Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Okay, so heads up. This is a two part episode that involves not only murder, but also discussion of suicide and a lot of talk of mental instability. That's not especially heavy in this first part, but it does come up, and we're starting with it right out of the gate, So jump away if if none of that is what you want to listen to. On September sixteenth, eighteen, Charles Chapin wrote the following upsetting note to his friend and business associate Carlos Sites quote. I know how wrong it is, but I cannot go on suffering as I have for months. I have tried to think out what is best to do and cannot bear the thought of leaving my wife to face the world alone. So I have resolved to take her with me. I've been living with my wife for thirty nine years and have been happy during that time. I am conscious of being on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and it is apparent that the time is close by when I will completely collapse. When you get this paper, I will be dead. My wife has been such a good pal I cannot leave her alone in the world. So the man who wrote that note was incredibly successful. He had a life that a lot of people envied. He had a great deal of power. His entire biography, which we will talk about, is full of noteworthy achievements, and he's like at the apex of like a lot of historical moments that he was responsible for reporting to the world. Yeah, this is like a tour of previous episodes of the podcast through his reporting. Yes, So how did someone who had really the command of pretty much anything one could want end up at a point where he wrote this note and what happened to him after this? It is quite a story. So today we are talking talking about Charles Chapin, and heads up, this is not Charles V. Chapin, who was a doctor who advocated for public health measures to decrease the spread of germs and disease. That is exactly how I did started reading about Charles Chapin that we're talking about today. Those two men were contemporaries. I had been searching for info in the doctor after we did our episode on Imogene W Reckton's No Kissing Crusade and Doctor Chapin will probably be a future episode at some point. But I had stumbled across a newspaper account that featured that note that I just read, and then I couldn't stop thinking about it. So today we are talking about the award winning newspaperman, Charles E. Chapin and the way that his seemingly perfect life fell apart. So Charles E. Chapin was born in Oneida, New York, on October fifty eight. His parents were Cecilia and Yale and Earl Chapin. Earl worked in the family business, which was a store that sold jewelry, watches, clocks, musical instruments, and similar items. Charles, who went by Charlie in his youth, was named after an uncle who had died as a baby. After the US Civil War, in which Earl served but never saw combat, the family moved to Junction City, Kansas. That was a town that was rapidly growing in the wake of the conflict, but they didn't stay very long. Earl was kind of disappointed in the business opportunities there and moved on to Atchison, Kansas. Charlie, who was the oldest son of the family, had been the only one of his siblings to attend any school, and that was in a one room schoolhouse in Junction City. But by the time they moved to Atchison, fourteen year old Charlie felt like it was time to strike out on his own. He later wrote of this quote, I reasoned out of my small boy brain that if I ever was to amount to anything, I must work out my salvation in my own way, without help or hindrance. He got his first job at the paper known as The Daily Champion as a delivery boy for a salary of four dollars a week. Chapin had to be at the press room at three thirty in the morning for every day except Monday. He would pick up and fold the papers and then start on a five mile route on foot. To add to his earnings, he also started running telegram deliveries after his paper route was completed. His total income from these two jobs was thirty dollars a month, and that was enough that when Earl decided to move the family again, Charles didn't go with them. He was ready to fend for himself. He negotiated a sleeping space in the press room. He had an arrangement with a local restaurant to run the cash register when it was busy in exchange for meals. His first telegram delivery job had been to Senator John James Ingles, who had taken a liking to Charlie and allowed him to borrow books from his library whenever he wanted. So for fourteen year old Charlie, he felt like he had enough to make fends meet. Yep, uh, yeah. He was a very very voracious reader throughout his life. Even though he didn't go to a lot of formal school, he was very smart and he absorbed a lot of what he read. He later lost access though, to Senator Ingalls library when the politician went to Washington, but at that point he supplemented his reading with a similar kindness from the newspapers editor. Charlie loved to read so much that the editor finally just gave him a key to his bookcase. And in addition to reading, Chapin expanded his self driven study by sending away for a course to learn shorthand, which he then used to take notes at public lectures that he attended. Again with that same goal of kind of expanding his education on his own, he taught himself Morse code and said that he subbed in for the town's regular telegraph operator when he was too intoxicated to do his job. Chapin's first published writing happened accidentally. He had written a short piece titled an Autobiography of a Hotel office Chair, and he left that in the telegraph office for the regular operator to read as an amusement. He didn't see it when he came back to the office after a dinner break and presumed it had just been thrown away. Put it appeared in the next morning's paper on the editorial page. He was sent a note from the papers editor thanking him for this well written sketch. He also got paid two dollars for it, and then it got picked up by other papers and republished. Charles Chapin was over the moon about this and met with the Daily Champions editor about becoming a reporter, a job the editor told him he would have within a year. Japan worked really hard to practice writing and prepare, but really overworked himself and became quite ill. He went to his parents, who were living in Freeport, Illinois, to nurse him through the sickness, and after he got better, he didn't go back to Kansas to see about that promised job at the Daily Champion. Instead, he went to Chicago. Yeah, that pattern of overwork and then kind of a collapse is something that plays out in his life over and over, as you will see. When he got to Chicago, Charlie met with editors. He pointed out his syndicated piece that he had written, uh, and some of those editors were encouraging. But based on that one accidentally published piece of writing and the fact that he was only sixteen, no one was ready to offer him a reporter job. So he went back to his family's home in Illinois to regroup. The only job he was offered with the papers there was an apprentice job, but he knew that wasn't going to be any kind of opportunity to write. Apprentices at the papers had to do a lot of menial jobs like sweeping and tending the office fireplaces, and he was not interested in that. Instead, he took an unusual path to getting his work published. He bought his own printing press. Mus had been auctioned off among the assets of a failed insurance company, and Shapin got it for what he said was a low bid. He didn't disclose the amount of that bid, though he did say that it was most of his existing savings. And then he set up the press at his parents house. Was given two rooms there to set up a print shop. The first things he printed were business cards and flyers so he could let people know that Charlie Chapin Book and job Printer was open for business. And he also started a magazine for kids which he wrote. It was called Our