Nellie Bly Goes Undercover At "The Madhouse"

Investigative journalist Nellie Bly gets her first big break...by pretending she's crazy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. Filthy, filthy, filthy, filthy filth listeners, Let's
go over the news that's vaguely related to this episode.
This week, Robert Fuckhead Kennedy Junior and President dumb ass
Trump those are their Christian names said that tyland All

(00:32):
causes autism. You know, if a pregnant woman takes it,
then her bay bay will catch the what they call disease.
So if a pregnant woman has a fever, she should
just tough it out, even though tyland All is mostly

(00:53):
deemed a safe drug for pregnant people. But never mind
the facts. Boo and the administration said that despite scientific
studies not conclusively proving this at all, studies actually suggest
it's more likely that a fever can cause issues for
a fetus. And you take dailanal to treat a fever. Wow,

(01:16):
and then well being haters to tailanol. Trump and Kennedy
suggested a medication to treat autism, which is for sure
not proven to do anything at all. But we're in
a post truth world. Facts irrelevant. Punishing political enemies, yes,
using the presidency to make money for yourself extremely good idea. Anyway,

(01:44):
Our supreme leaders live in an altered reality, support by
their feelings, informed by sheer stupidity. But hey, I don't
have an opinion about it. This is a bipartisan show.
We're all by sexual Yeah, if you're listening to this,
you're bisexual. I'm sorry. Your mom probably took tailan al

(02:05):
But this is in the first time that the people
of the United States of America don't understand mental illness.
In fact, we never really have until recent years. Having
mental differences resulted in lots of bad stuff, like being institutionalized,
getting a lobotomy more worse, and over the course of

(02:27):
our history, a wide variety of behaviors and conditions have
been deemed socially unacceptable. Ergo they are mental illnesses. One
of my favorite mental illnesses from the past was called
being a woman. Being a woman, there's a lot of
side effects shop in trip, in being on they periods.

(02:54):
But speaking of women, sometimes when women aren't shopping, tripping,
or being on their periods, they are sometimes performing absolutely
necessary journalism. In eighteen eighty seven, a woman named Nellie Cochrane,
who went by the pen named Nellie Bly, walked into
the office of the New York World and asked for

(03:15):
a job and the editor said, yes, the journalist in
him saw the journalist in her. He could just smell
the integrity all over her, which, by the way, if
you smell someone's integrity, that can be considered harassment, so
don't sniff too hard. So Nellie pitched him a story.

(03:39):
She was like, Hey, I want to do a story
about immigration because all of these damned Europeans keep coming
into our country. She was like, let me go to Europe,
assess the situation, get their stories, understand why they want
to come here. But the editor was like, Nah, that
sounds too expensive. Let's do something else. Let's do something local.

(04:02):
How about you pretend you're insane and get yourself institutionalized
at an insane asylum. That shouldn't be too hard for you.
You're a woman, and women be tripping. So that's what
Nelly did, and during her days at the institution, at
the asylum, she almost caught some mental illness herself. Cue

(04:26):
the theme song. This is American Filth and I'm Gabby Watts.
Every week I tell you a filthy story from American history.
This week's episode, Nellie Blide goes undercover at the mad House.

(04:58):
Maybe you could already say we're at the mad house.
So you know what I'm saying, because the world's crazy
right now. What I'm saying Nellie Bly always wanted to
be a writer. She had a rich ass dad, but
when he died when she was six, her mom raised

(05:19):
her and her siblings on her own, basically in poverty.
Nellie helped her mother run the family boarding house in Pittsburgh.
Her first splash on the newspaper page came in eighteen
eighty five. A man wrote to the Pittsburgh Dispatch complaining
about having five unmarried daughters Heaven forbid, and in response,

(05:41):
a columnist named Erasmus Wilson wrote a scathing editorial about
the role of women in society. By scathing, I mean
it's quite similar to what Maga people like Charlie Kirk's widow,
Erica Kirk, are saying today that a woman's role is
to marry and have babies. And Erica, let me tell you,

(06:02):
I'll stop working when you do, and when there are
any jobs available that pay enough so that my boyfriend
can support me, him and our copious babies. Thank you.
But back in eighteen eighty five, Erasmus's article is called
what Girls Are Good for In it, he called working

(06:22):
women a monstrosity and even made this suggestion quote in
China they kill girl babies. Who knows, but that this
country may have to resort to this sometimes. Yeah, ladies,
if you can't marry and pro create, you should be killed.

