Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

regiment: this was inviolable male territory. For its few female characters, papers retreated to feminine tropes. Rather than highlight rebel soldiers, medics, or spies who were women, the Journal touted Evangelina Cisneros, and portrayed her in the most stereotypical way possible—the beautiful girl extracted from a castle. In the Journal’s reporting, Cisneros was jailed for resisting a man’s advances rather than for treason; it became a case of a woman protecting her chastity, not fighting for her country. In his introduction to The Story of Evangelina Cisneros, the book that came out immediately after the rescue, reporter Julian Hawthorne (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son) made no bones about what kind of story this was, an old-fashioned one: “We are indeed accustomed to finding truth stranger than fiction; but it is a new sensation to find it also more romantic—more in the fashion of the Arabian Nights and the Gothic fairy-tales of the Medieval Ages.”

This wasn’t the only story in that vein. Earlier, in February 1897, in a ship on the way back from a less-than-fruitful reporting mission to Cuba, the jaunty Journal reporter Richard Harding Davis* sat next to Clemencia Arango at dinner. The sister of a rebel leader, Arango had been banished from the island under suspicion of carrying messages for the Cuban fighters. In an article titled “Does Our Flag Shield Women?,” Harding described Arango being undressed and searched by government officials at her house before she left, again at the Custom House, and again on the ship. In a huge second-page illustration by Frederic Remington, a naked woman stands, her pale back to the viewer. Three men, fully dressed, hover ominously. One has a devilish pointy black beard. This strip search was an affront to American manhood, a letter to the Journal opined several days later, suggesting if “the American government declines to call Spain to account, it shows a lack of virility that ought to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of every American woman, and indignation to the heart of every American man.”

But, as Arango told a World correspondent a few days after the article ran, the picture was wrong. She had been searched by women in a private room with closed doors, not leering men on deck. And the Spaniards’ fears were entirely justified.

“It is true that I was actively engaged in the conspiracy as far as I could be,” Arango gleefully confessed. She had delivered secret messages in the past and carried some on that very trip. Once in the United States, she acted as an agent for the rest of the war, supplying gunpowder and weapons to Cuban fighters, hiding bullets in the bottom of cans of milk. As in the case of the Evangelina Cisneros rescue, the damsel-in-distress narrative undermined women as drivers of their own stories—as rebels, as spies. Davis, disgusted and embarrassed, said that Remington’s illustration didn’t reflect what he’d written and swore off contributing to Hearst’s paper. As it turned out, the only one who displayed Arango’s body to prying male eyes was the Journal. Cuba itself became a maiden in need of rescue as Roosevelt and others emphasized the country’s inability to take care of itself.

And many women writers, heroines of their own narratives months before, were pushed aside just as they were coming into their own. As Brisbane put it bluntly in an article about the Journal’s war coverage: “The fair young female journalist dropped utterly from sight or joined the Red Cross.” He painted the scene in newspaper headquarters, emptying out as male reporters headed to the front: “Every beautiful newspaper woman declared that of all mankind she was best adapted to enter Havana in disguise, interview Blanco, get his views on the war and the enterprise of her newspaper, and return unscathed.” But the editors, concerned about danger where they hadn’t been before, said no. Battlefields were for men. (Brisbane may have been describing a conversation that played out in his own office, as he would have been the Journal editor making these decisions.)

The experience of Eva Valesh illustrates this abrupt shift in female reporters’ fortunes. In early March, fresh from New Bedford, Valesh had finagled a spot on the Anita, a 170-foot private yacht that Hearst filled with senators, representatives, and their family members, and sent on a fact-finding trip. He called it a “Congressional Commission.” At the Key West Hotel, before leaving for Cuba, the politicians toasted Hearst for his generous funds and activism. Valesh topped off the celebration with a final toast to the “New Woman in Journalism.” But it was more hope than prediction.

Unlike in New Bedford, where her expertise was deemed important and her name appeared in headlines, Valesh’s contributions from Cuba were strangely muted, and anonymous. It had been an honor for her to go. But back in the United States, when she slipped off a streetcar, hurt her back, and needed to take time off, the Journal quickly fired and replaced her.* With war as the main subject, her value to the paper had plummeted. One minute, her portrait graced the front page; the next, she was booted out the door.

At the World, Elizabeth Banks, once the toast of the Thames, struggled to get assignments on anything other than Cuba. War fever gripped the newspaper office. Reporters donned red, white, and blue neckties (they teased Banks when she accidentally wore a red and gold one, reflecting the Spanish flag; the men made her give it up, then lit cigars with it), and editors shunned everything that wasn’t a battle report or at least a colorful item about a society woman attending some glamorous function with “To Hell with Spain” pinned on her skirt. Banks’s decision to go on salary seemed smarter than ever, especially when she met a freelancer colleague aimlessly kicking around City Hall Park. His salary had plunged from $150 to $7 a week.

“God pity those who could not at command turn their thoughts warward and dip their pens in blood!” she wrote. It was