April 7, 2018 • 23 mins
Today we're revisiting an episode from Sarah and Katie. Born in 1864, Nellie Bly wasn't your average journalist. She feigned insanity to gain entry into a mental institution. Join Sarah and Katie as they take a closer look at the life of Nellie Bly, America's original stunt journalist.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Everybody. Today's classic is one that listeners have
requested so often that we actually included it in a
round up episode that was our most requested episodes that
we already have. It is journalist Nelly Bly, famous for
everything from feigning insanity to do an expos of an
asylum to traveling around the world in a hot air balloon.
This is back from with previous host Katie and Sarah.
(00:25):
So enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class
from housetop works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and our subject
for today has really captivated us, so I hope you
like her as much as we do. I think she's
(00:47):
our new professional heroine. Our subject is Nellie Bligh and
stunt journalism. And when Nelly Bligh embarked on the journalistic
stunt that made her so famous, which is feigning in
Santa d in order to be committed to a notorious asylum,
something I would not do as a health editor. A
fellow journalist from a competing paper picked up on the
(01:08):
story and he covered the court appearance that resulted in
her committal as real news. He didn't pick up on
the fact that it was a stunt, and he wrote
the circumstances surrounding her were such as to indicate that
possibly she might be the heroine in an interesting story. Indeed,
we'd have to agree Nellie bly pioneered the era of
(01:30):
girls stunt reporters, women who wrote firsthand, somewhat lowbrow reports
that got him off the fashion and flower show and
perhaps cat show beat from a corning stone take note,
and instead into the seediest, most dangerous parts of the city.
This was big from about the late eighteen eighties to
the early eighteen nineties, but no one was bigger than
(01:52):
Nellie Bligh. Yeah. She starts off writing for five dollars
a week, and at the pinnacle of her career she's
making thousand dollars, which is big money at the time.
So we're going to start at the beginning, as we
always do, with our heroine's childhood. Elizabeth Jane Cochrane was
born May fifth, eighteen sixty four, in Cochrane's Mills, Pennsylvania,
(02:14):
and her father was a Cochrane himself, Judge Cochrane, and
he'd already had a family of ten with his first wife, Elizabeth,
was his thirteenth child of fifteen, and she was considered
the most rebellious, and so her mother, Mary Jane likes
attention and quickly instills that in her daughter. She has
the baby Elizabeth christened in a bright pink gown, which
(02:36):
earns her the nickname Pink, and her childhood is comfortable.
She lives in a nice mansion um has an easy life,
you know, the daughter of a judge. But things change
when she's about six years old, when Judge Cochrane dies
without a will, and because he's already had this first family,
his second family is left with no protection and there's
(02:58):
not much anyways to be slipped fifteen children, so his
estate is auctioned off and the second family moves into
a modest home and Pink helps take care of her
siblings and her mother remarries, probably trying to make a
more stable life for herself and her children, but unfortunately
she marries an abusive alcoholic man, and Pink actually even
(03:21):
ends up testifying at their eventual divorce trial. Her brothers
ended up being able to land decent white collar jobs
even though they didn't have a lot of education, so
Pink decided that she liked to be independent and helps
support her mother. She enrolled at the Indiana Normal School
when she was fifteen to train as a teacher, but
ran out of money after one semester and moved to
(03:43):
Pittsburgh with her mother, where she helped run a boarding house.
And Pittsburgh is where she will meet her fortune. So
we're gonna skip to eighteen eighty five when she gets
her job at the Pittsburgh Dispatch, and this is the
most amazing way to get a job. She sends an angry,
anonymous letter to the editor of the paper in response
(04:04):
to an editorial by the Quiet Observer Erasmus Wilson, who
had written a piece called what Girls Are Good For?
And Wilson was one of the most popular columnists in Pittsburgh,
and he was a Civil War veteran. And this piece
he wrote considered women useless outside of the domestic sphere.
And this really angered young Pink because she knew that
(04:25):
some women didn't have a choice but to work. Uh,
you know, she was an example of this herself. And
don't have any other options. So she writes in and
the grammar isn't good. There's no punctuation after all, She
hasn't had much of a formal education, but it's such
a spirited letter and she signs it the Lonely Orphan
Girl that it completely captivates the editor of the paper,
(04:48):
and the managing editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch was George Madden,
who thinks, with his good business sense, that he's got
to get this girl to write for his paper. So
he puts an ad in a Sunday paper skiing that
she comes forward. And she came to the office the
next day and got her job as a cover board
and appropriately enough, her first article is a response to
Wilson's editorial Yeah, and she goes on to cover topics
(05:12):
that interest her, like the conditions of working girls in
Pittsburgh and life in the slums um the archaic divorce
laws in the state, topics that normally wouldn't fall to
a woman reporter. Who would who would write more about Yeah,
flower shows, cat shows, fashion, and um. Madden eventually decides
that she should be a permanent staffer because even though
(05:35):
she's not well trained, she's good and she's interesting. Madden
and ms Cochrane decide that she needed a nomed plume
so she could keep her personal and her professional identities
separate and he chooses Nellie Bligh from an old Stephen
Foster song. But eventually one of Nellie Bligh's stunts goes
(05:55):
awry and she poses as a sweatshop worker in Pittsburgh,
and the owners getting mad at the paper's negative coverage
of their business and threatened to cut off all their
all their advertising in the paper. So the editor's back
off and Nellie's forced onto the fashion beat, which she
is not interested in, so instead she goes to Mexico.
