Miriam Michelson’s Yellow Journalism
and the Multi-Ethnic West
Lori Harrison-Kahan
Boston College
Karen E. H. Skinazi
University of Birmingham
On 22 September 1897, aboard a steamship sailing out of Honolulu Harbor,
twenty-seven-year-old Miriam Michelson gazed back at the horizon and committed to paper her quickly dimming impressions of the island paradise she was leaving behind. With a regionalist’s eye for the atmospheric, she described the
landscape: the “mountains, veiled in tenderest green,” “the silver waterfalls,”
“the extravagance of foliage and of flowers,” and “the glory of sunshine on the
lava-created hills.” However, Michelson had not made the long trip from her
home in San Francisco to Hawai’i to partake in the beauty of the tropics.
Instead, as a special correspondent for the San Francisco Call, one of San
Francisco’s leading dailies, Michelson was covering the Hawaiian Patriotic
League’s petition against annexation by the US government. In Michelson’s view,
the annexation of Hawai’i was a clear-cut case of racial imperialism (a “battle [of]
the white man against the brown; might against right; strength against weakness”) that undermined America’s pride. Michelson’s interviews with the native
population recorded unilateral opposition to the treaty that threatened their
sovereignty and frustration that their protests were neither heard nor heeded.
“Here in Hawai’i, the best beloved, the most richly endowed of all Mother
Nature’s beautiful family, the old, old struggle for Anglo-Saxon supremacy is
going on,” wrote Michelson. “The only new phase in the old drama is that this
time a republic is masquerading in the despot’s role” (“Strangling” 1).
A week later, the San Francisco Call devoted the entire first two pages of its
broadsheet to Michelson’s article, heralded by the dramatic headline
“Strangling Hands Upon a Nation’s Throat.” Michelson’s reporting endeavored
to represent the humanity of the native Hawaiians, countering the dominant view
of annexationists who portrayed them as “heathens” in need of civilization. Her
respectful descriptions of the Hawaiian people, for example, captured the
elegance of the women in their “kid gloves” and “flowing trained gowns of black
crepe” and the decorum of the crowds standing “with straight shoulders
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DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlv013
MELUS Volume 40 Number 2 (Summer 2015)
Miriam Michelson’s Yellow Journalism and the Multi-Ethnic West
splendidly thrown back and head[s] proudly poised” (1). With the aid of an interpreter, Michelson gave voice to the Hawaiian people, privileging their protests
above her interviews with pro-annexation congressmen and other white proponents of manifest destiny. In gratitude for the reporter’s presence, a young
Hawaiian girl slipped a lei over Michelson’s head, and Michelson took down
her broken English: “No one comes to—to ask us. No one listens. No one cares.
Your paper will speak for us—us Hawaiians. Our voice will be heard, too. We are
poor—you un’stan? And we cannot talk your language very well. The white man
have ever’thing on their side. But we are right and they are wrong” (1-2).
Although the reporter insists on her impartiality, the article reads as an emotional
appeal on behalf of the islanders, intended to stir up anti-annexation sentiment.
Michelson’s front-page story serves as an example of “yellow” or “new” journalism. The newspapers of Progressive Era America were notorious for sensationalizing events and for testing, if not outright violating, the journalist’s code
of ethics in pursuit of a story or angle, usually with the goal of pushing certain
editorial and political agendas.1 In Narrating the News: New Journalism and
Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction
(2005), Karen Roggenkamp demonstrates that the literary aesthetic of “new journalism,” which reached its apotheosis in the 1890s when Michelson was working
as a reporter, was closely intertwined with the narrative and genre conventions of
American fiction. According to Roggenkamp, “The big business of urban newspapers . . . depended for its success on the reporters’ narrative skills and their
ability to mold information—sometimes factual and sometimes not—into dramatic and skillfully told tales” (xiv). To accomplish this goal, reporters used a
variety of literary techniques, including inserting themselves as characters in their
stories. Michelson, for example, employed the first person in her article, although
not for the express purpose of editorializing. In fact, she repeatedly invoked the
first person to remind her readers of her supposedly impartial role as a
reporter—warning the girl with the lei, for instance, that she (Michelson) “can’t
do anything [to aid in the protest against annexation] except repeat what you say”
or withholding a reply from the Portuguese driver who politely asked her
thoughts on the fate of Hawai’i because she “had come 2,000 miles to find out
other people’s opinions; not to express her own” (“Strangling” 2).2 Michelson’s
use of the first person allows readers to see Hawai’i through her eyes, the eyes
of an outsider sympathetic to the plight of the natives. The reportorial first-person
voice also acknowledges the writer’s subjectivity, the role she played in gathering
and presenting the “facts.” Such literary devices were essential to the development of late nineteenth-century journalistic narratives, which blurred the
lines between fiction and nonfiction, thus anticipating the work of postWorld War II writers such as Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion,
who revived the term “New Journalism” to refer to the postmodern sensibility
of their writing.
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It is no coincidence that a host of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
American writers—Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather,
Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far), to name some—began their careers as journalists.3 For Michelson, too, the literary style of “new journalism” provided a natural
transition into fiction writing. Beginning as a reporter for several Western newspapers, including the San Francisco Call and San Francisco Bulletin, Michelson
went on to become one of the early twentieth century’s best-selling novelists
and a popular short story writer whose work was featured in a wide range of mass
circulation magazines, including Century, The Saturday Evening Post, Munsey’s,
Ainslee’s, The Smart Set, and the Ladies’ Home Journal. The interplay between
her journalistic and fictional work, exemplified by the reprint of the short story
that follows, enriches the turn-of-the-twentieth-century canon in terms of gender,
ethnicity, and cross-racial representations.
If Michelson earlier incorporated techniques from fiction to create emotional
and narrative effects in her journalistic work, as a fiction writer she drew on her
training and experiences as a journalist. For example, one of her earliest published short stories, “Understudy for a Princess,” published in 1901 in The
Black Cat, was inspired by her trip to Hawai’i and uses the controversy over
American expansionism as the backdrop for an exotic love story. Adventurer
Arthur Jerdrum pays a visit to his childhood playmate, the Crown Princess
Kaiulani, niece of the deposed queen, with the scheme of staging a bloodless coup
that would restore Liliuokalani’s heir to the throne and install Jerdrum himself as
Hawai’i’s minister of war. When Kaiulani sends her loyal friend, Lilia Lauzon, to
impersonate the princess and see Arthur in her place, Lilia, an ardent royalist, is
won over by the stranger’s anti-annexation fervor and falls in love with him.
Together, they conspire to stage a rebellion against the powerful United States.
Their plans are foiled when Lilia is finally forced to reveal her true identity to
Arthur, but the story of passing, in which an ordinary woman convincingly plays
the part of royalty, ends happily with an interracial romance: Arthur sails off with
the “mimic princess” and the two make a life together in San Francisco (5).
