’s first stunt. The eight we compared with her writing were not, by far, the only candidates. Every time I unscrolled the microfilm of a new publication, there was another. The handful I ended up writing about here was only the smallest beginning. They had all left traces, sometimes in bound volumes, sometimes in the mere suggestion of life’s rich possibility.

  Chapter 20

  1899–1922

  A Collection of Endings

  Nothing is so humiliating as to be forgotten, and when I think that if I had wavered in my purpose, a twentieth century office boy in turning over the dusty files might have exclaimed as he woke the night editor from his peaceful slumber, “And who was Caroline Lockhart?” Yes, to be gone and forever forgotten is indeed a terrible thing.

  —Caroline Lockhart, Boston Post, 1895

  VICTORIA EARLE MATTHEWS

  In September 1899, a Sun reporter toured the White Rose Mission, the brainchild of Victoria Earle Matthews. It had only grown in the years since she first concocted the idea after her trip south. The reporter followed as Matthews led the twenty squirmy four- and five-year-old girls in song, visiting sewing and cooking classes. Matthews described the trips to the docks, the confused passengers she met there, her work to get police detectives to cut off employment agency representatives before they could take the girls away. The mission teachers do what they can, she said, but are hoping to expand. “Think of what a greater amount of good we could do if we were properly equipped for the work, as we will be when our building gets up,” she told the reporter.

  By 1907, the White Rose Mission had housed 304 young women, found jobs for 204, met 250 at the docks, distributing carfare and escorting them to meet their friends and relatives. The organization stayed in operation for almost ninety years, closing in 1984.

  KATE SWAN MCGUIRK

  In 1901, in a Brooklyn basement, an expert on the use of the gas cooking stove gave a demonstration of the appliance’s abilities, preparing Indian egg short cake, broiled fish, and huckleberry ginger cake at eleven, and roast beef, potato rose balls, and peach short cake at three thirty. The lecturer was listed as “Mrs. Katherine Swan.”

  After the Spanish-American War and the backlash against Pulitzer and Hearst’s papers, Kate Swan McGuirk dropped suddenly from view.* Her name and image were so publicly identified with the World’s stunt reporting, it would have been hard to forge a new identity. At first, the name “Katherine Swan” seemed a break from her earlier personas, a fresh start. She’d divorced her husband not long after returning from New Bedford in 1898 and had gone back to school to get a bachelor of science degree. Paid by gas companies, she traveled the East, exhibiting the new stove technology, burying her past fame. But a decade later, her earlier reporting became—if not a matter of pride—a matter of interest. The New York Summer School of Cookery in 1908 mentioned that one of their speakers played a key role in the epic battle between Pulitzer and Hearst, and said the lectures would be of particular interest to those who remembered “the famous ‘Kate Swan’” of the New York Sunday World.

  WINIFRED (SWEET) BLACK BONFILS, “ANNIE LAURIE” AND “COLUMBINE”

  In April 1906, Winifred Black Bonfils read the morning paper in Denver in shock. A massive earthquake had torn through San Francisco. She barely had time to absorb the news before a telegram arrived from Hearst, saying, “Go.” In Oakland, as she disembarked the train, an Examiner boat waited to escort her across the Bay. She stepped into San Francisco as she had almost twenty years earlier, though this time she had to pick her way through smoldering hunks of wood. A few years after the Galveston hurricane, she stood in the ruins of her own beloved city. Smoke hung in the air. Those left homeless, still in burned clothes, flooded down Broadway to the ferry depot, dragging their trunks. A mist crept in, chilling the thousands who slept in Golden Gate Park. The Examiner building, site of so much journalistic exhilaration, was damaged by fire and would have to be dynamited. Wandering past wrecked husks of mansions, she looked for signs of spirit, the impulse to rebuild, material she could use to write San Francisco back into existence. Her observations appeared in the Sunday paper: “Annie Laurie Tells of the Spectral City.”

  Her personal life heaved and crashed, stormy waves. After divorcing Orlow Black, she married Charles Bonfils, brother of the publisher of the Denver Post. She had two children with Bonfils, Winifred and Eugene. Eugene, never healthy, died at age nine. Jeffrey, the son from her first marriage, drowned off the California coast at thirty-two. But writing was a constant. She never apologized for her stunts (though she hated the term “sob sister”), just used them to launch herself into a sparkling journalistic career, something she and her sister could be proud of. She was unabashed about her mutually beneficial professional relationship with Hearst. She declared her debt to him until the end; he chose her to write a biography of his mother. Over her many decades as a reporter, she did everything—covered trials, edited the children’s page, reported on World War I. Her highly syndicated advice columns, sometimes by “Annie Laurie,” sometimes by Winifred Black, offered pointed advice to young women trying to navigate the world. She warned one not to be taken in by the romance of a man with a hidden past, and another to avoid sympathetic lunches with the boss who claimed to be misunderstood at home. To three young women desperate to marry and asking for tips on winning a man, she replied: “Get the idea out of your heads that marriage is the aim and end in life. Unless a woman is happily married she is far more likely to be happy when busily earning her own way.”