(06:17):
From eighteen eighty six to eight eight seven, she traveled
through Mexico doing quote unquote real journalism. She wrote about corruption,
the conditions of the poor, details about the food, what
bullfights were like, but the Mexican officials that eventually get
so angry that she's expelled from the country and she
returns to Pittsburgh, but the editors haven't learned their lesson
(06:40):
and they try to stick around the fashion flower Show
beat again, and she quits, and before she leaves, she
writes a note for Erasmus Wilson, Dear q O, I'm
off for New York. Look out for me. Bligh's got
to be the best off, so she arrives in New
(07:00):
York looking for a job and decides that she'd really
like to work for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, but
really anywhere will, do you know, She's not in a
position to be too picky at the time. Months later,
she still can't find work. She's running out of money,
and she smooth talks her way into the office of
Colonel John Cockrell, who's the managing editor of The New
York World, and as soon as she gets her audience
(07:21):
with him, she doesn't waste any time. Immediately suggests a
story where she would travel to Europe and return steerage
class to report on all the immigrants coming into the
US and what the conditions were like for them aboard
a ship, and the editor rejects this idea. He thinks
it's too challenging for a young, relatively inexperienced reporter, so
(07:43):
in its place, he suggests, why don't you instead pretend
to be insane and have yourself committed at Blackwell's Island, which,
to be doesn't sound much easier, but uh Nellie blies
into it. She signs up for the job he gives
her on the spot, and she joins the staff and
starts to prepare for her first assignment. Her piece is
(08:12):
called ten Days in a Madhouse. And we want to
say that John Marie Lutes article on girls stunt reporting
for American Quarterly was really helpful in researching this part
of the podcast. Yeah, and actually tex stuffs. Chris Pallette
was a huge help in actually obtaining the article using
his magic library skills. I like his magic skills. Thank
you to Chris. So a little background on Black Wells.
(08:35):
It was an interesting place. Um. It offered cheap psychiatric
care for mentally ill immigrants, but the conditions were really bad,
and Charles Dickens had visited it on his American tour
but left very quickly because it depressed himself. And reporters
were interested in it. To a Harper's Weekly reporter had
taken a supervised tour and um ended up writing that
(08:57):
it was a pretty comfortable, fair and clean place, but
you can only imagine what's on the officials. Yeah, so
people are curious about what it's actually like on the inside.
So Bligh has got to get inside to write this report. Um.
She's great for this story too. She doesn't have much
of a formal education, no real professional training and journalism,
(09:20):
no credentials. She's a total amateur. But she's really good,
and she's out there and adventurous enough to convince law
enforcement and mental health professionals that she's actually insane. But
she's still able to maintain that middle class respectability that
protects her reputation and makes her popular as a female journalist.
(09:43):
And in case you're wondering how you fake crazy, you
practice making faces in the mirror. There were actually illustrations
of her doing this. It's pretty awesome. So she checks
into a boarding house for women as nineteen year old
Nelly Brown, leaving all her documentation behind mind she acts irrationally.
She stays up all night. She's kicked out in the morning,
(10:04):
but won't leave the boarding house, so the matron calls
the police. The New York Times covered her court appearance
and described her as, I quote, a mysterious waif. So,
in order to convince the judge to send her to Blackwells, though,
which is the really critical part of this preparation, she
calls herself Nellie Murreno and pretends to speak Spanish, sort
(10:27):
of trying to play into prejudices against immigrants. And she
drops this act as soon as she gets to prison,
the whole Spanish speaking bit um. But then she's got
to get past the actual doctors, the mental health professionals,
who the professional bid is certainly called into question by
what she runs into. The doctor who examines her assumes
(10:51):
that she is a woman of the town, which is
our new favorite euphemism for prostitute, before pronouncing her this
is a quote positively demented. I consider it a hopeless case.
She needs to be put where someone will take care
of her. End quote. But interestingly, as soon as she's
in the ward, she doesn't even bother feigning insanity anymore.