Michelson also drew more directly on her professional experiences as a source
for her fiction. In 1905, she began working on an episodic series of stories for The
Saturday Evening Post that featured the adventures of her gutsy alter ego, Rhoda
Massey, a “girl reporter” for the fictional San Francisco News. These interlocking
stories were to become the basis of her third novel, A Yellow Journalist (1905),
which portrays the questionable ethics and cutthroat competition of the newspaper business from the perspective of its female protagonist. A woman in a man’s
world, Rhoda Massey is not averse to using her femininity to scoop the male
reporters from rival papers as she covers yellow journalism’s standard fare of
celebrity scandals, political corruption, and courtroom dramas. The novel offers
an exciting panorama of San Francisco in all its diversity, and reviewers took
note. The Atlantic Monthly’s reviewer, for instance, appreciated the book’s
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fast-paced tour of the city’s most intriguing corners: “In Chinatown, in convents,
you have a whiff of that queer San Francisco world; not a conscientious exposition, but breathless glimpses, as you scurry along on a ‘beat’” with the novel’s
journalist-protagonist. “Miss Michelson,” the review concludes with somewhat
damning praise, “is as popular, as ‘catchy’ as ragtime” (Moss 47).
This essay and the excerpt from A Yellow Journalist that follows it introduce a
writer who remains unknown to most scholars of American literature despite the
popularity she enjoyed in the era of ragtime.4 Michelson’s breezy style, unconventional heroines, and slangy prose capture the zeitgeist of a newly modern
America, but her work is also a product of her upbringing as a Jewish girl on
the nineteenth-century’s multi-ethnic Western frontier—an ethno-religious difference, a time, and a place that significantly shaped her attitudes towards gender,
race, and class. Here we offer an overview of Michelson’s life and work to demonstrate why this fascinating, neglected woman writer deserves the attention of
scholars of American and ethnic literature. Michelson’s career as a female
reporter and her fictional depictions of New Women are unquestionably
important from a feminist perspective; in this respect, the recovery of her work
contributes to recent studies of women journalists, mass culture, and the public
sphere by scholars such as Jean Marie Lutes, Alice Fahs, and Sari Edelstein. At the
same time, Michelson’s work adds to a rich archive of texts that allow us to
explore cross-racial, cross-ethnic, and interreligious relations in the United
States. In her writing about other races and cultures, such as Chinese immigrants
and Native Americans, in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century West, Michelson
offers ways to expand and complicate the inquiries of scholars such as
Jonathan Freedman, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Rachel Rubenstein, and Dean
Franco, who have situated Jewish writers within the framework of comparative
race and ethnic studies.
We initiate this process of recovery by reprinting Michelson’s “In Chy Fong’s
Restaurant,” a story of racial impersonation and sexual slavery set in San
Francisco’s Chinatown, which appeared in A Yellow Journalist in 1905. While
the Chinatown setting would be familiar to readers of Bret Harte and Frank
Norris, who similarly found rich material in the multi-ethnic urban West,5
Michelson’s work also shares significant thematic resonances with that of
Edith Maude Eaton, a writer whose recovery by critics of Asian American and
multi-ethnic literature has transformed scholarship on turn-of-the-twentiethcentury ethnic literary history. We chose to reprint this particular story in
MELUS because it vividly weaves together the sensationalist milieu of “stunt journalism”—in which women reporters made themselves part of the story and thus
part of the spectacle6—with the literary trope of “passing,” a recurring theme in
the work of Michelson, Eaton, and other ethnic writers of the period. As one of
Michelson’s most intriguing articulations of racial cross-identification, “In Chy
Fong’s Restaurant” exemplifies how her desire to tell stories about New
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Woman characters intersected with her interest in telling stories about
people of different ethno-cultural backgrounds dwelling in and on the outskirts
of America.
A “California Jewess who has succeeded with her pen”:
The Western Roots of Michelson’s Journalism and Fiction
Miriam Michelson was born in Calaveras County, California, in 18707 to parents
who had immigrated to the United States over a decade earlier when anti-Semitic
persecution drove them from their home in Strzelno, Poland. In 1854, Samuel and
Rosalie (Przylubska) Michelson and their first two children arrived in New York
and initially lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Soon, however, the
Michelsons were to chart an atypical course for nineteenth-century Eastern
European Jewish immigrants. Lured by news of the Gold Rush, which promised
opportunities and riches out West, the family migrated again, traveling by ship
and mule wagon across the Isthmus of Panama and then up the California coast
to Murphy’s Camp, an Indian trading post turned prosperous mining town,
where the Michelsons made a living selling supplies to miners. By the time they
left Murphy’s to set up shop in another boomtown, Virginia City, Nevada, the
family had expanded exponentially: seven children in all, from the oldest,
Albert (who would later become America’s first Nobel Prize Winner in
Physics), to the two youngest, Miriam and Charles (who became a journalist
and the first publicity director of the Democratic National Committee under
Franklin D. Roosevelt).8
In Virginia City, the Michelson children were known for their brilliance. Aware
that the raucous, often lawless, frontier life provided ample opportunity for children to make trouble (as the Michelsons inevitably did), their mother emphasized
the value of education for daughters and sons alike. As a result of her influence,
“no child . . . failed to absorb an enormous respect for literature and a love of
beauty in one form or another” (Livingston 17). Miriam Michelson was a wide
reader and serious scholar and was employed briefly as a teacher at Virginia
City’s Fourth Ward School. Yet in her nonfiction book The Wonderlode of
Silver and Gold (1934), a history of the Comstock region with bits of memoir
thrown in, she does not dwell on book learning. Instead, she catalogs the childhood thrills that the mining town provided to her and her siblings.
Michelson also documented the racial and ethnic diversity of the Comstock in
The Wonderlode of Silver and Gold. The miners, she wrote, “weren’t a body of
men, they were individuals of twenty-eight different races, and of as strongly
contrasted temperaments. . . . Italians, Germans, French, Mexicans, Irishmen,
Cornishmen, Americans, each with their own racial prejudices, customs, even
a particular saloon to patronize” (170). In addition, small-town life brought
her into contact with Chinese immigrants, mostly domestic workers, who lived
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Miriam Michelson’s Yellow Journalism and the Multi-Ethnic West
in a segregated camp on the outskirts of Virginia City, and with Indians from the
nearby Paiute and Washoe tribes, many of whom were integrated into the frontier
community.9 In one of the book’s explicitly autobiographical asides, Michelson
tells how, at age five, she became the play wife of Black Hawk’s son “at a
mud-pie wedding on A Street, when the groom . . . and bride [were] both too
young to protest” (72).
Just as the region of the multi-ethnic West had earlier influenced the work of
male writers such as Harte and Twain, the sagebrush landscape and its multiracial population gripped Michelson’s imagination. Two of her early short stories,
“A Touch of Civilization” (1897) and “Poker Jim’s Mahala” (1900), which, like
“Understudy for a Princess,” appeared in the Black Cat, were set in Nevada territory and featured Native American characters. Although the portrayals may
appear stereotypical at times, these stories subtly mock the pretensions of white
settlers who viewed Indians as savages. They are notable for Michelson’s attempt
to see colonization from an Indian point of view—as she does later, too, in the
first chapter of The Wonderlode of Silver and Gold, shifting to the perspective of
the Paiute Indian chief Winnemucca as he spies an approaching caravan of pioneers and is forced to accept that “the unbelievable tale of white men, wandering,
encroaching, closing-in on the land, even this bitter, barren land, is true” (9).
