All the News Unfit to Print

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST, PUBLISHER OF THE New York Journal, transcended the hoax. While Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe and others made up events, Hearst actually made an event, or at least was one of its principal architects. His building blocks were real people, real countries, real grievances, real armaments, and real battleships.

Hearst did not create the ill will that led to the event, but that he exacerbated it beyond all reason cannot be disputed. Would the event have happened had it not been for Hearst’s journalistic ferocity? Almost certainly not in the form that it finally took. And almost certainly not as quickly. He was, thus, in the curious position of reporting the truth about circumstances of his own manufacture, which therefore should have been a lie because they should not have happened in the first place. He was Sam Adams all over again, except with a less relevant cause and, perhaps, if such a thing is possible, even less regard for truth.

Hearst was born into wealth in a relatively poor part of California during the Civil War, much more his mother’s son than his father’s. When he was four years old, Phoebe Hearst, a former schoolteacher, said proudly of her boy, “He likes his books, you would be astonished to hear him spell and pronounce words of three letters, can count 100, and knows what country, State and City he lives in. Also who discovered America and about the world being round.” His father was less impressed and spent far less time with the boy than did his mother.

Hearst was a willful child, with a temper to match his intellectual precociousness. Once, he and a pal skipped dancing school and were discovered by a friend of Phoebe’s, who ordered them to go. Hearst refused and stuck out his tongue at her. When the woman scolded him for the gesture, he grabbed a hose lying at his feet and turned it on her, ruining her dress and causing her to run into the house screaming. Sometime later, showing his continued distaste for the dancing lessons upon which Phoebe insisted, he led a group of similarly dissatisfied terpsichoreans to the school and they bombarded it with rocks.

For many years, the United States had hoped to acquire Cuba, if not as a state, at least as a possession. Part of the reason was to add more territory to the country, America manifesting more of its destiny. Another part was that the Spanish ruled Cuba and we were wary of what might turn out to be an enemy presence only ninety miles from our shores. And a third part was that we were unhappy with the way the Spanish were treating the citizens of the tiny island nation, restricting their freedoms and taxing them beyond endurance. Cubans were punished for even the most minor of offenses by their overlords and more severely than common sense could justify. It is believed that some four hundred thousand Cubans were being held in Spanish detention camps in and around Havana at one time and that half of them eventually died in their confinement.

In 1895, conditions grew so bad that Cuban rebels formed an army to try to overthrow the Spanish. They won some battles and took back some land, but they were too few in number to accomplish their goals, being neither strong enough to put down their oppressors nor irresolute enough to give up the struggle. So the fighting went on, as did the Spanish oppression, in a kind of stasis.

In the United States, though, interest in Cuba, already high, was increasing. This was especially true among two newspaper publishers, Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World. Their concerns were sincere. They worried about the Spanish proximity and genuinely sympathized with the Cuban plight. Nonetheless, they found visions of increased circulation dancing in their heads.

William McKinley, who had become president in 1897, was also wary of the Spaniards. At the urging of several cabinet members, he persuaded them to grant Cuba a limited form of self-rule, hoping it would satisfy the rebels. It did not. In fact, the limited self-rule only encouraged the Cubans to increase the violence and the Spaniards to increase their counterattacks. McKinley now began to worry about the safety of Americans living on the island.

To protect them, he ordered the battleship Maine, all 6,682 tons of it, armed with twenty-five guns and four torpedo tubes, to proceed to Havana harbor. It docked on January 25, 1898, under strict orders from the president. The Maine was not to open fire, not to instigate or engage in any kind of aggressive action, unless specifically approved by the White House. The warship was simply to act a kind of sentinel: large and dark and foreboding—but for the time being, at least, inactive.

The Cubans were glad to see the ship, knowing American sympathies were with them. The Spanish found the ship’s very presence an insult, a deliberate taunt, and the Spanish minister in Washington wrote a letter, which he thought would be private, to a friend in Madrid that was critical of McKinley’s decision to employ the Maine. Actually, some of the language in the letter was more than critical; it was bellicose.

