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

narrative for the Times lawsuit was missing entirely. And there wasn’t much else. Before the end of 1889, West had been sentenced to prison for overissuing stock certificates of the Times Company. Five years after that, the Chicago Times was defunct. The rest of the legal file was lawyer after lawyer excusing himself from the case.

Tucked inside one file, though, was a summons for “The Chicago Times Company, James J. West, Joseph R. Dunlop, Florence Noble alias Margaret Noble and———Bowen.” On the back, the deputy sheriff scrawled that he had served the summons to the paper, West, and Dunlop, but made no mention of Noble or Bowen. It meant, most likely, they couldn’t be found in the county. A few weeks later, one newspaper claimed to have spotted her four hundred miles away in Ashland, a Wisconsin town on Lake Superior, declaring: “The Girl Reporter of the Chicago Times Is Here.” But the identification seemed based on a stray comment from a railroad man and the fact that a small, attractive, brown-haired woman showed up asking pointed questions about local dives, lying about her lodgings and her name. Then, nothing. Once again, the Girl Reporter, possibly known as Florence Noble, had slipped away.

No online searchable newspapers or magazines from the 1880s or 1890s have a reporter named Florence Noble. The archives of the Illinois Woman’s Press Association didn’t list any member with that name. No Florence Noble appeared in the Chicago directory for those years. A Margaret Noble did write a piece on presidential hopeful Benjamin Harrison’s Indiana home during the summer of 1888, but wrote nothing else that I could find.

Of course, Florence Noble could also be an alias. Certainly, “Florence” calls to mind Florence Nightingale, a medical heroine. And “Noble” would be an obvious choice. One of the Times’s editorials was headlined, winkingly, “A Noble Work.”

Or the series might have been too scandalous to launch a career. Maybe she had abandoned journalism. Stunt reporting in general had a dubious reputation, operating at the margins of decency; pretending to be pregnant out of wedlock and seeking an abortion may have been over the line of what a reporter might do and emerge unscathed. Was she the actress Florence Noble who read the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in New York during a week of Italian opera? Or the Florence Noble who sailed on the Olympic, the twin ship of the Titanic? Or the Florence Noble who had been a Chicago schoolteacher for thirty-two years before, according to the Tribune in 1924, being “committed to the Joliet asylum” because she “suffered from delusions.” I hoped not.

Anonymity seems unfortunate in hindsight, but maybe it was essential. Or so I thought, until I read Elizabeth Banks’s critique of yellow journalism in the Nineteenth Century.

In her indignation at the treatment of women reporters, Banks referenced the abortion series and declared: “That the young woman filled the assignment, wrote her exposé, was the means of having sent to prison several of Chicago’s leading physicians, and had her salary doubled the following week is now a matter of journalistic history.” So, according to Banks, the Girl Reporter did have a career, or at least she stuck around long enough to get a salary bump. Another writer confirmed this. In her 1897 piece “Women in Gutter Journalism,” essayist and suffragist Haryot Holt Cahoon blasted editors who assigned female reporters undercover work under the pretense they were doing “legitimate journalism.”* Her prime example was the Girl Reporter, though she seemed to misidentify her city: “Years ago, a degenerate public was nourished by the newspaper story of a young woman who called upon the various prominent physicians of New York, representing to them that she wished to lend herself to a criminal operation at their hands. As the tangible fruits of her canvass, she gathered an interesting collection of prescriptions. Then she published, together with the prices she paid for each prescription, the name of each physician and the interview.” This same reporter went on to other stunts, according to Cahoon, including showing up at the door of Reverend Parkhurst, after the 1893 Tenderloin raids that threw prostitutes out in the snow, claiming to his wife to be “a homeless fallen woman” needing shelter. So even a decade after her abortion series, her fellow journalists knew the identity of the Girl Reporter.

I thought of all the writers who had passed through Chicago in 1888. Nelson, hired by the World after her Times reports, had just left town. She might have lingered to do one last Chicago piece. Nora Marks, who had worked with Ada Sweet to report on prison conditions and the need for an ambulance service, had the perfect training as the Tribune’s stunt reporter. Elizabeth Jordan hadn’t yet left Milwaukee for New York and the World, and in the meantime, she wrote for Chicago outlets. Eva McDonald and Elizabeth Banks worked for papers in Minneapolis and St. Paul, not a far trip on the train. Winifred Sweet was still an actress, but her sister had Tribune connections and would soon be pushing her to publish. Could one of them have done the stunt, then gone on to flourish under another name?

None, that I could find, went to Reverend Parkhurst’s house in disguise in late 1893, in the aftermath of the brothel closings. The Recorder, the newspaper that ran Kate Swan’s interview with Lizzie Borden and hired Cahoon at one point, did send “Kathryn Krew” to the Florence Crittenden Mission, the Home for Fallen and Friendless Girls, and other places overrun with homeless women and frustrated with Reverend Parkhurst. Krew wasn’t in disguise, though, just accompanying two women looking for a place to stay. All the shelters were full.

In recent years, computer-based stylometry (authorship analysis) has been used to show, for example, whether William Shakespeare wrote sections of the play Arden of Faversham and which Supreme Court opinions were penned by clerks. I reached out to digital media experts at the University of Minnesota, Benjamin Wiggins