Home Front Studies

Measuring Intent: Press Coverage of a Brutal Colonial War

Serving as a field correspondent during the Cuban crisis of the mid1890s was a challenging assignment. This was a colonial conflict outside US borders that involved a major world power. The escalating violence between Cuban nationalists and the Spanish regime placed correspondents in real danger, and in fact, a few were killed on assignment (such as the Chicago Record’s Charles Crosby and the Key West (FL) Equator-Democrat’s Charles Govin). Only five correspondents gained prolonged access to the insurgents: Sylvester Scovel (New York World), George Bronson Rea (New York Herald), Grover Flint (New York Journal), Karl Decker (New York Journal), and T. Robinson Dawley (Harper’s Weekly).³ Securing access to the insurgents at great personal risk, these correspondents possessed the most important attribute for achieving accurate reporting: proximity. As eyewitnesses, they were not only invaluable reporters but also became important sources of information to the US government, which is why Congress, particularly the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, repeatedly summoned them to supply briefings on the state of Cuban affairs.

Spanish authorities forbade foreign correspondents from interacting with the insurgents, which meant that US correspondents seeking to travel with and document the insurgency’s campaigns were in violation of Spanish law. In order to contain the rebellion and limit access to the interior, the Spanish regime constructed a fortified military line, called la trocha, which spanned the length of the island and was both heavily guarded and secured by barbed wire. Correspondents seeking access to the insurgent armies had to find ways around the trocha barriers while evading Spanish detection. Furthermore, to navigate the countryside and communicate with locals, correspondents had to procure guides and interpreters.

If these correspondents managed to connect with the insurgents, their next logistical problem was getting their reports back to the mainland. The Spanish strictly censored all dispatches to manage the flow of information leaving Cuba. As such, correspondents had to find couriers to smuggle their dispatches aboard ships to Key West, where they could be telegraphed to New York without Spanish oversight. [End Page 4] In the four months that Journal correspondent Grover Flint traveled with the insurgents, for example, only four of his dispatches made it out; the rest were lost. In order to maximize their chances of getting Flint’s copy back to editors in New York, his couriers divided dispatches into two parts and sent them separately, adding to Journal managing editor Arthur Brisbane’s frustration when Flint’s dispatches arrived in disjointed pieces.⁴ Seeking an advantage, Hearst chartered his own yacht, the Vamoose, to serve as a dispatch boat.

Given these risks and obstacles, most journalists did not cover the conflict from its epicenter. A Chicago Times-Herald editorialist explained: “Almost since the beginning of the existing hostilities between Spain and Cuba, Key West has been the seat, not of war, but of war correspondents. From that vantage ground of safety writers who never set foot on Cuban soil sent out thrilling descriptions of battles which they claimed to have witnessed.”⁵ In 1895, Cuban nationalist leaders created the Junta, a propaganda network, to raise money and rally support for their cause. Junta agents were strategically positioned in New York; Key West, Tampa, and Jacksonville, Florida; and other key cities. Isolated from the action and under great pressure from their editors to procure new reports on the progress of the rebellion, most correspondents opted to rely on Junta sources for information.

The late 1890s may seem far removed from the current context of 24/7 news coverage, but at least some of the circumstances were not that different. The leading urban papers printed multiple editions per day, creating a nearly constant demand for new material. It is hardly surprising, then, that correspondents eager to please their editors might sacrifice accuracy for juicy reports fed to them by Junta agents or even official Spanish sources, which were equally inaccurate. While critics of yellow journalism (then or now) might chastise editors for recklessly publishing unsubstantiated content, particularly when its import was so consequential, one also needs to acknowledge the circumstances in which this reporting occurred.⁶ Even if correspondents wanted to do their due diligence, the dynamics of the situation made verifying information unfeasible. Consequently, press coverage was strikingly uneven: it encompassed some critically valuable reporting acquired at great personal peril, [End Page 5] some intentionally misleading content rooted in lies or carelessness, and many reports based on rumor and speculation that simply could not be authenticated.⁷

The select group of correspondents who managed to gain proximity to the action unquestionably provided a level of insight into events that would not have been possible otherwise. Yet they were hardly objective. Nearly all the field correspondents unapologetically sympathized with the Cuban insurgency and became active stakeholders in ensuring its success. The New York World’s Scovel, for example, moonlighted as an intelligence operative and liaison, conveying messages from the Junta and the US State Department to Cuban military leaders like Generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo. As he was both actively collecting military information and acting as a go-between, how could Scovel not have been deeply invested in the outcome of the conflict? In violation of Spanish law, in early 1898 Scovel personally solicited a statement from Gómez (exclusively featured in the World), who proclaimed the insurgency’s rejection of Spain’s proposed autonomy plan and declared that its leaders would accept nothing short of independence.⁸ In an illuminating example of fake news, the AP reported that Gómez had ordered the hanging of Scovel in anger at his demand that the insurgency surrender, which was, of course, wildly untrue. Scovel merely acted as liaison in order to seek Gómez’s response, without any exertion of pressure, and Gómez certainly did not order his execution.⁹

