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The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests
Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman, and Edward Rhodes (ed.)
1999
5. Strategic Adjustment and the U.S. Navy: The Spanish-American War, the Yellow Press, and the 1990s
Bartholomew H. Sparrow, University of Texas at Austin
Newspapers are made to sell and for this purpose there is nothing better than war. War means daily sensation and excitement. On this almost any kind of newspaper may live and make money....[I]t cannot but follow, that it is only human for a newspaper proprietor to desire war, especially when he feels sure that his own country is right and its opponents are enemies of civilization.
E. L. Godkin 1
Because Cold War expectations no longer obtain in the currently unipolar or unevenly multipolar world order, the United States, as the predominant world power, faces a period of strategic adjustment. Despite the many attempts that have been made to categorize the present international position of the United States, there are no obvious parallels between the United States today and prior eras of strategic adjustment, such as the late 1940s, the interwar 1920s and 1930s, the 1890s, the Civil War years, or the founding. 2
Unlike the latter half of the 1940s, the United States does not confront a formidable military and ideological antagonist of the stature of the Soviet Union. Its defense budget cuts and personnel reductions scarcely match those after 1945. Most of the major powers with the capacity to threaten the United States—Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan—happen to be its allies. Unlike the 1920s and 1930s, the United States does not face other major powers of equivalent capability. And unlike the 1890s and preceding eras, the United States is a major world power. In contrast to the decline of the British Empire, moreover, there is no emerging power to whom the baton of world leadership can be passed. 3 The United States finds itself in uncharted territory, in a “fog of peace.”
Yet, there may be an important parallel between the present strategic situation of the United States and that of a century ago with respect to the role of the news media. An examination of the 1890s is instructive as an example of the potential influence of the press (or news media) on U.S. foreign policy. The yellow journalism of the late 1890s exerted its own separate impact on national politics. 4 The sensational press fanned the flames of the Cuban issue and provoked a national outcry that neither the Congress nor the President could ignore. As historian David Trask concludes: “compelling domestic influences were more important than international considerations in dictating McKinley’s decision for war.” 5 National politics and societal interests, rather than changes in the international system, provided the grounds for the American war with Spain and for the accompanying U.S. strategic adjustment at the end of the nineteenth century.
With the quick and easy victory over Spain, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, Wake Island, Eastern Samoa, the Philippines, and shortly thereafter (and as a direct consequence of the war), the Hawaiian islands. Americans experienced “a new consciousness of international empire and world-wide power” as a result of their victory in 1898. The United States entered the ranks of world powers, complete with international ambitions and international obligations. The U.S. Navy became responsible for American interests that encompassed the Caribbean and stretched across much of the Pacific.
In the 1990s U.S. foreign policy has once more become tied to the news media, specifically in the case of the “CNN Effect.” The speed and impact of the televised image is forcing American decisionmakers to formulate policy on the run, before diplomatic communications and intelligence reports are in, and before the president has time to consult with his executive aides and congressional allies. The news media, and television in particular— rather than the White House, the Congress, or either of the political parties—often appear to be initiating government action and setting the political agenda. 6 Pictures of starving children got the United States into Somalia and televised pictures of a soldier being dragged through Mogadishu streets forced U.S. troops out. Similarly, news of Iraq’s treatment of the Kurds at the close of the Gulf War forced a change in the U.S. plans for withdrawal from the region. 7
The argument in this chapter is that the strategic adjustment of the United States in the 1890s—i.e., the rise of U.S. global strategic, economic, political, and humanitarian interests—hinged upon the occasion of the Spanish-American War of 1898. In order to understand the U.S. decision to go to war against Spain, however, we have to look at the sensational journalism of the late 1890s—the yellow press—and at why it was so able to affect American policy, and ultimately American strategic adjustment.
I define “strategic adjustment” as an enduring and significant change (although not necessarily a permanent change) in the ends and means of statecraft, i.e., in the definition and pursuit of the national interest. I operationalize “strategic adjustment” in terms of the changes in the ideas, institutions, and capabilities of the U.S. Navy. My assumption is that the strategic adjustment evident in naval affairs was consistent with and reflective of a more comprehensive strategic adjustment taking place in national politics and throughout the federal government. Section 1 establishes the central role of the Spanish-American War in the strategic adjustment of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, as manifest in the case of the ideas, organizations, and material resources of the U.S. Navy. Section 2 presents an institutional explanation for the short-lived impact of the yellow press on national politics in the 1890s. It is based on theory that focuses upon the fluidity of institutions. Section 3 reconsiders the news media as an institution in the 1990s in light of the history of the 1890s.