Compliments. He wrote under various aliases like Edwin S. Stone and Telegraph to make it seem like there were other staff involved, but it was just him writing and type setting and running the press. Yeah. This was a time when personal presses that were kind of like minis were very popular and a lot of boys were encouraged to like play with them, kind of the way we would do a science kit today. Um, he bought a real printing press, so it's not like a hobby press. Was an actual functional, professional press, which I find very funny. Uh. When he was seventeen, Charlie did expand the paper staff by joining up with a partner that was another young man named Stanton S. Mills, and Mills had actually worked in printing for several years, so he started managing the actual printing of the paper, and Chapin wrote an edited Charlie also started a trade group, the Western Association of Amateur Editors, and he set up a date for a meeting of that group in Dubuque, Iowa. He advertised the event in his paper Are Compliments, and the group had only one meeting, though, and soon Charlie sold his press and he moved with his family to Elgin, Illinois. Once again, the family was moving in pursuit of work for his father. At this point his life took a turn to a somewhat surprising profession, and we'll talk about that after we pause for a quick word from our sponsors. Charlie Chapin briefly became kind of a late blooming theater kid after getting to Elgin, and even toured with a theater company. Although he was, based on account, a pretty good actor, this was not his life's calling by any means. At one point, Chapin actually tried to shoot an actor named Eddie Foy during this period in his life. This was over a young woman that they were both interested in, but Chapin was, according to Foy quote no hiccock in marksmanship. He was such a bad shot that no charges were ever filed. He also got married in eighteen seventy nine to a young woman named Nellie Beebe that was a different woman than the one that had inspired his shooting. Nellie had been a teacher and then decided to switch careers and try acting. In the meantime, Charlie's father had abandoned the family. He had moved to Springfield, Illinois to try to find work, but then he never communicated with his wife, Cecelia Anne, or with anyone else in the family again. It turned out that he had found not only a job, but a whole other life. Earl, at that time forty eight, fell in love with an eighteen year old named Mary McCoy and started a different family with her. Charlie's sister Fanny, made inquiries and learned that Earle was still alive and well, but she never told their mother about this. Charlie and Nellie stayed with Cecilia for a while to comfort her about all this before going back on tour again. While performing in Deadwood, North Dakota, they performed to an audience that included Seth Bullock and Calamity Jane Jane is said to have spent tobacco juice on the gown of the leading lady when she didn't like the character's behavior. She was very much in line with everything we've ever heard about Collarity. It's just fascinating that Chapin was there. Um Chapin's acting career ended pretty abruptly when his theatrical manager died in an accident while traveling during the winter, and at that time, Charlie was still in Deadwood and he didn't have any money to pay for himself and Nellie to get back to Chicago, So he got a type setting job and then he took over for the papers editor when he was called away. He's dayed in that job for six months, while also occasionally taking some more acting roles, but he and Nelly did eventually land back in Chicago. Chapin would later call this foray into an acting career a quote false step in his life. Chapin quickly got a job at the Chicago Tribune, having returned at a time when most of the city's papers were staffing up. They were trying to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding city. He was working as a reporter the most junior reporter on staff, and that meant he got the least important assignments, although he wrote later quote they were always important to me. He also noted that he fell in love with the job and the thrill of covering unfolding news, and how it made him feel as if he had wasted a lot of time with his brief acting career. He got his first front page placement in February of eighty four while covering a gruesome murder of a wealthy couple north of the city. The headline and subheaders read when atkas horror the regularly brutal murder of Mr and Mrs James L. Wilson Tuesday Night, they warmed a viper in the person of a visitor who first robbed and then killed them. At a time when the idea of detective journalism was just taking hold, Chapin, a newcomer to the job, out did his peers with a write up that was incredibly detailed, in thorough, very graphic in its description of the bodies, and included a pretty thorough biography of the victims, James L. Wilson and Clarissa Wilson. This article was laid out very much like a case file, and it even included layout drawings of the Wilson's home so that readers could understand the information that we're given more fully kind of follow along with the story. It also had far more information about the incident than any of the other Chicago papers had. He continued to cover this double murder, which was believed to have been committed by someone the Wilson's had invited into their home for dinner, but finding out who that visitor was actually proved pretty challenging for investigators. When the local butcher, Neil mckeg was arrested and put on trial for the crime, Chapin secured one of the accused only interviews. They covered every day of the trial with the same detail that he had the murder scene, including the large group of women admirers who came to the courtroom every day to support mckeg. Shapen pretty obviously thought mckeege was guilty, but the butcher was acquitted. Regardless of the trial's outcome, Charles Chapin had gone from cub reporter to one of the Tribune's star reporters, and he got much more important assignments throughout his time as a reporter for the Tribune, Chapin became known for his determined pursuit of every story from the moment he started covering it to whichever point it reached its conclusion. For example, when the Haymarket incident happened in eight six, when a bomb was thrown at a labor demonstration, leading to police firing at the assembled demonstrators, Chapin covered that story. He wrote it with a very anti labor rights slant at the urging of the papers managing editor and co owner Joseph Medill. Madill could be an episode in his own right, but the short version is not a good guy. As that story unfolded over a period of time in which Chapin was also chasing other big news as well. Chapin wrote about every single development. Because the labor organizers at the Haymarket incident had been tied to socialist and anarchist activities led by German born August Spies. Once they were in custody, xenophobia drove the paper's coverage as the Tribune advocated for the death penalty when one of the sentenced men, Louis Ling, died by suicide the night before he was to be hanged, Chapin wrote up every minute detail, sparing his readers absolutely nothing in the description of Ling's body after he had detonated a small explosive cap in his mouth. Ling had not died immediately, and Chapin summed up the hours following the small blast by writing quote, Ling died hard. When four of the other organizers were executed at the gallows the following morning, Chapin witnessed it and reported it, including minute by minute accounts of each hangedman's pulse as stated by attending doctors. I was curious when you sent me this about whether I had read any of his reporting when researching our episode on the Haymarket riot. Very likely, I don't remember. I did not get to go check before we came into the studio. Japan's writing, as we've said, really did not spare his readers, but he was not hardened to the events