One significant exception to the pro-Cuban leanings of the American press corps was New York Herald correspondent George Bronson Rea, who prided himself on giving a balanced account of both sides. While he admitted that his “sympathies naturally went out to this gallant band,” he sought, unlike his contemporaries, to hold the insurgency accountable for atrocities it committed as well as the intimidation tactics it imposed upon Cuban civilians.¹⁰ Rea acknowledged that censorship came not only from Spanish authorities but also from the insurgent leaders, who could withhold permission for correspondents to accompany them at any time. He wrote a letter to Gómez criticizing him, for instance, for having “prohibited me, under penalty of death, to write the truth about the [End Page 6] actual campaign.”¹¹ To be sure, Rea’s pledge to maintain vigilance toward both sides hardly confirms his objectivity. His critics accused him of pro-Spanish bias, which seemed only to be affirmed by Rea’s dramatic exit from Gómez’s camp after the general threatened to shoot him for reporting information back to the Herald that hurt the Cuban cause.¹²

Driving the culture of false reporting was a general lack of understanding of the nature of the conflict from outsiders. This was a guerrilla-based war that defied conventional expectations of warfare in which two armies confront each other in discrete battles. A young Winston Churchill, who arrived in Cuba on assignment for the London Daily Graphic, called the Cuban ranks “an undisciplined rabble” composed of “colored men” who “can neither win a single battle or hold a single town.” Churchill was baffled by and contemptuous of Gómez’s evasive military strategy.¹³ What Churchill failed to recognize was that Gómez lacked sufficient combatants and ammunition to fight traditional battles with the Spanish; instead, his strategy was to make the costs of colonial administration too high for Spain. Evading direct military confrontation with the Spanish, Gómez’s army scoured the countryside, laying waste to the sugar crop and harassing Spanish troops in small skirmishes. In order to achieve success where Cuba’s prior revolutionary struggle against Spain—the Ten Years’ War (1868–78)—had failed, Gómez sought a policy of “economic strangulation” of Cuba, pushing the rebellion into the wealthier western provinces, the center of sugar production on the island.¹⁴ The insurgency proceeded through western Cuba, burning plantations, demanding tribute from landowners, and terrorizing Cubans into joining their ranks. According to Rea, “the Spaniards claimed that the war was forced on the western provinces, and I must admit the truth of such a statement.”¹⁵ Rea called out specific insurgent leaders, like Roberto Bermúdez, Federico Nuñez, and Tomás Murgado, among others, for inaugurating what he called a “reign of terror” on Cuban civilians in order to coerce enlistments.¹⁶ Of Bermúdez specifically, Rea wrote: “I found the few pacificos remaining in the country, to be in mortal dread of him and his men.”¹⁷ In January 1896 María Cristina, the queen regent of Spain, replaced Captain-General Martínez Campos, whose efforts [End Page 7] to quell the spread of insurgency had failed, with the notorious commander General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau. To suppress unrest, Weyler instituted a “reconcentration” policy, rounding up the rural populations of western Cuba and moving them into fortified camps. The intent was to prevent them from supplying the insurgent armies. Cuban civilians were truly caught between a rock and a hard place: the insurgency scorched the systems of economy and labor that sustained their livelihoods at the same time that the reconcentration order created a mass detention of civilians in camps ill-equipped to support them.

American news correspondents traveling alongside the insurgent armies, such as Rea and Scovel, saw firsthand how the insurgent tactics differed from conventional warfare. It bothered Rea, who criticized Gómez because “he never seem[ed] inclined to meet the enemy.”¹⁸ Junta agents, however, recognized that minor skirmishes and evasion techniques did not make for compelling copy, so they fed hungry press correspondents a steady diet of false or exaggerated battle accounts.¹⁹ This campaign of misinformation led to such headlines in the Journal as “Details of General Weyler’s Utter Defeat by Maceo,” describing Maceo’s defeat of 10,000 Spanish troops, and “Gen. Weyler May Be Hemmed In: Gomez, with an Army of 20,000 Men, Is Moving West to Meet Him.”²⁰ Rea positioned himself as whistleblower of this charade in his 1897 publication The Facts and Fakes of Cuba, aiming to expose “the true rottenness of the whole affair.”²¹ Having accompanied Gómez’s insurgent army for nine months, he discredited countless reports, denouncing them as “the most revolting and audacious campaign of systematic misrepresentations and willful lying that can be found in modern history.” He nicknamed the Associated Press, to which the majority of American newspapers subscribed, a “fake news factory.”²² The AP had only one correspondent stationed in Cuba (F. J. Hilgert), who had no direct access to the insurgent armies and thus had little choice but to rely on questionable sources, such as the Junta. As soon as Spain announced the pending arrival of General Weyler, the Junta began furnishing correspondents with Spanish atrocity stories that filled the papers in the spring and summer of 1896.

