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

an escort or much luggage. But a year later, she got the go-ahead, if she could be off in two days. And she was, in a long plaid jacket, a snug cap like a newsboy might wear, with no chaperone and only a small satchel for her spare dress and a light raincoat.

Just as Bly boarded a ship from Hoboken to England, Cosmopolitan magazine sent their own writer, Elizabeth Bisland, around the world in the other direction, speeding on a train from the East across the United States, in an attempt to beat Bly home.* You can almost feel the twist in Hearst’s gut. Why didn’t his paper have a girl racing around the world? The coupons where readers could guess the winning time? The prizes? The spectacle? It was everything he craved, yet someone else had dreamed it up.

Nellie Bly in her traveling clothes

Nellie Bly, c. 1890. Feb 21. (Library of Congress)

The Examiner was stuck playing catch-up, like everyone else, but the editors made the best of it. The stormy, muddy day Bisland arrived in San Francisco, Cosmopolitan urged the steamship, the Oceanic, to leave immediately for Yokohama so she could be on her way, but the owners of the ship wouldn’t budge. Bly was speeding across the Atlantic, bearing down on Europe. But the Oceanic would launch as scheduled, stranding Bisland on land for a few days with nothing to do but watch the minutes tick by. Examiner editors invited her to take a much more leisurely train ride than her recent four-day bullet across the continent, through the western reaches of the city out to lunch at the Cliff House, perched at the edge of the Pacific. With nowhere to go, Bisland admired the flaring sunset, the fat sea lions, the witty male journalists. With the rest of her San Francisco stay, Bisland slept in the Palace Hotel, shopped for light blouses to wear in the upcoming heat, bought silk for “fancy work” for when she got bored on the long ship passage, and talked with a young reporter—Winifred Sweet. Here Winifred, a stunt-reporter-in-training, came face-to-face with an active practitioner, almost as if she was taking notes on what to do, how to be.

If Sweet read other articles about the two racers, she would have gotten an education about the conflicting messages that swirled around stunt reporters. As Bly’s fame grew, so did the pushback against her and what she represented. Her previous work was described, tepidly, as “distinctive”; profiles highlighted her “peculiar personality” and rather straightforward face saved by her animated smile: “She is a plain every-day girl, with a wonderful head and warm heart.”

Even Bly, who always seemed to be enjoying herself, had learned to adopt a tone of apology for her fame and her stunts, using the need to support her mother and younger sister as an excuse. She told one paper that two paths faced her as a young writer: “One was the regular routine of fashion articles and the namby-pamby duties usually assigned to women in newspaper offices, and the other lay in doing something always startling, if not always original. I foresaw that the latter involved many things distasteful to me, but that I could earn more money, and I had two persons dependent upon me. I fully realized the vulnerability of my vocation—the exposure to charges of indelicacy of both action and motive, but horrible as it was to me I swallowed that, resolved to do my duty according to my conscience.”

Much easier to praise the more conventional career and beauty of Bisland, who, according to the Examiner, “has never done anything of the Bly order and a great deal of curiosity and surprise was shown here when it was known that she had started on a trip of this kind.” Bisland had been a literary editor and book reviewer. One reporter wrote, “Miss Bisland is universally regarded as one of the handsomest women in New York. [Hers] is a distinctively southern beauty, the soft eyes and long lashes which raise languidly to look at you, the full mouth, the gentle outline of her figure, her dainty small hands and feet all pointing to the South.”

Bisland herself stressed her feelings of ambiguity at such a high-profile role. Papers spent paragraphs detailing the reporters’ appearance and outfits. She told Winifred, of the trip, “I didn’t realize what a public character it would make me when I started, but everything has its drawbacks, they say. Does it always rain this hard in San Francisco?” And then, with the speed that characterized the whole trip, she was off to Japan to catch Bly, who was racing toward London.

Back in Illinois, Winifred’s sister Ada had become an even more passionate advocate for improving Chicago, campaigning for cleaner streets and a ban on child labor, among other causes—and would soon be referred to as “The Star-Eyed Goddess of Reform.” Spurred by Nell Nelson’s articles, she planned a Women’s Club lecture on “Influence of the Daily Press.” She saw how newspapers and activists could collaborate to spark change.

Nelson’s old paper, the Chicago Times, wasn’t going to be much help, though. The paper was crumbling. Rather than reporting scandals, it was the scandal. Rival papers trumpeted the downfall of James J. West, the self-made millionaire who rescued the Times, sent Nelson into the factories, and gave the Girl Reporter a list of suspect doctors. In January 1889, a scant few weeks after the abortion exposé, the paper accused police officers of fencing stolen goods. The officers sued West for libel and had him arrested, though he soon was out on bail. Private detectives guarded the Times office. Editors and reporters carried guns. Things spiraled out of control. On a trip to Washington in the summer of 1889, West showed up at the hotel of his former city editor, Charles Chapin. According to Chapin, the panicked West carried a suitcase full of cash and begged Chapin to flee with him to Europe. Chapin convinced