Nellie Bly, 1864-1922: Newspaper Reporter Used Unusual Methods to Investigate and Write About Illegal Activities in New York City

Source: www.manythings.org/voa/people








Source: pt.wikipedia.org

I'm Shirley Griffith. And I'm Ray Freeman with the Special English program,PEOPLE IN AMERICA. Every week we tell about a person important in the

history of the United States. Today, we tell about a reporter of more than one hundred years ago.

The year was eighteen eighty-seven. The place was New York City. A young woman, Elizabeth Cochrane, wanted a job at a large newspaper. The editor agreed, if she would investigate a hospital for people who were mentally sick and then write about it.

Elizabeth Cochrane decided to become a patient in the hospital herself. She used the name Nellie Brown so no one would discover her or her purpose. Newspaper officials said they would get her released after a while.

To prepare, Nellie put on old clothes and stopped washing. She went to a temporary home for women. She acted as if she had severe mental problems. She cried and screamed and stayed awake all night. The police were called. She was examined by doctors.  Most said she was insane.

Nellie Brown was taken to the mental hospital. It was dirty. Waste material was left outside the eating room. Bugs ran across the tables. The food was terrible: hard bread and gray-colored meat.

Nurses bathed the patients in cold water and gave them only a thin piece of cloth to wear to bed.

During the day, the patients did nothing but sit quietly. They had to talk in quiet voices. Yet, Nellie got to know some of them. Some were women whose families had put them in the hospital because they had been too sick to work. Some were women who had appeared insane because they were sick with fever. Now they were well, but they could not get out.

Nellie recognized that the doctors and nurses had no interest in the patients' mental health. They were paid to keep the patients in a kind of jail. Nellie stayed in the hospital for ten days. Then a lawyer from the newspaper got her released.

Five days later, the story of Elizabeth Cochrane's experience in the hospital appeared in the New York World newspaper. Readers were shocked. They wrote to officials of the city and the hospital protesting the conditions and patient treatment. An investigation led to changes at the hospital.

Elizabeth Cochrane had made a difference in the lives of the people there. She made a difference in her own life too. She got her job at the New York World. And she wrote a book about her experience at the hospital. She did not write it as Nellie Brown, however, or as Elizabeth Cochrane. She wrote it under the name that always appeared on her newspaper stories: Nellie Bly.

The child who would grow up to become Nellie Bly was born during the Civil War, in eighteen sixty-four, in western Pennsylvania.

Her family called her Pink. Her father was a judge. He died when she was six years old. Her mother married again. But her new husband drank too much alcohol and beat her. She got a divorce in eighteen seventy-nine, when Pink was fifteen years old. Pink decided to learn to support herself so she would never need a man.

Pink, her mother, brothers and sisters moved to a town near the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pink worked at different jobs but could not find a good one.

One day, she read something in the Pittsburgh Dispatch newspaper. The editor of the paper, Erasmus Wilson, wrote that it was wrong for women to get jobs. He said men should have them. Pink wrote the newspaper to disagree. She said she had been looking for a good job for about four years, as she had no father or husband to support her. She signed it "Orphan Girl".

The editors of the dispatch liked her letter. They put a note in the paper asking "Orphan Girl" to visit. Pink did. Mr. Wilson offered her a job.

He said she could not sign her stories with her real name, because no woman writer did that. He asked news writers for suggestions.  One was Nellie Bly, the name of a girl in a popular song. So Pink became Nellie Bly.

For nine months, she wrote stories of interest to women. Then she left the newspaper because she was not permitted to write what she wanted. She went to Mexico to find excitement. She stayed there six months, sending stories to the Dispatch to be published.  Soon after she returned to the Pittsburgh Dispatch, she decided to look for another job. Nellie Bly left for New York City and began her job at the New York World.

As a reporter for the New York World, Nellie Bly investigated and wrote about illegal activities in the city. For one story, she acted as if she was a mother willing to sell her baby. For another, she pretended to be a woman who cleaned houses so she could report about illegal activities in employment agencies.

