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

fight among men, including the white owner of a rival store. After several days of threats, fearing an attack on the People’s Grocery, Moss and his co-owners posted guards at the back of the building, and the guards shot and wounded white men creeping in. The three grocery owners were arrested, along with many other Black men in town, alleged to be part of a conspiracy. As the men sat in jail, white-owned papers stoked anger, describing the store as full of criminals and gamblers. Just as it was announced that all the injured men would live, Moss, the grocery store manager, and a clerk, were torn out of jail, put on a train a mile out of town, and shot to death.

As Wells talked, sadness overwhelmed her. Her Tennessee life had been yanked out from under her so suddenly. Relationships forged through time, over long evening walks and lively conversation, were gone. So was the printing press that had enabled her to publish her own thoughts on her own terms. Letters, type, cherished belongings, left behind, broken, or scattered. And there was no looping back. The only path was forward.

Tears dripped down her face, though she kept her voice even. It was embarrassing—she wanted to do well by these esteemed women who went to all this effort to celebrate her—and here she was, weak.

Without stopping, she reached behind her and gestured for help. Victoria Earle Matthews put a handkerchief in her hand. And Wells kept speaking.

Chapter 10

1892–1893

Guilt and Innocence

“Put a good woman on this!” shouts out the head editor to his assistant dozens of times a day.

—The Living Age, 1898

Through the rest of 1892 and into 1893, as Grover Cleveland won his rematch with Benjamin Harrison to take the presidency again, Nell Nelson reported from Europe on factory conditions in Berlin and Nuremberg, Winifred Sweet (now Winifred Black) solicited reader opinions on “Who Is the Greatest Woman Alive?,” and as Lizzie Borden paced in jail, awaiting trial, Elizabeth Jordan flourished at the World.

She stayed up late nights, going into all kinds of New York City neighborhoods, undoing the good work of her convent education. The World still felt like the center of a bustling universe. In the paper’s tenth anniversary issue in 1893, an illustration touted “Public Services Rendered by The World.” These included: “Equal rights for poor and rich,” “Relief for the oppressed,” “Anti-Monopoly,” and “Exposure of Fraud.” Jordan’s reporting on a medical student who’d poisoned his secret wife and Nelson’s advocacy for female factory inspectors were also listed among the World’s decade of accomplishments, though neither woman was mentioned by name. But Pulitzer wasn’t resting on his laurels; the paper continued to innovate, installing a color printing press and publishing one of the first Sunday comics supplements, popping with scrappy characters in bright reds and blues.

Jordan had proven her value as an editor as well as a writer but was still relatively new, garnering only the rare byline. So the assignment to cover the Borden murder trial was a coup; reporters all wanted to be on the train to New England in June 1893.

In the months since the crime, the mystery had only deepened. However you looked at the case, Jordan wrote in one of her early articles, “you have to make up your mind to accept things which are wildly improbable on the basis of any past experience of human action.” It was impossible to imagine Lizzie Borden had committed the murders. It was impossible to imagine she hadn’t.

The World, in a weekend feature, asked notable figures whether they thought Borden was innocent, revealing the depths of disagreement. Journalist Helen Watterson said she was guilty. Borden’s sex, and its relative powerlessness, was a motive, she suggested: “Many women—faithful daughters and wives—have lived out long lives of utter soul and mind starvation in so-called comfortable homes and in surroundings that outsiders might envy, simply because the unimaginative, sordid man who held the purse-strings did not think it necessary to countenance any display of ‘foolishness’ on the part of his women at the expense of his cash-box.” And Borden’s womanhood didn’t offer any defense: “The one thing to be said in rebuttal of the argument drawn from her character is that she is a woman. Which is really no defense at all. Because there may be an entire lack of moral fibre in a woman quite as certainly as in a man.” This contention, though not flattering, insisted that women were full, flawed, human beings rather members of some separate category.

In contrast, Rev. Charles Parkhurst, head of New York’s Society for the Prevention of Crime, who had been conducting a campaign against police corruption and prostitution in the Tenderloin, came to Borden’s defense. He declared her upbringing—her environment and “Christian attributes”—incompatible with such viciousness, writing, “Angels, my friends say, do not become Frankenstein in an instant.”

Like all the other reporters except Kate Swan McGuirk, Elizabeth Jordan couldn’t get an interview with the defendant. But there was plenty to observe in the courtroom as the Borden trial got underway. Bright sunshine streamed through courthouse windows on either side of the audience, bringing unbearable heat. The attorneys heaped their tables with evidence: a valise containing the skulls of the two murdered Bordens, a dress Lizzie might have worn, a bloody bandanna, a large selection of hatchets. Dozens of reporters perched on stools in front of the long wood shelves installed as communal desks, alongside sketch artists flecked with ink. Women from New Bedford and Fall River, fans in hand and lunches in their pockets, glowered at the defendant. Jordan found these women, who attended every day and formed “a self-constituted jury,” disconcerting, writing, “They sit and look at her with ghoulish eyes, and they have openly exulted with the prosecution on the rare occasions when a point has seemed to be scored.” Of course, she hoped her readers would exhibit the same lust for every gory detail, never missing a day, though at further remove.

In full-page articles with