by Kim Todd
But she found herself thwarted at every turn. The antipathy of the male reporters was obvious—they ignored or actively discouraged her. She understood that the presence of a woman, doing the same work they did, devalued it. This was true even when she made herself and her ambitions small, insisting to readers, “I am not here to detail the serious events of the war (which have not yet commenced) rather I am to write that light and airy matter which is ignominiously termed, by the trade, guff, but which is not always easy to manufacture.” Coleman told one of the male reporters that she didn’t want to write “in the grand style such as you boys write, but just the poor woman’s side of the war, don’t you see?”
But for weeks, Coleman was stuck in Tampa, the jumping-off point for soldiers headed to the battlefield, left behind when most of the male correspondents set off for Cuba in late June. She tried to get on a Red Cross boat, but they wouldn’t take her either. So she wrote around the edges of the conflict, interviewing a chambermaid whose husband had enlisted and a recruit who sat on an ants’ nest and stepped on an alligator his first day. In the heat of the afternoon, she retreated to her room to write. The envelopes she sent to her Toronto editors were fat with interviews and commentary, but it wasn’t the war. Women writers had broken down all kinds of barriers over the previous decade, but “war correspondent” remained male terrain.
Finally, near the end of July a naval supply boat picked Coleman up with some Red Cross workers, but by then the war was virtually over. Spain had surrendered on July 17. Still, she made valuable observations about the little she was allowed to see, documenting the Spanish soldiers ill with yellow fever and typhoid in Santiago, and detailing inadequate medicine and transportation home for infected and wounded American soldiers: “one hundred and thirty-three men in every stage of sickness, living on rotten rations and apparently forgotten by the country for which they were suffering.”
The Spanish-American War remade the world map and turned America into an imperial power. In the treaty following, the United States took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. McKinley had annexed the Hawaiian Islands, too. America, bold, muscled, masculine (in its own mind), took these countries behind its protective arm. The story became much more about American might than Cuban independence. Though its pages crowed about freedom and self-government for the Cubans, the Journal ran a headline the day after the surrender that read “Old Glory over Santiago.” An anonymous reporter concluded, “The ceremony of hoisting the Stars and Stripes was worth all the blood and treasure it cost.” (And the front page touted a circulation of 1,250,000.)
Despite the victory, reflecting on the Cuba coverage began to turn serious reporters’ stomachs. It had been too breathless, too much flirting with panic. It was like the whole news business had been stricken with hysteria. Things clearly had been totally out of control. Whether or not Hearst actually told the artist Frederic Remington, “You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war,” as he was alleged to have done, whipping up a passion for bloodshed was an unsettling way to sell papers.
The World staff, specifically, seemed ashamed. The publication had gone off the rails behind Pulitzer’s back: “The paper is a jest, a travesty, a smear, a damnable injustice to the man that owns it and possible only for the reason that he cannot see it I should think,” one editor wrote. In November, World editor W. Van Benthuysen served coffee and rolls and gave a speech to the staff, an effort to combat some of the slipping standards.
“We must heed it in every department, in every vocation that goes to make up this great newspaper. Absolute accuracy! Write it down! Have it ever before you!” It was supposed to rouse them to excellence, but the talk wandered, was repetitive, fell flat.
Those who felt wronged by Hearst and Pulitzer’s form of yellow journalism took advantage of the pile-on to try to outlaw it. In New York, a senator proposed a bill that made it a misdemeanor to publish an indecent paper or one that “corrupts, depraves, degrades, or injures” the minds of the public, punishable by a $1,000 fine or a year in jail. California passed laws that banned publishing portraits or caricatures of anyone but a public official without their permission. One California senator suggested that the killing of a reporter be classed as justifiable homicide.
Other critiques bubbled up as well, voiced by reporters like Wells-Barnett and Matthews. Newspapers implicitly make a claim that they represent reality—the world as it is. Over the previous decade, these urban, northern papers expanded to include more single women, working-class people, and certain groups of immigrants. In another way, though, the reality portrayed was false. Concerns of Black citizens, Chinese immigrants, American Indian tribe members were almost entirely absent, except as curiosities. But these observations gained far less traction than the “yellow journalism” outrage.
A narrative began to harden that the press coverage caused the war and that World and Journal reports were marked by outrageous, deliberate fiction.*
Those who criticized the World and Journal most vociferously were, as was the case in New Bedford, rival newspapers. Yet their word was accepted as the unbiased truth. “Yellow journalism” became a cry of “fake news.” Powerful people complained that negative reports were “yellow journalism.” Politicians dismissed critical editorials, claiming “yellow journalism.” Southern papers referred to accounts of lynchings as “yellow journalism.”
At times, it seemed that objections had to do more with class (cheap newspapers aimed at the “masses”) than subject matter. One writer pointed out in the Arena that there wasn’t really much difference in the tastes of yellow journalism readers and its high-brow critics: “The latter simply prefer scandal, crime and combat that deal with imaginary or historical characters. They are indifferent to the tragedy enacted yesterday in a slum tenement; but they follow with vivid interest the investigations of Sherlock Holmes; and thrill with the horror of Poe’s tales or Balzac’s gruesome stories or Stevenson’s morbid, ghoulish, dual creature, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” What was Boswell’s Life of Johnson, she said, but gossip?
