PROFILE: Ada Patterson

Ada Patterson: Co-pioneer of gender equity in American journalism and human interest feature reporting

In 1900, the field of journalism in America was dominated by men, with slightly more than 300 women regularly employed as reporters nationwide, according to Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press (Harper, 1936; Arno Press, 1974). Some of these women, however, demonstrated an ability to conduct interviews and write in-depth features about people and events, which gradually led to a trend of more women working in all departments of a newspaper. Among the early leading female reporters in the nation was Ada Patterson, who had previously resided in Franklin County, Nebraska from 1877 to 1889 as a student and a teacher.

The first notable woman in journalism was Nellie Bly, whose career with various newspapers endured from the 1880s until her death in 1922. While with the New York World, she became a national celebrity in 1890 after her trip around the world in 72 days, and later for publishing major features and interviews, often exposing corruption in various fields and supporting causes of neglected people.

Other significant female journalists during this era were Nixola Greeley-Smith and Winifred Black, who wrote for New York newspapers owned by the renowned Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, along with Dorothy Dix, who began her career in the 1890s, and from 1901 to 1949 worked for the New York Journal (renamed New York American and later Journal-American). Dix became "one of the first personal advice columnists in America," states her entry in American National Biography, Vol 6 (1999).

Ada Patterson also began her journalism career in the 1890s. After a summer vacation trip in 1891 to the West Coast and Alaska, she left her Nebraska teaching position at the age of 24 to work as a reporter for the Salt Lake City Herald. While on its staff for two years, she became its society page editor, conducted an interview of a notorious murderer, and reported on the activities of the upper house of the Utah Legislature, an unusual assignment for a woman at the time.

In the summer of 1893, at the suggestion of relatives in California, she took a position with the San Francisco Call, a major daily in that city, and gained recognition as one of its leading writers. In one feature, after she applied for work at a fruit cannery and spent a day of sorting, peeling, and cutting fruit, she revealed to the public how many poor women employed at the large fruit canneries were treated, the amount earned in a day of hard labor, and other facts. In another, she reported the philanthropic work done under the auspices of the French Christian Union of California, which not only offered instruction in French but also an institution for young girls who were leaving home, needed proper influences, and could learn sewing and other skills in its industrial classes. She also gained attention with her interview of wife-murderer Enoch Davis when he was on death watch, an assignment usually thought better suited for male reporters.

By 1896, Patterson had relocated to the St. Louis Republic, was given some very challenging projects, and became known for her character studies. Eventually, she was given the nickname "Nellie Bly of the West" from co-workers and readers. One of her first assignments required her to walk on a plank 90 feet over the St. Louis City Hall under construction, and write about the view. That summer, she attended the national political conventions held in St. Louis and Chicago, and published an article headlined "Big Politicians as Seen by a Little Woman". In another, she was the first to predict the nomination of William Jennings Bryan.

Her human interest features included the work of a St. Louis astronomer at his observatory, a revelation of experiences of poor people who survived by sorting through discards at a half dozen acres of low ground near the river, exposure of conditions at a house of ill repute, and a profile of the most aged pastor in the city, who stated after spending fifty years studying how to reach the human heart that "I have found that kindness is one of the avenues. I have tried never to add a drop of bitterness to any one's cup."

An early assignment had a long-term advantage despite its risk. Patterson had to drive a locomotive at night from St. Louis to Chicago, though the engineer did stand by her as she operated the throttle. Later that year, she became the only reporter to secure an interview with Judge Isaac Charles Parker of Fort Smith, Arkansas, who at the time was thought to have sentenced more men to death than any other judge. He had agreed to her request because he himself had once driven a locomotive, and wanted to meet the girl who had duplicated his feat. In her September 1, 1896 St. Louis Republic feature, she quoted Parker as saying, in part, "I never hung a man. It is the law." And he asserted he was actually against capital punishment, "provided there is a certainty of punishment, whatever that punishment may be."

On February 16, 1897, Patterson became the first woman journalist to witness an execution, standing on the gallows next to Arthur Duestrow at his hanging in Union, Missouri. The son of a mining millionaire, he had killed his wife and child, and during a sensational trial, his defense counsel had argued a plea of insanity. While Duestrow was in jail, she had interviewed him on several occasions, and when a Republic co-worker could not carry out his duties, she was asked to take his place at the execution, reported author Ishbel Ross. As a result of the publicity nationwide, Patterson was invited to work for a New York City newspaper several months later.

