Because the narrator in The New Colossus shared the same time and place as Nellie Bly, the reader was denied some interesting pieces of information. For instance, the city of “Pittsburg” was not misspelled. The “h” was not added until 1911—twenty-three years after the events in the story—in a community stab at respectability. A more omniscient narrator might have passed along the following:
Chapter One
Bellevue Hospital is the oldest hospital in the United States. George Washington was four years old when it was founded in 1736. Originally it was an alms house for the poor, and that remained its essential identity ever since, to the present day.
Nellie Bly’s investigative stories spawned the muckrakers of the early twentieth century and generations of investigative reporters thereafter. Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, I.F. Stone, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and dozens of others can all trace their roots directly to Nellie Bly and the scandal at the Bellevue Women’s Asylum.
Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Cochran, the favorite daughter of a well-to-do miller, Judge Michael Cochran, in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburg. Cochran’s first wife produced ten children but died shortly before the Civil War, and one year later he married a widow from nearby Kittanning, Mary Jane Hogan, and started a second family. That second family became the joy of his life and he pampered them to no end. He built the largest house ever seen in Apollo ten miles away, moved Mary Jane and their three young children there, and provided them with servants, a governess, and a cook. But Michael Cochran was a judge in name only, and his ignorance of the law proved calamitous to his second family when he died suddenly of heart failure, just after Elizabeth turned seven. Cochran left no will, and under the rules of intestacy at the time, none of a man’s property went to his widow—his entire estate was to be divided among his children. (The law in its infinite wisdom assumed that a man’s children would take care of his widow.) The children from Cochran’s first wife, however, were well into adulthood and insisted upon selling the Apollo home even though their father had clearly wanted his new family to live there. The proceeds of the sale were divided among the sixteen children, and little Elizabeth, her mother, and three young siblings were forced to move into a tenement in town with Mary Jane’s drunken sister, Lucy. The young children’s inheritance might have buffeted the transition, but the court placed it in trust with a local banker, Colonel Thaddeus Jackson, who embezzled the money and eventually filed for bankruptcy. The inheritance money meant for Elizabeth and her siblings was gone. Mary Jane and the children became penniless.
At the Dispatch, Nellie produced exposés on a half dozen Pittsburg factories, most notably a Squirt bottling plant where women and children worked on icy cement floors for fourteen hours at a stretch and wrapped rags around their feet to keep their toes from freezing. Her stories generated outrage from Dispatch readers and she developed a strong following—too strong, as it turned out, when the companies threatened to pull all advertising from the paper. The Dispatch editor-in-chief, so glad to have her initially, reassigned her to gardening and fashion stories, and refused to let her work on any more investigative pieces. At that point, she quit her job and moved with her mother to New York.
The Bellevue Asylum story was not the first story Nellie wrote in New York. After four months of getting nowhere on the job front, she hit upon an idea. She informed her Dispatch readers that she had received a letter from an “ambitious young woman who wanted to be a journalist and wanted to know if New York was the best place to start.” She decided “to put the question to the newspaper gods of Gotham” and, as a reporter doing a reverential story for an out-of-town paper, was able to get around the guards and interview the powers that be in the New York newspaper world. She delivered a piece that pulled no punches. The publishing lords of New York were portrayed as arrogant and disdainful—“I cannot imagine a gentleman in all delicacy asking a woman to have anything to do with the normal class of news,” averred James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the Herald’s publisher. The story was such a compelling read—and New York and its financial and cultural power so thoroughly resented across the nation—that the piece was reprinted in newspapers and periodicals in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and elsewhere around the country. Excerpts of her interviews were even reprinted in The New York Mail and Express, where Nellie was hailed with customary condescension as “a bright and talented young woman who has done a great deal for the nation’s newspapers.”
But public embarrassment failed to move the publishers. Still no offers or even inquiries came her way. A less determined person would have slunk back to Pittsburg and spent twenty years writing gardening stories at subsistence wages. Instead Nellie Bly went to every sentry along Newspaper Row, showed him the Mail and Express article, pointed to where his boss was quoted by name and demanded to see the editor. Only Colonel John Cockerill, managing editor of the World, would see her.
