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Authors: Kenneth Whyte
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A few weeks into the westward campaign, Scovel witnessed the same skirmish between Gómez’s men and Spanish regulars that was observed by Winston Churchill from the other side of the lines. While Churchill dismissed the insurgents as an undisciplined rabble, Scovel admired their unconventional methods and considered Gómez a minor military genius. He stuck with him as the rebels swept westward, evading Spanish columns and razing plantations. He witnessed Gómez’s romp through the suburbs of Havana in December—the gambit that launched rumors that the capital would fall.
As he traveled, Scovel had been composing dispatches and sending them via rebel smugglers to the
Herald
in New York. But he had no idea whether his copy was actually getting into print. Desperate to know, he broke from Gómez in January 1896, and headed for the Inglaterra to learn from the American press corps if he was a famous correspondent. It was that mission that landed him in a cell in Morro Castle.
Herald
in New York. But he had no idea whether his copy was actually getting into print. Desperate to know, he broke from Gómez in January 1896, and headed for the Inglaterra to learn from the American press corps if he was a famous correspondent. It was that mission that landed him in a cell in Morro Castle.
The
Herald
’s man in Havana should have vouched for Scovel and won his release, but instead George Bronson Rea made a special trip to the governor’s palace to deny that the prisoner represented his paper. Rea’s editors at the
Herald
said they had never heard of Scovel. The U.S. consul also contacted the paper on Scovel’s behalf but no one would claim responsibility for him. He might have languished in Morro Castle for months had it not been for the
World
’s Havana correspondent, William Shaw Bowen. A diligent reporter, Bowen was in the habit of checking out the Americans who turned up in Cuban jails in hopes that one might amount to a story. He visited Scovel four days after his arrest. He was surprised to meet a likable young man from a prominent Cleveland family. Convinced that Scovel was sincere in his ambition to be a famous war correspondent, Bowen arranged for the
World
to vouch for his credentials. Thus Harry Scovel left the
Herald
and became an unshakably loyal
World
man, giving Joseph Pulitzer an enormous advantage over all other editors covering Cuba.
Herald
’s man in Havana should have vouched for Scovel and won his release, but instead George Bronson Rea made a special trip to the governor’s palace to deny that the prisoner represented his paper. Rea’s editors at the
Herald
said they had never heard of Scovel. The U.S. consul also contacted the paper on Scovel’s behalf but no one would claim responsibility for him. He might have languished in Morro Castle for months had it not been for the
World
’s Havana correspondent, William Shaw Bowen. A diligent reporter, Bowen was in the habit of checking out the Americans who turned up in Cuban jails in hopes that one might amount to a story. He visited Scovel four days after his arrest. He was surprised to meet a likable young man from a prominent Cleveland family. Convinced that Scovel was sincere in his ambition to be a famous war correspondent, Bowen arranged for the
World
to vouch for his credentials. Thus Harry Scovel left the
Herald
and became an unshakably loyal
World
man, giving Joseph Pulitzer an enormous advantage over all other editors covering Cuba.
As Scovel waited for his papers to be processed by Spanish authorities, he was visited by a tall, red-headed, deeply apologetic George Bronson Rea, who explained that Taylor, Scovel’s contact at the paper, had been dismissed and that no one else on staff knew of his assignment. It was nonetheless thoughtless of Rea to have disowned a fellow correspondent, particularly since he too had been mistaken for El Inglesito only days earlier. Scovel was disappointed to learn that most of his smuggled copy had been lost or destroyed en route to New York. Only one early piece had made it into print, and, as per the
Herald
’s policy, it appeared without a byline, so Scovel was not yet famous. The paper offered to pay him a modest fee for the single published article. Scovel magnanimously forgave Rea his behavior and the two became friends and collaborators, but he held a grudge against the
Herald
for the rest of his life.
Herald
’s policy, it appeared without a byline, so Scovel was not yet famous. The paper offered to pay him a modest fee for the single published article. Scovel magnanimously forgave Rea his behavior and the two became friends and collaborators, but he held a grudge against the
Herald
for the rest of his life.
