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

seventy-five-year-old Susan B. Anthony. The reporter drew out Anthony’s past, concerns about women being paid less than men, her blossoming public profile. But then she changed tactics, giving in to the fact that, as Bly said of herself: “I adore the little peculiarities of people.” She asked Anthony whether she feared death. And then,

“Do you pray?”

“I pray every single second of my life,” Anthony answered. “I never get on my knees or anything like that, but I pray with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men.”

Cautiously, Bly pressed on.

“Were you ever in love?” asked the reporter. At the time, Bly knew how tangled these passions could be. She was still dodging detectives sent to spy on her and James Metcalfe, her rumored suitor.

“Bless you, Nellie! I’ve been in love a thousand times!”

“Really!” The reporter said, looking at the white-haired woman in her rocking chair.

“Yes, really. But I never loved anyone so much that I thought it would last. In fact, I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper.”

On Sunday, February 9, 1896, Bly had the lead story in the World’s Sunday magazine. Theodore Roosevelt, the recently appointed police commissioner, had been swept into office on a wave of reform after an investigation revealed the deep corruption of the force. Roosevelt had decided to clean up New York’s Oak Street Station House and stop allowing homeless women to sleep there. In the guise of a representative of a charitable association, Bly went to investigate the impact. Wood boards rested against the walls so women could take them and lay them on an iron grate on the floor for their beds. Water dripped constantly; it smelled terrible. The ground was covered with slush, and the women had barely enough clothes to cover themselves.

But again, as in the suffrage meeting article, Bly didn’t seem to know what point she wanted to make. The ostensible purpose was to learn where the women would go when kicked out in a few days, but she focused more closely on their addiction to whiskey and willingness to trade everything—job prospects, family—for another sip. They were disheveled and didn’t seem to care. The reporter recoiled. Bly might have been particularly unsympathetic to alcoholism because of her violent stepfather, but here, too, was the echo of the wife of a rich industrialist rather than the open-minded reporter on the boat to the asylum.

The piece ended, though, with a glimpse of one final woman who stumbled in late. In her fifties, from Philadelphia, she seemed sober enough, just miserable. She said she’d never slept at the station house before and hoped never to do it again, but she’d lost everything. The final image was of this unhappy woman hunched on the board that would be her bed, sobbing, while the others, splayed around her, snored.

And one week later Bly interviewed Elizabeth Cady Stanton and focused on her ideas rather than the cut of her sleeves. Playing the piano when Bly arrived, the eighty-year-old Stanton had just published a Woman’s Bible, a translation by a female scholar with commentary about the role of women. Interpretations of Eve had long been used to define women as flawed and deserving of a subordinate role because she was only Adam’s rib. Stanton felt it was important to offer another view (though the National Woman Suffrage Association didn’t agree with this radical perspective and refused to endorse the Woman’s Bible at the convention).

“You know every time women wish to make any advance in the world the Bible is quoted against us,” Stanton said, adding that, in addition to seeking out improved versions of Genesis, women should also be taught about evolution. It was an alternate, more equal, origin story. As Bly was leaving, Stanton inscribed her a copy of the Bible: “Man and woman a simultaneous creation.”

Lest things get too slow, the next week, Bly trained an elephant at the circus. Her descriptions almost seemed to lampoon her more serious work. Of baby elephant Alice, rolling a barrel and crying, Bly wrote, “She fell from the see-saw the other day and sprained her ankle. It was never a slender, willowy ankle, but now it reminds one of dropsical patients I have seen in hospitals and tenement houses.” Alice followed her in the ring, and then Bly, characteristically, asked to command the adult elephants and ride one.

The article wrapped around a full-page illustration of Bly perched on an elephant’s back in a striped dress with enormous puffed sleeves and a wry expression.

Though ample, realistic images of Bly existed, this one showed a generic Gibson girl. Stunt reporters were being paid more than ever before, but they were becoming interchangeable.

“Nellie Bly as an Elephant Trainer” in the World, February 23, 1896

“Nellie Bly as an Elephant Trainer,” World, February 23, 1896 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

Pulitzer, rarely in the office, sent letters from across the globe, scrambling to keep a handle on the World from Maine, Germany, Barbados. In the spring, the World launched a midnight edition and cast about for other ways to check Hearst’s momentum, regardless of cost. It dropped the price to one cent, matching the Journal. While Pulitzer was impatient to crush his nemesis, he also had his doubts about the paper’s direction, sensitive to criticism that the sensationalism went too far. Rival papers began to grumble about the larger headlines, the focus on crime, the showy illustrations, the breathless tone. Comics increasingly included racial stereotypes. Articles detailed very dubious scientific theories, like the existence of butterfly women on the planet Venus. Pulitzer kept after Brisbane to chase Hearst without falling to his level. Avoid “freaks” and “froth,” he urged, “your old energy on new lines will assure you brilliant success & higher reputation.” Pulitzer requested a portrait of recently retired General O. O. Howard, who’d lost an arm fighting for the Union in the Civil War and helped found Howard University, on the front page of the Sunday