Chapter Three
No doctor was a true cancer specialist in 1887. The scientific means of investigating the disease, aside from the invention of the microscope in the 1830s, simply weren’t available. Theories on cancer ranged from transmission through the bloodstream to the dominant explanation for all disease in the nineteenth-century—miasma, dirty particles that carried disease through the atmosphere. Nevertheless many who feared a diagnosis of cancer sought out the physicians at New York Cancer Hospital. Those doctors may not have known much about the disease, but most patients didn’t realize that.
Meeting a doctor at a hospital or an office was unusual in the 1880s. Doctors ordinarily visited patients at their homes. In fact, the notion of “doctor” itself was far different in the 1880s from a century later. State licensing of the medical profession, for instance, did not begin until the early twentieth century. Anyone so inclined could call himself or herself a doctor, beholden to no one other than the marketplace.
“Barker listened intently with only his ear, using no stethoscope.” Though the stethoscope had been invented decades earlier, it did not gain wide use until the early twentieth century.
Chapter Four
Out-of-wedlock trysts do not fit the image of Victorian morals, yet they were much more commonplace than people realized even at the time. Part of the explanation, of course, is massive self-deception. The prevailing view in academic circles, for instance, was that women had no interest in sex. “The majority of women (happily for them),” wrote the revered Dr. William Acton in the mid-1860s, “are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind … No nervous or feeble young man need, therefore, be deterred from marriage by an exaggerated notion of the duties required of him.” Women’s aversion to sex was thought to be so fundamental that the law in England guaranteed a man access to his wife’s body whether she desired it or not.
In fact, however, free love societies were very much a part of women’s intellectual landscape in the 1880s. Although modern history books tend to focus on suffrage, for many women the more pressing issue was the disparate treatment with sexual behavior. Susan B. Anthony, the legendary founder of the women’s suffrage movement, argued that for the sake of a healthy society, men should be forced to adhere to the same moral standards as women. Victoria Woodhull, who with her sister published the Woodhull and Claflin Weekly with the masthead “PROGRESS! FREE THOUGHT! UNTRAMMELED LIVES!”, took it a step further, proclaiming that women should “live with the complete sexual freedom that men enjoy.” The subject of numerous liaisons in the New York papers, Woodhull pronounced that it was her “inalienable right” to have as many lovers as she pleased, and she did her level best to meet to that standard. Though some, including the conservative Mrs. Anthony, were horrified at such a display of lax morals, it struck a chord with many younger women, especially those who, like Nellie, ventured out on their own into the working world.
Alan Dale, as the critic James Huneker once observed, founded “the school of literary criticism based on the flippant remark.” Critics around the country and in succeeding generations sought to match him, but none ever could. Dorothy Parker came the closest, offering such Dale-like bon mots as, “The House Beautiful is the play lousy.” In 1895, William Randolph Hearst hired Dale away from the World to the New York American and made him the leading critic in America for the next nineteen years, until Dale resigned because he “did not want to be part of an era of commercialism in journalism,” after Hearst agreed to a writer’s request for a different American critic to review his play.
When people think of immigrants from Europe arriving in America, they usually think of Ellis Island, and well they should. Before it closed in 1954, twelve million immigrants had entered America through the federal processing center at Ellis Island, adjacent to the Statue of Liberty. But Ellis Island did not come into existence until 1892. Before then the main port of entry for European immigrants coming to America was Castle Garden, in Battery Park.
Originally erected as Fort Clinton to protect the harbor back in the 1600s when New York was New Amsterdam, and then serving as the largest theater in New York in the 1830s and 1840s, Castle Garden became the arrival point for eight million immigrants from 1855 to 1890—about the same yearly influx as Ellis Island. But unlike Ellis Island, all the immigrants who arrived at Castle Garden were free to walk off the boat and into the New World without permission from any immigration officers.
The scale of the Jewish exodus from Russia exceeded the Hebrews leaving Egypt in Moses’ time and matched European Jews fleeing the Nazis fifty years later. Three million Jews lived in Russia and Poland in 1880, and one million of them took flight to the West following Alexander II’s death.
Chapter Six
There is actually more to the story of Mrs. Astor and the Metropolitan Opera House. With her sycophantic ferret from Savannah, Ward McAllister, she developed “Mrs. Astor’s 400,” a list of the families blessed enough to be invited to her annual ball at her mansion at Thirty-Fourth and Fifth Avenue, and whose own invitations she might descend from her lofty perch to accept. Mrs. Astor and her 400, as mentioned, had no use for the nouveau riche of nineteenth century New York, lowlifes such as the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Rockefellers, and anyone else who made their fortunes through the world of business.
