"Nellie
Bly" was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane.
She was a ground-breaking reporter, best known for completing a
record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules
Verne's fictional character of Phileas Fogg, She also wrote a scathing
exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from
within. She was a pioneer in her field, and launched a new kind of
investigative journalism. In addition to her writing, she was also an
industrialist and charity worker.
She
was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran on May 5, 1864 in "Cochran Mills",
which today is part of the Pittsburgh suburb of Burrell Township,
Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Her father, Michael Cochran, was a
modest laborer and mill worker who. taught his young children a cogent
lesson about the virtues of hard work and determination, buying the
local mill and most of the land surrounding his family farmhouse. As a
young girl Elizabeth was often called "Pinky" because she so frequently
wore the color. As she became a teenager she wanted to portray herself
as more sophisticated, and so dropped the nickname and changed her
surname to Cochrane. She attended boarding school for one term, but was
forced to drop out due to lack of funds.
Her
father had became an alcoholic and soon after her parents got divorced.
Nellie Bly's mother, Mary Jane, took her to Allegheny City, an
unincorporated part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where two of her
brothers were living. By that time the city, the steel capital of the
country, had earned the reputation as the "blackest, dirtiest, grimiest city in the United States,"
The
city had only 60,000 people, yet boasted seven daily newspapers. The
Pittsburgh "Dispatch" was one of the city's two major morning papers and
employed the most revered newspaper columnist in town, Erasmus Wilson
whose column had been running for over 30 years. One of the column's
most avid readers was the 20-year-old Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. She read
the series in which Wilson complained about women who were entering the
work force. He told women to let up on the business sphere and make the
"home a little paradise" and to play "the part of angel." In another piece, he wrote that a woman who worked outside the home was "a monstrosity.... There is no greater abnormality than a woman in breeches, unless it is a man in petticoats."
Like
many women in the city, Elizabeth was offended by the series, and
unleashed her anger in a letter to the paper. She wrote that Wilson. had
no understanding of the plight of young women, explaining that she had
spent the last four years in working class Allegheny row houses. There,
she said that she had met many of the poor young women who so often were
unable to find a good job. She signed it "Lonely Orphan Girl."
When
the letter first landed on the desk of George Madden, managing editor
for the "Dispatch," he was struck by its spirit. He passed it on to
Wilson saying "she isn't much for style, but what she has to say she says right out regardless of paragraphs or punctuation."
He thought the girl might be able to bring something fresh to the
newspaper and the men placed an ad asking for the girl to identify
herself by name and address.
When
Cochrane introduced herself to the editor in person, he offered her the
opportunity to write a piece for the newspaper, again under the
pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". After her first article for the
Dispatch, titled "The Girl Puzzle", Madden was impressed again, and
offered her a full-time job with a salary of $5 per week. Female
newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names, and for
Cochrane the editor chose "Nellie Bly", adopted from the title character
in the popular song "Nelly Bly" by Stephen Foster. She originally
intended for her pseudonym to be "Nelly Bly," but her editor wrote
"Nellie" by mistake, and the error stuck.
As
a writer, Bly focused her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of
working women, writing a series of investigative articles on female
factory workers.
In these pieces, she spoke of those "without talent, without beauty, without money." She continued: "We
cannot let them starve. Can they that have full and plenty of this
world's goods realize what it is to be a poor working woman, abiding in
one or two bare rooms, without fire enough to keep warm, while her
threadbare clothes refuse to protect her from the wind and cold, and
denying herself necessary food that her little ones may not go hungry;
fearing the landlord's frown and threat to cast her out and sell what
little she has, begging for employment of any kind that she may earn
enough to pay for the bare rooms she calls home."
Showing her flare for powerful and dramatic insight, Bly went on to tell the wealthy that these poor women "read
of what your last pug dog cost and think of what that vast sum would
have done for them -- paid father's doctor bill, bought mother a new
dress, shoes for the little ones, and imagine how nice it would be could
baby have the beef tea that is made for your favorite pug, or the care
and kindness that is bestowed upon it."
The
young Bly even suggested remedies. If ambitious young men could start
as errand boys and climb up the ladder to responsible and well-paying
positions, why not girls? "Just as smart and a great deal quicker to learn; why, then, can they not do the same?" Instead of working young women in airless factories, Bly suggested employing them as messengers or office "boys." She asked: why not make a girl a conductor on the Pullman Palace car?
She
wrote a piece on divorce, entitled "Mad Marriages." Bly recommended
that Pennsylvania's divorce laws be reformed and called for potential
spouses to reveal who they were in writing before they be allowed to
sign a marriage license. In an echo of her mother's own failed marriage
to an alcoholic, Bly also asked that women be allowed to get a divorce
from men who were criminals or "by means of dissolute habits, laziness or poverty, are likely to make the home wretched."
Eventually
editorial pressure pushed her back to the so-called "women's pages" to
cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for female
journalists of the day. Dissatisfied with these duties, she took the
initiative and traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent.
Still only 21, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and
customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches were later published in
book form as Six Months in Mexico.
In one report, she protested at the imprisonment of a local journalist
for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under
Porfirio Díaz. When the Mexican authorities learned of Bly's report,
they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to leave the country.
Safely home, she denounced Díaz as a tyrannical czar suppressing the
Mexican people and controlling the press.
