Nellie Bly launched the stunt age in journalism in the late 19th century, an unusual role for a young unmarried woman.
As a 19-year-old reporter for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Elizabeth Cochrane took the pen name of Nellie Bly from an old Stephen Foster song, an obvious alias that had people guessing even when she was well into her career that she must be a man. Having a byline at all was rare.
The Dispatch sent her to Mexico where she spent six months sending back travelogue columns and secretly investigating missing Americans. In 1887 she headed for New York and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.
Nellie's introductory stunt to the New York reporting was perhaps more dangerous. She had herself committed to the insane asylum on Blackwell's Island.
Reports of mistreatment of inmates at Blackwell's drew Pulitzer’s interest. His editor, John Cockerill, helped Nellie to plan the assignment. There would be no contact between them once she entered the asylum. After ten days Pulitzer would find a way to get her out again. Nellie checked herself out of her boarding house, removed all identity, and checked herself into another boarding house as Nellie Brown. She began to throw fits before the other guests, screaming, crying, and in the morning the landlady called the police.
Three doctors examined her. Attendants took her clothes away, clipped her fingernails and took her on the ferry to Blackwell's Island.
At the asylum Nellie observed, and coped with the Blackwell nurses, most of whom were not qualified nurses. Some brutally teased and mistreated the inmates. Many female patients were not suffering mental illness but were placed there by their husbands to get rid of them. Some were immigrants, who did not speak English, and were mistakenly placed there because they could not make themselves understood.
Nellie had seized her fits once she was behind the asylum walls. She asked questions and watched the daily process of Blackwell. She was forced into an icy bath, and slapped and punched for her impudence.
On the tenth day of her imprisonment, Pulitzer arranged for release, and published her series of articles.
A formal investigation on Blackwell's Island commenced. Some officials were tried, some were fired, and an appropriation of $3 million was given to Blackwell's for improvements.
Nellie then proceeded to apply the same mixture of courage and acting ability to explore the corruption of the New York free clinic system, to pieces on Central Park mashers, suffragettes, and prostitutes. She found she could get a story where ever she could slip in unnoticed.
In November of 1889, she came out of the shadows into the limelight with a new stunt. Nellie Bly attempted to beat the mythical Phileas Fogg journey in Jules Verne book “Around the World in 80 Days.” She said she could make it in 75. Contests were launched, and The World published an Around the World with Nellie Bly game for the kids.
From New York to Southampton, to France to meet Verne, Nellie sent home cables and watched train schedules from Port Said, on to Malaya, to Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. She was impressed with signs of British colonialism everywhere she went.
From Japan, she sailed to San Francisco. Then by train to New Jersey, Nellie Bly was clocked in at 72 days six hours 10 minutes 11 seconds. At 25 years old, she a broke mythical record and set a real one of her own.
When she died in 1922, the New York World, in an unusual tribute, singled her out: “she was considered to be the best reporter in America.”
Sources:
Swanberg, W.H. Pulitzer (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons) 1967.
Fredeen, Charles. Nellie Bly - Daredevil Reporter (Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Co.) 2000
Rittenhouse, Mignon. The Amazing Nellie Bly (NY: EP Dutton & Co., Inc.) 1956.