that he wrote about. He described the scene of the Wilson murders as something that haunted him for the rest of his life. Similarly, after watching the execution of the labor organizers, he was so rattled by the experience that he immediately went to a saloon and got what he thought was blackout drunk, though he later recounted that he didn't remember anything of that night. He was surprised to find that he had written and filed his story. The colleagues he had started drinking with told him that he only had one brandy and then left, So it seems like he entered kind of a fugue state. Worked on this article for eight hours straight, filed his story, and then went to sleep. Yeah, he wrote about in his autobiography, like waking up thinking he had dropped the ball and hadn't done his work, and really panicking. And then on his way to the office he bought a paper on the street and his article was in it, and he was very confused for a while while he tried to piece this whole thing together. When Chapin was covering a story about a possible instance of infidelity involving a man named William A. McCauley who was per the tip Chapin had received having an affair with his sister in law who had gone missing, Charlie accidentally found himself very deeply involved in the story as he had been interviewing William Ida McCauley, who was William's wife shot McCauley in the head. He fell into Chapin's arms. William died several hours later, and while this may seem like a situation where a reporter would step away from writing the story, Chapin did not. He was with the family as the police arrived and arrested Ida. He looked through their personal photographs to pull things for a story. He located the missing Molly Macklin, and he interviewed her. He interviewed Molly's husband, Harry Macklin, who was Ida McAuley's brother, and he went to the police station after Ida had been booked, and then interviewed her. He got all the details and was not very delicate about reaching out to anybody involved. The story ran on the front page Christmas Morning under the headline Mrs McAuley's crime. Because of that high profile story, on top of the other pieces he had become known for, Chapin was asked by the competing paper, the Chicago Times, to be at city editor. He took this job on the condition that he'd be given absolute authority over the news room. His bosses at the Chicago Tribune took his exit very hard, although he was also told that if the editor job didn't work out, he could come back. All of this transition happened in the course of a single day. Charles Chapin was working the newsroom at the Times. The night he took the job. He was preparing the next morning's paper. He also fired a reporter that very night after he heard him trash talking. Chapin when he thought he was out of earshot, and then he told the rest of the newsroom that if anybody held the same opinion, they should share an elevator with the reporter he had just fired. There was a turnover. Some of the long time staff decided to leave, and Shapin quickly filled their positions with other people. We're going to talk about more of Chapin's turbulent news career after we take a quick break to hear from the sponsors to keep stuff he missed in history class going. When he started working at the Chicago Times, Chapin was tasked with bringing the lagging paper back to life, and he had a very strong ideas for how to do that. He hired a woman reporter named Nell Cusack to respond to help wanted ads for sweatshops around the city so that she could write about conditions as an insider, and she started the series City Slave Girls as a result, which included the striking passage quote, I did not realize the ignominious position of respectable poverty un till I reached a cloak factory on Madison Street, where labor is bondage, the laborer a slave, and flesh and blood cheaper than needles and thread. The expose that Cusack wrote under the pen name Nel Nelson sold out paper so that the presses actually had to run additional copies. Chapin's changes to the paper were clearly working, and Cusack would eventually parlay that column into two books. When the papor's owner, James J. West, wanted Shapen to do the same kind of undercover story to find out which doctors in Chicago were willing to perform illegal abortions, Chapin refused. You threatened to quit rather than work on a story with quote such indecency, and he thought West had been abandoned the idea, But instead West really assigned the story to two young reporters himself. They were a man and a woman. They pretended to be sweethearts who were dealing with an accidental pregnancy and they went to respected doctors in the city to see who would help them with the illegal procedure. When Charles Chapin discovered that West had sent the story to print, he quit. Yeah, he walked out on the spot. He went back to the Chicago Tribune, and he also took some of the staff with him. He was back in a reporter role at his old paper, putting out paper selling front page articles immediately after his return. But then he was lured back to the time Himes as the Washington d c. Correspondent. He still had a lot of ill will toward West, but he really wanted the job, so, as he said, quote, I smothered my feelings and accepted. Chapin and Nelly rented an apartment five blocks away from the White House, and his life as a political reporter began. He held that job for six years. He made friends with politicians from Illinois who would feed him information that would sell papers back in Chicago, and Chapin continued to inject his own opinions into stories, influencing public opinion about political appointments, and even using his network of contacts to give information to politicians about how the public might perceive various decisions before they were made or announced. But all the while, James J. West, who was still Chapin's boss, had been mismanaging The Chicago Times and committing financial fraud to try to stay out of debt. West had tried to get Charlie to run away to Europe with him with a suitcase full of money, although that seemed to be more of a desperation request than any kind of a real plan. As the paper crumbled and a warrant was issued for West's arrest, Chapin resigned after working briefly as a campaign manager for a Salt Lake City politician who did not get elected. Uh that was a job Chapin took because he needed money. He was then offered a job at the Chicago Herald. He worked there first as a theater and music critic, something he was apparently bad at because he didn't know anything about music, and then he moved into the city editor position. One of the topics that he assigned on an ongoing basis was the wide disparity between the city's poorest and richest residents. His reporters filed story after story of people dying while charity organizations that were ostensibly raising money to aid the poor, seemed to focus more on their gala events than actually administering that aid. This led to the paper itself launching a relief effort and using an empty building near the offices as a base of operations to collect donations and assemble relief packages, including basics like coal and bedclothes. This then became its own goodwill story for the paper and drove up readership and continued on through the winter until the early spring of But then a few months later, Chapin abruptly left his job at The Herald due to ill health. To recover from his illness, Chapin traveled to the Atlantic coast and then visited New York, where he visited Park Row, on the street in Manhattan's financial district that had become the epicenter of journalism in the late nineteenth century was known colloquially as Newspaper Row. There, Joseph Pulitzer had recently completed the New York World Building, and the Renaissance Revival style structure was to Chapin like a beacon. This first visit to the offices of the World was unplanned. Chapin had seen it and had spontaneously decided to go inside. He did not stop at the information