The Trial of Lizzie Borden(30)

As a general matter, he disliked covering crime, but took special pride in having saved an innocent young man from the gallows. In his autobiography, The Making of a Journalist, Ralph wrote: “It was a case of pitting cold logic against detective stupidity; for what milder term can I give to that too common habit with some police of making an arrest and then twisting and distorting evidence to fit the bird in hand, rather than . . . set themselves the more difficult task of finding the real culprit.” He had his own remarkable near miss as well. In 1883, he covered the murder of a young woman in New Jersey. Wary of all strangers showing an interest in the case, the dead woman’s brothers began to suspect the journalist who wrote so movingly of their sister’s death. The brothers tried to force Ralph to touch their dead sister’s body “according to an age-old superstition which holds that such dumb mouths will accuse a murderer.” (Ten years later, he recalled the incident, wondering if the skull of Andrew Borden might accuse or clear his daughter.)

Joe Howard, Jr., a veteran of over thirty years of murder trials, including that of President Garfield’s assassin Charles J. Guiteau, arrived in New Bedford at the apogee of a long career. A former reporter for the New York Times and founding member of the New York Press Club, he graduated from daily journalism to a more comfortable life of sought-after columnist and lecturer. Examples of his most popular speeches give a sense of life as a bon vivant and boldface name: “Journalism,” “Cranks,” and “People I Have Met.” His columns appeared in the Boston Globe, Boston’s most widely circulated paper, with a readership nearly double that of the business-minded Boston Record and ten thousand subscribers greater than its closest competitor, the Boston Herald. (The columns also appeared in the New York Recorder and were reprinted in other papers as well.) Nearly sixty at the time of the Borden trial, Howard looked like the celebrated columnist he was—the highest-paid newspaperman in the country. He had a bald pate, bushy moustache, and a pointed red beard. He seemed to enjoy defying conventions: it was whispered that he traveled everywhere with an attractive blond stenographer. And he alone among all the many men in the courtroom flouted propriety and wore comfortable summer clothes. Howard was what his colleague Julian Ralph termed one of the “Bohemians” of the press, survivors of a less professional era, when it was “a haphazard, unmethodical business,” who now “wear clean linen, live comfortably, and are only called ‘Bohemians’ because they do not take life as seriously as most persons.” Howard was fond of noting incidents that allowed his readers to feel as if they, too, were inside the courtroom witnessing the spectacle. For example, later that day, Howard mentioned “a most demonstrative cow, whose mooing was almost continuous, frequently interrupting the learned judge, often drowning the responses of mild-mannered witnesses, and causing as far as the eye could see the one and only smile that changed the impassiveness of the Borden countenance.” The cow became such a regular feature of the reports that the Boston Globe’s editorial section opined: “The irreverent cow that moos beneath the windows of the courthouse in New Bedford will go down into fame with the historic cow that kicked over Mrs. O’Leary’s kerosene lamp and was thus the great first cause of the big Chicago fire in 1871.”

Joe Howard, Jr., Boston Globe



Female reporters—including Elizabeth Jordan and Anna Page Scott of the New York World and Amy Robsart of the Boston Post—were also on hand to cover the trial. They were considered noteworthy enough to warrant illustrations in rival papers of unusual and interesting persons attending the trial. They were not exactly novelties: the number of women journalists more than doubled in the 1890s (from “888 in 1890 to 2,193 at the turn of the century”—still less than 10 percent of the total number of journalists), but a few had full-time jobs as reporters. As Jordan herself put it, women reporters in the 1890s were “more numerous, and they are further in [than in the earlier part of the century]; but their tenure of office is distinctly open to discussion.”

Elizabeth Jordan, public domain from Google Books scan of Elizabeth Garver Jordan, Tales of the Cloister, vol. 4 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901)



The contrast between Julian Ralph and Joe Howard, Jr., on the one hand, and Elizabeth Jordan on the other could not have been more noteworthy. Elizabeth Jordan was a convent-educated woman from Milwaukee who decided to make her mark as a journalist in New York City. Her first important opportunity was in the summer of 1890, shortly after her twenty-fifth birthday. Her editor sent her to the seaside town of Cape May, New Jersey, for a feature on the daily life of President Harrison’s family, including their much-discussed five-year-old grandson. Many seasoned journalists had failed to penetrate the Harrisons’ retreat. Dressed in a “fresh white linen tailor made suit,” Jordan brazenly called upon the household, turning a chance encounter with Mrs. Harrison in the front hall into an extended interview while they both played with the little boy on the beach.

Jordan had a gift for more difficult stories as well. She followed her light interview, featuring the Harrisons’ cosseted grandson, with a tragic story called “The Death of Number Nine.” One of the nuns who taught her encouraged Jordan to let the readers shed their own tears. She took the advice to heart when dealing with this heartrending material. According to Jordan’s later summary, “This was the simple tale of a sick baby, carried three miles through New York streets one night in its mother’s arms, only to have her discover at Bellevue Hospital that the child was dead.” The mother, lacking funds for a proper burial, left her child there to be buried anonymously as “Number Nine” at Potter’s Field. As a result of her piece, enough money was raised not only to bury the child “with dignified simplicity” but also to give his mother and siblings a chance for “a happier life.” That and other pieces won her the respect of her colleagues—though they jokingly begged her “to drop the damned formality and convent polish.” Within a decade she had become editor of Harper’s Bazaar, a successful fiction writer, and an intimate of cultural and literary figures ranging from the actor Otis Skinner to the writer Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was even rumored that she and Henry James shared a “warmer emotion than a pleasant friendship.” She denied “the silly gossip” but counted him among her close friends, marveling at “the strange power of Henry James’s eyes. They made me feel in those instants as if he had read me to the soul.” Later in her life, she edited Sinclair Lewis’s first two novels. But, long before those happy milestones, she attracted notoriety with her first short story, “Ruth Herrick’s Assignment,” published in Cosmopolitan magazine, which told the story of a woman on trial for murder who confessed her guilt to a sympathetic female reporter. As a result, Jordan was widely thought to have heard and then suppressed Lizzie Borden’s confession out of a sisterly solidarity. Jordan disavowed any connection but admitted she, like many of her colleagues, was a Borden partisan. In her memoir Three Rousing Cheers, named for the customary greeting inaugurated in her circle, she declared: “The reporters around me were for Miss Borden as one man—convinced of her innocence, showing the conviction between the lines of their reports, and burning with sympathy for her.”