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

Journal metaphorically rubbed its hands in glee. On December 3, the paper trumpeted its accomplishments, along with its philosophy: “Above the boards and councils and commissions stand the courts, and by the side of the courts stands the New Journalism, ready to touch the button that sets their ponderous machinery in motion.” It highlighted the paper’s mottoes: “While others talk the Journal acts,” and “What is everybody’s business is the Journal’s business.” Then, days later, it taunted Pulitzer. The World’s accomplishments were all in the past. The paper had become “timid and dull, as bankrupt in enterprise as it is in talent.” The editorial writer, clearly channeling Hearst if not Hearst himself, imagined that in the World’s shining dome “a sad and reminiscent and beaten lonely man will be sitting, listening to the Journal’s triumphant music and the applauding shouts of the city far below, in the world of the present.” It was personal. It was always personal.

Despite the Journal’s glowing predictions of clear skies and moonlight, New Year’s Eve was cold and rainy. The fireworks and colored lights lit up the clouds and reflected off the damp pavement. Gaps yawned in the parade where groups had dropped out. Some celebrants, drinking to keep off the chill, stumbled into the parade route, only to be herded back by police. The singing societies were hard to hear, but there was no lack of noise, with whistles and horns, and the bells of Trinity Church over it all. At midnight on the East Coast, the mayor of San Francisco, standing in California, pressed a button that unfurled the flag of Greater New York, marking the new city, but also the stretch of Hearst’s empire, from West to East.

But Pulitzer was not up in the dome, pulling out his hair at the sight of the Journal’s glory, wincing at every firework explosion, watching the parade with churning envy. He was in Bar Harbor, Maine, with his teenage daughter, Lucille, who had been battling typhoid fever. She seemed to be making a recovery, but at 6:16 p.m., just as crowds gathered and organizers were debating whether to call the whole thing off because of bad weather, Pulitzer’s secretary sent a telegram to the World’s manager. “Chief much broken,” he wrote. Lucille had died, and for once her father’s mind was not on the newspaper business.

Chapter 15

1898

All Together in New Bedford

Do you believe that “woman is the weaker sex”?

Do you believe that the Fates intended that woman’s scheme of life should be worked out in a place called Home, where she should rest secure from the hubbub and turbulent hurry of the working world?

If that is your idea of woman’s existence, pay a visit to New Bedford.

—Boston Post, January 23, 1898

January 1898 found Eva Valesh (formerly Eva McDonald, pseudonym Eva Gay) on her way north to New Bedford, Massachusetts. The city had a rich history as a lively whaling port. In Moby-Dick, New Bedford appeared as a prosperous town built on whale oil. The mansions “came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. One and all they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea,” according to Melville. With the decline of the shipping industry and the move away from whale-oil lamps, though, the city turned to textiles along with nearby Fall River. Massive stone factories lined the waterfront along Buzzard’s Bay, churning out fine cotton cloth. Nearby, ramshackle buildings housed immigrant mill workers. The bay shore bristled with piers, and, this time of year, ice crusted the water’s edge.

But after declining profits prompted a 10 percent wage cut, almost ten thousand textile workers had walked out—a strike that some feared would spread throughout New England. On the first day, as strikers jostled outside the shuttered mills, boys threw rocks at one of the factories, breaking windows. Rumors swirled that the owners might bring in Pinkerton detectives to act as private security, that a riot was imminent. And just as in her very first reporting job in Minneapolis, Valesh, now on assignment for Hearst’s New York Journal, was headed toward the heart of it.

As she braced herself for the tumult on the streets, Valesh was coming off her own tumultuous year. For one thing, her marriage of seven years was failing.

She had met Frank Valesh back in the Twin Cities, organizing for the eight-hour-day campaign. Frank, who had emigrated from Europe when he was nine, had drooping light eyes, a drooping mustache. A portrait showed him in a white hat and a bow tie, giving the impression of a clerk pressed into cattle-roping duty. There was no East Coast slickness about him.

And at the start, all this appealed. They shared political convictions, a love for books; they critiqued each other’s lecture style. Eva Valesh wrote giddy newlywed letters to her reporter colleague Albert Dollenmayer, also a newlywed. She addressed him as “Friend Doll,” saying that “marriage opened so full and new a life to me” and describing the “utter wretchedness” at being apart from her husband. Even though Dollenmayer seemed similarly happy, she wondered whether he could truly understand as, she noted, “I hardly think marriage makes the difference to a man that it does to a woman.”

But even then, she could sense domestic life might conflict with other desires. With her marriage only a month old, she was already far away, in western New York on a lecture tour to promote the formation of a third political party. The People’s Party aimed to support farmers and laborers and wrest power from large corporations, and she was the state lecturer for the Farmer’s Alliance. Building her skills, speaking alongside senators, rallying the crowd, the work grew more fascinating all the time.

“It is a hard struggle,” she wrote to Dollenmayer. “I hate to leave him and I’m unhappy all the time away, yet I can’t bear to let slip the opportunities to get to the front.” Her companions were impressive but not overshadowing: “I think without egotism that I could