by David Nasaw
As the volunteers boarded trains for Tampa en route to Cuba, Will Hearst did his part by preaching the martial virtues in his editorial columns. Unfortunately, the more he exhorted American boys to battle, the more awkward became his own position on the sidelines. Town Topics, in particular, was relentless in its attack on the man it now referred to only as “Willieboy” or “Willie the Worst.”
“It is a good little time that little Willie has in this sweet town of ours,” Colonel Mann, editor, owner, and chief gossip, wrote under his pen name “The Saunterer” in mid-April:
It was after burning up Broadway with two warm babes and a hot hansom ... that Willie proceeded to Park Row the other night and penned an editorial “To the Boys of America.” It was a beauteous thing. It glittered with the rhetoric that comes from resting in the laps of the lovely.... If this war of ours presents great opportunities to the boys of America, why, oh Willieboy, do you linger where the laps and the lobsters sing their siren songs?...Boy, you Willieboy, you, standing to-day just at the verge of long trousers, do you know what war is? It is hell. Go to—war, Willie!
He himself, the Colonel averred, took “not the slightest interest over Hearst’s personal conduct.” He rambled on:
My vague allusions to his ways of sultanic languor and sybaritish luxury, to his frantic imitations of Oriental schemes of festival, to his general and presumably enjoyable disregard of the tiresome conventions of sedate society, had no other object than the illumination of my comments on the inconsistency of his course in damning and slandering and cursing men and women for possibly wanting to do as he actually does.... For a man who lives in a house that is not only glass, but that is open as to doors, windows and roof at all hours of the day and night, to be hurling lumps of pitch and mud at others is something too much for patience.... I hold that if sloth, idleness, loose gayety, riotous extravagance and general demoralization of manners and morals are to be publicly pilloried, the editor and proprietor of the Journal is not the person appointed and anointed for the mission.22
We don’t know if Hearst paid any attention to Mann’s taunting. From all accounts, he could have stopped them by paying off Colonel Mann who, it was said, made as much money from bribes as he did from publishing. Still, the criticism had to have rankled if only because it exposed a real problem.
For personal and professional reasons, Hearst did not want to spend the war in New York City. War was the ultimate test of masculinity. It demanded courage, resolution, discipline, and daring. Men who called for war in peacetime but shirked their responsibilities in wartime were not real men, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt explained to the press on resigning his position to accept a commission as lieutenant colonel in the U.S. First Volunteer Cavalry, nicknamed the Rough Riders: “I want to go because I wouldn’t feel that I had been entirely true to my beliefs and convictions, and to the ideal I had set for myself if I didn’t go.”23
Though Will Hearst, now thirty-five, was not as obsessed with proving his manliness as Roosevelt, he could not abide the thought that Teddy, more than four years his senior and more successful at Harvard, had gotten a head start by volunteering for duty in Cuba. If for no other reason than to protect his image from those who might compare him to Roosevelt, he had to find a way to action on some battlefield.
Late in May, after Roosevelt had accepted his commission with the Rough Riders, Hearst wrote President McKinley offering to equip, at his own expense, a cavalry regiment—horses, uniforms, arms, supplies, everything. He asked in return, with uncharacteristic humility, that he be permitted to join his regiment as “a man in the ranks" The president politely thanked him but declined his offer. Having been turned down by the army, Hearst offered the navy “as a gift, without any conditions, whatever, my steam yacht Buccaneer,” fully armed. This time, he asked that he be appointed “to a command on this boat" and promised that he would take and pass whatever examinations were necessary for a commission.24
In making these offers, Will paid no attention to cost. As Edward Clark, Phoebe Hearst’s treasurer, wrote her on June 9, Will’s offer to arm his yacht for navy service was going to cost $5,000 to $10,000, which he did not have. Phoebe was furious. She was concerned not just about the money, but about her foolhardy son who was trying so hard to put his yacht—and himself—in the line of fire. Clark reassured her that she need “have no anxiety as to his safety.” If his plan ever came to fruition, he would sail to Cuba in the company of the United States Navy. Moreover, Cuban waters had been “practically rid of Spanish gun boats and the small boats are not likely to be detailed to participate in any engagements as they would be useless.”25
Incapable of waiting on the sidelines while the navy considered his proposal, Hearst initiated his own military maneuvers in May on learning that a Spanish fleet was being assembled at Cádiz to recapture Manila from Commodore Dewey. Without consulting the Department of the Navy or Congress or the White House, the young publisher cabled James Creelman in London to “make necessary preparations, so that in case the Spanish fleet actually starts for Manila we will be prepared to buy or charter some English tramp steamer ... and take her to some narrow and inaccessible portion of the Suez Canal and sink her where she will obstruct the passage of the Spanish fleet. I do not know that we will want to do this, but we may.”
Creelman recognized at once that Hearst’s request violated international law—newspaper publishers were not supposed to establish naval blockades—but set to work anyway. Fortunately, the Spanish reinforcements were soon recalled and Hearst’s plan to blockade the Suez Canal abandoned.26
The plan was sheer madness and probably impossible to pull off. But it was no more daring than the rescue of Evangelina Cisneros from a Spanish jail—and that had succeeded. What was evident once again was that Hearst believed he could claim the right to act in what he saw as the public interest, even when doing so violated national policy and international law.