REA, LIKE SCOVEL, was in his mid-twenties and of good family; his father was a successful Brooklyn banker. For the previous five years, Rea had been working as an engineer in Cuba. When the fighting spread to the western provinces, industrial activity stopped cold and he began looking for something else to do. He joined the
Herald
just two weeks before he met Scovel.
32
Herald
just two weeks before he met Scovel.
32
Thanks to his engineering experience, Rea knew the country better than his fellow correspondents, and his view of the Cuban people was typical of American businessmen on the island: “I lived in Cuba for five years previous to the insurrection . . . and I must say that if the Cubans were oppressed, I failed to discover in what manner.” He saw little support for the revolution in the western provinces: “The majority were not in favor of it, and desired to be quiet, so as to grind their cane, and only joined the movement when forced to do so by lack of employment, hunger, or the burning of their homes.”
33
These attitudes made Rea a perfect correspondent for the
Herald,
which habitually defended Spanish war methods as severe but necessary. (A cut in tobacco exports to America was one of the few Spanish moves to draw heat from the paper: “To be compelled to smoke tobacco of the temperate zone while Spaniards monopolize the tobacco of Cuba . . . seems almost too much to bear,” complained one editorial.)
34
33
These attitudes made Rea a perfect correspondent for the
Herald,
which habitually defended Spanish war methods as severe but necessary. (A cut in tobacco exports to America was one of the few Spanish moves to draw heat from the paper: “To be compelled to smoke tobacco of the temperate zone while Spaniards monopolize the tobacco of Cuba . . . seems almost too much to bear,” complained one editorial.)
34
At the time he met Scovel, Rea had it in mind to gain an exclusive interview with Máximo Gómez. President Cleveland had just dismissed all talk of belligerent status for the Cubans and pledged the U.S. to respect Spanish sovereignty on the island and to maintain a pose of strict neutrality with regard to the rebellion. The rebel general’s response was eagerly anticipated in the United States. Scovel, too, intended to return to the countryside and interview Gómez. Although the journalist had been released from Morro Castle under a deportation order, he had no intention of retreating stateside. He told Rea that while competitive considerations prevented him from leading a rival newspaperman to Gómez, he would be happy to make introductions if Rea were to find the general’s camp on his own. Finding the rebels was not difficult, Scovel added, as most Cubans knew where they were at any given time and were happy to provide directions if approached the right way. As the historian Joyce Milton has pointed out, “Rea must have listened to all this with a good deal of skepticism. He had been in Cuba for five years, and here was Scovel after three months, a buddy of the famously enigmatic Gómez . . . and now an expert on how to talk to peasants.”
35
35
Rea was first to depart Havana. He left Scovel drinking whiskey in a Havana café on January 18 and trudged a week through the countryside of Havana province before stumbling across a band of rebels who led him to Gómez’s camp. The general was out when the reporter arrived. When Gómez finally came riding back, Harry Scovel was on a horse directly behind him having already filed his exclusive interview.
36
36
Rea took an immediate dislike to Gómez. “All my preconceived ideas of him,” he wrote, “were shattered by a glance, for instead of the martial-looking old gentleman, whose bearing conveyed the idea of a thorough soldier, I found a chocolate-colored, withered old man, who gave one the idea of a resurrected Egyptian mummy, with the face lighted by a pair of blurry, cold, expressionless gray eyes, that at times glowed like two red coals of fire, especially when in rage or passion.”
37
However jaundiced Rea’s view of the general, it counterbalanced the more familiar portrait of him as a Cuban George Washington.
37
However jaundiced Rea’s view of the general, it counterbalanced the more familiar portrait of him as a Cuban George Washington.
In the seven or eight months he traveled with Gómez, Rea was witness to insurgent looting and burning of villages and plantations, as well as some fifty “skirmishes and guerrilla fights that have been misnamed battles.”
38
His descriptions of these clashes, while colored by his contempt for Gómez, are some of the best on record. On a typical occasion, Gómez’s scouts had located a column of Spanish soldiers an hour away from camp. Instead of hustling his men into position for battle, the general sent out a few marksmen to harass the enemy. He himself remained in camp, reading, while his bodyguards lounged nearby singing. When it was learned that the sharpshooters had failed to halt the progress of the troops, Gómez ordered a colonel to occupy a stone house along the road and hold it against the Spanish advance. The general continued to relax in camp, rifle fire in the distance. It was not until a shell whistled over his head that Gómez, by Rea’s account, finally roused the five hundred or so soldiers and “general scum” of the insurgent army. They picked up their revolvers, shotguns and machetes and vanished like the mist.
