Sensational by Kim Todd (chromebook ebook reader .txt) 📕

seventies. And the suffragists seemed to have little power: the movement suffered loss after loss at the state and the national levels. In 1894, a pro-suffrage petition with more than half a million signatures went nowhere in New York; shortly after, the New York State Association Opposed to Woman’s Suffrage was launched. Stunt journalists tended to have less formal education and, as a result, be less erudite than writers like Anthony or Margaret Fuller, a journalist of an earlier generation. In the newspaper offices where they were trying to fit in, they were surrounded by the attitude that suffragists were to be made fun of, to be treated lightly. And their jobs depended on their spritely good nature, on being one of the boys.

Beatrice Webb, an English social reformer who went undercover in 1888 sewing trousers and wrote about it for Nineteenth Century, tried to articulate this internal conflict as she reflected (embarrassed) on her attitudes toward suffrage when she was young. The suffragists were off-putting with their repeated demands and grievances, she remembered feeling. Webb was thriving personally, so it was hard to see the larger argument for systemic change: “In the craft I had chosen, a woman was privileged. As an investigator she aroused less suspicion than a man, and, through making the proceedings more agreeable to the persons concerned, she gained better information. Further, in those days, a competent female writer on economic questions had, to an enterprising editor, actually a scarcity value. Thus she secured immediate publication and, to judge from my own experience, was paid a higher rate than male competitors of equal standing.”

Another one who felt this ambiguity about the source of a woman’s power was Winifred Black. Still a San Francisco Examiner star, though married and a mother, she had covered the Woman’s Congress in the summer of 1895 and found the speakers distasteful. Their stridency and zealous focus on voting excluded things she felt were more important. Black hoped the “new woman” with her suffrage obsession was a passing phase: “She deals only with ballot boxes and conventions and grievances. She can’t touch the real things of life, and we shall go on loving and suffering and being happy quite as if she didn’t exist.”

Though she expressed reservations about the suffragists’ demands, Winifred Black did, however, take particular care to investigate lecturer Anna Shaw’s claims that women owned nothing in a marriage—not their children, not money they’d earned, not their own bonnet. In fact, she went so far as to consult a lawyer, who assured her that under California law a woman had the right to all of these in case of a divorce.

A few months later, Black’s musings on the subject of “the real things in life” would be put to the test. One sunny morning in fall 1895, as Black tended the roses, heliotrope, and calla lilies in her San Francisco garden and kept an eye on her three-year-old son, a messenger handed her a telegram. It was from Hearst, commanding her to come to New York right away. As she later commented in her memoir, “There are certain moments in life that stand out in your memory as if they had been etched upon your brain.” The lanky, blue-uniformed boy showing up with this explosive note was one.

Despite her fond words about family, while she doted on her boy and relished quiet moments in front of a homey eucalyptus fire, when Winifred’s career hauled her out of the blooming garden, she didn’t hesitate. She packed her bags, hugged her son, and told him goodbye. At the docks, where limes from Mexico arrived, and cranberries, pomegranates, oranges passed through, though melons were almost gone, Winifred caught the ferry that would take her across the bay to the train that would send her hurtling three thousand miles toward Hearst’s unknown whim. In the station and then on board, she met the Examiner’s star cartoonist and sportswriter. They were in Omaha before they learned that Hearst had bought the New York Journal, the eight-page, rather tame paper formerly owned by Albert Pulitzer, Joseph’s brother.

Hearst had spent eight years as a publisher, honing his sense of the market and readers’ tastes. Now he was returning to Newspaper Row, where he’d been so awed and inspired. He’d tried before, angling for the New York Times, the Record, and the Herald, but no sales had gone through. The Journal offices were located in the Tribune building, in the shadow of the World’s showy tower. But not for long. He was ready to challenge Pulitzer on his own turf. And he needed his prize woman reporter by his side.

Chapter 13

1895–1896

Full Speed Ahead

When [the Examiner’s] manager detailed women reporters to attend prize fights, to explore the slums, to exploit the inner depravities of society, and to interview convicts and thugs, we omitted comment on the subject, leaving to the tongue of public opinion the administration of a merited rebuke.”

—San Francisco Call, December 12, 1896

Hearst entered New York in his usual style—like a runaway freight train. And any obstacle in his way was dynamited with cash. Flush with a portion of the $3 million* from his mother’s sale of her share of the Anaconda Mining Company, Hearst set out to build the best paper he could, regardless of cost and at blistering speed.

Building on what had worked in San Francisco, he imported the chaos of the Examiner to the Journal. One editor found himself finalizing his contract to oversee the Journal’s editorial page on Saturday, only to show up to work on Monday to an office where no one knew who he was. His only contact was gone, and Hearst was out of town. The man was at a loss, until he remembered the name of an acquaintance at the paper who led him to the compositing room and told him to get to it. No one seemed to acknowledge or care he was there, but he made up the pages and the paper came out.