Caricatures of Pulitzer and Hearst in Puck, surrounded by readers devouring headlines like “Nellie Spy as a Flower Girl” and articles by “Fanny Fake”
Frederick Burr Opper, artist. The fin de siècle newspaper proprietor / F. Opper, 1894. N.Y.: Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann, March 7. Illus. from Puck, v. 35, no. 887, (March 7, 1894), centerfold. (Library of Congress)
Even Hearst, who had seemed impervious to arrows of scorn, began to feel the sting. For the first time in years, he turned down stunt suggestions. And when, in 1901, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot and killed President McKinley, and the Journal was blamed (two Journal editorials several months before had hinted that political assassination could be justified), the paper defended itself but sounded chastened. Of its critics, the often-raging editorial page commented sedately, “The Journal has too sincere a sympathy for the President, too much self-respect, to reply to such men now.” And in a rebuke in the language Hearst would most understand, circulation declined. He changed the Journal’s name to the American. In the early years of the twentieth century, Hearst continued to build his newspaper empire, buying two newspapers in Chicago in 1902, and a Boston paper and a Los Angeles paper in 1904. But his fervor for journalism at this juncture may have been more of a prop for a new passion for politics. The same year found him running for president and losing the Democratic nomination to Alton Parker, who would lose to Teddy Roosevelt.
By today’s standards, the crimes of the yellow journals were minor. Things that seemed outrageous at the time—large headlines, vivid illustrations, newspapers running holiday charity drives and sponsoring contests—are now commonplace. And what is wrong with a paper solving a murder or putting together a committee to investigate a bad law? These are things we now value, though they go under different names—activist journalism, solutions journalism, immersion journalism. But the notion that yellow journalism was uniquely terrible and worthy of cen
sure lingers like ancient varnish.
Condemnations of “yellow journalism” included the work of the female undercover reporters, neatly folding their writing into a genre that some were eager to toss into the trash. After the war, the history of these bold journalistic experiments began to be erased. The task was made easier by the fact that, in the case of quite a few reporters, no one knew their real identities. While the anonymity of pseudonyms offered a refuge for stunt reporters, giving them privacy initially, it contributed to the ultimate disintegration and critical dismissal of the genre.
Sometimes the stunt reporters themselves were eager to assist in the erasure. In August 1898, Elizabeth Banks published a piece on “American ‘Yellow Journalism’” in Nineteenth Century magazine, condemning undercover work and women’s role in it. In particular, she blamed editors who would put a reporter in danger and then claim desire for reform as an excuse. Her essay argued that these stunts represented a man taking advantage of an inexperienced writer rather than, as was her case, a journalist choosing to write for a venue that paid well and hired the best talent. Her words echoed, reprinted in papers across the country: “I have yet to meet the woman engaged in even the mildest sort of sensational journalism who loved, indeed, who did not hate her work.”
But even she would be dismayed by the eagerness with which her critiques were adopted, the way the journalism establishment was ready to rid itself of its tradition of female-led investigations. A way in to the profession had been sealed off, marked as a scandal or a joke. Several years later, in 1901, when Banks was trying to sell her book Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl” to an American publisher, she sensed that her agent wasn’t happy with the manuscript. He wanted her to stress the “seamy side” of the female journalist’s life, but she resisted. She’d written the book she wanted and wouldn’t make any major changes: “I approve of journalism as a career for women who have talent, strong characters and are obliged to support themselves. I would never dream of ‘warning off’ aspirants who had what we Americans call ‘good stuff’ in them.”
Sensing the change in the tides, male writers studded their work with negative female journalist characters. A whiff of Hawthorne’s fear of the “ink-stained Amazons” lingered. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, reporter Ella Kaye used unsavory tricks to get an older rich man to do her bidding. As he confided in a letter to a friend, Fitzgerald based Kaye on Nellie Bly. In his novel Active Service, Stephen Crane, who worked at both the World and the Journal, reporting on the Tenderloin and doing stunts, described the sudden appearance of his hero’s romantic interest, the actress “Nora Black,” on the field of the Greco-Turkish War. The main character was surprised and embarrassed to see her. “But why are you here?” he asked, to which she coolly responded that she had been hired as a reporter for an opposition paper at a bigger salary than his. As he revised and republished his novel Portrait of a Lady, first released in 1881, Henry James made his journalist character Henrietta Stackpole increasingly vulgar, tracking the trashing of female reporters. One character commented, in the 1908 revision, “Henrietta, however, does smell of the Future—it almost knocks you down!”
The yellow did seem like it would stain the entire profession if reporters and editors didn’t do something about it. Pelted by disapproval, journalism began to professionalize. Previously, pushback greeted the idea of a reporter getting a journalism degree or even going to college. New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley had said, “Of all horned cattle, deliver me from the college graduate.” The pressroom would provide its own education. And in the days of stunt reporting, it did. While many of the men in Pulitzer and Hearst’s offices had a college education (at Harvard, more often than not), many of the women, including successes like Bly and Black, had only the most rudimentary high school coursework.