But after the Met opened to great success, Mrs. Vanderbilt was still not satisfied. She wanted more than victory, she wanted surrender: an invitation to Mrs. Astor’s yearly ball, the true acknowledgement of one’s rightful place in New York society. It was Mrs. Astor’s last line of good taste, one she vowed to defend to the death. Alas, she underestimated Mrs. Vanderbilt’s resourcefulness. Three months after the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House, Mrs. Vanderbilt planned a $3 million masquerade ball to celebrate her newly constructed French chateau on Fifth Avenue, but she failed to extend an invitation to Mrs. Astor’s daughter Caroline. Young Caroline was terribly hurt and demanded to know (through an intermediary, of course) why she had not been invited.
Mrs. Vanderbilt responded, “Why, I don’t know her mother.” Caroline begged her mother to go calling on Mrs. Vanderbilt; it would be dreadful, unacceptable, to miss the Vanderbilt ball. Mrs. Astor, good mother that she was, swallowed hard and called on Mrs. Vanderbilt with an invitation to her annual January ball. Mrs. Vanderbilt graciously accepted, and invited both mother and daughter to her masquerade ball. A precedent was shattered, the nouveau riche flooded New York society, and Mrs. Astor’s role as doyeness faded away into history.
Chapter Seven
Laboratories as we know them today did not even come into existence until the early twentieth century. The lab Nellie and Ingram saw was state of the art for the time: Bunsen Burners (invented thirty years before), thick glass beakers and flasks made of blown glass (pyrex would not be invented for another thirty years), electric lights, and copper piping (the Anaconda copper mine had begun producing at an incredible rate only eight years before).
Chapter Eight
The law of defamation in 1888 was far different from what it would become. From the mid-twentieth century forward, America has prized freedom of speech above all else. The era was defined by New York Times v. Sullivan, where the Supreme Court held that a newspaper was free to write whatever it wanted about a public figure, no matter how damaging, as long as it wasn’t a deliberate lie. Eventually that principle was expanded to any matter of public interest—write whatever you please, as long as you believe it is the truth. But Colonial and nineteenth century America were less concerned with speech and much more concerned with reputation. A man’s most valuable commodity was his reputation, and besmirching him was tantamount to ruining him. (A woman’s reputation, while also important, was a less complicated matter: question a woman’s chastity and you went to jail, paid financial damages, or lost your life in a duel.) In a land based on opportunity and second chances, an attack on a man’s reputation was an attack on America itself. In fact, in the early-1800s a person could be thrown into jail for harming a man’s reputation even if the statements made were entirely truthful. Gradually, though, freedom of speech became more valued by American society, newspapers became more powerful politically, and by 1850 truth had become a valid defense in criminal defamation cases—you could no longer be thrown in jail for telling the truth. But Cockerill was rightly concerned with the World’s legal exposure: in 1888 no court was yet willing to say that a newspaper publishing a hard-hitting but accurate story would be protected from libel damages in court. That would not come for another thirty years.
The men Nellie was impugning, Barker and DeKay, were from the strata of society that defamation laws were meant to protect: powerful men, professional men, respectable men.
Chapter Nine
Suicide was very much a mystery in the nineteenth century. Most people didn’t live long enough to take their own lives. For the upper classes, the life expectancy was fifty for the landed gentry, forty-five in manufacturing areas. For everyone else, no matter where they lived, it was under thirty. Like deficit spending or the makeup of prison populations in more modern times, everyone had strongly held theories on the causes of suicide but remarkably little evidence to support them. In the 1880s there was no real understanding or even acknowledgement of mental illness. Suicide was simply the sign of a troubled soul.
Although Gould’s building at Eighth and Twenty-Third was garish, his own offices were modest, almost stately. The building had been chosen by Gould’s more flamboyant partner, James Fisk, in order to be closer to his mistress, the actress and singer Josie Mansfield. Fisk’s affair with Mansfield would eventually lead to his murder by one of Mansfield’s many lovers, Edward S. Stokes, who schemed with Mansfield to extort money from Fisk by threatening to make public Fisk’s affair with her.