Today, a newspaper reporter usually does not pretend to be someone else to get information for a story. Most newspapers ban such acts. But in Nellie Bly's day, reporters used any method to get information, especially if they were trying to discover people guilty of doing something wrong.

Nellie Bly's success at this led newspapers to employ more women. But she was the most popular of the women writers. History experts say Nellie Bly was special because she included her own ideas and feelings in everything she wrote. They say her own voice seemed to speak on the page.

Nellie Bly's stories always provided detailed descriptions. And her stories always tried to improve society. Critics said Nellie Bly was an example of what a reporter can do, even today. She saw every situation as a chance to make a real difference in other people's lives as well as her own.

Nellie Bly may be best remembered in history for a trip she took.

In the eighteen seventies, French writer Jules Verne wrote the book "Around the World in Eighty Days." It told of a man's attempt to travel all around the world. He succeeded. In real life, no one had tried. By eighteen eighty-eight, a number of reporters wanted to do it. Nellie Bly told her editors she would go even if they did not help her. But they did.

Nellie Bly left New York for France on November fourteenth, eighteen eighty-nine. She met Jules Verne at his home in France. She told him about her plans to travel alone by train and ship around the world.

From France she went to Italy and Egypt, through South Asia to Singapore and Japan, then to San Francisco and back to New York.  Nellie Bly's trip created more interest in Jules Verne's book. Before the trip was over, "Around the World in Eighty Days" was published again. And a theater in Paris had plans to produce a stage play of the book.

Back home in New York, the World was publishing the stories Bly wrote while travelling. On days when the mail brought no story from her, the editors still found something to write about it. They published new songs written about Bly and new games based on her trip. The newspaper announced a competition to guess how long her trip would take. The prize was a free trip to Europe. By December second, about one hundred thousand readers had sent in their estimates.

Nellie Bly arrived back where she started on January twenty-fifth, eighteen ninety. It had taken her seventy-six days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds. She was twenty-five years old. And she was famous around the world.

Elizabeth Cochrane died in New York in nineteen twenty-two. She was fifty-eight years old. In the years since her famous trip, she had married, and headed a business. She also had helped poor and homeless children. And she had continued to write all her life for newspapers and magazines as Nellie Bly.

One newspaper official wrote this about her after her death:

"Nellie Bly was the best reporter in America. More important is the work of which the world knew nothing. She died leaving little money. What she had was promised to take care of children without homes, for whom she wished to provide. Her life was useful.  She takes with her from this Earth all that she cared about -- an honorable name, the respect and affection of her fellow workers, the memory of good fights well fought and many good deeds never to be forgotten. Happy the man or woman that can leave as good a record."

This VOA Special English program, PEOPLE IN AMERICA, was written by Nancy Steinbach. Your narrators were Shirley Griffith and Ray Freeman.

An American in St Peter

For An American in St Peter’s

Language level: Advanced
Source: www.speakup.com.br
Speaker: Trisha Thomas
Standard: American accent



I was looking down at the top of President Bush’s head as i filed my live report the beginning of Pope John Paul II’s funeral, April 8, 2005.

I was on the Braccio di Carlo Magno, the enormous colonnade that spreads out like two arms from St. Peter’s Basilica. A group of journalists had been permitted to watch the funeral from the bird’s eye view above. Down bellow me the US president, Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac, Nelson Mandela, Prince Charles, royalty from Spain and Jordan, and the Presidents of Iran and Afghanistan were among the dignitaries wishing farewell to the Pope.

Further down the row of onlookers, I noticed a Swiss Guard friend of mine dressed in a suit. He smiled and waved. Below I saw the book of Gospels  open on top of the Pope’s coffin. The pages fluttered and flipped in the wind.