From late 1897 to 1924, she was a feature reporter, specializing in theatrical matters, and an occasional editorial page columnist for the Hearst newspapers and syndicate, with her work appearing in various editions of the New York Journal, which was renamed the New York American about 1901 and later the New York Journal-American, which ceased publication in 1966. Many of her features were carried by other newspapers nationwide.

Patterson was also a prolific author of articles and stories for many magazines and periodicals, co-authored with Victory Bateman a book of short stories titled By the Stage Door (Grafton Press, 1902) and authored Maude Adams: A Biography (Meyer Brothers, 1907). For some time, she lived in the same building where actresses Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, and other notable persons resided. Her early reporting assignments involved taking a dangerous trip to the bottom of the river to see men building the East River bridge, and riding with daredevil race car driver Joe Tracy at the then-highest speed of ninety miles an hour on the Vanderbilt cup course. She was also the first woman to take a ride in the Argonaut, a new U.S. submarine, to the bottom of the Patapsco River at Baltimore.

On July 21, 1899, she published a feature about the hardships of the women and children of striking men who wanted more than $2 per day from their jobs. On another occasion, she wrote about Christina Oertling, who took her life after 21 years of marriage and five children because of the monotony and family discipline. Her husband had expected silence in the home and lack of affection, and she labored on a schedule from 7 am to 10 pm every day.

The first of her coverage of sensational murder trials in New York City occurred in 1904 after Nan Patterson (no relation), an attractive show girl, was charged with killing her bookmaker lover Caesar Young in a cab while accompanying him to the dock where he was scheduled to sail for Europe and a meeting with his wife. Ada was required to testify at the trial about an interview she had with the defendant in jail.

Though Nan Patterson was acquitted, since the jury decided the death of Young a probable suicide, the case became memorable because women at the time were not allowed entrance to the trial because it was thought the courtroom was not a place for "the weaker sex". However, many women forced their way into the courtroom, and their conduct became the subject of newspapers the next day.

In 1907, Ada was asked by her editor to cover the Harry K. Thaw murder trial, which became a nationwide media event. Some authors have called it the trial of the century. Sitting at the press table across from men who reported "straight news" stories were Winifred Black, Dorothy Dix, Nixola Greeley-Smith, and Ada Patterson, who did features of human interest to women and men readers.

As the trial progressed, the men reporters nicknamed the four women feature writers as the "sympathy brigade," then the "sympathy squad," and finally "sob sisters". The latter term resulted in stereotypes for the role of women in American journalism for subsequent decades, and human interest reporting was sometimes characterized as "yellow journalism" during the early decades of the 20th century. But the importance of human interest features for the public attracted the attention of more editors nationwide as a result of the work of these four female reporters.

Thaw was an heir to the fortune of his father William Thaw, a transportation executive and philanthropist. He had become enamored with and married to theatrical performer Evelyn Nesbit, and when in June 1906 he saw her prior suitor Stanford White at the rooftop theater of the Old Madison Square Garden, he shot White dead. Patterson had interviewed Thaw while he was imprisoned. During the trials held in 1907 and 1908, she had written on one occasion, in part, "The worst had been told. Nothing else could ever approach the horror of that story of a poor, beautiful, foolish, ignorant girl of sixteen pursued with the wealth and ferocity of a panther, by a man old enough to be her grandfather."

Found not guilty by reason of insanity, Thaw was committed to a state hospital for five years, then a jury found him sane and he was released in 1915. According to an entry in American National Biography, Vol 21 (1999), Thaw then divorced Evelyn Nesbit, was embroiled in another legal incident, attempted suicide, and was committed to a mental institution for seven more years. After various unsuccessful projects, including an autobiography, he died in 1947.

Another murder trial of note covered by Patterson was that of New York City police lieutenant Charles Becker in 1912 and 1914 for his involvement in the death of gambler Herman Rosenthal. After the gambler had reported to a New York newspaper in July 1912 that his casinos were damaged by the greed of Becker and his colleagues, he was murdered. It was determined that Becker had commanded others to carry out the killing, and he was sentenced to death, likely the first American police officer to receive the death penalty for a killing. Many had wondered what happened to his wife, but on the night of his execution on July 30, 1915, Patterson interviewed at her apartment Mrs. Becker, the only reporter to do so.