Unfortunately for both sender and recipient, the letter was stolen and news of its contents eventually reached the press room of the Journal. For Hearst, it was like a birthday present. The next day’s headline, a detonation of hyperbole probably written by the publisher himself, read:

For three weeks, duty aboard the Maine was something of a vacation for the 250 or so men stationed there. The fighting on the mainland had decreased; there seemed no immediate danger to Americans; and the sun shone down brightly on calm Caribbean waters day after day. The men kept the ship clean and functional, slept more than usual, and acquired healthy, golden-brown tans. They played cards on deck and looked more longingly than usual at the wrinkled pictures of girls back home that they had brought with them. If only they could leave the ship for a few hours, a few beers, a few of the Cuban women who were probably looking for ways to show their gratitude.

The reporters on the island were idle too, but they didn’t want to be. Supposedly, Journal correspondent and illustrator Frederic Remington was so bored with the inactivity that he telegraphed Hearst, asking for permission to return to New York. “Everything is quiet,” the telegram read. “There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.” Hearst wired promptly in response: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

On February 15, 1898, the sun was a little hazier than on previous days, the temperature perhaps a degree or two lower. There was no sign of military activity ashore, not even any activity that could be called out of the ordinary. Still vacation, still, as Remington had written, “no trouble here.” The water remained placid; a few seabirds hovered and flew away. Maybe they sensed something, because a few minutes later the idyll ended for sailors and reporters alike.

Late in the morning, the USS Maine exploded. Everyone on board was killed. The cause of the explosion was not known at the time and is not certain to this day, but to some Americans there could be no doubt: the Spaniards, those filthy curs, who had been biding their time until this very moment to blow up so peaceful a symbol of American sovereignty.

Three days later, fearing reprisal, the Spanish sent a warship of their own, the Vizcaya, to roost in the waters of New York harbor, although she flew her colors at half mast in honor of the Americans who had been killed aboard the Maine. Still, it was one more provocation to those who believed the worst of Spain.

President McKinley was not one of them. But he knew that he had to do something, had to prove that Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was wrong when he described the president as a man with “the backbone of a chocolate éclair.” Even though he would soon come to believe that the destruction of the Maine was caused by an accidental explosion of its own magazines, a conclusion that would be verified shortly afterward by a naval court of inquiry and that most historians would find plausible, if not definite, McKinley could not help but be carried away by the Journal-fueled zeitgeist.

Hearst printed his paper in black and white. He painted his portrait of Spaniards and Cubans in the same colors. The former were vicious, savage, subhuman beings who would not stop at destroying an American battleship and continuing to misrule a small island off the U.S. coast. One day they would attack the United States as well, hungry as they were in their barbaric way for world domination. The latter were harmless, peaceful, deeply religious tillers of the soil who represented the highest, if not the most sophisticated, form of God’s creatures on earth. The Americans were the only people both powerful and virtuous enough to defeat the forces of evil and elevate the simple forces of good to their proper place in the world order. It was thus their duty to do so. “Anyone advocating peace was a traitor or a Wall Street profiteer,” wrote Hearst biographer W. A. Swanberg, paraphrasing his subject’s sentiments, “probably both.”

Two days after the Maine blew up, the Journal reported that there was “undoubted proof of Spanish treachery and hostility.” It stated unequivocally that “American sailors were deliberately sacrificed.” It claimed to have found “other proofs in plenty of Spanish treachery and duplicity. The most villanous [sic] paper in Havana, the Diario del Ejercito, appeared in deep mourning, and in obedience to official instructions expressed deepest sympathy. But it is the organ of the army, and from one end of Havana to the other there is no feeling among the Spaniards save delight at the sinking of the Yankee vessel.”