  ELIZABETH JORDAN

  In 1907, Elizabeth Jordan, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, found herself deluged with scathing letters. She had ventured into an experimental literary form: the composite novel. Each chapter of The Whole Family, written by a different author, would offer a single family member’s point of view. Jordan launched the project full of hope, with a blizzard of requests to authors she respected, planning to write the young girl’s chapter herself. But problems arose immediately. Samuel Clemens, the writer she’d counted on to pen a young boy’s chapter, said no. Some authors said yes, only to quit. And then the woman tapped to write the old-maid aunt presented her character (only thirty-four) as lusty rather than doddering, scandalizing some of her collaborators. Jordan made the mistake of sending each new chapter to all the other contributors, who offered generous edits and criticism. So each mail delivery brought a heap of biting commentary and bruised feelings to Jordan’s desk. It took all her tact to keep the manuscript moving forward. Fortunately, she had plenty. Henry James, who wrote through the eyes of the married son, offered barbed critiques, but acknowledged the whole fraught disaster was Jordan’s to direct: “You will smile it out, I am sure, all successfully.”

  The final product was a mess, Jordan freely admitted, but it was one of her own making and it was just the kind of chaos, held in check by tendrils of charm and good organization, that she relished. In fact, she dove right into anoth
er composite novel, The Sturdy Oak, a 1917 book about women’s suffrage, with contributions from her friend from the World, Anne O’Hagan, and the western novelist Mary Austin. During her editorship of Harper’s Bazaar from 1900 to 1913, a position she felt was finally a perfect fit, though the pace seemed painfully slow after late nights in the Pulitzer Building, she spent her days soliciting stories from Stephen Crane and opinions on fairy tales from Jane Addams. When Hearst bought the magazine, she moved over to Harper’s Book Publishers, where she edited Sinclair Lewis’s first novel. Her own literary production never slowed. She was a prolific novelist and short-story writer, work that included Tales of Destiny, Tales of the Cloister, Young Mr. X. Several of her books were turned into movies: Make Way for a Lady and The Girl in Number 29.

  CAROLINE LOCKHART, “THE POST WOMAN”

  After writing for the Boston Post, and then the Philadelphia Bulletin, Caroline Lockhart ran off with her editor and lover, A. C. McKenzie, to Cody, Wyoming. There, she palled around with Wild Bill Hickok, had a parade of boyfriends, bought and ran a newspaper, and wrote seven popular Westerns, including, The Man from the Bitter Roots, The Fighting Shepherdess, and The Lady Doc, which featured both lesbian characters and abortion. The Lady Doc met with a generally glowing reception, though one tremulous reviewer commented, “The story itself is almost too strong for the average reader; it will haunt a man, and what it will do for a nervous woman is not nice to think about.”

  EVA (MCDONALD) VALESH, “EVA GAY”

  After the New York Journal fired Valesh, she moved to Washington DC to write for a syndicate, churning out lengthy pieces analyzing policy details—postal thefts, tariffs, an increasing push toward imperialism that she felt was misguided. “It was the happiest work I ever did in my life,” she said later. She moved on to the American Federation of Labor’s magazine, but when Samuel Gompers refused to credit her, she went to the magazine American Club Woman. In 1907, her divorce from Frank Valesh was finalized. She remarried, and when her fun-loving, debt-ridden second husband died in 1923, Valesh renewed her Typographical Union membership, then spent long years as a proofreader for the New York Times.

  A 1950s photograph of her with her adult son shows them sinking into a comfortable couch, in front of a window full of tree branches and light, his arm slung around her. It’s much more relaxed than the stiff 1890s portraits, high collars and tight fabric, photos taken while she struggled to balance her health, her child, and her ambition. In the later picture, her hair is still cropped short, and she wears a boldly patterned shirt. She’s leaning back and laughing.

  ELEANOR (STACKHOUSE) ATKINSON, “NORA MARKS”

  In 1909, Eleanor Stackhouse, now Eleanor Atkinson after her marriage, wrote a letter explaining the story behind a famous portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Even all these years later, after she’d penned a slew of history books, including The Boyhood of Lincoln, The Story of Chicago, and Johnny Appleseed, her undercover exploits loomed large in her mind. Signing the letter, underneath her real name, she still scribbled, “Nora Marks.” The two years in journalism, faux fainting in the street and investigating prison conditions, were a vital part of her life story. When one of her daughters published a novel with a plucky, mystery-solving heroine who worked as a reporter in Chicago, the daughter told an interviewer that writing ran in the family: “During the 90’s mother . . . was a sob sister on the Chicago Trib.”

  HELEN (CUSACK) CARVALHO, “NELL NELSON”

  On a warm June afternoon in 1915, New Jersey women gathered at the lovely Plainfield house of Mrs. S. S. Carvalho. An art gallery filled with old masters opened out into a garden where summer dresses swished across the grass. A thirteen-year-old girl played rousing music on the piano. A local suffragist leader gave a speech, warning the women to prepare for the fight ahead, and expressing gentle scorn for those who declared themselves neutral. “You know what the Lord said about them?” She asked the audience, nodding in their chairs. “It wasn’t pretty talk.”