(11:12):
She just acts like her regular oldself, she writes, Yet
strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted
the crazier I was thought to be. And she sees
really terrible things inside of Blackwells Asylum. She sees people
forced to eat meals, rotten food, beatings, and ice baths,
and she describes her own ice bath pretty memorably. She says,
(11:36):
my teeth chattered and my limbs were goose fleshed and
blue with cold. Suddenly I got one after the other,
three buckets of water over my head. Ice cold water
too into my eyes, my ears, my nose, and my mouth.
I think I experienced the sensation of a drowning person
as they dragged me, gasping, shivering, and quaking from the tub.
For once, I did look insane and quote this reminds
(11:58):
me of the Sarah Water's book I just finished Actually Well.
And she overhears another woman, another patient, shrieking and being
beaten while given her own ice bath, and the woman
is dead the next morning. Just all this terrible stuff
that happens in here. But this is a risky stunt
for Nellie too, aside from just being forced to take
ice baths, Female insanity, especially hysteria, which is what she
(12:23):
was trying to imitate, was often conflated with nymphamania at
the time, which would expose female patients to abuse from
people within the hospital. Even the ambulance driver who takes
Nellie to black Wells rights after the series is published
that he knew she wasn't crazy because she didn't make
a pass at him, and he thought about suggesting her
(12:43):
to a quote test, which we can only imagine what
that would be, but decided that she looked too respectable.
After a few days at black wells Blai asked for
a re examination, but was denied, and eventually Pulitzer sent
an attorney to rescue her. We were wondering, just how
you know, where is that? I imagine getting back from
lunch or something and being like, she's been God for
(13:06):
a while. We should we should good check on her.
When she's out, she starts writing her series and the
pieces called ten Days in a Madhouse, and the first
installment is so incredibly popular that her byline becomes a
headline for the next piece, and it actually results in
some social changes. There's a grand jury investigation of the asylum,
(13:28):
the care improves, and one quote that really sort of
sums up her experience there um was this one. Take
a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and
make her sit up straight from six am to eight pm.
Do not allow her to talk or move during these hours,
give her nothing to read, let her know nothing of
(13:49):
the world or its doings, and see how long it
will take to make her insane. It's pretty good quote,
and this series turns her into a star. She continues
to write for hand Investigative Accounts will give you some
of our favorite titles. First is my favorite the girls
who make boxes. Nellie Bligh tells how it feels to
be a white slave. You've got Nellie Bligh as a mesmerist,
(14:12):
which kind of reminded me of our Houdini episode trying
to be a Servant. Nellie Bligh's Strange experience Nellie Bligh
and the Pullman. She visits the homes of poverty in
the model Workingman's town, in the Magdalen's Home, Nellie Bligh's
visit to an institution for unfortunate women which was reformed
prostitutes or supposedly reformed, and she also does all kinds
(14:36):
of related stunt. She poses as an unwedded mother to
expose baby buying, and poses as a thief to spend
a night in jail, and does stuff that's um, I
guess not quite as risque as some of these pieces.
She uncovers the bribery of lobbyists in the legislature, and
in one story titled Visiting the Dispensaries, Lee Blind narrowly
(15:01):
escapes having her tonsils amputated. She goes to a throat
doctor that poor people are forced to visit for medical
care and applies makeup to make herself look poor, so
she has a sore throat, and this is what she writes,
that tonsil needs a peace cut off. The doctor said,
dropping the probing instrument and taking up another who's bright
gleam gave me a chill. I'll do a great deal,
(15:23):
I think pathologically to get a story, but I won't
give up half a tonsil lesson to us all. I
would draw the line there the price of journalism. So
Pulitzer's paper was really good at appealing to multi ethnic,
multi class audiences, from women's immigrants to poor people. So
this socially active journalism that still doesn't offend the middle
(15:45):
class mores is really popular. Yeah, and the New York World,
you know, encourages this girl's stunt journalism to a certain extent,
but they also find a way to keep other would
be Bligh's anonymous. Don't want to have all of these
superstar and then you get to pay them stunt reporters exactly. Um,
(16:06):
So they decide to call everybody else who's not Nellie
bly Meg Merriles, and by eliminating the individuality of stunt reporting,
which was what made it so captivating in the first place,
it's someone's own experience. They can talk about their own
background and how they're reacting to what they're seeing. By
removing that, it dooms the genre. It doesn't really extend
(16:29):
past the early eighteen nineties. So well, the mad House
piece is what makes Nellie bly so famous. What she's
remembered for is the stunt we're about to talk about. So,
Pulitzer had a plan to promote the building of the
(16:49):
world New offices. He wanted to launch a stunt where
a journalist would travel around the world trying to beat
the record set by the fictional Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne's
