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

particularly hard on women, she noted, less likely to have military expertise or be able to travel to the battlefield.

Other female reporters found themselves similarly adrift. Sidelined, they cast around for new opportunities. Elizabeth Jordan, still at the World, though eyeing her escape to an editor’s post at Harper’s Bazaar, published a collection of short stories on newspaper life: Tales of the City Room. Ida B. Wells-Barnett met with President McKinley, seeking justice for a North Carolina postmaster who had been lynched. (She didn’t get anywhere.) Kate Swan interviewed a wealthy woman who, when her husband lost their money, launched a dress design business. Elizabeth Banks wrote a magazine story on “Sunday at the White House.” Nellie Bly, reconciled with her husband, traveled Europe. Nell Nelson rocked her infant daughter.

Even those women who did manage to get credentials from the US Army to cover the war struggled to do meaningful reporting. One of these was Kathleen Coleman, a journalist for the Toronto Mail and Empire, who’d emigrated from Ireland at twenty-eight, spoke with a lilt, and wrote under the nickname “Kit.” Over the course of her career, she had dressed as a man to report on seedier neighborhoods in London, and now she was headed to Cuba. This, too, was sold to readers as a stunt, with ads that promoted “‘Kit’ as a War Correspondent,” as if it were just another fanciful role.

But she found herself thwarted at every turn. The antipathy of the male reporters was obvious—they ignored or actively discouraged her. She understood that the presence of a woman, doing the same work they did, devalued it. This was true even when she made herself and her ambitions small, insisting to readers, “I am not here to detail the serious events of the war (which have not yet commenced) rather I am to write that light and airy matter which is ignominiously termed, by the trade, guff, but which is not always easy to manufacture.” Coleman told one of the male reporters that she didn’t want to write “in the grand style such as you boys write, but just the poor woman’s side of the war, don’t you see?”

But for weeks, Coleman was stuck in Tampa, the jumping-off point for soldiers headed to the battlefield, left behind when most of the male correspondents set off for Cuba in late June. She tried to get on a Red Cross boat, but they wouldn’t take her either. So she wrote around the edges of the conflict, interviewing a chambermaid whose husband had enlisted and a recruit who sat on an ants’ nest and stepped on an alligator his first day. In the heat of the afternoon, she retreated to her room to write. The envelopes she sent to her Toronto editors were fat with interviews and commentary, but it wasn’t the war. Women writers had broken down all kinds of barriers over the previous decade, but “war correspondent” remained male terrain.

Finally, near the end of July a naval supply boat picked Coleman up with some Red Cross workers, but by then the war was virtually over. Spain had surrendered on July 17. Still, she made valuable observations about the little she was allowed to see, documenting the Spanish soldiers ill with yellow fever and typhoid in Santiago, and detailing inadequate medicine and transportation home for infected and wounded American soldiers: “one hundred and thirty-three men in every stage of sickness, living on rotten rations and apparently forgotten by the country for which they were suffering.”

The Spanish-American War remade the world map and turned America into an imperial power. In the treaty following, the United States took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. McKinley had annexed the Hawaiian Islands, too. America, bold, muscled, masculine (in its own mind), took these countries behind its protective arm. The story became much more about American might than Cuban independence. Though its pages crowed about freedom and self-government for the Cubans, the Journal ran a headline the day after the surrender that read “Old Glory over Santiago.” An anonymous reporter concluded, “The ceremony of hoisting the Stars and Stripes was worth all the blood and treasure it cost.” (And the front page touted a circulation of 1,250,000.)

Despite the victory, reflecting on the Cuba coverage began to turn serious reporters’ stomachs. It had been too breathless, too much flirting with panic. It was like the whole news business had been stricken with hysteria. Things clearly had been totally out of control. Whether or not Hearst actually told the artist Frederic Remington, “You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war,” as he was alleged to have done, whipping up a passion for bloodshed was an unsettling way to sell papers.

The World staff, specifically, seemed ashamed. The publication had gone off the rails behind Pulitzer’s back: “The paper is a jest, a travesty, a smear, a damnable injustice to the man that owns it and possible only for the reason that he cannot see it I should think,” one editor wrote. In November, World editor W. Van Benthuysen served coffee and rolls and gave a speech to the staff, an effort to combat some of the slipping standards.

“We must heed it in every department, in every vocation that goes to make up this great newspaper. Absolute accuracy! Write it down! Have it ever before you!” It was supposed to rouse them to excellence, but the talk wandered, was repetitive, fell flat.

Those who felt wronged by Hearst and Pulitzer’s form of yellow journalism took advantage of the pile-on to try to outlaw it. In New York, a senator proposed a bill that made it a misdemeanor to publish an indecent paper or one that “corrupts, depraves, degrades, or injures” the minds of the public, punishable by a $1,000 fine or a year in jail. California passed laws that banned publishing portraits or caricatures of anyone but a public official without their permission. One California senator suggested that the killing of a reporter be classed