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

expertise. Elizabeth Banks, done with living on $3 a day, also set out for New Bedford. Suddenly, instead of being the only woman covering a given story, all these reporters who’d slipped into the newsroom through the door of stunt journalism converged in one place.

The World would offer a female story from a female perspective, advertisements claimed: “The woes of the 4,000 women who are warring against capital strikingly told by women writers. Startling statements by labor experts. All in the great New York Sunday World.”

Though nothing much happened, initially, Valesh made the most of it. Finding the streets quiet rather than roiling, she wrote: “Grim Silence Everywhere.” Remembering the Journal style and her promise to Hearst, Valesh sought out examples of suffering, hoping to show the mill owners as villains. She visited a tenement with a large family short on food; the mother hadn’t been able to go back to the mill after giving birth and losing the baby. In another house, suffused with anguish, the mother had died of consumption only the week before. Valesh visited an old man, fired when his eyesight got too bad for loom work, and ate pea soup with a family unable to add meat because the father was an invalid and they lived only on the mother’s salary.

A follow-up on New Bedford tenement life went even further. Valesh encountered an eighteen-year-old dying of consumption drawing “her ragged gown about her” and a four-year-old so neglected no one had bothered to give her a name. Valesh asked for a glass of water, only to find it had been shut off. In summary, though she’d seen the worst of Paris and New York: “The New England mill operatives can compass a blank despair and slow starvation not to be matched anywhere.”

Other reporters offered images in a similar vein: The Boston Post reported on a mill worker’s pantry that contained only half a cabbage, a handful of potatoes, and some chicory coffee; O’Hagan described a tenement with plaster falling from the ceiling, calling the scene: “unutterable degradation—the degradation of dinginess, of forlornness, of poverty, of absolute hopelessness”; Rosen described sickly workers, with blue lips, in falling-down houses that “a howling wind might blow into the river.”

But this presentation of laborers as helpless victims was at odds with much of Valesh’s previous work as an organizer. Her speeches had urged women to come together to use their power, and she always stressed that she had been a working girl herself and kept her membership in the Typographical Union current. Her early stories built on tips from young factory women who lived in the same boardinghouse she did. They were her friends. Like Bly, who got her first job because of the Pittsburg Dispatch’s desire to add the voice of a genuine working girl to its staff, she claimed to be the very kind of person she wrote about. Now, in an effort to meet the Journal’s expectations, Valesh faced accusations of being out of touch.*

Local reporters in New Bedford and Fall River were disturbed by what they viewed as a New York invasion and an insult to their proud New England community. These two clashing portrayals—workers as victims and workers as heroes—didn’t escape their notice. What did this poverty have to do with the strike? they asked. The strike was only two days old. New Bedford reporters and editors pointed out that in much of the out-of-town reporting, the pictures and words didn’t match. About the Journal, one local journalist raged, “Yesterday’s story was mainly given up to women ‘with blanched faces and wasted figures’ who were dying here of cold and starvation. With the story was an alleged portrait of a woman who is a striking weaver. . . . The girl was superbly gowned in a walking suit which must have been made by a very skillful tailor and she wore a heavy boa of fur.” The image was of Valesh’s heroine, Harriet Pickering.

New Bedford was, coincidentally, also the site of the Lizzie Borden trial, and memories of the press circus lingered. One local reporter objected to the mill workers of New Bedford being portrayed as “a few degrees lower, if such a thing were possible, in the societal and intellectual scale than the wretched and semi-civilized Huns and Slavs of the mining districts of Pennsylvania and the West.” New England reporters and editors were disgusted. Degradation? Worse than the slums of Paris and tenements of New York? The outrages of the Journal and World were endless.

And they had the perfect term to sum it all up and discredit the New York reporters: “yellow journalism.”

The weavers and spinners also pushed back against these renderings. From the days of the Lowell Mill women’s strike in 1836, factory workers had a tradition of standing up for themselves, of describing their own experiences, and they resented being painted by outsiders as pathetic victims. Alice Brierly had been profiled by the Journal as “the Oldest” striker, drinking cold tea, not wanting to light a fire because there was no food to cook, bemoaning her sixty years in the mills and wishing she were back home in England: “America’s a cruel country to the work people.” Not long after the article appeared, she and her husband arrived at the New Bedford Evening Standard offices, carrying the Boston Post and the Journal, which bore an unflattering illustration of an ancient crone. She was only fifty-seven, Alice pointed out, and rather than scraping the bottom of the tea canister, their home was one where her daughter played piano during the interview. Not to mention that their last name was misspelled.

Valesh, maybe stung by the criticism, maybe wanting a comprehensive overview of underlying causes, maybe tired of the sharp elbows as all the New York reporters competed for interviews with the same sources, maybe wanting to cover the story in a way that played to her strengths, left the quiet streets of New Bedford for Washington DC after only a few days. The important decisions were