Much as she did in writing about the annexation of Hawai’i, Michelson shows
her willingness to take on a nonwhite point of view critical of American expansionism.10
It is unclear how much of Michelson’s attitude towards race and ethnicity
came from her own sense of difference as the child of Jewish immigrants.
Michelson herself once claimed that her religion played no role in the family’s life.
“Ours was [not] a religious family,” she wrote in response to a question posed by
her brother Albert’s biographer. “I had no religious training whatever. Nor can I
recall a religious discussion among us, nor a religious inhibition or compulsion.
And I believe this unorthodox viewpoint would have been the case with both parents and children no matter what religious belief the former might have
inherited” (qtd. in Millikan 128-29).11 Whether or not the Michelsons practiced
Judaism, the family’s Jewishness singled them out as different even among the
hodgepodge of races and nationalities that made up Comstock society. In an oral
history of the pioneer community, Miriam’s next-door neighbor, Alice Sauer,
recalled the Michelsons as “foreigners” and one of the few Jewish families in
town; however, she also noted that Samuel and Rosalie “were great friends of
my parents” and that the Jews “didn’t seem to have much of a society or organization, or anything like that” (Glass 9).12 When Michelson went on to achieve
renown as a writer, the secular press also took note of her ethno-religious background, and the Jewish press claimed her as one of their own. In 1905, the year
she published A Yellow Journalist, The Washington Post described her as a
“California Jewess who has succeeded with her pen” (“Jewish Women in Our
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History”), and she was similarly recognized as a famous Jewish woman writer by
periodicals as wide-ranging as The American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, The
American Israelite, the San Francisco Chronicle, Broadway Magazine, and the
Arizona Republican.13 Although Michelson may have downplayed the influence
of Jewish faith on herself and her family, she never explicitly abandoned her religion, and it is perhaps no coincidence that she made ethnic variety a mainstay in
her fiction.
If any immigrant culture prevailed in the Comstock region, it was the Irish,
and this influence clearly comes across in Michelson’s writing.14 Her second
book, The Madigans (1904), first serialized as “Stories of the Nevada
Madigans” in Century magazine, is set in Virginia City and features a large
Irish brood. The book indirectly sheds light on the Michelsons’ secularism and
indifference toward their Jewish heritage while also revealing much about its
author’s impiety toward traditional gender roles. Irishizing her family’s last
name, Michelson transformed her real-life coed clan into a sextet of mischievous
sisters with a dead mother, laissez-faire father, and self-absorbed aunt.15 Left to
their own devices, the six Madigan girls claim the mining town as their playground and stir up all sorts of trouble—mainly for each other. In the first tale,
“Cecilia the Pharisee,” whose title makes reference to the ancient Hebrew sect
known for its strict observance of Mosaic laws, the eponymous troublemaker
resolves to act more kindly towards her sisters and draws up her own version
of the Ten Commandments with that end in mind. Defying her father, “an outspoken foe to religious exercise,” she takes to prayer, searching for the forbearance to keep her commandments (Madigans 28). However, by the end of the
story, Cecilia, unable to abide by her program of self-reformation, finds herself
“a blissful bankrupt instead of a Pharisee” (38).
The Madigans’ sisterly shenanigans and disdain for religious righteousness
continue in stories with titles such as “A Pagan and a Puritan” and “The
Martyrdom of Man.” In the latter, Mr. Madigan takes an uncharacteristic interest
in his daughters’ education, reading aloud to them from his substitute Bible,
William Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man (1872). The daughters, however, prove as impervious to Reade’s secularist philosophy as they are to Christian
dogma. Mr. Madigan’s ineffectualness as a father leads his children to treat their
ethnic heritage with similar irreverence. In one of the book’s best chapters, “The
Ancestry of Irene,” the most rambunctious of the spirited lot entertains a common childhood fancy: she decides that she is not biological kin to her five sisters
and that the “ordinary and humble” Mr. Madigan is, in fact, her foster father
(Madigans 149). Over the course of the story, Irene concocts a number of origin
tales for herself, imagining, for instance, that she is the kidnapped papoose of
Indian Jim and that, as princess of the homeless Paiutes, she will help them to
win “back their lands—and the mines, too” (175). Irene quickly becomes disenchanted with the prospect of fighting to retrieve the millions from the mines that
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are rightfully hers, however, and forsakes her imagined tribe for the fantasy that
she is the daughter of a bonanza king.
The Madigans may “deserve spanking” (“Madigans” 6), as one reviewer
states, but the book’s charm derives from the author’s refusal to transform the
girls’ misbehavior, as bratty as it is, into a morality tale. To do so would be to
discipline the Madigans for their unladylike conduct. In treating the sisters’
high-spiritedness with unwavering good humor, the book is above all a celebration of female feistiness over femininity. It is no coincidence that the mine that
ultimately restores the family’s fortune is named the Tomboy, nor are the
Madigans the only residents of Virginia City to resist rigid gender roles; in several
incidents, boys dress as and are mistaken for girls. In The Madigans, as in much
of Michelson’s fiction set in the West, the openness of the frontier gives license to
individuals to operate outside prescribed gender norms.
For Michelson, gender iconoclasm and adventurousness went hand in hand,
and the frontier, like journalism later, offered outlets for both. Michelson may
have initially tried to chart a more conventional path by following her older sisters
into schoolteaching, but she ultimately followed the men in her family to San
Francisco and into newspaper work.16 In his autobiography, The Ghost Talks
(1944), Miriam’s brother, Charles, described the allure of San Francisco newspaper life in the era of yellow journalism:
The old bonanza kings and railroad millionaires . . . were still alive. Their sons
were figuring in all the fights and scandals that the community enjoyed.
The mines were still pouring in their millions, the ships from Australia and
Hawaii and China were bringing in the romance of the Orient, the cattle
ranchers were supplying their stint of picturesque news, and politics were raging
furiously. (78)
With her brother’s aid, Michelson secured her first assignment, a four-part series
about the 1895 Woman’s Congress of the Pacific Coast, for the San Francisco Call.
The most widely subscribed San Francisco daily of the time, the San Francisco Call
was well-known in literary circles for jump-starting the career of Mark Twain,
who had served as the paper’s Nevada correspondent in 1863 before spending
a year as a beat reporter in San Francisco.17 Following in Twain’s footsteps,
Michelson, too, made the leap from Nevada to San Francisco, and, in beginning
her career as a newspaperwoman, became a pioneer in yet another sense. In the
last decades of the nineteenth century, the profession of journalism was slowly
opening its doors to women. At the San Francisco Call, Michelson wrote theater
criticism, one of the assignments viewed as suitable for female reporters, and
eventually rose to the position of dramatic editor. As a writer for the San
Francisco Call, and later at the San Francisco Bulletin, she also broke a number
of gender barriers, especially when it came to reporting on crime and politics.18
Under the semi-respectable cover of newspaper work, this adventure-seeking
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single woman could explore the city and travel the country alone, gathering material that fueled her imagination and eventually her fiction.