39
38
His descriptions of these clashes, while colored by his contempt for Gómez, are some of the best on record. On a typical occasion, Gómez’s scouts had located a column of Spanish soldiers an hour away from camp. Instead of hustling his men into position for battle, the general sent out a few marksmen to harass the enemy. He himself remained in camp, reading, while his bodyguards lounged nearby singing. When it was learned that the sharpshooters had failed to halt the progress of the troops, Gómez ordered a colonel to occupy a stone house along the road and hold it against the Spanish advance. The general continued to relax in camp, rifle fire in the distance. It was not until a shell whistled over his head that Gómez, by Rea’s account, finally roused the five hundred or so soldiers and “general scum” of the insurgent army. They picked up their revolvers, shotguns and machetes and vanished like the mist.
39
Such maneuvers delighted Scovel as much as they enraged Rea, but their differences did not affect their working relationship. Together they perfected techniques of smuggling their dispatches to the mainland—dangerous work given the watchfulness of Spanish sentries. The pair would sneak into railway towns guarded by troops. and freight their articles to agents in Havana, who in turn would send the stories to Key West by ship. From there the copy was telegraphed to New York. Some of their pieces got to their papers in a week; most took a month; some took three months. They had a number of close calls, including one at Quivicán. “Unfortunately for our plans,” wrote Rea, “a Spanish column arrived there before us and saw us coming. Like the good soldiers that they were, they formed an ambuscade to capture us ‘vivita’ on entering the town. A fight was the result. On second thought, I think the letter ‘l’ inserted in the world ‘fight’ would probably express our conduct more clearly. Scovel was unhorsed, and narrowly escaped capture, and my own ‘genuine Cuban plug’ was killed. By a miracle we gained the shelter of the canefields and escaped.”
40
40
However much Rea hated Gómez, the feeling appears to have been mutual. Not only was the correspondent haughty and opinionated, his paper, to the extent that it had a discernable position, supported Spain. At one point Gómez asked Rea by what right he was traveling with the rebels and eating at the general’s table. When he mused aloud about having the reporter shot, Rea reminded the general that harming an American newspaperman would hurt the rebel cause in the U.S. He understood, nevertheless, that he had worn out his welcome and made his way to the camp of another insurgent leader, Antonio Maceo. A brave and self-educated mulatto cavalryman with a fondness for French literature and no qualms about confronting Spanish troops, Maceo emerged in Rea’s reports as the anti-Gómez: “As day after day I witnessed him at the head of his men, directing the fray from the front ranks of the firing line, I could not but feel a certain admiration for the man who, despite his color, was so far the superior of the many ‘opera bouffe’ generals in the Cuban Army of Liberation.”
41
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SCOVEL, MEANWHILE, had been shot in the leg while traveling with the rebels and the wound became infected. His hosts smuggled him to Havana, where U.S. consular officials shipped him back to the United States disguised as a businessman requiring medical treatment for tropical fever. Scovel used his time stateside to meet, for the first time, his employer, Joseph Pulitzer, and his managing editor, Bradford Merrill. He was presented with a new contract at a respectable $60 per week and with a generous allowance for expenses that permitted him to pick up a fine saddle, a camera, and a typewriting machine (possibly the first to be taken to a war zone). Scovel was anxious to return to Cuba, but Pulitzer apparently had qualms about sending him back into harm’s way and Merrill was uncomfortable with his close ties to the insurgents. Scovel promised not to put his life at risk and to conduct himself as a noncombatant and solely as a news correspondent. He was back in Havana by the spring of 1896.