It was journalism as a blunt weapon. “Hearst’s coverage of the Maine disaster,” says Swanberg, “still stands as the orgasmic acme of ruthless, truthless newspaper jingoism. As always, when he wanted anything he wanted it with passionate intensity. The Maine represented the fulfillment not of one want but two—war with Spain and more circulation to beat Pulitzer. He fought for these ends with such abandonment of honesty and incitement of hatred that the stigma of it never quite left him, even though he still had fifty-three years to live.”

In the days following the explosion, “Remember the Maine” became the nation’s battle cry. Hearst printed it. Pulitzer printed it. Banners hanging from buildings proclaimed it. Americans spoke it to one another on the street and in their workplaces; to some it became almost a form of greeting. And the Journal kept the ship’s name alive in headlines that rang out almost daily, the print seeming to enlarge and darken with each succeeding edition:

CRUISER MAINE BLOWN UP

THE WARSHIP MAINE WAS SPLIT IN TWO BY AN ENEMY’S SECRET INFERNAL MACHINE

THE WHOLE COUNTRY THRILLS WITH THE WAR FEVER

HOW THE MAINE ACTUALLY LOOKS AS IT LIES, WRECKED BY SPANISH TREACHERY, IN HAVANA BAY

HAVANA POPULACE INSULTS THE MEMORY OF THE MAINE VICTIMS

By this time the Journal had even gone to the preposterous length of making up something it called the “Game of War with Spain,” to be played with a conventional deck of cards by four people. “Two contestants would portray the crew of the United States battleship Texas, doing their best to ‘sink’ the other two, who manned the Vizcaya.” One shudders at the thought of what Hearst might have done if the technology for computer games had been available to him in those days.

A few days after it published the rules for the card game, the Journal wrote that it “can stake its reputation as a war prophet on this assertion: There will be a war with Spain as certain as the sun shines unless Spain abases herself in the dust and voluntarily consents to the freedom of Cuba.” Spain did not, and Hearst was right. On April 25, 1898, he was finally able to publish the headline toward which he had been aiming all along:

Theodore Roosevelt, by reputation an advocate of virtually any war, was supposedly delighted with the Journal’s, so much so that he expressed his glee to a Journal reporter. The paper quoted the future president on the front page: “It is cheering to find a newspaper of the great influence and circulation of the Journal tell the facts as they exist and ignore the suggestions of various kinds that emanate from sources that cannot be described as patriotic or loyal to the flag of this country.” But according to Roosevelt, he said nothing of the kind. The entire Journal interview was an “invention from beginning to end,” the future president complained. “It is difficult to understand the kind of infamy that resorts to such methods.”

Previously, there had been other inventions. The naval court of inquiry that would agree with McKinley that the Maine’s demise was an accident announced the results of its investigation on March 28, 1898. The New York Journal, however, couldn’t wait that long. It announced the results of the naval court’s investigation more than two weeks earlier, when there were no results to announce. Nonetheless, engraven on the Journal’s front page was the news that the court “finds that Spanish government officials blew up the Maine.” It was the gaudiest, most transparent of lies, so brazen that when other papers pointed it out in their next editions, the Journal did not bother to apologize or defend itself or even acknowledge its fabrication. What could it say? It knew the lie would be revealed within hours of the story’s hitting the streets and exposed all the more when the naval court finally did come to its decision. No matter. The Journal only wanted to improve its circulation for a few hours, and it did—-a few teaspoonfuls of success before a few more gushers of opprobrium.

When the naval court of inquiry ruled that “the Maine was destroyed by the explosion of a submarine mine, which caused the partial explosion of two or more of the forward magazines,” and when it further stated that it had no idea how long the mine had been in place, nor who had put it there, the Journal was ready. It ridiculed the court’s finding, charging it with suppressing evidence that conclusively proved Spanish guilt and denouncing it for being riddled with agents of the Spanish government, whose ultimate goal was Spanish dominion over the entire world. In other words, the Journal, in the Journal’s version, had been right after all, and right the hard way—in the face of all logic and reason. Hearst must have popped the buttons of his vest in pride.

