[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
rightly famous work of investigative journalism, and another that should also
be.
Yesterday’s
subject, Fanny Fern, arrived at Blackwell’s Island (literally and as a subject
for her journalism) long after she was well-established as a successful
columnist—as I argued in that post, that timing only adds to the series’
impressiveness, but it does also mean that Fern was by no means an
investigative journalist in her career overall (and never would have defined
herself as such). Whereas when Nellie
Bly (the pseudonym for Elizabeth
Jane Cochran; 1864-1922) published her own sensational (in every sense) 1887
series about the Island, she had already been producing substantive
investigative journalism for many years, since she was just a hugely precocious
young writer submitting columns to the Pittsburgh Dispatch on controversial topics like the need for
divorce reform. Bly published her groundbreaking first column for the Dispatch, “The
Girl Puzzle” (1885), when she was just 20 years old, launching a career in
provocative and investigative journalism that would change the industry and America
alike.
When the Dispatch tried to limit Bly’s columns to
more conventionally “women’s” subjects like theater and the arts, she left
the newspaper and the city, moving to New York and talking her way into a
job with Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York World. She did so by
making the case for the truly groundbreaking investigative assignment that
would become her justifiably famous series
on the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island (which had been renamed
Roosevelt Island). Fern visited Blackwell’s and wrote thoughtfully about what
she saw there, but Bly found a way to truly live the experience: going
undercover, first in a boarding house where she convinced the authorities
she was insane, then for a ten-day
imprisonment at the asylum (before the World
reached out to identify her and request her release). She published her
reporting first in the World in
October 1887 and shortly thereafter as the book Ten
Days in a Mad-House (1887), and in both forms her investigations and
journalism alike truly altered the way America thought about mental illness,
public health, and women’s rights—as well as about the possibilities for women
journalists and all journalists.
If Bly’s
asylum work was her only investigative journalism, it would be more than enough
to establish her as a titan in that field—but it wasn’t, and indeed despite her
youth it wasn’t her first extended such assignment. Shortly after she began
writing for the Dispatch her
published a series of investigative reports on women
factory workers in the city; they were significant enough that factory
owners complained to the paper and Bly was reassigned. She then embarked on an
extended investigation that, to my mind, was at least as impressive as the
asylum one: the 21 year-old Bly traveled to Mexico
and spent six months embedded with locals, producing in-depth reporting on
their communities as well as the dictatorial government of Porfirio Díaz. The
latter reports angered the government sufficiently that Bly was forced to
leave, but not before she had accumulated enough investigative journalism to
publish in the subsequent book Six
Months in Mexico (1888). I’m not in any way trying to downplay the
asylum work by suggesting that this Mexican project was just as impressive—quite
the opposite, I would argue that both represented the best of investigative journalism,
of a courageous writer pushing into settings and stories that many of her
colleagues and audiences alike never would, and changing our collective conversations
in the process.
Next
journalist tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other investigative journalists you’d highlight?
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