Hull, Peggy (1889–1967)

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Hull, Peggy (1889–1967)

Foreign war correspondent who was the first woman to be accredited by the U.S. War Department to cover a war zone. Born Henrietta Eleanor Goodnough on December 30, 1889, near Bennington, Kansas; died in 1967 in Carmel Valley, California; married George Hull (a reporter), around 1910 (divorced 1914); married John Kinley (a British captain), in 1921 (separated 1925, divorced 1932); married Harvey Deuell (a newspaper editor), around 1932 (died 1939).

Peggy Hull made history during World War I as the first woman correspondent accredited by the U.S. War Department to cover a war zone. Her colorful life and career included a friendship with pioneering radio commentator Irene Corbally Kuhn , who noted Hull had a "will of iron"; she was "a woman all men loved and no woman ever disliked."

Born on a farm near Bennington, Kansas, in 1889, Peggy Hull began her career as a typesetter for the Junction City (Kansas) Sentinel. At 21, she married George Hull, a handsome young reporter with a drinking problem. The couple moved to Hawaii, where George worked as a reporter for the Honolulu Star and Hull was a feature writer and women's page editor for the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Four years into the marriage, on the day her tipsy husband tried to climb a flagpole naked, Hull left him. Returning to the mainland, she took a job with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing advertising copy.

In 1916, the Ohio National Guard was mobilized and sent to El Paso, Texas, to join General John Pershing's expedition in Mexico to capture Pancho Villa. Hull requested permission to travel with the Guard. When her editor turned her down, she promptly quit her job and moved to Texas where she worked first for the El Paso Herald, then the El Paso Morning Times. Hull never made it to the front, but she was allowed to accompany the troops on a grueling two-week training march from El Paso to Las Cruces, New Mexico. During the trek, she slept on the ground like the men and at one point was caught in a sandstorm and separated from the troops. Although Pershing never captured Pancho Villa, the expedition helped prepare the American

troops for entry into World War I and served as Hull's training ground as well.

With America's involvement in the war, Hull resolved to pay her own way to France with only a promise from the El Paso Times to use her articles. Wearing a uniform of her own design, featuring a Sam Browne belt and short skirt, she charmed a State Department official into issuing a passport and bribed a French consular officer to obtain a visa. Once in France, she was side-tracked with an attack of appendicitis, after which she contacted the Paris office of the Chicago Tribune. She was able to travel to Le Valdahon through the efforts of Robert R. McCormick, its publisher, and Joseph B. Pierson, manager of the Paris edition, where she convinced the commanding generals to let her stay, even though her newspaper could not afford to have her accredited. While lodging in a barracks with women working for the YMCA canteen, she wrote personally of the war and signed her articles simply "Peggy." Her stories, which appeared in both the Paris and Chicago edition of the Tribune, were well-received but caused resentment among the male reporters, who felt that she was receiving preferential treatment.

In December 1917, Hull's mother was taken ill, and Peggy returned to the United States, although she was still determined to go back to Paris to cover the war legitimately. While nursing her mother, however, she became intrigued by plans for an American military expedition to Siberia to guard the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which was delivering supplies to the White Army. Interested more in this new mission than in returning to France, Hull set out to find a newspaper that would sponsor her for accreditation. After 50 rejections, she obtained endorsement of the Newspaper Enterprise Association, the Scripps-Howard press service headquartered in Cleveland. With the further endorsement of General Peyton C. March, whom she had met on the Pershing expedition, Hull boarded a Russian steamer for Siberia on September 1918. Landing in Vladivostok around the time of the Armistice, she began a 9-month, 1,000-mile inspection tour of the Siberian Railroad and reported on the suffering of the masses of refugees trying to escape both the Red and White armies. "Siberia is on the threshold of its blackest period," she wrote. "Twice a victim, first to monarchy and then to anarchy—its people will die by the thousands. They are freezing to death now." Julia Edwards , in Women of the World, points out that historians later dismissed the American expedition to Siberia as a "foolish venture," but Hull's stories provide one of the few firsthand accounts of what happened there. She left Siberia in July 1919, and after a stop in Shanghai where C.V. Lee, publisher of the Shanghai Gazette, offered her a job, she returned to the United States.

Hull went on to Paris in 1920, where she was well received by the very press corps that had treated her so poorly during the war. It was there that she met and befriended Irene Corbally, the 21-year-old correspondent for the Tribune who later won fame as Irene Corbally Kuhn. In 1921, when Hull left Paris to accept a job in Shanghai, Corbally, as a lark, joined her at the last minute. In a stopover in Singapore, Hull met a young British captain, John Kinley, who became her second husband. While Hull enjoyed a whirlwind courtship and a hasty marriage, Corbally went on to Shanghai, where she took a job with the China Press.

After an extended three-year honeymoon aboard Kinley's ship the Nile, Hull finally made it to Shanghai and her job at the Shanghai Gazette. After a year, however, her marriage deteriorated, and she returned to the United States only to discover that she had lost her American citizenship by marrying a foreigner. Not until 1932, after a successful campaign to change the law, was she able to divorce Kinley. In the interim, while free-lancing in New York, she fell in love with Harvey Deuell, the managing editor of the New York Daily News. In January 1932, while she was in Shanghai divorcing Kinley to marry Deuell, the Japanese attacked, and Deuell cabled her to cover the story for the Daily News.

Hull's third marriage ended with Deuell's death in 1939, just weeks before the start of World War II. Once again, she faced difficulty in obtaining accreditation, although ironically it finally came through from the North American Newspaper Alliance and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the newspaper that had refused to send her to the Mexican border in 1917. However, it was not until November 1943 that she received permission from Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson Jr., a commander general in the Central Pacific, to cover the war in his area. So, at age 53, Hull traveled with the fighting forces to the Pacific Islands, documenting the experiences of the GIs in articles that were likened to those of Ernie Pyle, who died in the Pacific. After the war, Peggy Hull retired to Carmel Valley, California, where she died in 1967.