The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (77 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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The major Park Row dailies were all assiduous in stealing one another’s news; it generally took less than half an hour for a scoop in one paper to appear in some form in the pages of its rivals. Most of the poaching appears to have occurred among the
World,
the
Sun,
and the
Herald,
but no paper was exempt. Brisbane had noted that the
World
was making a regular diet of news from the
Evening Journal
; after Pulitzer’s smear of Hearst, Brisbane laid a trap. The following item appeared in his June 8 edition: “Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz, an Austrian artillerist of European renown, who, with Colonel Ordonez, was defending the land batteries of Aguadores . . . was so badly wounded that he has since died.”
50
 
The
World
spotted the item and published a rewrite in its next edition, dressed up with a grandiose dateline:
On Board the World’s Dispatch Boat Three Friends, Off Santiago de Cuba, via Port Antonio, Jamaica:
 
Colonel R. W. Thenuz, an Austrian artillerist well known throughout Europe, who, with Colonel Ordonez, was defending the land batteries of Aguadores . . . was so badly wounded that he has since died.
51
 
 
 
The following day, the
Journal
published an ecstatic page-three headline: “The World Brands Itself a Pilferer of the News by Published Confession!”
52
It explained to readers that Reflipe W. Thenuz was an anagram for “We Pilfer the News.” Not content with proving Pulitzer’s depredations, the
Journal
returned to Colonel Thenuz almost every day for the next several weeks. It published poetry in memoriam of the late fictional colonel. It ran a cartoon of his framed portrait with the caption, “Specially taken for the
World,
by the
World
’s special photographer.”
53
It launched a fundraising campaign and a design competition for a monument to Thenuz. Readers played along, sending in Confederate currency and expired bonds as contributions. The
World
attempted to strike back by planting stories in its pages in hopes that the
Journal
would poach them. Brisbane not only eluded the snares but sent good-natured notes to the
World
teasing its editors for their clumsiness. “Great was Brisbane,” writes his colleague, A.P. Terhune.
54
 
Hearst now contemplated a stunt even more audacious than his Evangelina escapade. With a Spanish naval squadron rumored to be disembarking from Cadiz to attack Dewey in the Philippines, Hearst wrote Creelman as follows:
I wish you would make necessary preparations, so that in case the Spanish fleet actually starts for Manila we will be prepared to buy or charter some English tramp steamer on the Eastern end of the Mediterranean and take her to some narrow and inaccessible portion of the Suez Canal and sink her where she will obstruct the passage of the Spanish fleet. I do not know that we will want to do this, but we may, in case the American boats from San Francisco have not reached Dewey and he should be placed in a critical position by the approach of the Spanish vessels. I understand if a British boat were taken and sunk under such circumstances as above outlined, the British government would not allow her to be blown up to clear the passage, and it might take enough time to raise her to put Dewey in a safe position.
 
I merely want you to be in a position to do this in case it should be decided upon later.”
55
 
 
 
Hearst never ordered this act and, in any event, it proved unnecessary as the Spanish squadron returned to port soon after leaving in response to false rumors of an approaching U.S. fleet. Creelman, in his memoir, offers Hearst’s letter, with all reservations carefully excised, as a piece of “heartfelt, practical patriotism” and a “Napoleonic stroke” of newspaper promotion—yet another proof of yellow journalism’s alertness to its public duty. He also allowed that sinking a steamer in the canal would have been “a grave breach of international law,” but that is probably not what held Hearst back, given his defense of the “rank illegality” of his Cuban jailbreak.
56
Any number of practical considerations, from the expense and difficulty of the operation to the disruption of international trade and travel it would have caused, could have brought him to his senses.
 
