Nellie Bly Goes Undercover

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Blackwells Island Lunatic Asylum, New York, 1887.

A patient, Nellie Brown, was taken into the cold bathroom and ordered to undress.

They said if I did not, they would use force and that it would not be very gentle.

A woman stood by the bath, holding an old rag.

I knew now what was to be done with me.

I shivered.

They began to undress me and one by one they pulled off my clothes.

At last everything was gone excepting one garment.

I will not remove it, I said vehemently, but they took it off.

She noticed a group of patients watching her from the door and I jumped into the bathtub with more energy than grace.

The water was startlingly cold.

I again began to protest how useless it all was.

I begged at least that the patients be made to go away, but was ordered to shut up.

The woman standing by the bath began to wash her.

I can find no other word that will express it but scrubbing.

From a small tin pan, she took some soft soap and rubbed it all over me, even all over my face and my pretty hair.

I was at last past seeing or speaking, although I had begged that my hair be left untouched.

The woman finished scrubbing.

My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose fleshed and blue with cold.

Suddenly, I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head.

Ice cold water, too, into my eyes, my ears, my nose, and my mouth.

This was Brown's first day in the asylum.

I caught a glance of the indescribable look on the faces of my companions who had witnessed my fate and knew theirs was surely following.

Unable to control myself at the absurd picture I presented, I burst into roars of laughter.

Dripping wet, Brown was dressed in a flannel slip labeled Lunatic Asylum BIH6,

Blackwells Island, Hall 6.

She spent 10 days in the asylum, barely sleeping, noticing everything.

The staff had no idea she was enduring this treatment for a purpose.

The woman calling herself Nellie Brown was a reporter, and she was determined to expose the cruelty of how mentally ill people were treated.

For BBC Radio 4, this is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

I'm Alex von Tunselmann.

I'm a historian, and I'm inspired by the story of Nellie Bly, a pioneering journalist who refused to accept the twee assignments usually given to women and instead took on some of the most challenging stories of her time.

I love the story of Nellie Bly because as a child, a girl of 10, I read a juvenile biography of her.

And for someone growing up in the 1950s as a girl, the idea that there was something one could do that was not teaching or nursing was very, very appealing.

Brooke Kroger wrote the biography, Nellie Bly, Daredevil, reporter, feminist.

She was born Elizabeth Cochran, the daughter of a judge and mill owner in a very, very small hamlet in western Pennsylvania.

Her father dies when she's very young.

He leaves a bequest, you know, for her that she should be able to study, but somehow that falls apart and by 14, she's out of school.

Elizabeth's mother struggled to provide for her five children alone.

Elizabeth was the middle child.

She had to help earn everyone's keep.

In 1885, when Elizabeth was around 21 years old, the Pittsburgh Dispatch published an article entitled, What Girls Are Good For?

The article presented a simple answer.

Girls were only good for producing children and doing housework.

Elizabeth wrote a reply arguing that women needed jobs.

She signed it, Lonely Orphan Girl.

The paper's editor was so impressed with her passion that he placed an advert asking her to identify herself.

She did, and he asked her to write her letter up as an article.

It was common at the time for women writers to use pen names.

Elizabeth chose the name of a popular song of the time, Nellie Bly.

She wanted to write about factory workers, but the paper's editor shunted her onto the women's pages, so she went to Mexico.

She has spent six months as a quote-unquote foreign correspondent in Mexico, covering kind of light features about Mexico and some slightly political work.

Comes back to Pittsburgh and thinks she's going to be, you know, a chief correspondent, but instead they dump her back on the women's pages, which made her very angry.

So she doesn't last long in that job and leaves a note on the desk of her colleague, who's an important columnist known as QO, the quiet observer.

His name was Erasmus Wilson.

And the note says, this may be apocryphal, but he says, the note says, Dear Q.O., I'm off for New York.

Look out for me.

Bly.

You know, like that.

Bly went to New York City.

She hoped to get a job there as a reporter, but things didn't go to plan.

No one is interested in her at all.

Not at all.

So how is she going to break through?

She makes friends with an established columnist, and with him, they cook up the idea that she should write a story about how editors in New York consider women reporters.

So that gets her in the door of all the newspapers where she has not been able to get past the guard.

And the editors are willing to be interviewed on the question.

The responses were eye-opening.

They have a thousand reasons why it's not a good idea to hire a woman.

They have to have chaperones, that costs extra money.

There was a feeling then that women were congenitally incapable of doing the heavy lifting of journalism.

Heavy lifting meaning to cover murder, crime, huge political stories, government nefarious dealings.

It seemed a lot of people agreed that girls, even women, were only good for producing children and doing housework.

Women were about 10% of the field, but they would be peg-posted on the women's page or doing light editorial work or writing, you know, the short items that appear as little gossip columns, not the kinds of things that many of us would aspire to be doing.