(06:43):
Nelly was about twenty years old at the time, saw
this in the newspaper and was like, the fuck. So
she wrote a response to that column, sent it into
the editor of the newspaper, and he was so impressed
with her writing that he published what she wrote. Her
article is called the Girl Puzzle, and in it was like,

(07:06):
you little bitch Erasmus, you say that women's only function
in society is to breed and playhouse. What about lower
class women? How are they supposed to survive? They can't
just sit around like dolls. They need to work, you
dumb elitist bitch. She didn't say the elitist dumb She
didn't say any bitch actually in the whole article, but

(07:26):
you know, I feel like you could feel the bitch
kind of in there. Nelly was like, instead of telling
women to be breeders and homemakers, what actually needs to
happen is that we need more and better paying jobs
to be available to women. Women are just as capable
as men and also learn faster. It's unfair. Young dudes

(07:51):
get these entry level jobs where they don't know shit,
but then they can work their way up the company's ranks.
Why can't women get those same jobs. Because of that article,
the editor at the Pittsburgh Dispatch gave Nelly a job,
but she was mostly relegated to writing about the theater,
the art, society, gardening, you know, stuff that women think about.

(08:18):
But no offense to theater and society and gardening. But
Nelly wanted to do journalism with a little bit more
umph oomph m. You know what I'm saying, umph emph
you know, just a bit more pow pow p hw.
So she was like, Hey, Pittsburgh Dispatch, I'm gonna move
to Mexico. Yeah, I'm gonna go be a foreign correspondent

(08:41):
to report on the dictatorship there. So she lived there
for six months until her exposes made her get some
threats from the government, so she was like, okay, never mind,
by so she's skidaddled back to the United States. Nelly
moved to New York City in eighteen eighty seven and
that's when she landed that job with The New York World. Now,

(09:06):
if my editor was like, hey, pretend you're crazy and
get sentenced to an asylum, I might take a beat
reflect wonder if that was the best way to practice journalism.
But also, at the time, asylums were mysteries what was
going on in there. There didn't seem to be another
way to get the inside scoop unless you're on the inside.

(09:31):
When she got this assignment, Nelly was a bit stressed.
She was like, I don't personally know any insane people,
so will I really be able to convincingly play a
crazy person. To that, I say, Nelly, come hang out
with me and my friends. We got all the crazy
you could need. Also, her editor wasn't that helpful. His

(09:55):
only advice to Nelly was like, hey, Nelly, if you're
gonna pretend to be crazy, you need to stop smiling
so much. Wow, that's the first time a man has
ever told me woman to stop smiling. But Nelly was determined,
so she went method trying to embody the crazy women
that she'd seen on the streets of New York City.

(10:18):
She disguised herself in some old clothes and headed to
a boarding house for working women. She was like, I
will convince these strangers that I am crazy, and they
will have no choice but to call the police, who
will then take me to a judge who will then
sentence me to the madhouse on Blackwell Island. When she

(10:39):
arrived at the boarding house, Nellie commenced her ruse. She
said that from the crazy people she'd observed on the streets,
they had staring eyes, so she made sure her eyes
looked as empty and dead as possible. When the other
women at the boarding house asked her where she was from,
she pretended to be confused and was like, I can't

(11:01):
find my luggage. Do you have my luggage? Where's my luggage? Which?
Help me find it? Now, that is crazy. A normal,
sane woman always knows where her luggage is. That night,
Nellie tried to stay awake as long as possible, hoping
the insomnia might enhance her craziness, and it worked. One

