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NARRATING THE NEWS
NARRATING THE NEWS

New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction

KAREN ROGGENKAMP

T HE K ENT S TATE U NIVERSITY P RESS
Kent and London
2005 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2004028468
ISBN -10: 0-87338-826-7
ISBN -13: 978-0-87338-826-9
Manufactured in the United States of America
09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1
A version of chapter 2 , To Turn a Fiction to a Fact, originally appeared in the Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas 31 (2000): 19-46. Reprinted with permission.
A version of chapter 3 , A Front Seat to Lizzie Borden, originally appeared in American Periodicals 8 (1998): 45-62. Reprinted with permission of the Ohio State Univ. Press.
A version of chapter 4 , The Evangelina Cisneros Romance, Medievalist Fiction, and Journalism That Acts, originally appeared in the Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23, no. 2 (2000): 25-37. Reprinted with permission of Blackwell.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Roggenkamp, Karen, 1969-
Narrating the news : new journalism and literary genre in late nineteenth-century American newspapers and fiction / Karen Roggenkamp.
p. cm.
Based on the author s doctoral dissertation-Univ. of Minnesota.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87338-826-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Press-United States-History-19th century. 2. Sensationalism in journalism-United States-History-19th century. 3. Reportage literature, American-History and criticism. I. Title.
PN 4864. R 64 2005
071 .3 09034-dc22
2004028468

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available
For Jay, Simon, and Piper.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Literary Rooms in the House of News
1. The Sun, the Moon, and Two Balloons: Edgar Allan Poe, Literary Hoaxes, and Penny Press Journalism
American Literary Realism and the Cult of the Real Thing
2. To Turn a Fiction to a Fact : Nellie Bly, Jules Verne, and Trips Around the World
Journalist as Hero: Richard Harding Davis and the Cult of the Reporter in 1890s America
3. A Front Seat to Lizzie Borden: Julian Ralph, Literary Journalism, and the Construction of Criminal Fact
True Women and New Women: Lizzie Borden and Gender Anxieties in Late Nineteenth-Century America
4. The Evangelina Cisneros Romance, Medievalist Fiction, and Journalism That Acts
Captive Cubans, International Impulses, and New Journalism
5. From There to Here: Cooke, Conventions, Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS




Perhaps it was inevitable, given that several of my close relatives are journalists and that my family shares a general love of literature and history, that I should somehow try to fuse several disciplinary perspectives into one study. This book, at any rate, would not have come about without the support both of those family members and of my professional colleagues.
My deepest gratitude is directed toward my two closest advisors, Edward Griffin and Donald Ross, at the University of Minnesota. Their guidance as members of my doctoral dissertation committee, where they saw the first versions of this book, was surpassed only by their support as colleagues and mentors within the context of the Early American Literature Research Group at Minnesota. They exuded confidence in my project long before I could recognize its value myself, and they continued to offer frank advice and solid insights through final revisions of the manuscript. I cherish the good fortune I have had in knowing them. I also extend sincere gratitude to the other members of the Early American Literature Research Group, particularly Danielle Tissinger, Sarah Wadsworth, and Karen Woods Weierman; their good-humored suggestions and unflagging support enriched my project at each stage of its development.
I am greatly thankful for three other members of the University of Minnesota faculty who nurtured me as doctoral advisors: Toni McNaron, Nancy Roberts, and Hazel Dicken-Garcia. Their superb instruction continually challenged me to construct new paradigms for my own thinking. Collectively, they awakened my interest in journalism history, nineteenth-century gender politics, and interdisciplinary studies.
I owe hearty thanks to my editors at the Kent State University Press. Joanna Hildebrand Craig has demonstrated incredible humor and good faith from our first meeting. She has expressed her positive spirit through situations as mundane as my endless editorial questions and as unusual as her being driven from her office building after a botched animal dissection; she has kept me smiling all the while. Likewise, Kathy Method provided incredible flexibility, not to mention commiseration, during fall 2004. I would also like to thank Michael Robertson, whose cogent remarks on an early edition of the manuscript have proved invaluable.
This manuscript profited from the institutional support I received while I studied at the University of Minnesota. The Graduate School offered significant financial support, which allowed me to complete an earlier version of this book. And Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota continually impressed me with the depth of its collection and its level of courteous and prompt service. Both the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Literature and Languages at Texas A M University-Commerce provided additional support in the final stages of editing.
Finally, I owe a special debt to Simon and Piper, who remind me every day that the best stories are the ones a mother shares with her children, and to Jay, whose unswerving faith in my ability to get things done carried this project to its completion. The three of you are light in the darkness.
INTRODUCTION

