PUSHING AMERICA TOWARD AN INTERNATIONAL WAR
AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, AMERICAN IMPERIALISM and journalistic dynamism came together to create one of the darkest moments in the history of the country’s news media. The United States raced onto the global stage as a world power, eager to flex its muscles and expand its geographic and economic boundaries. Journalism bounded forward as well, driven by a desire to grab a larger slice of the growing population.
The changing news business attracted entrepreneurs who saw journalism as an exciting frontier worthy of their creative talents. Two publishing visionaries in particular dominated the era and ultimately changed the craft. After Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst revolutionized journalism, their bitter rivalry gave birth to a brand of sensationalism known as yellow journalism. Its toxic formula—one part news to one part hype—fueled an infamous circulation war.
Yellow journalism took on a life of its own after Hearst began championing, mainly to boost circulation, the cause of Cuban rebels seeking to break the Spanish shackles that bound them to colonial status. As Hearst’s campaign intensified and Pulitzer joined in, the Cuban crusade led to irresponsible behavior. The two men’s newspapers engaged in a variety of unethical practices, from distortion of events to the dissemination of misinformation and the systematic manufacturing of news. The sensationalism that Hearst and Pulitzer practiced, especially their coverage of the 1898 explosion of the battleship USS Maine, created a high-pitched and bumptious jingoism that led to a national hunger for war. That public frenzy ultimately helped push the president of the United States to abandon his antiwar policy and thrust America into an international conflict with Spain that, in a less hysterical climate, could have been avoided.
The New York Evening Post was among the papers that, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, denounced the yellow journals as “public evils” and “a national disgrace.” The Post wrote caustically, “Every one who knows anything about ‘yellow journals’ knows that everything they do and say is intended to promote sales. No one—absolutely no one—supposes a yellow journal cares five cents about the Cubans, the Maine victims, or anyone else.”1
Joseph Pulitzer Pioneers a New Journalism
Born in Hungary in 1847, Joseph Pulitzer came to the United States as a mercenary who fought in the Civil War. While still in his teens, he drifted west and wrote for a paper in St. Louis. By working ferociously, the reporter—taunted by his competitors as “Joey the Jew”—was able to buy one bankrupt paper and merge it with another to create the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Beginning in 1878, Pulitzer pioneered a new style of newspapering that targeted the masses of Americans who’d previously been ignored by the staid sheets of the old order. According to Pulitzer, papers should be cheap, should be written clearly and concisely, and should crusade in the community interest. The facts Pulitzer highlighted on page one were to be gathered and written with an emphasis on accuracy unknown to his journalistic predecessors. He vowed, “Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.”2
In 1883, Pulitzer broke into the biggest market in the country, targeting his New York World at the urban laboring class. The legendary “people’s paper” was committed to being readable and serving the masses by exposing fraud and fighting public evils.
Pulitzer’s innovative enterprise was controversial, as many erudite New Yorkers denounced the World as vulgar. They accused Pulitzer of introducing multi-column illustrations and dramatic headlines—such as “Baptized in Blood” and “A Brutal Negro Whips His Nephew to Death”—merely to shock readers. Pulitzer defended the techniques as essential to attracting people to his paper so they’d read his progressive editorials.3
Critics be damned, Pulitzer catapulted the World into the largest paper in the country. Its circulation soared from 15,000 when he bought it to 250,000 four years later. This growth was aided by innovative techniques. After Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days created a national stir, for example, Pulitzer sent “stunt girl” Nellie Bly on a global adventure to circle the world in seventy-two days. The pretty twenty-four-year-old’s stunt was a legendary triumph.
Pulitzer also expanded the definition of news into the world of sports and revolutionized the American newspaper by introducing women’s pages brimming with articles on social etiquette, home decorating, and romantic advice aimed at female readers—the target buyers for the department stores that became major advertisers in the World.
William Randolph Hearst Stupefies the World
Born in California in 1863, William Randolph Hearst began life very differently from Pulitzer. Hearst was the only son of an engineer who struck it rich in the silver mines of the Comstock Lode. George Hearst used his wealth to buy a seat in the US Senate, along with his son’s admission into Harvard. But young Hearst was an indifferent student who drank too much and spent more time playing with his pet alligator than studying. After sending his professors personalized chamber pots with each man’s likeness drawn on the bottom, he was expelled.
