NaNcy M. SheltoN
Dr. franklin’s famous filler
Despite the nation’s adamant insistence on honesty in reporting as a direct product of First Amendment protection of freedom of the press, the literary hoax enjoys a long history in American journalism. Possibly the first such case was perpetrated in April 1747 by none other than the revered statesman Dr. Benjamin Franklin, then editor-in-chief of the Pennsylvania Gazette.
Merely a few years after a youthful George Washington stood, ax in tremulous hand, regarding the fallen family cherry tree and contemplating the nature of honesty, some combination of social conscience and mischie-vousness impelled the 41-year-old Franklin to devise what remains one of the most famous American literary shams. He concocted a courtroom speech allegedly delivered by one Polly Baker, the fictional mother of five illegiti-mate children. In the discourse, supposedly given by a poverty-stricken Polly forced to represent herself before the bench, the defendant admitted to break-ing the law against bearbreak-ing children out of wedlock. As a result, she had twice suffered the penalties of heavy fines and public whipping. However, she said,
I have brought five fine Children into the World, at the Risque of my Life;
I have maintain’d them well by my own Industry, without burthening the Township, & would have done it better, if it had not been for the heavy Charges and Fines I have paid. Can it be a Crime (in the Nature of ἀ ings I mean) to add to the King’s Subjects, in a new Country, that really wants People? I own
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Contents
Dr. Franklin’s Famous Filler ... 3 Janet Cooke Creates “Jimmy’s World” ... 6 Stephen Glass: A “Spectacular Crash” ... 10 Conclusion ... 13 References ...14 Bibliography ... 15
it, I should think it rather a praise-worthy than a punishable Action. (Franklin 1971 [1747], 5)
Polly continued, maintaining that she had never consorted with another woman’s husband or young son. She dearly wished to marry, but had received only one proposal and this when she had been a trusting virgin. In her inno-cence, she not only had lost her virtue, but also had become pregnant. ἀ e father had promptly abandoned her and gone on to fame as a magistrate, while she had suffered the particular infamy reserved for fallen women. If, Polly reasoned, her offense was essentially religious in nature, why not leave it to heaven to mete out its eventual retribution? After all, custom forbade a woman to solicit a husband for herself and the law provided none for a woman in Polly’s circumstances. When the first duty of nature was to increase and multiply, which Polly had followed without regard to the consequent loss of her own good reputation, she asserted that she deserved not temporal pun-ishment, but rather a statue erected in her honor (Hall 1960, 5–7).
Polly’s courtroom saga was published extensively in Great Britain before returning only a few months later to the frontier nation Franklin called home. Surfacing in the Boston Weekly Post-Boy on July 20, 1747, the piece traveled from paper to paper, enjoying a life of its own in America. Another 30 years would pass before Franklin confessed to writing Polly’s disparag-ing attack on society’s treatment of “ruined women”; the only extant proof of his admission appears in ἀ e Writings of ἀ omas Jefferson. In a letter dated 1818, Jefferson quotes an anecdote related by Franklin about a con-versation the doctor said had occurred in Paris among the historian Abbé Raynal, Silas Deane of Connecticut, and Franklin at the end of 1777 or the beginning of 1778:
Raynal provided a meticulous account of Mary Baker’s trial in a Connecti-cut courtroom, for having produced a gaggle of illegitimate offspring. So eloquently did the hapless defendant argue her case that one of her judges rose to the rescue and married her. ἀe story had appeared earlier in Diderot as well, but its inclusion in Raynal’s text clinched its validity. Evidently Silas Deane questioned Mary’s own legitimacy at dinner one day with the abbé, who briskly defended himself. Deane was mistaken. ἀe story was authen-tic, protested the gravel-voiced sage. He had documentary evidence. Franklin listened to the debate for some time, silently shaking with laughter, before setting Raynal straight. He had invented Mary himself as filler for his paper in 1746. She was then Polly Baker. At last the ex-Jesuit relented, conceding that he preferred Dr. Franklin’s mistruths to anyone else’s truths, a statement that fairly summed up Paris’s attitude toward the muted propagandist in 1777.
From Polly’s triumphant European tour Franklin elicited his own moral.
What a slippery thing was history! ἀ irty years had suffered to transform fic-tion into fact. (Schiff 2005, 83)
Franklin went on to tell Jefferson that he wrote the Polly piece to “fill up vacant columns” in his newspaper; however, over the subsequent years, numerous exhaustive searches of the paper have not been able to confirm that the speech was actually printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette (Hall 1960, 80–83). Nevertheless, an unassailable history does exist of the doctor’s pro-pensity to use the literary hoax in any number of documented examples.
