EOTO1: Winifred Sweet Black

Winnifred Sweet Black Bonfils was a major figure in the public eye during the era of Yellow Journalism, making a name for herself through her daring stunts and critical stories.

Winifred Sweet Black, 1913

Sweet was born in Chilton, Wisconsin, in 1863 on a small farm to Civil War General Benjamin Sweet and Lovisa Denslow. She had one sister, Ada Celeste Sweet, the first woman to ever be given a disbursing officer position by the US government. Sweet spent much of her early years attending private school in Chicago and pursuing a career in theater.

When her family took a vacation to California in 1890, Sweet fell in love with San Fransico and promptly moved there to work for the San Francisco Examiner. She wrote under Winnifred Black and her pen name Annie Laurie, a reference to her mother’s favorite nursery rhyme.

The feedback on her first piece was humbling. She was meant to go cover a local flower show and was excited to see her story in the paper. Later in her life, when asked about it, she said she had been dismayed to see that it had been completely rewritten, but that she could see that the important information such as where the show was, who hosted it, who gave out the prizes and who won was included very early on in the rewritten story, where she hadn’t thought to add them at all.

After that, Sweet was determined to prove herself, so she put one of her most well-known plans into action: exposing the poor treatment of women and the lack of ambulances there. She dressed in threadbare clothes and “fainted” in front of a carriage.

She was then poked with a club by the police and put on the hard, wooden floor of the horse-drawn carriage to the hospital. While she was in the ER, she was subject to numerous lewd remarks by the attendants, before being released with the recommendation of drinking mustard and hot water to make her throw up.

Her story was published just 36 hours after she was released from the hospital. It immediately established her as a journalist and caused the hospital to let abusive attendants go and buy a new ambulance.

Undercover reporting became a trademark for Sweet after that.

In 1892, Sweet managed to corner Benjamin Harrison on his campaign train for an interview. She worked with Governor Henry Markham of California to smuggle her onto Harrison’s train. She was hidden under a dining car table that was covered with an extra-large white tablecloth, and when the president sat down, she popped out from underneath with a pen and notepad, forcing an interview.

In the same year, she investigated the conditions of the leper colony on Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands.

On September 8, 1900, Galveston, Texas, flooded. The damage was extreme, and the police cordoned off the entire city during the aftermath. Sweet was determined to get the story, so she disguised herself as a young boy. She successfully slipped past the police cordon to become the first and only woman reporter to enter Galveston during the recovery.

Aside from just reporting on the disaster, Sweet also set up a temporary hospital there and administered relief funds that the Hearst papers had raised. She was known to be a kind soul, and helping those she was reporting on was important to her.  She founded several charities and public benefactor campaigns in San Francisco, spanning all forms it can take.

Sweet's stories are marked by a consistent influence from Lewis Carroll, mainly in their wording. She consistently used onomatopoeias throughout her writing, “Tut-tut” and “Oof” being some of the most common.

Sweet was also one of the most prominent “Sob Sisters,” a label given to female reporters of the time who wrote human interest stories. The story that earned her the title was her coverage of the trial of the murder of Henry Thaw and her descriptions of his wife.

Sweet passed away due to complications with diabetes in 1936 at age 72. She worked for the papers until she died, still writing out stories while half-blind in bed. When she passed, The San Bernardino Daily Sun included these statements from her in the announcement.

To the moment of her death, she insisted she was neither a "sob sister nor a special writer."

"I'm just a plain, practical all-around newspaper woman," said the white-haired 73-year-old woman who began and ended her career in writing for the W. R. Hearst newspapers.

"I'd rather smell the printers' ink and hear the presses go 'round than go to any grand opera in the world," she once said.

Sweet was a massive influence on the journalism world, following much in the footsteps of Nellie Bly as a stunt journalist and a woman in the field. Her stunts and exposes were widely known, earning Sweet her rightful spot in the history books.