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

made far from the waterfront shacks or even the mill owners’ mansions, she knew. She went to interview the president.

In her report (including a large illustration of her talking with President McKinley, which made even this journalistic triumph seem vaguely stunt-like), she recorded his approval of arbitration between management and labor, the eight-hour day, and a current bill restricting immigration (using the logic that it would provide higher wages for laborers born in the United States).

Two days later, Valesh tracked down Representative Nelson Dingley of Maine in the Hamilton Hotel. The Dingley Act, passed the previous July, hiked tariffs on many kinds of cloth, china, and sugar. In Dingley’s analysis, New England mill owners had bought cotton relatively high and prices had dropped, leaving them with overstock and an inability to pay workers what they demanded. But southern competition was the real trouble, Dingley stressed, with southern weavers and spinners willing to work longer hours in worse conditions.

“Could you suggest any other plan by which the difficulty might have been tided over?” Valesh asked. Dingley proposed a reduction in hours with the mills running only a few days a week until the financial picture improved.

It was a very technical, wonky interview, and it’s clear Valesh relished every minute. Suicide might have been her Journal beat, but labor policy was her forte.

Other reporters, though they started out following an expected script, also found their own perspectives, pulling away from the stunt reporter’s increasingly generic tone. In response to Valesh championing Pickering, Anne O’Hagan offered Jane Gallagher. Gallagher, a weaver who’d also emigrated from Lancashire, demonstrated a quieter kind of resistance than Pickering, who shouted down her critics in the lecture hall. “Her bravery is not the Boadicean sort, that arms itself with sword and shield and goes out to battle with its foes. It is the rarer, more significant kind that resists oppression strenuously and steadily, and that, without any sounding of cymbals, announces its intention never to yield to injustice,” O’Hagan wrote.

In O’Hagan’s telling, when Gallagher handed in a piece of cotton cloth to receive the $1.17 she was due, she was fined 58.5 cents for a flaw. Rather than complaining, Gallagher declared: “I will not be fined.” And when the mill’s representatives laughed in her face, she walked out and then took them to court.

This offered an opportunity for the Journal to swoop back in. In keeping with its motto of “Journalism that acts,” the paper offered to pay for Gallagher’s lawsuit, previously funded by the Weavers’ Union.

Ever the contrarian, Elizabeth Banks also developed her own approach. Her arrival in New Bedford met both praise and pushback. In a newspaper image announcing her assignment, Banks stared challengingly out at the audience, a set mouth softened by a cloud of wavy hair, above two smaller pictures of Banks dressed as a maid and a street sweeper. To modern eyes, it looks like a movie poster. She is touted as the correspondent with the most “interesting and unique personality,” one who “roused all England by her campaigns of curiosity.” Meanwhile, the New England papers looked askance at the idea that the stunting young woman “who obtained situations in the homes of the families of the English nobility that she might write up the members” would be paying them a visit.

Banks determined to provide the opposite of the expected gloom. She rebelled against the assumption that, because of the World’s reputation as “a friend of the poor workers,” she would automatically side with the strikers. Her early articles were aggressively cheerful, going out of their way to laud positive aspects of the strikers’ lives. She visited their homes and noted that, though the women might make only $7 a week: “such clean houses they keep . . . and such an amount of comparative comfort as they manage to extract from it!” She continued, “I never saw such an intelligent looking and really pretty set of working girls as are now on strike in New Bedford.”

Illustration of Elizabeth Banks, announcing her presence in New Bedford

Elizabeth Banks illustration (Harry Beetle Hough Scrapbooks, Widener Library, Harvard University)

The vice president of the Weavers’ Union, William Foley, told her outright, “Write up some of the happy things in New Bedford. . . . Don’t you go painting this town blacker than it is.” So Banks complied, covering the church, Foley’s lovely home, and his mother (“one of the happiest and brightest of old woman I have ever met”). A boy making mud pies in an alley was “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” She toured some of the poorer families, taking on Valesh directly, commenting, “To compare their homes and the streets in which they reside to the slums of London and New York is to libel them and bring out their just resentment.” The headline? “Jolly Strikers Who Don’t Whine at Woe.”

Once she put aside her boosterism, though, Banks offered some of the most valuable straight reporting on the strike; her articles are where one would turn to find out what was happening day by day. Banks also painted a nuanced portrait of New Bedford, a place where local women created a community-subsidized nursery for the babies whose mothers worked at the mill; one where the library hosted fifteen-year-old boys devouring the news from Cuba, readers demanding books on economics, and a gaunt man refining his poetry. When Banks received a letter from Staten Island offering a place as a servant for a suffering mill girl, she recorded the polite refusals of the young women who, though hungry, didn’t want to leave tight-knit families. They saw such work as demeaning, just like their London counterparts.

Banks stayed at the strike longer than almost anyone else, offering increasingly complex analysis. It was the kind of reporting opportunity she’d been waiting for.

Kate Swan McGuirk, heroine of dozens of the World’s Sunday-page adventures, hewed to what she knew best: an undercover exposé. An advertisement for a new self-feeding loom claimed to eliminate health hazards of the traditional system where a weaver, when loading a new bobbin, put