A NATURAL

I would miss the man I had covered for 12 years. Covering him and the Vatican has been a challenge for me as a mother, but in this way, John Paul II made it easier, opening the Vatican up to television and being receptive to journalists. Right up until his death he was a natural on television. He knew how to use it. Back in 1993, for my first interview, inside the Vatican, I dressed in black form head to toe. I looked like a nun. At the Bronze Door, I told a Swiss Guard, in blue and yellow bloomers with a spear-length battle-axe, that I had appointment.

He pointed me to a wide staircase. Eventually I was ushered into a darkly furnished room after a while, the priest entered. He gave me a wet fish handshake, and look at something above my head. I began asking questions. His answers were short and vague. I gave up on acquiring information and just tried to get him to look at me, gesticulating and waving my hands about. He switched his gaze from the ceiling to the table. I gave up, fish-shaked, and left.

Later I learned about “custody of the eyes” according to the Encyclopedia for Catholicism, it is “the practice of diverting one’s gaze to protect the imagination…from sights that might tempt one to greed, lust of idle curiosity.” Certain priests believe that looking a woman in the eyes can be risky.

But it is not always like that. Before my first interview with a Cardinal at the Vatican. I became agitated over how I should address him –should I use “your Eminence,” and should I kiss his ring?  I wondered if I was going to ruin my chances of getting any information by not kissing his ring. While I was fretting, in marched the Cardinal, hand out stretched, “I’m Cardinal O’Connor, how ya’ doin?” Whoops, I had forgotten he was from New York City.

WORKING MUM

The Vatican is an easier assignment than others for a mother. Fortunately even when I was pregnant, I was able to travel on Papal trips. I was six months pregnant with my third child, Chiara, in the spring of 2000 when I traveled with the Pope to Cairo at Mt. Sinai.

And I was pregnant with my middle child, Caterina, on one of the Poland trips. But it was my oldest, nine-year-old Nicoló, who witnessed history. On April 19^th, the second day of the Conclave, I felt sick. I had been working non-stop for months starting in February waiting under John Paul II’s window at the hospital. I decided to run home for a rest.

WHITE SMOKE

At home my children were giving the baby-sitter a hard time. My son begged me t take him to the Vatican. In the taxi I explained how a Conclave works, white smoke if the cardinals have chosen a pope, black smoke if the vote was inconclusive. I said that we would be seeing some black smoke. As we arrived on Via della Conciliazione, a shout went up from the crowd, “Fumo!” I grabbed Nico’s hand and started to run. We couldn’t tell what color the smoke was. White, gray, dark gray, not black. The crowd was confused.

“Giornalista, giornalista!” I shouted waving my press pass as I climbed over wooden barriers in the square. We made it to the obelisk where my colleague was filming the smoke. A few big puffs burst out, clearly “white.” The bells began to toll. The crowd roared.

Ten minutes later we saw the cardinals in their red robes lining up at the windows of St. Peter’s Basilica, and then out he came, the new Pope, Benedict XVI.

Source: www.manythings.org/voa/people

Jacob Riis: A Reporter Who Fought for the Poor in Old New York

I'm Shirley Griffith. And I'm Ray Freeman with the VOA Special English program, PEOPLE IN AMERICA.

Every week at this time, the Voice of America tells about someone important in the history of the United States. This week we tell about Jacob Riis. He was a writer who used all his energy to make the world a better place for poor people.

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In the spring of eighteen seventy, a young man traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. The young man came from Denmark. His name was Jacob Riis. He was just twenty-one years old.

His first years in the United States were difficult, like those of most immigrants at that time. It was difficult to get a job. Jacob Riis went from place to place seeking work. He did any kind of work he could find. Farming, coal mining, brick-making. He even tried to earn money as a peddler. He went from house to house selling things. Many times he slept wherever he could.

Soon he was beginning to lose hope. He decided to leave New York. He started to walk north. After a time, he arrived in the Bronx, the northern part of New York City. His feet burned with pain. And he was hungry.

"I had not eaten a thing since the day before. I had no breakfast, and decided to have a swim in the Bronx River, instead. But that did not help. I was just as hungry when I came out of the water.

