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

The woman had a child but no husband. She seemed pleasant and competent, and Banks found her a job as a governess with someone known for her charitable works. Then, one day, the employer burst into the newspaper office. She had discovered the out-of-wedlock child and kicked her governess out on the street at night. Did Banks know about this? she demanded. Banks demanded in turn where she thought her employee would go so late in a city that was strange to her.

A Rescue Home, the woman answered. Banks exploded, all her feelings about hypocrisy, religion, charitable poses pouring out.

I had forgotten that you were interested in those pathetically funny institutions—those places where they herd women together and tell them the story of Mary Magdalen, and pray over them, giving them to understand that the crime they have committed is the one that takes the largest amount of the blood of Christ to wash out, if it can be washed out at all, and then, branding them with a mark, send them out to work at such odds as few women can combat.

The philanthropist, in turn, sneered that she should have reminded herself about the trashy publication where Banks worked. Then she left. No longer able to focus on her writing, “bitter hatred in my face and in my heart,” Banks stepped into the street to look for her friend. But she had no luck. Manhattan itself, sometimes so invigorating, set itself against her: “The great skyscrapers, the crowds of people, the loud jingle of the cable cars greeted me and seemed to laugh, in all their bigness, at me in my littleness and powerlessness.”

The incident became a chapter in her autobiography called, in the English edition, “In the Name of Christ.” Perhaps daunted by the tone, the New York publishers requested she cut it from the American version, and she did.

Hearst continued to needle the World. He’d hired away S. S. Carvalho, Pulitzer’s trusted publisher (and Nell Nelson’s husband), a few months after arriving in New York, and followed up by taking Arthur Brisbane, one of the World’s most dynamic editors, a year later.* He also doubled down on exuberant, pricy experimentation. Bringing Examiner successes to New York, Hearst ran endless contests. Journal readers could win prizes for the best hat design, the best breakfast menu, the best limerick, the best composition praising the Journal, the best name for a baby hippo at the Central Park Zoo. (Winner: “Iris.”) The paper offered $50 for deciphering a code in the Want Ads, $1,000 for the best solution to the serialized mystery “The Mill of Silence.”

The Journal continued to push its nascent form of activist journalism into new realms. In the summer of 1897, when three boys swimming in the East River brought to shore a package wrapped in red and gold fabric that turned out to contain a man’s torso and arms, the city editor wondered whether it was a joke. But the next day, when a father hunting berries with his young sons found another piece of the man near the Washington Bridge over the Harlem River, and the two pieces fit together, the Journal assembled a team of thirty reporters (and one novelist), a “Murder Squad” devoted to solving the crime. Some members tested the tides of the Harlem River to see where a package thrown from the Washington Bridge might end up, some looked for stores that might have sold the cloth, one found a palm reader to interpret the severed hands, one consulted with a surgeon. Others rented a boat to drag the river for the head. The novelist wrote up possible scenarios.

At one a.m., on June 29, a Journal reporter interviewed staff at a Turkish bath with a missing masseuse. After hearing a description of the man, and learning that a rival for his mistress’s affections had beat him not long before, the reporter went right then to interview the mistress. She seemed unconcerned about her lover’s disappearance. Employees of the bath identified the body at the morgue—that damaged index finger, the flesh removed from the chest just where his tattoo would have been. The next morning, the reporter visited the mistress again and found her packing her apartment, having told the landlord she was leaving immediately for Europe. The police arrested her later that day and her lover not long after.

The solving of the mystery, played out over the course of a week, allowed the Journal to brag: “When the educated man of special training and habits of thought competes with the detective who graduated from a lazy life of patrol duty he wins easily.”

Now that his reporters had mastered the role of detective, Hearst pushed them into another—revolutionary hero. The Journal was firmly on the side of the Cuban rebels and had been advocating for the United States to declare war against Spain. Now it had discovered a potent symbol of Spanish outrages in Cuba: an innocent maiden in the form of the dark-haired Evangelina Cisneros, locked in the tower of a Havana jail. Daughter of a rebel leader deported to an island off mainland Cuba, she’d caught the eye of a high-ranking Spanish official. Coordinating with insurgents, she agreed to invite him to her house, under the pretense that she returned his affections. According to the plan, the rebels would be waiting and, while his guard was down, capture him and take control of the garrison. She did her part, luring the official into her house, then shouting, “You, men, take care of the situation.” But her coconspirators were distracted by distant gunfire and missed their cue. She was arrested for treason and thrown into jail.

Hearst launched a letter-writing campaign, gathering signatures from prominent women to plead with the pope and the queen regent in Spain for Cisneros’s release. Then, in October, using funds in part from the Cuban businessman Carlos Carbonell, he sent reporter Karl Decker to stage a rescue. Decker was well cast: strapping frame, bristling mustache. After