Bly
left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 and headed for for New York City.
Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of
Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World, and took an undercover
assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports
of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's
Island.
After
a night of practicing deranged expressions in front of a mirror, she
checked into a boardinghouse. She refused to go to bed, telling the
other boarders that she was afraid of them and that they looked "crazy".
They soon decided that she was "crazy", and the next morning summoned
the police. Taken to a courtroom, she pretended to have amnesia. The
judge concluded she had been drugged.
She was then examined by several doctors, who all declared her to be insane. "Positively demented," said one, "I consider it a hopeless case. She needs to be put where someone will take care of her." The head of the insane pavilion at Bellevue Hospital pronounced her "undoubtedly insane". The case of the "pretty crazy girl" attracted media attention: "Who Is This Insane Girl?" asked the New York Sun. The New York Times wrote of the "mysterious waif" with the "wild, hunted look in her eyes", and her desperate cry: "I can't remember I can't remember."
Committed
to the asylum, Bly experienced its conditions first hand. The food
consisted of gruel broth, spoiled beef, bread that was little more than
dried dough, and dirty undrinkable water. The dangerous patients were
tied together with ropes. The patients were made to sit for much of each
day on hard benches with scant protection from the cold. Waste was all
around the eating places. Rats crawled all around the hospital. The
bathwater was frigid, and buckets of it were poured over their heads.
The nurses were obnoxious and abusive, telling the patients to shut up,
and beating them if they did not. Speaking with her fellow patients, Bly
was convinced that some were as sane as she was. On the effect of her
experiences, she wrote:
"What,
excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?
Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert
physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their
ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and
make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not
allow 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."
After ten days, Bly was released from the asylum at The World's behest. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House,
caused a sensation and brought her lasting fame. While embarrassed
physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had
been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions
at the asylum, inviting Bly to assist. The jury's report recommended
the changes she had proposed, and its call for increased funds for care
of the insane prompted an $850,000 increase in the budget of the
Department of Public Charities and Corrections. They also made sure that
future examinations were more thorough so that only the seriously ill
actually went to the asylum.
In
1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a
trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the
World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40
a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the
Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her
24,899-mile journey.
She
brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several
changes of underwear and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry
essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes
and gold in total as well as some American currency) in a bag tied
around her neck.
The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan
sponsored its own female reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time
of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. Bisland would travel the opposite way
around the world. To sustain interest in the story, the World organized a
“Nellie Bly Guessing Match” in which readers were asked to estimate
Bly’s arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at
first of (only) a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for
the trip.
On
her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where
she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo
(Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong,
and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the
electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports, though
longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and were thus often
delayed by several weeks.
Bly
travelled using steamships and the existing railroad systems, which
caused occasional setbacks, particularly on the Asian leg of her race.
During these stops, she visited a leper colony in China and she bought a
monkey in Singapore.
As
a result of rough weather on her Pacific crossing, she arrived in San
Francisco on the White Star Line ship Oceanic on January 21, two days
behind schedule. However, World owner Pulitzer chartered a private train
to bring her home, and she arrived back in New Jersey on January 25,
1890, at 3:51 p.m.
Seventy-two
days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken
departure, Nellie Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the
globe, traveling alone for almost the whole journey. Bisland was, at the
time, still crossing the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York four and a
half days later. Like Bly, she had missed a connection and had to board
a slow, old ship (the Bothina) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria).
Bly's journey was a world record, though it was bettered a few months
later by George Francis Train, who completed the journey in 67 days. By
1913, Andre Jaeger-Schmidt, Henry Frederick and John Henry Mears had
improved on the record, the latter completing the journey in less than
36 days.
In
1895 Nellie Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman, who was
40 years her senior. She retired from journalism, and became the
president of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel
containers such as milk cans and boilers.
In
1904, her husband died. In the same year, Iron Clad began manufacturing
the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon oil drum still in
widespread use in the United States. Although there have been claims
that Nellie Bly invented the barrel, the inventor is believed to have
been Henry Wehrhahn, who likely assigned his invention to her.
Nellie
Bly was, however, an inventor in her own right, receiving a US patents
for a novel milk can and stacking garbage can, both under her married
name of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. For a time she was one of the leading
female industrialists in the United States, but embezzlement by
employees led her into bankruptcy.
Back
in reporting, she wrote stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World
War I and notably covered the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913. Her
headline for the Parade story was “Suffragists Are Men's Superiors” but she also "with uncanny prescience" predicted in the story that it would be 1920 before women would win the vote.
In
1916 Nellie was given a baby boy whose mother requested Bly to look
after him and see that he become adopted. The child was illegitimate and
difficult to place since he was half-Japanese. He spent the next six
years in an orphanage run by the Church For All Nations in Manhattan.
As
Bly became ill towards the end of her life she requested that her
niece, Beatrice Brown, look after the boy and several other babies in
whom she had become interested. Her interest in orphanages may have been
part of her ongoing efforts to improve the social organizations of the
day.
She died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital in New York City, on January 27, 1922 at age 57.
She was interred in a modest grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
"I have never written a word that did not come from my heart. I never shall. "
Nelly Bly - The Evening-Journal; January 8, 1922
You can download free copies of some of Nellie Bly's books and read her Newspaper articles in full at www.nellieblyonline.com
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