But suddenly, in the wake of the Spanish-American War coverage, formal training seemed like a good idea. Pulitzer, in particular, was passionate about the notion. By the turn of the century, a handful of colleges offered journalism classes, but his vision was larger. He had always spoken eloquently about journalism’s potential; launching a school would be a way to promote these ideas and rehabilitate his image. Pulitzer laid out the concept in a 1904 article for the North American Review. He didn’t want a course of study that provided a mere grounding in business or finance. Journalists are like artists and statesmen, he argued, “whose thoughts reach beyond their own livelihood to some common interest” and warned, “Once let the public come to regard the press as exclusively a commercial business and there is an end of its moral power.” Students should learn ethics and study the great newspaper battles of the past to learn the lessons found there, Pulitzer wrote.
In many ways this tightening of standards was a good thing. Unregulated undercover work is open to abuses. Stories in the World and the Journal and papers they inspired could be highly exaggerated if not outright false. But like the formation of the American Medical Association with its explicit goal of discrediting midwives, and the institutionalization of the natural sciences, which labeled many women “amateur naturalists,” while men grabbed government and university jobs as botanists, entomologists, and astronomers, the change erected financial and cultural barriers for all women and racial barriers for those who weren’t white.
By 1910, Walter Williams, dean of the newly founded University of Missouri School of Journalism, advised reporters against adopting the role of “private detective” and writing anything they would not like their mother or sister to read, among other sins. Undercover investigations and first-person reporting were frowned upon. Distance and objectivity were prized.
Pulitzer didn’t live to see the reality of his educational dream. He died in 1911 at sixty-four on his yacht in Charleston Harbor, after twenty years of trying to outrun his ill health. A year later, funded by $2 million of Pulitzer’s fortune, the Columbia Journalism School plotted its September opening. But while the board hashed out details of curriculum, one pressing question remained: Would Columbia allow women? Were they part of this grand vision for the journalistic future? Things didn’t look good: the newly appointed director had at one point given a speech against women’s suffrage. Trustees were rumored to fear that coeducation would infect other parts of the university. The current building didn’t have accommodations for women and the new one wouldn’t be completed for several years. And planners seemed to be avoiding the issue.
“Was any decision reached on the question of admitting women to the school?” a reporter pressed the assistant director after an early board meeting. The assistant director brushed him off.
But, finally, Barnard stepped in. The women’s college would provide female students with their first two years of courses, at which point they could join the men at Columbia. Pulitzer’s journalism school opened in the fall with seventy-nine students, including twelve women.
After the era of stunts ended, exposés continued, though with a different focus, a different framing, and almost exclusively male authorship. Publications like McClure’s and Everybody’s Magazine ran lengthy articles by writers like Lincoln Steffens on government corruption, tainted food, and factory accidents. The constant questioning of institutions prompted President Roosevelt to make a 1906 speech condemning this branch of reporting. He lambasted “the man with the muck rake,” a figure from Pilgrim’s Progress who looked only “downward with the muck-rake in his hand.” The man with the muck rake was so focused on the filth and grime, Roosevelt said, he couldn’t look up to see the possibility of anything better. This attitude discouraged people from public life, promoted cynicism, and stunted the ability to recognize “worthy endeavor.” Roosevelt meant it as a criticism, but the term “muckraker” had a long life, and soon became a badge of honor while its progenitor, “stunt reporter” became a badge of shame.
After stunt reporters faded, a new female-branded journalism genre appeared in its place: the “sympathy squad,” the “pity platoon,” the “gush girls,” the
“sob sisters.” Rooted in Jordan’s perception at the Lizzie Borden trial that women, banned from juries, might offer a different perspective on criminal proceedings, and in her experiments at the World, empaneling a “jury” of women to weigh in on newsworthy cases, “sob sisters” were female reporters who covered trials. They offered their thoughts and—as implied dismissively in the name—feelings. Winifred Black Bonfils* was one of the most famous, with her coverage of the 1907 trial of Henry Thaw for the murder of his wife’s former lover (perhaps abuser) Stanford White.
It was another pejorative label, associating first-person point of view with an unseemly display of emotion, another thing women writers had to scramble to distance themselves from if they wanted to be taken seriously.
Winifred Black Bonfils
Head and shoulders, facing slightly right. “Annie Laurie.” Winifred Black, 1936., c. 1913. Jan. 18. (Library of Congress)
The collapse of the stunt reporter genre might well have been a relief for some female journalists who came after. The door to the newsroom had been pried open by Bly, Nelson, Black, Swan, and others, and women who remained had access to more respected forms. Ida Tarbell, working as one of the few female “muckrakers” for McClure’s, pored over hundreds of documents for her series about the unethical tactics of the Standard Oil Company. Her reporting resulted in the dissolution of its monopoly. Women continued to report, free to write about business or politics or organized crime with professional detachment, but were open to criticism if they adopted a unique voice or dipped into subjects more closely tied to their sex.