Mortimer Thomson’s “Witches of New York:” Undercover Reporting on the Fortune-Telling Trade
Volume 37, No. 4, 2020
By Samantha Peko, University of North Georgia-Gainesville
Stunt journalists, popular in the mid to late-1800s, investigated social problems by going undercover. They transformed into prostitutes, shop workers, and cigar rollers to later write first-person narratives, a job which aided the development of modern investigative journalism.
In Mortimer Thomson’s “Witches of New York,” Thomson poses as a paying customer at several fortune-tellers’ homes. In doing so, he learns of common fortune-telling tricks, like selling charms or tonics. Provoked by a series of dubious advertisements, the series supplied a glimpse into the fortune-telling trade. Fueled by the influx of immigration and lack of work opportunities for women, many in the series found that telling fortunes could be profitable and that advertising was a vehicle to promote their services.
Thomson, initially a comedic writer and playwright, became famous for his travel adventures. In the narrative, Thomson gave a satirical account of his experience visiting the homes of sixteen New York fortune-tellers. From the grimy streets of lower Manhattan, he visited tenement homes and various other seedy parts of New York to have his fortune read.
Sixteen articles in The Witches of New York published in the Tribune from January 1857 to May 1857 were analyzed. The series is available in Kroeger’s Undercover Reporting database and the book The Witches of New York, published in December 1858 by Rudd and Carleton. To fill in biographical and other details about Thomson and the series, this paper drew from the Life and Letters of Mortimer Thomson, also available in Kroeger‘s database, as well as a search of Chronicling America (www.chroniclingamerica.org), the Library of Congress’s collection of more than two thousand historical newspapers that appeared before 1923, and the diary of Thomas Butler Gunn, available through the Lehigh University digital archives on bohemians in antebellum New York.
Exercise 1
Mortimer Thomson’s “Witches of New York:” Undercover Reporting on the Fortune-Telling Trade looked at deceptive advertisements believed to harm the public good. Have students find examples of false advertising (diet pills, new weight loss program, etc.) and discuss the ad’s content and potential for harm.
Resources:
- Jane Marcellus, “Nervous Women and Noble Savages: The Romanticized “Other” in Nineteenth-Century US Patent Medicine Advertising,” Journal of Popular Culture 41, no. 5.
- Samuel Hopkins Adams. The Great American Fraud: aASeries of Articles on the Patent
Medicine Evil, Also, the Patent Medicine Conspiracy against the Freedom of the Press. New York: P.F. Collier, 1905.
- Marvin Olasky. “Advertising Abortion During the 1830s and 1840s: Madame Restell Builds a Business,” Journalism History 13, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 49-55.
Exercise 2
This article looks at how undercover reporting evolved. Today, undercover reporting is less common because of legal consequences that some undercover journalists have faced. Ask students to produce some examples of investigative reporting and argue if when and why should a reporter go undercover. Have students create a list of scenarios when undercover may be useful.
Resources:
- Brooke Kroger. Undercover Reporting: The Truth about Deception. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012.
- Nellie Bly. Ten Days in a Mad-House (New York: Ian L. Munro, 1887).
- David A. Logan.“Stunt Journalism, Professional Norms, and Public Mistrust of the Media,” University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy 9, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 151-176.
- Shane Bauer. “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard,” Mother Jones, July/August 2016. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer/.
- Jon Schwartz. “Undercover in North Korea: All Paths Lead to Catastrophe,” The Intercept, September 4, 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/09/04/undercover-in-north-korea-all-paths-lead-to-catastrophe/.
Exercise 3
Most journalists can agree that journalists should tell truthful stories and minimize any slant, yet it is almost impossible to always be unbiased. Thomson’s desire to expose fortune-tellers might have clouded his assessment of who these women were and why they told fortunes. Doing so may have altered the historical record and given these women a bad reputation they may or may not have deserved. Mortimer Thomson’s “Witches of New York:” Undercover Reporting on the Fortune-Telling Trade used census records and directories to find the women in the narrative. Ask them to browse “Chronicling America” for articles that have a slant. Then, strategize a historical study that could correct the historical record.
Resources:
- Shane White. “The Gold Diggers of 1833: African American Dreams, Fortune-Telling, Treasure-Seeking, and Policy in Antebellum New York City,” Journal of Social History 47, no. 4 (Spring 2014): 684.
- Natallie. Zarrelli “The Hidden World of Tenement Fortune Tellers in 19th Century Manhattan,” Atlas Obscura, December 04, 2015. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-hidden-world-of- tenement-fortune-tellers-in-19th-century-manhattan.
- John Lewis Gaddis. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.