by David Nasaw
While Davis never did find any fighting, he was able to find enough material to write a few magnificent front-page stories on the devastation the war had visited on Cuba and its peoples. Frederic Remington was not so fortunate. Disgusted by the lack of action and his inability to find scenes worth illustrating, he telegrammed Hearst from Havana that he wished to return to New York. “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war.” Hearst, according to James Creelman, who wrote about the incident in his autobiography, answered Remington by return cable, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”5
Though many pages have been written about these telegrams, there is no record of them outside of Creelman’s 1901 autobiography. Hearst himself, in a letter to the London Times in 1907, referred to the intimation that he was chiefly responsible for the Spanish war as a kind of “clotted nonsense” which “could only be generally circulated and generally believed in England.”6
Despite his disclaimers, Hearst might well have written the telegram to Remington, but if he did, the war he was referring to was the one already being fought between the Cuban revolutionaries and the Spanish army, not the one the Americans would later fight. There is no mention of or reference to American intervention in the telegrams; the groundswell that would lead to intervention after the sinking of the Maine had not yet begun. The war in question, the war Hearst may have claimed he would furnish, was the one between Cubans and Spaniards being waged in January of 1897, not the one that would be declared in Washington fifteen months later.
The question that is much more interesting than whether or not Hearst wrote the telegram is why its contents have been so universally misinterpreted. The answer is simple: Hearst, with his genius for self-promotion, so deftly inserted himself and his newspapers into the narrative of the Spanish-American War that historians and the general public have accepted the presumption that he furnished it.
Though Hearst tried his best to keep Cuba on his front pages, events conspired against him. By April of 1897, Cuba was no longer front-page news. Hearst focused his attention instead on the threatened war between Greece and Turkey, dispatching to the front a full complement of star reporters led by Stephen Crane, Julian Ralph, two “female correspondents,” and a full “contingent of Greek couriers, translators, and orderlies.”7
By the summer of 1897, peace having settled over Greece, Hearst and his editors were left without a viable front-page story cycle. They found it in August in Cuba where, as they reported in huge bold headlines and artfully engraved line drawings, Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros, the young and innocent daughter of a jailed insurgent, had been cast into an airless dungeon for daring to protect her chastity against the brutal advances of a lust-crazed Spanish colonel. Evangelina was the perfect heroine for Hearst’s melodrama: a beautiful eighteen-year-old “Cuban Joan of Arc, with long black hair.” As Creelman recalled in his autobiography—no doubt with some embellishment—Hearst, on hearing of Evangelina’s plight, took command of the newsroom and barked out orders to the assembled editors and reporters:
“Telegraph to our correspondent in Havana to wire every detail of this case. Get up a petition to the Queen Regent of Spain for this girl’s pardon. Enlist the women of America. Have them sign the petition. Wake up our correspondents all over the country. Have distinguished women sign first. Cable the petitions and the names to the Queen Regent. Notify our minister in Madrid. We can make a national issue of this case ... That girl must be saved if we have to take her out of prison by force or send a steamer to meet the vessel that carries her away—but that would be piracy, wouldn’t it?”
“Within an hour,” continues Creelman’s account, “messages were flashing to Cuba, and to every part of the United States. The petition to the Queen Regent was telegraphed to more than two hundred correspondents in various American cities and towns. Each correspondent was instructed to hire a carriage and employ whatever assistance he needed, get the signatures of prominent women of the place, and telegraph them to New York as quickly as possible.”