desk or talk to any receptionists. He just walked straight to the elevators, got on, and headed to the floor where the editorial desk for The New York World was. No one stopped him as he strolled off the elevator and went right to the editor. Chapin introduced himself and started to explain to editor Ballard Smith who he was, but Smith stopped him and already knew who he was, and offered him a job on the spot. He was working at the World as a reporter the next day. Chapin wanted, of course, the same front page placements of his stories that he'd had in Chicago. Even when he was given smaller stories, he looked for an angle on how to expand them into something unique that readers would want to discuss with their friends and families. He was assigned to cover a train wreck that had happened several stops north of Grand Central. There had been no fatalities, so it wasn't considered big news, but Chapin took this almost as a personal challenge. He wrote about what had happened, one engineer, seeming to have ignored a clear signal to stop, and the tension of the crowd that sawt of crash play out. He did this in a way that any thriller novelist would have been proud of. At the center of Chapin's write up was engineer John Cummings, who seemed to have had some sort of mental break even before the crash. He had stayed in his engineer seat perfectly still, not speaking or looking at anyone, even as the engine was falling apart around him. This is on the front page the next day, and Pulitzer telegramed the city editor that Chapin was to get a bonus for the story and to be given more high profile assignments going forward. Chapin was not only focused on news in New York. He also knew that his great uncle Russell Sage was there, and Russell Sage was rich. He had built his empire over the course of the nineteenth century, rising from a clerk position in a grocery store as a youth to become a railroad executive and a financier. He was one of the richest men in New York and the world at that point, and Chapin thought that if he could cultivate a relationship with Sage that could eventually lead to an inheritance, because even though Chapin had been one of, if not the highest paid reporter in Chicago for years, he always seemed short on money. He wrote that he had gotten a taste of a millionaire's life while spending time with wealthy contacts and friends over the years, and it was clearly something he wanted for himself. His opportunity to meet Sage came when the business mogul's office made news in early December a man who was trying to extort Sage exploded a bomb in sages office. Chapin was the first reporter to get an interview with Sage. Russell Sage recounted how a man who claimed to have been sent by John d. Rockefeller entered his office, demanded one point to million dollars and told Sage that his bag contained ten pounds of dinah might and that he would kill everyone in the building if his demands weren't met. Once again, Chapin's right up outpaced other reporters with greater detail and the interview from stage. But then Chapin had another bout of ill health, which he described as tobercular throat, and he left what seemed to have been his dream job. He and Nelly went to Colorado so Charlie could rest, and then he started working for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. That is a job that was probably arranged by Sage. He sat on the board of directors for the railroad the Chapin State in Colorado for a year. But Charles was soon on the trail of news again when Jacob Seckler Coxey started his quote petition in boots. That was the March to Washington to protest unemployment, which we have covered on the show before. Charles Chapin covered that march. One of the groups that was planning on meeting with Coxey and Washington came to be known as Kelly's Navy, named because it was made up of a bunch of men traveling on the St. Louis River by raft and boat. Chapin had taken a job with the St. Louis Dispatch as a reporter, and it was like the New York World owned by Joseph Pulitzer, which helped him get his job there. But it was a much less intense market in St. Louis than it had been in New York or Chicago, so Chapin kind of thought this would offer him a good on ramp back into reporting. As he continued to recover Chapin embedded with Kelly's Navy. We mentioned in our episode on Coxy's Army that the protesters had been really angry at the press because the coverage of their efforts tended to make them look like they were just a disgruntled group of malcontents looking to cause trouble. So for Chapin to be trusted enough to enter their circle was a big deal. Chapin wrote about the high degree of organization in the camps as they traveled, about hygiene requirements for participants, about how much all of them read the news of the day to stay informed. He was, he wrote, pretty impressed, and his work on the right up may him as central to the staff at his St. Louis paper as he had been in Chicago and New York. By the end of the year, he was assistant city editor, and by spring he was city editor after a significant shake up at the paper. This was a job that came with benefits and dangers. When an article that went after the school board president Frederick Brockman was published at the command of Chapin's boss, who was Colonel Charles H. Jones. Brockman sued the paper, and it was Chapin that face trial as city editor, even though he had not written or assigned that piece. The judge in the case was biased against the paper because of an article that had been published several weeks earlier questioning the judge's military record. He tried repeatedly to bait Chapin into arguing with him in court, and then he refused himself of the trial and attempted to fist fight with Chapin again. Chapin refused, although the chief of police had been concerned enough about the judge's temper that he actually gave Chapin a pistol to defend himself if need be. Nothing ever happened, although there were a couple of tense moments where the men passed each other in the street and kind of eyed one another. Uh. And the Brockman case was dismissed by the new judge that came in in March of Polits. Their telegraph Chapin that he had to come to New York at once, and that was the end of Charles Chapin's life in St. Louis, and that's where we're going to end it for today. Next time we will get into Chapin's time back in New York and the events that changed his life and his reputation forever. But that is where we're at. UM. I have a journalism related listener mail from our listener Sarah, who writes hy Allie and Tracy. I hate being that person, but I would like to point out Nellie Bligh's real name was Elizabeth Cochrane, not the other way around, is Holly stated in your latest Behind the Scenes. I studied Bligh in high school and pursued a journalism degree because of what she was able to accomplish. I recently left the field and now work for a symphony. That's a cool career trajectory. UM. Apologies, I didn't think about it. I will say I have read about Nelly Blie, but didn't retain everything. I feel like she sometimes used Elizabeth Cochrane after her Nellie blind name became known kind of as an alias, which is where I got confused. That's what's up. Thank you for the correction, Sarah. UM. I also have a fun another I swear I won't talk about butterflies every time. But our list Karen also wrote UM. She was catching up on things and she mentioned that I can tell you that it is very easy to order painted lady caterpillars and to grow and release them at your home. It was brought to our attention during pandemic and it is now our kiddo's favorite late spring activity. So uh, that is a good thing to look up if you are interested in in doing some butterfly time at home, which sounds great to me and it's something I kind of want to do. Um, thank you so much for writing us, both of you. