Sensational Kim Todd (popular books to read .txt) 📖

bachelor with a reputation as a man about town. And as president of the Ironclad Manufacturing Company, he was reputed to be worth millions. Finally, on April 6, after reporters interviewed the clerk and unearthed a license made out to Robert Seaman and Elizabeth Cochran, headlines asked, incredulous, “Is ‘Nellie Bly’ Married?”

Perhaps it was another stunt, maybe a piece on the nature of honeymoons, or an exposé of May–December marriages to be followed by a first-person account the following Sunday of divorce? But none was forthcoming. For once, Bly seemed in dead earnest. On April 5, at the rectory of the Church of the Epiphany, a small structure of ruddy stones and heavy arches to the west of the city, with a lawyer as a witness, she married Seaman who, apparently, she had met several weeks before at a hotel dinner. In an interview, Bly said they’d kept it quiet because of their business affairs and illness in her family. And then she headed back to Manhattan, this time to her new husband’s fancy Midtown Manhattan mansion, a long way from her old cramped rooms in Harlem.

Some papers tried to frame it as a kind of fairy tale, but most were deeply cynical. Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner commented: “The marriage of Nellie Bly doubtless resulted from love at first sight of the groom’s bank account.” The Weekly Pioneer Times of Deadwood, South Dakota, suggested a moral: “And thus is refuted the theory that if girls were educated to support themselves they would not marry for money, for position, for a home, anything but love.” Of Mr. Seaman, the Buffalo Morning Express, said, “He is very old and a millionaire. What better luck could befall a young woman of Nellie’s cast of mind?”

Bly’s younger self would have been cynical, too, the one who counseled in her second-ever published article, “Mad Marriages,” that couples should enter into marriage slowly, deliberatively, with consultation from friends and investigation into their prospective spouse’s personal history. Urging lovers to be upfront about their faults, the twenty-year old had written solemnly that lying about one’s past should be a crime. Maybe she forgot those concerns; maybe other concerns overrode them. There was no time for the leisurely confessions the young Nellie demanded.

Just a few months before her wedding, she’d been riding in a decorated coach in a seaside parade with editor James Stetson Metcalfe. Their names had been linked for years. He’d taken the train to Philadelphia to travel at her side for the final miles of her round-the-globe trip. But that December, as reflected in her column for the Evening World, loneliness was on her mind. A friend, Walt McDougall, a cartoonist at the World who’d drawn her liberation from the asylum and spent long nights with her in haunted houses, recalled that, despite Bly’s fame, she was intensely private: “Everybody knew her but she had very few familiars.”

Here was just another mystery, though McDougall offered a clue to her Chicago move and to her marital leap: “Nellie was deeply attached to a friend of mine, and when he suddenly married another she abandoned New York. I never knew, nor does anybody, I suspect, what her intentions were.”

Maybe something was in the air. Two months later, in June 1895, Nell Nelson returned from Europe on the steamship Brittanic from Liverpool. She’d been traveling with her ailing mother, sending dispatches from Paris and contributing a chapter to a serialized “composite novel.” The next day, barely having had time to unpack, she ducked into the modest Church of the Transfiguration, a bright spot in the Manhattan landscape with its redbrick tower, golden wood doors, lush green garden. And there, under a fanciful ceiling painted with stylized clover and morning glory, with only a few friends to witness—she married S. S. Carvalho, the publisher of the World.

At this point, Carvalho was deeply involved in the day-to-day operation of the paper, with Pulitzer leaning on him increasingly heavily. He’d apparently been scheduled to come to Europe to meet her but hadn’t made it, possibly because of yet another upheaval in the World’s staff. The wedding caught many off guard: “It is a genuine surprise to all his friends, and they are legion,” wrote a Boston Post columnist about Carvalho. But the writer declared himself “delighted.” Carvalho was known to be serious-minded, well paid, vigorous despite a limp, and dogged in pursuit of the paper’s interests. A World staffer described him as “a small man with muscles of iron gained by driving a fast horse every evening” and “the most energetic, resourceful and original of all of J.P.’s finds.” Many who knew Nelson also commented on her work ethic, the way she’d taken care of her invalid mother, looked after two sisters, and written article after article. Elizabeth Jordan, who’d been awed by Nelson as she paced through the World’s offices, wrote, of all the hard labor that culminated in this marriage: “Her reward was great.” Nelson never wrote again.*

The same day as Nelson’s nuptials, Ida B. Wells lectured at St. John’s Church in Kansas, describing for her audience, in detail, the violence of lynching, explaining the cruel economic calculations behind it, then continuing to press her message over punch at the reception after. With the publication of Southern Horrors, Wells had become an acknowledged leader of the anti-lynching movement. The revered Frederick Douglass contributed the introduction to the book, thanking her for writing it (“Brave woman!”) and lauding her methods: “You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.” The book launched her career as a public speaker and resulted in an invitation to take her message to England and Scotland.

Wells took two trips abroad, in the spring of 1893 and again in the spring 1894. In churches, drawing rooms, and YMCA halls, she urged listeners to start anti-lynching societies and shower the United States with moral condemnation. On her second visit, the Chicago Inter Ocean printed her