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Authors: Kenneth Whyte
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Mrs. Nack and Martin Thorn had murdered Willie Guldensuppe in order to pursue their love undisturbed. She had lured the victim to a cottage in the Queen’s neighborhood of Woodside, where Thorn, taking no chances, awaited him with a pistol, a poison dagger, a hammer, a noose, carbolic acid, and a carving knife. After shooting Guldensuppe and stabbing him in the heart with the poison dagger, Thorn had dissected him in the bathtub and dumped his parts around town. The victim’s head was never found. Mrs. Nack got fifteen years. In August 1898, Thorn took a seat in the electric chair at Sing Sing. Fifty-nine seconds later he was dead.
68
68
CRANE, SEELEY, Corbett-Fitzsimmons, and Guldensuppe are among the most sensational of the sex, violence, and squalor stories covered by Hearst in New York. There were many others, some one-day wonders, some week-long page-dominating dramas, some raising serious public issues, some occasioning brilliant journalism, and others best described as meretricious junk. While Hearst managed to dominate more than his share of these narratives, almost all of them would have excited the public even without his attentions. It was an age of sensation. The public space was awash in febrile emotions and they spilled not only into murders and scandals but such great and consequential events as the Panic of ’93 and the clash of ’96, with all of it leading to a great bloody eruption over Cuba in ’98. Hearst did not set the mood, but he reveled in it and amply exposed its less savory dimensions to his readers, and that was enough to make him a plausible target for a morals campaign.
Ervin Wardman led the charge
.
A tall, severe native of Salt Lake City, Wardman followed Hearst by a few years at Harvard before taking up journalism and climbing swiftly to the editorship of the
New York Press.
A staunch Republican sheet, the
Press
fought McKinley’s corner in ’96, mocking Hearst as “our silverite, or silver-wrong” competitor, which was about as close to humor as the grim Wardman ever managed. He took pleasure in taunting the socially prominent Phoebe Hearst for having raised a rabble-rousing son who ran a paper without “even the veneer of decency.” He claimed that Hearst had spent millions in weak imitation of Pulitzer’s “new journalism,” and he dismissed both the
Journal
and the
World
as “fake mongers, chambers of horrors, cesspools, sloughs, purveyors of mendacity.”
69
The
Press
had lost its business manager to the
Journal
in 1896 and was struggling to hold its circulation in an increasingly competitive market.
70
.
A tall, severe native of Salt Lake City, Wardman followed Hearst by a few years at Harvard before taking up journalism and climbing swiftly to the editorship of the
New York Press.
A staunch Republican sheet, the
Press
fought McKinley’s corner in ’96, mocking Hearst as “our silverite, or silver-wrong” competitor, which was about as close to humor as the grim Wardman ever managed. He took pleasure in taunting the socially prominent Phoebe Hearst for having raised a rabble-rousing son who ran a paper without “even the veneer of decency.” He claimed that Hearst had spent millions in weak imitation of Pulitzer’s “new journalism,” and he dismissed both the
Journal
and the
World
as “fake mongers, chambers of horrors, cesspools, sloughs, purveyors of mendacity.”
69
The
Press
had lost its business manager to the
Journal
in 1896 and was struggling to hold its circulation in an increasingly competitive market.
70
Wardman is believed to be the first editor to publish the term “yellow journalism” in relation to Hearst and Pulitzer. Because it was never intended as a classification so much as as an epithet, Wardman never got around to defining the phrase. It appears to have been inspired by his loathing of the Yellow Kid cartoons—Wardman took their irreverent gutter humor as symbolic of everything foul in the
World
and the
Journal.
Whatever its derivation, it seems clear that Wardman intended “yellow journalism” to cover a gamut of journalistic sins, from unreliable information to dangerous politics, moral turpitude, sensationalism, and bad taste. It was soon ubiquitous as a term of abuse for both the Hearst and the Pulitzer papers, and it remains today as Wardman’s principal contribution to the history of journalism.
World
and the
Journal.
Whatever its derivation, it seems clear that Wardman intended “yellow journalism” to cover a gamut of journalistic sins, from unreliable information to dangerous politics, moral turpitude, sensationalism, and bad taste. It was soon ubiquitous as a term of abuse for both the Hearst and the Pulitzer papers, and it remains today as Wardman’s principal contribution to the history of journalism.