hero and around the world Old in eighty days. Yeah,
at this point she kind of reminds me not only
of Brenda's starr, but also Carmen san Diego. So Pulitzer
plans on sending a man, but Blinde says that she'll
(17:11):
do it for less time for another paper unless they
send her. So Pulitzer caves and on November nine, she
sails from New York City to beat the record, and
with her she takes two British pounds silver, a tiny
bit of American money, which was really more of an
experiment to see if other countries accepted American money. And
(17:33):
a twenty four hour watch and a huge jar of
cold cream, which I think is funny because she hardly
brings anything on this trip. She's trying to pack the
light but must have been the key component of her
beauty regiment. Skincare is very important and if Charles Badeaux
we're going with her, he would have told her to
bring troubles. But since her dispatches are so sporadic on
her travels to go back to our actual story, so
(17:56):
the world has to resort to promoting the stunt. How
where they can. They run articles on geography, they hold
contests where people guess what her time will be with
the prize of a trip to Europe which gets them
one million entries. Yeah, they basically try to keep it
in the paper anyway they can. And Blin meanwhile is
traveling by ship, train, rickshaw Borough catamaran and another girl
(18:21):
stunt reporter joins in to this quest. I guess Cosmopolitans
Elizabeth Bisland and she tries to compete unsuccessfully, but it
just kind of goes to show how popular this girl's
stunt journalism was at the time, and her trip sounds
pretty cool. She ends up stopping for wine and biscuits
(18:42):
with Jules Verne at his home in France. I wish
he would invite me. He shows her a map of
Phileas Fogg's route and has hers lined up next to it,
so you know they can compare. And she ends up
spending Christmas in a Canton Leper colony, which gives us
another chance to to redeem ourselves from saying Canton like Canton,
Ohio all through the Opium Wars podcast, We're very sorry.
(19:05):
And she runs into a storm while sailing for Japan,
and at this point she's getting worried that she's not
going to complete the journey on time, and she says,
I would rather go back to New York dead than
not a winner. I don't know if that's just her
her natural flair for sensationalism, but maybe that's how she felt.
But on day sixty eight, she docks in San Francisco
(19:28):
and she hears that there might be a smallpox quarantine
on her ship, so she jumps overboard onto a tug
boat to make sure that she's not held up in
San Francisco, and the World has chartered a special train
for her to take her to Chicago. It's got one
sleeping coach and an engine, so it makes record time
getting there. She arrived in New York at seventy two days,
(19:52):
six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds, two bands, parades
and fireworks, and the world proclaims in all caps the
stage coach days are ended, the new age of lightning
travel begun. So she's a huge star at this point,
and she writes around the World in seventy two days
(20:12):
in eighteen nine. But despite her huge success with this
stunt and the huge success it brings the paper, she's
not even given a bonus, so she resigns, just kind
of checked in disgust. World bosses eventually agree to treat
her more respectfully and pay her better, and so she
(20:34):
returns in EE to do more work on women's rights
on wed Mother's Uh some interesting and influential interviews too.
She profiles the boxer John L. Sullivan, writes about Susan B. Anthony,
and um interviews the anarchist Emma Goldman. You've gotten a
lot of requests for her. We might have to do
her in another podcast. She's in rad time to another
(20:56):
Houdini mentions they're all connected to people. She so cover
the Pullman Strike from the perspective of the strikers, which
she was the only journalist to do that. That's pretty cool, thanks,
Nelly Blagh And she ended up writing an unsuccessful novel
before marrying millionaire Robert Seaman in she was thirty, he
was seventy, and he was president of the American Steel
(21:18):
Barrel Company and the Ironclad Manufacturing Company. It's quite a name,
isn't it um. So he leaves her his business after
his death ten years later, but she has some bad
luck with it. She's grown accustomed to living her life
as this New York matron um, but managing the business
is not her forte, and the employees commit some forgeries.
(21:42):
There's a lot of litigation, the company goes through bankruptcy
and she loses the fortune. She ends up going to
England for a vacation in nineteen fourteen, kind of to
escape some of these troubles, and World War One breaks out,
which would be pretty bad for your average traveler, but
for Nelly b it's an opportunity to do some some
(22:03):
journalistic work. She starts reporting through nineteen nineteen and goes
home when her mother's health began to fail. In nineteen twenty,
she joined the New York Journal and she died of
pneumonia January nine two in New York City, and her
obituary was over all the New York members. Thank you
(22:29):
so much for joining us for this Saturday classic SyncE.
This is out of the archive. If you heard an
email address or a Facebook U r L or something
similar during the course of the show, that may be
obsolete now, so here's our current contact information. We are
at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com, and
then we're at Missed in the History. All over social media.
