Secret Heroes by Paul Martin

Author:Paul Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

A Thorn in the Side of Convention

ANNE ROYALL

The best story told about journalist Anne Royall isn’t true, although it fits her character perfectly. According to legend, Royall wanted to interview President John Quincy Adams but had been denied access. Knowing that the president bathed in the Potomac River each morning, Royall supposedly waited until Adams was happily splashing about one day, then she sat on his clothes on the riverbank and refused to budge until he answered her questions.

It’s a great anecdote, but Royall didn’t need to waylay the president in order to talk with him. The two had become friends soon after Royall arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1824. The apocryphal tale may have gotten started because it represented just the type of resort-to-any-means journalism that Anne Royall practiced. She wasn’t intimidated by power or privilege. For more than two decades, she roamed the halls of Congress and haunted federal office buildings, badgering people, charming them, or simply raising hell until she got her stories.

Dubbed “the grandma of the muckrakers,” Royall set a new standard for journalistic vigilance in the public interest. She was relentless in sniffing out corruption, fraud, and incompetence. Government officials routinely ducked down corridors or cowered behind closed doors when the little old lady with the green umbrella and the hectoring voice was on the prowl. Her constant, predatory smile revealed a set of gleaming white teeth that seemed poised to take a bite out of something. She was like a fierce old mongoose circling a snake.

The impoverished widow of a Revolutionary War officer, Royall had originally come to Washington to petition Congress for a pension. One of the first important men she met was Adams, who was then secretary of state in the Monroe administration. Adams saw beyond her shabby clothing and took a liking to the small, wrinkled-faced woman with the piercing blue eyes. He backed her petition, and even invited Royall to call on his wife, Louisa, who gave her a new white shawl. Later, Royall visited Adams’s father, John Adams, the country’s second president, who was living in Massachusetts.

As a child, this irrepressible journalist probably never imagined that one day she’d be hobnobbing with bluebloods. Born in colonial Maryland in 1769, Anne Newport grew up in a log cabin in the wilds of western Pennsylvania. In her book Letters from Alabama, she described a childhood of poverty and danger: “I suffered all that human nature could bear, both with cold and hunger. . . . Often running for our lives to the forts, Indians pursuing and shooting at us. At other times lying concealed in brushwood, exposed to rain and snakes, for days and nights without food, and almost without clothes.”

The hard life in Pennsylvania took its toll. Anne’s father died when she was a young girl. Her mother got married again, to a man named Butler, but he died after a few years as well. Sick and destitute, Anne’s mother set off with her three children for a better life in western Virginia.

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