The flood of Spanish atrocity reports correlated Cuban privation [End Page 8] with Spanish repression when, in reality, it was the compounding of insurgency strategy and Weyler’s reconcentration order that had exacerbated the crisis. Gómez was fighting a war of attrition, which effectively undermined Spanish control but at great human and economic cost. Weyler sought to subdue the rebellion in the western provinces by any means necessary and was unable to protect civilians from losing their livelihoods. Displacing them made the situation all the more dire, as mass starvation and disease gripped the camps. When referring to civilians, Rea wrote: “That they are in a pitiful condition can not be denied; but the writer [he was referring here to New York Herald special war correspondent Stephen Bonsal] has made the mistake of attributing all this misery to the reconcentration decree of Weyler, without referring to the previous causes that led to the present situation.”²³ Bonsal’s oversimplification of the crisis exemplified the general tenor of press coverage. The truth ostensibly was multidimensional, morally ambiguous, and complex.

Evaluating Journalistic Practice: A Master Class in the Art of Persuasion

The Cuban conflict was an illuminating episode in the history of journalistic practice, with American editors successfully mobilizing home front opinion, encouraging readers to feel emotionally invested in an international affair. As the prominent media researcher Peter Dahlgren aptly stated, “here we hit a sort of bottom line: the fundamental role of journalism in democracy is to link citizens to political life.”²⁴ What made this moment particularly remarkable in the history of journalism was the engagement of a largely provincially oriented readership with the impacts of a conflict beyond US borders.

To assess these press campaigns properly, one must situate them within the evolution of journalistic practice. This was a historical moment defined by advocacy journalism, not so-called objective journalism. To be sure, journalism is always subjective, but it was not until the 1910s that the professional ideals of objectivity and balanced reporting became more pronounced. Even in the 1890s editors understood the importance of factual reporting, which is evident by [End Page 9] their legitimating efforts. Yet they had no illusion of having to tell both sides of the story. Moreover, editors unapologetically deployed alleged facts in the service of whatever social or political agenda they sought to advance. Even though most papers had an editorial page, the line between feature story and editorial comment was often blurred. Compelled by the moral charge of “Cuba Libre,” Pulitzer and Hearst devoted their resources to its ends by all means necessary. The New York Herald, by contrast, though also siding with the Cubans, was more conservative in its pitch.

Spanish-American War press coverage, therefore, represents a historical case study in the art of persuasion, presenting an opportunity to study the confluence of tactics that were mobilized to engage readers at home. Given the complexity and indefinability of Cuban affairs, it was all the more reckless for editors to ground their reporting so pointedly in the language of facticity. Instead of declaring the challenges that prevented them from speaking with certainty, editors coated their reports with a veneer of truth. To be sure, press coverage during the earlier period of the conflict (1895–early 1897) often acknowledged rumor and speculation. But the level of conviction in the language of reporting kept amplifying over the course of 1897 and did not relent until Congress declared war in April 1898, bringing the United States into the conflict.

In order to lay out briefly some of the key rhetorical strategies in this journalistic tool kit, I will present only a few illustrative examples, each of which reflects larger patterns of journalistic practice.

establishing simple, compelling narratives

It is not hard to imagine that US readers might sympathize with those struggling to break free from colonial oppression. The newspaper editors were masterful storytellers who tugged at readers’ moral heartstrings by framing Cuba’s struggle for independence as a melodramatic tale of good versus evil, of the defenseless confronting power. Accordingly, the Spanish brute became a familiar character on news pages and in cartoons across the country. In one representative example (see fig. 1), Hearst’s West Coast paper, the San Francisco [End Page 10]

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Fig. 1.

The Spanish brute, as depicted in William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, April 28, 1898.

