Weighing the Costs: The Scripps-McRae League Reports the War in Cuba

Abstract

This is the first historical examination of how the Scripps-McRae League of US newspapers reported the uprising in Cuba in the 1890s and the Spanish-American War in Cuba in 1898. It is based on the E. W. Scripps papers at Ohio University and a close reading of all war news in the league's flagship Cleveland Press. Founder E. W. Scripps applied his conservative business model to limit expenses, which put his newspapers at a competitive disadvantage. News from the war zone was delayed by disease, military censorship, and limited independent transportation and was overshadowed by war coverage in Washington. The league's low-cost strategy pushed coverage toward observational narratives, including portrayals of the Cuban people that shifted from admiring and supportive before the war to racist deprecation afterward. Scripps-McRae war correspondents are identified and their contributions analyzed.

Notes

A list of fifty-five afternoon newspapers served by the Scripps-McRae Press Association, “in connection with the New Publishers’ Press Association,” as of November 15, 1897, can be found on an untitled memo in Series 3.1, folder 7, box 3, general correspondence, May 1898–June 1898, E. W. Scripps Papers, Alden Library, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio (henceforth EWSP).

Thos. W. Steep, “Garcia Meets ‘Press’ Man with Warning That He Is to Be No Mere Assistant,” Cleveland Press, June 27, 1898.

Ibid.

“The War at a Glance,” Cleveland Press, June 8, 1898.

Scripps-McRae Special Service, “Surrender: Hundreds of Spaniards Ready to Do So,” Cleveland Press, June 17, 1898.

E. S. Wright, “How Siboney Was Destroyed,” Cleveland Press, August 2, 1898.

W. J. Taylor, “No Earthly Use,” Cleveland Press, July 14, 1898.

Willis P. King Jr., “Are the Cubans Ready for Citizenship?,” Cleveland Press, August 18, 1898.

Willis P. King Jr., “Does Free Cuba Mean Peace?,” Cleveland Press, August 19, 1898.

King, “Are the Cubans Ready for Citizenship?”

“R. F.P” [Robert F. Paine] to L. T. Atwood, June 6, 1898, folder 7, box 3, general correspondence, May 1898–June 1898, EWSP.

See David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2000); William A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961); Arthur Lubow, The Reporter Who Would Be King (New York: Scribner, 1992); Joyce Milton, The Yellow Kids (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); Charles H. Brown, The Correspondents’ War: Journalists in the Spanish-American War (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967); W. Joseph Campbell, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001); and Joseph E. Wisan, The Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press (1895–1898) (New York: Octagon Books, reprint edition 1965).

The incident is related in detail in Milton, The Yellow Kids, 363–367.

W. Joseph Campbell, ed., The Spanish-American War, vol. 4 of David Copeland, ed., The Greenwood Library of American War Reporting (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005).

See Charles R. McCabe, ed., Damned Old Crank: Self-Portrait of E. W. Scripps Drawn from His Unpublished Writings (New York: Harper, 1951); Gilson Gardner, Lusty Scripps: The Life of E. W. Scripps (New York, Vanguard Press, 1932); Patricia A. Schaelchlin, The Newspaper Barons: A Biography of the Scripps Family (Carlsbad, CA: Kales Press, 2003); Gerald J. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Vance H. Trimble, The Astonishing Mr. Scripps: The Turbulent Life of America's Penny Press Lord (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1992); and Milton A. McRae, Forty Years in Newspaperdom: The Autobiography of a Newspaperman (New York: Brentano's 1924). Other academic studies of E. W. Scripps focus on particular issues or eras. These include Scripps's overall business model, the Scripps newspaper empire during World War I, Scripps's attempt to create and sustain a newspaper that accepted no advertising, and Scripps's business and political philosophy. See, respectively, Gerald R. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Dale E. Zacher, The Scripps Newspapers Go to War, 1914–18 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Duane C. S. Stoltzfus, Freedom from Advertising: E. W. Scripps's Chicago Experiment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); and Michael Sheehy, “Capitalism as a Necessary Evil: How E. W. Scripps Charted a Cautious Course toward the Left,” American Journalism 28, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 7–21.

Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, 3.

Brown, The Correspondents’ War, 446.

Ibid., 49, 53.

Campbell, ed., The Spanish-American War, 326.

Ibid.

Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 53.

W. Joseph Campbell, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms (New York: Routledge, 2006), 125–126. Bylines for star reporters were not limited to war correspondents, as evidenced by Pulitzer's promotion of stunt journalists such as Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) in the late 1880s and early 1890s. See Brooke Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (New York: Times Books, 1994).

Campbell, ed., The Spanish-American War, 319.

Michael S. Sweeney, The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 17–18.

Emmet Crozier, Yankee Reporters 1861–65 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 263–264; and Mary Cronin, “‘The North to Us Is Like the Grave’: Albert D. Richardson's and Junius Browne's Confederate Prison Letters,” Journalism History 39, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 66.

Sweeney, The Military and the Press, 30.

J. Cutler Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955), 640; and ibid., 26.

Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 43.

Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, 2.

Journalism historian John C. Nerone has attacked the idea that reliance on advertising instead of political patronage liberated newspapers from political parties and powerful interests. Advertising substituted one type of influence for another. Scripps became leery of big advertisers demanding influence over news content in the 1890s and took steps to limit advertisers’ influence. For example, Scripps's Seattle Star refused to allow the large Seattle department store Bon Marche to censor news articles about the store, prompting Bon Marche to pull all of its advertisements. Scripps also banned lucrative patent medicine advertisements in 1900 and had his editors censor national advertisements before publication, a policy that may have cost him $500,000. He favored limiting advertisements to only forty percent of the space in his newspapers and experimented with an ad-free newspaper, the Chicago Day Book, beginning in 1911. See John C. Nerone, “The Mythology of the Penny Press,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4, no. 4 (December 1987): 378; and Stoltzfus, Freedom from Advertising, 2, 35–37.

Spencer Tucker, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars: A Political, Social, and Military History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 535.

Davis identified the rebel as Adolfo Rodriguez, the only son of a Cuban farmer living near Santa Clara. He was captured in December 1896. See Richard Harding Davis, “The Death of Rodriguez,” in Notes of a War Correspondent (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911), 3–14.

“Circular Letter to Editors,” February 6, 1898, 45–46, Series 3.2, folder 6, box 2, legal correspondence, February 1898, EWSP.

“Went to Cuba Four Months Ago and Hasn't Been Heard From,” Scranton Tribune, March 30, 1897, Chronicling America, Library of Congress, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.

E. W. Scripps, “Dear Mac,” February 25, 1898, Series 1.2, folder 11, box 3, outgoing letters, February 1898–April 1898, EWSP.

Ibid.

[No author], “To All Business Managers,” April 2, 1898, Series 3.1, folder 6, box 3, general correspondence, January 1898–April 1898, EWSP.

Milton A. McRae to E. W. Scripps, April 15, 1898, Series 1.1, folder 15, box 12, “Incoming Letters: 1898, McRae, Jan.–Apr.,” EWSP.

Milton A. McRae to E. W. and George H. Scripps, April 9, 1898, Series 1.1, folder 15, box 12, “Incoming Letters: 1898, McRae, Jan.–Apr.,” EWSP.

Milton A. McRae to E. W. Scripps, May 17, 1898, first letter of that date, Series 1.1, folder 15, box 12, “Incoming Letters: 1898, McRae, Jan.–Apr.,” EWSP.

Milton A. McRae to E. W. and George H. Scripps, April 9, 1898, Series 1.1, folder 15, box 12, “Incoming Letters: 1898, McRae, Jan.–Apr.,” EWSP.

Milton A. McRae to Paul H. Blades, May 9, 1898, Series 3.1, folder 7, box 3, general correspondence, May 1898–June 1898, EWSP.

R. F. Paine to E. W. Scripps, March 5, 1898, Series 1.1, folder 15, box 12, “Incoming Letters: 1898, McRae, Jan.–Apr.,” EWSP.