A skillful interviewer, Michelson was at ease speaking with people from all
walks of life, regardless of class or race. She was as adept at grilling congressmen
and conducting jail cell interviews with murderers as she was discussing
anarchism with Emma Goldman (“Character”) or racism with Emma and
Walter Ngong Fong (“Woes”), an Anglo-Chinese couple whose taboo-defying
marriage made national headlines. In one case, Michelson cleverly turned her
inability to secure an interview into material for a half-page story. Setting out
to profile the enigmatic entrepreneur and abolitionist Mary Ellen “Mammy”
Pleasant, the reporter made multiple visits to the black woman’s home only to
be repeatedly turned away. “My interview with Mammy Pleasant should rightly
be written up under the head, ‘People I Haven’t Met,’” wrote Michelson with characteristic wit:
If a foreign Prince comes to San Francisco your managing editor, through an influential friend may arrange a short meeting for you, when only stereotyped questions
may be asked. If a famous murderer is to be hanged soon you may talk to him,
provided your questions are not too personal or indelicate. If a great lady’s daughter
is to be married she will grant you an interview, if you will be sufficiently grateful.
But tell me, ye gods of the pull, what is the magic string that will open Mammy
Pleasant’s door and Mammy Pleasant’s lips! (“Dark-Skinned” 29)
Rather than give up on the story, Michelson used her failure to penetrate the mystery of Mammy Pleasant as a means of portraying the black woman’s power.
By the new century, Michelson had left San Francisco for a temporary stint in
the East, where she wrote journalism for dailies in New York and Philadelphia
and became a regular contributor to the country’s booming periodical culture.
By the time of her death in San Francisco in 1942, Michelson had published over
thirty stories in magazines, ranging in length from a single page in the Ladies’
Home Journal to complete “novelettes” in The Smart Set. Attuned to popular taste,
Michelson tailored her work for a commercial audience with an eye to female
readership. As a whole, her body of work is not easy to categorize. Michelson produced a wide variety of fiction, experimenting with narrative point of view, form,
and genre. For instance, the title story in The Awakening of Zojas (1910), a collection of four novellas, is considered an early example of science fiction (Bleiler
938). Another novella, The Superwoman, which appeared as the featured story in
the August 1912 issue of The Smart Set, is a trailblazing work of feminist utopian
fiction, predating Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s similarly speculative Herland
(1915), which it likely inspired. Her last novel, The Petticoat King (1929), written
during a period when she had turned her attention from fiction to politics, is a
historical romance based on the life of Queen Elizabeth I.
Michelson’s most productive period as a fiction writer occurred between 1904
and 1910. During that time, in addition to magazine stories, she published the five
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novels for which she was best known, including two based on her experiences as
a female reporter, A Yellow Journalist and Anthony Overman (1906). However,
Michelson first burst onto the novel-writing scene with a heroine even
more unconventional than A Yellow Journalist’s Rhoda Massey or Anthony
Overman’s scandal-chasing Jessie Incell. Michelson’s debut novel, In the
Bishop’s Carriage (1904), featured a female thief as its first-person protagonist.
In 1903, Michelson had published a short story in Ainslee’s told from the point
of view of Nance Olden, an orphan raised by the “Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children” (or just the “Cruelty,” as she calls it) who had “flung herself
away on the first handsome Irish boy she met” (Michelson, In 14), becoming his
accomplice in a life of larceny. The story’s scandalous appeal, and the slangy
speech of its streetwise narrator, caught the attention of the Bobbs-Merrill
Company, who suggested that Michelson turn it into a novel. The result, In the
Bishop’s Carriage, was a best seller, earning the author praise for her refreshing
prose style and condemnation for what some viewed as an immoral depiction of
feminine criminality.
Accusations of immorality persisted despite the fact that by the end of the
expanded version Michelson’s disreputable heroine is reformed: Nance parlays
her talent as con artist into a stage career and trades up her felonious fiancé
for a theatrical manager-husband. For readers, however, Nance was more memorable as crook than actress, and reviews highlighted the novelty of a woman in a
role previously reserved for male characters. Nance Olden is a “female Raffles,”
stated one reviewer (“For” 157), while another described her as “Oliver Twist in
petticoats” (Thacher 249).19
In the Bishop’s Carriage established Michelson’s national reputation and
earned her a loyal fan base. As a result, even before A Yellow Journalist appeared
in novel form in 1905, the publisher, D. Appleton & Company, reported significant advance sales. Edna Ferber, who became the first Jewish writer to win the
Pulitzer Prize in fiction (for her novel So Big in 1925), recalled reading
Michelson’s “yellow journalist” stories as they first appeared in The Saturday
Evening Post in 1905: “Those were fresh and racy newspaper stories all about
a woman reporter and her dashing adventures on a big-town paper. There was
the kind of newspaper woman I wanted to be. Immediately I dramatized myself
as the Girl Reporter” (115). Michelson’s influence on Ferber was profound.
Ferber, too, began her career as a reporter for a small-town newspaper in
Wisconsin, where she grew up, and went on to become a best-selling novelist,
spending her career documenting the diverse, multi-ethnic, and multiracial panorama of the United States in epic family sagas such as Show Boat (1926),
Cimarron (1930), and Giant (1952). Ferber’s strong, self-sufficient heroines were
similarly descendants of Michelson’s protagonists: adventurous, independent
women who achieved success by flouting gender norms, often by crossing
ethno-racial lines. None of Michelson’s characters embodies the traits of this
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pioneering Progressive Era New Woman better than A Yellow Journalist’s Rhoda
Massey, a reporter with a reputation as a “violent and aggressive champion . . . of
the under dog” (Michelson, Yellow 59). In the following section, we offer an introduction to the Rhoda Massey story “In Chy Fong’s Restaurant” and discuss how A
Yellow Journalist exemplifies the writer’s, and her character’s, passion for championing racial “underdogs” and forging cross-racial alliances, especially between
women.
A “violent and aggressive champion . . . of the under dog”: Passing,
Stunt Girl Reporting, and Cross-Racial Identification in A Yellow
Journalist
The theme of “passing” pervades Michelson’s work. The term as we use it here
does not connote the common literary usage of “passing,” in which a mixed-race
African American character crosses the color line and assumes a fully white identity. However, in telling stories of racial, class, and gender masquerade,
Michelson’s fiction does share elements with more conventional passing narratives, offering commentary on societal prejudices and socially constructed differences.20 In “Understudy for a Princess,” for instance, it is significant that Lilia’s
impersonation of the Crown Princess Kaiulani dupes only one person, Arthur
Jerdrum, which alludes to the white man’s inability to distinguish between
“Oriental” women, who are, to him, interchangeable exotic “Others.”
Michelson’s 1909 novel Michael Thwaites’s Wife, a story of “good” and “bad”
identical twins who trade places, offers another take on passing, exploring how
movement between two supposedly dichotomous identities can create a “third,”
composite self (385)—in this case, one that counteracts the rigid categorization of
women as either Madonna or whore. Similarly, In the Bishop’s Carriage finds
Nance supporting herself as both con artist and actress by performing various
roles that expose the social construction of femininity. The book’s title comes
from its opening chapter in which Nance dodges the law after a heist by taking
refuge in a waiting carriage, which turns out to belong to a bishop. She persuades
him that she is a lost college girl, and her convincing performance of feminine
helplessness allows her to flee the scene of her crime.