Literary Rooms in the House of News



Throughout most of the nineteenth century, New York City s newspapers were housed along a pulsating street named Park Row-unofficially dubbed Newspaper Row -which stretched from the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, past Printing House Square at Nassau Street, and on to Chatham Square on the lower end of Manhattan. Adjacent to City Hall, criminal courts, and the Bowery, Newspaper Row electrified the city and molded the narration of news throughout the nation. Large and small papers alike found a home here, including three that changed the course of both American journalism and literature at the end of the century: the World, the Sun, and the Journal. 1
By the 1890s the very buildings of Newspaper Row had entered into cultural imagination, symbolizing within their walls the swiftly changing print culture they helped produce. The Sun building had been a fixture on Newspaper Row since editor Charles Dana had installed his paper there in 1868. 2 Out of its solid, unflappable depths, the daily story of New York had risen for decades. But in 1890 editor Joseph Pulitzer amazed New Yorkers by constructing headquarters that surpassed in scope and brilliance all other structures in the city and that quite literally cast his competition-specifically Dana of the Sun -into the shadows. Sixteen stories high and domed in gleaming gold plate, Pulitzer s World building captured a new pulse pounding along Newspaper Row. Americans had never seen a structure of this size; many visitors were afraid to ride the elevator to the World s top floors. Clearly, this was not a common office building. The World s home spoke instead of importance, illustriousness, and new ness-it spoke of surpassing all competition and of sheer business enterprise. Pulitzer s building stood as the tallest in New York for a short time, and the World was the city s most spectacular newspaper as well until another enterprising builder -William Randolph Hearst-blazed into town and introduced an even newer and more spectacular daily: the New York Journal. Hearst did not bother to build literally a larger and more impressive structure to tower over his competition. Rather, in a telling move that brought new meaning to the phrase undermining the competition, Hearst took office space within the buildings of his rivals, including Pulitzer s own World tower. 3
The papers that the Sun, World, and Journal offices produced were more important, of course, than the buildings that held them. For in the nineteenth century these newspapers developed a novel way of narrating the news that came to be known as new journalism -an innovative, commercialized, sensationalistic, and above all dramatic style of reportage. The phrase new journalism was coined by Matthew Arnold in 1887 in connection with the energetic editorial style Pulitzer had been championing for over four years, first in St. Louis, then in New York. New journalism has much to recommend it, Arnold admitted; it is full of ability, novelty, variety, sensation, sympathy, generous instincts. 4 However, he added, new journalism s one great fault is that it is feather-brained. It throws out assertions at a venture because it wishes them true; does not correct either them or itself, if they are false; and to get at the state of things as they truly are seems to feel no concern whatever. 5
Arnold recognized the roots of a mass communication phenomenon that was to increase in force as the nineteenth century closed. Facing growing rivalries with one another and within a burgeoning print marketplace more generally, urban newspapers felt pressure to create prose that entertained, and the urge to spin attractive and popular tales sometimes came at the expense of factual information. Indeed, most editors and reporters believed, as they still do today, that one could be both entertaining and factual. But for new journalism the ideal of entertainment was primary, creating within its pages an ongoing dance between the literary (dramatic, sometimes fictionalized, stories) and the journalistic (factual reportage). In essence