Chapter Ten
A hundred years later, the outcome of Nellie’s lawsuit would be clear-cut. The bank would have to pay Nellie and her sisters all the money lost through its employee’s malfeasance, plus interest, plus punitive damages. The embezzler would have gone to jail for at least seven years. Mary Jane would have been entitled to 50 percent of Judge Cochran’s entire estate, no matter what the children of his first wife said or did. And Mary Jane and her children would have been represented by an attorney well-versed in the laws of wills and estates, who would have won a substantial verdict, large enough for all of them to live comfortably for a long, long time.
In 1888, however, the outcome was far less certain. Mary Jane, as a widow, would have no legal claim, and Nellie, unable to afford a lawyer, would have to represent herself and her sisters in court, which would pose quite a challenge since women were not allowed to serve as lawyers or jurors. The case would be before a judge who was a part-time lawyer and frequently employed by the First Pennsylvania Bank. The judge would undoubtedly know Colonel Jackson and want to protect his reputation. (Colonel Jackson was a leading citizen of Apollo and had commanded the Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves in the Civil War.) And even though he was its president at the time, the bank would deny all financial responsibility for the actions of Colonel Jackson, and under state agency law they would have a strong case.
Originally the Constitution of 1789 had made no provision for a jury trial in civil or criminal cases, an omission that provoked outrage and threatened ratification. The right to a trial by jury in criminal cases had been part of English law since the Magna Carta in 1215, and a constitutional guarantee to that right was quickly made part of the first ten amendments, with little resistance. But the right to a jury trial in civil cases (that is, when the issue is money damages) had no such precedent. In order to maintain commerce with English merchants (the States’ primary trading partners), the framers took pains to assure those merchants their contracts would be enforced in American courts. But local farmers and merchants, mistrustful of the plantation-owning framers and fearing that judges would become tools of wealthy creditors, insisted on a right to a jury before their peers in civil cases, and that led to the Seventh Amendment.
By no means was it clear that Nellie’s case would even be heard by a jury. Although the Seventh Amendment explicitly guaranteed a litigant’s right to a jury trial in civil cases, the Supreme Court in 1805 had drastically narrowed that right as to render it almost meaningless. Under a legal doctrine that continues into the twenty-first century, a litigant was entitled to the Seventh Amendment right to a civil jury trial only if an analogous case in 1791 would have been tried by a jury. Otherwise the case would remain with the judge, a part-time lawyer whose bias and interests would almost always be with the wealthier party.
Chapter Twelve
Hilton’s house outside of Saratoga Springs would eventually become the campus for Skidmore College.
Chapter Fourteen
Nellie asked herself who visited Emma frequently those last three months. The most natural step for future generations, of course (pre-Google), would be to pore over the obituary tributes to Emma in a large library and see who was at her bedside. But although New York City had passed Paris in population and was second only to London as the world’s largest city, it had no libraries in 1888 other than the private collections of Henry Clay Frick and J.P. Morgan. The New York Public Library would not open for another twenty-three years. (The first public library in the United States had opened in Boston forty years before, in 1848.) Information that would be at one’s fingertips in later times was essentially inaccessible to Nellie. Her only hope was the World’s archives.
Chapter Seventeen
The full correspondence between Moses Seixas (Emma Lazarus’s great-great-uncle and the founder of the first synagogue in America) and George Washington is set out here:
The letter from Moses Seixas to President George Washington
To the President of the United States of America. Sir:
Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits — and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to NewPort.
With pleasure we reflect on those days — those days of difficulty, and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword, — shielded Your head in the day of battle: — and we rejoice to think, that the same Spirit, who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest, upon you, enabling you to discharge the arduous duties of Chief Magistrate in these States.
Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People — a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: — deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine: — This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual confidence and Public Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the Armies of Heaven, and among the Inhabitants of the Earth, doing whatever seemeth him good.
For all these Blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days, the great preserver of Men — beseeching him, that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised Land, may graciously conduct you through all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life: — And, when, like Joshua full of days and full of honour, you are gathered to your Fathers, may you be admitted into the Heavenly Paradise to partake of the water of life, and the tree of immortality.
Done and Signed by order of the Hebrew Congregation in NewPort, Rhode Island August 17th 1790.
Moses Seixas, Warden
The letter from George Washington in response to Moses Seixas
To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island. Gentlemen,
While I receive, with much satisfaction, your Address replete with expressions of affection and esteem; I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you, that I shall always retain a grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced in my visit to Newport, from all classes of Citizens.
