Nellie Bly & Stunt Journalism

Born in 1864, Nellie Bly wasn't your average journalist -- in fact, 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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History class from how
Stuff 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

(00:21):
like her as much as we do. I think she's
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 was feigning insanity
in order to be committed to a notorious asylum, something
I would not do as the health editor, a fellow
journalist from a competing paper picked up on the story,

(00:44):
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 a interesting story. Indeed,
we'd have to agree Nellie Bly pioneered the era of

(01:06):
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

(01:27):
Nellie Bly. Yeah. She starts off writing for five dollars
a week and at the pinnacle of her career she's
making twenty five thousand dollars a year, which is big
money at the time. So we're going to start at
the beginning, as we always do with our heroines. Childhood.
Elizabeth Jane Cochrane was born May fifth, eighteen sixty four
in Cochrane's Mills, Pennsylvania, and her father was a Cochrane himself,

(01:52):
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 earns her the nickname Being

(02:15):
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 not much anyways to
be split between fifteen children, so his estate is auctioned

(02:38):
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 ends up testifying
at their eventual divorce trial. Her brothers ended up being

(03:01):
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 Pittsburgh with her mother,
where she helped run a boarding house. And Pittsburgh is

(03:22):
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 was the most amazing way
to get a job. She sends an angry, anonymous letter
to the editor of the paper in response to an
editorial by the Quiet Observer Erasmus Wilson, who had written

(03:44):
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 Pain because she knew that some
women didn't have a choice but to work. Uh, you know,

(04:04):
she was an example of this herself. And I 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, And
the managing editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch was George Madden,

(04:27):
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 asking that
she come forward and she came to the office the
next day and got her job as a cover boarder,
and appropriately enough, her first article is a response to
Wilson's editorial Yeah, and She goes on to cover topics

(04:48):
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 or porter. 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

(05:10):
she's not well trained, she's good and she's interesting. Madden
and ms Cochrane decide that she needed a nombed 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 awry and

(05:32):
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. From eighteen

(05:53):
eighties six to eighteen eighties seven, she traveled through Mexico
doing quote unquote real journalism. She wrote about corruption, the
conditions of the poor, details about the food, what bull
fights 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

(06:15):
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 blig. She's
got to be the best. So she arrives in New

(06:36):
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

(06:57):
with him, she doesn't waste any time. Immediately said us
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,

(07:18):
so 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 so much easier, but uh Nellie bliges
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

(07:41):
called ten Days in a Madhouse. And we want to
say that Jean Marie Louts article on girls stunt reporting
for American Quarterly was really helpful in researching this part
of the podcast. Yeah, and actually tex Stuffs Chris Palette
was a huge help in actually obtaining the article using
his magic library skills, and like his magic skills, thank
you to Chris. It's a little background on Black Wells.

(08:04):
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

(08:26):
it was a pretty comfortable, fair and clean place, but
you can only imagine what's the official tours. 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 in journalism,

(08:49):
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 p fessionals 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

(09:10):
female journalist. 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. She acts irrationally.

(09:30):
She stays up all night. She's kicked out in the morning,
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

(09:51):
calls herself Nellie Murraino and pretends to speak Spanish, sort
of trying to play into prejudices against emigrant 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,

(10:12):
who the professional bit is certainly called into question by
what she runs into. The doctor who examines her assumes
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

(10:34):
of her end quote. But interestingly, as soon as she's
in the ward, she doesn't even bother feigning insanity anymore.
She just acts like her regular old self, she writes,
Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and
acted the crazier I was thought to be. And she's
these really terrible things Inside of Blackwells Asylum. She sees

(10:56):
people forced to eat meals, rotten food, beatings, and ice baths,
and she describes her own ice bath pretty memorably. She says,
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.