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Examiner, published a cartoon featuring multiple faces of a sadistic Spanish pirate. He boasts of his genocidal and psychopathic prowess: “Have I not the right to murder and starve the Cubans if I choose?”; and “No; to kill, to butcher and to starve is never a mistake. It has always been my policy.” The recurrence of this visual and textual messaging normalized Spanish barbarism, providing for readers a set of expectations that substantiated any claims of Spanish treachery. Furthermore, by turning a complex international conflict into a human-interest story, editors invited the American savior to swoop in and save the vulnerable from colonial subjugation. As Amanda Frisken wrote in her history of graphic news, “sensational visual journalism . . . was at its most persuasive when it promoted stories of honor, adventure, and swashbuckling heroism.”²⁵

Hearst’s operation was instrumental in shaping this melodramatic narrative. It fit perfectly into the new journalistic style he was formulating—a “journalism of action”—that not only covered the news but also actively intervened in making it. After learning about the fate of a young Cuban woman, Evangelina Cisneros, imprisoned on the charge of treason, Hearst went all in to construct her story as the quintessential tale of Spanish depravity. The Journal reported: “Evangelina Betancourt Cisneros, young, beautiful, cultured, guilty of no crime save that of having in her veins the best blood in Cuba, is in imminent danger of being sent to Spain’s African penal settlement for twenty years. This true daughter of the Revolution is now undergoing trial by a military tribunal at Havana on the charge of rebellion, after a hideous imprisonment of nine months in a jail filled with the vilest women of Havana.”²⁶ For six weeks, Hearst chronicled her distress through a succession of illustrated news stories. The Journal published, for example, a large illustration of her being forced to scrub the floors on her hands and knees “in the unspeakable den in which she is imprisoned.”²⁷ Such outwardly false accounts were surely meant to heighten public outrage.

Not everyone was fooled. Fitzhugh Lee, the US consul to Cuba, checked on Cisneros personally and called the Journal’s claims “false and stupid.”²⁸ The New York Herald published Lee’s statement attesting that she was “well clothed and fed” and kept in “two clean rooms.”²⁹ Lee further substantiated her guilt according to Spanish [End Page 12] law: “That she was implicated in the insurrection on the Isle of Pines, there can be no question. She herself, in a note to me, acknowledged that fact.” Contrary to the Journal’s claims that she was to be harshly sentenced, Lee affirmed that she was already on the pardon list and “would have been pardoned long ago if it had not been for the hubbub created by American newspapers.”³⁰

Undaunted, Hearst added to the drama by organizing a petition campaign for Cisneros’s release that allegedly received signatures from over ten thousand women across the globe. Then, in the spirit of his “journalism of action” philosophy, Hearst sent his own field correspondent, Karl Decker, to Cuba to break Cisneros out of prison and convey her to safety in the United States. Who could resist the lure of such a story? Although some have questioned the details of the rescue plot, it appears to have happened as reported. Much has been written about this bold journalistic exploit, by which Hearst captured public attention by manufacturing an international crisis around the woman’s incarceration and then took it upon his paper to save her. Not surprisingly, in the days after the rescue, the Journal brimmed with self-congratulatory rhetoric. In concert with the stream of reports of Spanish atrocities, the Cisneros story warranted belief because it confirmed the larger narrative of Spanish exploitation, particularly of women, that circulated broadly in American visual and popular culture.³¹

attributing reports to correspondents on location

The Journal and World, among a few other periodicals, distinguished themselves by employing correspondents to cover the crisis on location. Editors recognized the influential weight of named sources, which was a fairly novel convention for late nineteenth-century newspapers. Giving correspondents attribution with a byline or accompanying portrait highlighted their special access. Their reports pitched a level of insider, privileged access that these select correspondents had achieved by currying favor with key actors in the conflict. On a front-page spread in January 1898, for instance, the World published a large drawing of General Gómez: “Reproduced [End Page 13] from a photograph taken a fortnight ago in Santa Clara Province. Gen. Gomez held in his hand his signed message to the United States sent through The World.” Enhancing the newspaper’s own credibility, the caption gave precise details about when and where the photograph had been taken and reveled in the fact that the World had been the agent to deliver this important diplomatic communication.³²

At times, reporters consciously manipulated the use of attribution to feign authenticity. New York Herald writer Rea, for example, took aim at Journal correspondent Frederick Lawrence, whom he saw as one of the worst offenders in terms of propagating falsehoods. Rea accused Lawrence, who did not travel with the insurgents, of habitually crediting his vivid descriptions of events to an imaginary correspondent in the field. As one might imagine, Rea was later horrified when Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama gave a speech justifying action based on Lawrence’s testimony.³³

Over the course of 1897, editors increasingly published bylines that affixed correspondents’ names to their stories, heralding the rise of the golden age of war correspondence. Their names achieved a persuasive power that editors leveraged to the hilt. Perhaps the best example was the World’s premier correspondent, Scovel, who made such a reputation for himself that Brisbane repeatedly tried to lure him to the Journal. Scovel’s tenure in Cuba was colorful, to say the least: he was shot in the leg, arrested multiple times, and deported more than once. His talents made him one of Weyler’s primary targets (Weyler offered a $10,000 reward for his capture), to which the World responded: “The Spanish complaint against him is not that he has told lies, but that he has relentlessly told the truth; not that he has perverted facts, but that he has related them in all their naked hideousness.”³⁴ The World hailed Scovel as exclusively positioned to provide the most accurate insights on evolving events.