Hearst himself telegraphed the most prominent women in the nation, including Mrs. McKinley in the White House: “Will you not add your name to that of distinguished American women like Mrs. Julia Ward Howe ... who are cabling petitions to Queen Regent of Spain for release of Evangelina Cisneros eighteen years old ... who is threatened with twenty years imprisonment? She is almost a child, sick, defenseless, and in prison. A word may save her. Answer at our expense. William Hearst.”8
Hundreds of responses followed—from Clara Barton, Mrs. Jefferson Davis, President McKinley’s mother, and many more—each one of them reproduced on the pages of the Journal. While the World, citing the American consul general in Havana, screamed that the Cisneros story was more hoax than fact, and Town Topics, the weekly guide to gossip and politics in New York, echoing the opinion of the city’s respectable classes, complained that the Journal’s coverage was both “senseless and pernicious,” Hearst continued to trumpet the story, with the focus shifted from what had been done to Evangelina Cisneros to what the Journal was doing for her.9
As it became apparent that Spain was not about to release Evangelina, Hearst ordered the reporter and adventurer Karl Decker to sail for Cuba and help Evangelina escape. Miraculously, with the help of some well-placed bribes, Decker succeeded in springing Cisneros from her dungeon and transporting her to New York City: “An American Newspaper Accomplishes at a Single Stroke What the Red Tape of Diplomacy Failed to Bring About in Many Months.” In New York, Hearst dressed Evangelina like a princess in a long white gown, installed her in a suite at the Waldorf, and paraded her through the streets to a huge rally at Madison Square Garden, followed by a dinner at Delmonico’s, a ball in the Waldorf’s Red Room, and a trip to Washington, D.C., for a reception with President McKinley at the White House.10
Hearst’s rescue of Cisneros was significant not because, as his supporters and critics would later argue, it embarrassed the Spanish and pushed the United States toward involvement in the Caribbean, but because it strengthened his sense of entitlement and bolstered his confidence that because he was acting on behalf of the American people, he could make his own rules—subverting, if need be, common sense and international law.
The Evangelina Cisneros rescue was a sideshow. The real story was being played out in Cuba, where the insurgents continued their battle for independence, and in Spain, where the new Liberal party government found itself caught between the Cuban insurrectionists, who demanded complete independence, and the Conservative opposition, army officers, Spanish landholders in Cuba, and colonial officials, who threatened civil war should the Liberal government cede the island to the Cubans. With no compromise possible, the war continued. American businessmen watched hopelessly as the Cuban economy disintegrated, trade halted, and tens of millions of dollars in American investments were rendered virtually worthless.
On January 11, 1898, antigovernment riots broke out in Havana, incited this time not by the Cuban revolutionaries but by Spanish army officers who feared that the government in Madrid might give in to the revolutionaries. President McKinley ordered the battleship U.S.S. Maine to sail from Key West to protect American interests on the island.
Two weeks later, a representative of the Cuban Junta appeared at the Journal office with a stolen letter in which Dupuy de Lôme, the Spanish ambassador to the United States, referred to President McKinley as “weak, vacillating, and venal.” The Cubans had offered the letter to the Herald, but when the Herald editors delayed publication pending authentication, the rebels withdrew it and marched to Hearst’s offices. The Journal published the letter next morning in an inflammatory English translation. The headline read, “Worst Insult to the United States in Its History.”11
Under ordinary circumstances, Hearst could have wrung headlines out of this story for weeks, but events were now moving so fast he did not have to. On the evening of February 15, 1898, the U.S.S. Maine, under circumstances which even
today are not entirely clear, exploded in Havana Harbor, instantly killing more than 250 of the sailors, marines, and officers on board. This event, if we are to judge only from the size of the headlines, became at once the biggest newspaper story since the assassination of President Lincoln.
According to Hearst's account, he was awakened with news of the Maines sinking by his butler, George Thompson:
“There’s a telephone call from the office. They say it’s important news.”
The office was called up.
“Hello, what is the important news?”
“The battleship Maine has been blown up in Havana Harbor.”
“Good heavens, what have you done with the story?”
“We have put it on the first page of course.”
“Have you put anything else on the front page?”
“Only the other big news.”
