The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (56 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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DAVIS TRAVELED IN AN ARMORED TRAIN with a Swiss-born interpreter who insisted on calling him “my lord” and who doubled as his valet. The U.S. consuls around the island knew Davis by reputation and offered their services in making his travel arrangements. He boasted in his letters of spending more of Hearst ’s money in one night at a Cárdenas hotel than Spanish officers would spend in a week. However much he was enjoying himself, Davis was aware that he was seeing only what Weyler was permitting him to see. He could not forget that the point of his journey was to join the rebels. He thought of Scovel, traveling under an assumed identity, with his eyebrows shaved and a bounty on his head, and he knew he could not match the
World
reporter for “deeds of daring.” Davis reassured himself that he was at least getting closer to the truth than his colleagues back in Key West and Havana. He flattered himself that he brought unsurpassed perspective to the story, having read more about Cuba than the likes of Scovel, but he still could not shake his doubts.
64
 
Davis never would meet a rebel on this trip, nor would he abandon his comfortable itinerary, but he did file three remarkable pieces. The first was on the effects of Weyler’s reconcentration order, which now applied to Havana, Matanzas, and Santa Clara provinces. Spanish troops were burning fields, huts, and villages in order to drive hundreds of thousands of
pacificos,
or noncombatants, from the countryside to fortified suburban encampments. In a story datelined Cienfuegos, January 22, 1897, Davis wrote that the order was proving “exceedingly short-sighted.” Far from hurting the insurgency, it had the opposite effect: “The able-bodied men of each family who had remained loyal [to Spain], or at least neutral, so long as they were permitted to live undisturbed on their few acres, were not content to exist on the charity of a city, and they at once swarmed over to the insurgent ranks by the hundreds.”
 
Not only was reconcentration counterproductive to the Spanish war effort, it was ruinous to the local populations. The camps, Davis observed, were filled with the old and infirm, with women and with children, living unsupervised in revolting conditions. At one facility in Jaruco, he reported, “the filth covered the streets and the plaza ankle deep and even filled the corners of the church, which has been turned into a fort and has hammocks swung from the altars. The huts of the
pacificos,
with from four to six people in each, were jammed together in rows a quarter of a mile long, and within ten feet and parallel with the cavalry barracks, where sixty men and horses had lived for a month. . . . No one was vaccinated, no one was clean, and all of them were living on half rations.”
65
 
As many as 400,000 Cubans would be relocated under Weyler’s order. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, would die of fever and disease. The reconcentration policy would do much to persuade the United States and Europe that the burden of the war was falling unduly on the helpless. Davis was one of the first newspapermen to the scene, and the first to write a substantial account of the effects of reconcentration. What he witnessed had a profound effect on him. He had gone to Cuba determined to be “fair to both sides,” and with heavy skepticism of the pro-Cuban sympathies of the yellow newspapers. He had dismissed Remington as excitable and determined to see the worst in everything. But his views were shifting. He began to assign blame for the “wholesale devastation” on the island primarily to the Spanish, who were embarked on a policy of “extermination and ruin.” Davis believed things could only get worse: “As soon as the rains begin the yellow fever and smallpox will set in and all vessels leaving Cuban ports will be quarantined and the island will be one great plague spot. The insurgents who are in the open fields will live and the soldiers will die for their officers know nothing of sanitation.”
66
 
His second piece, as good as any Davis would ever write, and the only story from the conflict still reprinted in our time, was an account of the last hour in the life of Adolfo Rodriguez, a twenty-year-old farm boy from Santa Clara province. He had been captured with a band of rebels two months earlier and charged with bearing arms against the government. A Spanish military court had sentenced him the previous day to die by fusillade before sunrise, one of thirty so condemned; they were being shot on consecutive mornings for maximum effect. Spanish officials frequently invited American journalists to witness these deaths. In fact, the execution story was already a staple of coverage from Cuba, which perhaps explains why Davis felt it necessary to rationalize his presence:
I hope it is not impertinent for the writer to introduce himself, so far as to say that he did not go to see this man die through any idle or morbid curiosity. The young man’s friends could not be present. It was impossible for them to show themselves in that crowd and that place with wisdom or without distress, and I like to think that although Rodriguez could not know it, there was one person present when he died who felt keenly for him, and who was a sympathetic though unwilling onlooker.
67
 