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe on the I heart Radio, Apple anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Okay, so heads up. This is a two part episode that involves not only murder, but also discussion of suicide and a lot of talk of mental instability. That's not especially heavy in this first part, but it does come up, and we're starting with it right out of the gate, So jump away if if none of that is what you want to listen to. On September sixteenth, eighteen, Charles Chapin wrote the following upsetting note to his friend and business associate Carlos Sites quote. I know how wrong it is, but I cannot go on suffering as I have for months. I have tried to think out what is best to do and cannot bear the thought of leaving my wife to face the world alone. So I have resolved to take her with me. I've been living with my wife for thirty nine years and have been happy during that time. I am conscious of being on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and it is apparent that the time is close by when I will completely collapse. When you get this paper, I will be dead. My wife has been such a good pal I cannot leave her alone in the world. So the man who wrote that note was incredibly successful. He had a life that a lot of people envied. He had a great deal of power. His entire biography, which we will talk about, is full of noteworthy achievements, and he's like at the apex of like a lot of historical moments that he was responsible for reporting to the world. Yeah, this is like a tour of previous episodes of the podcast through his reporting. Yes, So how did someone who had really the command of pretty much anything one could want end up at a point where he wrote this note and what happened to him after this? It is quite a story. So today we are talking talking about Charles Chapin, and heads up, this is not Charles V. Chapin, who was a doctor who advocated for public health measures to decrease the spread of germs and disease. That is exactly how I did started reading about Charles Chapin that we're talking about today. Those two men were contemporaries. I had been searching for info in the doctor after we did our episode on Imogene W Reckton's No Kissing Crusade and Doctor Chapin will probably be a future episode at some point. But I had stumbled across a newspaper account that featured that note that I just read, and then I couldn't stop thinking about it. So today we are talking about the award winning newspaperman, Charles E. Chapin and the way that his seemingly perfect life fell apart. So Charles E. Chapin was born in Oneida, New York, on October fifty eight. His parents were Cecilia and Yale and Earl Chapin. Earl worked in the family business, which was a store that sold jewelry, watches, clocks, musical instruments, and similar items. Charles, who went by Charlie in his youth, was named after an uncle who had died as a baby. After the US Civil War, in which Earl served but never saw combat, the family moved to Junction City, Kansas. That was a town that was rapidly growing in the wake of the conflict, but they didn't stay very long. Earl was kind of disappointed in the business opportunities there and moved on to Atchison, Kansas. Charlie, who was the oldest son of the family, had been the only one of his siblings to attend any school, and that was in a one room schoolhouse in Junction City. But by the time they moved to Atchison, fourteen year old Charlie felt like it was time to strike out on his own. He later wrote of this quote, I reasoned out of my small boy brain that if I ever was to amount to anything, I must work out my salvation in my own way, without help or hindrance. He got his first job at the paper known as The Daily Champion as a delivery boy for a salary of four dollars a week. Chapin had to be at the press room at three thirty in the morning for every day except Monday. He would pick up and fold the papers and then start on a five mile route on foot. To add to his earnings, he also started running telegram deliveries after his paper route was completed. His total income from these two jobs was thirty dollars a month, and that was enough that when Earl decided to move the family again, Charles didn't go with them. He was ready to fend for himself. He negotiated a sleeping space in the press room. He had an arrangement with a local restaurant to run the cash register when it was busy in exchange for meals. His first telegram delivery job had been to Senator John James Ingles, who had taken a liking to Charlie and allowed him to borrow books from his library whenever he wanted. So for fourteen year old Charlie, he felt like he had enough to make fends meet. Yep, uh, yeah. He was a very very voracious reader throughout his life. Even though he didn't go to a lot of formal school, he was very smart and he absorbed a lot of what he read. He later lost access though, to Senator Ingalls library when the politician went to Washington, but at that point he supplemented his reading with a similar kindness from the newspapers editor. Charlie loved to read so much that the editor finally just gave him a key to his bookcase. And in addition to reading, Chapin expanded his self driven study by sending away for a course to learn shorthand, which he then used to take notes at public lectures that he attended. Again with that same goal of kind of expanding his education on his own, he taught himself Morse code and said that he subbed in for the town's regular telegraph operator when he was too intoxicated to do his job. Chapin's first published writing happened accidentally. He had written a short piece titled an Autobiography of a Hotel office Chair, and he left that in the telegraph office for the regular operator to read as an amusement. He didn't see it when he came back to the office after a dinner break and presumed it had just been thrown away. Put it appeared in the next morning's paper on the editorial page. He was sent a note from the papers editor thanking him for this well written sketch. He also got paid two dollars for it, and then it got picked up by other papers and republished. Charles Chapin was over the moon about this and met with the Daily Champions editor about becoming a reporter, a job the editor told him he would have within a year. Japan worked really hard to practice writing and prepare, but really overworked himself and became quite ill. He went to his parents, who were living in Freeport, Illinois, to nurse him through the sickness, and after he got better, he didn't go back to Kansas to see about that promised job at the Daily Champion. Instead, he went to Chicago. Yeah, that pattern of overwork and then kind of a collapse is something that plays out in his life over and over, as you will see. When he got to Chicago, Charlie met with editors. He pointed out his syndicated piece that he had written, uh, and some of those editors were encouraging. But based on that one accidentally published piece of writing and the fact that he was only sixteen, no one was ready to offer him a reporter job. So he went back to his family's home in Illinois to regroup. The only job he was offered with the papers there was an apprentice job, but he knew that wasn't going to be any kind of opportunity to write. Apprentices at the papers had to do a lot of menial jobs like sweeping and tending the office fireplaces, and he was not interested in that. Instead, he took an unusual path to getting his work published. He bought his own printing press. Mus had been auctioned off among the assets of a failed insurance company, and Shapin got it for what he said was a low bid. He didn't disclose the amount of that bid, though he did say that it was most of his existing savings. And then he set up the press at his parents house. Was given two rooms there to set up a print shop. The first things he printed were business cards and flyers so he could let people know that Charlie Chapin Book and job Printer was open for business. And he also started a magazine for kids which he wrote. It was called Our Compliments. He wrote under