It is surprising, at least in retrospect, that there was so little opposition to Hearst’s practices from those who worked for him. True, they wanted to keep their jobs, especially in the difficult economic times that lingered from the Panic of 1893, but, just as true, many of them were appalled by the lengths to which they had to go to do so, and they spoke often of their dissatisfaction to one another. Only one man, however, seems to have ever defied Hearst, a remarkable man by any standards, and someone who was not really an employee.

Richard Harding Davis was the era’s most famous reporter, and one of the few in any era to whom the adjective “swashbuckling” might justly be applied. A successful novelist and playwright as well as a globe-trotting correspondent, he covered the Greco-Turkish War of 1896-1897, World War I, and virtually every conflict in every corner of the globe in between. But he knew how to keep fiction and fact apart and took pride in so doing. His renown never affected his integrity. As one of his fellow journalists commented, “His powers of observation were the most remarkable I have ever known. . . . In addition, he possessed a remarkable nose for news. He seemed to have a natural instinct for picking out the right point to make for [sic] when in search of a really good story.”

Davis also knew that “a star reporter must not only observe but be observed.” Which is to say he was one of the first journalists to realize that his occupation could bring public notice as well as a regular paycheck. And he realized that being seen in the right places, in the company of the right people, attired in the right manner, was an important part of the process. “His costume was an ulster and yellow gloves in his youth, English tweeds and khakis in his maturity.” He was also known, at a formal gathering, to enter wearing a cape, remove it with a flourish upon passing through the front door, and present it to the butler with a slight bow.

Davis’s good looks would have been obvious even without his clothier’s assistance. His jaw was square, his eyes magnetic, his hair slicked back, his collar starched, his voice “an aristocratic drawl”; so striking a figure did he cut that the artist Charles Dana Gibson, who created the famed Gibson Girl, often drew her on the arm of a man clearly modeled after Davis. No ink-stained wretch, he.

The effect that Davis had on women can be imagined. His effect on men was no less electric. Writers of all sorts, not just journalists, seemed especially drawn to him. To read F. Scott Fitzgerald is to conclude that he described the dress and behavior of many of his heroes with Davis in mind. The American author (not the future British statesman) Winston Churchill wrote a novel based on Davis called The Celebrity, and even Sinclair Lewis, in Dodsworth, has one of his characters, an ambitious college student, cite Davis as he effuses about his plans to travel the world. “Certainly like to see Europe some day. When I graduate, thought I’d be a civil engineer and see the Brazil jungle and China and all over. Reg’lar Richard Harding Davis stuff.”

Booth Tarkington, the Indiana novelist, never wrote about Davis, who could not easily fit into a novel set in the adventure-starved towns of the American Midwest. But in his own college days, he found himself with some friends in New York’s Waldorf Hotel during a school break, “and Richard Harding Davis came into the Palm Room—then, oh, then, our day was radiant! That was the top of our fortune; we could never have hoped for so much. Of all the great people of every continent, this was the one we most desired to see.”

Even in a war zone, Davis could be the center of attention. According to his biographer, Arthur Lubow, Davis refused to turn his back on amenities, no matter how close he was to the front lines. He was “the reporter who brings a folding bathtub and dinner jacket to the front so that he can dress properly in the evening.”

Hearst was no less transfixed by Davis, his exploits and his aura, than were the others. More than a year before the Maine exploded, but with fighting between the Cuban rebels and the Spanish increasing at the same time that interest at home was decreasing, Hearst offered Davis the unheard-of sum of three thousand dollars, plus all expenses, to cover the battles for a single month. Stories by Richard Harding Davis, Hearst reasoned, would ratchet up both the passions of the populace and the circulation of the Journal.