"Then I walked slowly to Fordham College, which was not far from where I was. The doors to Fordham College were open, and I walked in, for no reason. I was just tired and had nothing else to do.

"Fordham is a Catholic college. And an old monk came to me and asked in a kind voice if I was hungry. I still remember in my dreams at night the beautiful face of that old monk. I was terribly hungry, and said I was, although I did not mean to do so. I had never seen a real live monk before. My own religious education as a Lutheran did not teach me to like Catholic monks.

"I ate the food that was brought to me. But I was troubled. I was afraid that after giving me food, the churchman would ask me to change my religious beliefs. I said to myself: 'I am not going to do it. ' But when I had eaten, I was not asked to do anything. I was given more food when I left, and continued on my way. I was angry with myself for having such bad thoughts about the Catholic churchmen at Fordham College. For the first time, I learned something about how to live with people of different religious beliefs."

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Later, Jacob Riis learned more about liking people, even if they are different. This time, it happened while he was working on a railroad with men who did rough work and looked rough.

"I had never done that sort of work, and it was not the right job for me. I did my best to work like the other men. But my chest felt heavy, and my heart pounded in my body as if it were going to explode. There were nineteen Irishmen in the group. They were big, rough fellows. They had chosen me as the only 'Dutchman' -- as they called me -- to make them laugh. They were going to use me as part of their jokes.

"But then they saw that the job was just too hard for me. This made them feel different about me. It showed another side to these fun-loving, big-hearted people. They thought of many ways to get me away from the very rough work. One was to get me to bring water for them. They liked stronger things to drink than water. But now they suddenly wanted water all the time. I had to walk a long way for the water. But it stopped me from doing the work that was too hard for me. These people were very rough in their ways. But behind the roughness they were good men. "

At last, Jacob Riis got a job writing for a newspaper in New York City. This was his chance. He finally had found a profession that would lead to his life work -- making the world a better place for poor people.

The newspaper sent him to police headquarters for stories. There he saw life at its worst, especially in a very poor part of New York which was known as Mulberry Bend.

"It was no place for men and women. And surely no place for little children. It was a terrible slum -- as such places are called -- where too many are crowded together, where the houses and streets are dirty and full of rats. The place began to trouble me as the truth about it became clear. Others were not troubled. They had no way of finding out how terrible the lives of people were in Mulberry Bend. But as a newspaper reporter, I could find the truth. So I went through the dark dirty streets and houses, and saw how the people suffered in this area. And I wrote many stories about the life there.

"I did good work as a police reporter, but wanted a change. My editor said, 'no'. He asked me to go back to Mulberry Bend and stay there. He said I was finding something there that needed me."

The words of Jacob Riis' editor proved to be very true. Riis started a personal war against slum houses, the sort he saw in Mulberry Bend. He learned to use a camera to show the public clearly what the Mulberry Bend slum was like. The camera in the eighteen eighties was nothing like it is today. But Riis got his pictures.

"I made good use of them quickly. Words could get no action to change things. But the pictures did. What the camera showed was so powerful that the city's health officials started to do something. At last I had a strong partner in the fight against Mulberry Bend -- my camera. "

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Jacob Riis continued the fight to clean up the slums for many years. There were not many people to help him. It was a lonely fight. But his camera and fighting words helped to get a law passed which would destroy the Mulberry Bend slum. Finally, the great day came. The slum housing was gone. The area had become a park.

"When they had fixed the ground so the grass could grow, I saw children dancing there in the sunlight. They were going to have a better life, thank God. We had given them their lost chance. I looked at these dancing children and saw how happy they were. This place that had been full of crime and murder became the most orderly in the city.

"The murders and crimes disappeared when they let sunlight come into the Bend. The sunlight that shone upon children who had, at last, the right to play. That was what the Mulberry Bend Park meant. So the Bend went. And I was very happy that I had helped to make it go. "

That was not Riis' last battle to make life cleaner and better for many people. He had great energy. And his love for people was as great as his energy.

