Sensational

by Kim Todd

  Taking the notion of “journalism that acts” to heart, Valesh would be advocating for a law that she called the “Journal’s bill.” It specified that if any pay deductions were made, the manufacturers had to give the weavers written notice. The weaver needed to see the flaw and agree to the amount of damage. Hoping to rely on legal training she’d picked up from her husband’s night-school classes to argue for the Journal’s positions in front of the Labor Committee, Valesh entered a room full of mustached men, including AFL leader Samuel Gompers. Harriet Pickering was also there, opposing the bill.

  Apparently, Pickering made good on her promise to go see the manufacturers and present her idea, one she vastly preferred to Valesh’s. In her view, the fine system should be abolished, not amended. From Valesh’s perspective, Pickering, the woman she’d once considered the Joan of Arc of the strike, had been reduced to a “pitiable object,” doing the bidding of the mill owners by speaking out against the Journal’s plan.

  Valesh gave her testimony, basing it on her New Bedford observations, followed up by Gompers and representatives of weavers throughout New England.

  Then she turned to question Pickering, underscoring the irony of the weaver testifying for the manufacturers.

  “You are out on strike in New Bedford?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Pickering said. “Find out for yourself. We don’t want you to come down to New Bedford and make it any worse and your bill here does make it worse.”

  A Boston Globe reporter wrote dryly: “The two women were evidently not entirely friendly.”

  Papers (other than her own, where articles—written by her—applauded her performance) mocked Valesh for her pushiness, her endless talking. At the end of the first day, when she suggested they close the hearing before the manufacturers had the chance to argue their side, everyone laughed. But she found her stride. On the last day, the Globe reported her argument straight.

  In the final speeches, counsel for the manufacturers began by claiming the law was born of “sensational yellow journalism.” He then lavished praise on Pickering, mentioning she’d come of her own volition.

  Though Valesh wasn’t a politician or lawyer, lecturing was her expertise. She tied up all her questioning in the final argument, chipping away at the claim that workers who didn’t like the fining could just leave: “We have always had the right to do that. We can leave or starve or throw ourselves into the river. We do not have to come to the manufacturers to have that privilege conferred on us.”

  While Valesh left the meeting optimistic, poised for success, thinking it was one of the most important things she’d ever done, Pickering had a hard time being heard anywhere after her testimony against the bill. The tone at the next union meeting turned threatening as word of her appearance at the statehouse spread. “Choke her off,” yelled one striker when her name came up. The Weavers’ Union secretary urged female strikers to ignore Pickering and indicated that when the strike was over she’d be dealt with: “This woman carries nothing only a long tongue, and that tongue had better be shortened.”

  As the weeks passed with no concessions by workers or manufacturers, some weavers left and looked for other jobs. Pickering wondered how to get the union to listen. Eva Valesh awaited the outcome of her bill. More national labor leaders arrived, sensing publicity. Hunger and anxiety didn’t soothe tempers.

  The outcome was still unknown, except for this: as a result of all these reporters flooding New Bedford, each defining her own niche, the papers were full of women—far beyond aristocrats marrying in silk finery and “ruined” girls leaving beautiful corpses on the streets of New York. Paging through the New Bedford coverage, readers encountered a rare reflection of a society where both sexes contributed. There were female strike leaders and church organists, weavers who supported their entire families, volunteers who ran the childcare center for the mill workers’ children, boardinghouse managers, teachers, and millionaire industrialists. And, of course, dashing journalists.

  Far to the south, the Maine waited in the Havana harbor, moored to a buoy. The night air was hot, the sky cloudy, the whole place unsettlingly still. The armored war ship, flying the American flag, had been called to Cuba from Key West for what the Department of State termed a “friendly” naval visit. But the captain noted sullen faces in the crowd when he was on shore and ripples of tension among Spanish officers as he carried out the rituals of military etiquette. Sweltering, the captain put on a lighter jacket than usual and found, in the pocket, a letter he was supposed to have mailed for his wife ten months before. As the crew, forbidden to leave the ship, swung in their hammocks belowdecks, he penned an apology. The notes of taps, played with a flourish, echoed over the water.