At first Davis did not even respond to the offer. He was dubious about Hearst and had little regard for the Journal and thus no desire to see his byline on its front page. Then Hearst repeated the offer and Davis began to find the notion of so much money for so little time irresistible. Finally he accepted. But for a variety of reasons, some of them involving Hearst’s difficulties in arranging transportation for him to Havana, Davis became almost immediately disenchanted with his employer and let him know about it. Rather than being upset by Davis’s attitude, Hearst was almost obsequious. He apologized, pleaded for another chance, and spent an additional thousand dollars to charter a boat to get the reporter to his destination.

Davis arrived in Cuba only a little later than he had anticipated and began to file stories immediately. But when he found out that Hearst had changed one of them, making Davis’s balanced account more pro-Cuba and anti-Spain than he believed circumstances warranted, he quit on the spot. Hearst pleaded with him once more and promised it would never happened again. Davis would not listen. No one, he told Hearst, tampered with his prose. It was the same thing as tampering with his reputation, and that was unforgivable. He took a boat back to the United States four days before his month was to end and never again dealt with the publisher of the New York Journal.

As for Hearst, who had by this time armed his personal yacht and loaned it to the navy for the duration, he eventually went to Cuba himself to write a few stories. The Journal “ran reports on the front page in large type under enormous headlines with insistent mention of his name.” They assured readers that war was certain. They predicted the Hearst yacht would play a significant role in defending U.S. interests.

Hearst was capable of occasional drippings of charm. So was Joseph Pulitzer, but less often. Author Theodore Dreiser described him as “undoubtedly semi-neurasthenic, a disease-demonized soul, who could scarcely control himself in anything.”

As a young state legislator in Missouri, Pulitzer found that he could not control himself in the company of a certain lobbyist. So he pulled out a gun he should not have been carrying in the first place and shot the man. It was just a flesh wound, however; the lobbyist staggered out of the state capitol and, after getting treatment from a nearby doctor, continued with his career. Pulitzer, fearing he might not have the temperament for politics, got out of the field, and several years later he headed east to become the publisher of the New York World, which he turned into one of the city’s more respected sources of news.

Pulitzer himself was less respected. On his bad days, his temper could be vicious. One of the worst was when he found out that his brother Albert, who owned the New York Journal, had sold it to Joseph’s soon-to-be bitter enemy, William Randolph Hearst. Pulitzer thought Hearst represented the worst in journalistic excess. Albert thought he was exaggerating, and besides, he said, he needed the money. Pulitzer screamed at his him, berating him for what seemed virtually an act of treason. It was years before the chasm between the two brothers closed.

The gap between Pulitzer and Hearst never did, and was reinforced as soon as Hearst bought the Journal and started stealing Pulitzer’s employees, including many of his top reporters and editors. He offered them salaries that Pulitzer could have matched but would not, believing them to be, as they were for the time, outrageous. There was another reason Pulitzer might have lost employees to his foe. He treated them miserably. In a letter to relatives in London, his secretary described Pulitzer as “a coarse, bloated millionaire, who thinks that by paying people he can buy immunity from the little self-restraint that comes natural to most people (thank goodness).”

He was no kinder to his family. When his fourteen-year-old daughter Lucille had throat surgery, she lost so much blood that she fainted. A second operation was necessary, and afterward she had to be given a form of morphine because the pain was so intense. Pulitzer’s wife seldom left her bedside, and there was fear for a time that she would die. As for Pulitzer, he made not a single appearance at the hospital. When his wife came home one night for a quick dinner, she asked why. Had he no pity for his daughter? “Pity Lucille!” he screamed. “No! I’m the only one to pity—has no one any pity for me!—does no one realize what I suffer!” Kate Pulitzer, stunned speechless, hurried back to her daughter’s room, having no idea what her husband was talking about, no idea what he might do next, wanting only to be out of his reach.