Strange as it may seem, Hearst’s Suez whim was not unusual in one respect: all of the Park Row papers were putting resources at the disposal of the U.S. war effort. The
World
’s Scovel spent the spring of 1898 performing secret service work on behalf of a government woefully short of intelligence capacity. He gathered information on Spanish military preparedness and coastal defenses, recruited agents from among his acquaintances, provided them with press credentials, and helped them land in Cuba using
World
dispatch boats. He ran messages between the insurgents and the U.S. Navy and helped to negotiate the terms of cooperation between them. He reported some of the information gathered in these pursuits without revealing his official role, and when he eventually did he was widely applauded for his patriotism. The
Herald
’s George Bronson Rea ran errands for Captain Sigsbee and gathered intelligence for the U.S. in Puerto Rico while his editor floated trial balloons with Spanish officials on behalf of the State Department. It is a safe bet, however, that Hearst was alone in contemplating an independent contribution to the fight.
 
 
 
RUMORS THAT HEARST HIMSELF was headed to the battlefields of Cuba began to circulate on Park Row in early June. They were met with silence from the
Journal,
but on June 18, 1898, the
Times
reported the following:
The British steamer
Sylvia,
Quebec Steamship Line, which arrived from Barbados a few days ago with a load of asphalt, will leave the docks of the Barber Asphalt Company, Sixth Street and East River, Long Island City, to-day bound for Cuba. The steamer has been chartered by William R. Hearst, proprietor of the
New York Journal,
who proposes to publish the first paper printed in English in Cuba. He will personally superintend its production.
 
Besides editors and skilled workmen the vessel takes a complete printing outfit, including stereotyping apparatus and an army hand-press.
 
The party expects to reach Santiago by Wednesday, and will effect a landing at the safest point in the vicinity.
 
 
 
Hearst had received permission from Secretary of War Alger to take the
Sylvia
to Cuba as part of the press corps. “Goodbye Mother dear,” he wired Phoebe. “Take good care of yourself. You are much more likely to get sick than I am to get injured and your life and health [are] just as dear to me as mine is to you. Your loving son, etc.”
57
 
In addition to his printing facilities and pressmen, Hearst loaded his boat with provisions, field equipment, medical supplies, and an entourage that included his printing expert and jack-of-all-trades George Pancoast, his star correspondent James Creelman, the photographer John C. Hemment, motion-picture cameraman Billy Bitzer, and old friend Jack Follansbee. He outfitted a complete darkroom in the bowels of the ship to allow Hemment to develop photographic plates at sea for immediate shipment on arrival in port. He also carried Bitzer’s unwieldy Biograph motion-picture camera, an early prototype requiring two thousand pounds of storage batteries. Hearst was the only publisher to take a press or a darkroom, let alone a motion-picture camera, to war. According to Bitzer, he was also the only newspaperman with a set of sisters in his cabins: the Willson girls were along for the ride.
 
Hearst’s journey to Cuba was smooth. The
Sylvia
docked first at Kingston, Jamaica, where Hemment took on a supply of ice for his darkroom and Hearst and Follansbee wandered a few miles out of town to purchase polo ponies from a racetrack. The entire
Sylvia
party then ate a sumptuous meal at the Crystal Springs Hotel, loaded the horses, and shoved off for Cuba. After ten hours on a rough sea they caught sight of the blockading U.S. squadron at the mouth of the harbor at Santiago de Cuba on the southeast coast.
 
The Fifth Army had also just arrived off Santiago. After two false starts, complete with bands playing and flags waving, its transports had finally steamed out of Tampa on June 14, a week after they had been boarded, this time without so much as a goodbye or a backward glance. Traveling much of the way at a 6-knot crawl, the convoy of 35 vessels carried 819 officers and over 16,058 soldiers, including 3 regiments of volunteers and 23 of regulars—the largest military force to depart from the United States before the Great War.
58
The men endured two weeks of jostling in the stinking bowels of the transports, with nothing to drink but fetid water, before they finally received instructions to land.
 