And it was very hard to make that leap.

Bly was determined.

And when she wrote her story about how editors saw female reporters, she made a splash.

The story gets very wide attention.

And that gets her in the door of the world to pitch some ideas.

There were many newspapers in New York at the time.

Bly's target was the New York World.

I think in New York there were at one point as many as 20, I mean many daily papers.

When The World comes along in 1885, this is Joseph Pulitzer's paper, he brings on a lot of sensationalism, which was fantastic for readers, but also a lot of real substance.

So that paper combined all these elements and was very, very widely read and considered the most exciting of the papers of the late 1880s.

She'd learned an important lesson from her piece on editors.

Any editor is going to ignore gender if you've got a big idea.

Like what is the currency in journalism?

Ideas.

And the next idea Bly was interested in was really big.

On the 22nd of September, I was asked by the world if I could have myself committed to one of the asylums for the insane in New York with a view to writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein and the methods of management, etc.

Her target was the lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island.

The history of how people with mental health conditions had been treated in the West was often cruel and horrifying.

A more humane concept of moral treatment had developed in Europe in the 18th century and made its way to the United States by the early 19th century.

By modern standards, moral treatment was not very enlightened, but it was a significant improvement on what had gone before.

Patients were supposed to be offered quiet locations, meaningful work, and recreation in a social environment.

They were rewarded for rational behavior.

If they were perceived to behave badly, though, they could be punished.

The Lunatic Asylum on Blackwells Island was New York City's first publicly funded mental hospital.

It was supposed to offer moral treatment, yet the staff were often convicts conscripted from the nearby prison on the island, and the asylum soon became overcrowded.

There were rumours of mistreatment and physical and sexual abuse directed at patients and sometimes at nurses as well.

Local newspapers often published articles about the inmates of the asylum, to the extent that some of them became quite well known to the public.

Brooke Kroger is reading extracts from Nellie Bly's book, 10 Days in a Madhouse.

Did I think I had the courage to go through such an ordeal as the mission would demand?

Could I assume the characteristics of insanity to such a degree that I could pass the doctors, live for a week among the insane without the authorities there finding out that I was only a child among them taking notes?

That was the challenge she took on.

Blackwell's Island was what one tourist pamphlet described as the home of all the cancer spots of modern Manhattan.

The almshouses, the prisons, the madhouses, everything was there.

There were all these rumors about terrible things happening on Blackwell's Island.

But reporters who wanted to know more had to go through the management of the asylum.

Bly knew from her work covering factories in Pittsburgh that managers would often clean things up before reporters were allowed in, or keep them away from the things they didn't want them to see.

I think, I can't prove this, but I believe it's true in my heart, that this gave her the idea to say, if you really want to find out what's really going on, go undercover to not expose yourself so you could really see what was happening to people.

The New York World agreed that the Lunatic Asylum would not be warned Bly was coming.

Instead, she had to get herself admitted.

She chose the name Nellie Brown.

Similar enough to her writing name that the newspaper could trace her if they needed to.

They also took steps to defend her against prosecution.

They take her to the assistant district attorney to get her quashed legally.

Because if you think about it, she's taking the place of someone who might need a bed.

I mean, what you're doing is illegal.

It's a fraud you're committing.

But it's in the name of this higher purpose, and so they agree to quash her legally.

In other words, that she won't have to come out and be prosecuted.

If you were committed to an asylum, you might never get out.

Bly's editor promised her, we'll get you out if we have to tell who you are and for what purpose you feigned insanity.

Only get in.

Bly knew she'd have to deceive specialist doctors to get into the asylum.

The most likely way for her to be committed was to be pulled up in front of the police courts.

And the way to make that happen was to cause a public nuisance.

She found a boarding house, a working women's boarding house down in like the Bowery area, like 2nd Street, and decided she would try to get herself a place overnight.

She practiced her act.

The hard fact is she had never encountered an insane person.

She didn't really know what an insane person looked like, acted like, or did.

So she had to kind of concoct that.

Her idea was first she stood in front of the mirror and was making faces she thought that seemed to suggest that she was not mentally all there.

A dreamy kind of look was one of her ideas.

In the boarding house, she caused chaos, accusing all the other boarders of being insane and going on and on about her lost trunk suitcases.

She kept asking about her trunks.

She needed her trunks.

Where were her trunks?

She just drove everyone crazy.

She wouldn't go to sleep.

She stayed awake all night.

This really alarmed everyone.

And the deputy matron, assistant matron, goes to the police and brings back an officer to cart her away.

So she is on her way.

Bly was put in front of Judge Duffy at the Essex Market Police Court.

He took pity on her.

saying she reminded him of his late sister.