“There is not any other big news. Please spread the story all over the page. This means war.”12
While President McKinley convened a naval court of inquiry to determine the cause of the Maine explosion and newspapers across the country cautioned readers to await the gathering of evidence before jumping to conclusions, Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Journal determined, after only forty-eight hours, that the explosion had been detonated by a Spanish mine. “Destruction of the Warship Maine Was the Work of An Enemy,” read the Journal's front-page headline on February 17, 1898. In the middle of the page was a drawing of the Maine in Havana Harbor with a mine placed directly underneath it. The caption read: “The Spaniards, it is believed, arranged to have the Maine anchored over one of the Harbor mines. Wires connected the mine with a powder magazine and it is thought the explosion was caused by sending an electric current through the wire.”13
“Maine is great thing. Arouse everybody. Stir up Madrid,” Hearst telegrammed James Creelman in London. Having determined that the Spanish were responsible for the explosion, Hearst positioned the Journal in the center of the story as the hero who would avenge the murder of the American sailors. He offered a $50,000 reward for the solution to the mystery of the Maine explosion, began a drive for a Maine memorial and contributed the first $1,000, devised a new “War with Spain” card game, enlisted a delegation of senators and congressmen to travel to Cuba on a Hearst yacht as “Journal commissioners,” and implored his readers to write their congressmen. The combined circulation of the morning and evening Journals reached one million and continued to grow.
Pulitzer and his editors tried but failed to keep up with Hearst's newspapers on this, the biggest story since the Civil War. The World did not have the funds—or the Hearst-owned yachts—to send dozens of correspondents and artists to report firsthand on Cuba, nor did it have the staff to put out six to eight pages of articles, editorials, cartoons, interviews, and illustrated features on the Cuban crisis each day. The Journals coverage was bigger, more spectacular, more varied, and more imaginative than that of any other paper in the city. There were dozens of stories on the Maine explosion, on the funeral procession for the Maine victims, on the mounting horrors in “Butcher” Weyler's death camps, on the findings of the “Journal commissioners” to Cuba. While McKinley awaited the report from his naval court of inquiry on the cause of the Maine explosion, the Hearst papers attacked the president together with Mark Hanna, the “conservative” newspapers that refused to join the crusade, and “the eminently respectable porcine citizens” who resisted the call to battle. To graphically demonstrate to the public how easy it would be to win this war, the Journal contacted America's most famous oversized athletes, including heavyweight champions James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons, baseball star Cap Anson, and champion hammer-throwers and wrestlers, to ask if they would consider joining a regiment of athletes. “Think of a regiment composed of magnificent men of this ilk!” the Journal gloated on March 29, 1898. “They would overawe any Spanish regiment by their mere appearance.”14
“Whatever else happens, the World must go,” declared Town Topics in early April. “It has been beaten on its own dunghill by the Journal, which has bigger type, bigger pictures, bigger war scares, and a bigger bluff. If Mr. Pulitzer had his eyesight he would not be content to play second fiddle to the Journal and allow Mr. Hearst to set the tone.”15
When, less than two months after the Maine explosion, Congress passed a joint resolution demanding that Spain “relinquish its authority and government on the island of Cuba” and directing the president “to use the land and naval forces of the United States to carry these resolutions into effect,” Hearst's Journal greeted the news, in headlines a full four inches high, “NOW TO AVENGE THE MAINE!” Five days later, on April 25, rockets were set off from the roof of the Journal building to celebrate the signing of the declaration of war and the Journal offered a prize of $1,000 to the reader who came up with the best ideas for conducting the war. A week later, Hearst, unable to contain his euphoria, asked on the very top of his front page, “How do you like the Journals war?”16
Though Hearst claimed that the war in Cuba was the Journal’s war, it was not. President McKinley had not asked for a declaration of war, nor had Congress granted him one, to please William R. Hearst. The “yellows” had been clamoring for war for several years, with no discernible effect, their strident voices balanced by more conservative Republican voices like Whitelaw Reid’s Tribune and E. L. Godkin’s Evening Post, which urged restraint. Hearst was a cheerleader not a policy maker. McKinley had his own sources of information in Cuba; he did not need a Hearst or Pulitzer to tell him what was going on there nor did he place much trust in what they had to say. According to the historian Walter LaFeber, he did not even read the “yellows.” As John Offner, the author of An Unwanted War, has concluded, sensational journalism had “only a marginal impact” on the decision to go to war with Spain: “Hearst played on American prejudices; he did not create them. Although he and other sensationalists supplied many false stories, they did not fabricate the major events that moved the United States.... Had there been no sensational press, only responsible editors, the American public nevertheless would have learned about the terrible conditions in Cuba [and] would have wanted Spain to leave.”17
What prompted McKinley, Congress, and most of the business community to support intervention in early 1898, after resisting for so many years, was the recognition that Spain had lost control of Cuba and would not be able to regain it. Politically, McKinley could not afford to allow the Democrats to blame him and his party for so much human suffering and bloodshed so close to home. Economically, he could not allow the millions of dollars invested on the island to lie fallow or, worse yet, be lost forever should the Cubans oust the Spanish.