A testament to his growing reputation, Scovel’s arrest in February 1897 generated enough international attention and diplomatic pressure to ensure his swift release from Spanish custody. His release inspired the World to print a political cartoon crediting the worldwide outcry for his liberation (see fig. 2). It depicts an armor-clad Scovel as the warrior of “Truth,” grasping a torch and fitted with a helmet bearing the plumes of “Accuracy,” “Energy,” and “Public Service.” [End Page 14] Standing upon headlines of international importance, Scovel literally embodies the superpower of truth-telling, free again to serve the public good. As the World editorialized, “Mr. Scovel’s work in the field has been unique. He writes of what he sees, not of what he hears. Mr. Scovel has shown that he combines all the great and high qualities of the war correspondent—devotion to duty, accuracy, graphic descriptive power, absolute courage and skill both in getting the news and in sending it through the enemy’s lines to his newspaper.”³⁵ Scovel’s on-location reputation, therefore, allowed him to

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Fig. 2.

Sylvester Scovel as warrior of “Truth” in the New York World, March 11, 1897.

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become a household name and came to define the World’s brand of allegedly truthful reporting.

providing visual proof

In terms of quality, newspaper images at the time were still a far cry from the standards of later photographic journalism. Indeed, even when photographs were available, the papers typically had them redrawn by hand, issuing their images in print as graphic illustrations. Nonetheless, these renderings still had the power to convey ideological ideas in an economical and captivating way. Some of the most compelling images of the press campaigns were pictorial compilations, published in 1897 and early 1898, of suffering Cubans— particularly women and children in advanced stages of malnutrition and starvation. In one celebrated case, Journal correspondent Julian Hawthorne investigated the state of the Cuban reconcentration camps and sent photographs back to New York. In turn, in-house illustrators used them to create large graphic spreads, with captions attributing the images to photographs taken on location, in what came to be called the Journal’s “Human Documents” campaign. With his usual descriptive flair, Hawthorne wrote harrowing descriptions to narrate the visual exposition, such as: “On the first cot a child about five years old lay prone. She was breathing with difficulty and was evidently in pain. . . . She was in the act of dying, no one was attending to her.”³⁶

Moreover, editors often punctuated these illustrated stories with statistical data attesting to the numbers of Cubans dead and dying and the number of Americans in dire need in Cuba. The World, for example, accompanied images of emaciated children varying in age from six to fourteen with the headline: “World Photographs Taken among the 200,000 Survivors of the 400,000 Cuban Non-Combatants Condemned to Death by Weyler’s Order” (see fig. 3). Next to an image of a near-naked, dangerously gaunt, and helpless-looking child appears the label “Another ‘Rebel,’” a clear shot at Spain for targeting innocent civilians to suppress the insurgency. The numerical data magnifying the scale of the crisis, combined with the heartrending [End Page 16] illustrations, likely sought to rouse readers’ sympathies. In reality, editors had no way of confirming the accuracy of these numbers. More recent studies of the death toll estimate that fewer than 200,000 likely died, but reports in the New York papers went up as high as 600,000.³⁷

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Fig. 3.

The New York World’s depiction of Cubans perishing under Spanish oppression, November 14, 1897.

The Journal took its picture campaign a step further by submitting its images to Congress as documentary evidence in favor of military intervention. In a revealing meta-example of graphic news consumption, the Journal published an illustration of congressional leaders viewing this set of images. It showed readers that the very images they were seeing on the news pages were circulating among members of the House of Representatives, thus corroborating their [End Page 17] authenticity and allowing readers to experience their moral outrage collectively with their national leaders (see fig. 4). Journalists in the House galleries duly reported on the images’ reception in Congress: “‘Horrible!’ ‘Shocking!’ ‘Shameful!’ ‘Revenge!’ were the expressions which followed a first glance at the pictures.”³⁸ Such graphic news was vital to inciting readers’ emotions, making visible the cruel impacts of the humanitarian crisis, and, along with partisan textual commentary, substantiating the moral necessity of routing Spanish villainy.

deploying expert opinions and testimonials

The impact of these image campaigns on home front opinion was surely magnified when, on February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing 266 American sailors. Both the Journal and the World hired diver teams to investigate but were prohibited from accessing the site. The United States and Spain conducted parallel investigations that came to opposing conclusions: the Americans determined the cause to be external to the ship, while the Spanish found it to be internal. The US Naval Board of Inquiry surmised that the explosion was likely caused by a mine in the harbor but found no evidence to tie Spain or any other party to the crime. However, this finding did not prevent the Journal and the World from trying and convicting Spain in the court of public opinion.