various aliases like Edwin S. Stone and Telegraph to make it seem like there were other staff involved, but it was just him writing and type setting and running the press. Yeah. This was a time when personal presses that were kind of like minis were very popular and a lot of boys were encouraged to like play with them, kind of the way we would do a science kit today. Um, he bought a real printing press, so it's not like a hobby press. Was an actual functional, professional press, which I find very funny. Uh. When he was seventeen, Charlie did expand the paper staff by joining up with a partner that was another young man named Stanton S. Mills, and Mills had actually worked in printing for several years, so he started managing the actual printing of the paper, and Chapin wrote an edited Charlie also started a trade group, the Western Association of Amateur Editors, and he set up a date for a meeting of that group in Dubuque, Iowa. He advertised the event in his paper Are Compliments, and the group had only one meeting, though, and soon Charlie sold his press and he moved with his family to Elgin, Illinois. Once again, the family was moving in pursuit of work for his father. At this point his life took a turn to a somewhat surprising profession, and we'll talk about that after we pause for a quick word from our sponsors. Charlie Chapin briefly became kind of a late blooming theater kid after getting to Elgin, and even toured with a theater company. Although he was, based on account, a pretty good actor, this was not his life's calling by any means. At one point, Chapin actually tried to shoot an actor named Eddie Foy during this period in his life. This was over a young woman that they were both interested in, but Chapin was, according to Foy quote no hiccock in marksmanship. He was such a bad shot that no charges were ever filed. He also got married in eighteen seventy nine to a young woman named Nellie Beebe that was a different woman than the one that had inspired his shooting. Nellie had been a teacher and then decided to switch careers and try acting. In the meantime, Charlie's father had abandoned the family. He had moved to Springfield, Illinois to try to find work, but then he never communicated with his wife, Cecelia Anne, or with anyone else in the family again. It turned out that he had found not only a job, but a whole other life. Earl, at that time forty eight, fell in love with an eighteen year old named Mary McCoy and started a different family with her. Charlie's sister Fanny, made inquiries and learned that Earle was still alive and well, but she never told their mother about this. Charlie and Nellie stayed with Cecilia for a while to comfort her about all this before going back on tour again. While performing in Deadwood, North Dakota, they performed to an audience that included Seth Bullock and Calamity Jane Jane is said to have spent tobacco juice on the gown of the leading lady when she didn't like the character's behavior. She was very much in line with everything we've ever heard about Collarity. It's just fascinating that Chapin was there. Um Chapin's acting career ended pretty abruptly when his theatrical manager died in an accident while traveling during the winter, and at that time, Charlie was still in Deadwood and he didn't have any money to pay for himself and Nellie to get back to Chicago, So he got a type setting job and then he took over for the papers editor when he was called away. He's dayed in that job for six months, while also occasionally taking some more acting roles, but he and Nelly did eventually land back in Chicago. Chapin would later call this foray into an acting career a quote false step in his life. Chapin quickly got a job at the Chicago Tribune, having returned at a time when most of the city's papers were staffing up. They were trying to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding city. He was working as a reporter the most junior reporter on staff, and that meant he got the least important assignments, although he wrote later quote they were always important to me. He also noted that he fell in love with the job and the thrill of covering unfolding news, and how it made him feel as if he had wasted a lot of time with his brief acting career. He got his first front page placement in February of eighty four while covering a gruesome murder of a wealthy couple north of the city. The headline and subheaders read when atkas horror the regularly brutal murder of Mr and Mrs James L. Wilson Tuesday Night, they warmed a viper in the person of a visitor who first robbed and then killed them. At a time when the idea of detective journalism was just taking hold, Chapin, a newcomer to the job, out did his peers with a write up that was incredibly detailed, in thorough, very graphic in its description of the bodies, and included a pretty thorough biography of the victims, James L. Wilson and Clarissa Wilson. This article was laid out very much like a case file, and it even included layout drawings of the Wilson's home so that readers could understand the information that we're given more fully kind of follow along with the story. It also had far more information about the incident than any of the other Chicago papers had. He continued to cover this double murder, which was believed to have been committed by someone the Wilson's had invited into their home for dinner, but finding out who that visitor was actually proved pretty challenging for investigators. When the local butcher, Neil mckeg was arrested and put on trial for the crime, Chapin secured one of the accused only interviews. They covered every day of the trial with the same detail that he had the murder scene, including the large group of women admirers who came to the courtroom every day to support mckeg. Shapen pretty obviously thought mckeege was guilty, but the butcher was acquitted. Regardless of the trial's outcome, Charles Chapin had gone from cub reporter to one of the Tribune's star reporters, and he got much more important assignments throughout his time as a reporter for the Tribune, Chapin became known for his determined pursuit of every story from the moment he started covering it to whichever point it reached its conclusion. For example, when the Haymarket incident happened in eight six, when a bomb was thrown at a labor demonstration, leading to police firing at the assembled demonstrators, Chapin covered that story. He wrote it with a very anti labor rights slant at the urging of the papers managing editor and co owner Joseph Medill. Madill could be an episode in his own right, but the short version is not a good guy. As that story unfolded over a period of time in which Chapin was also chasing other big news as well. Chapin wrote about every single development. Because the labor organizers at the Haymarket incident had been tied to socialist and anarchist activities led by German born August Spies. Once they were in custody, xenophobia drove the paper's coverage as the Tribune advocated for the death penalty when one of the sentenced men, Louis Ling, died by suicide the night before he was to be hanged, Chapin wrote up every minute detail, sparing his readers absolutely nothing in the description of Ling's body after he had detonated a small explosive cap in his mouth. Ling had not died immediately, and Chapin summed up the hours following the small blast by writing quote, Ling died hard. When four of the other organizers were executed at the gallows the following morning, Chapin witnessed it and reported it, including minute by minute accounts of each hangedman's pulse as stated by attending doctors. I was curious when you sent me this about whether I had read any of his reporting when researching our episode on the Haymarket riot. Very likely, I don't remember. I did not get to go check before we came into the studio. Japan's writing, as we've said, really did not spare his readers, but he was not hardened to the events that he wrote about. He