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

than one reporter. The way stunts and their performers became indistinguishable was underscored by the play Very Little Red Riding Hood, a show by the Mask and Wig Club at the University of Pennsylvania. In a tumultuous burlesque that included seventy-five student performers and a “Shakespearean ballet,” the show featured “a chorus of women reporters,” including actors dressed as Nellie Bly, Dorothy Dare, and Kate Swan. Besides the rare solo, a chorus contains few distinct voices. “Stunt reporters” was a more invigorating cliché than “domestic angels,” but it became a cliché nonetheless.

“Dorothy Dare’s Wild Ride on the Snow Plough” in the World, March 22, 1896

“Dorothy Dare’s Wild Ride on the Snow Plough,” World, March 22, 1896 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

And as the popularity of stunt reporters grew, so did the objections. The Chicago Times-Herald (a merger of the Chicago Times and the Herald) railed against the contest between the World and the New York Journal, deploring “the furious exploitation of crime, vulgarity and squalid enterprises of women reporters.” Did New York contain multitudes of morbid readers who demanded this kind of thing? “The only alternative is that the directors of these papers are insane,” the Times-Herald concluded.

Critics included women writers. Frances Willard, head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, warned against reputation-ruining assignments in her book Occupations for Women: “If any girl who reads this is ever tempted to make her entrance into newspaper work through this unclean path, let her put aside the temptation and give up her fondest hopes of becoming a newspaper woman if they are to be obtained at such a cost.”

A column in the New Orleans Times-Democrat by playwright Lucile Rutland was a long howl of protest.

Rutland particularly objected to the reliance on the first person, an unseemly bid for attention. She decried the way these reporters were “intruding their individuality on the public,” deploying “the first person singular.” In contrast, she praised a southern woman who’d written anonymously, displaying “an innate shrinking from public notice.” She saw it as a contest between the “New Woman” and the “True Woman.” She also disliked the way the writing was marked specifically as female: “If women have to do men’s work (and it seems inevitable), why, in the name of decency, can’t they do it like men? Why must they label everything with the vagaries of their sex?” She singled out, as egregious examples, Bly (“clever enough to know better”) and Kate Swan McGuirk (“short skirts, crocheted slippers, disheveled locks”).

Did the editors who assigned these stories even care about the plight of female writers? Rutland wondered. She told the story of a New York woman who, like so many others, felt called to “Write!” But no one saw the value of her work, and she met only rejection. Unwilling to give up and accept her failure, she kept at it until she starved. “The paper that recorded her death, with a few paragraphs of post mortem justice, had a full-page illustration of Kate Swan exposing her shapely body to the revolting rites of electrocution, for the sake of new sensations to work up into several columns of hysteria and capital I’s,” Rutland wrote.

Unlike most other stunt reporters, Kate Swan McGuirk used her real name, though she played with variants. For good or ill, that name, and her face (and calves and ankles), which graced so many Sunday magazine front pages, became a symbol of the World and this moment of its history.

It was a risky move, rather like taking a turn as a fairy bareback rider, sweating in the glare of hot stage lights, wearing an itchy yet shiny costume, slowly rising on the spine of an unpredictable animal, toes clinging for balance.

Part III

Facing the Storm

1896-Present

Chapter 14

1896–1897

A Smear of Yellow

The yellow journals incite them to do the things that get them into jails, though they do sympathize with them a great deal afterward and send their oldest girl reporters to draw touching pictures of how much they suffer in confinement after they have battered in somebody’s head or carved a man into pieces and thrown him around two counties.

—Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 12, 1897

In fall 1896, Elizabeth Banks disembarked the steamship St. Louis, back in New York City after four years in London. Accompanied by her big black dog,* she stepped onto the pavement of a shifted country, a shifted city, a shifted journalism landscape. The Vitascope allowed moving pictures to be projected on a screen, and audiences marveled at images of heaving surf. Bicyclists flew through the streets, on the cutting edge, but in peril: one had just died when hit by a train, another suffered internal injuries after being run over by a carriage. Hearst and Pulitzer’s frenzied competition continued unabated, with newsboys hawking dozens of “Extra” editions per day. Several weeks before, Kate Swan visited North Brother Island, New York’s leper colony, and a Journal Woman joined the hunt for alleged murderers in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. A flock of reporters awaited Banks’s arrival.

She was a big name in Europe, with her undercover jaunts inspiring plays and poems* and, even better, a fair amount of controversy and scorching editorial commentary. Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London, her book filled with photographs of Banks in various disguises and details of her exploits, sold well enough in England to require multiple printings and was pirated in the United States. She’d covered a coal strike and conducted a rare and high-profile interview with the Chinese diplomat Li Hung Chang. One of Hearst’s reporters was among the first to approach her when she arrived in the States.

But when the interviewer asked about her undercover reporting plans in America—hiring out as a servant? Advertising as an heiress angling for an introduction to high society?—Banks demurred.

“Oh, no; I am not going to do any sensational work here,” she said.

That was all in her past, she insisted, touching the bracelet of coins she earned as a housemaid.