Nellie Bly’s biographer, Brooke Kroeger, captured the essence of his admirable subject when he wrote: “In the 1880s, she pioneered the development of ‘detective’ or ‘stunt’ journalism, the acknowledged forerunner to full-scale investigative reporting.”
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran on May 5, 1864 to Michael Cochran and Mary Jane Cummings, both of whom were of Irish descent, Bly had the distinction of being born into a town renamed Cochran Mills in honor of her father, a local judge. She was called “Pink” as a child, that being the color her mother usually dressed her in.
One of fourteen children, Bly and her family were thrown into disarray after her father died suddenly when she was just six years old. Her mother’s subsequent marriage ended in divorce after her husband turned out to be an alcoholic and wifebeater. When she was 15, determined to be a teacher, Bly enrolled at the Indiana Normal School in western Pennsylvania. After only one term, however, her money ran out.
At the age of 22, Bly had a letter published in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, which impressed the editors and earned her a job with the publication. As a prospective journalist for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, she later posed as a mental patient in a New York institution, publishing her experiences in an explosive story which led to reform in mental health care.
“People in the world can never imagine the length of days to those in asylums,” she wrote poignantly. “They seem never ending, and we welcomed any event that might give us something to think about as well as talk of.”
Bly’s article provided good insight into the logic of her thinking. “Take a perfectly sane and healthy woman,” she wrote, “shut her up and make her sit up straight from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her nothing to read, let her know nothing of the world or its doings, and see how long it will take to make her insane.”
She added: “The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out…I had looked forward so eagerly to leaving the horrible place, yet when my release came and I knew that God’s sunlight was to be free for me again, there was a certain pain in leaving. For ten days I had been one of them. Foolishly enough it seemed intensely selfish to leave them to their sufferings. I felt a quixotic desire to help them by my sympathy and presence. But only for a moment. The bars were down and freedom was sweeter to me than ever.” Pulitzer’s response to her story? “Obviously this girl is very suited for this profession,” he told a friend, “and of course I have given her a very large bonus.”
Energy rightly applied can accomplish anything.”
One of the forerunners of modern investigative journalism, Bly was reputed to be a fearless character who would go anywhere and do anything for a good story. Add to that her excellent writing skills and you end up with a world-class reporter.
In 1889, Bly had her fifteen minutes of fame worldwide when she set out to beat the record set by Phileas Fogg in the Jules Verne novel Around the Worm in Eighty Days. Setting out from Hoboken, New Jersey on November 14, and garbed in a checkered coat, she journeyed by boat, train, rickshaw and horse, and managed to beat the 80-day record by just under eight days. Despite the perils of her journey, she said she “would rather go back to New York dead than not a winner.”
The diary of her trip records her impressions of the many cities she visited. She describes London as a city of “dim lights and a gray, dusty shade…[with] some fine buildings [and] beautifully paved streets.” Amiens, France, meanwhile, provided her with the opportunity to meet Jules Verne, the inspiration for her journey. Egypt struck her as an unappealing place, with its hordes of beggars, while in Hong Kong it seemed to her as though “one seems to be suspended between two heavens.”
But it was her arrival back in New Jersey that really struck a chord with Bly, as is obvious from her recollections. “The station was packed with thousands of people,” she wrote, “and the moment I landed on the platform, one yell went up from them…I took off my cap and wanted to yell with the crowd, not because I had gone around the world in seventy-two days, but because I was home again.”
In the aftermath of her record travels, completed when she was just 25, Bly saw a hotel, a train and a racehorse named in her honor.
After her marriage to billionaire businessman Robert Seaman in 1895, Bly retired from journalism. After he died, she lost a lot of her fortune to swindlers. Three years after an unsuccessful attempt to restart her career, she died of pneumonia on January 27, 1922. Fellow journalist Arthur Brisbane, a prominent and much-admired newspaperman, described her as “the best reporter in America.”
Note: Margaret Collins, the daughter of immigrants from Co. Tyrone, worked as Nellie Bly’s assistant before marrying D.J. Carey, helping him grow his oil business, and becoming the mother of Hugh Carey who went on to become the governor of New York.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November 1999 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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