The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (62 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

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Not trusting the press or his diplomats, William McKinley, in one of his first acts as president, arranged to collect his own information in Cuba. He sent a friend, the former congressman William J. Calhoun, as his personal envoy to the island in the spring of 1897. Calhoun found that all classes of Cubans backed the insurrection, that the armies had fought to a standstill, and that the
reconcentrados
were dying in droves. Touring the depopulated countryside, he noted that “every house had been burned, banana trees cut down, cane fields swept with fire, and everything in the shape of food destroyed. . . . I did not see a house, a man, a woman or child; a horse, mule or cow, not even a dog; I did not see a sign of life, except an occasional vulture.” In the reconcentration camps, he observed children with swollen limbs and “extended abdomens that had a dropsical appearance; this I was told, was caused by a want of sufficient food.”
62
 
Calhoun put the death count at 300,000 and believed that if the Spanish were allowed to fight the war to its conclusion, the island’s entire population might be eliminated. His observations were seconded by C.F. Koop, a Boston tobacco merchant who several months later testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. By the end of 1897, Koop said, 80 percent of the
reconcentrados
in some camps had died. The Spanish policy, to his mind, amounted to genocide. He calculated that 500,000 to 600,000 people had perished in Cuba since the start of the conflict.
63
 
Hearst’s paper estimated 500,000 casualties in Cuba, and reported that Senator Gallinger, who had visited Cuba at the paper’s behest, used the figure of 600,000 in a speech to his colleagues.
64
The
Sun
and the
World
printed comparable numbers while the
Tribune
preferred a toll of 400,000. Other observers who were not in competition with Hearst had arrived at similar counts. In March 1898, writes John Offner, the American minister told the Spanish prime minister that 400,000 had died in Cuba; the Spanish leader did not dispute the figure, since his sources reported a similar loss of life.
65
José Canalejas, a Madrid publisher and respected politician who toured Cuba late in 1897, wrote two extensive reports on the situation for Premier Sagasta. Everyone he encountered on the Spanish side, of whatever political persuasion, agreed “that the war and reconcentration policy [had] led to the death of a third part, at the very least, of the rural population, that is to say, more than 400,000 human beings.” Canalejas put the total losses between reconcentration and fighting at 600,000, which represented close to 40 percent of the island’s population, with no end in sight.
66
 
At the start of 1898, there was a rough consensus in the United States that war, starvation, and disease had claimed at least 400,000 people in Cuba in very short order. More recent studies, working with data extrapolated from the last Spanish census and an American-led survey in 1899, have put the death toll in Cuba at less than 200,000.
67
The new numbers may be unduly conservative (there are serious problems with the data underlying these estimates).
a
In any event, the precise body count does not much bear on the legitimacy of Spanish war measures: it is indisputable that Spain forced at least several hundred thousand noncombatants away from their land and their livelihoods into reconcentration camps, where they dropped like flies from disease and lack of food and clean water. The humanitarian case for U.S. action does not vary if 50,000 lives are lost or half a million. No one in American public life was telling McKinley to wait until the death toll reached a big round number before intervention in Cuba was worth the bother.
 
By the end of 1897, the McKinley administration had clearly signaled that it was coming around to Hearst’s point of view. Coincidental to the Cisneros drama, the president had dispatched Stewart Woodford, his newly appointed envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, across the Atlantic to Spain, to inform Madrid that America was impatient with the “chronic condition of trouble and violent derangement” in Cuba. Woodford was to mention that the fighting had persisted through a period of twenty-nine years, dating from the start of the Ten Years’ War, and that the last two years in particular had threatened “mutual destruction” for the warring parties while bringing unexampled devastation to the island. Significant U.S. investment in Cuba had been destroyed, the peace of the American people disturbed, and their sympathies aroused. Woodford was further instructed to admit that McKinley was under pressure from Congress and the American public to recognize the Cuban rebels as belligerents.
68
 
The language of Woodford’s brief is important. The yellow newspapers are often criticized for demonizing Spain and exaggerating both its sins and the suffering of Cuba, yet the minister was told to speak not only of chronic trouble and violent derangement but “grave disorder and sanguinary conflict,” and he was told to chastise Spain for the “unparalleled severity” of its war measures. The administration described these measures as “horrible and unchristian and uncivilized,” and “cruel, useless and horrid.” Spain was begged to reconsider its methods “for the sake of humanity and civilization.” In personal correspondence, Woodford worried that the Spanish were intent on bringing “the peace of a graveyard” to Cuba.
69
 
McKinley himself used similar language in his first annual message to Congress on December 6, 1897. Nearly half of the speech was devoted to the Cuban insurrection. The president regretted the “devastation and ruin” of the island and the “horrors of starvation” that had visited the Cuban people and the “horrors and danger to our own peace.” Weyler was singled out as the commander “whose brutal orders inflamed the American mind and shocked the civilized world.” Reconcentration was described as a policy of “cruel rapine and extermination” that had “shocked the universal sentiment of humanity.” The words “shocked,” cruel,” “extermination,” “ruin,” “devastation,” and “horrible” were all repeated. At more than a half-dozen points, McKinley charged Spain with violating international standards of civilized conduct. There was no mention of feeding prisoners to the sharks but the administration and the yellow press were now finding harmony.
70
 
For all its flaws and melodrama, the Evangelina Cisneros story was an effective allegory of Spanish depredation, Cuban suffering, and American responsibility. The story did not drive the United States to confront Spain as its author, Hearst, had hoped. That decision was several months and three calamities away. It did, however, solidify popular sentiment against Spain and in favor of U.S. involvement. And when Washington finally chose to act, it followed to a remarkable extent Hearst’s script, right down to the chivalrous ire. The American people and their government, writes the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of U.S. foreign policy Walter A. McDougall, would be “swept by a hurricane of militant righteousness into a revolutionary foreign war, determined to slay a dragon and free a damsel in distress.”
71
 