Willie Hearst, who idolized Pulitzer, worked briefly on the World and then persuaded his father to let him edit the financially failing San Francisco Examiner. The young Hearst took to journalism like Babe Ruth took to baseball. With his father’s deep pockets at his disposal, he hired the best staff money could buy and undertook ambitious and progressive crusades, including a campaign to lower city water rates.
Hearst, like Pulitzer, appealed to the masses, telling his reporters, “There’s a gripman on the Powell Street line—he takes his car out at three o’clock in the morning, and while he’s waiting for the signals he opens the morning paper. Think of him when you’re writing a story. Don’t write a single line he can’t understand and wouldn’t read.” Hearst also was innovative, pushing sports and theater news to page one while hiring reporters exclusively to cover society and financial news.4
The publisher was a showman who set out to entertain and startle his readers. And when the actual news of the day was too dull, he created stupefying events. He paid a young couple to be married in a hot-air balloon and hired hunters to go into the mountains to trap a grizzly bear and bring it to San Francisco—while writing exclusive stories for the Examiner. Readers became so eager to see what Hearst would come up with next that the publisher kept the city at a carnival pitch.5
After eight years in Hearst’s creative hands, the Examiner had become a popular and profitable business. Circulation had jumped from 12,000 to 200,000.
The War of the Newspapers
Willie Hearst was a privileged young man who, in 1895, at the age of thirty-two, realized his life’s dream of competing with Joseph Pulitzer. Hearst’s vehicle was the New York Journal, a scandal sheet that had been nicknamed “the chambermaid’s delight.” Pouring his father’s money into the paper, Hearst dropped the price from two cents to one, introduced color printing, and lured advertisers away from the World.
The New York World’s mindless and impudent cartoon character Yellow Kid has remained a symbol of sensationalistic journalism for more than a century.
Reprinted from the New York World.
Within a year, the Journal ranked as New York’s second largest paper, trailing only the World. Hearst and Pulitzer then became engaged in the most notorious newspaper war in history. Editors filled their pages with emotion-packed stories that set out not merely to inform but also to entertain and shock.
Among Hearst’s innovations was hiring Annie Laurie as the first “sob sister” who stressed the tragic and emotional side of stories. Sent to investigate the city hospital, the young woman dressed in shabby clothes and intentionally collapsed on the street. Taken to the hospital, she was pawed by lustful interns who gave her nothing but hot water and mustard. Laurie’s front-page exposé shook up the hospital and led to the head physician being fired. In later stories, Laurie moved to Utah and lived with the Mormons to describe polygamy and interviewed prostitutes to offer readers a window into the underbelly of urban life.
By 1897, Hearst had pushed the Journal’s daily circulation to 500,000, within striking distance of the World’s 600,000. It was in this atmosphere of scrambling for the hottest scoop of the day that the two papers focused on the events that helped thrust the nation full tilt into international warfare.
The Battleground Shifts to Cuba
As the Industrial Revolution evolved, the United States grew eager to expand its boundaries and enlarge its economic markets. Many imperialistic eyes turned south. By 1895, Cuban rebels had grown tired of their colonial status and were striking out at Spanish economic interests by wrecking trains and burning sugar plantations.