  Helen Cusack, unless she hid herself under an as-yet-undiscovered pseudonym, wrote little after her marriage in 1895. If she’d ever imagined herself in the tenement houses she visited, worried that one economic downturn or lost job could put her there, those concerns were long past. She raised her two daughters, Sarah and Helen, both teenagers at the time of the suffrage tea, and drove her husband to the station, where he continued to manage the business affairs of Hearst’s papers; the couple attended Hearst’s wedding in 1903. Her home became a site for fundraisers for the soldiers fighting in Europe during World War I and lectures on topics like “What the Women Are Doing in the War.”

  ELIZABETH BANKS, “POLLY POLLOCK”

  During World War I, while sales of her book Dik: A Dog of Belgium, featuring a Red Cross dog, funded wounded soldiers, Elizabeth Banks traveled back to Wisconsin, site of her lonely childhood. After writing her condemnation of stunt reporting, Banks had a long literary career. Despite her early reservations about do-gooders, she became overtly political, campaigning for woman’s suffrage and other causes. Tromping through meadows, she peered at the experimental farm where her uncle tried to pay the mortgage by tinkering with the latest scientific theories of making molasses. Old habits die hard and even here, for no real reason, she disguised herself, telling a man leaning against a fence drinking water from a dipper that she was unfamiliar with the place: “As a stranger, I could better get the information I wanted.” Cars chugged down the road and telephones interrupted conversations, but the creek was the same, the oak trees, the yellow brick church that awed her as a child. Wandering in, she listened as the preacher described how the world was created in six days and disparaged anyone who thought differently as in league with Satan. What would have become of her if she’d stayed? she wondered. Then she went out to the car, where the hearty college student who was her driver paged through Ernest Haeckel’s lecture on the views of Darwin. After spending a lifetime searching for the definition of “American” and where she might fit within it, the contrast between church and parking lot answered some fundamental question about her country. “Where else in the world could such an incident as this have taken place?” she wrote.

  Private to the end, though the author of three memoirs—Campaigns of Curiosity, Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl,” and The Remaking of an American—Banks demanded in her will that her papers and photos be destroyed, her body burned, and the inscriptions rubbed off her jewelry. She kept her secrets.

  IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT, “IOLA”

  In 1920, Ida B. Wells-Barnett returned to the South for the first time since her friend was killed and her printing press smashed so viciously twenty-eight years before. She took a train from Chicago to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she met up with the wives and mothers of men who had been jailed during a “race riot” in Elaine. Several of the men had been sentenced to death. She joined the women as they prepared to visit the prison. And though it wasn’t her usual method, she donned a disguise, obscuring her own outsize reputation.

  “Boys come and shake hands with my cousin who has come from St. Louis to see me,” one of the women said. The guards didn’t look twice as the famous reporter stepped up to the bars and began conducting interviews. In response to her questions, the jailed men told her their version of events. She pieced together a far different story than the one the papers told, laying bare the cold calculations undergirding the heated violence. It was a good cotton year, and the Black men’s arrest had been an excuse to strip them of pigs, chicken, wagons, furniture, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cotton, they told her. Of their accusers, Wells-Barnett wrote: “They are now enjoying the result of these Negroes’ labor, while the Negroes are condemned to die or stay in prison twenty-one years.” While she was at the jail, the men sang songs, some of which they had written, but she told them the lyrics focused too much on death and forgiveness.

  “Pray to live and believe you are going to get out,” she advised. And five years later, in part as a result of her
efforts, they did.

  Throughout her life, along with raising four children, Wells-Barnett continued to fight against lynching, for opportunities for African Americans, and for women’s suffrage, founding the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913. Sometimes her campaigns collided. At the March 1913 parade in Washington DC, when the National American Suffrage Association instructed Black women to march separately from white so as not to upset some delegations from the South, Wells-Barnett ignored the command and marched with the Illinois group, refusing the place they’d deemed fit for her. The parade marked a shift in the suffrage movement, a turn toward radical actions—White House picketing, arrests, and hunger strikes—a tide of anger that would finally sweep the Nineteenth Amendment to ratification in 1920. Wells-Barnett’s commitment to her vision of the way things should be never wavered, a fact she detailed in her autobiography, aptly titled Crusade for Justice.*

  ELIZABETH (COCHRANE) SEAMAN, “NELLIE BLY”

  The fall of 1914 found Nellie Bly on a hospital train filled with wounded soldiers, traveling from Przemysl to Budapest. At each station, she watched eager young men headed to the front and saw those returning with hacking coughs, cholera, mangled limbs. Men on the train died in anguish every night. Planes buzzed overhead. Her fifty-year-old feet hurt. At one stop, soldiers ordered a ragged woman to get them some chickens. When she brought four and told them the price, they killed the birds, underpaid her, and mocked her distress. It was just the kind of thing Nellie Bly would notice.