FINISHING
THE JOB
An American
cartoon from
the fall of 1898
shows Uncle Sam
administering the
coup de grâce
to the tottering
Spanish Empire.
GRANGER/ALBUM
and ordered Creelman to concoct a plan to pur-
chase a tramp steamer that would be sunk in
the Suez Canal to block the Spanish fleet if it
attempted to reach Manila. This ridiculous
scheme was never carried out.
Hearst was not alone: Pulitzer’s Wo r l d corre-
spondent Sylvester Scovel, a former drama critic
in Cleveland and one of the most flamboyant
correspondents, had such a close relationship
with the insurgent Gen. Máximo Gómez that
the Spanish considered him a rebel agent, which
he effectively was. Scovel carried messages back
and forth to Gómez and supplied American au-
thorities with intelligence.
In this same participatory spirit, Scovel in-
sisted on joining in the solemn ceremony to low-
er the Spanish flag at the end of the war. When
the rotund American commander, Gen. William
Rufus Shafter, told him to take his hands off thehalyard, the correspondent slugged him, or tried
to (accounts vary).
The New York newspapers were not the on-
ly ones feeding the public’s appetite for news
about Cuba. Americans everywhere were
inundated with reports and editorials about
Cuba. In the seven months leading up to the war,
readers of the conservative Los Angeles Times
found almost 10 Cuba-related items on aver-
age each day; readers of the Chicago Tribune had
more than six.
Newspapers often took swipes at each other
and the quality of their rivals’ coverage, but rival
papers’ critiques of each other did little to ex-
onerate the Spanish or poke holes in insurgents’
claims. Far more commanding was the size of
the Journal’s headline type, which increased
400 percent in the run-up to the war. Editor
Arthur Brisbane was thankful that the word
“war” had only three letters. “Had we had the
French ‘guerre’ or even the German ‘Krieg’ to
deal with, we would have been lost.”
Before war was declared, George Bronson Rea
of the relatively restrained New York Herald grew
so fed up with the journalistic shenanigans in
coverage of the rebellion he wrote Facts and Fakes
about Cuba. But he admitted to having “omitted
many events that would have hurt the cause” of
the insurgents.Multimedia War
Every medium, from comic strips to print ad-
vertising, wanted in on the act. The Yellow Kid,
a crazed cartoon character who gave the yellow
press its moniker, set out in one series of comic
strips to redress Cuba’s ills. An inspired copy-
writer came up with “We would like to C-U-B-A
purchaser of a pair of our stylish fitting shoes.”
The Chicago Dry Goods Reporter suggested re-
tailers use “the disaster to the battleship Maine”
for window displays.
Magazines were no less hyperventilating.
Cosmopolitan editor John Brisben Walker pro-
claimed, “The time is right for the interference
of the United States in the affairs of Cuba.”
New York Herald correspondent Stephen Bon-
sal wrote in Harper’s Weekly, “In these leaking
huts, where the dead and the dying lie huddled
together, unceasing prayers are being offered up86 MARCH/APRIL 2019