When Hearst heard about the ragged rebels, the Journal heralded them as—voilà!—courageous freedom fighters struggling against Spanish oppressors. Hearst’s praise conflicted with the US State Department’s assessment, which regarded the insurgents as insignificant because they didn’t control even one city of any size. But Hearst, who liked to reduce complex phenomena to simple terms, cast the Cuban rebels as patriotic heroes thirsting for liberty. He told readers, “Their proceedings have been animated by the same fearless spirit that inspired the patriot fathers who sat in Philadelphia on the 4th of July, 1776.”6
To champion the Cuban cause, Hearst painted a portrait of Spanish brutality. One article said, “The Spaniards stab to death all Cubans who come under their power.” Another described Spanish soldiers dragging people from a hospital and bayoneting them to death. Journal readers found the accounts compelling, though the stories weren’t based on the firsthand observations of correspondents but on statements from partisan Cubans who’d recently fled to the United States.7
Pulitzer initially opposed American involvement in Cuba, but he soon shifted to supporting it. Years later he admitted that the motivation for his change of heart had been to increase his paper’s circulation.8
In 1896, Hearst sent reporter Richard Harding Davis and artist Frederic Remington to Cuba. Remington initially said the activities taking place there didn’t deserve the coverage Hearst wanted to give them. According to legend, the artist sent Hearst a telegram reading, “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.” The publisher is said to have replied, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Although historians question whether this verbal exchange ever took place, it accurately captures Hearst’s style during the era.9
The reporter and artist soon produced the kind of journalism their boss demanded. Davis wrote that Spanish officers had boarded an American ship anchored off the Cuban coast and forced three pretty young Cuban women to submit to strip searches. Spread across five columns was a Remington drawing that showed Spanish officers leering at a young woman’s naked body as she stood helpless on deck. The story set off a political firestorm. Members of Congress introduced resolutions denouncing the brutish Spanish officers and praising the Journal for bringing the incident to light. Disgruntled at being scooped, the World tracked down the women and quoted them as saying they’d been searched by a female officer in the privacy of a cabin—not by male officers on the deck of the ship.10
Frederic Remington’s drawing of Spanish officers forcing young women to submit to strip searches helped propel the United States toward war with Spain.
Reprinted from the New York Journal.
Although the World didn’t manufacture stories with the abandon the Journal did, Pulitzer also sent correspondents to Cuba and published sensational reports. One announced, “Old men and little boys were cut down and their bodies fed to the dogs,” and another said, “The Spanish soldiers habitually cut off the ears of the Cuban dead and retain them as trophies.”11
Coverage of the era ranks as a disgraceful example of journalistic distortion. Cuban officials kept reporters away from the action because they wanted to control how the world perceived the situation. Reporters cooperated because they preferred to trade the primitive conditions of the jungle for Havana’s palatial Inglaterra Hotel, complete with sterling silver serving trays and exotic Spanish delicacies. So each day, reporters gathered around a rebel spokesman who fed them “eyewitness reports.”
The accounts aroused so much public attention that members of the US Congress quoted from the Journal and World in floor debates concerning the Cuban insurrection. These hawkish legislators knew the grisly details would win support in Washington, just as they were selling papers on street corners.12
“Remember the Maine!”
News coverage of the Cuban rebels from 1895 to 1898 primed the weapons for war, and coverage of the USS Maine disaster pulled the trigger. Officials had anchored the battleship in Havana Harbor as a reminder that the United States was watching the Cuban conflict because of American business interests there. On February 15, 1898, the Maine exploded, killing 260 US sailors.
The Journal and World exploited the American public’s horror and anger to create warmongering coverage that still stands today as the epitome of the news media at their most truthless. Screaming headlines, misleading drawings, and shrill editorials blamed the Spanish government and demanded that the United States declare war.
In reality, it was preposterous to suggest that Spain had destroyed the Maine. Spanish officials had desperately avoided bringing the United States into their conflict with Cuba because they knew the American Navy would crush theirs. The Maine disaster was, in fact, the worst setback Spain could have suffered.
Although William Randolph Hearst immediately proclaimed the 1898 destruction of the USS Maine “The Work of an Enemy,” most experts attribute the tragedy to an explosion aboard the ship.
Reprinted from the New York Journal.
