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

him to go back to Chicago, where he was arrested again, this time for issuing duplicate stock certificates, and writing checks backed by the paper for his own expenses. In late 1889, a judge sentenced West to five years in jail and a $5,000 fine, but this only launched a series of courtroom defeats and victories until he left the publishing business to try his luck in overseas gold mines.

While West scrambled to stay ahead of the law, Eleanor Stackhouse of the Chicago Tribune continued her investigations as “Nora Marks,” sometimes in disguise, sometimes out. She had great potential as a partner in Ada Sweet’s scheming, and the women knew each other because Ada occasionally served as the Tribune’s literary editor. Like other reporters doing stunts, Marks was in her mid-twenties, courageous, and curious about the hidden side of her city. One slushy January weekday in 1889, she stopped in at the Cook County jail. In the absence of any juvenile facility, young boys were kept there for weeks until they had a trial, or even after, if they weren’t old enough or their crimes serious enough to be sent to reform school. Since the county jail housed only men, she couldn’t trick her way in, so she walked up to the jailer with a letter of introduction.

Nora Marks promotion in the Chicago Tribune on October 12, 1888

“Where has ‘Nora Marks’ Been?,” Chicago Tribune, October 12, 1888 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

“Well, what do you want?” The man with a large ring of keys stared her down.

“To see the boys in here and get your opinion of their being here.”

“O, they’re all right. This is the place for them. They’ve been bad.”

Unimpressed with his level of concern, Marks requested a tour, and followed him through the barred door.

Here a teacher stood in front of twenty boys with messy hair and ragged clothes, trying to pretend they weren’t curious about the reporter. It seemed clear the boys housed with adult criminals had more opportunity to pick up bad habits than to master grammar and arithmetic. Marks caught the teacher’s eye.

“You don’t approve of this?”

“It’s a disgrace to the City of Chicago,” the teacher said.

Marks noticed a ten-year-old with only a beginner’s book.

“Haven’t you got further along than that?” she asked.

“I can’t read,” he volunteered, but added that it didn’t hold him back from his job selling newspapers. He learned the news of the day at the office. And if he forgot, he just yelled something about fire, a murder, or anarchists, and the papers sold.

The boys mocked the reporter’s aspirations for them, hollering out their crimes as if they were career paths: That boy stole a lead pipe because he wanted to be a plumber, this one stole pants so he could be a tailor. But she launched into a story about her recent stunt in the stockyards, describing the techniques for making cans, wheel by wheel, belt by belt, and they fell silent, awed by the complex machinery.

Marks thought of herself as a vehicle for reform, the kind of “inconvenient individual who keeps abreast of the moral sentiment of his age and pushes his nose ahead of reform into existing institutions.” Others viewed her this way, too. A month and a half later, the mayor declared the West Madison Station would be repurposed as a separate house of detention for boys. The Women’s Club launched a campaign to raise money for the Norwood Park School, a privately funded industrial school that Marks visited and praised as a good place for boys to learn career skills.

Ada Sweet had her eye on Marks and on the need for an ambulance in Chicago. She asked the Women’s Club to raise money for the cause, welcoming an amount as little as one cent. But she didn’t stop there.

A month after Bly and Bisland set out, in December 1889, as Bly sampled curry in Ceylon and Bisland heaved on a storm-tossed ship headed to Hong Kong, the Chicago Tribune featured a new stunt. Nora Marks stepped off a streetcar and pretended to faint, falling into the chaotic intersection of Madison and Halsted, crowded with commuters, ringing with streetcar noise, blazing with electric lights. When bystanders attempted to rouse her, they got no response. Checking her purse, they found no clue to her identity, only change and a handkerchief. She was taken on a bone-shaking ride in a patrol wagon to Cook County Hospital. At the hospital, Marks collected herself enough to declare her name was “Annie Myers,” and request her employer be sent for. Then, when the staff didn’t do it immediately, she emphasized how worried her friends would be in her absence (and revealed how little she wanted to spend the night at the county hospital).

When the “employer” showed up to take her home, it turned out to be Ada Sweet. The activist played the scene with a gusto that her sister Winifred, the former actress, would have applauded.

“I can’t see that there is anything the matter with her,” the doctor told Ada. “She may have fainted—she acts a little peculiar.”

“She is a little odd sometimes,” Ada agreed.

Ada Sweet had teamed up with Nora Marks to pull off an exposé to raise awareness of the need for an ambulance. Nora would fake an illness that would result in her being transported to the hospital, and Sweet would get her out. And then, to drive home the point, Ada wrote a piece on the same page as Nora’s story (which was entitled “All Jolted Alike”), explicitly advocating for better transportation: “The city should at once organize within the Police Department an ambulance corps, its members to be trained and drilled in the temporary care, handling, and transportation of sick and injured people. Squads detailed from this corps should be stationed at certain central police stations throughout the city, where they could be reached by the police alarm telephone service.”

Proud of her work, Ada must have clipped the article and sent it to her