To incriminate Spain, the Journal and the World built a persuasive case that relied on the allegedly expert opinions of correspondents on scene such as Scovel and George Eugene Bryson; the Maine’s own captain, Charles Sigsbee; Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt; and various admirals and other naval experts. As discussed earlier, correspondents like Scovel had already established credibility with readers. It is for this reason that front-page headlines like “‘It Was a Torpedo,’ Cables Sylvester Scovel,” printed in the World just three days after the Maine exploded, carried such weight.³⁹ Essentially, the papers trafficked in rumor and speculation but presented them as fact. The World wrote: “Ensign [Wilfrid Van Nest] Powelson, an officer of the light-house tender Fern, has found [End Page 18]

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Fig. 4.

The New York Journal portrays its own images under the scrutiny of congressional leaders, April 6, 1898.

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indisputable evidence that the keel of the battle-ship was blown upward. The forward ports are visible above the water. Their ribs and plates were forced upward so that part of the double bottom can be seen. . . . It can be positively stated that the boilers of the Maine did not explode.” By insisting that the boilers were still intact, Powelson offered convincing proof that the Maine had not blown up from an internal cause, and his observations of the upward bend of the plates seemed to confirm the theory that the source of the explosion came from below, as if from a Spanish mine. Similarly, the Journal’s expert, Captain E. L. Zalinksi, brought his knowledge to bear on the question by analyzing photographs of the Maine wreckage and concluding: “The destruction of the Maine was brought about by a tremendous blow from the port side, acting toward the starboard. . . . The conclusion, therefore, forces itself upon us that it was probably a fixed submarine mine or type known as a grounds mine, planted in the bottom of the harbor, which destroyed the Maine.” The employment of experts who closely examined diagrams of the ship and photographs of the shipwreck provided the basis for the newspapers’ conclusive findings, and in so doing, took a telling leap into advocacy for readers at home. As the World put it, “the Government of Spain is inescapably responsible for the destruction of the Maine by a MINE in Havana Harbor. What are we going to do about it?”⁴⁰ In fact, even before the US Naval Board published its official report, dated March 21, 1898, the Journal and World repeatedly stated the “cold facts” that Spain was culpable.⁴¹

On a logical level, of course, it was not in Spain’s interests to target the Maine: short of leaving Cuba, the Spanish regime had been doing everything it could to avoid war. Still, it is possible that unauthorized Spanish sources committed the act or that Cuban insurgents were behind it, as they certainly had motive to want to incite US intervention. Nonetheless, the true cause has never been proven, and subsequent investigations have affirmed the possibility that it could have been accidental after all.⁴² But once the US Naval Board pointed to an external cause, the portrait of Spanish treachery that had become deeply entrenched in the media consciousness was enough to confirm the feeling that Spain was guilty. As a result, the board’s [End Page 20] findings drew the captivated nation closer to war, perhaps inevitably so, despite the lack of any evidence directly implicating Spain.

Just as editors called upon experts to confirm their theories of the Maine explosion, they also sought a more official validation of the humanitarian crisis. As the country awaited the Naval Board’s findings, the Journal sent its own congressional commission, comprising three senators and two representatives, to visit Cuba at the newspaper’s expense. In essence, Hearst paid these public figures to verify his paper’s perspective on the extent of civilian suffering. When the commission returned, it affirmed the need for immediate action and provided exclusives to the Journal, detailing the horrific sights its members had witnessed. One commissioner, Representative William Alden Smith of Michigan, emphatically told the Journal: “Language is inadequate to describe the suffering and misery seen here.”⁴³ Arranging the visit and giving voice to these respected politicians’ firsthand accounts of Cuban privation lent greater authority to the Journal’s partisan views.