In early June, the navy accepted the gift of Hearst’s yacht, the Buccaneer, though without authorizing him to sail on it. When the World charged that the navy had commandeered the boat because the Journal had violated American law by using it to carry dispatches back and forth from Cuba, Hearst sued Pulitzer for half a million dollars. As proof of his innocence, he published the letters to McKinley in which he had volunteered his money, his yacht, and his services.27
Realizing belatedly that the only way he was going to get to Cuba now was on his own, Will Hearst appointed himself a war correspondent and telephoned Creelman to charter a steamer and secure press credentials for him. In mid-June of 1898, Hearst boarded the Sylvia, a refitted steamer leased from the Baltimore Fruit Company and reequipped for the trip south with printing presses, dark rooms, medical supplies, food fit for a king, and enough ice to resupply the American military hospital in Cuba when it ran out. He was accompanied by a boatful of cooks, stewards, illustrators, telegraphers, pressmen, editors, colleagues and friends, including James Creelman, Jack Follansbee, and George Pancoast. Also on board, traveling incognito, were the Willson sisters, Millicent and Anita, the chorus girls Hearst had been escorting around town for the past year and a half.28
Billy Bitzer, the Biograph cameraman who had been filming from the Anita, the first Hearst yacht to reach Cuban waters, was invited to transfer to the Sylvia, when it arrived in June. In his autobiography, Bitzer recalled his surprise at discovering that among the passengers on Hearst’s ship were “two pretty young ladies who were sisters.... The Sylvia had just arrived that morning, and they were all anxious to go sightseeing. This would be difficult if the girls were seen by the sailors on the battleships, so to prevent this, the girls donned male attire. We were in the delirious state of being under fire in war time, and we got more friendly than we would have at home; the crew mixed with the guests and vice versa.”29
After stopping off in Kingston, Jamaica, to restock supplies, the Sylvia landed on the southern coast of Cuba just days before the American invasion
of the island. The printing equipment was transferred to a temporary plant at Siboney, a hamlet on the southern coast, where at least two editions of the Siboney Journal were printed and distributed to the grateful troops.30
Edward Marshall, a Journal reporter already stationed in Cuba, had a few days earlier been seriously wounded at the front. Worried that Phoebe had by now read about Marshall, Hearst cabled her on arrival that he was “at the front and absolutely safe so don’t worry. Since poor Marshall was shot the General has made strict rules limiting newspaper men to certain localities ... so there is no opportunity for any of us to get hurt even if we wanted to.” He had sailed to Cuba, he explained, not to satisfy a lust for adventure, but because “the standing of the paper will profit by my being here.”31
He was right of course. While every other newspaper, including the World, had reporters in Cuba, none covered the war with the bravado and extravagance of the Hearst crew. Hearst took his self-appointed role as war correspondent very seriously. He visited American and Cuban military leaders on the island and reported back to the Journal in a series of articles written with clarity, style, and the assurance of a seasoned correspondent. Hearst’s writing had no histrionics, little purple prose, and a remarkable lack of sentimentality or flag waving.
In a memoir of the war, Charles Johnson Post, a former New York Journal cartoonist who had enlisted, recalled his shock at encountering the publisher on the road to San Juan Hill. The troops had halted at a clearing where he noticed, sitting in the shade of a large thick-leaved tree, a man on a horse:
The horse was not big but the man was, and tall: his legs and white socks hung well below the horse’s belly. Dressed in black civilian clothes as if he had just stepped over from New York, he wore a jaunty felt-brimmed straw hat with a scarlet hatband and a scarlet tie to match. It was William Randolph Hearst.... We hailed him joyously—he was someone we knew! “Hey, Willie!” The hail went up and down the column, and it was all friendly. Someone from New York! He never moved a muscle. Always poker-faced, he never cracked a smile. If he thought we were jeering he was wrong. We were just glad to see someone from home. James Creelman, the correspondent, came galloping back from ahead and conferred with Hearst.... Creelman turned in his saddle and called out to us: “Boys, you’re going into battle. Good luck!” Then he spoke and turned to Hearst. Hearst made a gesture in our direction with his scarlet-banded hat. He almost smiled. “Good luck!” he called mildly. “Boys, good luck be with you,” and then he stiffened again.32
Hearst and Creelman were, at the time, headed toward El Caney where the Spanish commanded a stone fort and several blockhouses. Not fully understanding the lay of the land—and the position of the Spanish troops—Hearst’s entourage, on arriving at El Caney, strolled up the hill toward the Spanish fort. Only when the American soldiers, lying prone on the ground to escape Spanish gunfire, shouted at the civilians to make themselves scarce, did those in the Hearst party realize that they were walking toward the Spanish fortifications.
James Creelman drew fire from the Spanish soldiers and was wounded. Waiting for medical assistance, half-conscious and in great pain, he felt a hand on his “fevered head” and looked up to see William Randolph Hearst leaning over him, a “straw hat with a bright ribbon on his head, a revolver at his belt and a pencil and note-book in his hand.”