  Then, with sounds of gunshots and rending metal, the ship exploded.

  In the falling debris, the splintered shards of the Maine, the deaths of 266 men, one thing became clear: Hearst would get his war. No one cared about New Bedford anymore.

  Chapter 16

  1898–1912

  Reversal of Fortune

  America is a big country; it is destined to become a great country, for there is manliness and vigor in the memorable phrases coined by celebrated Americans.

  —The Standard Union, August 20, 1898

  Maine Explosion Caused by Bomb or Torpedo?” ran the World’s February 17, 1898, headline. The front page announced that the paper had deployed a boat with divers to investigate the scene and floated a number of rumors—including overheard talk of a plot to destroy the Maine. An illustration of a ship ripped in two, bodies flung into the air and water, filled most of the space. The second page followed up with a rebuttal: “Blanco Reports to Spain That It Was an Accident” and a graphic of a cross section of the inside of the annihilated ship. (The paper also bragged of a circulation of 863,956.)

  “Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy,” the Journal asserted, more definitively, the same day. It cited former New York police commissioner and now assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, saying the explosion was no accident (Roosevelt later denied saying this). The Journal offered a $50,000 reward for the identity of the perpetrator. Its lead image, imagination-infused, showed a mine below the surface of the water, lurking under the unsuspecting Maine. Another edition the same day declared with a maniacal cheerfulness, “War! Sure!” and displayed a picture of an alleged torpedo hole in the Maine’s side. Both papers claimed evidence of a “suppressed” dispatch from the Maine’s captain to the secretary of the navy, speculating that the destruction was not an accident. (The cable didn’t exist.)

  Reverberations from the explosion soon reached the White House. On April 25, President McKinley issued a proclamation that war with Spain existed, and had been ongoing since April 21. The headline in the Journal took up a third of the front page and looked hand-drawn rather than typeset, giving the whole thing a precarious, shaky feel: “Congress Declares War.”

  The highly paid reporters, the ability to print lavish illustrations and bright color, the outsize type, the competitive hunger, all was unleashed. If anyone had overlooked the newspaper contest before, now it would have been unavoidable. Newsboys waved the latest edition, the word “Extra” glowing red. The Evening Journal printed forty editions a day, adjusting for each additional scrap of news. Headlines ballooned to cover entire front pages. Arthur Brisbane, Hearst’s prize steal from Pulitzer, calculated the shortest usable words so letters could be even larger. In March, before McKinley’s decision to go to war, a World editor, delirious with exhaustion and the stress of trying to beat the Journal, convinced himself that war had actually been declared and put out an Extra saying so. Copies had already hit the streets before the issue was recalled. He collapsed and died of overwork-related pneumonia not much later at age thirty-eight. The fact that information was hard to get heightened the drama. The Spanish government censored news of the island and rebel outposts were remote. One reporter, defying the news ban, was arrested by the Span
ish twice, saved from execution only by American public outcry.

  In some ways, even though war was deadly serious, the spirit of Hearst’s time at the Harvard Lampoon lived on. In June, the Journal reported the death of the Australian “Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz,” killed in Cuba. Editors were thrilled when the World picked up the story—because it was a hoax. “Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz,” unscrambled, became “We Pilfer the News.” But in their pleasure in the deception, editors took the wrong moral from the episode. Yes, the World stole from the Journal, but the Journal had made up news just to play a prank. And even for reports made in earnest, the pressure for a scoop meant inaccuracies crept in. An entrenched rivalry between two men was making it hard for readers to find an accurate picture of the war.

