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

in the World’s Columbian Exhibition,” drawing attention to the country’s brutal history regarding its Black citizens, and protesting their lack of representation at the fair.

But the glitter of prosperity, like the gilded statue of a woman, arms aloft, representing the Republic, was a facade. Just as the fair opened in May, the stock market took a sickening plunge. Spooked depositors took their money out of banks, which then failed: 642 by the end of the year. Unable to get credit, farmers couldn’t transport grain and cotton to market. Textile mills stopped production. Iron and steel companies locked their doors. Railroads went under. Unemployment soared. The pain rippled throughout the country. Elizabeth Jordan’s father, a real estate developer in Milwaukee, lost everything, leaving her parents financially dependent on their journalist daughter. She joined the ranks of reporters supporting family with their wages. Still, people flocked to the fair.

On October 24, in the exposition’s last days, a sportswriter and stable owner stumbled into the Chicago Press Club and collapsed. A doctor found him unable to speak and paralyzed on one side. At the hospital, he recovered enough to say he was exhausted, having spent the past week walking the city, looking for his wife and his three-year-old son. They’d been visiting her mother in St. Louis and, on October 16 a letter arrived, saying they were on their way to Chicago and the fair. And then he heard nothing else. He tried to trace her route from the train station but couldn’t find any clues.

His wife, Elizabeth A. Tompkins, was a writer, too, specializing in knowledgeable stories about horse racing. The job had taken her to London not long before. She’d just written a glowing report about the Saratoga track, the lush lawns, the bright shirts, the holiday atmosphere. And yes, they’d fought about whether she should keep writing (her preference) or quit to take care of their son (his preference). But he was sure something had gone amiss. Like the actual cities of San Francisco and New York, Chicago’s fairgrounds, dubbed the “White City,” tempted young women with promises of glamour and excitement. And sometimes they never came back, for reasons that could be quite sinister.

Or not. Her mother soon received a letter in St. Louis, saying it might be a long time before Tompkins got in touch again, but “no news is good news.” Once again, the expected story—a girl lured to ruin by bright city lights—was perhaps not the real one.

In New York that winter, during a period of bitter cold, the impact of the financial panic on the poor was exacerbated by a moral crusade. In early December, police pounded on brothel doors in New York’s Tenderloin and told the women living there they had one day to get out. Rev. Charles Parkhurst had been preaching against prostitution and condemning the police for turning a blind eye. Parkhurst and others from the Society for the Prevention of Crime had been visiting brothels that flourished through the city, taking notes, upping the pressure. Finally, the police conducted a raid.

Residents scrambled for trunks, stowing shawls and hairbrushes. They hired cabs to take dressing tables and sofas to storage. Then they set out to find somewhere to live, some lying to get access to “respectable” apartment buildings, others sleeping at the police station. Hard economic conditions became all the harder. The next day, the brothels were dark and empty.

And the temperature was dropping. A bitter wind raced between buildings, and New Yorkers pulled out their heaviest coats. Ice crusted the Hudson. The parade of women out on the streets, some who hadn’t found a place to stay even days later, seemed a sign of viciousness rather than virtue. In a front-page cartoon in the Evening World, reformers and police battled each other while, overlooked, a woman lay collapsed in the snow. The caption read, “The Usual Result.”

The police, Parkhurst concluded, staged the raid in this dramatic way to make him look bad, to cast blame on him for homelessness. He invited women to his house, printing his address in the paper, where he would try to find them shelter—provided, of course, they would swear to reform and “lead respectable lives.” They started to show up, more than fifty a day.

Bly, back at the World after her attempts at fiction foundered, interviewed Parkhurst a week after the brothel closures, commenting on his youthful looks, the “merry twinkle” in his eyes. But over the course of five hours, she grilled him. Wouldn’t campaigning against high prices and tainted food be a better way to help the poor? she asked. And “don’t you think that if ministers were to learn a little more about life and take broader views of subjects that they would be more fitted to be preachers and leaders of congregations?” And the question that always consumed her: “Is not one of the great difficulties with the reformation of these women their lack of ability to work?” And then she signed off with a gracious nod to his perseverance.

Chapter 11

1893–1894

Across the Atlantic

If acting the part of spy or detective in this way is considered by anybody as a dishonorable feature of journalism, the attention of such a person is directed to the fact that Charles Dickens, in order to obtain the material for “Nicholas Nickleby” assumed a character not his own, in order that he might better investigate the miserable Yorkshire schools.

—Reading Times, February 27, 1889

After several years writing for papers in the Midwest and the South, and a brief stint as personal secretary to the US envoy for Peru, Elizabeth Banks tried her luck in London. In England, she settled in to become the writer she imagined, following the lead of her personal heroine, Aurora Leigh, the title character of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem she had read obsessively during solitary days on her uncle’s Wisconsin farm. If not a poet, like Aurora Leigh, Banks aimed least to be a real journalist. She didn’t want to be