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

know,” and allow the community (and perhaps frustrated daughters) to say, “I told you so.” For this piece, she dropped “Orphan Girl,” and picked up the pseudonym “Nellie Bly,” a nod to a song by Pittsburgh native Stephen Foster.

Elizabeth Cochrane, “Nellie Bly”

Elizabeth Cochrane, “Nellie Bly,” head-and-shoulders portrait c. 1890. (Library of Congress)

Through the late winter and early spring, Bly wrote a series on “Our Workshop Girls.” Week after week, she interviewed women making money in fields beyond cleaning and cooking. Unlike her pieces that would come later, exposing harsh factory conditions, Bly’s implied argument was that women could do a lot more than generally thought, and do it well. She profiled women contributing to Pittsburgh’s most iconic, manly industries, immersed in dirt and flame: the iron works, the wire works, the glassworks. These surprising stories, and her energetic recounting of them, spread beyond western Pennsylvania. The Dispatch’s New York correspondent copied the idea, noting that Bly’s series “attracted considerable attention here.”

It quickly became clear that behind the timorous girl who turned up and painted herself as a representative of the ordinary and unexceptional lurked someone else entirely, someone deeply determined. Not long after the Dispatch hired her, Bly found herself pushed into the society journalism traditionally offered to women. Reports on spring fashions and flower shows were painfully boring, and she took off to Mexico for six months as a correspondent, writing about hotels and cuisine, but also poverty and prison conditions. After Mexico, she gave Pittsburgh-based reporting another try, but her mind drifted elsewhere. Finally, in spring 1887, Bly wrote a goodbye letter to Wilson (who became a close friend, despite his infuriating on-paper attitudes), left the smoke and comfort of western Pennsylvania behind, and went to seek her fortune in New York City, home of legendary newspapers like the Tribune, founded by Horace Greeley; Charles Dana’s Sun; and, most significantly, Joseph Pulitzer’s World.

Gangly with poor eyesight, Joseph Pulitzer had come to the United States from Hungary in 1864 to fight for the Union in the Civil War as a seventeen-year old. He then spent hard years scrambling for a job—tending mules, waiting tables—until making his way in the newspaper business, first as a reporter for the German-language newspaper in St. Louis, and ultimately as publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was here that he honed his ideas about the kind of paper he wanted. Positioning the Post-Dispatch as a friend of the common man against rich corporations, he published the tax returns of the wealthy to show they weren’t paying their share and campaigned against railroad monopolies. He experimented with a different kind of storytelling, conducting investigations of gambling dens and fortune-tellers, sending a reporter to find a killer who had eluded the police (with no luck), and pushing his writers toward crisp, compact prose. As an editor and publisher, he was always in the office, always offering an opinion. His unruly dark beard was cropped close to his jaw when he was a younger man but, when he was older, flowed down his chest like that of a Victorian genius.

Joseph Pulitzer

Joseph Pulitzer, 1911; Joseph Pulitzer at 40. Head and shoulders, arms crossed, facing left, glasses, beard. (Library of Congress). https://www.loc.gov/item/2007682378/.

In 1883, drawn to publishing’s epicenter, he moved to Manhattan and bought the struggling New York World. A year earlier, his younger brother Albert had launched the 1-cent paper the Morning Journal in the same city. The Journal aimed for a “sparkling, breezy, good-natured tone” specifically to appeal to women and their advertising dollars. Failing to get a loan from his brother, Albert did a fundraising tour in Europe, came home with $25,000, and rented space and printing presses from the New-York Tribune. With its low price and coverage of dances and love affairs, the Morning Journal became known as the “chambermaid’s delight.”

But the moment Joseph Pulitzer arrived in New York, where he would upend the newspaper business, his hardnosed single-mindedness was on display. He hired away Albert’s managing editor and two of his best writers. He then launched a radical and ambitious experiment with journalism in the public interest. Thin-skinned and demanding, willing to set employees against one another to compete for positions, he could be a tough man to work for. But he could also articulate a vision and carry it out. With the World (he dropped “New York” from the name), Pulitzer aimed to produce a paper that was “not only large but truly democratic—dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse potentates—devoted more to the news of the New than the Old World—that will expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses—that will serve and battle for people with earnest sincerity.”

The World was forged as the United States was struggling with questions about citizenship—who belonged, whose hopes for the young country would prevail. Black men had only recently been provided citizenship and the ability to vote, but southern states were busy undermining these rights, using laws, propaganda, and violence. Many were fleeing to the North. And between 1870 and 1900, 12 million immigrants entered the country, the majority through New York: Irish fearing a second potato famine, Italians escaping serfdom, Russian Jews taking refuge from pogroms. The changing composition of the country inspired a backlash from those whose vision of America was a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant one. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the United States for a decade after its signing (making the exception for merchants, intellectuals, tourists), and barred those already in the country from citizenship. American Indian tribes, whose members weren’t considered citizens, were massacred and systematically stripped of their land by broken treaties. In 1877, the US government made a grab for the gold in Black Hills, overriding the Fort Laramie Treaty. The Dawes Act of 1887 laid the groundwork for transfer of even more reservation acreage to whites by dividing land into individual parcels.

In this demographic turmoil, Pulitzer, an immigrant