(11:26):
woman was so perturbed by Nellie's behavior that she awoke
in the night claiming she was having a horrific nightmare
about Nelly. I mean, I get it. Nellie was being
so scary. She was a woman not sleeping, she had
bug eyes, and she didn't know where her luggage. Was
truly a demonic monster. The next day, the women at

(11:50):
the boarding house became so upset with Nellie that they
demanded she get kicked out. They were like, you gotta
get her out of here, she's gonna kill us. The
woman who ran the boarding house sent for the police,
who were unable to ascertain any additional information from Nelly,

(12:10):
like who she was, where she was from. And then
Nelly started acting even more insane. She started speaking in Spanish,
a woman who speaks Spanish. Oh no. The police took
her down to the court and she was examined by

(12:31):
a doctor and he said, yep, she seems crazy. She's
got no luggage, she knows Spanish, and she's a woman. Yep,
a hopeless case of insanity. The judge asked her where
she was from, and Nellie said the hacienda, so he
decided she was from Cuba. But the judge also thought

(12:52):
she was crazy, so he sentenced her to the asylum.
He saw that she needed help, and he said he
felt so bad for her, specifically because she looked like
his sister. Isn't that help? Full information in the courtroom
before she left the courtroom. Suddenly a reporter appeared. Nellie

(13:14):
was like, shit, that reporter is gonna know who I
am and reveal my ruse. Luckily, she was wearing a
very big hat so he couldn't see her. And then
she descended into some hysterics about her luggage again, so
the judge made the reporter go away, but Nellie knew
she'd have to be cautious and be extra crazy so

(13:37):
she wouldn't be exposed. Police then transported Nellie to Bellevue Hospital,
and this was when it started getting serious. The police
strapped her down to a bed in the back of
the police vehicle, handling her roughly, you know, the right
way to handle someone facing mental health issues. At the hospital,

(14:00):
she met a few other women, and most of them
didn't seem that crazy to her. They were mostly poor.
She had another consultation with a doctor who was like, yep,
this broad is cou coo. Nellie wrote, after this, I
began to have a smaller regard for the ability of
doctors than I had ever had before. I felt sure

(14:23):
now that no doctor could tell whether people were insane
or not, so long as the case was not violent,
and indeed, over the course of her stant the asylum,
she encountered many doctors, Most of them didn't acknowledge her,
and the rest of them tried to flirt with her medicine.

(14:44):
When Nellie looked outside the hospital window, she saw Bellevue
was surrounded by reporters like the Paparazzi for the mentally deranged,
and she heard that they were developing an interest in
this new patient from Cuba with no luggage. Who was she?
Little did they know she was one of their colleagues. Ha. Finally,

(15:07):
Nelly and the other women at the hospital were rounded up,
shoved into a truck, and taken to a boat that
would deliver them to a notorious asylum on Blackwell Island.
Be right back after these soothing advertisements. Back in the

(15:29):
nineteenth century, Blackwell Island now Roosevelt Island was the place
to send not just the insane, but also other undesirables
in New York City. Back then, the nickname for it
was Welfare Island. And you know, whenever someone dubbed something
with the term welfare, they mean it positively. By the

(15:52):
time Nellie bly got herself committed, Blackwell Island housed not
just an institution for the insane, which housed sixteen hundred women,
but also a prison, workhouses, and hospitals for incurable like
peeples smallpox. As far as islands go, definitely put this
on your list for a visit. Who was basically Fiji

(16:15):
but really bad. Before embarking on this undercover reporting, Nelly
and her editor decided she'd go by the name of
Nellie Brown. That way the editor could find her and
get her the frick out of there when the time came.
Once she arrived on the island, Nellie immediately realized this

(16:38):
was about to be a horrendous experience. First, the smell.
As they rolled up to the facility in a wagon.
The stench was overwhelming, and Nellie discovered that that horrible
smell was coming from the kitchen. Mm hm. After the
women had their intake meeting, a doctor got Nelly's measurements

