The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (51 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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Although one could read even in the
Herald
reports of Spanish forces raiding rebel hospitals, assassinating the wounded in their cots and burning the buildings over their heads to cover up the crime, the yellow papers clearly had the most enthusiasm for atrocity stories, a fact that has brought Pulitzer and Hearst heavy criticism over the years, a great deal of it unjust. The
Journal
’s headline “Feeding prisoners to sharks” is a frequently cited example of supposed excess, yet it ran over a well-reported story of how Havana policemen were executing prisoners outside the harbor and dumping the corpses in shark-infested waters. The
New York Times
ran an almost identical piece on the same day: “The reason why [the prisoners] are taken out of the harbor is on account of the immense number of sharks which get hold of the bodies and leave no trace.” The
Times
headline—“Cuban prisoners drowned”—was less emotive than the
Journal
’s, and in a sense less accurate for failing to convey that the victims were deliberately and not accidentally killed.
45
 
 
THE ONLY OTHER AMERICAN NEWSPAPERMAN to spend significant time with the rebels in the early years of the conflict was Grover Flint of the
New York Journal.
Slightly older than Scovel and Rea, Flint came from a more illustrious background, being the son of the Civil War hero Major General Cuvier Grover and the grandson of the noted New York physician Austin Flint, president of the American Medical Association
.
Born Flint Grover, he reversed his name at the request of the Flint side of his family and received a substantial inheritance for his trouble. He graduated from Harvard and remained close to his alma mater, courting the daughter of Cambridge historian and philosopher John Fiske. It was in all probability a Harvard connection that brought him to Hearst’s employ—both were associated with the
Lampoon.
Flint was unique among the early reporters in Cuba for having actual combat experience with the First Cavalry in the Indian Wars. He was also fluent in Spanish thanks to a year in Madrid with a friend, the American diplomat Edward Strobel.
46
 
After connecting with Havana-based Junta agents, Flint hopped off a train at the port of Cárdenas on March 27, 1896, and began roaming the countryside in search of Gómez. He found a small crew of insurgents who led him to a larger group busily torching plantations. They were courteous to Flint, supplying him with a pair of porters and leading him eventually to Gómez, whom he described as a “gray little man” in ill-fitting clothes but impressive in his own way: “[T]he moment he turns his keen eyes on you, they strike like a blow from the shoulder. You feel the will, the fearlessness, and the experience of men that is in those eyes.”
47
Flint disagreed with Rea’s criticism of Gómez’s leadership qualities, noting that the general managed to hold sway over a ragtag group of undernourished and poorly supported volunteers who were kept moving constantly through inhospitable terrain, even in the rainy seasons. Discipline was firm and morale was strong.
 
A stolen saddlebag reduced Flint to scribbling notes with pencil stubs, and he appears to have had trouble finding reliable couriers. He filed only four reports to the
Journal
in his four months in the field, but among these was a thorough sketch of one of the few direct engagements of the early part of the war. The forty-eight-hour battle began on the afternoon of June 9 in the thick hilly country near Puerto Principe. Gómez’s ragged troops, including four hundred cavalry and a hundred infantry, confronted two Spanish columns comprising two thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry. Most of the time was spent in a tense standoff with the combatants firing at each other from safe distances, but when the action got hot, Flint recorded it minute by minute.
 
At 4:55 p.m. on the first afternoon, he described the Spanish forming “dark gray lines, splashed with the red of sashes.” Their bullets were “coming thickly, but too high. You can feel them in the air. They make you wink. The smoke is getting thick. I can scarcely see the lines. Our men loom up in silhouette.”
 
At 5:05 p.m.: “Our infantry are shooting into the enemy’s right wing from the woods. The enemy are getting excited. They shoot higher and faster. General Gómez, followed by his staff, [is] riding placidly up and down, peering at the lines through the smoke. He has stationed his escort on the plain back of us as a reserve. . . . The Spaniards open on us with artillery, two guns well to the rear of the hill. It is inspiring to watch Gómez under fire. He looks twenty years younger.”
 