(22:50):
That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Thanks again for listening for moral on this and thousands
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Happy Saturday. Everybody. Today's classic is one that listeners have
requested so often that we actually included it in a
round up episode that was our most requested episodes that
we already have. It is journalist Nelly Bly, famous for
everything from feigning insanity to do an expos of an
asylum to traveling around the world in a hot air balloon.
This is back from with previous host Katie and Sarah.
(00:25):
So enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class
from housetop works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and our subject
for today has really captivated us, so I hope you
like her as much as we do. I think she's
(00:47):
our new professional heroine. Our subject is Nellie Bligh and
stunt journalism. And when Nelly Bligh embarked on the journalistic
stunt that made her so famous, which is feigning in
Santa d in order to be committed to a notorious asylum,
something I would not do as a health editor. A
fellow journalist from a competing paper picked up on the
(01:08):
story and he covered the court appearance that resulted in
her committal as real news. He didn't pick up on
the fact that it was a stunt, and he wrote
the circumstances surrounding her were such as to indicate that
possibly she might be the heroine in an interesting story. Indeed,
we'd have to agree Nellie bly pioneered the era of
(01:30):
girls stunt reporters, women who wrote firsthand, somewhat lowbrow reports
that got him off the fashion and flower show and
perhaps cat show beat from a corning stone take note,
and instead into the seediest, most dangerous parts of the city.
This was big from about the late eighteen eighties to
the early eighteen nineties, but no one was bigger than
(01:52):
Nellie Bligh. Yeah. She starts off writing for five dollars
a week, and at the pinnacle of her career she's
making thousand dollars, which is big money at the time.
So we're going to start at the beginning, as we
always do, with our heroine's childhood. Elizabeth Jane Cochrane was
born May fifth, eighteen sixty four, in Cochrane's Mills, Pennsylvania,
(02:14):
and her father was a Cochrane himself, Judge Cochrane, and
he'd already had a family of ten with his first wife, Elizabeth,
was his thirteenth child of fifteen, and she was considered
the most rebellious, and so her mother, Mary Jane likes
attention and quickly instills that in her daughter. She has
the baby Elizabeth christened in a bright pink gown, which
(02:36):
earns her the nickname Pink, and her childhood is comfortable.
She lives in a nice mansion um has an easy life,
you know, the daughter of a judge. But things change
when she's about six years old, when Judge Cochrane dies
without a will, and because he's already had this first family,
his second family is left with no protection and there's
(02:58):
not much anyways to be slipped fifteen children, so his
estate is auctioned off and the second family moves into
a modest home and Pink helps take care of her
siblings and her mother remarries, probably trying to make a
more stable life for herself and her children, but unfortunately
she marries an abusive alcoholic man, and Pink actually even
(03:21):
ends up testifying at their eventual divorce trial. Her brothers
ended up being able to land decent white collar jobs
even though they didn't have a lot of education, so
Pink decided that she liked to be independent and helps
support her mother. She enrolled at the Indiana Normal School
when she was fifteen to train as a teacher, but
ran out of money after one semester and moved to
(03:43):
Pittsburgh with her mother, where she helped run a boarding house.
And Pittsburgh is where she will meet her fortune. So
we're gonna skip to eighteen eighty five when she gets
her job at the Pittsburgh Dispatch, and this is the
most amazing way to get a job. She sends an angry,
anonymous letter to the editor of the paper in response
(04:04):
to an editorial by the Quiet Observer Erasmus Wilson, who
had written a piece called what Girls Are Good For?
And Wilson was one of the most popular columnists in Pittsburgh,
and he was a Civil War veteran. And this piece
he wrote considered women useless outside of the domestic sphere.
And this really angered young Pink because she knew that
(04:25):
some women didn't have a choice but to work. Uh,
you know, she was an example of this herself. And
don't have any other options. So she writes in and
the grammar isn't good. There's no punctuation after all, She
hasn't had much of a formal education, but it's such
a spirited letter and she signs it the Lonely Orphan
Girl that it completely captivates the editor of the paper,
(04:48):
and the managing editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch was George Madden,
who thinks, with his good business sense, that he's got
to get this girl to write for his paper. So
he puts an ad in a Sunday paper skiing that
she comes forward. And she came to the office the
next day and got her job as a cover board
and appropriately enough, her first article is a response to
Wilson's editorial Yeah, and she goes on to cover topics
(05:12):
that interest her, like the conditions of working girls in
Pittsburgh and life in the slums um the archaic divorce
laws in the state, topics that normally wouldn't fall to
a woman reporter. Who would who would write more about Yeah,
flower shows, cat shows, fashion, and um. Madden eventually decides
that she should be a permanent staffer because even though
(05:35):
she's not well trained, she's good and she's interesting. Madden
and ms Cochrane decide that she needed a nomed plume
so she could keep her personal and her professional identities
separate and he chooses Nellie Bligh from an old Stephen
Foster song. But eventually one of Nellie Bligh's stunts goes
(05:55):
awry and she poses as a sweatshop worker in Pittsburgh,
and the owners getting mad at the paper's negative coverage
of their business and threatened to cut off all their
all their advertising in the paper. So the editor's back
off and Nellie's forced onto the fashion beat, which she
is not interested in, so instead she goes to Mexico.
