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

two literary characters, in order to cover the maximum number of stories in multiple styles. When the San Francisco Examiner ran her articles, they appeared under the established name “Annie Laurie.” In the New York Journal, she wrote under her own name: “Winifred Black,” chasing human interest stories from police station to the alcohol-soaked Bowery, with little time to do anything but report and type. “I used to go to my hotel at night absolutely dizzy with the pressure of life that beat and surged up and down those dark and narrow streets like a tidal wave rising to engulf us all,” she wrote. A few days after she settled into a New York routine in the fall of 1895, her husband and son came to join her.

As happy as she was to see her little boy, her feelings about her domestic life were mixed. Back in 1892, when she’d been married for a year, she’d hidden in a wooden box with a slit in it so she could watch a boxing match and not be observed. The men, some acquaintances, were transformed, howling like beasts. A doctor she knew gave a “guttural snarl” and a lawyer followed the fight blow by blow with his fists. Her article read like anthropological fieldwork. “I saw that I was looking on a race of beings I had never seen before.” The race was men. She wrote, of the faces in the crowd, “They told a wonderful story of repression, of dissimulation. Since I saw them I know that women never see men as they are. Women do not know anything about men. They see them, they talk with them, they love them, they fear them, they laugh at them, but they do not know them.”

Perhaps it goes without saying that her husband was not what she’d hoped for. For a number of years, paid generously by Hearst, a big draw for both of his papers, she supported their family. Her husband had been withdrawing her money without telling her, breeding mistrust. Something would have to give.

While Winifred Black buttressed the Journal in New York, readers of the San Francisco Examiner who craved adventure followed the exploits of “Helen Dare.” Stunting with a particular California flair, she rode forty miles down a log flume in the Sierra mountains, a feat her paper called the “Wildest Ride Ever Made by a Woman.” (These flumes inspired amusement park “log rides.”) As with many of these reporters, though her name was dashing, she did other kinds of journalism, too. As well as picking hops with migrant workers, she wrote about threats to California forests—highlighting human-caused fires—on the same page that featured an interview with John Muir, who blamed sheep and poor logging practices. She also conducted a humanizing series of interviews with prisoners in San Quentin.

Helen Dare promotion in the San Francisco Examiner, July 25, 1896

“Flying the Flume,” San Francisco Examiner, July 25, 1896 (Newspapers.com)

Then in October, a reporter from a rival paper revealed that Helen Dare was actually Elizabeth Tompkins, the noted horse-race writer who’d vanished on the way to the Chicago World’s Fair with her son and left her husband temporarily paralyzed with worry. She’d met a dashing representative of the California Jockey Club at Saratoga and had run off with him to San Francisco. But she was bored and lonely, even in the Pacific Heights apartment with the view and her now five-year-old boy. The pseudonym had allowed her to do the work she loved, while staying in hiding. And she kept doing it, false identity stripped away, exposed to public view and condemnation.

Back on Park Row, stunt reporters continued to multiply. Throughout 1896, the World had so many, its Sunday magazine could barely contain the thrills. “Daring Deeds by the Sunday World’s Intrepid Woman Reporters”: the headline of March 8 spanned two pages of heart-stopping adventure. Dorothy Dare headed out in a pilot ship in a storm, another reporter (perhaps less daringly) took up shears as a barber, while Kate Swan McGuirk lived a childhood dream of balancing on a moving horse as a circus “fairy bareback rider.” Nellie Bly declared she would raise an all-female regiment to fight for Cuba. Since 1895, when Cubans had rebelled against Spanish control of the island, both the World and the Journal followed developments—the torching of the countryside by both rebel and Spanish armies, the relocation of rural people into urban concentration camps, the resulting disease and starvation—and agitated for United States intervention. And Bly, pictured sword in hand at the head of an army, was ready to lead the charge.

Hearst’s answer to this flood of female reporters was the “Journal Woman.” It was an umbrella term covering several reporters, but the one who dominated the Journal’s Sunday pages was Kate Masterson. She profiled a Michigan town where women wore the trousers, literally and figuratively, conducted an interview with Edison, took a trip on a haunted schooner. Bly’s military bravado may have been inspired by reports of Cuban “Amazons” fighting with the rebels. Kate Masterson did her one better, traveling to Havana to interview Spanish military leader General Valeriano Weyler in the palace hung with red velvet curtains. Weyler, called “the Butcher,” denied her requests to visit the battlefield and prison but gave her a tour of his elaborate bathroom and bedroom. She asked him specifically about the stories of female soldiers, and he said they were true. In fact, one had been captured, wearing men’s clothes and holding a machete. “These women are fiercer than the men,” he told her.

Circulation numbers spiraled up, but the sheer volume of stunt stories blurred the boundaries between one reporter and the next, flattened individual writers and their styles. When Nellie Bly first started writing for the World in 1887, the selling point was her voice. That was why headlines featured her name. But nine years later, the value of uniqueness was slipping away. Like the “Journal Woman,” the pseudonym “Meg Merrillies” covered more