Her career as a general contributor of articles to more than 60 leisure magazines was noteworthy, too, not only while she was with the Hearst syndicate but also after retirement from newspaper work in 1924. By her own admission, she wrote most often about subjects related to health, the theater, and life building, that is, constructive or inspirational living. Some of her articles appeared in lesser-known publications. For example, there was an in-depth series of her articles in The Mooseheart Weekly during 1920-21 about the home of the orphaned or half-orphaned children of the members of the Loyal Order of Moose located west of Chicago in the Illinois town of Mooseheart.

Many of her articles were published in magazines with national circulation such as Liberty, Screenland, Ladies Home Journal, American, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, and Theatre Magazine. As an example, in her article titled "The Bravest Woman I Ever Knew" published in the May 1928 Psychology Magazine, she described the efforts of Nebraska native Dr. Olga Stastny, who during and after World War I in Europe had treated and helped prevent diseases, most notably at a quarantine station for refugees at Macronissi Island near the mainland of Greece.

In addition to her books of 1902 and 1907 previously mentioned, she was credited for writing with Robert Edeson the play Love's Lightning, produced in 1918, and with George Nelson another play titled The Bonfire in 1927, according to American Women Playwrights 1900-1930 (Greenwood Press, 1992).

It is also of interest that Ada maintained a close friendship for nearly 40 years with the famous advice columnist Dorothy Dix, which began during their employment with the New York Journal. Dix had written a letter in 1920 to Ada's parents in Franklin, Nebraska, where they had resided after 1901 in a house on 14th Avenue adjacent to the Franklin Academy from which Ada was its first graduate in 1885. After the deaths of Ada's mother in 1926 and father in 1930, the Jesse H. Naden family rented from Ada the home of her parents for several years, and according to records from their daughter Beth Naden Kellar, Dix had sent a tribute about Ada in July 1939 to Mrs. Naden for reading at a banquet in Franklin.

Presently, some information about Ada Patterson's connection to Franklin County is housed at the Franklin County Historical Society Museum. And on May 4, 1990, a Franklin Academy Historical Marker was dedicated by state authorities at Franklin's City Park, the site the school had previously occupied from 1881 to 1922. She was one of three of the school's distinguished alumni named in the Marker's inscription.

A repository that contains almost 100 sheets of clippings of Patterson's work in Salt Lake City, San Francisco, St. Louis, and New York exists in the morgue of the New York Journal-American housed at the Center of American History at the University of Texas in Austin, the institution that originally received the morgue from the Hearst Corporation in 1968. In the clippings there is also an autobiographical article of hers published in an undated issue of True Story Magazine. And there are a few brief news items about her from Franklin County, Nebraska newspapers along with a copy of her 1885 Franklin Academy valedictory commencement address in which she emphasized the importance of ideality in the world, stating, in part, "Lives of great men have proven to us the wisdom of having a high and worthy aim, and of striving toward that as the object of existence."

Entries on Patterson were published in Who's Who in America. Vol 19 (1936-37) and Who's Who Among North American Authors (Golden Syndicate, 1939) and articles appeared in The Journalist, July 1, 1905 and The Editor and Publisher and Journalist. November 15, 1913 and Tampa /FL/ Sunday Tribune, June 4, 1939. Her work is also described in Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press (Harper, 1936; Arno Press, 1974) and Phyllis L. Abramson, Sob Sister Journalism (Greenwood Press, 1990) and Editor & Publisher, October 14, 1995. There is an entry in the prestigious American National Biography, Sup 1 (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Born in 1867 in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, the daughter of John M. and Elizabeth E. McDannel Patterson, Ada lived with her family also at Mount Pleasant, Ohio until 1877 when the family moved to Franklin County, Nebraska, according to Biographical Souvenir (Franklin County, Nebraska, 1890). Soon the family settled on a farm along Lohff Creek south of Riverton, where she attended school, then the Franklin Academy in Franklin from 1883 to 1885. She then taught the intermediate level of elementary school at Riverton for four years, and the Lincoln Public Schools in Lancaster County, Nebraska for two more years.

Ada Patterson remained unmarried. She died at age 71 in June 1939 at her retirement home in Sarasota, Florida, with her cremated remains placed in Luke Wood Park at nearby Longboat Key. Her obituary in the June 27, 1939 New York Journal-American stated, in part, "She was acknowledged by all as America's foremost newspaper woman of her day."

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PROFILE: Ada Patterson

Ada Patterson: Co-pioneer of gender equity in American journalism and human interest feature reporting