Nellie Bly

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Nellie Bly
Image:Nellie Bly 2.jpg
Nellie Bly in 1890
BornMay 5, 1864
Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania
DiedJanuary 27, 1922
New York City, New York
OccupationJournalist, author
SpouseRobert L. Seaman

Nellie Bly (May 5, 1864 – January 27, 1922) was an American journalist, author, industrialist, and charity worker. She is most famous for her record-breaking trip around the world, but perhaps her most important contribution to society was as an undercover exposé in which she feigned insanity to study a mental institution from within.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Nelly Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, which she later spelled Cochrane, adding the 'e' for sophistication and was nicknamed "Pink" for the color of clothes her mother dressed her in, although she preferred black. She was born on May 5, 1864[1] in Cochran's Mills, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, forty miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Her father, Michael Cochran (May 22, 1810 to July 19, 1870), a wealthy judge, died when she was only six years old. Michael Cochran's estate was distributed among the nine living adult children from his first marriage to the late Catherine Murphy and his widow Mary Jane Kennedy Cochran and her children. Nellie Bly's mother remarried three years later, but sued for divorce when Nellie was fourteen and Nellie testified in court against her drunken, violent stepfather, signing her testimony under "Pink" E.J. Cochrane. She attended boarding school for one term, but dropped out for financial reasons, not health concerns as she initially stated (probably out of embarrassment).

In 1880, Nellie and family moved to Pittsburgh. A sexist column in the Pittsburgh Dispatch prompted her to write a fiery rebuttal to the editor. Impressed with her earnestness and spirit, he asked her to join the paper. Female newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names, and the editor chose "Nellie Bly", the title character in a popular song by Stephen Foster, "Nelly Bly".

Bly focused her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on female factory workers. But editorial pressure pushed her to the women's pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for female journalists of the day. Impatient with these duties, she took the initiative and traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent.

Then just 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 the incarceration of a local journalist imprisoned for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When 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.

[edit] Asylum exposé

Burdened again with theater and arts reporting, Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 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.[2]

After a night of practicing deranged expressions in front of a mirror, she checked into a working-class boardinghouse. Nellie faked a German accent and gave herself a false name. She refused to go to bed, telling the boarders that she was afraid of them, that they looked crazy, and told the housekeeper that they were trying to kill her. 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 some one will take care of her."[3] 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."[4]

Committed to the Blackwell's Island Insane Asylum, Bly experienced its conditions firsthand. The food—gruel broth, spoiled meat, bread that was little more than dried dough—she found inedible. The inmates were made to sit for much of each day on hard benches with scant protection from the cold. The bathwater was frigid, and buckets of it were poured over their heads. They were then told to stand in a line to drip-dry. The nurses were rude and abusive, telling the patients to shut up and beating them if they did not. Speaking with her fellow residents, 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.[3]

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.

[edit] Around the world

Image:Nelliebly.jpg
Nellie Bly in her traveling clothes, 1890

In 1888, Nellie suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, mimicking Jules Verne's book Around the World in Eighty Days. Finally, a year later, on November 14, 1889 she left New York on her 24,899 mile journey.

"Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure" (January 25, 1890) Nellie arrived in New York. At the time this was a world record for circling the earth, though it was bested a few months later by George Francis Train, who completed the journey in 67 days.

On her travels around the world, she went through England, France, Italy, the Suez Canal, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and Japan, among other places. While in France, she visited Jules Verne's home. Traveling unaccompanied by a man, she became a role model of independence for women everywhere. Her book about the trip, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, became a best seller.

[edit] Later years

Nellie Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman in 1894, who at 72 was forty-four 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. She invented and patented six items, including three utility patents for trash cans, two for milk cans, and one design patent for a stand.

Her husband died in 1904, whereupon she took over management of the company. For a time she was one of the leading women industrialists in the United States, but mismanagement forced her into bankruptcy. Returning to reporting, she covered such events as the women's suffrage convention in 1913, and stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World War I.

In 1916 Nellie was given a baby boy whose mother requested that Nellie 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 of All Nations in Manhattan.

As Nellie became ill towards the end of her life she requested her niece, Beatrice Brown, to look after the boy and several other babies that she had become interested in. 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 in 1922, at age 57.

[edit] Legacy

Image:Nellieblyusstamp.jpg
Nellie Bly U.S postage stamp

[edit] Patents

(Filed as Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman.)

[edit] References

  • Bly, Nellie (1887). Ten Days in a Mad-House.
  • Kroeger, Brooke (1994). Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Kroeger 1994 reports (p. 529) that although a birth year of 1867 was deduced from the age Bly claimed to be at the height of her popularity, her baptismal record confirms 1864.
  2. ^ Ken Silverstein. "Undercover, under fire", LA Times, June 30, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-07-01. 
  3. ^ a b Bly 1887.
  4. ^ Kroeger 1994, pp. 91–92.
  5. ^ "After the poorly received Nellie Bly (1946) ... [stage director Edgar J.] MacGregor retired.", musicals101.com
  6. ^ USPS Press Release (September 14, 2002), Four Accomplished Journalists Honored on U.S. Postage Stamps, usps.com

[edit] External links

Sources

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