“As a 16-year-old apprentice, he pretended to be a prudish widow named Silence Dogood, and he made a subsequent career of enlightening readers with similar hoaxes such as ‘ἀ e Trial of Polly Baker’ and ‘An Edict from the King of Prussia’” (Isaacson 2003, 466).
Jefferson’s account of Franklin’s confession to the authorship of Polly’s speech is accepted as authentic by scholars. ἀ ere exists no explanation of why the great man perpetrated the scam. However, using this indirect meth-odology to bring to light the collective plight of the many unfortunate real women on whom Polly was based bears some resemblance in its obliqueness to Franklin’s technique of listing the virtues he believed should guide behav-ior in the area of ethics.
After shunning his father’s brand of Christianity, a highly elitist Calvin-ism, the young Franklin took up Deism. He more or less espoused this phi-losophy for the rest of his life, but always felt obliged to point out the creed’s inadequacies as a code of ethics. According to Tolson,
Franklin knew that a highly cerebral acknowledgment of the distant, clockmaker God of Deism was no more conducive to ethical behavior than were some of his own deepest instincts. So what did he do? He con-structed a rigid—and now famous—system of behavioral self-accounting that would make him not only successful but also a better person. “I made a little Book in which I allotted a Page for each of the Virtues,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I rul’d each Page with red Ink, so as to have seven Columns, marking each Column with a Letter for the Day.” And for any of the 13 virtues he deemed himself insufficient on any given day—including temperance, industry, and humility—Franklin would ink in a “little black Spot” (2003, 35).
Had Franklin decided, in similar fashion, that his evolving young coun-try, which in 1747 had yet to extricate itself from the grip of British colonial-ism but was moving inexorably in the direction of independence, possessed a set of laws that, although by and large sufficient, was in need of certain enhancements? He may have thought that a declaration against the unnatu-ral and restrictive legislation regarding procreation outside the accepted state of matrimony, a law that had come straight from the throne of England, at the very least deserved to be examined in the public forum. If so, creating Polly certainly accomplished that aim.
More than two centuries after Franklin’s escapade with Polly, a pair of American journalists kept their literary secrets neither as successfully nor as long. In the early 1980s, Janet Cooke of the Washington Post and, 15 years later, the New Republic’s Stephen Glass found themselves exposed and pro-fessionally ruined comparatively soon after publishing fallacious accounts of current affairs.
Janet Cooke Creates “Jimmy’s World”
Janet Cooke, who had successfully passed herself off as a magna cum laude Vassar graduate, was working as a reporter for the Washington Post when she submitted “Jimmy’s World” to her editors in 1981. ἀ e attractive young African-American woman’s writing had earned glowing appraisals up to this point. ἀ e new and ostensibly factual article about an 8-year-old heroin addict interspersed narrative describing Washington D.C. neighborhoods where drug addiction truly was rampant, discourse from sources such as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and vignettes of what was eventually revealed to be fictional exposition about “Jimmy’s” home life. Opportunely timed, concerned with a critical societal issue, and well written, “Jimmy’s World” would be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Early in Cooke’s account, the reader learns that
Jimmy’s is a world of hard drugs, fast money and the good life he believes both can bring. Every day, junkies casually buy heroin from Ron, his mother’s live-in lover, live-in the dlive-inlive-ing room of Jimmy’s home. ἀe y “cook” it live-in the kitchen and “fire up” in the bedrooms. And every day, Ron or someone else fires up Jimmy, plunging a needle into his bony arm, sending the fourth grader into a hypnotic nod. (Cooke 1980, A1)
Craftsmanship aside, details that felt a little too patent to the professional discrimination of many of Cooke’s colleagues on the Post triggered suspi-cions about the article’s authenticity almost immediately.
Jimmy’s mother Andrea accepts her son’s habit as a fact of life, although she will not inject the child herself and does not like to see others do it.
“I don’t really like to see him fire up,” she says. “But, you know, I think he would have got into it one day, anyway. Everybody does. When you live in the ghetto, it’s all a matter of survival. If he wants to get away from it when he’s older, then that’s his thing. But right now, things are better for us than they’ve ever been.…Drugs and black folk been together for a very long time.