To get through the questioning, she faked amnesia.

A doctor examined her and put her in an ambulance.

She's taken to, you know, the famous Bellevue Hospital with a lot of other people who are not completely compass mentis.

Through all the examinations, Bly had to keep up the act.

They checked her pulse and looked at her tongue.

Most of all, they asked her questions.

Can you work?

Tell me, are you a woman of the town?

How do you feel tonight, Nelly?

Do you see faces on the wall?

Do you ever hear voices at night?

She told them them the voices stopped her from sleeping.

They put her on a boat.

This is a very short boat ride to the middle of the East River.

Along with some other women, Bly was led into a dirty cabin with high windows.

If they tried to look out, they were scolded by the terrifying female guards.

As they walked off the boat, they were shoved into an ambulance.

The asylum was a compound of long stone buildings.

Bly held her breath as the stink from the kitchens hit her.

Inside, the the doors were locked behind them.

From her descriptions, we know that the spaces were bleak, really bleak.

There was nothing inviting or warm or charming about them.

Bly soon realised that not everyone confined to the asylum was mad.

Among her fellow inmates was a German woman who couldn't speak English, so just couldn't make herself understood.

Another woman came across as perfectly sane, but was ignored.

She was suffering from a nervous stability, and as Bly watched, her condition deteriorated.

She says that people she met really were not crazy.

They just had fallen into the trap of ending up there because there was no place else for them to go.

And then, of course, there were others who really were ill.

So there was a combination, and

the culture was a mess.

Because A, the facilities were terrible, the food was beyond awful, and her descriptions of the food just leave you aghast.

Bly wrote, I was hungry, but the food would not go down.

I asked for unbuttered bread and was given it.

I cannot tell you of anything which is the same dirty black colour.

It was hard and in some places nothing more than dried dough.

I found a spider in my slice, so I did not eat it.

The scene that absolutely affected me most deeply was her encounter with the bathroom and having been given a bath in stone-cold water with scaly towels and harsh treatment from the nurses.

Bly wrote, I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me gasping, shivering, and quaking from the tub.

For once, I did look insane.

It was humiliating.

The nakedness in front of a whole bunch of people and you've just arrived.

I mean, the public nature of it, the lack of privacy at every single juncture.

You wonder how she could even have gone on to the next day in the asylum where she spent the next nine.

The patients were given uniforms, a white calico dress and a coarse dark cotton underskirt.

It was constantly cold.

Bly wrote, I asked some of them to tell how they were suffering from the cold and insufficiency of clothing, but they replied that the nurse would beat them if they told.

Physical abuse was common.

Bly wrote, A girl called Urena Littlepage was brought in.

She was, as she had been born, silly, and her tender spot was, as with many sensible women, her age.

She claimed 18 and would grow very angry if told to the contrary.

The nurses mocked her.

Urina, said Miss Grady, the doctors say that you are 33 instead of 18.

And the other nurses laughed.

The girl cried.

They began to scold and tell her to keep quiet.

She grew more hysterical with every moment until they pounced upon her and slapped her face and knocked her head in a lively fashion.

This made the poor creature cry the more, and so they choked her.

Yes, actually choked her.

Then they dragged her out to the closet and I heard her terrified cries hush into smothered ones.

Bly had to commit every detail to memory.

Nellie has had her notebook taken away from her, so she's having to mentally record everything that's going on.

And of course she's trying to stay awake through the nights to glean as much information as she possibly can.

The doctor didn't like this and said he would make her sleep.

When he saw I was not to be coaxed, he grew rather rough and said he had wasted too much time with me already.

That if I did not take it, he would put it into my arm with a needle.

It occurred to me that if he put it into my arm, I could not get rid of it.

But if I swallowed it, there was one hope.

As soon as the doctor left, she vomited the dose back up again.

And she claims that when she went into, as soon as she crossed on the boat, she gave up the insane act.

She just became herself the whole time.

And the distinction, of course, was never made.

So she's flying with this ruse.

And then along comes a reporter from the Pittsburgh Dispatch, her own paper.

He was looking for a girl who'd gone missing.

He takes one look at her and he's startled, and she is like, uh-oh, it's up for me.

I'm done.

The head nurse, Miss Grady, was nearby.

Bly wrote, In an instant, I determined, if he betrayed me as Nellie Bly, to say I'd never seen him before.

However, I had one card to play and I risked it.

With Miss Grady within touching distance, I whispered hurriedly to him in language more expressive than elegant, don't give me away.

He realizes and says, no, she's not the person he was looking for.

So later on, she writes him a letter to thank him for what he did, which is a letter I've seen.

Live in the Bay Area long enough and you know that this region is made up of many communities, each with its own people, stories, and local realities.

I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

I sit down with reporters and the people who know this place best to connect the dots on why these stories matter to all of us.

