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

“Who told you?” When she offered a name she had at the ready, he handed her the opium. She didn’t have a prescription, he didn’t record her identity, as the law required, and the box didn’t bear the mandatory poison label. Story complete, she turned the evidence over to the assistant district attorney and ended up testifying about illegal opium sales in front of a grand jury.

While some of Kate Swan’s articles, like those on illegal drugs and immigration policy, had a serious purpose, what lingered in some readers’ minds were the half-page illustrations of the reporter at work, hair billowing, eyes ablaze. These lodged the character of the “daring journalist” in the public imagination and set the stage for comic-book female reporters like Lois Lane and Brenda Starr. Meanwhile, the more proper “Mrs. McGuirk” kept writing, too. On the page, Mrs. McGuirk was the opposite of Kate Swan, keeping her distance, cool and skeptical, never illustrated. The two sides of Kate Swan McGuirk were so distinct, the paper had room for them both, and they often competed for space on the same page.

McGuirk, with her Washington DC savvy, covered the upcoming 1896 presidential election between big-city, big-business William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, the young populist hero of western farmers. After the low-key election of 1892, the contest gripped the politically minded: New York broke records on the first day of voter registration. McGuirk interviewed McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, a wealthy Ohio businessman, with wariness. Burnishing his importance, he kept her waiting then settled into a leather couch, a gold nugget dangling from his watch chain. Her interview revealed that his investments stood to benefit from government policies, that he wasn’t interested in China, didn’t care for travel, and, rich as he was, had never been to Europe. Could this really be the next ambassador to England? she wondered.

Bryan, too, she met with a raised eyebrow, highlighting his manufactured appeal to women, with his collar rolled down in a “Byronic fashion” and his constant references to his dear mother. He has a “profound respect for womanhood,” she commented, one that seemed based in a certain vagueness. And his western women supporters in turn were similarly vague on his policies. The whole piece appeared complimentary, about his warmth, his storytelling, his smile, yet not. Her conclusion: “Bryan would make a good dress-suit figure.”

McGuirk did have the occasional adventure. The much-hyped “Thrilling Hunt for a Wild Woman” took McGuirk into unaccustomed scenery, but she still represented a decent lady looking at the oddities of those beyond her sphere. Kate Swan would likely have played the wild woman herself, tramping through the trees, bedding down in the swamp, branches tearing at her hair. In fact, the same issue had her driving an electric engine through a tunnel at seventy-five miles per hour.

“Kate Swan Drives the Electric Engine” in the World, May 31, 1896

“Kate Swan Drives the Electric Engine,” World, May 31, 1896 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

Hearst continued his assault. Pulitzer tried to keep his distance from the day-to-day workings of the paper, but he couldn’t help himself. Particularly after the loss of so many of his staff, he worried about spies. Ideas dreamed up at the World seemed to appear in the Journal the next day. Pulitzer increasingly relied on a complex code to keep his moves secret from telegraph operators and others who might glimpse his communications. Codebooks helped staff decipher and encode messages. “Semaphore” meant that the previous communication had been read and understood. “Geranium” meant “The Morning Journal,” “Hearst” was “Gush” or, perhaps grudgingly, “Magnetic.” Pulitzer himself was “Sedentary.”

In one typical letter to his business manager, Pulitzer started, “I hope you are satisfied with my abstention from business and general non interference,” then offered a list of suggestions, labeled “a” through “e,” and then three more pages of notes, numbered 1 through 10. The World should be an entertaining paper that is still truthful, not all pictures and horror stories: “freedom of thought and public interest would make up for any lack of features of size or splash.” And then, written in pencil “—let us hope.” In another letter, he warned staffers not to underestimate their adversary: “Geranium has brains and genius beyond any question, not only brains for news and features, but genius for the self advertising acts which have no parallel.”

The Hearst-Pulitzer battle could be exhilarating, brainstorm upon brainstorm. In early summer, the World empaneled a “jury” of all women, including a lawyer, a principal, and a Tolstoy translator, to mull over a case where a woman was accused of poisoning her mother by putting arsenic in her clam chowder. It was likely the brainchild of Elizabeth Jordan, who was one of the “jurors.” The female jury weighed in over the course of the trial, and the series had a specific political purpose: “to prove a conspicuous experimental illustration of the theory that a woman should be tried by a ‘jury of her peers.’”

It could also be exhausting for those watching from the outside. Charles Dana’s Sun editorialized: “There was never before anywhere on earth such a rivalry, and, God willing, there never will be again after Mr. Pulitzer is dead or has gone mad, or after Mr. Hearst is tired out or has reluctantly come to his senses.”

Though she didn’t object to a little vicious competition, Winifred Black wasn’t relishing her time in Manhattan writing for Hearst’s Journal. Life in the city seemed relentlessly grim, peopled by those grinding out their lives in utmost poverty, packed into dark tenements, standing in soup kitchen lines, shivering out on strike in thin shawls. The scorching summers and freezing winters exacerbated the misery. Those with money spent their energy fretting over clothes and social status. There was no natural beauty like the moon over the Pacific or wild roses or crates of oranges at the dock to blunt the bleakness. Like Kate Swan McGuirk, she developed