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

Those who worked for the Pullman Company in Illinois—which made luxurious sleeping cars—saw their paychecks drop by as much as 35 percent, but the rent in their Pullman-owned factory town remained the same. In early May, a committee of laborers went to ask company owner George Pullman for higher pay or housing relief. When they were turned away and then fired, workers voted to strike. They were soon supported by the huge American Railway Union, headed by Eugene Debs. The ARU ultimately refused to handle any trains with Pullman cars. This decision swept 250,000 workers into a boycott and confounded railways throughout the West. Passenger trains were stranded in the mountains. Produce rotted in freight cars left sitting on the tracks.

At the urging of the railroad companies, President Cleveland sent troops to Illinois and issued an injunction against the boycott, the first federal involvement in labor issues on this scale. Soon two thousand armed men entered Chicago with the goal of ending the strike. In response, crowds overturned trains and set them on fire; troops shot indiscriminately, killing protesters and bystanders.

Nellie Bly went to Chicago, arriving amid newspaper reports of mobs, destruction, and rioting. Labor’s reputation for violence had only grown with bloody altercations at recent strikes in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. But when she visited the Pullman town, she found a distinct lack of murderousness. Instead, there was mainly sadness and frustration, and a funeral was underway for a striker shot in the head by a deputy. She approached a man sitting on a porch, told him she was from New York, asked in her faux naive way when the rioting would begin.

“Do you think we’re as bad as that?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” she answered. “We are all frightened to death. We think you are all bent on burning down, blowing up and assassinating.” Invited into the house, she talked with the man and his friend, drawing out the problems with the company town. One of the main sticking points was the lack of freedom that came from living in a place where your employer dictated every rule. A man from Rosedale, a town next to Pullman but not factory-owned, laid out the comparison:

“I have a lot of 90 feet front by 124 feet deep. I have a house of eight rooms. I have a garden, where I raise all my vegetables and I have my own chickens and eggs and I only pay $12 per month rent and $3 a year water tax. Compare that with this five-roomed house with no garden for $17 a month and 71 cents a month for water.”

When Bly asked the Pullman man why he didn’t move to Rosedale, he said job priority went to those in Pullman properties. If he moved, he would have been unemployed. She talked with women and children in Pullman, bringing to life complicated family dynamics, humanizing the strikers. Readers encountered the German immigrant, consumed by her rage, who declared “Curse America”; a wife who hated the union her husband needed to join; and those stretching food and keeping tiny spaces tidy, doing their best in a bad situation.

Taking another tack, Bly went to Springfield to interview the beleaguered Illinois governor. After asking him whether he was an anarchist (no) and believed in women’s suffrage (dodged), to warm him up, she pressed him on the strike. Federal troops had made things worse, he said, and Pullman workers were too much at the company’s mercy. “Their only hope is to stand together, but at the same time keep within the law,” he told Bly.

By early August, it was clear the strike had failed. The Pullman Company reopened, only rehiring those who swore never to join a union. It was another high-profile labor defeat, an intimidating display of corporate muscle, and a cause of popular disillusionment with Grover Cleveland’s Democratic Party.

For Bly, it was an eye-opening summer, leading into a fall and winter of good, intense reporting. A St. Paul newspaper editor noted, after watching her cover a northern Minnesota fire that killed more than four hundred people, her single-minded focus on journalism: “While it occupies her she hasn’t room for anything else, not even a dinner.” She traveled through Nebraska and South Dakota, visiting homesteaders freezing and starving in sod houses during a blizzard that followed a crop-killing summer drought. Increasingly sympathetic to the labor cause, she interviewed American Railway Union president Eugene Debs, jailed in Illinois for violating a court injunction against the Pullman strike, and defended striking streetcar operators in Brooklyn, documenting their bandages from ill treatment by police. Socialists began sending her letters, hoping to recruit her.

The start of 1895, though, found Bly in an increasingly bleak frame of mind. Sidewalks filled with trash caught her eye, as did the slush that soaked women’s skirts as they climbed the stairs to the elevated railway. Her dog—a favorite—had recently died. Liars and frauds seemed to dominate society. Even organizations bent on doing good just seemed to talk and talk, never getting anything done. These thoughts unspooled in her Evening World column, “Nellie Bly Says,” offering a glimpse behind the chipper facade of most of her first-person reporting. One essay began simply: “Life is growing worse every day.”

Still, Nellie Bly continued to inspire. A racehorse, a steamer, and a gold mine had all been named after her. Young women continued to show up to newspaper offices, make their pitch to editors, and use stunt reporting for their own ends.

The magazine publisher Mrs. Frank Leslie-Wilde sometimes received a dozen letters a day from aspiring journalists, queries she tried to answer, offering help and encouragement. So when a young woman calling herself Mary Martin asked to tour her home for a piece about houses of the wealthy, Leslie-Wilde agreed. It was only when she found two checks missing, along with a $500 crescent-shaped jewel-crusted pin, that she became suspicious. Martin was arrested in Brooklyn. She may have been the “Ethel Townsend” who had been passing bad checks