Nellie Bly

Elizabeth Jane Cochran was born outside Pittsburgh, PA in 1864, and grew up during the final days of the Civil War on some shitty farm with her fourteen brothers and sisters.  In 1880, at the age of 16, she read a newspaper article that pissed her off, and her response to that article kicked off a career that would result in three books, thousands of newspaper articles, a job working for Joseph Pulitzer, and the world record for fastest circumnavigation of the globe.  She faked insanity to infiltrate America's most notorious insane asylum and write an exposé about it, barely avoided execution by the Mexican government for talking too much shit about their horrifying tyrannical dictator, was arrested as a spy while reporting from the front lines of World War One, and, weirdly, invented those 55-gallon oil drums that are still used by petroleum companies and Mafia enforcers to this day.

Meet Nelly Bly – one of the most widely-read investigative journalists of post-Civil War America, and a woman who literally volunteered to be tortured in a creepy-ass mental institution solely so that she could write a badass article that would bring down that entire corrupt system by itself.

The story starts in 1880, when Elizabeth Cochran is 16 years old, and one day she reads some bullshit article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch called "What Girls Are Good For," with the TL;DR of the article being basically just "make babies".  Cochran got pretty righteously pissed about this, but since this was back in the days before you could just post screenshots of other peoples' Twitter posts on your Facebook feed with a few rolling-eye emojis for emphasis and then spend the rest of the day in smug satisfaction that you've pretty much just single-handedly brought down the patriarchy, Cochran instead sat down and did some Badass Writer Shit, smashing out an anonymous Letter to the Editor calling out all the flaws and errors in the original article and accusing the original author of being a total dickwad.  The editor of the Dispatch, a dude named George Madden, loved her response so much that he not only ran it in the paper, but posted it along with a note that basically said, "Hey, I know you submitted this anonymously, but you're awesome and come find me if you want a job." 

Cochran saw her work in the paper and went to Pittsburgh to meet with Madden.  He immediately gave her another assignment, and she wrote something called "The Girl Puzzle," which was basically about how divorce affects the lives of young girls.  I know this doesn't seem like a huge deal to us today, but this was kind of back at a time when people really didn't talk about divorce that much, and since Cochran had been through this with her parents she provided a pretty unique perspective on shit.  Madden was so impressed that he offered her a full-time gig at the Dispatch as soon as he read it.

She took the job, then spent the next couple years doing undercover investigative work about how horrific the situation was for people working inside shitty factories in Pittsburgh.

Writing under the pen name "Nellie Bly" (a reference to a song that was popular at the time), Cochran took a bunch of miserable jobs working in some of those nightmare 1880s Industrial Revolution Oliver Twist factories where people are always getting their fingers ripped off or their arms mangled by janky equipment that's designed to build cardboard boxes but just ends up looking like a tool of the Spanish Inquisition.  After a few days undercover trying to avoid getting scalped by some kind of fucked-up machine that looks like the concept art for some monster from a Steampunk RPG, she'd write a big article for the Dispatch about how seriously jacked-up the entire situation was, and how, oh, I don't know, maybe the factory owners should at least invest in putting a piece of metal over the giant whirling gears that make it just a little less easy for their nine-year-old employees to get a face wedged in there.

That went pretty well for a while, but eventually the factory owners were like, "Uh, yeah, fuck this chick," and they wrote a bunch of letters to the Dispatch saying they were going to pull ad money if she kept making them look like assholes.  So, the Dispatch moved Nellie Bly over to the "Women's Section", and assigned her to write about girl stuff like which kind of teacup patterns go best with your drapes and what ten sex things are going to drive your man wild in bed.

Yeah, fuck that.

Bly quit that office, moved to some tiny town in Mexico, and then started sending back stories to the Dispatch about the fucked-up dictatorship under Generalissimo Porifiro Diaz and how he was murdering his population, censoring his press, and repressing individual liberties, and how it was super not cool to have some psycho madman curbstomping freedom just 150 miles from San Antonio.

Madden hadn't assigned her this mission.  But he sure as shit ran the stories in the paper.

Nellie learned fluent Spanish, met with the locals, and wrote in-depth reports on her experiences there over the next six months.  She would have stayed longer, too, except that Presidente-por-Vida Diaz eventually got word about the gringa who was talking shit about him, and he basically sent federales to black-bag her and chuck her in a hole somewhere.  Bly got word before she could be grabbed, and managed to escape the country in time, hopping a train under the cover of darkness and riding it back to Pittsburgh.

The first thing she did when she got home was write a poison pen article about Diaz that made the rest of the stuff she'd been writing look like something they'd wanted her to write for the Women's Section.  She'd had to pull her punches while she was living in this guy's country, but now that he'd basically tried to murder her, she could tell the world how she really felt about him.   The works would later be collected into a book called Six Months in Mexico, a work of non-fiction so hardcore that I think it probably qualifies as a prequel to Sicario.

Well, bad news, the Dispatch basically welcomed their young trouble-maker back to town by assigning her some fluff crap writing about about theater (and, not to sound like a dick, but how big was the theater scene in Pittsburgh in 1887?), and she'd had enough.  She quit, moved to NYC with basically no money and no place to stay, tracked down fucking Joseph Pulitzer (there's an award named after this guy, from what I understand), and talked her way into a staff writer job at the New York World, which was one of the biggest newspapers in the world at the time.  Among the first ideas she pitched for stories to Joe Pulitzer, the one that made her famous was also the one that was literally crazy:

She was going to pretend to be insane, get admitted to the goddamn Women's Lunatic Asylum at Blackwell Island, stay there as an inmate for ten days, and then write an exposé about it as a way of trying to effect some kind of change in the way America treated people with mental illness.