(06:17):
From eighteen eighty six to eight eight seven, she traveled
through Mexico doing quote unquote real journalism. She wrote about corruption,
the conditions of the poor, details about the food, what
bullfights were like, but the Mexican officials that eventually get
so angry that she's expelled from the country and she
returns to Pittsburgh, but the editors haven't learned their lesson
(06:40):
and they try to stick around the fashion flower Show
beat again, and she quits, and before she leaves, she
writes a note for Erasmus Wilson, Dear q O, I'm
off for New York. Look out for me. Bligh's got
to be the best off, so she arrives in New
(07:00):
York looking for a job and decides that she'd really
like to work for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, but
really anywhere will, do you know, She's not in a
position to be too picky at the time. Months later,
she still can't find work. She's running out of money,
and she smooth talks her way into the office of
Colonel John Cockrell, who's the managing editor of The New
York World, and as soon as she gets her audience
(07:21):
with him, she doesn't waste any time. Immediately suggests a
story where she would travel to Europe and return steerage
class to report on all the immigrants coming into the
US and what the conditions were like for them aboard
a ship, and the editor rejects this idea. He thinks
it's too challenging for a young, relatively inexperienced reporter, so
(07:43):
in its place, he suggests, why don't you instead pretend
to be insane and have yourself committed at Blackwell's Island, which,
to be doesn't sound much easier, but uh Nellie blies
into it. She signs up for the job he gives
her on the spot, and she joins the staff and
starts to prepare for her first assignment. Her piece is
(08:12):
called ten Days in a Madhouse. And we want to
say that John Marie Lutes article on girls stunt reporting
for American Quarterly was really helpful in researching this part
of the podcast. Yeah, and actually tex stuffs. Chris Pallette
was a huge help in actually obtaining the article using
his magic library skills. I like his magic skills. Thank
you to Chris. So a little background on Black Wells.
(08:35):
It was an interesting place. Um. It offered cheap psychiatric
care for mentally ill immigrants, but the conditions were really bad,
and Charles Dickens had visited it on his American tour
but left very quickly because it depressed himself. And reporters
were interested in it. To a Harper's Weekly reporter had
taken a supervised tour and um ended up writing that
(08:57):
it was a pretty comfortable, fair and clean place, but
you can only imagine what's on the officials. Yeah, so
people are curious about what it's actually like on the inside.
So Bligh has got to get inside to write this report. Um.
She's great for this story too. She doesn't have much
of a formal education, no real professional training and journalism,
(09:20):
no credentials. She's a total amateur. But she's really good,
and she's out there and adventurous enough to convince law
enforcement and mental health professionals that she's actually insane. But
she's still able to maintain that middle class respectability that
protects her reputation and makes her popular as a female journalist.
(09:43):
And in case you're wondering how you fake crazy, you
practice making faces in the mirror. There were actually illustrations
of her doing this. It's pretty awesome. So she checks
into a boarding house for women as nineteen year old
Nelly Brown, leaving all her documentation behind mind she acts irrationally.
She stays up all night. She's kicked out in the morning,
(10:04):
but won't leave the boarding house, so the matron calls
the police. The New York Times covered her court appearance
and described her as, I quote, a mysterious waif. So,
in order to convince the judge to send her to Blackwells, though,
which is the really critical part of this preparation, she
calls herself Nellie Murreno and pretends to speak Spanish, sort
(10:27):
of trying to play into prejudices against immigrants. And she
drops this act as soon as she gets to prison,
the whole Spanish speaking bit um. But then she's got
to get past the actual doctors, the mental health professionals,
who the professional bid is certainly called into question by
what she runs into. The doctor who examines her assumes
(10:51):
that she is a woman of the town, which is
our new favorite euphemism for prostitute, before pronouncing her this
is a quote positively demented. I consider it a hopeless case.
She needs to be put where someone will take care
of her. End quote. But interestingly, as soon as she's
in the ward, she doesn't even bother feigning insanity anymore.