The picaresque heroines of In the Bishop’s Carriage and A Yellow Journalist are
of a similar stripe even if “girl reporter” Rhoda Massey operates in the more
legitimate realm of journalism, resorting to theft and impersonation only when
it is necessary to get her scoop (as opposed to Nance, whose booty is more along
the lines of chinchilla coats and gold watches). Rhoda’s exploits are reminiscent of
the stunt journalism practiced by female reporters such as Nellie Bly, who
famously went undercover to report on treatment of the mentally ill, faking
her own insanity in order to be admitted to Manhattan’s notorious asylum at
Blackwell’s Island.21 Like Bly, Rhoda embodies other identities and through
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her transformations becomes as much of a spectacle as the sensationalist news
she seeks to break. Initially, her subterfuge does not involve crossing racial
and gender lines; instead, she assumes the personae of other women. For
instance, early in the collection, she poses as a college roommate of a woman
thought missing and, in so doing, gets the story all the newspapers are seeking.
Later she tries out the roles of a nurse and a bride. Her performance as a bride is
affectedly feminine. She blushes, cries, lays her head in the lap of the nun she is
deceiving, and reports, “I found I could be as silly and hysterically without reason
as any woman I’ve ever interviewed” (Michelson, Yellow 217)—a strong contrast
to the Rhoda who rides on a wagon through a volley of gunshots with a murderer
or chooses to pursue her exciting career rather than become an actual bride to the
handsome rival reporter who courts her.
Like most of In the Bishop’s Carriage, but unlike the Western landscape that
Michelson knew so well, the initial setting of A Yellow Journalist is monoracial
and monocultural. As the narrative progresses, however, the novel’s title takes
on an additional, racialized meaning. In the fourth and fifth chapters of the book,
Rhoda encounters “the dirt and the glamour of the East” when she ventures into
the “noisome, narrow streets” of San Francisco’s Chinatown.22 At first, Rhoda’s
view of Chinatown and its immigrant population conforms to Orientalized
notions of Asian difference. Readers following along with Rhoda are treated to
the uneasy pleasures of “slumming,” entering a foreign and exotic otherworld
“where the big lanterns swing and the Chinese children, playing in the entrances
to subterranean dwellings, are like gaudy dragon flies lighting up the squalor”
(88-89). At once enthralling and threatening, Chinatown is a place of darkness
and mystery, crime and corruption; it is a spatial embodiment of the “Yellow
Peril,” made more threatening by its intrusion on the domestic terrain of the
United States. As Rhoda muses in the hyperbolic language of the yellow journalist,
“The stones of Chinatown are cushioned and reeking with the dirt of years, as its
history in San Francisco reeks with the stain of crime, the guilt of bribery, and the
failure of law” (90).
Rhoda’s sensationalized and Orientalized notions of Chinatown as a space of
dirt and disease, ridden by vice and marked by inscrutability, are to change over
the course of these two chapters as she becomes a “yellow” journalist in quite
another sense. Rhoda’s identity as a racial outsider in Chinatown is complicated
through acts of immersion journalism that allow her to access, albeit fleetingly, an
insider’s view of this ethnic enclave. In the first of the two Chinatown chapters,
“The Fascination of Fan Tan,” Rhoda crosses racial and gender lines, disguising
herself as a Chinese boy in order to visit an alleged gambling den accompanied by
the white police sergeant her paper enlists for her protection. However, the police
officer turns out to be in cahoots with the Chinatown highbinders, warning them
in advance about the “yellow journalist” he is escorting into their midst. Rhoda
may be the one in drag, but it is the Chinese gamblers who end up putting on a
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show for her, transforming their regular fan tan game into an “orderly, sociable,
quiet meeting of half a dozen Chinamen, sitting amiably chatting in sing-song
Chinese, drinking tea and smoking their pipes” (91). Rhoda, however, is not
so easily fooled. Recognizing that the white man is the one pulling the strings,
she elicits the aid of an ethnic insider, an elderly Chinese woman named Gum
Tai, to take her back to the gambling parlor. There, in the same room she left
but half an hour earlier, Rhoda witnesses the excitement of the notorious gambling game known as fan tan.
The chapter from A Yellow Journalist reprinted here, “In Chy Fong’s
Restaurant,” continues and intensifies this narrative of immersion journalism.
Now, instead of “balancing unsteadily on” the “wooden . . . slippers” (86) of a
long-queued Chinese boy on his way to a fan tan game, Rhoda is clad in “crimson,
gold-embroidered slippers,” a “satin blouse, upon which peacocks were embroidered in silver,” “absurd, wide trousers of salmon pink, whose bands of purple
were embossed in flaming orange, [and] purple silk hose” (100). In pursuit of
an exposé on yellow slavery, Rhoda has gone undercover as a Chinese slave girl
in a Chinatown brothel. Instructed in the ways of docility by Gum Tai (“No talk.
No look see. No turn head. No move”), Rhoda also models her behavior on the
slave girl Ah Oy, who appears as “passive” as a “Chinese doll” (113). Rhoda
observes of the Chinese prostitutes, “What lifelong rehearsals must these pale,
quiet girls’ mothers have gone through . . . to bring to its perfection that yellow
flower of repose that Ah Oy is as she sits idly there with her guitar” (102, emphasis
added). Rather than depicting Chinese women as innately submissive, the story
indicates that Ah Oy’s Lotus Blossom performance is as much an act as Rhoda’s
racial drag.
“In Chy Fong’s Restaurant” draws on the titillating topic of sexual slavery,
which would have been familiar to Michelson from her experiences as a yellow
journalist in San Francisco.23 In early twentieth-century California, the popular
discourse of the Chinese slave girl positioned Eastern heathenism and “powerful
and abusive patriarchy” (Huang) against Western, Christian morality and greater
freedom for women. “Chinese prostitution [in America] epitomized the antithesis
to the founding values of the United States—the immoral ‘alien’ practice that
posed an imminent threat to the nation’s morals, hygiene, racial purity, and freedom,” writes Yu-Fang Cho, in her study of “yellow slavery” narratives (40).
Whether prostitutes or wives, female emigrants from China were lumped together
by “the assumption that all Chinese women seeking admissions to the United
States were prostitutes by default”; in a series of newspaper accounts, for example, Chinese wives were depicted as “Worse than Slaves” (Cho 44). The popular
understanding of Chinese women as powerless victims of patriarchal oppression
allowed, in turn, the West to imagine itself in the role of “savior,” exemplified, for
example, by the work of missionaries, usually white women, who sought to rescue
their enslaved Chinese counterparts from lives of sin.