Just so we are clear here, this is the Women's Lunatic Asylum of Blackwell Island:

That's a fucking episode of American Horror Story.  You can almost hear the Ghost Bros firing up their EVA machines just looking at this thing.  This is also 1887, when mental health treatment was just six dudes in white clothes with big wooden sticks standing around being like,  "Yeah, I don't know doc, should we just shock 'em again and see what happens?", so the idea of voluntarily Sarah Connor-ing yourself for a week and a half sounds about as appealing to me as trying to take a can opener to my nutsack.  She did it though – Nellie Bly checked herself into a women's boarding house in some gnarly part of Brooklyn, stopped sleeping and eating so that she'd look super crazy, and then just started screaming and raving and attacking the other women in the boarding house and waving a gun around until all of her housemates were so goddamn terrified of her that they called the cops to haul her off the The Octagon (that is legitimately what they called that building in those photos… the irony that it's also what they call an MMA arena is not lost on me) and ten days of pre-Freudian psychiatry. 

For ten excruciating days Nellie Bly was beaten, tortured, doused with freezing water, zapped with electricity, and tied up alone for hours.  She ate rotten food.  She shared rooms with violent inmates who consistently threatened her (she later wrote that "The attendants seemed to find amusement and pleasure in exciting the violent patients to do their worst"). She was dragged kicking and screaming to sessions where she'd be essentially waterboarded by guys who had less medical education than my fucking cat.  Her plan during this was to basically just act as not-insane as possible – from the moment she entered the Asylum, she was just going to be herself and see what happened.  And, according to her, the more normal she acted, the more everyone there thought she was insane.  She would later conclude in her book that any normal person who was not crazy when they entered that facility would be made insane by the treatment they received there, which I guess makes sense when your mental health professionals are basically Dr. Octopus and the bad guy from a rejected episode of Black Mirror.

Finally, after ten brutal, soul-shattering days, Joe Pulitzer pulled her out of the Asylum.  And it was time for revenge.

The book about her experiences, Ten Days in the Mad-House, was an instant best-seller.  People were so horrified by what they read that they pushed for serious reform on Blackwell Island – the city committed an additional $1 million per year on funding to improve treatment of patients there, many reforms were made on what's appropriate treatment, a lot of people were fired for being psychotic quacks, and within a couple years the Asylum was actually incorporated into a legitimate Hospital and became part of that facility.

Ok, cool.  So, with that done, Nellie Bly decided she'd break the world record for the fasted circumnavigation of the globe.

Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days in 1873, a book about Jackie Chan flying around the globe on a bunch of hot air balloons, and it was basically like the Harry Potter of 1873.  Nellie Bly was pretty fascinated by this, so, in November of 1889, she set off on a boat and decided she was going to see if she could beat Jackie Chan’s time.  With a starting inventory that contained nothing but 200 bucks, her dress, a warm coat, a pen and paper, and like five pairs of underwear, she boarded a ship in New York Harbor on November 14, 1889, and embarked on a 25,000-mile journey around the surface of the Earth, with the goal of doing it faster than any human had ever done it (and, in 1889, only like eight expeditions had ever actually even accomplished a circumnavigation – it wasn't like today where 25,000 miles barely qualifies you for Delta Gold).

Traveling alone by steamship and railroad at a time when women traveling alone was probably even less safe than it is today, sending home dispatches via telegraph and letter (many of the letters arrived home after she did!), Nellie Bly departed New York, crossed the Atlantic, landed in England, went to France to hang out with Jules Verne at his house, then went through Italy, through the Suez Canal, down to Sri Lanka, bought a pet monkey in Singapore (!), wrote about visiting a Chinese leper colony outside Hong Kong, then hit Japan, crossed the Pacific to SF, and took a train the entire length of the United States.  Entire trip time – 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes.  A world record.

Bly's world record would eventually be broken, obviously (I think the ISS circumnavigates the globe in like an hour and a half or some shit), but people were fascinated by her adventures, followed her in the paper, and thousands of cheering fans greeted her as a hero on her arrival back home.  Her book, cleverly titled Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, became another instant bestseller.  Bly got married, took over her husband's steel business when he died a few years later, and then designed and got the patent for the 55-gallon steel drum, a weird milk can, and some kind of "stacking garbage can" that sounds like something that might help me organize my recycling a little better.  When she got bored of making millions of dollars and inventing a variety of new and interesting containers, she hopped a boat to fucking Serbia (because, of course she did), to cover World War I from the front lines – working as a badass war correspondent while the Austrians and Serbians were blowing the fuck out of each other and sending news and war dispatches home from the Eastern Front.

Naturally, the American girl with the pen and paper attracted some suspicion on the front lines, and Bly was captured by the Austrians when they pulled her off of a train transporting wounded from the front lines.  She was arrested as a British Spy, but luckily she also spoke fluent German and was able to talk her way out of being thrown into a German military prison or publicly executed.

After the war, Bly returned home, covered the Women's Suffrage movement in the 1910s, famously interviewed Susan B. Anthony, and lived just long enough to see women get the right to vote exactly 100 years ago this August.  She died of pneumonia in 1922 at the age of 57.

Links:

Womenshistory.org

HistoryNet

Washington Post

Wikipedia

Sources:

Bly, Nellie.  Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.  Wildside Press, 2009.

Bly, Nellie.  Ten Days in the Mad-House.  Accessible Publishing, 2008.

Christensen, Bonnie. The Daring Nellie Bly. Random House Children's Books, 2013.

Kroeger, Brooke. Nellie Bly. Times Books, 1995.