Brown, The Correspondents’ War, 447.

Ibid.

Ibid., 446.

R. F. Paine to E. W. Scripps, March 5, 1898, op. cit.

Hearst's New York Journal devoted its entire front page of January 17, 1897, to promote the work of Davis and Remington. It ran large portrait illustrations of both men. See “Richard Harding Davis and Frederic Remington in Cuba for the Journal,” New York Journal, January 17, 1897. Seven years later, Hearst traded on the name of one of the most popular novelists in the United States, Jack London, when he hired London to report on the Russo-Japanese War despite London's never having worked as a journalist. See Michael S. Sweeney, “Delays and Vexation: Jack London and the Russo-Japanese War,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 75, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 548–550.

Pulitzer first promoted Bly, by name, in 1887, when she faked insanity to gain access to, and expose the practices of, Blackwell's Island, an institution for mentally unbalanced women. The act that brought her the greatest fame, and an outpouring of self-promotion by the World, was her trip around the world in seventy-two days, besting the fictitious record of Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days. See Denis Brian, Pulitzer: A Life (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001), 125–126; and James McGrath Morris, Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power (New York: Harper, 2010), 282.

“Court Notes,” St. Paul (MN) Daily Globe, October 27, 1895, Chronicling America, accessed May 1, 2012. The story identifying Steep's hometown reported that he had sued an actor to reclaim some $120 that the actor owed him.

“A Cuban Correspondent Missing,” Evening Times (Washington, DC), March 27, 1897, Chronicling America, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024441/1897-03-27/ed-1/seq-2/.

Thomas W. Steep, “The Provisional Government of the Cubans,” Arena, 18 (August 1897): 227–231. The quotation is on page 231.

Thos. W. Steep, “In and about Key West,” Cleveland Press, June 2, 1898.

E. S. Wright, “Surrender Is the Only Thing That Is Left for Santiago,” Cleveland Press, July 12, 1898.

Thomas W. Steep, “Emptying Barrels of Wine Left by the Spanish Soldiery at Siboney,” Cleveland Press, July 20, 1898; Thos. W. Steep, “Swept: By Ocean Breezes Is Fever Camp,” Cleveland Press, July 27, 1898; and Thos. W. Steep, “Discovery of the Deserted Family,” Cleveland Press, August 5, 1898.

W. J. Taylor, “Havana Is Almost Impregnable, It Is Believed,” Cleveland Press, June 13, 1898.

W. J. Taylor, “At Sea. Transports Are Steaming to Santiago at Last” and “At Sea at Last,” Cleveland Press, June 15, 1898.

W. J. Taylor, “How the Army Landed,” Cleveland Press, July 2, 1898.

Willis P. King Jr., “Truth about the Cubans,” Cleveland Press, August 8, 1898.

Willis P. King Jr., “Killing Is the Work of Soldiers in Camp,” Cleveland Press, June 29, 1898.

King, “Truth about the Cubans.”

Willis P. King Jr., “A Stricken Army: A Pen Picture of the Suffering Troops at Santiago a Week Ago,” Cleveland Press, August 5, 1898.

Willis P. King, “Rough Riders Song,” Cleveland Press, August 10, 1898, 5. The song, which King tilted Rough Riders Roundelay, was to the tune of The Irish Fusiliers. Lyrics included, “When the Spanish shells and shrapnel burst / Our losses were the worst; / The chaplain even cursed. / “Charge!” cried Colonel Roosevelt, / and charged the first / To carve his way to glory.”

Willis P. King Jr., “Truths about the Cubans,” Cleveland Press, August 8, 1898; Willis P. King Jr., “More Truths about the Cubans,” Cleveland Press, August 8, 1898; Willis P. King Jr., “Are the Cubans Ready for Citizenship,” Cleveland Press, August 18, 1898; and “Does Free Cuba Mean Peace?,” Cleveland Press, August 19, 1898.

“Correspondent Missing,” Evening Times (Washington, DC), April 15, 1897, Chronicling America.