 
 
The procedings, as described by Davis, began at 5 a.m. under a full moon. Some three hundred Spanish soldiers marched in formation to an empty plain a half mile from town, led by a military band playing a jaunty quickstep. They found a spot on the grassy plain and waited patiently, the band still playing, as a second procession made its way from town, this one including Rodriguez. “I expected to find the man, no matter what his strength at other times might be, stumbling and faltering on this cruel journey, but as he came near I saw he led all the others, that the two priests on either side of him were taking two steps to his one, and that they were tripping on their gowns and stumbling over the hollows in their efforts to keep pace with him as he walked erect and soldierly at a quick step in advance of them.”
 
Davis was impressed at the young man’s appearance, his handsome, gentle face, “great wistful eyes,” and curly black hair. He looked more Neapolitan than Cuban: “You could imagine him sitting on the quay at Naples or Genoa, lolling in the sun and showing his white teeth when he laughed.” Davis thought him shockingly young for the sacrifice he was about to make, but was exhilarated by his bravery. “I confess,” he wrote, “to have felt a thrill of delighted satisfaction when I saw, as the Cuban passed me, that he held a cigarette between his lips, not arrogantly or with bravado, but with the nonchalance of a man who meets his punishment fearlessly and who will let his enemy see that they can kill but not frighten him.”
 
It was all over quickly. Rodriguez, his arms bound at the elbows, was positioned with his back to the firing squad; he looked out over the plain to the hills where he had lived most of his twenty years. One of the priests held a cross before him. Rodriguez dropped the cigarette from his lips and bent to kiss the cross. An officer drew his sword and gave the “make ready” signal. Only at the last second did he realize that some of his men, forming a U around the condemned man, were actually in the line of fire. Rodriguez, braced for the worst, was instead tapped on the shoulder and politely ordered to move a few steps. Davis wondered at his coolness—“snatched back to life” at the supreme moment, Rodriguez neither trembled nor broke down, but on steady legs advanced to his new position. He stood, alone among enemies, facing certain death with his back straight and chin high.
 
The officer of the firing squad, mortified by his blunder, hastily whipped up his sword, the men once more leveled their rifles, the sword rose, dropped, the men fired. At the report the Cuban’s head snapped back almost between his shoulders, but his body fell slowly, as though some one had pushed him gently forward from behind and he had stumbled. He sank on his side in the wet grass without a struggle or sound and did not move again. It was difficult to believe that he meant to lie there, that it could be ended so without a word, that the man in the linen suit would not go up and continue to walk on over the hills, as he apparently started to do, to his home, that there was not a mistake somewhere or that at least some one would be sorry or say something or run to pick him up.
 
But fortunately he did not need help, and the priests returned—the younger one with the tears running down his face—and donned their vestments and read a brief requiem for his soul, while the squad stood uncovered, and the men in hollow square shook their accoutrements into place and shifted their pieces and got ready for the order to march, and the band began again with the same quickstep which the arrival of the prisoner had interrupted. The figure still lay on the grass untouched, and no one seemed to remember that it had walked there itself, or notice that the cigarette still burned, a tiny ring of living fire, at the place where the figure had first stood.
 
 
The front page of the
New York Journal
on February 2, 1897, was taken up almost entirely by an illustration of the brave Rodriguez, face to the reader, in his last moment standing. The moon in the sky is so bright that you can see the shadows of the soldiers aiming at his back, and behind them the outline of the town of Santa Clara. Remington’s signature is low on the left- hand side. He drew the scene from Davis’s report, as was customary for newspaper illustrators. The story opens on the front page and continues inside. It is not a long piece and it is sentimental in moments, but it is nonetheless transfixing. A Davis biographer says it anticipates Hemingway in its spare language and its theme of a death well met. But the mix of farce, pathos, and tragedy may be more suggestive of Orwell and his indictment of imperial cruelty in “Shooting an Elephant.” Davis lacks Orwell’s subtlety and self-awareness, but he makes the most of his material.
 
