The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (49 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

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Halstead’s tour of Havana coincided with a changing of the Spanish guard: Captain-General Martínez Campos, hero of the Ten Years’ War in Cuba, was recalled to Madrid for failing to quash the rebellion. He did not leave reluctantly. Campos had seen enough to know that the only way succeed in Cuba would be to make war on its rural population, which gave the rebels succor and shelter. He felt he had already violated his own notions of the limits of civilized warfare. “I lack the qualities,” he told his superiors. “Among our present generals only Weyler has the necessary capacity for such a policy.”
21
 
Lieutenant-General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, Marquis of Teneriffe, Captain General of Catalonia, a veteran of the Ten Year’s War, the Carlist Wars, the Moorish War, and the Philippine uprising, took command of the Spanish forces in Cuba on February 10. He was depicted as a savage barbarian all along Park Row, and even in leading Spanish papers, at least one of which was suppressed for detailing his record of ruthlessness. The
Journal
described him as “a fiendish despot” and an “exterminator of men,” the “prince of all the cruel generals this century has seen.” The
Tribune
recalled his “revolting acts” of “cruel persecution of the defenseless, wounded invalids and women.” This was more abuse than Weyler deserved but only slightly, as events would prove. He immediately extended martial law on the island and attached the death penalty to crimes of disloyalty and treason. He also tightened up censorship of the press, expelling from Cuba reporters whose work he deemed offensive to the regime.
22
 
Halstead gained one of the first interviews with Weyler, a fierce little man under five feet tall, whose thick dark sideburns met his long mustache to monogram his face with a perfect W. The captain-general was courteous and businesslike. He denied that the Spaniards were using Cuban prisoners for target practice, as rebel spokesmen had charged. He dismissed the insurgents as so many “fire-bugs,” “murderers,” “destroyers,” and “ravishers.” Halstead attempted to persuade the new commander that allowing correspondents to travel about the island would improve the quality of reporting on the conflict. Weyler wasn’t buying. He saw the reporters as the problem: “One would think, from the writings of correspondents here, that they were . . . themselves sufferers from the severities they related when what they give out as news comes from agitators and conspirators.”
23
He continued to expel reporters by the cartload, adding immeasurably to the problems Park Row and Hearst, in particular, met in covering the war.
 
The best news correspondent Hearst had stationed in Havana at the time of Halstead’s visit was Charles Michelson. Typical of reporters attracted to the Cuba story, Michelson was an athletic young man with a taste for literature and adventure. He was the son of shopkeepers in Virginia City, Nevada, and the brother of Albert Michelson, who would win a Nobel Prize in physics for his exact calculation of the speed of light. Charles had clerked in company stores in the mining belt before finding his way into journalism. He was part of the
Examiner
team that hunted down a California grizzly to prove the species was not extinct in the state. When he was passed over for the position of editor of the Sunday edition he fled to the
San Francisco Call,
but Hearst soon tempted him back with an assignment to Cuba. “This,” Michelson would later write, “was bait I could not resist.”
24
 
Michelson was a responsible reporter by the standards of the day. He filed to New York whatever seemed to be news as quickly as possible, seeking independent corroboration if time allowed, but more often using his best judgment to separate truth from rumor and doing further investigation afterward. He frequently used information from biased parties—rebel or government spokesmen—but he identified his sources, allowing readers to judge the content accordingly. He seldom admitted mistakes, preferring to write follow-up stories with corrective information. In early 1896, for instance, the insurgents surprised the Spanish by sweeping deep into western Cuba, almost to the suburbs of Havana, and Michelson (like all the reporters in the city) reported rumors that the city was in peril of falling. When it became clear that the rebels did not have the numbers, the arms, the expertise, or the intention to take a fortified city brimming with Spanish soldiers, Michelson wrote that “there is nothing to indicate that Havana is in immediate danger of an attack . . . notwithstanding the alarming rumors cabled to New York from here.” He added that Spanish officials, cognizant of the strength of their position, laughed at the rumors of their impending doom.
25
The better Havana correspondents all worked in this amend-as-you-go manner.
 