  Opportunities for journalism and heroism abounded, but not for everyone. After a decade-long debate, in which the stunt reporters played an integral part, about what it meant to be a woman, coverage of the Spanish-American War concerned what it meant to be a man. Teddy Roosevelt—hunter, police commissioner, outdoorsman—had long been worried about American manliness and its decline. An advocate for war with Spain, he joined a regiment of young men eager to experience the first war of their lifetimes. Harvard students, Roosevelt’s hunting buddies, cowboys, miners, all clamored to join up. In his self-mythologizing book about the regiment and its war experiences, The Rough Riders, he said applicants “possessed in common the traits of hardihood and a thirst for adventure. They were to a man born adventurers, in the old sense of the word.” War made men.

  Male reporters, too, took the opportunity to test their mettle. Novelist and journalist Stephen Crane, who’d imagined the plight of a Civil War soldier so vividly in The Red Badge of Courage, felt his lack of firsthand experience as a flaw. When the Maine exploded, he was in London and scrambled for funds to head back across the Atlantic to witness Cuban events. Reporters like Crane not only wrote about the war, they carried weapons, spotted the enemy, translated, and, allegedly, led a bayonet charge. The line between soldier and reporter was indistinct, like the lines between detective and reporter, factory inspector and reporter, coast guard rescuer and reporter. New Journalism had done its boundary-blurring work.

  Hearst himself emerged from the editor’s office and opera box to become a correspondent for his own paper. Wearing a Panama hat, he carried a gun and wrote about vultures feeding on corpses of Spanish soldiers. Never one to miss a publicity opportunity, he met with a Cuban general who presented the newspaper publisher with a tattered Cuban flag, for his paper’s “services to liberty.” He interviewed one of his reporters, who had been shot, and, cruising in a rented steamship, witnessed the wreckage after a Spanish naval defeat in early July. It was here that Hearst, spotting Spanish combatants waving a white flag on shore, accepted their surrender, took them prisoner, and turned them over to the military.

  All these brandished weapons and troop movements produced few stories about women. The combat zones, the army camps, the brotherhood of the regiment: this was inviolable male territory. For its few female characters, papers retreated to feminine tropes. Rather than highlight rebel soldiers, medics, or spies who were women, the Journal touted Evangelina Cisneros, and portrayed her in the most stereotypical way possible—the beautiful girl extracted from a castle. In the Journal’s reporting, Cisneros was jailed for resisting a man’s advances rather than for treason; it became a case of a woman protecting her chastity, not fighting for her country. In his introduction to The Story of Evangelina Cisneros, the book that came out immediately after the rescue, reporter Julian Hawthorne (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son) made no bones about what kind of story this was, an old-fashioned one: “We are indeed accustomed to finding truth stranger than fiction; but it is a new sensation to find it also more romantic—more in the fashion of the Arabian Nights and the Gothic fairy-tales of the Medieval Ages.”

  This wasn’t the only story in that vein. Earlier, in February 1897, in a ship on the way back from a less-than-fruitful reporting mission to Cuba, the jaunty Journal reporter Richard Harding Davis* sat next to Clemencia Arango at dinner. The sister of a rebel leader, Arango had been banished from the island under suspicion of carrying messages for the Cuban fighters. In an article titled “Does Our Flag Shield Women?,” Harding described Arango being undressed and searched by government officials at her house before she left, again at the Custom House, and again on the ship. In a huge second-page illustration by Frederic Remington, a naked woman stands, her pale back to the viewer. Three men, fully dressed, hover ominously. One has a devilish pointy black beard. This strip search was an affront to American manhood, a letter to the Journal opined several days later, suggesting if “the American government declines to call Spain to account, it shows a lack of virility that ought to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of every American woman, and indignation to the heart of every American man.”

  But, as Arango told a World correspondent a few days after the article ran, the picture was wrong. She had been searched by women in a private room with closed doors, not leering men on deck. And the Spaniards’ fears were entirely justified.

  “It is true that I was actively engaged in the conspiracy as far as I could be,” Arango gleefully confessed. She had delivered secret messages in the past and carried some on that very trip. Once in the United States, she acted as an agent for the rest of the war, supplying gunpowder and weapons to Cuban fighters, hiding bullets in the bottom of cans of milk. As in the case of the Evangelina Cisneros rescue, the damsel-in-distress narrative undermined women as drivers of their own stories—as rebels, as spies. Davis, disgusted and embarrassed, said that Remington’s illustration didn’t reflect what he’d written and swore off contributing to Hearst’s paper. As it turned out, the only one who displayed Arango’s body to prying male eyes was the Journal. Cuba itself became a maiden in need of rescue as Roosevelt and others emphasized the country’s inability to take care of itself.