In addition to sniping at Hearst and Pulitzer, Wardman joined Dana’s
Sun
and the
New York Times,
recently purchased by Adolph Ochs, in fomenting a public uprising against the yellow menace through the winter of 1896 and well into ’97. The
Times
acted as megaphone for a committee of the New York Ministers’ Association that was complaining about the pernicious influence of the
World
and the
Journal,
papers “so low in moral tone as to make their toleration and success a reproach upon the community.” The ministers encouraged the public to patronize “clean and wholesome” newspapers—papers like the
Times,
it went without saying.
71
Sun
and the
New York Times,
recently purchased by Adolph Ochs, in fomenting a public uprising against the yellow menace through the winter of 1896 and well into ’97. The
Times
acted as megaphone for a committee of the New York Ministers’ Association that was complaining about the pernicious influence of the
World
and the
Journal,
papers “so low in moral tone as to make their toleration and success a reproach upon the community.” The ministers encouraged the public to patronize “clean and wholesome” newspapers—papers like the
Times,
it went without saying.
71
When trustees of the Newark Free Public Library voted on February 4, 1897, to remove copies of the
Journal
and the
World
from its files on the grounds that their “chronicles of crime, of lust, and of general nastiness” were offensive to decent people and corruptive of youth, Wardman and Dana could not contain themselves. “In decent public esteem yellow journalism occupies the same place as brothels,” crowed the
Press.
72
The
Sun
warmly congratulated the Newark trustees and encouraged other libraries, clubs, and reading rooms to institute similar bans. It claimed to see in the
World
and the
Journal
a licentious, vulgar, and criminal spirit and “an effrontery almost without example in the history of journalism.”
73
Dana, a past master at counseling decency and restraint while displaying neither, echoed Wardman’s whorish imagery: “The procuress corrupting her sex is not more an enemy to society than the ‘new journalism, ’ with its prurient wares—the suggestiveness of the pencil and the salaciousness of the pen.”
74
The
Times
lamented that so much of the public was “debased in soul and deed” and “vulgar in taste and thought,” and sought to shame respectable men and women into dropping the yellow papers: “The moral disease germs of the new journals are as big and hideous as rattlesnakes.”
75
Journal
and the
World
from its files on the grounds that their “chronicles of crime, of lust, and of general nastiness” were offensive to decent people and corruptive of youth, Wardman and Dana could not contain themselves. “In decent public esteem yellow journalism occupies the same place as brothels,” crowed the
Press.
72
The
Sun
warmly congratulated the Newark trustees and encouraged other libraries, clubs, and reading rooms to institute similar bans. It claimed to see in the
World
and the
Journal
a licentious, vulgar, and criminal spirit and “an effrontery almost without example in the history of journalism.”
73
Dana, a past master at counseling decency and restraint while displaying neither, echoed Wardman’s whorish imagery: “The procuress corrupting her sex is not more an enemy to society than the ‘new journalism, ’ with its prurient wares—the suggestiveness of the pencil and the salaciousness of the pen.”
74
The
Times
lamented that so much of the public was “debased in soul and deed” and “vulgar in taste and thought,” and sought to shame respectable men and women into dropping the yellow papers: “The moral disease germs of the new journals are as big and hideous as rattlesnakes.”
75
By spring, close to a hundred institutions had jumped on the banishment bandwagon, including the Yale University Library, the Harlem Branch of the YMCA, the Century Club in Manhattan, and the Flatbush Young Republican Club in Brooklyn. Hearst kept up his standing routine of printing religious features and sermons in order to “ingratiate ourselves with the Godly,” but otherwise he ignored the hullabaloo.
76
Pulitzer lashed back, calling his critics malicious troublemakers jealous of his phenomenal success. But while giving no quarter publicly, Pulitzer was privately rattled by the banishment campaign. He lectured his executives on the importance of journalistic respectability and found occasion for yet another reorganization of his management suite. He needn’t have worried. The protests petered out by summer, leaving the circulations of the
Journal
and the
World
undiminished. In all probability, the attentions of its rivals convinced more people to try the
Journal
than to shun it.
76
Pulitzer lashed back, calling his critics malicious troublemakers jealous of his phenomenal success. But while giving no quarter publicly, Pulitzer was privately rattled by the banishment campaign. He lectured his executives on the importance of journalistic respectability and found occasion for yet another reorganization of his management suite. He needn’t have worried. The protests petered out by summer, leaving the circulations of the
Journal
and the
World
undiminished. In all probability, the attentions of its rivals convinced more people to try the
Journal
than to shun it.