At 5:20 p.m.: “They are beginning to bring the wounded from the front. Some are in the arms of comrades, riding double, to be left with the impedimenta. In the firing line some have had their horses shot, and are fighting on foot.”
48
 
By noon of June 11 the battle had ended, with a Spanish retreat to Puerto Principe. Flint rode through their abandoned positions, noting the bits of bloody clothing, empty cigar packages, and ammunition boxes that marked their presence. “I learned how the Spanish bury their dead,” he wrote. “The graves were so hastily dug and covered that in many cases hands protruded and faces could be seen between clods of earth.” His report was accompanied by six illustrations, including one of a cavalry charge and another of the graves of dead Spaniards. He estimated that Spain had lost fifty men. Soon after this incident he sailed from Cuba to Nassau in an open twenty-seven-foot boat, and from there returned to the United States.
49
 
IT IS SIGNIFICANT that of the three American newspaper reporters to penetrate Spanish lines and travel for significant times with the insurgents, one worked for the
Herald
, with its great tradition of foreign reportage, and the other two worked for the
Journal
and the
World
. The same three dailies would continue to dominate coverage of events in Cuba. All three pursued the story in the spirit of journalistic enterprise and competitiveness, confident of their readers’ interest. The yellows had none of the
Herald
’s international experience but they made up for the lack with fierce commitment, rooted in outrage at the plight of the Cuban people. Hearst and Pulitzer dedicated more resources to the story than other papers and saw more of their men arrested, expelled, and injured on the job. (Weyler treated
Herald
men lightly because of the paper’s relatively sympathetic treatment of Spain.) The yellows routinely carried three or four pieces a day during the conflict, and at peak moments they published three, four, five, or more pages of coverage. More copy made more error inevitable, and Cuba was an especially tricky war, as Halstead and others noted.
50
With much of the action occurring in a hit-and-run manner in remote areas, journalists could see little for themselves and were dependent on unreliable sources on both sides. By taking a leading position in covering the conflict, the yellow press was more vulnerable to the difficulties such coverage presented.
 
Forgotten though they may be, the laudable aspects of the Cuban coverage were at least appreciated at the time. Richard Harding Davis had Grover Flint in mind when he wrote the following tribute to reporters in Cuba:
They are taking chances that no war correspondents ever took in any war in any part of the world. For this is not a war—it is a state of lawless butchery, and the rights of correspondents, of soldiers, and of noncombatants are not recognized. Archibald Forbes and “Bull Run” Russell and Frederick Villiers had great continental armies to protect them; these men work alone with a continental army against them . . . and they are in the field now, lying in swamps by day and creeping between the forts by night, standing under fire by the side of Gómez . . . [and] going without food, without shelter, without the right to answer the attacks of the Spanish troops, climbing the mountains and crawling across the trochas, creeping to some friendly hut for a cup of coffee and to place their despatches in safe hands, and then going back again.
51
 
 
 
Davis’s admiration was not misplaced. A case in point is the story of Charles Govin, as reported by the
Journal
’s Grover Flint.Yet another young man of good family determined to make a name for himself as a war correspondent in Cuba, Govin was twenty-three and a reporter for the Key West
Equator-Democrat.
On July 6, 1896, he crossed to Cuba on one of the many filibustering expeditions smuggling men and arms out of Florida. Three days after landing, he was marching in Havana province in the company of a rebel major named Valencia. The Cubans skirmished with a Spanish column under Colonel Ochoa. When Spanish reinforcements arrived on the scene, the Cubans disappeared into the bush. Govin, finding himself alone and lost, rode to a nearby hilltop to get the lay of the land. He saw Spanish troops advancing from three directions. He presented himself to the Spaniards waving a white handkerchief, confident of his rights as a U.S. citizen and neutral observer. He was detained by an advance guard until Colonel Ochoa arrived, dismounted, and addressed him with vehemence. According to Flint’s account, “his papers were torn from his pockets, and his clothing hurriedly searched. No weapons were found.” His papers were handed to Ochoa, who “glanced them over and scornfully threw them on the ground.” Govin was then bound to a tree and hacked to death with machetes by two noncommissioned officers. A handful of Cuban soldiers witnessed the execution from nearby hiding places. They recovered and buried Govin’s body and reported the incident to their superiors. Major Julio Rodríguez Baz of the Cuban army told the story to Flint.
52
 
George Bronson Rea, skeptical as always of reports of Spanish atrocities, did his own investigation into Govin’s death. He told a U.S. Senate committee in June 1897 that he could not find Flint’s source, a Major Baz, but that his own sources corroborated the facts of the story.
 