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“In Chy Fong’s Restaurant” could have easily participated in the popular discourse of oppressed Chinese woman versus liberated American woman by having
Rhoda, that “violent and aggressive champion . . . of the under dog,” become the
“savior” of Ah Oy and the other Chinese prostitutes through her investigative
reporting (59). Instead, however, Michelson’s story offers a scenario of equality
and cross-racial solidarity between Rhoda and Ah Oy, allying them against the
zealous white missionary, Miss McIntosh, who foils Rhoda’s investigation by
staging a raid on Chy Fong’s Restaurant. In fact, it is Ah Oy who acts as
Rhoda’s protector and “guardian,” signaling her with a “swift, enigmatic
glance—imploring, confiding, searching”—and leading her out onto the brothel’s balcony so that she can escape discovery during the raid, just before fleeing
herself to elude Miss McIntosh (113). The cross-racial identification between the
white journalist and the Chinese prostitute is humorously reinforced at the end of
the story when the “mimic” Chinese woman finds herself saved by Miss
McIntosh, who is under the assumption that her new charge is the supposedly
helpless slave girl Ah Oy rather than the fearless “girl reporter” Rhoda Massey.
Ah Oy invokes the historical figure of Ah Toy, who was the second Chinese
woman to arrive in the American West and who accumulated enough wealth
to buy a brothel; similarly, the character of Miss McIntosh has a historical referent.24 She is based on a Scottish American missionary crusader, Donaldina
Cameron, who ran the Presbyterian Mission House at 920 Sacramento Street
in San Francisco from 1895 to 1934. Cameron’s efforts to save and reform heathen
women who had been forced into prostitution were internationally renowned and
earned her the sobriquet “Chinatown’s Angry Angel.”25 Like Rhoda’s journalistic
calling, Cameron’s “mission” enabled her to lead an atypically adventurous life
for a woman; she, too, disguised herself as a Chinese woman at least once, crossed
cultural and physical lines (such as the quarantine lines into Chinatown during a
bubonic plague outbreak), and was even reported to have climbed through a skylight on one of her rescue missions (Martin 22, 77). However, the religious mission that inspired Cameron to don disguises and lead a life of adventure had dire
consequences for a number of her “beneficiaries.” For white, Christian San
Francisco, she was a much lauded and loved moral crusader. For many
Chinese, on the other hand—and not only the Tong traffickers from whom
she abducted the “victims” of Yellow Slavery—she was a symbol and a weapon
of imperial American attitudes, forcing the women to either submit to an austere
Christian lifestyle or be deported to China.26
Rhoda’s reaction to her rescue by the missionary woman—about whom she
says, “I longed to beat her!” (117)—apprises readers of the fact that not all
Chinese slave girls were interested in being saved and not because they, like
Rhoda, were capering journalists in disguise. According to Cameron’s biography,
in training for her missionary work, she was instructed by her predecessor that
even women who sought sanctuary did not necessarily approve of the Christian
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values presented to them by their “saviors” (Martin 44). Cameron’s ledger documented great resistance to her aid; she describes the women’s “loud weeping”
and “Chinese imprecations” and reports that “when these half frenzied creatures
found themselves prisoners [in her Mission Home] they shrieked and beat themselves with their hands; they spat upon furniture and clean floors[;] . . . the scene
was one of horror and yet of pathos” (qtd. in Martin 57). Yet Cameron and her
Mission persisted in subjecting the Chinese women to their religious and moral
lifestyle. Such misguided beliefs and methods come under critique in Michelson’s
story.
The resolution of “In Chy Fong’s Restaurant” is not the grand exposé of graft
in Chinatown that Rhoda hoped to publish; instead, it is the small victory she wins
in thwarting the effort of the missionary to capture Ah Oy. Rhoda’s response to
McIntosh suggests a rebellion against the tyranny of Christian imperialism.
Rhoda refuses to “write up that story of the slave girls and the Mission” for
her paper, a decision that Miss McIntosh “never can understand” (118). The ending of the story thus bears similarities to Michelson’s sympathetic Hawaiian
appeal, in which she also endeavored to represent the humanity of a nonwhite
people to Americans who viewed them as “heathens” and whose civilizing
mission entailed an annexation of land and of spirit. A Yellow Journalist draws
on the literary convention of racial passing and the journalistic practice of undercover stunt reporting to upend the relationship between cultural insiders and
outsiders, thus allowing Michelson to highlight her heroine’s solidarity with
the ethnic Other, the racialized “under dog” (118), rather than with the white,
Christian hegemony, the “Anglo-Saxon supremacy,” against which they struggle
(Michelson, “Strangling” 1).
Yet, like the work of the missionary woman, Michelson’s Chinatown stories,
too, are circumscribed by Progressive Era paternalism. It is difficult to read
the accompanying story without being reminded that Rhoda’s (and, by extension,
Michelson’s) attempt to advocate on behalf of the racial “under dog” is enabled by
her own whiteness, the privileged identity to which she will return once her journalistic stunt has come to an end. If the Chinatown stories at times operate within
and reproduce the racist, and racialist, ideology of the era,27 they also require
readers to see beyond it, especially as Rhoda forms cross-racial alliances with
two Chinese women: Gum Tai, the cultural informer who enables the journalist’s
voyeuristic crossings into the space of Chinatown in both stories, and Ah Oy, the
Chinese slave girl who becomes Rhoda’s protector in “In Chy Fong’s Restaurant.”
Rhoda’s experiences of racial impersonation and her connections with these
women complicate the story’s initial stereotypical view of Chinatown and its
inhabitants, leading to the realization that white, Anglo-Saxon greed and misguided Christian morality—represented by the corrupt police sergeant and the
plan-bungling “savior,” Miss McIntosh—may present greater threats to
American values than the so-called “Yellow Peril.”
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In drawing on, while also undermining, turn-of-the-twentieth-century discourses of Orientalism, Michelson’s A Yellow Journalist makes a compelling companion piece to the journalistic and fictional work of Edith Eaton, who, at the turn
of the century, was also living and writing in San Francisco, canvassing for the
San Francisco Bulletin.28 Now rescued from the archives and recognized as the
first Chinese American fiction writer, Eaton similarly used her writing to counter
popular perceptions of Chinese immigrants, especially women, and often did so
obliquely through narratives of passing, cross-dressing, and tricksterism.29 The
Chinatown chapters of A Yellow Journalist warrant comparison to Eaton’s
writings for their differences and similarities. In an effort to overturn the
stereotypical association between Chinese women and sexual impropriety,
Eaton typically depicted her Chinese female characters as wives and mothers
rather than prostitutes, as in the famous Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) stories
and the frequently anthologized “In the Land of the Free” (1909). A notable
exception, however, was her 1899 sketch, “Lin John,” about the sexual bondage
of the title character’s sister, an unnamed prostitute in a Chinatown brothel. Like
Michelson in “In Chy Fong’s Restaurant,” Eaton refuses to portray the Chinese
woman as a passive victim in need of salvation. Instead, the prostitute foils
her brother’s plan to “redeem” her physically and morally: she steals from him
the money he has earmarked to buy her freedom and send her home “to their
parents in China” where she can “live like an honest woman.” To Lin John’s
sister, sexual slavery in America, with its material riches and comforts, is
preferable to poverty in China. Well satisfied with the “richly embroidered”
clothes, “glittering” jewels, and “artistically carved” furnishings lavished upon
her by the brothel’s owner and its male patrons, she asks, “Now, what do I want
to be free for?” (76-77). Eaton’s tale may be heavily ironic, but it avoids the
condemnatory, moralizing tone prevalent in missionary writings about Chinese
immigrants and vice.30 Like “The Fascination of Fan Tan” and “In Chy Fong’s
Restaurant,” Eaton’s stories fulfill readers’ Orientalist desires, but they also play
off those desires, imagining perspectives from within the exoticized space of
Chinatown that surprise readers and unsettle their expectations about the
Chinese in America.