The morals campaign fizzled because readers liked the yellow papers and did not see anything terribly wrong with them. The watchdogs had failed to make a credible case that Hearst and Pulitzer were propagating evil or causing harm. As the newspaper historian Joseph Campbell notes, the attacks tended to be “invective-filled generalizations,” short on specific grievance.
77
Indeed it was difficult to be precise because there was nothing the yellows could publish that their gray rivals wouldn’t touch. All of the big papers on Park Row competed for sensational stories. The
Herald
ran the most explicit testimony from the Seeley trial, and even the sanctimonious
Times
found it necessary to mention, in a 4,500-word story on Mrs. Nack’s confession, her strong and sensual features and “the high swell of her bust.”
78
The yellow tricks of presentation were prevalent in the three-cent papers, too. The moralizers never really had a chance, and they should have known better—Dana in particular, who had trained readers to expect what he was now asking them to reject.
77
Indeed it was difficult to be precise because there was nothing the yellows could publish that their gray rivals wouldn’t touch. All of the big papers on Park Row competed for sensational stories. The
Herald
ran the most explicit testimony from the Seeley trial, and even the sanctimonious
Times
found it necessary to mention, in a 4,500-word story on Mrs. Nack’s confession, her strong and sensual features and “the high swell of her bust.”
78
The yellow tricks of presentation were prevalent in the three-cent papers, too. The moralizers never really had a chance, and they should have known better—Dana in particular, who had trained readers to expect what he was now asking them to reject.
While the gray papers tried in vain to foment a popular revolt against Hearst, a more interesting and substantive discussion of yellow journalism was playing out in the trade press, as it made honest efforts to understand the sudden tumult in their industry. The trades picked up arguments on both sides of the question and distilled, elaborated, and tested them through the spring and summer of 1897.
While some trade commentators echoed Ervin Wardman and company, others were excited by the work of the yellow papers. The
Journal
’s proponents recognized the paper as a serious daily, and wondered why the “sober, clean, self-respecting” papers weren’t providing their readers with work by top-drawer talent or matching the enterprise of Hearst and Pulitzer in their newsgathering.
79
They celebrated the efforts of the “sensational press” to fight corruption and expose fraud and help the needy. It wasn’t drivel that drew readers to the
World
and the
Journal
but “the freshest news brightly presented, the sham sharply punctured and, above all, the feeling, justified or not, that behind and through the paper there beats a warm, generous, human heart alive to the troubles and miseries of humanity and anxious to alleviate them.” The better papers, by contrast, seemed to have had all the humanity refined out of them
.
80
Journal
’s proponents recognized the paper as a serious daily, and wondered why the “sober, clean, self-respecting” papers weren’t providing their readers with work by top-drawer talent or matching the enterprise of Hearst and Pulitzer in their newsgathering.
79
They celebrated the efforts of the “sensational press” to fight corruption and expose fraud and help the needy. It wasn’t drivel that drew readers to the
World
and the
Journal
but “the freshest news brightly presented, the sham sharply punctured and, above all, the feeling, justified or not, that behind and through the paper there beats a warm, generous, human heart alive to the troubles and miseries of humanity and anxious to alleviate them.” The better papers, by contrast, seemed to have had all the humanity refined out of them
.
80
The trades were careful to separate real from imagined problems in the yellow press. For instance, they were not overly distracted by politics. Whereas the “wholesome” papers sought to stigmatize Hearst for his support of Bryan and progressive causes generally, industry professionals were generally tolerant of political differences, recognizing that no particular brand of politics made a paper good or legitimate. One man’s vicious muckraking was another’s “sham sharply punctured.”
A trade critic who signed his pieces XYZ took up another supposed problem with yellow journals: charges of falsehood and fakery leveled at Hearst and Pulitzer. These did not come only from the gray papers; the
World
and the
Journal
frequently accused each other of getting things wrong and making things up. There was the usual amount of hyperbole in all these indictments; a paper’s honest mistake would be discovered by an enemy and lustily denounced as a deliberate fraud. There is no question, however, that the yellows were fingered more often than the grays, a fact that troubled XYZ:
World
and the
Journal
frequently accused each other of getting things wrong and making things up. There was the usual amount of hyperbole in all these indictments; a paper’s honest mistake would be discovered by an enemy and lustily denounced as a deliberate fraud. There is no question, however, that the yellows were fingered more often than the grays, a fact that troubled XYZ:
The charge of lying against newspapers and newspaper men is so old and threadbare that those of us who have been ten years in the work sometimes smile when we recall how indignantly we repelled the accusation during our first year or two in harness. But there seems to be an added bitterness, a more convinced tone in the mouths of men when they speak of the
Journal
or the
World. . . .