The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet, from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security. If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and happy people.
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity.
May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.
G. Washington
Chapter Eighteen
On a map Long Island looks like a pitchfork with two prongs facing east. The northernmost prong, stretching out to Orient Point, has more rugged terrain, rockier shorelines, and fewer people. The southern prong, with Sag Harbor and the beaches of the Hamptons, is more inviting and was settled more quickly. But in the 1880s, except for a few fishermen here and there, most of the population of Long Island lived in the western part, a spillover from the contiguous Brooklyn and Queens. Or rather, most of the white population lived there. Native Americans had settled throughout the territory.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lesbian relations were simply not the first explanation one thought of regarding an unmarried, wealthy, brilliant, charismatic thirty-eight-year-old woman in nineteenth-century America. Female homosexuality was unimaginable for most of the nineteenth century, as women, according to prevailing thought, had no sexual impulses. In fact, after British moralists sought to make lesbian activity a crime in the 1870s, Queen Victoria declined to go along with such a condemnation because she refused to believe that female homosexuality even existed. But it did exist, of course, and nineteenth-century American and British society were at a loss to explain its presence. At first it was dismissed as a practice limited to prostitutes, but with the increasing presence of lesbian couples on city streets, that explanation was obviously insufficient. Instead, in an era uncomfortable with the notion of a female sex drive, lesbians were deemed to be “no longer women, but usurpers of masculine roles who have become desexualized.” Unfortunately, the empirical reality meant that an inordinate number of males, far too many, were being usurped in their masculine roles. Consequently, many reactionary males sought to outlaw lesbian activity altogether, making it a crime for a woman even to dress as a man. That helped normalize the streets and put men at ease, but financially-able women simply went behind closed doors and lived together in what was called a “Boston Marriage.” (The term originated with the wife of Jay Gould’s philandering business partner, James Fisk. While Fisk chased women all over New York City, his wife lived for twenty years with a female companion in Boston.) Finally, with the criminal sanction unable to rid society of the moral pestilence, society began labeling lesbian activity a “mental illness.” Anyone who felt “abnormal” emotions, that is, an attraction for the same sex, was deemed “sick,” and in the 1880s the term “homosexual,” to describe a poor soul thus abnormally afflicted, came into being.
Chapter Twenty-Three
During the 1888 election, voters in Indiana were paid $15 if they voted Republican. That would be equivalent to $366 in 2014 dollars.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Prior to the Civil War an artist’s personal studio was essentially the great outdoors, but by the 1880s many artists, especially in New York City, had moved their day-to-day work inside. The studio became both a space to produce the art and a gathering place to display it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Regarding the stench and garbage in New York City, it was not until 1898 that the Metropolitan Board of Health issued a proclamation forbidding “the throwing of dead animals, garbage or ashes into the streets.” At the time, cholera and diphtheria epidemics were commonplace. Five thousand people died from a cholera epidemic in 1881 alone. When word arrived of an epidemic in New York, the rich would clear out of the city until the danger had passed, while the poor remained and hoped for the best.
Chapter Thirty
Since the 1950s heart disease has become the number one killer in the United States, due mostly to a more sedentary lifestyle and richer diet. But in the 1880s the leading causes of death were from communicable diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea.
Heart disease was ranked only number four. But some heart disease occurs no matter what the era, and that was the case with Ingram. A case of rubella during his mother’s first trimester had narrowed the valves in his heart and impeded the blood flow. Twenty years later, he might have had an electrocardiograph that would have alerted him to the condition; thirty years later it could have been treated with medication; and fifty years later cardiologists would have made it as good as new. But in the 1880s, doctors had no idea how to detect or prevent a heart attack. Ingram was entirely at the mercy of his defective heart.
A hundred years later, the steps for helping a heart attack victim were well-known: put them in a comfortable position. Place aspirin or nitroglycerin under their tongue. Get help immediately—time is absolutely of the essence. Position them in as stable position as possible on the ride to the hospital. Give them oxygen. Administer CPR if their heart fails. Nellie, of course, knew none of those things, nor did anyone else at the time. She just wanted Ingram to get to the hospital as fast as possible. But the fastest route to the hospital was over cobblestone roads, with multiple turns that shifted the ambulance carriage from side to side and almost turned it over. That alone would have killed most heart attack victims.