He started a campaign to get clean water for the state of New York. He showed that water for the state was not healthy for people. State officials were forced to take actions that would clean the water.

He also worked to get laws against child labor, and made sure that these laws were obeyed. In those days, when Riis was a fighting newspaper reporter, laws against child labor were something new. People did not object to making young children work long hours, in places that had bad air and bad light. But in the United States today, child labor is not legal. It was because of men like Jacob Riis that this is so.

He was also successful in getting playgrounds for children. And he helped establish centers for education and fun for older people.

His book, "How the Other Half Lives," was published in eighteen ninety. He became famous. That book and his newspaper reports influenced many people. Theodore Roosevelt, who later became president of the United States, called Riis the most useful citizen in New York City.

Riis continued to write about conditions that were in need of major reform. His twelve books including "Children of the Poor" helped improve conditions in the city. The books also made him popular as a speaker in other cities. Jacob Riis's concern for the poor kept him so busy writing and speaking around the country that he ruined his health. He died in nineteen fourteen.

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This Special English program was written by Herbert Sutcliffe and produced by Lawan Davis. I'm Ray Freeman. And I'm Shirley Griffith. Listen again next week for another PEOPLE IN AMERICA program on the Voice of America.

Margaret Bourke-White: A Fearless News Photographer part I

Source: www.manythings.org/voa/people

I'm Barbara Klein. And I'm Steve Ember with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Today we tell about photographer Margaret Bourke-White, one of the leading news reporters of the twentieth century.

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A young woman is sitting on her knees on top of a large metal statue. She is not in a park.  She is outside an office building high above New York City.   The young woman reached the statue by climbing through a window on the sixty-first floor.  She wanted to get a better picture of the city below.

The woman is Margaret Bourke-White. She was one of the leading news reporters of the twentieth century. But she did not write the news. She told her stories with a camera. She was a fearless woman of great energy and skill.  Her work took her from America's Midwest to the Soviet Union. From Europe during World War Two to India, South Africa and Korea. Through her work, she helped create the modern art of photojournalism.

In some ways, Bourke-White was a woman ahead of her time. She often did things long before they became accepted in society. She was divorced.  She worked in a world of influential men, and earned their praise and support. She wore trousers and colored her hair.  Yet, in more important ways, she was a woman of and for her times. She became involved in the world around her and recorded it in pictures for the future.

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Margaret Bourke-White was born in New York City in nineteen-oh-four. When Margaret was very young, the family moved to New Jersey.   Her mother, Minnie Bourke, worked on publications for the blind. Her father, Joseph White, was an engineer and designer in the printing industry. He also liked to take pictures.  Their home was filled with his photographs. Soon young Margaret was helping him take and develop his photographs.

When she was eight years old, her father took her inside a factory to watch the manufacture of printing presses.  In the foundry, she saw hot liquid iron being poured to make the machines.  She remembered this for years to come.

Margaret attended several universities before completing her studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in nineteen twenty-seven.  She studied engineering, biology and photography.   She married while she was still a student. But the marriage only lasted one year.

Margaret took the name Bourke-White, the last names of her mother and father. In nineteen twenty-eight, she began working in the midwestern city of Cleveland, Ohio.  It was then one of the centers of American industry. She became an industrial photographer at the Otis Steel Company.  In the hot, noisy factories where steel was made, she saw beauty and a subject for her pictures.

She said: "Industry is alive.  The beauty of industry lies in its truth and simpleness.  Every line has a purpose, and so is beautiful. Whatever art will come out of this industrial age will come from the subjects of industry themselves…which are close to the heart of the people."

Throughout America and Europe, engineers and building designers found beauty in technology.  Their machines and buildings had artistic forms.  In New York, the Museum of Modern Art opened in nineteen twenty-nine.  One of its goals was to study the use of art in industry.  Bourke-White's photographic experiments began with the use of industry in art.