CHAPTER ELEVEN
 
Only a Hero Can Sit for a Month on a Hotel Porch
 
R
ichard Harding Davis’s account of the Yale-Princeton football match during Hearst’s first month in New York sold out the edition, earning the paper much praise and guaranteeing that Davis would be invited back to the pages of the
Journal.
After the game, he signed on to cover anticipated hostilities between the United States and Great Britain over the Venezuelan boundary dispute, but before he could sail, a diplomatic solution averted war and kept him at home. Five months later, in the spring of 1896, he had better luck, disembarking for Moscow to report on the coronation of Nicholas II as Czar of All the Russias for both the
Journal
and
Harper’s
magazine.
 
Hearst may have considered royalty a tiresome anachronism, but many Americans felt otherwise, and Davis could be counted on to compensate for the publisher’s relative lack of enthusiasm. According to his superb biographer, Arthur Lubow, Davis looked upon kings and queens with inexhaustible wonder, as though they belonged to a gorgeous “imperilled species.”
1
He was a connoisseur of their pageants and spectacles, covering the coronation of Spain’s King Alfonso XIII, and the millennial celebration of the Kingdom of Hungary. His passion for regal splendor was consistent with the Victorian era’s nostalgia for a chivalric past. The Arthurian legends were much in vogue, as were heroic tales from classical and medieval mythology. Davis drew heavily on these traditions in his bestselling fiction: his virile Manhattan knights in dinner jackets and polished shoes traveled the Americas to rescue chaste maidens and slay metaphorical dragons. He crafted his own public image from romantic ideals of courtliness and valor, as the gallant, square-jawed, squeaky-clean gentleman adventurer, equally at home in the opera box and on the field of battle. So who better to travel four thousand miles to report on one of the most splendid imperial ceremonies of the age?
 
The trick to the story was gaining access to the Cathedral of the Assumption, where Nicholas would take his oath and begin his reign. The guest list was limited to eight hundred and the Russian court, European royalty and nobility, and international heads of state took most of the seats, leaving few for journalists. Twelve, to be precise. Davis began his campaign for admission at the top, asking President Cleveland to declare him part of the official U.S. delegation—after all, Richard Harding Davis was no ordinary hack—but his request was denied. Baffled but undeterred, Davis hustled to Moscow to try his luck with the Russian court, playing up his status as a “literary light of the finest color,” one whose work would live forever, yet again he was refused. Much to his credit, Davis grew more determined in the face of rejection. “There is not a wire we have not pulled, or a leg, either,” he wrote his family, “and we go dashing about all day . . . leaving cards and writing notes and giving drinks and having secretaries to lunch and buying flowers for wives and segar [
sic
] boxes for husbands, and threatening the Minister with Cleveland’s name.” His fierce lobby paid off. Davis finally gained one of only two blue badges of admission handed to U.S. correspondents.
2
 
On the morning of May 26, Davis passed through some 300,000 people gathered outside the cathedral to take his place amid the crush of tiaras and uniforms inside. He watched the three-hour ceremony with awe. The grand dukes, carrying the royal robes of ermine to the front of the church, literally staggered under their weight. The dowager empress was all gems and tears. The czar placed his crown upon his own brow and took up his scepter, ornamented with the Orloff diamond. Davis was especially enchanted by the young czarina, Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, whom he had first glimpsed on an earlier trip to Athens. He had found her, on that occasion, so strikingly beautiful that he had followed her from the Acropolis to her hotel to learn her identity. His infatuation had blossomed into his bestselling 1895 romance,
The Princess Aline,
in which a young man (not unlike Davis) falls into a passionate but chaste affair with a princess (not unlike Alix). For the coronation, the czarina was “so simply dressed that, in comparison with the ladies of the Court and the Princesses and wives of Ambassadors rising in tiers around her, she was the most feminine looking woman in the Cathedral. Her shoulders were bare, even of straps; her hair was without ornament, and hung in two plaits, one over each shoulder. Around her neck was a single string of pearls. . . . [T]he contrast was striking.”
3

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