Regardless of who or what was responsible for the Maine tragedy, Hearst pulled out all the stops. The most memorable of the Journal’s front pages remains a textbook example of distortion. The banner headline read “Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy.” Below the incendiary headline, Hearst ran a drawing of a ship with cables leading from a submerged mine to a Spanish fortress on shore—a flight of fancy that many readers undoubtedly accepted as fact. Six headlines on page one carried an eye-popping “$50,000!” as the reward the Journal offered for evidence related to “the crime.”13
The shrieking headlines for the next week testify that truth was the 261st casualty of the explosion—“The War Ship Maine Was Split in Two by an Enemy’s Secret Infernal Machine,” “War! Sure! Maine Destroyed by Spanish,” “The Whole Country Thrills with War Fever.”14
Hearst didn’t confine his warmongering to the headlines. He introduced a “War with Spain” card game, with the object being to sink Spanish ships, and he ordered his reporters in Havana to skulk about the city at night plastering walls with posters that read “Remember the Maine!”15
Hearst’s sensational coverage paid off. Three days after the explosion, the Journal became the first paper in American history to surpass the 1 million circulation mark—and the World.16
Although Pulitzer wasn’t as willing as Hearst was to sacrifice truth for circulation growth, he also pushed hard for war. Immediately after the Maine explosion, the World expressed skepticism that foul play had destroyed the ship by placing a question mark at the end of its first headline: “Maine Explosion Caused by Bomb or Torpedo?” The paper highlighted President William McKinley’s belief that the explosion had been the result of the ship’s magazines catching fire. But the World didn’t remain skeptical for long. Four days after the disaster, with his rival at the Journal insisting that the Spanish had killed the American sailors, Pulitzer announced the findings of his own investigators. Indeed, Pulitzer went even further than Hearst, not only announcing that the Spanish had destroyed the Maine but also crediting that discovery to his own paper. A page-one headline boasted “World’s News of the Evidence of a Mine Under the Maine Changes the Feeling Throughout the Country.” Pulitzer adopted a tough stance on the editorial page as well, stating, “Two hundred and sixty of our brave sailors have been hurled to sudden and awful death. What more is needed? Is there no limit to our patience?”17
Overpowering the President
The most significant impact of the campaign wasn’t on readers but on the country’s commander in chief. The Journal and World whipped public fury to such a fever pitch that the words initially uttered by voices of reason were drowned out by the din of screaming headlines.
Both papers ridiculed McKinley’s measured statement that the Maine explosion had been an accident. Hearst called the president’s peace stance “cowardly” and dictated by Wall Street financiers who feared that war might upset the stock market. The World also pushed McKinley, writing, “The army is ready. The navy is ready. The people are ready. And now the President says ‘Wait!’—Wait for what?”18
McKinley judiciously refused to act until navy investigators studied the remains of the ship. Hearst, in contrast, had no intention of being judicious. Three weeks before the report was released, he quoted anonymous sources as stating definitively, “The disaster in Havana harbor was due to the explosion of a submarine mine. This mine was planted by officials of the Spanish Government.”19
When McKinley, not a dynamic leader, continued to call for “deliberate consideration,” the Journal and World turned up the heat. Hearst gave prominent placement to stories about McKinley’s effigy being hanged and burned. Hearst also sent reporters to interview the mothers of the dead sailors, quoting one as saying, “How would President McKinley have felt, I wonder, if he had had a son on the Maine murdered as was my little boy?” Pulitzer was less emotional but no less insistent, telling McKinley, “Stop deliberating and proceed to action.”20
Amid such statements from a war-hungry press, it became increasingly difficult to continue diplomatic efforts. McKinley’s popularity waned as public sentiment mounted for war. McKinley felt relentless pressure as the press frenzy swept across the nation. The entire country seemed to be seething under the daily onslaught of misinformation and sensationalism. The president clearly lacked the personal charisma to sway public opinion in such a high-pitched environment.
Spanish officials made a determined bid for peace, giving indications that they were willing to compromise in the hope of reaching an amicable settlement. When the United States demanded that Spain abandon its controversial policy of separating noncombatants from the rebels, for example, Spain agreed. But it was too late for concessions. War fever had become so pervasive that rational thinking no longer played a role.