Now, as a matter of fact, either Mr. Empson, the city editor of the
Journal,
or Mr. Russell, who holds the same position on the
World,
is just as insistent on verification of stories turned in as Mr. Rieck, of the
Herald,
ever dreamed of being. . . .Nor is this all. I have amused myself when I have heard such remarks made about the
World
or the
Journal,
by asking the one talking which paper he believed told the truth. The answer might be the
Herald,
the
Times
or any other. Procuring the two papers, that believed in and that denounced, I have asked for a comparison of the reports. Provided it was not a case of a “beat,” the statements made have been identical to all intents and purposes with that of the “new” journal as usually the more conservative. Yet I have never found proof of this kind to have any effect on the belief or prejudice, if you will, of the objector, simply because that belief or prejudice is honest.
81
While it is not unreasonable to assume that its exuberance and inexperience led the
Journal
to commit more error than its rivals, the paper has never been demonstrated to be unusually inaccurate or unethical. Like every other daily on Park Row, it sometimes made mistakes, embroidered stories, manipulated facts, rushed to judgment, and plagiarized competitors. But it also made best efforts to get things right, and its shortcomings were within the realm of acceptable practice for the times. Gilded Age journalism ethics were ad hoc and learned on the job, and most yellow journalists, including Hearst’s top editors, were trained at the best papers in New York. That the Park Row dailies were hyper-vigilant about spotting and bewailing one another’s mistakes was a huge deterrent to any sort of journalistic crime. The yellows probably felt the scrutiny more keenly than many of their competitors because market leaders were always prime targets for criticism. As Bradford Merrill, a Pulitzer editor, wrote James Creelman during the election campaign: “The
World
has ten times as many reasons to be careful as any other newspaper in this land. I am determined so far as eternal vigilance and earnest sincerity can prevent, not to let one canard or single unauthentic sensation get into the [paper]. We are absolutely surrounded by enemies—our deflated competitors, many of whom do not hesitate to lie to make any body believe that we are lying.”
82
Journal
to commit more error than its rivals, the paper has never been demonstrated to be unusually inaccurate or unethical. Like every other daily on Park Row, it sometimes made mistakes, embroidered stories, manipulated facts, rushed to judgment, and plagiarized competitors. But it also made best efforts to get things right, and its shortcomings were within the realm of acceptable practice for the times. Gilded Age journalism ethics were ad hoc and learned on the job, and most yellow journalists, including Hearst’s top editors, were trained at the best papers in New York. That the Park Row dailies were hyper-vigilant about spotting and bewailing one another’s mistakes was a huge deterrent to any sort of journalistic crime. The yellows probably felt the scrutiny more keenly than many of their competitors because market leaders were always prime targets for criticism. As Bradford Merrill, a Pulitzer editor, wrote James Creelman during the election campaign: “The
World
has ten times as many reasons to be careful as any other newspaper in this land. I am determined so far as eternal vigilance and earnest sincerity can prevent, not to let one canard or single unauthentic sensation get into the [paper]. We are absolutely surrounded by enemies—our deflated competitors, many of whom do not hesitate to lie to make any body believe that we are lying.”
82
A lot of trade commentators believed that the
Journal
and the
World
were more sensationalistic than other New York papers, an assessment that stands today. It is seldom clear, however, what is meant by “sensationalism.” Like “yellow journalism,” the term tends to be thrown around indiscriminately. By a plain definition, sensationalism denotes journalism that wallows in the lurid, shocking, and emotive. But, again, content of that sort was wallowed in by a variety of papers, gray and yellow. The gray editors described Hearst’s paper as a chamber of horrors, a procuress, a brothel, a criminal, a moral disease, a rattlesnake, and a licentious vulgarian without example in the history of journalism—words that were nothing if not sensationalistic.
Journal
and the
World
were more sensationalistic than other New York papers, an assessment that stands today. It is seldom clear, however, what is meant by “sensationalism.” Like “yellow journalism,” the term tends to be thrown around indiscriminately. By a plain definition, sensationalism denotes journalism that wallows in the lurid, shocking, and emotive. But, again, content of that sort was wallowed in by a variety of papers, gray and yellow. The gray editors described Hearst’s paper as a chamber of horrors, a procuress, a brothel, a criminal, a moral disease, a rattlesnake, and a licentious vulgarian without example in the history of journalism—words that were nothing if not sensationalistic.
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