The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (57 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

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The British have just sent an expedition of 800 men to the west coast of Africa to punish a savage king who butchers people because it does not rain. Why should we tolerate Spanish savages merely because they call themselves “the most Catholic,” if they are in reality no better than this naked negro? What difference is there between the King of Benin crucifying a woman because he wants rain and General Weyler outraging a woman for his own pleasure and throwing her to his body guard of blacks, even if the woman has the misfortune to live after it, and still lives in Sagua la Grande to-day?
 
 
This unsourced attack on Weyler (the previously “dignified and impressive soldier”) was followed by a more restrained enumeration of the reasons for U.S. intervention. The Spaniards had destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of American property and ignored State Department demands for an explanation. They had imprisoned and shot U.S. citizens, sometimes after a trial, sometimes not. And now they were running amok on American vessels. If that were not reason enough to step in, Davis locked arms with Hearst, Pulitzer, and Dana and made the compassionate case for action against the “revivers of the Inquisition”:
[Why not] interfere in the name of humanity, not because we are Americans, but because we are human beings and because within eighty miles of our coast Spanish officials are killing people as wantonly as though they were field mice, not in battle, but in cold blood: cutting them down in the open roads, at the wells where they have gone for water, on their farms where they have stolen away to dig up a few potatoes . . . ? This is not an imaginary state of affairs. . . . I am writing only of the things I have heard from eye witnesses and of some of the things I have seen.
 
 
 
Davis quoted President Cleveland’s warning to Spain that if its efforts to defeat the insurgency degenerated into a “useless sacrifice of human life,” America’s obligations to respect Spanish sovereignty would be superseded by higher obligations. “These conditions,” concluded Davis, “are now manifest.”
 
The story ran in the February 12 edition of the
Journal,
halfway down the front page, which was prominent but not aggressive placement. The headlines scrupulously reflected Davis’s reporting. The text continued to the second page, where it was accompanied by a Remington illustration that showed a cluster of Spanish officials in suits and straw hats pawing over the clothes of a young Cuban beauty, who stands before them shapely and naked, her backside to the reader.
 
The story raised an uproar unlike anything yet published about the war. Determined to horn in, the
World
sent staff to greet Señorita Arango as she disembarked in Tampa. When these reporters asked her to speak of being strip searched by Spanish soldiers, she was shocked. The searches, she protested, had been performed by matrons. The
Evening World
was jubilant: “Association for a few short weeks with the
Journal
has led Mr. Davis to write over his signature an atrociously exaggerated story of an alleged Spanish outrage upon a woman.”
71
The
Commercial Advertiser
labeled the Arango incident the “most monstrous falsehood that has yet appeared even in the new journalism.” It was suggested that Davis and Remington should be quarantined before being allowed to mingle again with reputable newspapermen.
72
 
Davis, horrified at the error, wrote a letter to Pulitzer’s paper disavowing Remington’s illustration and Hearst’s presentation of his story. He claimed to have been clear in his text that male Spanish officers directed rather than conducted the search. The outrage he expressed in his story, he continued, had nothing to do with gender: it had been prompted by the fact that the
Olivette,
an American ship, was searched in Havana harbor in violation of international law. He begged the
World
to print his statement as prominently as possible. He needn’t have asked.
 
The Arango debacle has lived ever since as another example of how yellow journals trampled truth and accuracy in pursuit of tawdry sensations. Hearst, as editor of the paper, bears ultimate responsibility, but Davis deserves a share of the blame. His story describes three searches of the Arango girl: one at her home, one at the Customs House, one aboard ship. With regard to the first, Davis does say, as per his defense, that Spanish detectives “had” the women undressed, but he does not say by whom. Recounting the second search, Davis writes that “they” searched the women thoroughly, right down to their stockings. “They” refers either to the Spanish officials who ordered the women deported or to the Spanish detectives who ordered the first search. Spanish policemen and justice officials, as Remington knew, were uniformly male, and all the Spaniards identified by gender in Davis’s piece are male. Davis is silent about who performed the third search but his phrasings, together with his numerous descriptions of Spanish officers strutting about, and his extreme indignation at the treatment of the señoritas, would lead a reasonable person to infer that the young women were searched by men.
 
Davis was perhaps too decorous to have quizzed Señorita Arango on the sordid details of the incident, but if he knew the searchers to have been matrons, he should have been precise about it. He was also wrong about the number of searches endured by Señorita Arango (there were two, not three). And he was wrong on the point of law: Spain was perfectly entitled to search foreign ships in its harbor. Regardless, Davis emerged from the incident unscathed. He had moved quickly to pin blame on the
Journal,
vowing never to write for the paper again. Rival editors were quite pleased to accept his version of events and blame Hearst
,
who took the criticism without comment, as did Remington.
 
In the end, the results of the great Richard Harding Davis experiment were mixed. Hearst got “The Death of Rodriguez,” an unusually powerful piece for any daily to carry on its front page. He printed the first major report from the reconcentration camps, a story of enormous consequence. The Arango tale received its share of attention (a debate on Spain’s right to search American vessels erupted in Congress), but the incident itself was insignificant. Remington provided dozens of sketches, primarily of Spanish troops training, standing for inspection, loading their dead—enough to last the paper for several months. His work had a detail and subtlety that stood apart from the usual clear, bold lines of newspaper illustration but it did not reproduce as well on newsprint as it would have in magazines. Remington’s one illustration of the brave Rodriguez meeting his death easily matched Davis’s story for emotional power.
 
