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

West; it seemed the paper just wanted to squeeze all they could out of her and then toss her aside. Her love life was in turmoil. Rumors had her engaged to Frank Ingram, the assistant superintendent of Blackwell’s asylum who’d been kind to her there. Simultaneous reports had her engaged to James Metcalfe, an editor at Life magazine who’d shown up on the train at Philadelphia to escort her on the last leg of her round-the-world jaunt. She denied both commitments, and no marriage was forthcoming. Empty seats plagued her lectures. In late March, she missed her train from Chicago and had to pay $100 for a “special” out of her own pocket to make her scheduled talk at the Milwaukee Press Club.

Nellie Bly game in the World, January 26, 1890

“Round the World with Nellie Bly.” World, January 26, 1890 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

So when a gushing young woman, all naive confidence, approached her in Milwaukee and confided that she was about to board a train herself to start a job at the World, then declared she wanted to write straight news, not perform stunts like Bly, perhaps the veteran reporter wasn’t in the mood to exhibit her trademark cheer. Bly was only a year older than the woman who waylaid her, twenty-five to her twenty-four, but had much more life experience, much less raw enthusiasm. Though the woman described Bly’s and Nelson’s exposés as “wonderful things,” she was pulling moral rank. While it had been a genre for only three years, stunt reporting was already considered not quite respectable. As the young woman remembered it, her chat with Bly took on “a delicate layer of frost.”

Not long before, the woman, named Elizabeth Jordan, aspired to be a nun. Something about the quiet intensity of the life of the Convent of Notre Dame in Milwaukee, where she’d gone to school, called to her. The walled garden with its fountain. The trees and the paths that wound through it. The ritual by which the novices took vows to enter the cloistered order that shunned the public unless called to action. It drew her in.

But not everyone was convinced. In the photography studio for her graduation picture, Jordan conveyed a certain sense of contradiction. Yes, she had dressed in all white, looped a cross around her neck, and wore a sober expression. But her jaw was still rounded with traces of childhood. Her dress, far from severe, featured a skirt of stacked ruffles, trailed lace at the sleeves. Holding a jaunty umbrella, an explosion of curling white plumes on her hair, Jordan looked more prepared to stroll a fashionable boulevard than sink to her knees on a chapel’s stone floor. Hearing her religious aspirations stated out loud could make her friends burst into laughter.

Her parents were similarly skeptical. While Banks’s editor told her to be anything but a newspaper girl, Jordan’s parents had another problem altogether. Her father, a Milwaukee real estate developer, and her musician mother who made Jordan practice her piano for two hours a day, had other hopes for their bright, bubbly daughter. Please let her be anything, they thought, but a nun.

One night, when she was seventeen and recently graduated from the convent school, her father sat at the desk in his study and made her a deal: if she would put aside thoughts of the convent for four years, he would bankroll her other dream—to be a writer—even as far as helping her to Chicago and New York, if that’s what she wanted. The hustle of a newspaper office would test her religious resolve. And his plan seemed to be paying off. In Milwaukee, she edited the women’s page for Peck’s Sun, then wrote for Chicago papers, and finally took a “vacation” to New York that found her in the editorial offices of the World, asking the gruff, foul-mouthed Colonel Cockerill for a job. And he agreed. Six months later, she was on her way.

Like Chicago, in 1890, New York high society rested on top of a subterranean world of poverty. The wave of immigration throughout the previous decade meant that four-fifths of city residents were born elsewhere or children of those born elsewhere. And the city was straining to house them all. Whole families lived together in single rooms in tenement houses with little light or fresh air. Strangers paid 5 cents a night for space on a mattress or a corner to sleep in. Fire and disease were devastating in these closely packed quarters. In the summer, residents fled the stifling rooms and slept on the roofs. In the winter, homeless boys clustered around Newspaper Row, sometimes picking up work selling papers, sometimes just jockeying for space on the grates emitting heat from the underground printing presses. Narrow alleys offered space for gangs to gather, gangs that exploited the poor for economies of drugs and prostitution.

Stunt reporters discovered creative ways to cover hazardous housing, and others followed. Jacob Riis, a police reporter for the New York News Association, had been documenting life in the tenements. In Dickens-inflected, apocalyptic language he described his encounters: “A horde of dirty children play on the broken flags about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it; it is the best it can do. These are the children of the tenements, the growing generation of the slums.”

But his real innovation was photography. He often arrived in tenements unannounced and caught his subjects unawares. They frequently had surprised or bleary expressions, as if they’d just been jerked out of sleep. The technique wasn’t kind, but the resulting images felt very candid, very real. Since January 1888, when he’d compiled a hundred photographs and presented a slide show called “The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York” to the New York Association of Amateur Photographers, he had been offering wealthy New Yorkers a view into the homes of their less fortunate neighbors. Not