(11:12):
She just acts like her regular oldself, she writes, Yet
strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted
the crazier I was thought to be. And she sees
really terrible things inside of Blackwells Asylum. She sees people
forced to eat meals, rotten food, beatings, and ice baths,
and she describes her own ice bath pretty memorably. She says,
(11:36):
my teeth chattered and my limbs were goose fleshed and
blue with cold. Suddenly I got one after the other,
three buckets of water over my head. Ice cold water
too into my eyes, my ears, my nose, and my mouth.
I think I experienced the sensation of a drowning person
as they dragged me, gasping, shivering, and quaking from the tub.
For once, I did look insane and quote this reminds
(11:58):
me of the Sarah Water's book I just finished Actually Well.
And she overhears another woman, another patient, shrieking and being
beaten while given her own ice bath, and the woman
is dead the next morning. Just all this terrible stuff
that happens in here. But this is a risky stunt
for Nellie too, aside from just being forced to take
ice baths, Female insanity, especially hysteria, which is what she
(12:23):
was trying to imitate, was often conflated with nymphamania at
the time, which would expose female patients to abuse from
people within the hospital. Even the ambulance driver who takes
Nellie to black Wells rights after the series is published
that he knew she wasn't crazy because she didn't make
a pass at him, and he thought about suggesting her
(12:43):
to a quote test, which we can only imagine what
that would be, but decided that she looked too respectable.
After a few days at black wells Blai asked for
a re examination, but was denied, and eventually Pulitzer sent
an attorney to rescue her. We were wondering, just how
you know, where is that? I imagine getting back from
lunch or something and being like, she's been God for
(13:06):
a while. We should we should good check on her.
When she's out, she starts writing her series and the
pieces called ten Days in a Madhouse, and the first
installment is so incredibly popular that her byline becomes a
headline for the next piece, and it actually results in
some social changes. There's a grand jury investigation of the asylum,
(13:28):
the care improves, and one quote that really sort of
sums up her experience there um was this one. Take
a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and
make her sit up straight from six am to eight pm.
Do not allow her to talk or move during these hours,
give her nothing to read, let her know nothing of
(13:49):
the world or its doings, and see how long it
will take to make her insane. It's pretty good quote,
and this series turns her into a star. She continues
to write for hand Investigative Accounts will give you some
of our favorite titles. First is my favorite the girls
who make boxes. Nellie Bligh tells how it feels to
be a white slave. You've got Nellie Bligh as a mesmerist,
(14:12):
which kind of reminded me of our Houdini episode trying
to be a Servant. Nellie Bligh's Strange experience Nellie Bligh
and the Pullman. She visits the homes of poverty in
the model Workingman's town, in the Magdalen's Home, Nellie Bligh's
visit to an institution for unfortunate women which was reformed
prostitutes or supposedly reformed, and she also does all kinds
(14:36):
of related stunt. She poses as an unwedded mother to
expose baby buying, and poses as a thief to spend
a night in jail, and does stuff that's um, I
guess not quite as risque as some of these pieces.
She uncovers the bribery of lobbyists in the legislature, and
in one story titled Visiting the Dispensaries, Lee Blind narrowly
(15:01):
escapes having her tonsils amputated. She goes to a throat
doctor that poor people are forced to visit for medical
care and applies makeup to make herself look poor, so
she has a sore throat, and this is what she writes,
that tonsil needs a peace cut off. The doctor said,
dropping the probing instrument and taking up another who's bright
gleam gave me a chill. I'll do a great deal,
(15:23):
I think pathologically to get a story, but I won't
give up half a tonsil lesson to us all. I
would draw the line there the price of journalism. So
Pulitzer's paper was really good at appealing to multi ethnic,
multi class audiences, from women's immigrants to poor people. So
this socially active journalism that still doesn't offend the middle
(15:45):
class mores is really popular. Yeah, and the New York World,
you know, encourages this girl's stunt journalism to a certain extent,
but they also find a way to keep other would
be Bligh's anonymous. Don't want to have all of these
superstar and then you get to pay them stunt reporters exactly. Um,
(16:06):
So they decide to call everybody else who's not Nellie
bly Meg Merriles, and by eliminating the individuality of stunt reporting,
which was what made it so captivating in the first place,
it's someone's own experience. They can talk about their own
background and how they're reacting to what they're seeing. By
removing that, it dooms the genre. It doesn't really extend
(16:29):
past the early eighteen nineties. So well, the mad House
piece is what makes Nellie bly so famous. What she's
remembered for is the stunt we're about to talk about. So,
Pulitzer had a plan to promote the building of the
(16:49):
world New offices. He wanted to launch a stunt where
a journalist would travel around the world trying to beat
the record set by the fictional Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne's
hero and around the world Old in eighty days. Yeah,
