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

on her experience later, Valesh wrote that readers expected the kind of drama that happened only in novels, so she and her peers faked details of clothing and facial expressions, keeping in mind that “these things must be done artistically.”* On the other hand, the Journal’s motto, “Journalism that acts,” echoed Valesh’s own philosophy: “a great paper has a duty toward the country in critical times.” Such a paper “may wield an enormous influence if the proprietor desires to spend the money and take the trouble to do so.” For someone who shifted between journalist and activist from her very first assignment, it was a perfect fit.

But then in January 1898, she faced a new opportunity. Hearst himself called Valesh into his office to say he was sending her to cover the textile strike in New Bedford.

The summer before, more than one hundred thousand coal miners in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, frustrated by eroding wages, struck in dramatic fashion. A group of miners near Hazelton, Pennsylvania, protested, in particular, a new tax of 3 cents per day on employers hiring immigrants, a fee the owners passed on to the workers. The men walked out and marched from mine to mine, urging others to join them. A sheriff and his men opened fire on the strikers, killing at least nineteen men, all unarmed immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Journal, eager to align with sympathies of its readers and to support labor, reported on the dire poverty of the workers, the violent suppression of their protest, and the union’s ultimate (rare) victory in extracting concessions from the owners. Perhaps things were changing for labor. New Bedford had the potential to be similarly explosive.

“Of course, we are a bit sensational,” the soft-voiced, yet intimidating editor said. At thirty-four, he was still youthful, still with the center part in his hair, though his dandyism had been tempered by time. “Do you understand enough of the way we run our papers to be able to give us the sort of a story we want?”

She certainly did. She had been racing from Harlem to Jersey City to Brooklyn for months, tracking down details of contentious divorces and ferreting out dress styles of corpses. Even though Valesh knew she got the chance only because his star reporters were off covering Cuba, where rebel forces were making headway against the Spanish with much encouragement from the Journal, she was not one to let any opportunity slip away.

“Yes, sir,” Valesh said.

In New Bedford, Valesh rushed to find scenes and interview subjects, as her New York experience trained her to do. She quickly recruited a heroine in Harriet Pickering, a thirty-three-year-old weaver originally from Lancashire, England. She had many traits Valesh valued, including courage and a seriousness of purpose. A widow, she was raising her twelve-year-old son to be a lawyer, a career Valesh imagined for herself, if her circumstances had been different. And when Pickering wasn’t weaving, she studied economics and lobbied state politicians for labor-friendly legislation, often hauling a satchel of papers to support her arguments.

Valesh saw Pickering in action at the meeting of the Weavers’ Union, not long after she arrived. The central issue in the strike was the 10 percent pay cut, but some weavers wanted to include reform of the “fining” system in their demands. While weavers worked for set prices per piece, like sweatshop seamstresses, if the cloth showed any damage, the weaver would be fined, her pay drastically cut for that item: even for an oil stain that could be cleaned off and the fabric sold as perfect; even for an error that occurred before the yarn reached the weavers’ looms. In theory, the practice was outlawed by an 1892 statute. In practice, the law was ignored. And women, maybe because managers thought they wouldn’t object, were fined much more frequently than men. “A man, you see,” explained the treasurer of the New England Federation of Weavers, “has more ways of standing up for his rights. There’s the ballot-box, for one.”

Pickering stood up confidently and argued that objection to fining should be part of the protest. Tall and thin, pale from hours in the mill, Pickering preferred a severe black dress with white collar and cuffs, but it didn’t lace in her spirit. If there was anything Valesh prized, it was the ability to give a good speech.

“Sit down!” a man yelled at Pickering.

“Not I,” she replied. “Your Executive Committee know I am right, but they have grown timid.”

Ultimately, though some complained the fining issue would complicate matters, her resolution carried, and Valesh made the debate the centerpiece of her early reporting.

Pickering wasn’t the only woman the Journal highlighted in the strike’s early days. All of a sudden, after being denied so much as a byline, Valesh’s identity was integral to the story. The January 19, 1898, Journal splashed a large illustration of Valesh on the front page, showing her strong-jawed and serious, detailing her labor past, touting her as “the Journal’s special commissioner to the cotton strike.” Three smaller pictures showed her in alternate guises: “labor agitator,” “shop girl,” “reporter.” Her background gave her authority.

Eva McDonald Valesh

Eva McDonald Valesh (listed as 1886, but likely 1890s) (Minnesota History Center)

The strike offered Hearst and Pulitzer another battlefield and created a new opportunity for female reporters. In addition to Valesh, the Journal sent Anne O’Hagan. Not to be outdone, the World put its own women on the job: Kate Swan McGuirk, who grew up in nearby Fall River, and labor leader Minnie Rosen, an organizer with the Women’s Branch of the United Brotherhood of Tailors, a Russian Jewish immigrant who lived in a tenement. A World reporter heard Rosen give a talk at the YWCA and offered her a job covering the strike, rushing her to Grand Central Station to board a New Bedford–bound train. Rosen’s introduction to readers emphasized that she worked long days in a sweatshop and that her family members spoke only broken English, counterbalancing Valesh’s