It is ironic that an effort to bring first-rate journalistic talent to a mass-circulation paper should still be cited more than a century later as an example of cheap sensationalism, but one significant mistake will have that effect. We do not know whether or not Hearst thought the Davis-Remington experiment worth the criticism it engendered, or the expense, but something that would have interested him keenly was the frame of mind in which Richard Harding Davis left Cuba. The
Journal
had taken a gamble sending Davis to report on the conflict. The hope was that the ruthlessness of the Spanish war effort and the suffering of the Cuban people would be sufficient to stir in any reporter, whatever his ideological or partisan leanings, a modicum of sympathy for the insurgency. By his return, Davis was as fierce an enemy as Spain had in America.
 
CHAPTER TWELVE
 
To Slay a Dragon and Free a Damsel in Distress
 
O
f all the advice Joseph Pulitzer hurled at Morrill Goddard before he departed to edit Hearst’s Sunday paper, the one piece of lasting significance was contained in a simple observation. “Most men know very little about their own business,” said Pulitzer, “and newspapermen least of all.” This hit Goddard between the eyes. He determined to study his trade as a doctor studied medicine or a divinity student the Bible. As obvious as this notion may seem now, there were no schools of journalism at the time, and the literature on the subject was thin so Goddard had to devise his own course of study. What he came up with bears little resemblance to what we might today consider a proper education in print journalism, with emphasis on writing and editing skills, legal and ethical issues, the history of the press, and so on. It is not that those things were unimportant; they just were not what Pulitzer meant by the business of newspapermen. Goddard took another approach entirely.
1
 
The business of an editor, as Goddard understood it, came down to two fundamentals: “to seize attention and deliver a compelling message.” The first took priority because it allowed for the second. Goddard believed that the way to seize attention was to print stories of interest to readers. Too many editors, he felt, filled their papers with items they themselves found interesting, or that interested their peers or people in positions of authority. Others sought to impress their audiences with their own superior taste, judgment, or intellect—they were especially fond of stories they believed readers
ought
to appreciate. Goddard dismissed these approaches as impractical, self-indulgent, and condescending to readers. He wanted the newspaper to be a friend as well as a mentor to its audience. People expect their friends to respect their taste, judgment, and intellect. Why shouldn’t an editor do his readers the courtesy of identifying and respecting their genuine interests and make his editorial choices accordingly? It followed that if an editor was to be successful, he needed to know what interested people, and why. That was the proper business of a newspaperman.
2
 
Goddard studied this subject throughout a long career during which he remained the most successful features editor at any American newspaper. His Sunday magazine-style sections for Hearst’s
Journal
evolved into the
American Weekly
supplement, which eventually achieved a circulation of 5.5 million in a nation of 75 million. At the end of his half century of practice, Goddard published a treatise entitled
What Interests People—and Why.
It is not a rigorous work, but it is probably the most serious attempt undertaken by an American practitioner of the craft to explore and codify human-interest journalism. Goddard adopts a very broad definition of his subject: human-interest journalism is journalism of interest to humans or, as he liked to say, journalism that sets the mind aglow. The mind, he wrote, is the seat of one’s senses, emotions, and intellect, and it is in these fields, to use another of his metaphors, that the journalist plants his seeds. If an editor does not understand the human mind—the way people think, feel, and behave—he cannot expect a bumper crop of readers.
3
 
None of that is terribly contentious. Goddard’s more daring assertions begin from the premise that it is hard to make people think. He agrees that the power of abstract thought is the highest human faculty, but he nonetheless sees a lot of flattery in the notion that man is a rational animal. In Goddard’s observation, people are far more interested in their sense perceptions and emotions than in their thoughts. He sees nothing particularly wrong or shameful in this, but puts it down to the fact that we have been sensing, feeling, and emoting since we lived in caves, while we have only lately begun to cultivate our rational faculties, public education and mass literacy being last-minute innovations in the life of man. Thus, while all mankind is capable of rational thought, most of us only use it with deliberate effort, after a good night’s sleep, and for remuneration. Even then, our efforts are often halfhearted and the results mixed. Our senses and emotions, by contrast, are always engaged and rather quickly and effortlessly excited and acted upon. At any given moment, our feelings are far more likely to be governing our intellects than vice versa. If an editor, then, wants to set our minds aglow, he had better respect our natural human inheritance and approach us through the grand portal of feelings rather than through the sticky wicket of rational thought.
 
The appeal to feelings is not an end in itself. Goddard argues that our emotions tend to ignite our intellects: a story catering to a reader’s feelings is more likely than a dry treatise to stimulate thought and persuade a reader to begin weighing facts and arguments. Goddard also considers it humane to approach the reader as a living, breathing whole rather than as a mere intellect. Great storytellers, he observes, have relied upon this approach from the Bible through Shakespeare to Dickens—aren’t those works celebrated for stimulating and cultivating human feelings as well as intellects? Why should journalism aim for less?
 
Surveying the full range of stories he had edited over the years, Goddard identified sixteen universal elements of human interest: love, hate, fear, vanity, evildoing, morality, selfishness, immortality, superstition, curiosity, veneration, ambition, culture, heroism, science, and amusement. Some overlap, while others were subject to Goddard’s own personal interpretations. For instance, he lumped stories about health fads under the label “fear,” and fashion under “ambition.” He also saw significance in the number sixteen: it allowed an editorial maestro two full octaves of emotions on which to play. Not surprisingly, Goddard’s standard repertoire included pieces on money and status, sacrifice and devotion, beautiful women, passions and crimes, mysteries and discoveries, and the spiritual life (or, as he called it, the haunted universe), all of which appealed to natural and deeply rooted instincts.

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