Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

and wish to reform can find a Christian home and friends” by writing him a letter. And finally, in the personals: “Minnie . . . come home; all is forgiven.”

But Winifred was not one to be intimidated. Orphaned at fourteen, when her mother died not long after her father, she’d grown up in the Midwest under her older sister Ada’s care. The two sisters looked alike, with the same unruly reddish-blonde hair, but their temperaments could not have been more distinct. Ada had the military bearing of her father, a Union solider, and portraits show sober clothing, serious expressions.

Ada Sweet

Ada Sweet, portrait, c. 1882. (Chicago History Museum)

In contrast, Winifred preferred to bedeck her head with towering constructions of feathers and velvet. While Ada Sweet arranged for Winifred to attend the staid Mary A. Burnham girls’ boarding school in Northampton, Massachusetts, Winifred had been swept up by the desire to be an actress and spent several years on the road. As a performer she struggled, playing roles like “ZoZo, the Magic Queen” rather than Ophelia, and it left her discouraged but not daunted. She’d already navigated New York City and been stranded in small towns with rickety theaters. She had taken the train across the country to find a missing brother, fending off marriage proposals along the way, locating him on a ranch in the southwest. Her sister Minnie had died a year and a half before, and now she’d come to California to visit her brother-in-law.

Ada, a noted Chicago reformer who supported her younger siblings by working as a United States pension agent, had urged Winifred to give up her attempts at an acting career and try reporting. Deeply invested in pulling Chicago from the muck and making it a healthy, compassionate city, Ada saw how the Women’s Club responded to Nell Nelson’s daring journalism. It fired them up, so that the society women were suddenly engaged in the lives of factory girls and poor children missing school. The bravura required by journalistic stunts might be a perfect fit for her younger sister, who, with her acting career languishing, needed another way to make a living. Winifred might be impetuous, but she was a good writer, as evidenced by her letters home, some of which Ada had arranged to be printed in the Chicago Tribune as a series on “Confessions of an Actress” by “Columbine.”

On the page, Winifred poked fun at herself, admitting that while she considered herself a “heaven-born genius” as an actor, her friends generally thought she was a “stage-struck idiot.” She mocked her own inexperience, reporting that she delivered her first-ever line, “My Lord, the carriage awaits,” with such a tone of tragic intensity that she almost got fired. And when she finally landed a leading role and strode to center stage so the villains could abduct her, her fellow actors missed their cue. No one showed up for so long, she confided, “I began to think I should have to abduct myself.” Though her dream of being a romantic heroine with the need to “weep and denounce” hadn’t panned out, she knew she wanted a life that would let her roam. And in San Francisco, she found it. She immediately determined to stay and, since her first attempts had met with laughter and her sister’s approval, try to make her way as a writer.

For someone considering a journalistic career, the San Francisco Examiner would have been hard to miss. In the spring of 1887, just as Bly headed to New York, William Randolph Hearst took his own risk. For at least two years, he’d been haunting the Examiner offices when he was home from college, sending his father, the wealthy Senator George Hearst, letters of advice on the paper’s management. He’d been studying Pulitzer’s World like a textbook, hiring college friends from the Harvard Lampoon to write columns, urging his father to spend more freely, chiding him: “The paper must be built up,” and noting “cheap labor has been entirely ineffectual.” After this lengthy campaign, and when it appeared he never would return to Harvard to finish his degree, the twenty-three-year-old had gotten what he wanted—a newspaper of his own. On March 4, a change appeared on the masthead. In a boastful note under “Ownership of the Examiner” was the comment: “The Examiner, with this issue, has become the exclusive property of William R. Hearst, the son of its former proprietor.”

It’s no surprise that the visitor who described San Francisco’s atmosphere as “charged with a vigorous, disrespectful sort of youth” had spent an afternoon with Examiner reporters. Hearst himself had the intensity of a frontier priest or a prizefighter. Both characters held sway in his personality—a teetotaler known for a love of hunting and fishing, restless and ruthless in his desire to dominate the newspaper business. His techniques could be those of a broad-shouldered bully, while his soft voice was, according to a colleague, like “the fragrance of violets made audible.” Bartenders all over the city knew the name of the Examiner’s sharp-witted editor S. S. Chamberlain, as careful in his dress as Hearst, with Paris tastes and a gardenia in his lapel, but a hard drinker. In Chamberlain’s small warren of an office, the reporters and editors, some from Hearst’s Harvard days, some hired at high salaries with his father’s backing, flung ideas like darts. They constructed elaborate and expensive schemes as if they were sand castles that could collapse without consequence. There always seemed to be more money.

The Examiner was evolving, testing out what might be possible with a printing press, creativity, and a mine full of gold. Editors masterminded exposés of police bribery and morphine clubs in Oakland. And in a strategy Hearst learned at the World, the Examiner ferreted out stories that, rather than focusing on power plays of senators, revealed scenes of life in factories, criminal courts, prisons. Like Pulitzer, he positioned himself as a champion of the poor and overlooked. Whether this reflected a deep-held political conviction on Hearst’s part or