Reliable as he was, Michelson’s career in Havana was short. Forbidden by the Spanish regime to contact insurrectionists or to travel about the island, and with his stories subject to censorship, he worked underground, as did most American reporters. He would arrange secret meetings with the rebels and smuggle his copy to Key West on passenger steamers with instructions that it to be forwarded to New York. He also tried to sneak out of Havana to get a better sense of what was happening in the field. In February 1896, he was arrested trying to slip past a military checkpoint on his way to investigate rumors of a massacre of twenty noncombatants by Spanish soldiers in a village west of the city. Michelson was interrogated and locked in a tiny cell in Morro Castle, the grand fortress guarding the entrance to Havana Bay. Murat Halstead, learning of his fate, quietly tried to negotiate his release. When the
World
reported the arrest, Halstead wrote it up as well, guessing that it was Michelson’s Kodak camera that worried Spain most. Press reports of Michelson’s incarceration eventually reached Madrid, where cooler heads prevailed. He was released and instructed to leave the country.
26
 
Another
Journal
man, Charles Salomon, reached Havana in January 1896 with plans to steal into the countryside and travel with the rebels. Spanish customs agents found a letter of introduction from the U.S.-based leadership of the Junta in his bags and locked him up. When his
Journal
credentials were authenticated, he was marched aboard the next ship home.
27
No paper had more reporters expelled from Havana than the
Journal,
largely because no paper was sending as many and reporting as aggressively. On one of his trips through Florida, Rea counted eight
Journal
men attempting to arrange the difficult passage to rebel territory.
 
The expulsions caused Hearst fits. He was scrambling to build a foreign operation for his paper, which had no tradition of international reporting, and the turnover in his Havana staff produced some unfortunate results. Hearst was reliant for a time on the dubious talents of Frederick Lawrence, a former police reporter from San Francisco who Rea considered one of the worst correspondents to write from Havana during the conflict. Lawrence camped out at the Inglaterra and reported whatever was handed to him from rebel sources. According to Rea, he vastly exaggerated the size of the insurgent army, gave detailed accounts of battles that never happened, and had the same band of Cubans attacking, in the same night, cities hundreds of miles apart. About all that can be said for Lawrence (and what Rea failed to mention) is that he clearly sourced his rebel propaganda to the rebels and dutifully reported disavowals from Spanish officials.
28
 
It is tempting to criticize Hearst and the rest of Park Row for the inexperience of some of their Cuban correspondents but, again, many seasoned men were expelled and, as it happened, much of the best work as the war progressed came from raw recruits. While most of their colleagues were reporting on Cuba from Havana, Key West, or Fort Lauderdale, the
World
’s Sylvester Scovel, the
Journal
’s Grover Flint, and the
Herald
’s George Bronson Rea took enormous risks to break through Spanish lines and report the story from insurgent camps and the Cuban countryside. They did some of the most daring and important reporting of their times, and none had any previous experience in journalism.
 
 
 
AT THE SAME TIME Murat Halstead was snuggling into the Inglaterra, Sylvester Henry “Harry” Scovel was locked up in Morro Castle. He had been arrested on January 12 while attempting to sneak into Havana from the countryside with faked credentials. He had been mistaken for El Inglesito, the legendary English-speaking rebel colonel, and threatened with a firing squad. Springing him from jail should have been easy, but the newspaper to which Scovel had been filing, the
New York Herald,
refused to recognize his credentials.
 