To survive politically and stabilize the nation, McKinley finally caved in to the pressure and adopted a prowar stance. The might of the Fourth Estate had forced the president of the United States to capitulate on a matter of grave importance. On April 19, the US Senate passed a war resolution by a vote of forty-two to thirty-five.21
After war was declared, Hearst and Pulitzer continued to maintain a hysterical pitch. Symbolic of Hearst’s attitude was the question he began posing to his readers on the upper corners of page one: “How do you like the Journal’s war?”22
Hearst assembled a journalistic armada by chartering ten ships to shuttle news stories from Havana to the nearest telegraph station in Key West, then selling as many as forty editions a day on the streets of New York during the height of hostilities. Unable to contain his zeal, Hearst hired a luxury steamer for himself and sailed for the war zone with a lightweight printing press that let him publish a newspaper on Cuban soil. He claimed the Journal-Examiner was for the benefit of American soldiers fighting in the field, but the real purpose of the Cuban edition was to reap favorable publicity back home.23
The master showman received additional positive press when he set up a trap to catch Pulitzer at blatant plagiarism. That is, Hearst published a totally fallacious item that stated, “Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz, an Austrian artillerist of European renown, who, with Colonel Ordonez, was defending the land batteries of Aguadores was so badly wounded that he has since died.” The World took the bait and the next day published a slightly rewritten version of the item, saying, “Col. R.W. Thenuz, an Austrian artillerist, well known throughout Europe, who, with Col. Ordonez, was defending the land batteries of Aguadores, was so badly wounded in the bombardment of Monday that he has since died. He performed many acts of conspicuous gallantry.”24
The Journal pounced on the World, announcing that Colonel Thenuz had never existed and then gloating about how it had caught the World in an embarrassing journalistic faux pas. Thrilled with the success of his trickery, Hearst ran letters from editors condemning the World for plagiarism and published a tongue-in-cheek “In Memoriam” poem honoring the fictitious colonel. Refusing to allow the prank to die, Hearst proposed building a monument to the colonel. Meanwhile, the humiliated World had no choice but to maintain a painful silence.25
Hearst had even more fun when he strapped on a pistol and covered the war firsthand—often on horseback. In one incident, the publisher and reporter James Creelman were double-teaming the same battle when a bullet struck Creelman in the arm. The reporter later recalled waking up in a hospital to see Hearst, “his face radiant with enthusiasm,” as he clutched his notebook. “‘I’m sorry you’re hurt,’ said Hearst. ‘But wasn’t it a splendid fight? We beat every paper in the world.’” The story about the battle carried only Hearst’s byline.26
American soldiers and sailors weren’t having nearly as much fun. US military forces suffered badly from lack of experience and poor planning. Although the one-sided war lasted only four months, the toll in American lives surpassed 5,000. At war’s end, Spain granted Cuba its independence and ceded the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States.
From Hearst’s point of view, the war was a glorious success. Not only did the United States thrash Spain, but Hearst also achieved the massive circulation he’d dreamed of. By August 1898, when the fighting ended, the Journal and World both were claiming figures of 1.25 million.
Legacy of Shame
The Spanish-American War probably could have been avoided, as the Spanish gave clear signals they were eager to negotiate. But the decision to go to war wasn’t made entirely by politicians. For it was, more than any American conflict before or since, a war fueled by the news media. If Hearst, with his tawdry flair for publicity and agitation, hadn’t filled his pages with sensational and misleading stories—making the explosion of the Maine a symbol of Spanish treachery, pushing McKinley to abandon his antiwar stance, and whipping the public into such a war frenzy that senators no longer acted on the basis of reason but for political survival—there may have been no war.
Hearst later yearned to become president of the United States. Though he failed in that effort, he served in the US Congress and built a huge publishing empire. When he died in 1951, Hearst left assets of $160 million and a legacy of accomplishment overshadowed by shame.
Numerous participants in and scholars of the Spanish-American War have attributed much of the blame for the conflict to Hearst. Spanish Commander Valeriano Weyler insisted the catalyst was neither Spanish oppression nor Cuban rebellion, saying, “The American newspapers are responsible.” Spanish Prime Minister Canovas del Castillo agreed, telling an American reporter, “The newspapers of your country seem to be more powerful than the government.” John Winkler was among the many historians who have blamed Hearst for the war, saying, “The Spanish-American War came as close to being a ‘one-man war’ as any conflict in our history.” Joseph Wisan, who wrote a book about the press during the Cuban crisis, concluded, “The Spanish-American War would not have occurred had not the appearance of Hearst in New York journalism precipitated a bitter battle for newspaper circulation.” Wisan continued, “The Journal and World used Cuba to achieve their prime purpose—an increase in circulation.”27
Statements regarding Hearst provoking the war also came from the egotist himself. His editorial-page editor wrote in his memoirs, “Hearst was accustomed to referring to the war, in company with the staff, as ‘our war.’” The publisher summarized his own reflections on the war—and the mighty power of the news media more generally—in an editorial published in the Journal a month after the war ended. Hearst boasted,
The newspaper is the greatest force in civilization.
Under republican government, newspapers form and express public opinion.
They suggest and control legislation.
They declare wars . . . The newspapers control the nation.28
