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

meaning everything outrageous, crowd pleasing, colorful and—the implication was—false. Other terms clung to “yellow journalism” like flies to fly paper: “lurid,” and “prurient” and “sensational.” “Lurid,” with its roots in the Latin color “luridus,” means a pale yellow, like the skin of someone who is ill, a sickly slice of sky before a storm. Or reddish, like a flame against darkness or smoke. Metaphorically, it means to look at something in this unsettling light, a tint that distorts. “Prurient” refers to itching with lust or curiosity, particularly that “dangerous curiosity” mentioned by clergyman Josiah Tucker as “that prurient desire of knowing where lies the exact Boundary between Virtue and Vice.” “Sensational,” unsurprisingly, is knowledge rooted in the senses, which brings readers back to their troublesome bodies.*

By March, the categorization “yellow journalism” was being used to boot the World and the Journal from libraries. The Newark Public Library led the charge. When the Union Club voted to eliminate the papers as well, the Sun commented, approvingly, “In many institutions where the World and Journal are still admitted they are and have been for some time excluded from the libraries and reading rooms, and are kept under lock and key, to be brought out on the express demand of adults only.” Other libraries followed suit, including the Ansonia Public Library in Connecticut, which banned “yellow journalism” from the reading room to limit access to “pernicious and unclean newspapers.”

Pulitzer struggled to maintain control, impeded by his distance and blindness. It must have been hard to feel the pulse of events without being able to see the excitement or indifference when a given edition hit the streets. Did commuters miss a train to read the headlines, or use the front page to wipe mud off their boots? Circulation numbers were the only way to track this, so he pressed for them, endlessly. Writing to his business manager, he stressed that the World needed to recover “the respect and confidence of the public” and destroy “the notion that we are in the same class with the Journal with recklessness & unreliability.” He worried the code had been cracked.

The criticism didn’t bother Hearst at all.

Other New York papers sought to distance themselves from the yellow stain, advertising their unsoiled brands. The New York Times moved its newly minted, rather prim, slogan to the front page: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” If simply reading these papers was indecent, what did it mean to edit one, as the convent-educated Elizabeth Jordan did? Or to write for one?

But still, the World beckoned. Eventually, Banks went in.

It was as she feared. After she refused to be arrested as a prostitute, the editor assigned her to take a train, then a mule, into “the wilds of Virginia,” where a group of whiskey distillers had recently attacked government officers trying to arrest them. It was an echo of Elizabeth Jordan’s journey to the South, where she interviewed a backwoods preacher years earlier, but with much higher stakes. If Banks pretended to be lost, with her delicate appearance, she could get access to their headquarters. An interview with the gang leader would be quite the tale. Could she leave in half an hour?

When Banks asked which male reporter would be sent along to keep her safe, the editor replied, “Men! . . . why, if I sent a man along with you, both he and you would be shot! Your only safety lies in your going by yourself.” Chivalry would protect her, he suggested.

Banks’s faith in the chivalry of the American man had its limits. She declined that assignment, too.

But she couldn’t continue saying no and keep her job. She had to come up with an alternate plan. Increasing concern over Cuba spurred interest in military technology. An inventor named John Holland was working on a boat that could attack an enemy from underwater: a submarine. Banks’s editor ordered her to be sure to be in it for the first test. Imagining plummeting to the bottom in a large metal coffin, without even time to type up a first-person piece on this novel kind of death, Banks tried a new strategy. As she had way back in St. Paul, she disguised herself as a “womanly woman,” shunning her usual practical skirt for a dress, frilly and white. Perfecting her “delicate, feminine appearance” in the mirror before she left, admiring the way the pale outfit made her face green and sickly, she set off for the Holland Torpedo Boat Company at the shipyards in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Looking at the fifty-foot tube lurking under the water’s surface, armed with not just a torpedo but two dynamite guns, Banks let fear play across her face. Ruffles trembling, she timidly asked Holland to let her step in the vessel and be submerged. Though Holland had full confidence in his invention, she got the refusal she wanted.

“You would not die of the going down, but you would die of the fear! You would be actually and literally frightened to death!” he said. Then she got him to promise he wouldn’t let any other reporters go down either, and fluttered away.

Even with these tactics, Banks stayed busy and employed. In between bringing stray kittens and injured dogs to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, she chased stories into the hospital, the jail, the morgue, smelling salts at the ready. She worked in a sweatshop, slept in a 15-cent-per-night lodging house, X-rayed her foot, interviewed a murderess.

Though usually, as fit the genre, the writing featured a light touch, Banks’s chipperness could gloss over real turmoil. While in London, isolated, plagued with insomnia, in a state she later described as “breaking down under a very great mental strain,” she’d befriended journalist and reformer W. T. Stead, who let her recuperate at his property. And sometime during her stint at Pulitzer’s paper, a story unfolded that cut through the gloss to rage. A friend had introduced her to a girl from England who had come to America looking for employment.