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

the cab following, until she reached the blazing electric streetlamps of the large street and made her way home, “safely inside, with that door barred against the universe.”

But, unlike her short-story heroine, she persisted. Jordan neither quit nor got married. The moral of the story was not her moral. (And Miss Van Dyke’s realization at the end—“After all, a woman’s place is in a home!”—was not something Jordan believed.) Ballard Smith and her male colleagues gradually came around to accepting her—to the point of staging a formal ceremony to urge her to throw off the habit of the nunnery, the good manners and politeness, the “I beg your pardons.” It was a marriage to words and grime and scandal, the inverse of the ritual she’d admired where novices took vows to enter the cloistered order. Would she, they asked, “drop the damned formality and the convent polish and be a regular fellow like the rest of them?” Jordan agreed she would, and they all went out to celebrate at a French restaurant known for fine wines.

By December 1890, the Pulitzer Building was complete. Dwarfing competitors on either side, like a broad-shouldered soldier in a gold helmet looming over the peasants, it was the tallest office building in the world. At an opening celebration, politicians flooded in to offer congratulations. Dozens of carrier pigeons were released from the dome, clapping blue-gray wings and bearing the paper’s messages of self-congratulation wired to their tails. Lights at the crest ensured the towering structure was visible for miles. The World touted the building’s superlatives, not overlooking the smallest details: 375 feet tall! 26 stories! 16 miles of steel beams! 1,000 windows! 15,650 feet of water pipes! 57 urinals!

The Pulitzer Building

Pulitzer Building, New York City, c. 1909 (Library of Congress)

Unable to attend, Pulitzer sent a telegram from Germany, read by Cockerill at the ceremony: “God grant that this structure be the enduring home of a newspaper forever unsatisfied with merely printing news—forever fighting every form of Wrong—forever Independent—forever advancing in Enlightenment and Progress—forever wedded to truly Democratic ideas—forever aspiring to be a Moral Force—forever rising to a higher plane of perfection as a public institution.”

His influence announced itself, as well, in a sign posted in the offices: “Accuracy! Terseness! Accuracy!”

And Jordan felt complete, too. After months of striving, she had finally arrived, able to walk through the high-arch entrance of the World, under a balcony with four statues representing “Art,” “Literature,” “Science,” and “Invention” and a gilt sign declaring PULITZER BUILDING, into a rotunda with a floor of white marble, past the windows for dropping off payments and buying newspapers, and into the publication office. Underneath it all, the dragon in the lair, the presses roared and shuddered in the basement, printing up to three hundred thousand copies an hour. The public could watch the long strips of white paper be stamped with the day’s news from a special viewing gallery.

From the high observation deck on top of the building, rather than contemplating God in a walled convent, Jordan could survey the entire city, the sharp spires, the stacks puffing smoke, the tenements leaning tiredly into one another, the elevated train reaching deep into the nest of uptown, the post office, the people, the rooms all squirming with secret lives, the Brooklyn Bridge over the ship-packed East River, the distant Hudson, and as far beyond as a hungry eye could go.

The World’s audacity continued to spread across the country. Out in San Francisco, Winifred Sweet had none of Jordan’s reservations about sensational reporting. She slipped into the stunt-girl costume with ease, diving into oceans of trouble and gleefully paddling around. In the months since fainting at Market and Kearny, “Annie Laurie” visited a leper colony in Hawaii, sought a divorce from unscrupulous lawyers and testified in the resulting libel trial, interviewed a murderer, and canned fruit for low wages.

Later, writing about her affection for the city, she highlighted quiet pleasures: the hummingbirds that visited her garden, fig trees, and the view of Mount Tamalpais across the bay. But she savored the chaos, too.

In a single day, Sweet later recalled, she reported on “a minister’s meeting from ten to twelve; interviewed Lottie Collins, the famous ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay dancer; went to see a Russian Bishop of the Greek Church and asked him if it were true that he burned an orphan asylum full of children to get rid of some incriminating papers; and went down to the morgue to try to help identify a poor girl who had found the sweet delirium of youth suddenly turning into somber tragedy.”

Winifred Sweet as “Annie Laurie” in the San Francisco Examiner, August 17, 1890

Annie Laurie in a Cannery, San Francisco Examiner, August 17, 1890 (Newspapers.com)

Throughout 1890 and 1891, the paper trumpeted her name, building the brand. The Examiner reprinted a column by Arthur McEwen that referred to her as “the ‘Nelly Bly’ of San Francisco” but insisted she was even better: “I have not met Nellie Bly, but my impression of her, from what I have read and heard, is that she is a chipper, kittenish and perhaps somewhat hoodlumesque young person—just the sort of newspaper female you’d rather not know. Annie Laurie is not of this variety at all.” McEwen praised Laurie for being unobtrusive, wearing subdued clothing, and needing days to recover her nerves after one of her courageous feats.* He suggested she turn her skills to novel writing—“a womanly book and a pure one.” The message was clear to aspiring female journalists: be anything but “hoodlumesque.” It was, confoundingly, the opposite of the advice Jordan received—that she needed to lighten up and forget her convent ways.

Though she got her start echoing a Nora Marks stunt, Sweet also experimented with new material, exposing false advertising aimed at women. In one report, she described an acquaintance, her nose an odd tint of white, her cheeks smeared with purple, who happily showed off her $7 haul of bottles and tins labeled “Face Bleach,” “Freckle