“‘I’m sorry you’re hurt, but’—and his face was radiant with enthusiasm—‘wasn’t it a splendid fight? We must beat every paper in the world.’”33
Hearst got his story and, while Creelman was lying on his litter on the beach waiting for the medics, reboarded the Sylvia and set off for Jamaica to file his exclusive, leaving not only Creelman but Jack Follansbee behind to fend for themselves. He returned to Cuban waters, a day and a half later, on the morning of July 3, just in time to witness the defeat of the second Spanish armada. With an arrogance that had become second nature by now, Hearst and his party boarded one of the burning Spanish warships, took notes, and collected souvenirs. They were chased back to their steamer by American marines who swarmed up the Sylvia’s gangplank as if it were an enemy ship.
Years later, Hearst told the story with boyish enthusiasm, as if describing an incident of trespassing:
“What were you doing on that ship?” said the officer in charge.
“Just looking about, sir, at the results of the battle,” said your columnist meekly.
“Can’t you mind your own business?” said the officer.
“Not very well, sir, and be good newspapermen,” we replied with returning confidence.
The point of Hearst’s story seemed to be that the marines had no business interfering with Hearst’s news gathering—even though a war was going on around them. In recounting this incident—as he had the story of Creelman’s wound—Hearst took enormous pleasure in describing his defiance of common sense and the marines.
As the marines departed the Sylvia, they warned Hearst to return to his yacht and stay out of trouble. Instead of remaining on the perimeter, as directed, he ordered the Sylvia closer to the shore where he had spied, through his state-of-the-art binoculars purchased for the occasion in New York, a group of men, “more naked than clothed,” washed up on the beach. In a scene straight out of opera buffa, Hearst in his white yachting outfit and white captain’s hat, with a revolver in his hand and a notebook in his pocket, boarded the Sylvia’s launch and was rowed to shore, racing all the way with a marine boat headed in the same direction. Fortunately for Hearst, the marine boat was farther out to sea and capsized before it reached the shore. Hearst bravely threw off his shoes—one report said his pants as well—and led his crew onto shore, where they discovered that the naked men were Spanish sailors who had abandoned their burning ships. “Battered and bruised, half clothed, half drowned, half starved,” the Spaniards were delighted to be taken prisoner and helped Hearst turn his launch around so they could all go back to the Sylvia.
It being the Fourth of July, Hearst asked his prisoners, now safely aboard the Sylvia, to give three cheers for the American sailors on the nearby warship Texas. They obliged—with gusto—whereby Mr. Hearst “ordered that these prisoners should have plenty to eat and drink and [be] clothed in the best we could give them.”
This was precisely the kind of situation that Hearst had dreamed of on his way to Cuba. He had not only maneuvered his reequipped fruit steamer into the thick of the action, he had taken his own prisoners. His only problem now was finding a place for them. He tried to locate a navy officer who would accept delivery, but the captain of the Oregon, the first ship he approached, refused:
“Keep ’em,” said the bluff Captain. “You took ’em. You can take care of ’em.”...
None of the battleships seemed to want our prisoners....
Finally, we encountered the Harvard, a converted cruiser....
Your columnist delivered the prisoners to an officer ... on board the Harvard.
We knew that no one would ever believe that we had taken twenty-nine Spanish prisoners, so we demanded a receipt.34
The story, as Hearst told it forty years later, was laced with self-deprecating humor. But the 1898 dispatches he telegraphed to his newspapers from Cuba were delivered straight, with Hearst describing his capture of twenty-nine sailors in the matter-of-fact understated tone of the veteran war correspondent. The result was more than he had hoped for. The former “Willie the Worst” was praised not only by his own newspaper but by politicians and publishers from coast to coast. Even the New York Times applauded his courage and his patriotism, though not without a trace of mockery.
“We observe that the proprietor of our esteemed and enterprising yellow contemporary The Journal has carried his characteristic enterprise into Cuban waters,” the Times said in an editorial. “He has there, with his own hand, so to speak, captured some twenty survivors of the Maria Teresa, huddled on the beach, and turned them over to the proper authorities. This is the most genuine as well as the most legitimate increase of circulation
, so to speak, which he has of late achieved, and is a subject for honest pride, beyond the fear of rivalry.”35
In his rush to get to Jamaica to file his story, Hearst had neglected to get medical assistance to Creelman who, while he never publicly complained about Hearst's having abandoned him, was hurt by his boss's indifference. On July 5 he wrote Hearst in desperation, not knowing where the publisher was or when he would get the letter:
Dear Mr. Hearst,
After being abandoned without shelter or medicine and practically without food for nearly two days—most of the time under constant fire—you can judge my condition. My shoulder was as you know. That I am here and alive is due simply to my own efforts. I had to rise from my litter and stagger seven miles through the hills and the mud without an attendant.... Mr. Follinsbee stayed one night with me and got a fever. We are both here without cloths. I must get to the United States in order to get well. I expect no gratitude but I do expect a chance for my life.