Hearst used every available means to put himself and his newspapers into the center of the war against Spain. He was not content with covering the hostilities in print alone. He wanted the Hearst name to be attached as well to the latest news medium, the moving-picture “actualities” or “visual newspapers” that the Biograph and Edison companies were exhibiting in New York's vaudeville halls.
The day after the Maine explosion, the Biograph Company recaptioned old footage of the battleships Iowa and Massachusetts as the Iowa and the Maine and showed it in vaudeville theaters across the country. The audience response was overwhelming. “There was fifteen minutes of terrific shouting,” the New York World reported from a Chicago vaudeville hall, “when the battleships Maine and Iowa were shown in the biograph.... The audience arose, cheered and cheered again, and the climax was reached when a picture of Uncle Sam under the flag was shown on the canvas.”18
Hearst offered space to Biograph cameramen on the Anita, one of several yachts he owned or chartered to transport reporters to Cuba, and entered into a partnership with the Edison Company to produce “war pictures” for exhibition in New York’s vaudeville theaters. The Edison cameramen were transported to Cuba on another Hearst news yacht, the Buccaneer. Reporter Karl Decker, the savior of Evangelina Cisneros, sailed with them as their guide. Se
venteen different “Edison-Journal views” were produced, several of them moving pictures of Hearst’s yacht, captioned “New York Journal War Correspondents on Board.” Though short-lived, the Edison-Journal War Pictures were invaluable to Hearst, as they associated the Journal with Edison, the most important name in moving pictures, and brought the paper free advertising in every vaudeville hall where the Edison-Journal films were shown.19
With the official declaration of war, the U.S. Navy—such as it was—joined the battle. Admiral William T. Sampson blockaded Havana Harbor with the North Atlantic Squadron, which consisted of two battleships, seven torpedo boats, five gunboats, and a handful of cruisers and monitors. On the other side of the globe, Commodore George Dewey sailed his seven warships and two unarmed colliers toward the Philippines to capture or destroy the Spanish fleet moored there.
With events occurring thousands of miles away and no effective means, short of the telegraph, of getting information back to New York, the newspapers embellished the official bulletins from Washington and stole items from one another which they published as “exclusives.” Charles Michelson, a Hearst correspondent stationed in New York City, recalled in his autobiography how he and his colleagues, when they reported on Dewey’s May 1 victory in Manila Bay, “blew up the short official bulletin. It was a shameless bit of fakery, but all the newspapers were doing it.”20
Because the Hearst papers had the most reporters in the field, their dispatches were most often stolen, especially by Pulitzer’s editors at the World. Brisbane found a way to make the World editors pay for their sins by slipping into an early edition of the Evening Journal “an item to the effect that in a naval bombardment ... an Austrian artillery man, Colonel Reflip W. Thenuz had been slain.” The story was picked up by the World, which carried it through some twenty or more editions without crediting the Hearst papers. The next day the Evening Journal announced on its front page that it had planted the story of the Austrian artillery man to trap the World editors: Reflip W. Thenuz was an anagram for “We pilfer the news.”21