Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,814

This is the grave of Nellie Bly.

Born in Burrell, Pennsylvania in 1864, Elizabeth Jane Cochran grew up in an upwardly mobile family. Her father had started out quite poor, but ended up buying a local mill and building up a local empire and becoming a judge. He also had 15 children from two women. Elizabeth was almost the last of them and her father died when she was 6. From the time she was a child, she was very conscious about her image. That started in a way that was typical for a young girl–she would only wear pink. As she got into her teen years, she decided adding an ‘e’ to her last name would make her sound more sophisticated. She ended up at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (as it is known today), but the family didn’t have that much money at this time so she had to drop out. So by this time, the now somewhat downwardly mobile family moved to an area just outside of Pittsburgh (which is now part of that city).

In 1885, some awful human wrote an article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch arguing that women were only good for raising children and keeping house. Cochrane (as she wanted to be known) wrote a blistering and angry response under the pseudonym “Little Orphan Girl.” The editor was like, “who wrote this amazing letter?” He published his own response asking her to reveal herself. She did and was hired to write her own work for the paper. The editor wanted her to have a real pseudonym though (most women who reported did, in part to protect themselves). He chose Nellie Bly. She liked it and kept it and that became her lifelong public name.

Bly did not exactly hold back as a young columnist. She was already a fully fleshed-out feminist ready to argue. Her first ever article was about how it was bad to assume all women wanted to marry and instead, people needed to figure how women could support themselves through good jobs. Her second article was in favor of divorce. She wasn’t messing around here! She started to do investigative reporting on the conditions for factory girls in Pittsburgh mills. These were good articles and that really exposed the awfulness of the working conditions. So the Pittsburgh manufacturing community went to the Dispatch owners and probably threatened them with the loss of advertising funds if they allowed this continue. The paper completely caved and reassigned Bly to the silly stuff that most women were forced to cover, like society balls.

Nellie Bly was not going to spend her time on society balls. Adventurous and with an amazing mind for self-promotion, she decided, as she later put it, “to do something no girl has done before.” That was to go to Mexico and become an international correspondent. So she did, in 1885. She spent six months down there investigating all sorts of things and sending her reports back to whatever American papers would take them. Mostly it was still the Dispatch, whose editor was willing to try this. It wasn’t as if this kind of on the ground coverage was something that Americans were used to anyway, especially in a nation such as Mexico. She spent six months down there before the government of Porfirio Diaz kicked her out after threatening her with arrest for doing just a bit too much investigation. She returned and collected her work in her book Six Months in Mexico, published in 1888. A lot of this reporting was really just discussions of social customs, ranging from marijuana usage to wedding ceremonies. Informative, but not really threatening. But then she reported on Diaz having a journalist imprisoned and well….he might not want to imprison a gringo woman journalist, but he certainly would do so.

Well, Six Months in Mexico did very well. Bly was now at least kind of famous. And she used her fame to really turn a lot of Americans against Diaz, or at least try to. Industrialists didn’t care of course, they were getting rich off him handing over Mexico’s resources. But Bly started to frame Diaz to the American public, which twenty years later would really matter when Mexicans themselves revolted against their dictator.

Bly came back though and still couldn’t do the kind of reporting she wanted for the Dispatch. Pittsburgh elites weren’t having the person exposing Porfirio Diaz expose them. So Bly was doing the same kind of bullshit society reporting and such. She quit the paper for good in 1887 and moved to New York, where she decided to get herself admitted to a mental institution to expose conditions there. She did this for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, who was more than willing to take the kind of risks that the Dispatch would not. After all, Bly was relatively well known and this would sell copies and Pulitzer didn’t care much about what leading New York power figures would think about it. This gambit worked. She pretended to be crazy in a boarding house and got herself sent to the asylum on Blackwell’s Island. She then was suddenly well and got out after ten days. But those ten days were plenty. She reported on the brutality toward women in the asylum and the general state of neglect. These stories sold like hot cakes and became another book, Ten Days in a Mad-House.

She was now somewhat addicted to this kind of stunt journalism, which to be fair, can do some good. So she decided she wanted to set the record for traveling around the world and by god she was determined to do so. She had read Around the World in Eighty Days of course, like everyone else in the 1880s. So she suggested to her editor at the World that she show it was possible. He was likely to let her do most anything she wanted given the profits she brought in. So it happened. And in 72 days. She either must have been immune to seasickness or she was one hell of a tough woman. Both probably. To me that doesn’t sound like a great way to travel–what can you see when you are on the boats the whole time–but she managed another book out of it (not to mention all the dispatches sent from various ports that sated the public appetite), Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, published in 1890.

After this trip, she retired from journalism for awhile. She decided to write novels and she wrote a bunch of serialized fiction for the New York Family Story Paper, but no one remembers any of this today. She did manage 11 novels between 1889 and 1895, which is solid production. But the paper had low circulation and in fact, it wasn’t until 2021 that enough copies were discovered to piece together the novels.

Then in 1895, now 31 years old, Bly married the 73 year old millionaire Robert Seaman, who ran the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company. Since he was so damn old (I’m not even going to speculate on why she would marry someone 42 years old than she), she ended up running the company on a day to day basis! In fact, she patented an invention for an improved milk pail and an improved garbage can, both of which were under this can business. But she was a terrible businesswoman and the company eventually went under, in part because a manager embezzled a huge amount of money. She was evidently too trusting to be a Gilded Age capitalist.

Her husband died in 1904 and she eventually went back into reporting, including on the suffrage movement, which of course she supported. Her last major work was on the Eastern Front in World War I, when she was interviewing soldiers before being arrested as a British spy by the Germans. Of course she wasn’t, but they got her back to the U.S.

Bly died in 1922, of pneumonia. She was only 57 years old, despite doing just about everything possible in one life. What a force of nature!

Nellie Bly is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, New York. As you can see, this gravestone was only erected in 1978 and I’m not sure if it was unmarked before this.

Also, this was just about the only time I’ve ever stopped to see a grave and my wife was excited to see it. As you can imagine, she’s mostly like OMFG this again. Ha ha ha.

If you would like this series to visit other women who became famous journalists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ethel Payne is in Chicago (as of 2021, there was an attempt to raise money for a gravestone for her unmarked grave) and Sarah Bierce is in Cleveland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.