A related—and pivotal—moment in driving the nation to war was a speech by Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont on March 17, 1898. President William McKinley had sent Proctor, who was esteemed as prudent and dispassionate, to conduct his own investigation of Cuban affairs. Even though the visit occurred independently from the press, editors seized upon the speech in which Proctor reported his findings as a key testimonial for their campaigns. The Journal’s editorial was revealing:

Mr. Proctor is thrillingly sensational, because the facts he has to present do not allow him to be anything else, but he is not a “lying correspondent.” . . . And the report he lays before the Senate confirms in every detail the news sent to the Journal for months past by the devoted men who have risked their lives in the service of truth, and who have been libelled as purveyors of baseless sensations by papers that have never spent a dollar for Cuban correspondence of their own. Senator Proctor went to Cuba, as he said, believing that the pictures of misery had been overdrawn, but he found that “words could not draw the picture in all its horrors.” . . . These statements cannot be dismissed as newspaper rumors.⁴⁴ [End Page 21]

Here the Journal wielded Proctor’s speech as a legitimation of its reporting executed in the “service of truth” to validate its editorial agenda, demonstrating that it was not rooted in lies or rumor. To the press, Proctor’s speech was the ultimate in expert testimonial, effectively serving as both its vindication and the nation’s call to arms.

A Historical Reassessment

Fake news was clearly a critical piece of the media ecosystem of the 1890s.⁴⁸ Its efficacy during the Cuban crisis can be traced to the [End Page 23] artful tactics of partisan editors as well as the susceptibility and compliance of their readers. Driving its production was a culture of advocacy journalism that went unrestrained. Some of the period’s fake news stemmed from limited access, while some amounted to outright lies. Yet remarkably, the leading practitioners of yellow journalism did not come away from the Cuban conflict swayed by the future potential of these journalistic practices, despite their soaring circulation numbers and successful incitement of American military involvement. Even before 1898 had concluded, Pulitzer instructed his staff members to tone down their sensationalist tactics, while Hearst’s “journalism of action” took a pause after failing to enrich his paper financially.⁴⁹

Pulitzer and Hearst, like many editors of the period, seemed genuinely sympathetic to the Cuban cause, and this moral imperative situated their content. Their bias likely contributed to what media researchers term selective exposure: the phenomenon in which people “indulge information that pleases [them]” and give a “deaf ear” to the information that might challenge those beliefs.⁵⁰ To put it another way, in 2005 Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness to convey his critique of partisan journalism. He claimed, “Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty.”⁵¹ He explained the phenomenon of “feeling the news,” when people justify their position not on evidence, logic, or facts but on the basis of intuition and feelings. In the case of Cuba, antipathy among US readers toward Catholic imperial Spain was so ubiquitous that it likely made plausible any account of Spanish wrongdoing. The broad circulation of cartoon imagery of the Spanish as bloodthirsty pirates, brutes, and rapists served to validate that feeling. Similarly, sympathy for Cuba’s struggle was so visceral that correspondents may not even have consciously realized that they were discounting, or entirely omitting, the insurgency’s part in the crisis. Predisposing press coverage was a gut emotional instinct that confirmed the truthiness of any report that favored Cuban resistance or castigated Spanish brutality, justifying American intervention even without much consideration of what that would mean for Cuba’s future.

Fake news, moreover, required audience buy-in to be effective. The pervasive vitriol exchanged between rival papers denouncing [End Page 24] the others’ inaccurate reports suggests that readers likely approached papers like the Journal and the World with some degree of skepticism. But as the rising circulation numbers of these papers attest, readers may not have cared if the news was accurate; simply put, they may have already made their minds up. As noted in the writings of journalist Farhad Manjoo and other contemporary media studies, a striking pattern emerges when consumers are confronted with contrary reports: “in an effort to avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes out of receiving news that challenges our beliefs, we cunningly select the messages we consume.”⁵² Readers of the 1890s were little different. In a telling example, the weekly newspaper Fourth Estate reported just weeks prior to the declaration of war against Spain that Manhattan newsboys were shouting on the streets: “Here’s yer fake latest extra!” and “Exclusive Fakes!” and still selling all their copies.⁵³ Such rhetoric must have boosted sales for newsboys to capitalize on it so readily. Evidently, once persuaded to sympathize with Cuba, readers may have consciously or subconsciously ignored any contrary report or allegation of inaccuracy that challenged this position. In other words, when confronted with a story based in rumor, they may have chosen to feel the news, to go with instincts shaped by whom they envisioned as in the right and whom they deemed in the wrong. Thus, fake news thrived because it was coconstructed by its purveyors and its receivers, both of whom had to be willing to overlook the lack of facticity.⁵⁴

Still, the question remains: Did yellow journalism cause the Spanish-American War? Those who believe so look no further than the oft-cited telegrammic exchange between Hearst and artist Frederic Remington in January 1897. Remington allegedly cabled Hearst: “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.” Hearst is said to have responded: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” Many historical accounts point to this exchange as evidence of Hearst’s malicious intent to manufacture the war. Hearst did not help the case, as he essentially boasted that indeed this war was of his own making. On May 8, 1898, Hearst placed alongside his front-page nameplate on the Journal: “How do you like the Journal’s War?”