The Rodriguez piece notwithstanding, Davis still feared that his trip was a failure. He had not seen any fighting and he had yet to meet an insurgent. He twice tried to slip out of government-controlled territory to join the rebels, but both times his Cuban escorts backed out, wary of Spanish spies. In his last attempt, he arranged a rendezvous with George Bronson Rea and Sylvester Scovel in the seaside village where they were meeting their own Cuban guide.
 
The two reporters arrived in disguise, with their hair dyed. According to Davis, they were waving the January 17 edition of the
New York Journal
in which Davis’s likeness was prominently featured along with a claim that he and Remington had “reached the insurgent army on the island of Cuba.” Scovel told Davis the article had blown his cover. “Your paper has queered you, Davis,” he said. “I never knew a case of a paper’s treating a correspondent worse.” Rea and Scovel said they could not assume the risk of added scrutiny on their hazardous mission and promptly disappeared, taking with them Davis’s last hope of reaching the rebels.
68
 
The January 17 story may have been a pretext for Scovel and Rea to dump Davis, given that he represented a competitive threat, and a large one, by virtue of his prof ile. He was also a security risk. Scovel and Rea were taking great pains to move by stealth through the countryside, and even if Davis agreed to abandon his folding bathtub and valet, he was ridiculously conspicuous. But Davis had every reason to be upset with the
Journal.
Running his picture at that moment only made his job more difficult, and besides, the claim was patently false—he was not riding with the insurgents. It is not clear whether the paper simply assumed Davis and Remington had achieved their goal of reaching rebel territory or if, as Davis suspected, it ran the promotion to provoke him into joining the rebels.
69
 
Davis now surrendered his dream of finding Gómez and the rebels, and made preparations to return home. But he would stumble across one more story before leaving Cuba. Appropriately, given his red-carpet tour of the island, he found it at dinner.
 
LEAVING HAVANA AS HE CAME, aboard the passenger liner
Olivette,
Davis met at his table Señorita Clemencia Arango, a cultivated young Cuban woman who “spoke three languages and dressed as you see girls dress on Fifth Avenue after church on Sunday.”
70
She told her new acquaintance she had been expelled from the island along with her sister, her younger brother, and two other women on suspicion of aiding the insurgents (she freely admitted her guilt). Davis wrote up the three women’s experiences, including the following incidents:
After ordering them to leave the island on a certain day, [Spanish officials] sent detectives to their houses on the morning of that day and had them undressed and searched to discover if they were carrying letters to the Junta at Key West and Tampa. They then, an hour later, searched them at the Custom House as they were leaving for the steamer. They searched them thoroughly, even to the length of taking off their shoes and stockings, and fifteen minutes later when the young ladies stood at last on the deck of an American vessel, with the American flag hanging from the stern, the Spanish officers followed them there and demanded that a cabin should be furnished them to which the girls might be taken, and they were then again undressed and searched for the third time.
 
 
 
The image of Spanish officers, “with red crosses for bravery on their chests and gold lace on their cuffs,” plucking pretty maidens from the deck of an American ship and subjecting them to strip searches was too much for the chivalrous Davis. The executions, the atrocities, the suffering he had witnessed in Jaruco—all of it paled next to this base and insulting treatment of womanhood. He was furious. Under the headline “Does Our Flag Shield Women?” he announced a complete personal capitulation to a pro-Cuban position on the war. He was dropping his opposition to U.S. interference in the conflict, a stance he now blamed on his ignorance of reality on the island. He felt ashamed that America had stood by idly for so long. The young nation had been too considerate of European power, unintentionally giving free rein to a cruel and dishonest imperial regime.

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