Sensational by Kim Todd (chromebook ebook reader .txt) 📕

the World’s February 17, 1898, headline. The front page announced that the paper had deployed a boat with divers to investigate the scene and floated a number of rumors—including overheard talk of a plot to destroy the Maine. An illustration of a ship ripped in two, bodies flung into the air and water, filled most of the space. The second page followed up with a rebuttal: “Blanco Reports to Spain That It Was an Accident” and a graphic of a cross section of the inside of the annihilated ship. (The paper also bragged of a circulation of 863,956.)

“Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy,” the Journal asserted, more definitively, the same day. It cited former New York police commissioner and now assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, saying the explosion was no accident (Roosevelt later denied saying this). The Journal offered a $50,000 reward for the identity of the perpetrator. Its lead image, imagination-infused, showed a mine below the surface of the water, lurking under the unsuspecting Maine. Another edition the same day declared with a maniacal cheerfulness, “War! Sure!” and displayed a picture of an alleged torpedo hole in the Maine’s side. Both papers claimed evidence of a “suppressed” dispatch from the Maine’s captain to the secretary of the navy, speculating that the destruction was not an accident. (The cable didn’t exist.)

Reverberations from the explosion soon reached the White House. On April 25, President McKinley issued a proclamation that war with Spain existed, and had been ongoing since April 21. The headline in the Journal took up a third of the front page and looked hand-drawn rather than typeset, giving the whole thing a precarious, shaky feel: “Congress Declares War.”

The highly paid reporters, the ability to print lavish illustrations and bright color, the outsize type, the competitive hunger, all was unleashed. If anyone had overlooked the newspaper contest before, now it would have been unavoidable. Newsboys waved the latest edition, the word “Extra” glowing red. The Evening Journal printed forty editions a day, adjusting for each additional scrap of news. Headlines ballooned to cover entire front pages. Arthur Brisbane, Hearst’s prize steal from Pulitzer, calculated the shortest usable words so letters could be even larger. In March, before McKinley’s decision to go to war, a World editor, delirious with exhaustion and the stress of trying to beat the Journal, convinced himself that war had actually been declared and put out an Extra saying so. Copies had already hit the streets before the issue was recalled. He collapsed and died of overwork-related pneumonia not much later at age thirty-eight. The fact that information was hard to get heightened the drama. The Spanish government censored news of the island and rebel outposts were remote. One reporter, defying the news ban, was arrested by the Spanish twice, saved from execution only by American public outcry.

In some ways, even though war was deadly serious, the spirit of Hearst’s time at the Harvard Lampoon lived on. In June, the Journal reported the death of the Australian “Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz,” killed in Cuba. Editors were thrilled when the World picked up the story—because it was a hoax. “Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz,” unscrambled, became “We Pilfer the News.” But in their pleasure in the deception, editors took the wrong moral from the episode. Yes, the World stole from the Journal, but the Journal had made up news just to play a prank. And even for reports made in earnest, the pressure for a scoop meant inaccuracies crept in. An entrenched rivalry between two men was making it hard for readers to find an accurate picture of the war.

Opportunities for journalism and heroism abounded, but not for everyone. After a decade-long debate, in which the stunt reporters played an integral part, about what it meant to be a woman, coverage of the Spanish-American War concerned what it meant to be a man. Teddy Roosevelt—hunter, police commissioner, outdoorsman—had long been worried about American manliness and its decline. An advocate for war with Spain, he joined a regiment of young men eager to experience the first war of their lifetimes. Harvard students, Roosevelt’s hunting buddies, cowboys, miners, all clamored to join up. In his self-mythologizing book about the regiment and its war experiences, The Rough Riders, he said applicants “possessed in common the traits of hardihood and a thirst for adventure. They were to a man born adventurers, in the old sense of the word.” War made men.

Male reporters, too, took the opportunity to test their mettle. Novelist and journalist Stephen Crane, who’d imagined the plight of a Civil War soldier so vividly in The Red Badge of Courage, felt his lack of firsthand experience as a flaw. When the Maine exploded, he was in London and scrambled for funds to head back across the Atlantic to witness Cuban events. Reporters like Crane not only wrote about the war, they carried weapons, spotted the enemy, translated, and, allegedly, led a bayonet charge. The line between soldier and reporter was indistinct, like the lines between detective and reporter, factory inspector and reporter, coast guard rescuer and reporter. New Journalism had done its boundary-blurring work.

Hearst himself emerged from the editor’s office and opera box to become a correspondent for his own paper. Wearing a Panama hat, he carried a gun and wrote about vultures feeding on corpses of Spanish soldiers. Never one to miss a publicity opportunity, he met with a Cuban general who presented the newspaper publisher with a tattered Cuban flag, for his paper’s “services to liberty.” He interviewed one of his reporters, who had been shot, and, cruising in a rented steamship, witnessed the wreckage after a Spanish naval defeat in early July. It was here that Hearst, spotting Spanish combatants waving a white flag on shore, accepted their surrender, took them prisoner, and turned them over to the military.

All these brandished weapons and troop movements produced few stories about women. The combat zones, the army camps, the brotherhood of the