The Pioneer American Newspaper Girls Who Inspired a Novel
The story behind writing Dark Heart of Chicago
“In the late nineteenth century an extraordinary breed of new journalists appeared on the scene in America. The world had seen nothing like them before. They were young, feisty, courageous and iconoclastic — and they were women.”
Women Journalists appear on the scene
In the late nineteenth century an extraordinary breed of new journalists appeared on the scene in America. The world had seen nothing like them before. They were young, feisty, courageous and iconoclastic – and they were women. Leaving the security and obscurity of their homes in midwestern towns, or sometimes even the Kansas prairie, they headed off to the big city in search of an independent life and new challenges. It was a unique, bred in the bone frontier spirit that drove this generation of ‘free American girls’, as they liked to think of themselves. All in various ways were determined to get away from home, from controlling parents, and the expectations of a pre-ordained life of marriage, motherhood and domesticity.
At first they were looked upon as a mere novelty and forced into anonymity. No by-lines for them but a succession of coy pseudonyms like ‘Bessie Bramble’, ‘Lucy Locket’, ‘Polly Pry’ or ‘Meg Merrilees’. Their reporting ambitions were thwarted too, with most of them finding themselves consigned to the tame backwaters of woman’s-page writing and the endless round of bishop’s tea parties, sewing patterns, flower shows and genteel philanthropy.
But slowly and inexorably, through the power of their often courageous investigative reporting, these young women would change the face of American journalism forever; and none more so than Elizabeth ‘Pink’ Cochrane from Pittsburgh. It was the fearless way in which she fought her way into the tough, competitive, male-dominated world of the American press that directly inspired the creation of Emily Strauss of the New York World and the writing of Dark Hearts of Chicago. During the Pulitzer–Hearst newspaper wars of the 1890s and the rise of the sensationalist ‘yellow’ press she led the way with a new brand of often dangerous investigative work.
Determine Right. Decide Fast. Apply energy. Act with Conviction. Fight to the Finish. Accept the Consequences. Move on.
Bly soon capped this story in 1889–90 with one of the biggest and most glamorous publicity stunts of all time, beating Phileas Fogg’s fictional voyage around the world in 80 days by doing the journey in only 72.
In pursuit of a story the Stunt Girls went undercover as sweatshop girls, rag-pickers and box factory workers; they worked as laundresses and flower sellers; posed as chorus girls, serving maids, artist’s models, beggars, lunatics, Salvation Army girls and prostitutes. They went up in balloons, risked attacks of the bends by going down into the caissons of the newly constructed Brooklyn Bridge, rode on elephants and even went into the lion’s cage at the circus. They ventured alone on horseback out into the backwoods to report on mountain feuds and moonshiners and even camped out in haunted houses watching for ghosts. Some subjected themselves to mesmerists. Others risked physical injury by seeking ‘treatment’ at the rough hands of back street abortionists in an attempt to expose their rackets.
Women Journalists: These Women Were A Very Tough Breed
Over on the San Francisco Examiner meanwhile, Annie Laurie (aka Winifred Sweet Black) rapidly established herself as William Randolph Hearst’s answer to Nellie Bly. Feigning sickness on a San Francisco street, Black had had herself carted off to the local public hospital in order to expose the appalling conditions and maltreatment of the poor there. Later, she went undercover in Utah to report on polygamy among the Mormons, but her biggest coup came when she disguised herself as a boy to investigate conditions in the closed city of Galveston, Texas after a freak hurricane in 1900 had killed 7,000 people there. The presses soon rolled, bannering the portentous biblical tones of Black’s leader story: ‘Corpse-Laden Waters Lit by Funeral Pyres: Winifred Black Crosses the Dismal Bay of Death to the Desolate City of Disaster’ – headlines guaranteed to sell thousands of extra copies for Mr Hearst.
The birthright of an American girl maybe a glorious attribute on the deck of a transatlantic steamship or the floor of a London ball-room, but it is not worth the flop of a brass farthing in the cloak factories of Chicago.
I re-discovered Nell Nelson in my research for Dark Hearts of Chicago, but she is still virtually unknown and unsung even in the USA, so much so that it took a while to find her real name, Helen Cusack, and I am yet to trace a single photograph of her. The sweatshop sequences in Dark Hearts would not be what they are without her trenchant news reporting.
Both of Winifred Sweet Black’s marriages failed and two of her children died in tragic circumstances. The light went out of Nellie Bly’s reporting the day she married a much older man in 1895 and became embroiled in his business ventures. Nell Nelson married well however – to Pulitzer’s business manager Solomon Carvalho – but soon afterwards, she too abandoned news reporting to breed horses on her farm in New Jersey.
Throughout her 35-year journalistic career Winifred Black had loathed being called a ‘Stunt girl’, asserting at all times that she was just ‘a plain practical all-around newspaperwoman’. She always remembered the good advice she had got after labouring long and hard over her first piece for the San Francisco Examiner, only to be hauled over the coals for her impossibly florid style. ‘We don’t want fine writing in a newspaper’, she had been told:
There’s a gripman on the Powell Street Line – he takes his car out at three o’clock in the morning, and while he’s waiting for the signals he opens the morning paper. It’s still wet from the press and by the light of his grip he reads it. Think of him when you’re writing a story. Don’t write a single word he can’t understand and wouldn’t read.
It was sound advice that guided her career and which we put into the mouth of our own Emily Strauss’s city editor in Dark Hearts of Chicago, as he sent her off in search of a missing girl.