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 
Uncrowned King of an Educated Democracy
 
T
he very same Saturday that Evangelina Cisneros and her guard of naval cadets rode into Madison Square to the accompaniment of the Seventh Regiment Band, Charles Anderson Dana, editor of the New York
Sun,
lay dying of cirrhosis of the liver at his home in Glen Cove, Long Island. He was seventy-eight years old and it was the first major illness of his life. At one point in the evening, he slipped into unconsciousness and his doctors gave him up for dead. Some time after midnight, the embers of a brushfire lit earlier in the day by workers on his property were whipped into flames by a north wind. The fire consumed several outbuildings and threatened the main house and Dana’s deathbed before it was brought under control around 4 a.m. The great editor did not stir throughout the emergency. He rallied in the morning long enough to murmur farewell to his assembled family and died in the early afternoon, knocking all other news, including Evangelina Cisneros, from the
Journal
’s front page.
 
Hearst’s coverage of Dana’s death was full and fair. It included an account of his final days, a review of his long and stormy career (highlighting his transition from youthful radical to archconservative), generous tributes from former colleagues and leading newspapermen, four front-page pictures, and the following editorial:
A good fighter, he was hard fought; a consistent hater, he did not escape hatred. But those who fought and who criticized and who hated never for a minute questioned his brilliancy of intellect, his mastery of style or his effectiveness in combat.
 
Charles A. Dana was a brilliant journalist. He was one of the last of the old-time “great editors”—a type which seems passing in journalism. Perhaps he would be the last man to wish to be spared just, if hostile, criticism after his death, and yet, hard as has been the fight he has waged, it is doubtful whether even his enemies will remember their grievances against him when they reflect how great and vigorous was the intellect which was thus obliterated.
1
 
 
 
Those were generous words considering what had transpired between the
Journal
and the
Sun
in the previous eight months. Not only had Dana tried to lead a moral revolt against the yellow papers, but in the midst of that campaign he had opened up a second front against Hearst with the aid of a cranky and little-known New York State Republican senator, Timothy E. Ellsworth. A practiced prude, Ellsworth had earlier contributed to the decency crusade by drafting a bill calling for fines and prison terms for anyone involved in the production and distribution of any licentious, indecent, corrupt, or depraved paper.
2
This ridiculous legislative gambit was laughed out of Albany, but Ellsworth returned with a better-focused effort to outlaw the publication of illustrated portraits, caricatures, and cartoons of identifiable persons without their prior consent. His so-called Anti-Cartoon Bill did not explicitly target Hearst, but no other paper used caricature as frequently and as effectively as the
Journal.
New York’s most powerful Republican, Thomas Platt, whose own mug was routinely abused in the
Journal,
lent Ellsworth his support, and the Anti-Cartoon Bill passed the state Senate. Dana, who had been depicted by Davenport as a pint-sized prizefighter pummeling straw anarchists in the
Journal
’s election coverage, took up the cause from Park Row:
No one can now be summoned into public view without the certainty of having not merely his portrait flaunted to the rabble, but of having the same subjected to every conceivable distortion and deformity. . . . If there ever was an evil that called for whole restraint by law, it is surely this.
3
 
 
 
There was a touch of hypocrisy in Dana’s position. He attacked public figures with relentless brutality, and while he seldom used cartoons, his prose was so evocative he hardly needed them: his jeremiad against Hearst’s paper—“the procuress corrupting her sex is not more an enemy to society than the ‘new journalism’”
—
was as vivid as anything Homer Davenport might produce. Despite Dana’s support, most editorialists and legislators dismissed Ellsworth’s initiative as a gross attack on press freedoms, and it died in the lower house without coming to a vote.
 
However bitter these final quarrels, Hearst was right to give Dana a generous send-off. He owed more to the
Sun
’s editor than either party would have admitted. Dana’s hatred of the yellow press, his high literary style, and his conservative visual tastes obscure the degree to which Hearst and Pulitzer benefited from his example. Dana taught them how to mix human-interest journalism, sharp rhetoric, and Democratic politics for a mass audience, and he trained many of the men crowding their executive suites. In fact, the biggest talent to leave the Dome for Hearst’s employ in 1897 owed his start not to Pulitzer but to Dana. Arthur Brisbane was the third of three great editorial talents to abandon Pulitzer in a span of eighteen months, following Morrill Goddard and S.S. Carvalho out the door.
 
 
 
BRISBANE WAS A YEAR YOUNGER than Hearst, yet he had several more years’ experience in journalism. He had been a teenager when his father, Albert, had arranged for him to meet Charles Dana, then at the peak of his success with the New York
Sun.
It was not just anyone who could walk in off the street and get his son an appointment with Dana: Albert Brisbane was a wealthy American socialist who had helped finance several Utopian communities in the United States, including Brook Farm, Dana’s alma mater. Not content with proselytizing his radical social ideals, the elder Brisbane had also practiced them at home. Young Arthur and his brother were raised as close as possible to the state of nature on a farm in New Jersey. They spent their days running wild, forbidden all contact with clergy, teachers, doctors, barbers, or books. Eventually Mrs. Brisbane intervened and Arthur was sent to boarding schools in Paris and Stuttgart, where he received a solid education at safe distance from the corrupting influences of American materialism. He returned to the United States intending to study at Harvard, but his visit to the
Sun
changed his plans.
4

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