(Cooke 1980, A1)
Later in Cooke’s story, she writes:
A fat woman wearing a white uniform and blond wig with a needle jabbed in it like a hatpin totters down the staircase announcing that she is “feeling fine.” A teen-age couple drifts through the front door, the girl proudly pull-ing a syrpull-inge of the type used by diabetics from the hip pocket of her Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. “Got me a new one,” she says to no one in particular as she and her boyfriend wander off into the kitchen to cook their smack and shoot each other up. (Cooke 1980, A1)
Cooke had inspired an odd mixture of support and resentment among her co-workers since signing on as a reporter at the Post in January 1980.
Her first byline appeared 2 weeks after she was hired and her first big article, about Washington’s crime-infested riot corridor, came out on February 21.
By the time “Jimmy’s World” was published seven months later, 52 of her stories had made it to print—more than ample justification for descriptions of her as a “self-starter” who “produced” and was a “conspicuous member of the newsroom staff” (Green 1981, A12–15). One colleague described her as
“striking, smartly dressed, articulate” and even the Post’s executive editor Ben Bradlee said, “She has a dramatic flair.” Remarks from Elsa Walsh, who had briefly roomed with Cooke, were less flattering:
“Janet was hard to live with, very high-strung,” Walsh recalled. “She bought clothes lavishly. Every day she talked about her ambitions. She had no sense of the past or even the present, except for its consequences for the future.
She always looked to the future, and she didn’t care about the people she left behind” (Green 1981, A12–15).
Assigned to “District Weekly,” Cooke worked under Vivian Aplin-Brownlee, who said of her new reporter: “She was consumed by blind and raw ambition. It was obvious, but it doesn’t deny the talent” (Green 1981, A12–15). When Aplin-Brownlee examined Cooke’s background material (2 hours of taped interviews and 145 pages of handwritten notes) for a heroin story that she had been assigned, the seasoned journalist immediately saw its potential to become a “Metro” piece. At the time, the “Metro” editor was Bob Woodward, famous as half of the team that broke the Watergate story in 1972.
Cooke’s 13½-page rough draft of the story contains exhaustive detail.
Although it raised no eyebrows with editors lower in the Post hierarchy,
“Woodward was to say later that if he had seen the first draft he might have asked questions about the long and seemingly perfect quotations. Woodward never looked at the first rough draft until Cooke’s Pulitzer was in question”
(Green 1981, A12–15). Woodward did call Cooke in for an interview before the story ran. “He simply wanted to hear her story. ‘She was a terrific actress, terrific,’ he said. ‘She related it all in the most disarming way. It was so per-sonal, so dramatic, so hard in her tummy’” (Green 1981, A12–15).
Held for Sunday publication, “Jimmy’s World” ran on September 28 and
“the story struck at Washington’s heart. ἀ e paper had no sooner reached the streets than the Washington Post’s telephone switchboard lit up like a space launch control room” (Green 1981, A12–15). Cooke had likely sealed her own fate by appealing so unflinchingly to the sympathy of readers:
Addicts who have been feeding their habits for 35 years or more are not uncommon in Jimmy’s world, and although medical experts say that there is an extremely high risk of his death from an overdose, it is not inconceiv-able that he will live to reach adulthood. “He might already be close to get-ting a lethal dose,” Dr. Dorynne Czechowisz of the National Institute on Drug Abuse says. “Much of this depends on the amount he’s getting and the frequency with which he’s getting it. But I would hate to say that his early death is inevitable. If he were to get treatment, it probably isn’t too late to help him. And assuming he doesn’t OD before then, he could certainly grow into an addicted adult.” At the end of the evening of strange questions about his life, Jimmy slowly changes into a different child. ἀ e calm and self-assured little man recedes. ἀ e jittery and ill-behaved boy takes over as he begins going into withdrawal. He is twisting uncomfortably in his chair one minute, irritatingly raising and lowering a vinyl window blind the next.
(Cooke 1980, A1)
By the next day, the chief of Washington’s police had launched a city-wide search. “Mayor Marion Barry was incensed. All schools, social ser-vices and police contacts were to be asked for ‘Jimmy’s’ whereabouts. ἀ e word went out on the streets that big reward money was available” (Green 1981, A12–15). After the story went both national and international, with the Los Angeles Times–Washington Post news service moving it out to over 300 clients, “Police were receiving letters from all over the country, includ-ing one signed by 30 students in a Richmond school, pleadinclud-ing that they find
‘Jimmy’” (Green).