The recovery of Eaton’s fiction, which began in earnest with Amy Ling and
Annette White-Parks’s publication of Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings
in 1995 and continues today,31 transformed the study of ethnic literary history
by adding the voice and perspective of an underrepresented minority writer.
The work of Miriam Michelson has the potential to do the same. As a firstgeneration Jewish American woman whose identity was shaped by her upbringing on the nineteenth-century multi-ethnic frontier, Michelson was both insider
and outsider in America, and she used this complex perspective to access the
points of view of others on the margins, outsiders who, unlike her, were denied
the opportunity to speak—and to be heard—themselves. Michelson’s fiction
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complements and provides alternatives to that of the best-known women
writers of her era—authors such as Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
and Kate Chopin—by offering a less constricted and more optimistic view of
women’s place in mass culture and the public sphere. In this respect, her
work also anticipates that of writers such as Willa Cather, whose attitudes
towards gender and immigration were similarly shaped by the culture of the frontier, and the so-called “middlebrow moderns,” writers such as Edna Ferber,
Fannie Hurst, Jessie Fauset, Zona Gale, and Anita Loos, who ushered the literary
representation of the New Woman from the era of ragtime into and through the
Jazz Age.32
Michelson is also an indispensable addition to Jewish literary history. Most
scholarship on Jewish American literature has conflated early Jewish literary production in the United States with urban, working-class immigrant experiences—
the ghetto fiction of writers such as Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska, for
instance. Michelson’s western writings expand this limited canon and in the
process “deghettoize” American Jewish fiction, demonstrating the diversity of
the Jewish experience in America and the diverse ways that Jewish writers
have contributed to American literature.33 Her work as a whole broadens and
complicates established narratives of Jewish American literary history in terms
of gender, class, progressivism, and regionalism while A Yellow Journalist—as
in the chapter reprinted here—illustrates one of the many ways that Jewish
writers were engaged with other cultures and ethnic traditions through representations of cross-racial identification. Toward the end of “In Chy Fong’s
Restaurant,” Rhoda stands on the balcony of the Chinatown brothel and looks
out over the city and the bay below: “I stretched out my arms toward it all,”
Rhoda states, “it was beautiful; it was American; it was Western; it was mine”
(114). Speaking while still in the guise of an enslaved Chinese immigrant woman,
the yellow journalist, this “violent and aggressive champion . . . of the under dog”
(59), boldly asserts the right of those on the margins, both women and ethnic
minorities, to lay claim to America by writing their own versions of the nation’s
story.
Notes
We would like to thank Mary Chapman and the two anonymous reviewers for
their thoughtful comments on this essay. We also extend our heartfelt appreciation to Martha Cutter, MELUS’s outgoing editor, for encouraging us to submit
this essay and a reprint of Michelson’s work to the journal. Our gratitude, too,
goes to Boston College undergraduate Marena Cole who provided research assistance for this article and transcribed the accompanying excerpt.
1. See W. Joseph Campbell.
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Miriam Michelson’s Yellow Journalism and the Multi-Ethnic West
2. In a later article published in the San Francisco Call, Miriam Michelson confessed
that she was in favor of annexation until her visit to Hawai’i persuaded her otherwise. See Michelson, “Perkins Talks Upon Annexation” (1897).
3. For more on the interplay between journalism and fiction at the turn of the twentieth century, see, for example, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Michael Robertson, Karen
Roggenkamp, and Douglas Underwood.
4. Scholars who do consider Michelson’s work, albeit briefly, include Nina Baym
and Jean Marie Lutes (Front-Page).
5. See, for example, Bret Harte’s 1874 short story “Wan Lee, The Pagan.” For more
on Frank Norris’s stories of sexual slavery in Chinatown, which appeared in the
San Francisco journal The Wave, see Karen A. Keely.
6. On girl stunt reporters in the late nineteenth century, see Lutes (“Into”).
7. This date is disputed. Although most sources list 1870 as her date of
birth, some claim that she was the youngest of the Michelson clan while
others place her birth before that of her brother Charles, who was born in
1868 or 1869.
8. The most complete account of the family’s history can be found in Dorothy
Livingston’s The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson (1973).
9. Chinese immigrants experienced employment discrimination and were prevented from working in the mining trade. For more on the Chinese presence
in Virginia City, see George Blackburn and Sherman Ricards.
10. For more on the complexity of Michelson’s views of Native Americans and US
assimilation policy, see her remarkable article about the Indian Government
Training School at Carson, Nevada, “Changing a Bad Indian into a Good One”
(1898).
11. Michelson’s upbringing in Virginia City contrasted significantly with that of her
cousin Harriet Lane Levy (the daughter of Samuel’s sister, Henrietta), whose
family settled in San Francisco. Levy documents her family’s religious observance
in her memoir, 920 O’Farrell Street: A Jewish Girlhood in San Francisco (1947). We
know that the Michelsons were in close contact with their more observant
cousins since Miriam’s brother, Albert, lived with the Levys while attending high
school in San Francisco.
12. On Jewish life in the far West, see, for example, Fred Rosenbaum, Harriet and
Fred Rochlin, and Ava Kahn.
13. See, respectively, Frances Maule Bjorkman; Lee K. Frankel; “Jewish Women in
New York: Their Influence is Felt in Every Phase of Metropolitan Life”;
“Jewish Women in Our History”; and “New York Jewish Women: Their Great
Influence for Good in the Metropolis.”
14. Michelson discusses the significant Irish presence on the Comstock in The
Wonderlode of Silver and Gold (1934) and credits Irishmen with the Lode’s discovery. Even Michelson’s characters who are not explicitly Irish are taken to be
Irish by reviewers, as evidenced by reviews mentioning the Irishness of Nance
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15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
200
Olden in In the Bishop’s Carriage (1904) and Rhoda Massey in A Yellow Journalist
(1905).
In a 1907 interview for The New York Times Saturday Review of Books, Michelson
explained that The Madigans (1904), her personal favorite among her books, was
based in part on her childhood experiences: “Some of it did happen to me, and I
always insist that I am Sissie, in spite of the fact that a friend of mine insists she
is. I guess it is a good many childhoods” (Notman BR356).
Michelson got her start writing dramatic criticism for a short-lived political
weekly edited by, and named for, her brother-in-law, Arthur McEwen, a legendary frontier figure who had married her sister, Bessie. With its radical progressive
stance, Arthur McEwen’s Letter was to serve as a prototype for another shortlived weekly, The Liberator, which employed Michelson as managing editor
between 1908 and 1910.
Prior to writing for the San Francisco Call, Mark Twain was based in Michelson’s
hometown of Virginia City, where he reported for the Territorial Enterprise.
Michelson draws extensively on Twain’s writings about frontier life in her history
of the Comstock region, The Wonderlode of Silver and Gold.
For more on turn-of-the-century female journalists, see Lutes (Front-Page), Alice
Fahs, Roggenkamp, and Sari Edelstein.