described the scene of the Wilson murders as something that haunted him for the rest of his life. Similarly, after watching the execution of the labor organizers, he was so rattled by the experience that he immediately went to a saloon and got what he thought was blackout drunk, though he later recounted that he didn't remember anything of that night. He was surprised to find that he had written and filed his story. The colleagues he had started drinking with told him that he only had one brandy and then left, So it seems like he entered kind of a fugue state. Worked on this article for eight hours straight, filed his story, and then went to sleep. Yeah, he wrote about in his autobiography, like waking up thinking he had dropped the ball and hadn't done his work, and really panicking. And then on his way to the office he bought a paper on the street and his article was in it, and he was very confused for a while while he tried to piece this whole thing together. When Chapin was covering a story about a possible instance of infidelity involving a man named William A. McCauley who was per the tip Chapin had received having an affair with his sister in law who had gone missing, Charlie accidentally found himself very deeply involved in the story as he had been interviewing William Ida McCauley, who was William's wife shot McCauley in the head. He fell into Chapin's arms. William died several hours later, and while this may seem like a situation where a reporter would step away from writing the story, Chapin did not. He was with the family as the police arrived and arrested Ida. He looked through their personal photographs to pull things for a story. He located the missing Molly Macklin, and he interviewed her. He interviewed Molly's husband, Harry Macklin, who was Ida McAuley's brother, and he went to the police station after Ida had been booked, and then interviewed her. He got all the details and was not very delicate about reaching out to anybody involved. The story ran on the front page Christmas Morning under the headline Mrs McAuley's crime. Because of that high profile story, on top of the other pieces he had become known for, Chapin was asked by the competing paper, the Chicago Times, to be at city editor. He took this job on the condition that he'd be given absolute authority over the news room. His bosses at the Chicago Tribune took his exit very hard, although he was also told that if the editor job didn't work out, he could come back. All of this transition happened in the course of a single day. Charles Chapin was working the newsroom at the Times. The night he took the job. He was preparing the next morning's paper. He also fired a reporter that very night after he heard him trash talking. Chapin when he thought he was out of earshot, and then he told the rest of the newsroom that if anybody held the same opinion, they should share an elevator with the reporter he had just fired. There was a turnover. Some of the long time staff decided to leave, and Shapin quickly filled their positions with other people. We're going to talk about more of Chapin's turbulent news career after we take a quick break to hear from the sponsors to keep stuff he missed in history class going. When he started working at the Chicago Times, Chapin was tasked with bringing the lagging paper back to life, and he had a very strong ideas for how to do that. He hired a woman reporter named Nell Cusack to respond to help wanted ads for sweatshops around the city so that she could write about conditions as an insider, and she started the series City Slave Girls as a result, which included the striking passage quote, I did not realize the ignominious position of respectable poverty un till I reached a cloak factory on Madison Street, where labor is bondage, the laborer a slave, and flesh and blood cheaper than needles and thread. The expose that Cusack wrote under the pen name Nel Nelson sold out paper so that the presses actually had to run additional copies. Chapin's changes to the paper were clearly working, and Cusack would eventually parlay that column into two books. When the papor's owner, James J. West, wanted Shapen to do the same kind of undercover story to find out which doctors in Chicago were willing to perform illegal abortions, Chapin refused. You threatened to quit rather than work on a story with quote such indecency, and he thought West had been abandoned the idea, But instead West really assigned the story to two young reporters himself. They were a man and a woman. They pretended to be sweethearts who were dealing with an accidental pregnancy and they went to respected doctors in the city to see who would help them with the illegal procedure. When Charles Chapin discovered that West had sent the story to print, he quit. Yeah, he walked out on the spot. He went back to the Chicago Tribune, and he also took some of the staff with him. He was back in a reporter role at his old paper, putting out paper selling front page articles immediately after his return. But then he was lured back to the time Himes as the Washington d c. Correspondent. He still had a lot of ill will toward West, but he really wanted the job, so, as he said, quote, I smothered my feelings and accepted. Chapin and Nelly rented an apartment five blocks away from the White House, and his life as a political reporter began. He held that job for six years. He made friends with politicians from Illinois who would feed him information that would sell papers back in Chicago, and Chapin continued to inject his own opinions into stories, influencing public opinion about political appointments, and even using his network of contacts to give information to politicians about how the public might perceive various decisions before they were made or announced. But all the while, James J. West, who was still Chapin's boss, had been mismanaging The Chicago Times and committing financial fraud to try to stay out of debt. West had tried to get Charlie to run away to Europe with him with a suitcase full of money, although that seemed to be more of a desperation request than any kind of a real plan. As the paper crumbled and a warrant was issued for West's arrest, Chapin resigned after working briefly as a campaign manager for a Salt Lake City politician who did not get elected. Uh that was a job Chapin took because he needed money. He was then offered a job at the Chicago Herald. He worked there first as a theater and music critic, something he was apparently bad at because he didn't know anything about music, and then he moved into the city editor position. One of the topics that he assigned on an ongoing basis was the wide disparity between the city's poorest and richest residents. His reporters filed story after story of people dying while charity organizations that were ostensibly raising money to aid the poor, seemed to focus more on their gala events than actually administering that aid. This led to the paper itself launching a relief effort and using an empty building near the offices as a base of operations to collect donations and assemble relief packages, including basics like coal and bedclothes. This then became its own goodwill story for the paper and drove up readership and continued on through the winter until the early spring of But then a few months later, Chapin abruptly left his job at The Herald due to ill health. To recover from his illness, Chapin traveled to the Atlantic coast and then visited New York, where he visited Park Row, on the street in Manhattan's financial district that had become the epicenter of journalism in the late nineteenth century was known colloquially as Newspaper Row. There, Joseph Pulitzer had recently completed the New York World Building, and the Renaissance Revival style structure was to Chapin like a beacon. This first visit to the offices of the World was unplanned. Chapin had seen it and had spontaneously decided to go inside. He did not stop at the information desk or talk to any