[This coming weekend we’ll celebrate the 160th birthday of one of my favorite Americans, Ida B. Wells. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of fellow investigative journalists, leading up to a special tribute to the inimitable Wells!]
On a
journalistic series that isn’t perfect, but is pretty darn impressive
nonetheless.
I’ve
written many times about my love for Fanny Fern, most especially in this Saturday
Evening Post tribute. In place
of the first paragraph here I’ll ask out to check that column out if you would,
and then come on back here for more on Fern’s most striking example of
investigative journalism.
Welcome
back! Toward the end of that column I mention Fern’s 1858 series
of columns on Blackwell’s Island, calling it a “long, imperfect but
important look at the forgotten women housed in that fraught space.” Imperfect
Fern’s Blackwell’s pieces certainly are—if we look for example at the one
hyperlinked above, which I believe was a follow-up reflection on the series
itself and which there is republished in her 1872
collection Caper-Sauce, we see
the way in which Fern consistently contrasts “our sons and our daughters” with
the women imprisoned at Blackwell’s (officially all convicted prostitutes,
although as I mention in my Sat Post
column that was a frustratingly capacious category). It’s certainly
understandable that she wouldn’t want to think of her own children as part of
such a category or community, and likewise that she imagines herself writing to
audiences in similar positions and with similar perspectives. But there’s no
reason to think that the women at Blackwell’s wouldn’t have the chance to read
Fern’s columns—and in any case and more importantly, there’s every reason to
remember that they are just as much “our daughters” as any other women.
But as I
hope every day on this blog (and everywhere else I write and talk and teach and
work and live) makes clear, I’m very much not in favor of making the perfect
the enemy of the good, and there is a great deal that is good about Fern’s
investigative journalistic series on Blackwell’s Island. Most especially, I would
reiterate something I also mentioned in my column—that by this time Fern was
already the highest paid newspaper
columnist in America (and had been for three years). I suppose you could
argue that that position gave Fern license to take risks, but in my experience
the opposite is much more often the case: that achieving success and stability
(especially after years of painful instability such as those Fern had
experienced) makes authors, artists, activists, all of us more likely to do
what we perceive as safe and smart enough to keep that position. Whereas Fanny
Fern, having experienced a multi-layered version of some of the worst of what
could happen to women in 1850s America (abuse, neglect, abandonment, widowhood,
single parenthood, extreme poverty, and more), decided to investigate a
community featuring women in even more desperate shape, women whom (as she
notes in that hyperlinked reflection, and more importantly demands that her
audience recognize) the rest of society was all too willing to ignore and forget.
Seems to me that’s a profoundly impressive and inspiring moment and way to use
investigative journalism indeed.
Next
journalist tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other investigative journalists you’d highlight?
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