Scovel did not stick to the letter of his promises to Pulitzer and Merrill. While he never carried a gun or engaged in combat, he did courier documents for the insurgents, and they valued his work highly enough to provide him with an armed escort of up to eleven men when he traveled in Cuba. The Spanish were not wrong to regard him as an enemy. Weyler, meanwhile, had read Scovel’s interview with Gómez, conducted in defiance of Spain’s ban on press contact with the rebels, and posted a $5,000 reward for the correspondent’s capture, dead or alive. By simply being in Cuba with a price on his head, Scovel was putting himself at risk. When James Creelman arrived in Havana in April, he was astonished to find Scovel hiding in plain view amid Spanish officers at the Cafe Inglaterra. He was wearing a shabby business suit and pretending to be Mr. Brown, a salesman from New York.
Creelman, taking a break from his political assignments, was also in Cuba for Pulitzer, who was preoccupied with documenting Spanish atrocities against civilians. Probably with Scovel’s assistance, Creelman slipped out of Havana to nearby Campo Florida to investigate another rumored massacre of noncombatants by Spanish soldiers. In a field not far from town, he and his Cuban guides found the fresh shallow graves of the slain, their hands tied behind their backs. Creelman gave Pulitzer the atrocity story he sought, with the names of thirty-three victims and the dates of their executions. It appeared May 1 on the front page of the
World
and continued over almost a full page inside. Creelman personally delivered a copy of his report to Weyler, who promptly ordered him deported. Creelman’s response, on returning stateside, was one of the more notorious screeds of the war: “The horrors of the barbarous struggle for the extermination of the native population are witnessed in all parts of the country. Blood on the roadsides, blood in the fields, blood on the doorsteps, blood, blood, blood! The old, the young, the weak, the crippled, all are butchered without mercy. There is scarcely a hamlet that has not witnessed this dreadful work.”
42
World
and continued over almost a full page inside. Creelman personally delivered a copy of his report to Weyler, who promptly ordered him deported. Creelman’s response, on returning stateside, was one of the more notorious screeds of the war: “The horrors of the barbarous struggle for the extermination of the native population are witnessed in all parts of the country. Blood on the roadsides, blood in the fields, blood on the doorsteps, blood, blood, blood! The old, the young, the weak, the crippled, all are butchered without mercy. There is scarcely a hamlet that has not witnessed this dreadful work.”
42
The
World
’s editorial page responded to Creelman’s report by calling for diplomatic pressure on Spain to end the conflict: “It is time that the government at Washington awoke to the fact that we have an Armenia at our very doors, and that the fair and fertile island of Cuba is not only being desolated by the torch of the insurgents but depopulated by the remorseless savagery of the Spanish soldiers. Intervention has become a duty.”
43
World
’s editorial page responded to Creelman’s report by calling for diplomatic pressure on Spain to end the conflict: “It is time that the government at Washington awoke to the fact that we have an Armenia at our very doors, and that the fair and fertile island of Cuba is not only being desolated by the torch of the insurgents but depopulated by the remorseless savagery of the Spanish soldiers. Intervention has become a duty.”
43
Notwithstanding his paper’s position, Harry Scovel, still in Cuba, was skeptical of Creelman’s story and began his own investigations into atrocity reports. In May, he visited a site near San Pedro where eleven unarmed civilians were said to have been slaughtered by Spanish troops. He then proceeded to several other sites of reported carnage. “I came here with the conviction that the reports of these slayings of unarmed men were much exaggerated,” he wrote, but over two months of field work he collected 196 signed affidavits attesting to Spanish brutality resulting in 212 deaths. He had the names, addresses, and ages of his victims, and in some cases the identities of the soldiers who had ordered or committed the killings: “That extermination of the Cuban people under the cloak of civilized warfare is Spain’s settled purpose is shown by facts already made public through the
World.
” Scovel’s conversion from skepticism would be repeated by many observers in the months ahead. Rea challenged his friend’s reporting, pointing out that many of his examples came from rebel sources and that some of the names were repeated. Nonetheless, Scovel’s reporting was unusually thorough for the time, and a British journalist who traveled in his footsteps through Havana province believed his work to be solid.
44
World.
” Scovel’s conversion from skepticism would be repeated by many observers in the months ahead. Rea challenged his friend’s reporting, pointing out that many of his examples came from rebel sources and that some of the names were repeated. Nonetheless, Scovel’s reporting was unusually thorough for the time, and a British journalist who traveled in his footsteps through Havana province believed his work to be solid.
44
BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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