E. S. Wright to E. W. Scripps, September 7, 1898, Series 1.1, folder 10, box 12, incoming letters, 1898 W-Z, EWSP; and “Report of Managing Editor E. S. Wright,” Dec. 31, 1894, subseries 3.1, box I, folder 1, EWSP.

E. S. Wright, “Surrender Is the Only Thing That Is Left for Santiago,” Cleveland Press, July 12, 1898.

Scripps-McRae Telegram, “Pounded the Forts,” and Harry N. Rickey, “Little Advantage,” Cleveland Press, June 1, 1898.

“Noted Editor and Reporter, 77, Dies,” Indiana Evening Gazette, August 27, 1948.

Bellairs was identified as a “staff special” of the Scripps-McRae League. He contributed two bylined stories to the Press coverage. Three paragraphs filed in Key West described the Spanish batteries of Havana firing on blockading ships. No ships were damaged. Bellairs also reported on the state of fortifications in Havana in a front-page story on June 20. Sentney filed a one-sentence dispatch from DeSoto Park, near Tampa, on June 1 that said, in its entirety, “The censor has blue-penciled today's dispatches.” This appeared beneath an anonymous Scripps-McRae report announcing that troops soon would leave Tampa. Waldeck filed a three-paragraph dispatch from Washington, DC, on June 17 about Ohio troops eager to be sent to Cuba. Robinson was a Pall Mall Gazette reporter who sailed to the Cuban coast aboard a neutral British yacht and landed near Matanzas on May 28. Spanish troops arrested him and a companion as spies. British intervention secured their release, but not before they observed the defenses of Matanzas and Havana. The Scripps-McRae League and New York Sun hired Robinson as a “special correspondent” to tell of their visit to the war zone. Thompson filed a story July 14 in Key West about a Cuban fisherman picked up by the Navy off the coast of Havana, who described the effect of the American blockade on the city's residents. Butter sold for one dollar a pound in the hungry town, the man said. See K. G. Bellairs, “Blanco Takes a Crack at Our Fleet,” Cleveland Press, June 14, 1898; K. G. Bellairs, “Plans of the Fortifications of Havana,” Cleveland Press, June 20, 1899; W. S. Sentney, “Day Set,” Cleveland Press, June 1, 1898; Jacob Waldeck, “Fifth Ohio Will Probably Go to Cuba in a Week,” Cleveland Press, June 17, 1898; Philip Robinson, “Ran the Blockade: Thrilling Experience of a Scripps-McRae Correspondent,” Cleveland Press, June 17, 1898; and Walter Thompson, “From Havana. Conditions in the Big City Told by a Refugee,” Cleveland Press, July 14, 1898.

“100. The Total American Casualties,” Cleveland Press, June 30, 1898.

“Fighting Fiercely!,” Cleveland Press, July 1, 1898; and “Spaniards Driven from Intrenchments around Santiago,” Cleveland Press, July 2, 1898.

Scripps-McRae Special Service, “Cervera's Fleet Is Destroyed,” Cleveland Press, July 4, 1898.

Scripps-McRae Special Service, “Fighting at Santiago Is Graphically Described,” Cleveland Press, July 4, 1898.

Brown, The Correspondents’ War, 225–226; and McRae, Forty Years in Newspaperdom, 167.

Brown, The Correspondents’ War, 225.

Ibid., 226–227.

Ibid., 225.

Ibid., 227–228.

E. S. Wright to E. W. Scripps, September 7, 1898.

“Censor. Uncle Sam Controls Santiago Cable,” Cleveland Press, July 19, 1898.

E. S. Wright, “Beat Balaclava Charge,” Cleveland Press, July 19, 1898.

Giovanna Dell’Orto, American Journalism and International Relations: Foreign Correspondence from the Early Republic to the Digital Era (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 59.

Scripps-McRae Special Service, “Cervera's Fleet Is Destroyed.”

Scripps-McRae Telegram, “Fighting Fiercely!”

Scripps-McRae Telegram, “Pounded the Forts.”

Scripps-McRae Telegram, “Schley's Official Report,” Cleveland Press, June 3, 1898.