Morro Castle was an odd landing place for a young man descended from three generations of American college presidents, but Scovel had a flair for the unexpected. Just a year before his detention, he had been working as the popular general manager of the Cleveland Athletic Club. He directed several amateur sports teams, a poetry circle, and a dramatics society, and lived in a suite of rooms off the lobby of the downtown mansion that served as the clubhouse. In his spare time, he promoted boxing matches and billiard tournaments and performed in a well-reviewed amateur operetta of his own composition. These pursuits brought the boisterous and likable Scovel a buttery salary of $1,000 a month. He committed all of it and more to what he termed “a good deal of riotous living.” By the autumn of 1895, his debts had caught up with him and he had no choice but to turn to his father, who was the president of the University of Wooster and a stiff-necked Presbyterian minister given to railing against “popular corruption.” The elder Scovel settled his son’s debts on harsh terms. Harry was compelled to return to Pittsburgh and work in the insurance business, which he toiled at for three miserable months before scraping together $200 and setting off for Cuba. He told friends he wanted to see the fighting. He told his parents nothing.
29
 
Scovel’s writing credits at the moment of his departure were limited to his amateur operetta and a handful of dramatic notices. There was nothing in his background to suggest that he might become a great war correspondent except, perhaps, an affinity for danger. He had been so enamored of hazardous stunts as a boy that his father had encouraged him to attend funerals in order to contemplate his mortality. He survived to attend the University of Michigan, establishing himself as a leading student politician and one of the best athletes on campus before quitting from boredom midway through his sophomore year. His alumni magazine, remembering his “vivacity” and “impulsiveness,” claimed that he had passed through so many perils before his majority that “he seemed to bear a charmed life.”
30
 
Scovel’s personal qualities—his intelligence, resourcefulness, determination, bravery, and affability—would more than compensate for his lack of education and experience as a reporter. On his way to Cuba, he stopped by the Manhattan offices of the
New York Herald.
The
Herald
may have had an insipid editorial page, but it was an aggressive newsgatherer, producing the best foreign file of any paper on Park Row. Its attention to international affairs was a reflection of the cosmopolitan interests and lifestyle of its owner, Bennett Jr., who still resided most of the year in Europe. Scovel told a
Herald
editor named Taylor of his intention to travel with the insurgent army; the editor promised him $24 a column for whatever copy he could smuggle out of Cuba.
 
That same day, Scovel visited Horatio Rubens, legal counsel and official spokesman for the Junta in New York. Rubens had gained prominence as host of the so-called Peanut Club, a daily news briefing where Park Row reporters were fed peanuts and the party line. Scovel told Rubens he intended to travel to Cuba to report the war. Rubens decided the young man was crazy but likable and he took him to dinner to talk some sense into him. He advised Scovel that Cubans spoke a language other than English, and warned him that even if he managed to elude Spanish border guards, there was no guarantee that an American correspondent would be welcomed by the insurgent army. Undaunted, dreading only a return to the insurance industry, Scovel persisted and won a letter of introduction from Rubens on Junta stationary.
31
 
The letter did Scovel no good. Detained by customs agents in Havana on his first attempt to get in, he tore it up and ate it before police arrived to interrogate him. He was sent back to the United States and made a second entry attempt in mid-October, this one by steamer to Cienfuegos on the southern coast of the island, where security was relatively lax. He arrived safely and began searching for a contact suggested by Rubens. Unable to find the man, Scovel determined to simply walk out into the countryside in search of insurgents. Spanish police picked him up as he tried to bluff his way past a military sentry on the road out of town. He was escorted back to his hotel and relieved of his cash and watch. Two days later, he slipped past the sentry and began wandering from village to village, asking if anyone spoke English and knew where he might find some insurgents. Despite the language barrier and his unfamiliarity with the island, Scovel fetched up in the camp of the rebel commander Máximo Gómez less than two weeks later, on November 1, 1895.
 
Scovel had caught up to Gomez just as the general was gearing up for his foray to the western provinces, which involved crossing the troches, a system of fortified blockades running the width of the island and designed to contain the insurgents in the east. Gomez was the architect of the theory that the rebels needed to take their campaign to the prosperous western region, the center of the sugar trade and the foundation of the island’s economy. He sought not only to destroy the wealth that was keeping Spain in Cuba and funding the oppression of his people, but to make ordinary Cubans desperate enough to join the rebellion.

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