McDonald interviewed laundry workers who stood on damp floors, slogging through the winter in wet shoes. She visited another facility where the owner repeatedly “forgot” to pay his workers. She ate dinner with chambermaids at a hotel that featured ants in the sugar bowl and flies in the mustard. She charted further wage inequity, reporting that while female telegraph operators were paid $50 a month, males received $85. At a knitting factory, the girls warned that her notebook would reveal her identity as everyone was checked as they left to be sure they weren’t stealing. But once again, McDonald somehow slid by, and, as she noted, “joyfully made my escape.”
Chapter 4
1888
Hunger for Trouble
There is hardly an editor in New York who is not bothered with young women who want to disguise themselves and go into unusual places with the idea of making newspaper stories out of their experiences.
—Buffalo Morning News, 1888
The year Nellie Bly went into the asylum was a low point for the Chicago Times. A Democratic Party organ for decades, its criticisms of Lincoln and the Union cause in the Civil War were so aggressive that General Ambrose Burnside sent soldiers to stop the presses. The Times hewed relentlessly to the wrong side of history, referring to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as “silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances.” The publisher, Wilbur Storey, whose journalistic goal was to “print the news and raise hell,” pioneered an incendiary style. His paper was infamous for spewing inflammatory rhetoric and unearthing things best left buried. A former reporter summed up its early years this way: “Scandals in private life, revolting details from the evidence taken in police court trials, imaginary liaisons of a filthy character, reeked, seethed like a hell’s broth in the Times’ cauldrons and made a stench in the nostrils of decent people.”
At his death in 1884, suffering from dementia, Storey left a will that would be fought over for years, becoming the kind of news he loved to cover. His paper, enterprising and original, whatever else you might say about it, descended into a sorry rag with a front page overrun with ads—True Bay Rum, gentlemen’s underwear, Dr. Shephard’s London Toilet Water. The rest was wire stories written elsewhere, railway timetables, snoozy editorials.
Into this chaos rode a white knight with a saintly backstory who bought a majority interest in the Chicago Times for a million dollars. At twenty-nine, James J. West presented himself as a self-made man. A poor boy with aspirations to be a minister, he started work at the Western Publishing Company at a salary of $500 in the hopes of raising money for his education. Three years later, he was a full partner and oversaw the publication of a book that sold more than a million copies. He had the erect posture, strong jaw, and straight nose of Greek statuary, an impression only slightly marred by a plaid bowtie. Still part pastor at heart, West claimed never to drink anything stronger than lemonade.
Despite the desperate situation of the newspaper, the ugly front page, the general aura of neglect, West determined that it would soon be “one of the ablest and handsomest journals in the world” and cast about for ways to make that happen: new type; thrilling fiction by the British adventure writer H. Rider Haggard; a Times-sponsored plan to find bison in Texas, domesticate them, and save them from extinction. A writer would file exclusive reports by carrier pigeon.
West hired away the Chicago Tribune’s star reporter, Charles Chapin, who’d tracked opium smugglers across the Canadian border. Chapin had written an exposé of a gang of virtue vigilantes who dragged adulterous couples out of their houses and whipped them. In his latest feat, he’d been on the scene, conducting an interview, when a wife shot and killed her cheating husband. Chapin disarmed the woman, went for the doctor, and wrote up the murder in gripping prose. That was the kind of initiative West was looking for. A week after the story ran, he offered Chapin the position of city editor, a promotion he couldn’t refuse.
Nothing worked to boost the Times, though, until Chapin hired a schoolteacher-turned-reporter named Helen Cusack, pseudonym “Nell Nelson.” (“Nell” recalled Bly and was also a nickname for “Helen.”) For some reporters, a stunt was their first assignment, a cannonball into the profession. But Nelson was an experienced journalist. In addition to preparing lessons, she wrote for the Inter Ocean, the Herald, and the New York Evening Telegram. In 1885, she served as vice president of the newly formed Illinois Woman’s Press Association. She and her two younger sisters, Marcella and Virginia, all teachers and close in age, lived together during much of the 1880s. She was known for looking after her family, possessing a regal bearing, and wielding “a particularly caustic pen.”
Nell Nelson in the Journalist, January 26, 1889
Nell Nelson portrait, The Journalist, 1-26-1889 (University of Minnesota Libraries)
Stunt work represented a new opportunity. In July 1888, Nell Nelson donned a shabby frock, arranged her brown veil, swept her hair back in a twist called a “Psyche knot,” and went looking for a job. It was a rainy, humid summer, with reeking trash piling up. Headed down State Street, she applied at two feather factories and three corset makers without any luck before going upstairs to the Western Lace Manufacturing Company. Here, in a lobby displaying samples of hand-crocheted products—doilies, collars, pillow covers—she took a seat and waited to submit an application. The lobby was watched over by a young man with a mustache. Nelson described him as the “pretty blonde secretary.” His good looks, though, were spoiled by a constant scowl.
A girl brought in a dozen crocheted mats and asked for her pay. The accountant is out, the secretary told her. She’d need to wait. Nelson chatted with the girl, named Martha, and asked to see her contract. Perhaps as befits a teacher, Nelson focused on