Bourke-White's first pictures inside the steel factory in Cleveland were a failure. The difference between the bright burning metal and the black factory walls was too extreme for her camera.  She could not solve the problem until she got new equipment and discovered new techniques of photography.  Then she was able to capture the sharp difference between light and dark.  The movement and power of machines.  The importance of industry.

Sometimes her pictures made you feel you were looking down from a great height, or up from far below.  Sometimes they led you directly into the heart of the activity.

In New York, a wealthy and influential publisher named Henry Luce saw Bourke-White's pictures.  Luce published a magazine called Time. He wanted to start a new magazine.  It would be called Fortune, and would report about developments in industry. Luce sent a telegram to Bourke-White, asking her to come to New York immediately.  She accepted a job as photographer for Fortune magazine.  She worked there from nineteen twenty-nine to nineteen thirty-three.

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Margaret Bourke-White told stories in pictures, one image at a time.   She used each small image to tell part of the bigger story. The technique became known as the photographic essay.  Other magazines and photographers used the technique.  But Bourke-White – more than most photographers – had unusual chances to develop it.

In the early nineteen thirties, she traveled to the Soviet Union three times.  Later she wrote:

"Nothing invites me so much as a closed door.  I cannot let my camera rest until I have opened that door. And I wanted to be first. I believed in machines as objects of beauty.  So I felt the story of a nation trying to industrialize – almost overnight – was perfect for me."

On her first trip to the Soviet Union, Bourke-White traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway.  She carried many cameras and examples of her work. When she arrived in Moscow, a Soviet official gave her a special travel permit, because he liked her industrial photographs. The permit ordered all Soviet citizens to help her while she was in the country.

Bourke-White spoke to groups of Soviet writers and photographers. They asked her about camera techniques, and also about her private life.

After one gathering, several men surrounded her and talked for a long time. They spoke Russian. Not knowing the language, Bourke-White smiled in agreement at each man as he spoke.  Only later did she learn that she had agreed to marry each one of them.  Her assistant explained the mistake and said to the men: "Miss Bourke-White loves nothing but her camera."

By the end of the trip, Margaret Bourke-White had traveled eight thousand kilometers throughout the Soviet Union. She took hundreds of pictures, and published some of them in her first book, "Eyes on Russia." She returned the next year to prepare for a series of stories for the New York Times newspaper. And she went back a third time to make an educational movie for the Kodak film company.

Bourke-White visited Soviet cities, farms and factories.  She took pictures of workers using machines.  She took pictures of peasant women, village children, and even the mother of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. She took pictures of the country's largest bridge, and the world's largest dam.  She used her skill in mixing darkness and light to create works of art. She returned home with more than three thousand photographs – the first western documentary on the Soviet Union.

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Margaret Bourke-White had seen a great deal for someone not yet thirty years old. But in nineteen thirty-four, she saw something that would change her idea of the world. Fortune magazine sent her on a trip through the central part of the United States.  She was told to photograph farmers – from America's northern border with Canada to its southern border with Mexico.

Some of the farmers were victims of a terrible shortage of rain, and of their own poor farming methods.  The good soil had turned to dust. And the wind blew the dust over everything.  It got into machines and stopped them.  It chased the farmers from their land, although they had nowhere else to go.

Bourke-White had never given much thought to human suffering.  After her trip, she had a difficult time forgetting.  She decided to use her skills to show all parts of life.  She would continue taking industrial pictures of happy, healthy people enjoying their shiny new cars.  But she would tell a different  story in her photographic essays.

Under one picture she wrote: "While machines are making great progress in automobile factories, the workers might be under-paid.  Pictures can be beautiful. But they must tell facts, too."  We will continue the story of photographer Margaret Bourke-White next week.

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This program was written by Shelley Gollust. It was produced by Lawan Davis.  Our studio engineer was Tom Verba.  I'm Steve Ember. And I'm Barbara Klein.  Join us again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.