The
Sylvia
buzzed through the blockade and located Admiral Sampson’s flagship, the
New York,
directly in front of Santiago’s Morro Castle. As twilight fell, Hearst, Creelman, and Hemment ventured out in a launch and clambered up the flagship’s rope ladder to present their credentials. They were warmly received by the admiral and allowed full run of the fleet. Hearst would describe Sampson as a quiet, conservative man with thin features, a snowy beard, and melancholy eyes,
59
which, judging by Hemment’s photographs, is accurate:
As he sat under a sailcloth awning on the quarterdeck and talked in a soft voice it was hard to imagine we were lying in front of a great stronghold of the enemy. Ships stretched out on both sides in perfect order. Everywhere were signs of intelligent method. “We have had men ashore,” [Sampson] said, “and have located the position of Cervera’s entire fleet. Every one of his vessels is lying safe from our guns behind that high hill there with such a narrow entrance and with thick fields of mines that the navy can do nothing but stay here and prevent any egress. [The Army] must first drive the enemy out of Santiago forts and capture Morro Castle before we can remove the mines and enter the harbor.”
60
 
 
 
Hearst and the
Journal
crew next sought to introduce themselves to Major General William Rufus Shafter, commander of the Fifth Army Corps. They learned that he was quartered on the transport
Seguranca
at Guantanamo Bay, forty-five miles east of Santiago, but finding him after sundown was no easy task. The waters between Santiago and Guantanamo were crowded with American vessels—warships, supply ships, transports, dispatch boats—and very few were using their lights. The
Sylvia
bumped around in the dark for several hours until at last they discovered the
Seguranca
and all three hundred pounds of General Shafter.
 
Cranky, wracked with gout, stripped of his jacket yet still sweating profusely, the 63-year-old Civil War veteran was in the process of disgorging his enormous cargo, which in addition to his officers and troops included 2,295 horses and mules, 10 million pounds of rations, field guns, howitzers, siege rifles, mortars, Hotchkiss mountain guns, four Gatlings, an experimental dynamite gun, and an ill-fated observation balloon.
61
Shafter was putting all this ashore at the tiny villages of Daiquiri and Siboney, the latter a dozen miles east of the strategic target of Santiago. It was not a graceful landing. Neither village had a port or a useful pier. The Fifth Army was simply dumped into the surf with bands playing and men singing—anything was preferable to another night on a miserable transport ship—yet Shafter drowned only two soldiers and a handful of animals in the operation. The Spanish had unaccountably decided against defending the beaches.
 
Shafter had already had his fill of journalists by the time Hearst arrived. His supercargo included eighty-nine reporters (as against just seventeen ambulances).
62
Richard Harding Davis was one of the eighty-nine. On the first day of the landing, Davis had objected to the general’s order that everyone not on immediate duty stay afloat until the beaches were secure. Shafter dismissed his complaint but Davis persisted, using the line that he wasn’t some hack newspaperman but a “descriptive writer.” The general exploded: “I don’t care a damn what you are. I’ll treat you all alike.”
63
Shafter suffered in Davis’s copy for the duration of the conflict, but the general nonetheless received Hearst and company with civility and treated them to an extensive briefing.
 
Shafter’s assignment was to fight his way west from Siboney and Daiquiri by an inland route to take Santiago and its shore defenses, leaving Cervera’s warships in the harbor at Sampson’s mercy. The destruction of Spain’s Caribbean squadron, combined with Dewey’s work, would give the United States effective control of the seas and a strangle-hold on Spanish Cuba. Shafter, who struck Hearst as a “bold, lion-headed hero . . . a sort of human fortress,” told the
Journal
that Spain had 12,000 troops deployed in strategic and well-protected positions in and around Santiago.
64
He doubted the fighting spirit of the Spaniards and predicted that he would require only a short campaign to reach Santiago. Hearst, Hemment, and Creelman presented their papers, which the general countersigned, allowing them the right of uninterrupted travel in and out of combat lines. “We then returned to our ship and retired for the night,” writes Hemment. “Next morning we were awakened early, and we got all things in readiness and went ashore.”
65

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