(17:01):
because that's how you measure crazy with a ruler, and
then some nurses forced her to play piano on a
piano that was extremely out of tune, and that was
the extent of the entertainment provided at the facility. After that,
Nelly came face to face with that stinky food. The

(17:22):
broth was stinky, The meat was stinky, the bread was hard.
Nellie tried to eat the bread with butter, but the
butter seemed to be made out of petroleum. The other
patients advised her to ask her playing bread next time.
So yeah, that meal absolutely horrendous, but at least they

(17:43):
got five prunes for dessert, Mmm prunes. After that, the
nurses took the new patients to the bathroom and bathed
them in extremely cold water. At Blackwell Island, patients were
only allowed to bathe every five days, and then the

(18:04):
women were all bathing in the same water no refills.
Nellie said the water was thick by the time she
got in it. After that, Nelly was given a thin nightgown.
Despite the coolness of the night, Nellie couldn't sleep in
her lumpy bed, and throughout the night the nurses opened

(18:27):
the creaky doors and stomped around, checking on each patient
every few hours with lots of clanking and yelling. When
Nellie got up in the morning, she was still wet
and cold from the previous night's bath. She also noticed
that if the asylum caught on fire, there was no

(18:48):
way for the patients to escape, so they would have
just all burnt up. Nellie quickly realized that the Blackwell
Island Asylum wasn't going to provide any real treatment for
these insane women. They started the morning with some stinky
food and then had to clean the facility. After that,

(19:09):
the women saw one of the random doctors who did
nothing except take their measurements again, and then for hours,
the women had to sit on these hard benches, not talking,
not moving, and if they did get up or make noise,
the nurses would yell at them or choke them. And yeah,

(19:30):
I don't think any of this stuff would help cure
your mental illness. I haven't tried it, though, I don't know.
Maybe this could be a treatment for people, you know, like, oh,
you have ADHD, don't take adderall, have you tried manual labor?
Sitting for long periods of time and strangulation could be
a quick fix Those hours sitting on the benches. That

(19:55):
shit wrecked Nelly. She said, I was never so tired
as I grew sitting on those benches. Several of the
patients would sit on one foot or sideways to make
a change, but they were always reproved and told to
sit up straight. If they talked, they were scolded and
told to shut up. If they wanted to walk around
in order to take the stiffness out of them, they

(20:16):
were told to sit down and be still. What accepting
torture would produce insanity quicker than this treatment. Here's a
class of women sent to be cured. I would like
expert physicians to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman,
Shut her up and make her sit from six am
until eight pm on straight back benches. Do not allow

(20:39):
her to talk or move during these hours. Give her
no reading and let her know nothing of the world
or its doings. Give her bad food and harsh treatment,
and see how long it will take to make her insane.
Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck. Yeah,
nell He's like, I'm not an insane person, but the
way you're treating us is making me insane. The only

(21:05):
time the women were allowed outside was when they had
a brief walk, and that was the only time they
got additional clothes. They got a thin shawl and a hat.
While outside, Nellie observed some of the more disturbed and
violent patients. They were all fastened together in a long
line with a rope and were driven around by a cart.

(21:28):
Many of them screaming and wailing. One of them yelled
at a nurse, you want to kill me. Outside, Nellie
saw that there were reporters lingering near the entrance and
they wanted to get an interview with her. This crazy
Cuban woman was becoming the talk of the town. Back inside,

(21:52):
Nellie talked to as many patients as possible, and most
of them she thought they seemed pretty sane. One woman
was sent there because she had gotten deathly sick with
a cold, and the woman who was operating the warding
house she was staying at was like, she's crazy. Get her,
she's sneezing boo. Another woman's husband sent her to the

(22:14):
asylum because she found other men attractive. A couple women
just couldn't speak English and that's why they were there,
and Nelly heard harrowing stories. One woman was sent to
the asylum because she spoke to a man who was
not her husband. Wow, and this is what she said

(22:35):
for crying. The nurses beat me with a broom handle
and jump on me, injuring me internally so that I
will never get over it. They tied my hands and
feet and throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it
tightly around my throat so I could not scream, and
thus put me in a bathtub filled with cold water.

