Transcription
On the evening of February 15, 1898, a massive explosion tore through the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor, Cuba. The explosion sank the vessel, killed over 260 sailors, and shocked the American public. Days later, William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, The New York Journal, ran a sensational headline. But how did Hearst know Spain was to blame? Well, he didn't. Unverified sensationalism was Hearst's stock and trade. This was yellow journalism, born out of the New York newspaper circulation wars of the 1890s.
By the mid-1890s, the Spanish Empire had lost nearly all of its colonial possessions in the Western Hemisphere, besides Puerto Rico and Cuba. With the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the U.S. had declared European assertions of power in the Americas as dangerous to our peace and safety. In 1895, Cuban revolutionaries rose up against Spanish rule. The United States was also beginning to feel that here was a people who had been colonized by a brutal imperial power. It felt so resonant to the United States' own experience, its own birth.
First, we see a developing story in Cuba where the bad guys are the Spanish, the damsel in distress is the Cuban people, and the hero is going to be William Randolph Hearst and the American government that's going to rescue these poor Cubans. In 1895, the same year as the Cuban rebellion, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World began publishing a satirical cartoon about New York slums called Hogan's Alley. The bright, colorful cartoon featured a memorable character, Yellow Kid, outfitted in an oversized yellow night shirt.
The audience for newspapers was expanding as the cities were expanding. A lot of these people were immigrants; a lot of these people didn't read English all that well or speak English all that well. In 1896, in an effort to spur sales of his New York Journal, Hearst hired the Hogan's Alley cartoonist away from Pulitzer and continued a fierce war for talent between the two publishers. This was before radio and certainly before television, before films were really catching on. Comics brought color to these printed forms of entertainment that were arriving in people's homes.
Critics began calling the publishers' methods yellow kid journalism or yellow journalism for short. Yellow journalism gave rise to a new form of newspapering. It usually meant lots of sensation, lots of screaming headlines in enormous type, lots of illustrations, drawings, cartoons, and lots of pages of cartoons. It was wild, loud, brash, and jingoistic. These were years when newspapers in New York City were starting to accumulate circulations that reached a million. This was a new mass audience, and the approach worked. Flashy presentation and sensationalized reporting increased circulation for both publishers.
As the Cuban rebellion swelled, the intensity of yellow journalism was increasing. With yellow journalism and competition between Pulitzer and Hearst came large headlines, big illustrations, and more photographs in newspapers. Some Americans called for the Spanish to withdraw from the island and even sent material support to the Cuban revolutionaries. The Spanish had been ruling Cuba with enormous brutality for quite some time. Cuba is very close; Cuba's 90 miles off Florida. There are a lot of interests at stake here. There are economic interests; there's agricultural interest. Cuba provides crops that are important for the United States.
With tensions between the U.S. and Spain mounting, the American Navy ordered the USS Maine to Havana Harbor in January 1898. By February, yellow journalism was peaking, and tensions with Spain were at a boiling point. Then the explosion occurred. Hearst immediately published on his front pages a variety of stories going after the Spanish, all made up. His reporting was sensational; it was exaggerated; it was, in many cases, distorted. One Hearst headline even offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to who caused the explosion.
Pulitzer's New York World also published similar sensational coverage, and it was effective in helping drive the United States to war with Spain over Cuba. On April 25th, the U.S. declared war on Spain. Yellow journalism helped foster a political climate that was conducive to war. Hearst's competition with Pulitzer became the defining moment of journalism in the late 19th century. It really just went beyond; neither one could step back; neither one could control it. It came to its head with the Spanish-American War.
The two countries fought the Spanish-American War for eight months in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. By the time Spain and America signed the peace treaty on December 10, 1898, over 3,000 Americans and an estimated 55,000 Spaniards had died. In 1976, American naval investigators concluded that the Maine explosion was likely caused by a fire that ignited its ammunition stocks.