Scripps-McRae Special Service, “In Peril,” Cleveland Press, June 14, 1898.

Milton A. McRae to E. W. Scripps, May 17, 1898, second letter of that date, Series 1.1, folder 15, box 12, “Incoming Letters: 1898, McRae, Jan.–Apr.,” E. W. Scripps Papers, Alden Library, Ohio University, EWSP.

“Fever Next Door to US Cuban Postoffice,” Cleveland Press, July 2, 1898.

Taylor, “On Cuban Soil.”

“Miles Says ‘Help’”; “Yellow Jack!”; “Spain's Awful Ally”; “Take Patients to Florida”; and “Fourteen Cases,” Cleveland Press, July 13, 1898.

Thomas W. Steep, “Swept by Ocean Breezes Is Yellow Fever Camp,” Cleveland Press, July 26.

PBS, “The Great Fever,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/fever/peopleeevents/e_cuba.html.

Tone noted that cultural and racial stereotypes about Latinos and blacks reasserted themselves once the United States became an occupying power and administration of the island became an immediate concern. “American forces quickly learned to despise the Cuban insurgents,” Tone wrote, “once called heroic freedom fighters, now seen as ‘Negro hordes’ and ‘anarchist incendiaries.’” John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 11–12.

Scripps-McRae Telegram, “Fought Like Apaches,” Cleveland Press, June 25, 1898.

Scripps-McRae Telegram, “Attack on Santiago Probably Began Tuesday Morning,” Cleveland Press, June 28, 1898, 1; and Scripps-McRae Special Services, “100. The Total American Casualties,” 1. The former story was datelined June 27; the latter, June 26.

Taylor, “On Cuban Soil.”

Scripps-McRae Telegram, “Cubans Are Dumped by the United States; No Longer Allies,” Cleveland Press, July 21, 1898.

William R. Brock, “The American Commonwealth and the Dilemmas of Democracy,” American Nineteenth Century History 2, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 75; and Francis G. Wilson, “The American Commonwealth,” review of Bryce's American Commonwealth, Fiftieth Anniversary, by Robert C. Brooks, The Review of Politics 2, no. 2 (April 1940): 226, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1404111.

James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1889), 737.

James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 894.

Ibid., 496.

Ibid., 518.

E. W. Scripps, I Protest: Selected Disquisitions of E. W. Scripps, ed. Oliver Knight (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 433–434.

Historians examining the issues of race and class in the United States in the nineteenth century noted widespread support for the concepts of social Darwinism as described by Herbert Spencer, bifurcating the world into superior white and inferior nonwhite. People of Spanish or mixed Spanish-Indian descent were increasingly racialized as nonwhite after the Mexican-American War. Class issues also complicated racial divisions, with rich and well-educated Hispanics more likely than others to be classified as white. Poor, dark-skinned, uneducated peoples living in territories acquired in war remained unassimilable to most Americans, despite widespread opinion that the island of Cuba logically fit within the American empire. Speaking of Cuba in 1853, New York Tribune journalist James Shepherd Pike said the United States did not want a territory occupied by “black, mixed, degraded, and ignorant, or inferior races.” See Victor M. Rodriguez Dominguez, “The Racialization of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans: 1890s–1930s,” Centro Journal 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 78; Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13, 24; and Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 282. For a general history of manifest destiny, see Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935).

Laura Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 74–75.

E. W. Scripps, “Dear Mac,” February 25, 1898.

Shahira Fahmy and Thomas J. Johnson, “Embedded versus Unilateral Perspectives on Iraq War,” Newspaper Research Journal 28, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 111.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael S. Sweeney

Michael S. Sweeney is a professor in the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, Schoonover Center 231, Athens, OH 45701, [email protected].

Paul Jacoway

Paul Jacoway is a PhD student and teaching assistant in the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, Schoonover Center 217, Athens, OH 45701, [email protected].

Young Joon Lim

Young Joon Lim is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas Pan American, Arhu 165, Edinburg, TX 78539, [email protected].