(11:17):
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
me of that 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

(11:40):
that happens in here. But this is a risky stunt
for Nelly too, Aside from just being forced to take
ice baths, Female insanity, especially hysteria, which is what she
was trying to imitate, was often conflated with nymphamania at
the time, which would expose female patients to abuse from
people with in the hospital. Even the ambulance driver who

(12:03):
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 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

(12:25):
an attorney to rescue her. We were wondering just telling
that too, like, you know, where is that Nellie? I
imagine getting back from lunch or something and being like,
she's been God for a while. We should we should
cold 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

(12:47):
byline becomes a headline for the next Teeth and it
actually results in some social changes. There's a grand jury
investigation of the asylum, 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,

(13:09):
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 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 firsthand investigative accounts. Will

(13:30):
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, 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

(13:51):
of poverty in the model workingman's down 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 of related stunt. She poses as an unwin
mother to expose baby buying, and poses as a thief

(14:12):
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, Nellie blind
narrowly escapes having her tomsels amputated. She goes to a

(14:33):
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 tonseil 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, I think pathologically to get a story, but

(14:54):
I won't give up half a tonsil. Listen to us
all I would draw the line there the price of ournalism.
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
class mores is really popular. Yeah, and the New York World,

(15:19):
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. They don't want to have all of
these superstar and then you get to pay on the
stunt reporters exactly. Um, so they decide to call everybody
else who's not Nellie Bligh, Meg merrileth and by eliminating

(15:41):
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 past the early So
while the Madhouse piece is what makes Nelly Blyi so famous,

(16:05):
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 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 Burne's hero and around the world in eighty days. Yeah.
At this point she kind of reminds me not only

(16:26):
of Brendon's starr, but also Carmens in Diego. So Pulitzer
plans on sending a man, but Blin says that she'll
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

(16:49):
bit of American money which was really more of an
experiment to see if other countries accepted American money, and
a twenty four hour watch, and a huge jar of
cold cream which I think it's 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

(17:10):
were 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, that
the world has to resort to promoting the stunt. However
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

(17:31):
million entries. Yeah, they basically try to keep it in
the paper anyway they can. And Blind meanwhile is traveling
by ship train, rickshaw Borough catamaran and another girl stunt
reporter joins in to this quest. I guess Cosmopolitans Elizabeth
Bisland and she tries to compete unsuccessfully, but it just

(17:55):
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 with Jules
Verne at his home in France. I wish you 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

(18:16):
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 Words podcast We're Very Sorry,
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,

(18:36):
I would rather go back to New York did 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
and she hears that there might be a smallpox quarantine
on her ship, so she jumps overboard onto a tug

(18:57):
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,
six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds, two bands, parades,

(19:19):
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
in eighteen nine, but despite her huge success with this

(19:40):
stunt and the huge success it brings the paper, she's
not even given a bonus, so she resigns to kind
of check in disgust. World bosses eventually agree to treat
her more respectfully and pay her better, and so she
returns in eight to do more work on women's rights.
Funwed mothers uh some interesting and influential interviews too. She

(20:05):
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
Houdini mentions they're all connected to people. She also covered
the Pullman strike from the perspective of the strikers, which

(20:26):
she's the only journalist to do that. That's pretty cool,
thanks Nellie Bligh. 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 Barrel Company and the Ironclad Manufacturing Company. It's quite
a name, isn't it um? So he leaves her his

(20:48):
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. There's a lot of litigation. The company goes
through bankruptcy and she loses the fortune. She ends up

(21:10):
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 Nellie Bly, it's an opportunity to
do some some journalistic work. She starts reporting through nineteen
nineteen and goes home when her mother's health began to fail.

(21:34):
In nineteen twenty, she joined the New York Journal, and
she died of pneumonia January nineteen two in New York City,
and her obituary was over all the New York papers.
And I think we're going to close this one with
one more quote from Nellie Bly herself. She wrote shortly
before her death, if one would become great, two things

(21:55):
are absolutely necessary. The first is to know yourself. The
second is not to let the world know you. So
while we don't think Nellie Bligh would have approved of
social media, we do you should come follow us on
Twitter at missed in History, and we'd like to point
you to a pretty cool article that goes back to
her mad house days called top ten instances of medical

(22:17):
quackery throughout History. I edited that one. I can tell
you it's good, and you can find that if you
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