Listen to The Bay, new episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Bly tried to tell the staff about the discomforts all of the patients were suffering.

She complains about the clothes.

She complains about the warmth.

She complains about the locks.

She complains about the people who've been incarcerated inappropriately.

None of it made the slightest impression.

After 10 days, the prearranged plan for her release went into action.

The newspaper editor sent an attorney to the asylum.

He told them that friends of Nellie Brown's were willing to take care of her so she could be released.

She wrote of her fellow patients, For 10 days, I've 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 sympathy and presence, but only for a moment.

The bars were down, and freedom was sweeter to me than ever.

And after she comes out, of course, she's busy writing her two-part series, Two Pages in the World over Two Successive Sundays.

On the 9th of October, 1887, a few days after her release, her first report was published.

And it's a sensation.

There was like one Wisconsin newspaper said no one in the annals of journalism had ever become so famous in so short a time.

And it was just completely remarkable how this spread across the world.

And of course, through the newspaper exchanges, everybody was reprinting her story.

So it wasn't just in the world, in other cities.

So that was really important.

And then there's an investigation because what she's claimed seems so horrific.

New York's Assistant District Attorney led a grand jury investigation of the conditions in the asylum.

Bly wrote, I was summoned to appear before the grand jury.

I answered the summons with pleasure because I longed to help those of God's most unfortunate children who I'd left prisoners behind me.

If I could not bring them that boon of all boons, liberty, I hoped at least to influence others to make life more bearable for them.

Just days afterwards, investigators visited the asylum with Bly.

The staff had already tidied a few things up.

Certain people were suddenly gone.

You know, people that she had spoken about and named are gone.

But too much of it seems true.

You know, nothing really discredits her, which is kind of great.

The grand jury recommended the appointment of several women physicians to oversee nurses and attendants.

It also called for an improvement in the food.

Bly was worried that the locks on the ward doors made it impossible for patients to escape if there was a fire.

The grand jury agreed with her and wanted those changed too.

Some $50,000 of $60,000 requested was earmarked for the Blackwells Island Asylum.

So, you know, for a journalist, this is the most important thing you can do.

to cause those in a position of power to act, to act.

And she did that.

I I mean, it's just something you'd dream to have happen from your work.

Bly's pieces were published as a book called 10 Days in the Madhouse.

She didn't only create a sensation, she helped create a whole new era of women's journalism.

Before, women had often been fobbed off with writing for the women's pages.

Now, editors realized that women could go undercover with great effect because people didn't suspect them of being reporters.

It was known as stunt girl journalism.

I mean, a lot of it was silly.

You'd have women standing outside the union club selling flowers to see what high-born men solicited them.

Nellie always had a social agenda, always.

Her stunts always had a purpose to help someone who couldn't speak for themselves.

Villai continued to go undercover herself.

She had herself arrested to find out how prisons were treating incarcerated women.

She investigated the baby buying trade.

She shone a light on lobbyists in Albany committing fraud, mesmerists cheating vulnerable people, doctors giving false diagnoses.

She put the engine behind a movement that we now call investigative reporting.

As a form, even though it often comes under scrutiny for its ethical questions, which are not to be ignored, it persists because it's so effective and so powerful and often fraught with danger for the person undertaking the effort.

But when it's done well and when you pair it with strong documentary investigative work, you really get something powerful.

In 1889, after reading the novel Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, Bly tried out the book's challenge.

The world newspaper published updates on her global journey.

She set a new record by completing the trip around the world in just 72 days.

Age 30, Bly married.

Her husband was a 73-year-old millionaire industrialist, Robert Seaman.

They were married for around a decade before his death.

As a widow, though, Bly proved less brilliant at running his business than she had been as a journalist.

It went bankrupt.

She returned to the press.

She reported from the Eastern Front in Europe during the First World War.

In 1922, she died from pneumonia.

She was just 57, but had lived an astonishingly full life.

I love that girls of 11 and 12, because they're doing National History Day, continue to contact me for their live person for their Nellie Bly archival work.

She has that power, you know, it's just an enduring power.

Look, we found this.

Nikki's never seen this before.

Oh, wow.

It was just him.

In homes across Britain, children and grandchildren are discovering stories about their families in the Second World War.

I've never noticed it before.

It's a battered old suitcase.

Do you want to open it?

I'd love to open it.

Not the war you're thinking of, the fight against the Nazis.

The other story of World War II, the one on the Asian front against Japan.

The better was a gun better, really, and kept on pounding them, pounding them, pounding them.

I'm Kavita Puri.

From BBC Radio 4, The World Service and the History Podcast, this is the second map.

80 years after the end of that war, why don't we remember it as well as we should?

Listen to the second map first on BBC Sounds.

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