Hearst’s studying of Pulitzer paid off, though he had a distinctly more nativist bent. The Examiner advocated for continuation of the Chinese Exclusion Act, opened an employment agency for white applicants only, and referred to Chinese laborers as “the common enemy.” This was a noted difference from Pulitzer, an immigrant himself, whose paper raised money for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and touted its message of welcome. The same month it published Bly’s asylum exposé, the World hosted a debate between Wong Chin Foo, editor of the Chinese American newspaper, and Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant and labor activist, over the Chinese Exclusion Law. (Kearney was trounced.)
For the next two years, Hearst and his staff explored how far a paper could go. Could it act as a police force? A rescue squad? A charity? The Examiner sponsored contests, threw parties. When reports came in that a fisherman was stranded on a rock near Point Bonita, his boat smashed and four companions dead, two Examiner reporters staged a rescue. One jumped into the heaving waves to bring the survivor a rope (though one of the boat’s crewmen actually got it to him). The subhead read: “The Examiner Does the Work of the Life Saving Service.” Reporter Allen Kelly headed into the coastal mountains to capture a live grizzly bear to prove the giants weren’t extinct in California. Kelly spent many fruitless months engineering and setting traps, building a series of enormous pens with pine trees as corner posts. Eventually, rumor that some rich San Francisco publisher would pay for a bear reached the high-country communities and a group of shepherds caught one. Kelly bought it, then faced the task of getting the massive, snarling, enraged animal four hundred miles to the Examiner. He did it, though. Hundreds came out to view the animal the first day it was on display in Woodward’s Gardens, a San Francisco zoo and amusement park. The bear, named “Monarch” for the paper that called itself “Monarch of the Dailies” was chained, thin, and covered with bare patches where ropes had worn away the fur, but he became another Hearst triumph.
This was the environment of the Examiner office when Winifred Sweet showed up, all wild red hair and bluster. She was an experienced newspaperwoman, she assured the paper’s city editor, and she “would cover not only myself but the paper with glory if only he’d give [her] a chance.”
He gave her a chance, but her copy revealed the lie. One of her first assignments was to cover a flower show, and, nervous, she stayed up all night before it appeared only to find that the printed version contained completely new opening paragraphs. She’d neglected to include the location, the organization, the prizewinners—all of the actual news. Other stories came back with paragraphs crossed out in blue pencil and critical notes written in the margins, including “Don’t moralize. Get at your story.” But she kept at it, gaining confidence, a sense for the telling detail, the ability to infuse an article with personality, until, one day, the editor asked if she’d like a regular job as a reporter for $15 a week.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and then, as she later described in a memoir, Winifred Sweet “walked out into the quiet of a sunny Sunday afternoon hardly knowing where I was or what I was doing.”
Strangely, though peers described her as “wholesome and pink and white as an apple blossom” and “wholesome as a May morning,” Winifred Sweet fit right in to the Examiner’s alcohol-fueled, extended bachelor party. She liked the reporters; she liked the publisher. Covering a children’s celebration at Golden Gate Park, she watched a man in a light-gray suit and blue tie patiently entertain a boy who couldn’t find his parents. Back at the office, the man in the suit—tie askew and damp spots on the knees of his pants from kneeling to a child’s level—asked what happened with the lost boy. That was her introduction to Hearst, a man she described as “the best boss, the kindest friend, and the simplest-hearted, wisest, most understanding, most forgiving, most encouraging human being it has ever been my luck to know.”
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst, c. 1904. (Library of Congress)
She caught Hearst’s eye, too. Unlike East Coast editors who, as Bly discovered, could balk at the impropriety of hiring women, Hearst saw no obstacle. Whatever worked. The Examiner had tried using “girl stunt reporters” before, but the stunts were tame, and the narrators didn’t capture the public imagination. But now this forceful young woman had shown up with her lavish hats and fearlessness. She was self-deprecating on the page and possessed of a good sense of humor off it. In this neophyte, Hearst saw his answer to Nellie Bly.
Winifred hadn’t been working for the Examiner for long before Bly attempted one of the most audacious stunts to date. In November 1889, Bly volunteered to beat the time for circling the globe laid out in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days. She’d hatched the plan on a Sunday, brainstorming ideas for the World’s Monday editorial meeting, and fantasizing about a vacation. Somewhere far away, like the other side of the globe.
“If I could do it as quickly as Phileas Fogg did, I should go,” she told herself. Maybe she could do it faster. That would be a story. When she proposed it—fact literally challenging fiction, a stunt to see whether what people could do might surpass what they could imagine—her editor put her off, saying the paper had already considered that idea and wanted to send a man, who wouldn’t need