  And many women writers, heroines of their own narratives months before, were pushed aside just as they were coming into their own. As Brisbane put it bluntly in an article about the Journal’s war coverage: “The fair young female journalist dropped utterly from sight or joined the Red Cross.” He painted the scene in newspaper headquarters, emptying out as male reporters headed to the front: “Every beautiful newspaper woman declared that of all mankind she was best adapted to enter Havana in disguise, interview Blanco, get his views on the war and the enterprise of her newspaper, and return unscathed.” But the editors, concerned about danger where they hadn’t been before, said no. Battlefields were for men. (Brisbane may have been describing a conversation that played out in his own office, as he would have been the Journal editor making these decisions.)

  The experience of Eva Valesh illustrates this abrupt shift in female reporters’ fortunes. In early March, fresh from New Bedford, Valesh had finagled a spot on the Anita, a 170-foot private yacht that Hearst filled with senators, representatives, and their family members, and sent on a fact-finding trip. He called it a “Congressional Commission.” At the Key West Hotel, before leaving for Cuba, the politicians toasted Hearst for his generous funds and activism. Valesh topped off the celebration with a final toast to the “New Woman in Journalism.” But it was more hope than prediction.

  Unlike in New Bedford, where her expertise was deemed important and her name appeared in headlines, Valesh’s contributions from Cuba were strangely muted, and anonymous. It had been an honor for her to go. But back in the United States, when she slipped off a streetcar, hurt her back, and needed to take time off, the Journal quickly fired and replaced her.* With war as the main subject, her value to the paper had plummeted. One minute, her portrait graced the front page; the next, she was booted out the door.

  At the World, Elizabeth Banks, once the toast of the Thames, struggled to get assignments on anything other than Cuba. War fever gripped the newspaper office. Reporters donned red, white, and blue neckties (they teased Banks when she accidentall
y wore a red and gold one, reflecting the Spanish flag; the men made her give it up, then lit cigars with it), and editors shunned everything that wasn’t a battle report or at least a colorful item about a society woman attending some glamorous function with “To Hell with Spain” pinned on her skirt. Banks’s decision to go on salary seemed smarter than ever, especially when she met a freelancer colleague aimlessly kicking around City Hall Park. His salary had plunged from $150 to $7 a week.

  “God pity those who could not at command turn their thoughts warward and dip their pens in blood!” she wrote. It was particularly hard on women, she noted, less likely to have military expertise or be able to travel to the battlefield.

  Other female reporters found themselves similarly adrift. Sidelined, they cast around for new opportunities. Elizabeth Jordan, still at the World, though eyeing her escape to an editor’s post at Harper’s Bazaar, published a collection of short stories on newspaper life: Tales of the City Room. Ida B. Wells-Barnett met with President McKinley, seeking justice for a North Carolina postmaster who had been lynched. (She didn’t get anywhere.) Kate Swan interviewed a wealthy woman who, when her husband lost their money, launched a dress design business. Elizabeth Banks wrote a magazine story on “Sunday at the White House.” Nellie Bly, reconciled with her husband, traveled Europe. Nell Nelson rocked her infant daughter.

  Even those women who did manage to get credentials from the US Army to cover the war struggled to do meaningful reporting. One of these was Kathleen Coleman, a journalist for the Toronto Mail and Empire, who’d emigrated from Ireland at twenty-eight, spoke with a lilt, and wrote under the nickname “Kit.” Over the course of her career, she had dressed as a man to report on seedier neighborhoods in London, and now she was headed to Cuba. This, too, was sold to readers as a stunt, with ads that promoted “‘Kit’ as a War Correspondent,” as if it were just another fanciful role.