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

a bold young reporter at the New York Searchlight, eager to prove herself with a scoop, is sent to get an exclusive interview with Helen Brandow, accused of poisoning her husband. Gossip declared Brandow—young, good-looking, and from a respected family—certain to be acquitted. But she refused to talk with the press. Ruth, though, impressed the warden with her credentials. He had read her articles and had seen the illustration of her face in the paper—and he let her in.

Ruth Herrick was struck, almost immediately (as was McGuirk) by the distorted media image of the person in front of her. Brandow wasn’t beautiful. Had the male reporters even looked at her, or had they been describing a woman of their imagination? And she was composed to the point of coldness. The prisoner told the reporter she trusted her to represent her accurately—not overwrought and sobbing. Yet through their conversation, her composure began to crack.

Her marriage, Brandow said, had been miserable. Within a month of the ceremony, she realized her mistake: “He spent his time devising ways of persecuting and humiliating me, and his efforts were eminently successful.” Her body was still marked by his beatings; she waited in her room at night in dread of his kicking at the door. When he attacked her mother, it was too much.

“That night I killed him,” she told the astonished reporter.

Jordan ably described Ruth Herrick’s quandary. The prisoner had handed her a scoop beyond her editor’s fantasies: a confession. The article would earn her applause and admiration. On the other hand, if she kept quiet, the woman would probably go free. As Herrick debated, she heard her internal voice as one of a lawyer: “Something within the reporter asserted itself as counsel for her and spoke and would not down.” Though she couldn’t serve on a jury, Ruth had the opportunity to mete out justice.

“I am going to forget this interview,” the reporter told the prisoner.

In doing so, she gestured at theories that wouldn’t be named until a century later, like battered woman’s syndrome and jury nullification. Ruth offered the woman a defense that the courtroom, as constructed at the time, wouldn’t provide.

The 1894 story published in Cosmopolitan raised many eyebrows. The timing seemed suspicious. People imagined Jordan, one of the most high-profile correspondents to report the Borden trial, might have heard and suppressed a similar confession.

“So, Ruth Herrick, that’s the kind of reporter you are, is it?” Jordan’s managing editor wrote her.

Jordan insisted she thought of the story before she’d heard of Lizzie Borden, but her imagined interview has many similarities to McGuirk’s real one. And later, when Borden resolutely stayed in Fall River, instead of moving to Europe as Jordan thought she might, spent time with theater people instead of dutiful churchgoers, and seemed to revel in her newfound wealth, even Jordan experienced a whisper of doubt. Why, when her sister began to lose her mind, did Borden hold her close at home, where she could keep an eye on her? Children began to chant:

Lizzie Borden took an ax

Gave her mother forty whacks;

And when she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.*

And people began to wonder whether the jury hadn’t been swayed by their inability to conceive that a wealthy, white Christian woman could do such a thing. Had the men been blinded by their lack of imagination? Perhaps. But no one suggested they weren’t fit to serve.

If Kate Swan McGuirk wrote more about the Borden trial for one of her many employers, there is no obvious record of it. She spent at least part of the blazing June of 1893 working on a piece about “Summer Homes of the Washington Cabinet.” These straitlaced topics made it all the more surprising that three years after Borden’s acquittal, she would be considered the most notorious stunt reporter of them all. And she would be egged on by assignments from Elizabeth Jordan—who went to New York determined to avoid stunts—in Jordan’s role as editor of the World’s Sunday magazine.

As the Borden jury sweated in Massachusetts in the summer of 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition opened seven miles south of Chicago. The vision of Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Daniel Burnham, the fair promoted the country’s triumphs in the slightly more than one hundred years of its existence. Otherworldly white buildings in the Beaux Arts style lined the Court of Honor, borrowing Grecian grandeur with their columns and arches. The vast Palace of the Mechanic Arts housed towers of electric lights, and telephones, both local (for eavesdropping on the German Village in the Midway) and long distance (for listening to conversations in New York). The thirty-acre Manufactures and Liberal Arts building showcased Japanese vases, Swiss carvings, Italian glassware, as well as clocks, embroidery, and lacquer boxes from all over the world. Water features wound their way through the grounds, and one might see a gondola floating by, or stumble on a wigwam. States and countries all had space to display their food, clothing, crafts. Cultures smashed up against one another in a disorienting yet tantalizing way. Visitors marveled at belly dancers on the “Street in Cairo” exhibit, clutched each other’s hands 250 feet above the ground on the first-ever Ferris wheel, sampled Cracker Jacks, and sipped a fizzy strawberry crush. Some days they picked their way through sticky mud; other days they luxuriated in the breeze off Lake Michigan. But they came. Over the course of its six-month run, 20 million visitors attended the fair, eight hundred of them journalists.

Eva McDonald Valesh, formerly “Eva Gay” and now a union activist, lectured on “Woman Wage Workers,” representing Minnesota at the fair’s women’s congress. Kate Swan McGuirk had visited Chicago with a delegation of senators to report on fair preparations. Victoria Earle Matthews rode the elevated railway that looped through the grounds, past the Foreign Building and the Fisheries Building, recalling it as a “dream of beauty.” Ida B. Wells organized and distributed a pamphlet, “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not