As a newspaper publisher, Pulitzer was more admirable—most of the time, at least. When the New York Tribune published a front-page story about a six-year-old girl being sexually molested by two boys only a few years older than she, he criticized the Tribune in his own pages, claiming that the World was also aware of the story but would not stoop to print such filth. In explaining his reason for this and similar decisions, Pulitzer stated that in his opinion,

a newspaper should be scrupulously accurate, it should be clean, it should avoid everything salacious or suggestive, everything that could offend the good taste or lower the moral tone of its readers; but within these limits, it is the duty of a newspaper to print the news. When I speak of good taste . . . I mean the kind of good taste which demands that frankness should be linked with decency, the kind of moral tone which is braced and not relaxed when it is brought face to face to vice.

A few years before the Americans entered the war, Pulitzer’s World started covering the events that led to the conflict in a relatively objective and restrained manner. It was a decision he would later come to regret, for as Hearst turned the story into a national sensation, the Journal became the “official” paper of the Spanish-American War and remained so throughout the fighting. Pulitzer could never catch up.

He certainly tried. Well before the Maine, with Hearst already inflaming his readers, Pulitzer began to slide down the slippery slope of sensationalism. A New York World headline predicted the effect that Spanish mistreatment would have on the Cubans:

The day after the Maine blew up, despite the World’s view in an editorial that “nobody outside of a lunatic asylum” believed Spain had deliberately destroyed the ship, the paper’s headline for the lead story seemed to indicate that someone from the asylum had escaped and gotten his hands on the World’s type tray.

In fact, by this time, Pulitzer, as he was later forced to admit, had abandoned his journalistic principles and his coverage had become roaringly, and in some cases irresponsibly, anti-Spain. In one edition of the World he went so far as to write that the Vizcaya , which had done nothing since it arrived in American waters but float, would soon begin an offensive against the United States. “While lying off the Battery,” the World predicted, “her shells will explode on the Harlem River and in the suburbs of Brooklyn.”

Yet it was not until almost two months after the Maine exploded that the World published its first pro-war editorial. Pulitzer’s tone, apparently, was meant to make up for lost time, and part of the editorial was meant to chastise the Journal:

Spain is a decaying, ignorant and well-nigh bankrupt nation. No Spanish ship could stand an hour before the Americans. Havana is at our mercy and this is a nation that talks of war with the United States. Now fifty-four days have passed since the Maine was destroyed by a stationary mine. God forbid that The World should ever advocate an unnecessary war! That would be a serious crime against civilization. The first duty of the President and Congress is to order the navy to proceed to Cuba and Puerto Rico without delay. No declaration of war is necessary. Send the fleet to Havana and demand the surrender of the miscreants who blew up the Maine.

At one point in the war, however, the Journal did take on the World. A few days earlier, in one of its articles, the World had written critically of New York’s 71st Regiment, saying that many of its members had lost heart and, instead of fighting the Spaniards, had fled from them—this at the same time that Colonel Roosevelt, who had resigned as assistant secretary of the navy, was leading his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. The story was true; the men of the 71st were in fact running away from the Spanish aggressors, afraid of coming under attack. Nonetheless, Hearst, having no information to contradict the World’s account, sprang to the men’s defense:

SLURS ON THE BRAVERY OF THE BOYS OF THE 71ST The World Deliberately Accuses Them of Rank Cowardice at San Juan.

But Hearst was not yet done taunting Pulitzer. Not long afterward, the Journal published an article about the death of Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz, supposedly a famed European artillery officer, who had been killed while fighting for the Cubans. The World, not knowing anything about the incident, was forced to rely on the Journal’s story and published its own version the next day. As W. A. Swanberg tells us:

Joy was unrestrained in the Hearst newsrooms. The Journal disclosed that Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz was its own invention and rearranged the letters of his name into “We pilfer the news.” For a time the World’s encounter with Colonel Thenuz was given almost as much space in the Journal as the war news from Cuba. It published a poem, “In Memoriam,” honoring the colonel. It published a fanciful cartoon of him, captioned “specially taken for the World, by the World’s special photographer.” . . . The Journal kept it up for more than a month while the mortified World preserved a pained silence.