at this point she kind of reminds me not only
of Brenda's starr, but also Carmen san Diego. So Pulitzer
plans on sending a man, but Blinde says that she'll
(17:11):
do it for less time for another paper unless they
send her. So Pulitzer caves and on November nine, she
sails from New York City to beat the record, and
with her she takes two British pounds silver, a tiny
bit of American money, which was really more of an
experiment to see if other countries accepted American money. And
(17:33):
a twenty four hour watch and a huge jar of
cold cream, which I think is funny because she hardly
brings anything on this trip. She's trying to pack the
light but must have been the key component of her
beauty regiment. Skincare is very important and if Charles Badeaux
we're going with her, he would have told her to
bring troubles. But since her dispatches are so sporadic on
her travels to go back to our actual story, so
(17:56):
the world has to resort to promoting the stunt. How
where they can. They run articles on geography, they hold
contests where people guess what her time will be with
the prize of a trip to Europe which gets them
one million entries. Yeah, they basically try to keep it
in the paper anyway they can. And Blin meanwhile is
traveling by ship, train, rickshaw Borough catamaran and another girl
(18:21):
stunt reporter joins in to this quest. I guess Cosmopolitans
Elizabeth Bisland and she tries to compete unsuccessfully, but it
just kind of goes to show how popular this girl's
stunt journalism was at the time, and her trip sounds
pretty cool. She ends up stopping for wine and biscuits
(18:42):
with Jules Verne at his home in France. I wish
he would invite me. He shows her a map of
Phileas Fogg's route and has hers lined up next to it,
so you know they can compare. And she ends up
spending Christmas in a Canton Leper colony, which gives us
another chance to to redeem ourselves from saying Canton like Canton,
Ohio all through the Opium Wars podcast, We're very sorry.
(19:05):
And she runs into a storm while sailing for Japan,
and at this point she's getting worried that she's not
going to complete the journey on time, and she says,
I would rather go back to New York dead than
not a winner. I don't know if that's just her
her natural flair for sensationalism, but maybe that's how she felt.
But on day sixty eight, she docks in San Francisco
(19:28):
and she hears that there might be a smallpox quarantine
on her ship, so she jumps overboard onto a tug
boat to make sure that she's not held up in
San Francisco, and the World has chartered a special train
for her to take her to Chicago. It's got one
sleeping coach and an engine, so it makes record time
getting there. She arrived in New York at seventy two days,
(19:52):
six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds, two bands, parades
and fireworks, and the world proclaims in all caps the
stage coach days are ended, the new age of lightning
travel begun. So she's a huge star at this point,
and she writes around the World in seventy two days
(20:12):
in eighteen nine. But despite her huge success with this
stunt and the huge success it brings the paper, she's
not even given a bonus, so she resigns, just kind
of checked in disgust. World bosses eventually agree to treat
her more respectfully and pay her better, and so she
(20:34):
returns in EE to do more work on women's rights
on wed Mother's Uh some interesting and influential interviews too.
She profiles the boxer John L. Sullivan, writes about Susan B. Anthony,
and um interviews the anarchist Emma Goldman. You've gotten a
lot of requests for her. We might have to do
her in another podcast. She's in rad time to another
(20:56):
Houdini mentions they're all connected to people. She so cover
the Pullman Strike from the perspective of the strikers, which
she was the only journalist to do that. That's pretty cool, thanks,
Nelly Blagh And she ended up writing an unsuccessful novel
before marrying millionaire Robert Seaman in she was thirty, he
was seventy, and he was president of the American Steel
(21:18):
Barrel Company and the Ironclad Manufacturing Company. It's quite a name,
isn't it um. So he leaves her his business after
his death ten years later, but she has some bad
luck with it. She's grown accustomed to living her life
as this New York matron um, but managing the business
is not her forte, and the employees commit some forgeries.
(21:42):
There's a lot of litigation, the company goes through bankruptcy
and she loses the fortune. She ends up going to
England for a vacation in nineteen fourteen, kind of to
escape some of these troubles, and World War One breaks out,
which would be pretty bad for your average traveler, but
for Nelly b it's an opportunity to do some some
(22:03):
journalistic work. She starts reporting through nineteen nineteen and goes
home when her mother's health began to fail. In nineteen twenty,
she joined the New York Journal and she died of
pneumonia January nine two in New York City, and her
obituary was over all the New York members. Thank you
(22:29):
so much for joining us for this Saturday classic SyncE.
This is out of the archive. If you heard an
email address or a Facebook U r L or something
similar during the course of the show, that may be
obsolete now, so here's our current contact information. We are
at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com, and
then we're at Missed in the History. All over social media.
(22:50):
That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Thanks again for listening for moral on this and thousands
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