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

World. But Brisbane, who feared the general would mouth clichés—very decent, very boring—wrote back: “Sorry we did not have that O. O. Howard picture and interview. Instead, on the front page, I had a wonderful picture of Kate Swan in the electric chair and circulation is up 15,000.”

Brisbane had tracked down Kate Swan McGuirk, the astute Washington DC reporter who’d made such a notable scoop with her Lizzie Borden interview. Or she had volunteered herself. Either way, the World hired her, and she became a key element of the publication’s reimagining.

One of McGuirk’s first stunts for the paper tied in with the story of Maria Barbella (also called Barberi), who was on death row for slitting the throat of a man who promised, then refused, to marry her. She was scheduled to be the first woman to die in the electric chair. Brisbane, who had fainted when he witnessed an execution several years before, had taken a sympathetic interest in the Barbella case. Continuing to pursue questions, launched in the Borden trial, about the way a predominantly male justice system treated female criminals, McGuirk visited the prison and went through the experience of being walked from a cell to the electric chair and buckled in, aiming to show what it felt like to be a woman encountering the death penalty.

McGuirk dwelt on facing death surrounded by men, who would dress her, walk with her, and watch. She emphasized that to attach the electrode, the criminal would need to bare a knee. Talking with New York State’s head executioner afterward, she extracted from him the promise that he would never execute a woman. Having achieved this tangible result, she wrote, “I am not sorry that I endured all the strange agonies I did during my experience in the death chair.”

“Kate Swan in the Death Chair” in the World, February 16, 1896

“Kate Swan in the Death Chair,” World, February 16, 1896 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

A huge illustration, the one Brisbane gloated over, showed a woman shackled to the electric chair at wrists and ankles, leather strap over her eyes and across her chin, and a helmet with wires on her head. The paper had commissioned a noted fashion designer to create a dress that allowed for the electrode to be attached to her leg while the woman retained as much dignity as possible. Showing an execution itself would be taboo, and this toed right up to the line. It sold a lot of copies.

After the story ran, Pulitzer was gracious in defeat (and always happy about a circulation bump): “You know perfectly well I am blind, and must rely on you. Congratulations,” he wrote Brisbane.*

Though she’d always signed her pieces “Mrs. McGuirk,” the reporter now developed a second persona: Kate Swan. She was nothing like the upright Mrs. McGuirk, with her arch commentary on senatorial outfits. Kate Swan was youthful. Adventurous. Risqué. And, apparently, inexhaustible.

Over the course of a year, Kate Swan jumped into the surf from a rowboat at Coney Island to test the rescue capabilities of the Volunteer Life Saving Corps, wrapped herself in a boa constrictor, pedaled a $3,000 bicycle built for six, swung on a flying trapeze, had her heart X-rayed, drove a carriage in a horse race, floated the East River in an inflatable “Merman life-saving suit,” shoveled coal into a ferry-boat furnace, visited a burial vault at night, explored the inside of a whale skeleton to prove the impossibility of the literal truth of the story of Jonah and the whale, and judged a contest for the best-looking baby.

One night she stayed on Ellis Island, with those scheduled to be deported. This article worked in the sly way of some of the other stunt reporting pieces. Even though the reporter here was not in disguise, the opening proposed one kind of tale that turned out to cloak another one. Here her role was not that of a participant but of an active mind able to see things beyond the way they were usually framed. Guards detailed the dangers of these masses of immigrants: the knives they carried, the anger and restlessness in the crowds of men—most from Italy—waiting to be sent back across the Atlantic, the probability that some were escaped criminals. Wide-eyed, the reporter documented her fear for the first few paragraphs.

But the reader’s understanding shifted as the reporter detailed the “cages” where the deportees were kept, the 250 beds for a population of five hundred, the lack of ventilation. (Officials assured Swan that renovations were planned, but it would be months.) At some point in the evening, a man started to play a concertina and the music lured some of the dangerous deportees to waltz. After they settled down to sleep, many still in their boots, Swan (whose in-laws emigrated from Ireland; whose immigrant employer had devoted all the resources of his newspaper to raising money for the base of the Statue of Liberty) noted, pointedly: “The light from Liberty’s torch streams across the water and shines on the sleepers. That is the nearest some of them will ever get to the liberty they have come to seek.”

Still another episode found her leaning, close to midnight, over the railing of the elevated train station in the Tenderloin, watching customers stream in and out of the Internationale Apotheke, a pharmacy. A small round box smudged with opium sat in her jacket pocket. Opium addiction was rampant in 1896. The anarchist Emma Goldman, writing of a time when she was in charge of the jail dispensary at Blackwell’s Island, reported that most of the prostitutes she met there were suffering withdrawal. Finally, after watching a handful of women come up with boxes that seemed similar to hers, McGuirk walked down the stairs and went inside.

She started with a perfectly legal request for a disinfectant.

“Give me two ounces of a 4 percent solution of carbolic acid.”

When the pharmacist obliged, she flashed the box and a half dollar.

“Can I get that filled here?” she asked.

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