But this telegrammic exchange is hardly a smoking gun. The [End Page 25] Hearst–Remington messages, it turns out, were likely just more fake news. W. Joseph Campbell’s historical detective work in his book Yellow Journalism persuasively debunks the view that the exchange even happened. It was first reported by Journal correspondent James Creelman in his book On the Great Highway: The Wanderings and Adventures of a Special Correspondent (1901). At the time of the alleged communication, Creelman was serving in Europe, so at best, he was describing a secondhand account told to him after the fact. Hearst’s telegram itself was never found, and Hearst adamantly denied sending it. Campbell demonstrates that the likelihood of such a telegram defies reason: not only because it would have failed to make it past the Spanish censors but also because it did not make sense within the context of events.⁵⁵ Creelman’s account gained currency in the 1930s when public distrust of Hearst’s newspaper empire was on the rise, and it soon became part of the historical narrative of the Spanish-American War in journalistic histories and biographies.⁵⁶ Its dubious status, however, affirms that it is insufficient evidence to prove that yellow journalism induced the war.

Regardless, it is clear from the documentary record that President McKinley did not take his cues from the press. In November 1897, Spain’s queen regent adopted a conciliatory course, recalling Weyler and granting Cuban autonomy. McKinley sought to give these policies “a reasonable chance.”⁵⁷ The autonomy scheme, however, never gained traction. The insurgents categorically rejected it, and the Maine disaster soon overshadowed it, making a diplomatic solution less viable. Still, Spanish leaders repeatedly denied responsibility for the Maine explosion, actively assisted in the ship’s rescue and recovery efforts, and even offered to submit the matter to peaceful arbitration. McKinley refused, but not because the newspapers told him to do so. His actions were influenced by the findings of official government investigations, like that of the US Naval Board of Inquiry and Senator Proctor’s evaluation of Cuban affairs. In fact, once McKinley had decided upon a military course, his administration transformed the war from one of liberation (promoting Cuban independence) to one of conquest, with the United States acquiring the remainder of Spain’s imperial holdings. Had the Journal and the World been dictating the course of action, [End Page 26] the war would have ended with Cuban independence and would not have resulted in the American incorporation of Puerto Rico, Guam, or the Philippines. Pulitzer, for his part, felt deeply betrayed by the imperial turn of the war and avidly opposed it. Hearst came around to supporting McKinley’s policies, although his editorial line had long favored “Cuba Libre.” Even if McKinley felt public pressure to take action, it would be reductive to conclude that war or imperial acquisition was his only option.

Labeling the Spanish-American War a press-made war, therefore, is misleading: (1) the press did not control when the nation went to war (the Journal and World had been advocating for intervention for years); (2) even with its penchant for fake news, the press did not invent the humanitarian crisis in Cuba or the Maine explosion; and (3) the press did not prescribe the political agenda of the war. Campbell calls the press-made theory of the war a dangerous “media myth” that, by blaming press sensationalism, effectively deflects responsibility away from those who had the actual power to shape and implement foreign policy, who, it must be noted, made a critical shift away from the nation’s isolationist past toward the assumption of global empire.⁵⁸

Nonetheless, even if yellow journalism did not cause the war, the propaganda-infused media environment of the time is certainly a relevant factor in understanding popular investment in the conflict. Press coverage kept the public spotlight on the Cuban crisis, persuading readers on the emerging home front to care about its impacts and ultimately unite behind a military course of action. Perhaps this sentiment was easily stirred, as the nation had not seen war with a foreign power since the 1840s, and a rise in martial spirit was palpable. But even if many Americans were predisposed to want war, they likely wished to believe that its cause was legitimate and just. As an editorial in the Boston Post put it, “the public, we believe, wants the facts; it does not want to be trifled with.”⁵⁹ Such readers may have been willing to accept, or simply overlook, some degree of bias and imprecision, not realizing the full extent of distortion and falsity permeating press accounts. And so, in the end, the most disturbing element is the lengths to which certain editors went to proclaim the factual basis of their reporting when they were fully [End Page 27] aware of its tenuous nature. Perhaps this is the true tell-all, the historical lesson to be learned. The newspapers that declared their devotion to truth the loudest were, ironically, the least faithful to it. In the words of Hamlet’s mother: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”⁶⁰