The novel caused a further sensation when it was dramatized in 1906 by director
Channing Pollock, whose adaptation became the basis of two Hollywood silent
films: the first, in 1913, a melodramatic vehicle for Mary Pickford, and the
second, in 1920, renamed She Couldn’t Help It, with comedic actress Bebe
Daniels leading the cast. In his autobiography, Harvest of My Years (1943),
Pollock confessed that he wrote the play without having read Michelson’s novel
because he “never had time” and that “success in dramatizing a novel depended
on not knowing too much about it” (169). The fact that Pollock knew the story of
In the Bishop’s Carriage well enough to adapt it without reading the book speaks
to the popularity of the novel and how the plot and characters were very much
part of general cultural knowledge at the time.
Two anthologies, in particular, offer insight into the diverse approaches scholars
have taken to the topic of passing. Elaine Ginsberg’s Passing and the Fictions of
Identity (1996) focuses largely on narratives of racial passing while Maria
Carla Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg’s Passing: Identity and Interpretation in
Sexuality, Race, and Religion (2001) covers a variety of approaches. For other
influential scholarship on the literature of passing, see Werner Sollors,
Pamela Caughie, Gayle Wald, Kathleen Pfeiffer, Julie Nerad, and Martha Cutter
(“Intricate”). For a discussion of Jewish narratives of racial crossing, see
Lori Harrison-Kahan (White) and on Asian-white passing, see Karen
Skinazi (“As” and Introduction).
Nellie Bly’s account initially appeared in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in
1887 and was published the same year as a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House.
Miriam Michelson’s Yellow Journalism and the Multi-Ethnic West
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
This story and other examples of Bly’s stunt journalism can be found in Around
the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings (2014).
However, even before A Yellow Journalist evolves into a narrative of racial impersonation, it explores the possibility of cross-racial alliances between women.
Chapter Three, “The Pencil Will,” which precedes the two Chinatown stories,
introduces the character of Mammy Sinnott, who is based on the famous black
abolitionist and entrepreneur Mary Ellen “Mammy” Pleasant, with whom
Michelson was unable to secure an interview during her time as a journalist
for the San Francisco Call. In many ways, Mammy Sinnott is a stock mammy
figure, who is villainized by the press for being an “evil genius” (58). A close
reading of the chapter, however, indicates that Rhoda and Mammy Sinnott are
aligned against the other reporters, who depict the black woman only in terms
of racial stereotypes; in contrast, Rhoda offers a counternarrative, treating this
racial “under dog” with respect and giving her the voice of justice. Although
Mammy Sinnott deceives the other newspapermen (the justification: “Tain’t
no lie to lie to a newspaper reporter that gets a livin’ by tellin’ lies!”), she spares
Rhoda the humiliation she doles out to the others so that Rhoda and Mammy
Sinnott are never pitted against each other in the tale (77).
During Michelson’s tenure as a journalist, the San Francisco papers frequently
reported on the sexual traffic in Chinese girls and women. For an example of
Michelson’s reporting in and on Chinatown, see her 1900 article about
Chinese women’s experiences of the discriminatory Chinatown quarantine during the bubonic plague outbreak, “The Terror of Quarantine to an
Unsophisticated Chinese Lady.”
On Ah Toy, see Lucie Cheng Hirata and Benson Tong.
“920,” as the Mission Home was known, “gained enough notice to become part of
every Chinatown tour, in the year 1900 hosting more than a thousand visitors
from the United States, Canada, and Europe” (Martin 62).
On Donaldina Cameron, see Mildred Martin, Carol Wilson, and Brian Donovan.
Cameron was frequently in the news, and her rescue of the prostitute Kim Quey
was in the headlines for several months over the course of 1900. See, for example,
“Kim Quey’s Fate Still Undecided” (1900) and “Kim Quey Sailed” (1900). That
Kim Quey was deported as a result of Cameron’s missionary zeal is glaringly
absent from the biographies that herald her as an “angel.”
In this respect, her fiction shares much in common with the work of other
Western writers such as Bret Harte, whose attempts to offer sympathetic portraits
of Chinese immigrants often went awry because they were so infused with racial
stereotypes that they ended up fueling anti- Chinese sentiment. See, for instance,
Harte’s “Wan Lee, The Pagan” and his 1870 poem “Plain Language from Truthful
James” (commonly known as the “Heathen Chinee”).
Although Edith Eaton chooses not to name the newspaper in her autobiographical essay “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909), Annette
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29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
202
White-Parks identifies it as the Bulletin. Like Michelson’s, a good deal of Eaton’s
fiction was drawn from her experiences as a journalist. As Dominika Ferens
observes, “in several cases . . . [Eaton’s] stories are extended readings of motifs
and images of her newspaper reports” (59). Lutes gives the example of Eaton’s
1908 short story, “The Success of a Mistake,” which drew on her 1903 article
“Betrothals in Chinatown” (Lutes, “Queer” 281). Another pair, this one with a
curious national transposition, consists of “In the Land of the Free,” a story in
her 1912 collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, that indicts heartless American immigration officials, lawyers, and missionaries who destroy innocent, newly-arrived
Chinese families, and “The Land of the Free,” an 1890 article condemning
Canada’s head tax on and treatment of Chinese immigrants.
Eaton discusses her personal experiences with race passing in “Leaves from the
Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” while her gender-crossing stories include “The
Smuggling of Tie Co,” “A Chinese Boy-Girl,” and “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit”; all
of these pieces are reprinted in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (1995).
Scholars such as White-Parks have discussed her fiction in the context of the
trickster tale.
On Eaton’s writing as a response to the ethnographic missionary tradition, see
Ferens.
S. E. Solberg was the first scholar in the United States to do research on
Edith Eaton and her sister, Winnifred. Amy Ling and White-Parks’s 1995 edition
of Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings made readily available a selection
of Edith’s short stories from her published book Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912)
and her journalism; White-Parks also published a biography of Edith the same
year as the collection. Since then a number of scholars have continued doing
archival research on Edith, including Ferens, Cutter (“Sex” and “Sui Sin”), and
most recently Mary Chapman, who has recovered almost one hundred previously
unknown works, which can be found in MELUS, Legacy, and a forthcoming
edited collection titled “Sui Sin Far” in Canada: The Uncollected Canadian
Writings of Edith Eaton. A similar body of work has resurfaced for Winnifred
(see Ferens, Jean Cole, Diana Birchall), who, like Michelson, was a popular writer
with a penchant for passing narratives and a wide-ranging multi-ethnic literary
landscape. Some of Winnifred’s recovered work will appear in a forthcoming digital archive of her late career Alberta writing, collected by Skinazi.
The term “middlebrow moderns” comes from Lisa Botshon and Meredith
Goldsmith. On this topic, see also Catherine Keyser.
Harrison-Kahan provides a fuller discussion of the ways that Jewish women
writers in the turn-of-the-century West “deghettoize” American Jewish fiction in
her forthcoming article “Pioneering Women Writers and the Deghettoisation of
Early Jewish American Fiction” in The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish
Fiction (2015).
Miriam Michelson’s Yellow Journalism and the Multi-Ethnic West
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