(22:55):
They held me under until I gave up every hope
and became senseless. At other times they took hold of
my ears and beat my head on the floor and
against the wall. Then they pulled my hair out by
their roots, so that it will never grow in again.

(23:16):
Nelly heard even worse stories, and then whenever she complained
about the conditions, the nurses were like, shut up, bitch.
You're here on charity. You should be grateful, which to
me does sound like how Republicans talk to liberals. They're like,
how dare you complain? You live in the United States. Sure,
everything's expensive, we kill people every day, and there's no

(23:37):
affordable healthcare. You should just shut up and be grateful.
When Nelly first arrived at the Blackwell Island Asylum, she
had planned to get into as many wards as possible,
but after she was there for more than a week,
she couldn't do it. She wrote, the insane asylum on

(23:57):
Blackwell's Island is a human rat trap. It is easy
to get in, but once there it is impossible to
get out. I had intended to have myself committed to
the violent wards, but when I got the testimony of
two sane women who had been there, I decided not
to risk my health. At around ten days in, Nellie's

(24:19):
editor started making inquiries about a patient named Nellie Brown,
saying he could take charge of her. When doctors told
Nelly that someone was looking for her and she could
leave if she wanted, she was like, yes, please get
me out of this place, And finally she was able
to leave. She wrote, I had looked forward so eagerly

(24:41):
to leaving the horrible place. Yet when my release came
and I knew that God's sunlight was to be free
from me again, there was a certain pain in leaving.
For ten days, I had been one of them, foolishly enough.
It seemed intensely selfish to leave them to their suffering.
I felt a desire to help them by sympathy and presence,

(25:02):
but only for a moment. The bars were down, and
free dam was sweeter to me than ever. Nellie quickly
wrote up her experience in two parts, the first running
on October tenth, eighteen eighty seven. It was an immediate
hit with readers who were ravenous for the second part,
that came out the next week. Because the story was

(25:25):
so successful and because of her daring investigative journalism antics,
she got a permanent job at the New York World.
But like, can you imagine if she didn't, if the
editor was like, hey, thanks for going undercovering an asylum
for ten days, but honestly, it's just not good enough
for us. And the articles led to change. People were

(25:47):
pissed off. So the Department for Public Charities got more
money from the government, and fifty thousand dollars of that
was specifically for the Blackwell Asylum. Did that make the
conditions at the asylum particularly better? Historians can't really tell,
but theoretically, you know, they did have more money for
sheets and ropes to choke the patients with Nelly was

(26:12):
especially pleased because no reporters had figured her out. She
was like, Haha, I'm the trickiest bitch in the biz.
And after that piece came out, Nelly continued doing undercover work,
particularly trying to highlight the plights of working class women.
She pretended to seek employment at various agencies to show
how women were discriminated against. She worked in a factory

(26:35):
to report on the terrible working conditions there. She also
pretended to be an unwed mother trying to sell a
baby to expose the black market for newborns. She posed
as a legislator's wife to expose corrupt lobbying. And another
huge thing she did is she read the novel around
the world in eighty days and she decided she could

(26:55):
do better. She was like, bitch, I'm going to make
it around the world in seventy two days. And she
did girl power. On every episode of American Filth, we
learn a lesson. I think the lesson we learn here
is women be crazy. Yeah, women be crazy for reporting

(27:17):
in depth investigative journalism. Yeah, women love doing that shit.
Cue the credits. American Field is a production of School
of Humans and iHeart Podcast. This episode was written and
hosted by me Gabby Watts. Jesse Niswanger composed our beautiful

(27:39):
theme song. Our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Croley,
and Brandon Barr and you can follow along with the
sea on Instagram at American Filth Pod. Make sure you like,
make sure you subscribe, make sure you send the show
to your friends and your enemies, and I'll talk to
you guys next time Bye ya, School of Humans,