receptionists. He just walked straight to the elevators, got on, and headed to the floor where the editorial desk for The New York World was. No one stopped him as he strolled off the elevator and went right to the editor. Chapin introduced himself and started to explain to editor Ballard Smith who he was, but Smith stopped him and already knew who he was, and offered him a job on the spot. He was working at the World as a reporter the next day. Chapin wanted, of course, the same front page placements of his stories that he'd had in Chicago. Even when he was given smaller stories, he looked for an angle on how to expand them into something unique that readers would want to discuss with their friends and families. He was assigned to cover a train wreck that had happened several stops north of Grand Central. There had been no fatalities, so it wasn't considered big news, but Chapin took this almost as a personal challenge. He wrote about what had happened, one engineer, seeming to have ignored a clear signal to stop, and the tension of the crowd that sawt of crash play out. He did this in a way that any thriller novelist would have been proud of. At the center of Chapin's write up was engineer John Cummings, who seemed to have had some sort of mental break even before the crash. He had stayed in his engineer seat perfectly still, not speaking or looking at anyone, even as the engine was falling apart around him. This is on the front page the next day, and Pulitzer telegramed the city editor that Chapin was to get a bonus for the story and to be given more high profile assignments going forward. Chapin was not only focused on news in New York. He also knew that his great uncle Russell Sage was there, and Russell Sage was rich. He had built his empire over the course of the nineteenth century, rising from a clerk position in a grocery store as a youth to become a railroad executive and a financier. He was one of the richest men in New York and the world at that point, and Chapin thought that if he could cultivate a relationship with Sage that could eventually lead to an inheritance, because even though Chapin had been one of, if not the highest paid reporter in Chicago for years, he always seemed short on money. He wrote that he had gotten a taste of a millionaire's life while spending time with wealthy contacts and friends over the years, and it was clearly something he wanted for himself. His opportunity to meet Sage came when the business mogul's office made news in early December a man who was trying to extort Sage exploded a bomb in sages office. Chapin was the first reporter to get an interview with Sage. Russell Sage recounted how a man who claimed to have been sent by John d. Rockefeller entered his office, demanded one point to million dollars and told Sage that his bag contained ten pounds of dinah might and that he would kill everyone in the building if his demands weren't met. Once again, Chapin's right up outpaced other reporters with greater detail and the interview from stage. But then Chapin had another bout of ill health, which he described as tobercular throat, and he left what seemed to have been his dream job. He and Nelly went to Colorado so Charlie could rest, and then he started working for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. That is a job that was probably arranged by Sage. He sat on the board of directors for the railroad the Chapin State in Colorado for a year. But Charles was soon on the trail of news again when Jacob Seckler Coxey started his quote petition in boots. That was the March to Washington to protest unemployment, which we have covered on the show before. Charles Chapin covered that march. One of the groups that was planning on meeting with Coxey and Washington came to be known as Kelly's Navy, named because it was made up of a bunch of men traveling on the St. Louis River by raft and boat. Chapin had taken a job with the St. Louis Dispatch as a reporter, and it was like the New York World owned by Joseph Pulitzer, which helped him get his job there. But it was a much less intense market in St. Louis than it had been in New York or Chicago, so Chapin kind of thought this would offer him a good on ramp back into reporting. As he continued to recover Chapin embedded with Kelly's Navy. We mentioned in our episode on Coxy's Army that the protesters had been really angry at the press because the coverage of their efforts tended to make them look like they were just a disgruntled group of malcontents looking to cause trouble. So for Chapin to be trusted enough to enter their circle was a big deal. Chapin wrote about the high degree of organization in the camps as they traveled, about hygiene requirements for participants, about how much all of them read the news of the day to stay informed. He was, he wrote, pretty impressed, and his work on the right up may him as central to the staff at his St. Louis paper as he had been in Chicago and New York. By the end of the year, he was assistant city editor, and by spring he was city editor after a significant shake up at the paper. This was a job that came with benefits and dangers. When an article that went after the school board president Frederick Brockman was published at the command of Chapin's boss, who was Colonel Charles H. Jones. Brockman sued the paper, and it was Chapin that face trial as city editor, even though he had not written or assigned that piece. The judge in the case was biased against the paper because of an article that had been published several weeks earlier questioning the judge's military record. He tried repeatedly to bait Chapin into arguing with him in court, and then he refused himself of the trial and attempted to fist fight with Chapin again. Chapin refused, although the chief of police had been concerned enough about the judge's temper that he actually gave Chapin a pistol to defend himself if need be. Nothing ever happened, although there were a couple of tense moments where the men passed each other in the street and kind of eyed one another. Uh. And the Brockman case was dismissed by the new judge that came in in March of Polits. Their telegraph Chapin that he had to come to New York at once, and that was the end of Charles Chapin's life in St. Louis, and that's where we're going to end it for today. Next time we will get into Chapin's time back in New York and the events that changed his life and his reputation forever. But that is where we're at. UM. I have a journalism related listener mail from our listener Sarah, who writes hy Allie and Tracy. I hate being that person, but I would like to point out Nellie Bligh's real name was Elizabeth Cochrane, not the other way around, is Holly stated in your latest Behind the Scenes. I studied Bligh in high school and pursued a journalism degree because of what she was able to accomplish. I recently left the field and now work for a symphony. That's a cool career trajectory. UM. Apologies, I didn't think about it. I will say I have read about Nelly Blie, but didn't retain everything. I feel like she sometimes used Elizabeth Cochrane after her Nellie blind name became known kind of as an alias, which is where I got confused. That's what's up. Thank you for the correction, Sarah. UM. I also have a fun another I swear I won't talk about butterflies every time. But our list Karen also wrote UM. She was catching up on things and she mentioned that I can tell you that it is very easy to order painted lady caterpillars and to grow and release them at your home. It was brought to our attention during pandemic and it is now our kiddo's favorite late spring activity. So uh, that is a good thing to look up if you are interested in in doing some butterfly time at home, which sounds great to me and it's something I kind of want to do. Um, thank you so much for writing us, both of you. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe on the I heart Radio, Apple anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.