In his will, Pulitzer would leave two million dollars to Columbia University to establish awards for journalism and the arts that are today among the most prestigious in those fields. Nothing that appeared in the New York World during the Spanish-American War would have even qualified for a nomination.

Yet, as biographer Denis Brian points out, after the war the World “regain[ed] its former glowing reputation,” which it kept, and for the most part deserved, for the rest of Pulitzer’s tenure as its owner. The Spanish-American War was something of an aberration in U.S. foreign policy, and something more of an aberration in the journalistic career of Joseph Pulitzer, who, having vowed not to let Hearst egg him on to irresponsible excess anymore, once again felt free to make his paper what he had always wanted it to be.

Their sympathy for the Cubans and their animosity toward Spain notwithstanding, the real struggle for both Hearst and Pulitzer was with each other. Shortly before American soldiers landed in Cuba, one issue of the Journal sold more than three million copies, probably an all-time high for any newspaper at any time anywhere in the country. That, however, was far from the norm.

As the war began, both the Journal and the World were selling about 1.3 million issues a day, still more than either paper had ever sold before on a regular basis. The two publications stayed at that approximate level throughout the fighting, although the slight edge in sales went to the Journal, despite the World having been the more popular paper in earlier years. The war might not have done much for the Journal’s image, but it did wonders for its visibility.

Some of the credit, if that is the proper word, probably goes to the newsboys who sold the Journal on the streets of New York. They were a feisty lot who would often plant themselves within a few feet of the World’s young salesmen and simply outyell them. The Journal’s headlines were usually exaggerations of one sort or another; the newsboys would exaggerate them even more, bellowing Armageddon so loudly that a person could hear it from one end of the block to the other, if not farther.

From time to time the purveyors of the two papers would resort to fisticuffs, dropping their papers and flailing at each other, sometimes rolling into the street in a violent embrace and coming up stained with dirt and grime and horse droppings. Their customers were forced to wait until one or the other had surrendered before they could make their purchase, in the meantime cheering on their favorite. Usually it was the Journal boy. Bellicose prose, bellicose kids to hawk it.

The irony for both papers was that with increased circulation came decreased profits. The costs of covering the war were immense, more than either Hearst or Pulitzer had anticipated. Reporters could not file their reports electronically in those days. In most cases they wrote them out longhand and made arrangements for them to be transported from Cuba to the United States like any other kind of merchandise: on muleback to the docks, by boat to southern Florida, by train (or sometimes, if there was a good connection available, by phone) to New York. As mule owners, sailors, and railroad officials saw how important the cargo was to the Journal and the World, as well as to the other papers covering the war less bombastically, they raised their rates. And then raised them again, and again. Eventually, things reached such a point that, added to the other costs of coverage, each issue that Hearst and Pulitzer sold meant a slight loss for them. Both men could afford it; neither was happy about it.

Fortunately for the two journalistic combatants, the war ended after less than a year, and in another ten months Spain officially granted Cuba its independence. A total of 385 Americans had lost their lives in the fighting. More than 2,000 died as a result of disease and other causes related to the war, and another 1,660 were injured. Neither they nor the surviving members of the families liked the Journal’s war at all.

But it was a more consequential event than the casualties, which were small for an armed conflict, suggest. For one thing, the Spanish-American War fueled our country’s desire for expansion in warmer waters and nations. Professor Jeffrey Bass of Quinnipiac University refers to a “spate of U.S. interventionism in Latin American countries, most notably Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic.” The noted diplomatic historian William Stueck Jr. picks up the theme. “It is highly unlikely,” he wrote, “that the United States would have acquired the Philippines without the war, and it’s possible that we would not have annexed Hawaii without it (there had long been pressure to annex it, but it was only after the war started that Congress finally acted).”