The story prompted doubts right away. Dr. Alyce Gullattee, director of Howard University’s Institute for Substance Abuse and Addiction, one of the people Cooke interviewed when she was gathering her original material, said that she “didn’t believe any of those people ‘fired up’ in front of Cooke. ‘Junkies,’ she said, ‘just don’t trust reporters like that’”
(Green 1981, A12–15). The persistence of this kind of skepticism caused editors at the Post to ask the author for substantiation of her material.
City editor Milton Coleman requested that she arrange a meeting with the subject, “mainly to protect Cooke from more staff jealousies and to establish once and for all the soundness of her reporting. Cooke kept arranging times and places for such a meeting, but canceled them all before they could occur.
In spite of the somewhat ominous uncertainties, the Post entered “Jim-my’s World” as a nominee for a Pulitzer Prize in local news reporting in December 1980. On April 3, 1981, ten days before the official announcement, Cooke learned that she had won. Almost as soon as the award winners’ names were made public, trouble began:
ἀe Post learned that irregularities might exist in Cooke’s autobiographical submission to the Pulitzer board early Tuesday afternoon, when officials at Vassar College called Bradlee and told him that Cooke had not graduated magna cum laude, but in fact had only attended the school for her freshman year. At the same time, the Associated Press called Post Managing Editor Howard Simons to report that AP staffers in Ohio were being told that Cooke had not received a master’s degree from the University of Toledo. (Maraniss 1981, A1)
In a matter of days, Cooke was disgraced, forced to relinquish the Pulit-zer Prize, fired by the paper, and required to make a humiliating public apol-ogy for her transgression.
In longhand, she wrote: ‘‘Jimmy’s World” was in essence a fabrication. I never encountered or interviewed an 8-year-old heroin addict. ἀe September 28, 1980, article in ἀ e Washington Post was a serious misrepresentation which I deeply regret. I apologize to my newspaper, my profession, the Pulitzer board and all seekers of the truth. Today, in facing up to the truth, I have submitted my resignation. Janet Cooke” (Green 1981, A12).
Cooke’s mother flew to Washington from the family home in Toledo, Ohio, on April 12 and her father arrived two days later. In a united front, they removed their daughter from the public eye. After a year had passed, Janet Cooke appeared on television on the Phil Donahue Show and offered her version of the incident. She blamed her behavior on the high-pressure environment of the Post. She “briefly reemerged in 1996 to tell her story to the magazine GQ” (Museum of Hoaxes Online, 2005). ἀ ereafter, she quickly and, it seems, permanently fell out of sight.
ἀ e last words of Ben Bradlee, the famed executive editor who presided over the Washington Post during Cooke’s tenure, on the “Jimmy’s World”
debacle read, fittingly, like an epitaph:
“It is a tragedy that someone as talented and promising as Janet Cooke, with everything going for her, felt that she had to falsify the facts,” said Benjamin C.
Bradlee, executive editor of ἀ e Washington Post. “ἀe credibility of a news-paper is its most precious asset, and it depends almost entirely on the integrity of its reporters. When that integrity is questioned and found wanting, the wounds are grievous” (Maraniss 1981, A1).
Stephen Glass: A “Spectacular Crash”
In contrast to Cooke’s single, albeit monumental, display of literary malfea-sance, Stephen Glass, a “white hot rising star” reporter for the New Republic, one of the most respected of the glossies, prolonged his hoaxing over a “two-and-a-half-year period between December 1995 and May 1998.” With his work appearing in a glittering array of popular magazines, from John F. Ken-nedy, Jr.’s George to Rolling Stone to Policy Review and Harper’s, for a time Glass pulled off “a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism” (Bissinger 1998). Disclosure took lon-ger than it had for Cooke, but after getting away with his sham for more than two years, Glass, whose stories had regularly provoked outraged responses, began to receive closer scrutiny from interested parties. Alarmed, his editor
In contrast to Cooke’s single, albeit monumental, display of literary malfea-sance, Stephen Glass, a “white hot rising star” reporter for the New Republic, one of the most respected of the glossies, prolonged his hoaxing over a “two-and-a-half-year period between December 1995 and May 1998.” With his work appearing in a glittering array of popular magazines, from John F. Ken-nedy, Jr.’s George to Rolling Stone to Policy Review and Harper’s, for a time Glass pulled off “a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism” (Bissinger 1998). Disclosure took lon-ger than it had for Cooke, but after getting away with his sham for more than two years, Glass, whose stories had regularly provoked outraged responses, began to receive closer scrutiny from interested parties. Alarmed, his editor