That long-existing pressure, directed not just at Hawaii but at the other nations just mentioned, had come largely from American business interests that wanted new markets for their goods. The New York Journal’s reporting on the Spanish-American War roused the captains of American industry as well as the rabble who were its more frequent readers. Stueck also believes that the U.S. State Department became a much more professional organization after the war. No longer would amateurs like William Randolph Hearst be able to exert such influence over the conduct of the nation’s foreign policy.

Two decades later, Hearst had still not learned his lesson—although that is a misleading way to put it. Hearst was not the kind of man who was open to lessons, who conceded that other people or events might have something to teach him. He was the kind of man who taught lessons. If people did not listen, he simply taught them louder. If his lessons proved wrong, he either ignored them or found someone to blame, in either case moving on to the next lesson. Shy and full of himself at the same time, easily able to bend people to his will, he was tall and well-built, his broad shoulders somewhat stooped. His physical presence dominated a room, and you could sense that presence on the pages of the Journal, a kind of energy that respected no limits. He wanted the people who worked for him to be similarly hard-driving, unwilling to be deterred, except in their dealings with the Chief, as Hearst was sometimes known. In those cases they were to keep their conversations brief and their behavior obsequious.

When World War I broke out, Hearst let it be known that his sympathies were with the Germans and that if the United States ever got involved in the fighting, despite President Woodrow Wilson’s denials that such a thing would happen, he hoped America would align itself with the kaiser.

Of course, the United States finally did enter the war, with the Germans as foes, not allies. Nonetheless, Hearst announced that the Journal would cover the fighting fairly and extensively, that it would in fact provide the best coverage of any paper in the nation. Heading up the reporting team would be five of his very best men: John C. Foster and Lawrence Elston in London, Frederick Werner in Berlin, Franklin P. Merrick in Paris, and Brixton D. Allaire in Rome.

They’ve been overseas, getting the lay of the land, Hearst replied, in effect. Don’t worry, he said, you’ll hear of them. These men will get to the truth of the fighting and the reasons behind it and capture it, every single day on the pages of the Journal. Of course, the Journal did not give bylines to its war correspondents (although it certainly would have given one to Richard Harding Davis), but when you see the dateline, you’ll know the man.

Hearst’s competitors were suspicious. Wrote an editor at Harper’s, “Brixton D. Allaire, dear reader, is not a romantic figure in khaki, braving untold dangers in the field of battle, but simply a common ordinary, contemptible Hearst fake.”

It was true. The other four reporters were also fakes. Take the following article, which appeared in the Journal late in the summer of 1917: “Paris, August 23.—More than 8,426 German prisoners, 200 machine guns and twenty-four cannon have been captured by the French on the Verdun front since the French drive opened on August 20, the War Office announced to-day. Of the total number of prisoners taken—186 were officers. All but 600 of the captives are unwounded.”

It reads like a wire service dispatch or, worse, a press release. It might have been either. Or it might have been written for the Journal by a burned-out old desk man in London or New York—if New York, he might have been sitting within a few feet of Hearst himself—with the Paris dateline the only thing in the entire article even remotely resembling reportorial enterprise.

And it was not the first time the Chief had done such a thing. Occasionally, during the Spanish-American War, dispatches from Cuba would be delayed a day or two. In that case, Hearst assigned the stories to more hacks, either in Miami or New York, and they crafted precisely what the Chief wanted to hear, forgetting their early dreams of a noble career in the newsroom, and then drowning their sorrows of self-recrimination at the neighborhood saloon after work. They had not taken the world by storm as they had hoped in younger days. They were approaching the end of the line, and what they were taking was dictation.

William Randolph Hearst died on August 14, 1951, at the age of eighty-eight. His last public crusade was for the illegalization of marijuana, which helped lead to the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. As for his legacy, Martin Lee and Norman Solomon describe it concisely and accurately in their book Unreliable Sources. They point out that Hearst “routinely invented sensational stories, faked interviews, ran phony pictures and distorted real events.” The world always remained a dancing school to him, and over the decades he had become much more sophisticated in his ways of throwing rocks at it.