Strategic Adjustment and the U.S. Navy in the 1890s
The complex process of strategic adjustment may take years to accomplish. Even the rearming and mobilization of the U.S. economy and society during the 1940s, perhaps the single greatest economic transformation and societal reorientation in American history, was a lengthy process. The rearmament period began in earnest after the fall of France, in June 1940. It would not be until after the invasion of South Korea, in June 1950, that the American military, industry, and scientific communities achieved their Cold-War standing. 8
The strategic adjustment of the late 1890s and early 1900s was a similarly drawn-out process, with roots in the 1880s and extensions into the 1910s. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power on History was published in 1890; Navy Secretary Benjamin Tracy called for the construction of a battleship navy at the end of 1889. Total navy budgets grew rapidly in the 1880s, rising from $6.6 million in 1886 to $8.5 million in 1888, and then to $11.4 million in 1890. A battleship-based, blue-water fleet would eventually replace the U.S. Navy’s former and exclusive dependence on cruisers and coastal-defense vessels. 9
The Spanish-American War accelerated and consolidated this process of strategic adjustment. Lectures, discussions, and popular articles on navalism were prevalent in the United States during the 1890s, even before 1890, but it was not until after the Spanish-American War that there was an across- the-board acceptance of Mahan’s ideas. Similarly, while a limited set of organizations necessary for conducting naval warfare were already in place, it was not until mid-1898 that the United States reinforced and created the naval institutions appropriate for a world power. And it was not until the war with Spain, and its aftermath, that the United States permanently dedicated the budgetary resources necessary for the construction of a formidable ocean- going navy.
Naval Strategy
Ideas of what the Navy should do constitute naval strategy. In peacetime, U.S. naval strategy was to implement foreign policy; in wartime, it was to decide where conflict would be engaged and how it would be pursued. Here, the success of the U.S. Navy in the Spanish-American War legitimated Mahan’s naval strategy. Mahan argued that command of the sea was essential to a nation’s success in the “harsh competition of international life.” The “denial of safe transit” was the key to victory in modern warfare. For the defense of the merchant marine and for keeping trade routes open, maritime strategy demanded a force capable of being trained on rival fleets or on the “highways of commerce.” Naval fleets should be kept intact, and not dispersed, if they were to achieve this concentration of power. “The most important units of the fleet were those which would contribute most directly to a decisive outcome”—the capital ships, the battleships. 10
The victory over Spain in 1898 marked the changeover in U.S. naval strategy, from commerce raiding and coastal defense to Mahan’s blue-water strategy that required capital ships, fleet engagements, and command of the sea. Future naval conflicts would be in the open water, away from American shores. The destruction of the Spanish fleets in Manila harbor and off Santiago de Cuba demonstrated the efficacy of the ocean-going navy as a gun platform and means of sea control. After the war most Americans would consider the United States to be a maritime nation, dependent on an offensive battleship fleet for its security and prosperity. Before the war, few Americans had thought of the United States and the U.S. Navy in such terms. 11 The success of the naval war with Spain provided an emphatic confirmation of the naval doctrine espoused by Mahan, Stephen Luce, Theodore Roosevelt, Carl Schurz, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and others. 12
Naval Institutions
Several institutions of the U.S. Navy were affected by the war: the Naval Institute, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Naval War College, the Naval War Board, and the General Board. The Naval Institute, founded in 1873 by Stephen Luce, served as a forum for ideas about the Navy. It awarded prizes, published journals, and sponsored conferences on matters of “policy, materials, strategy, tactics, organization, administration, education,” and naval developments abroad. 13 The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), created in 1882 by Navy Secretary William Hunt and located within the Bureau of Navigation, was the first U.S. agency to be organized explicitly for the purpose of collecting and classifying information on military affairs abroad, on “all information that may be of value to the Navy in the event of hostilities.” 14 Two years after the creation of the ONI, Navy Secretary William Chandler established the Naval War College (again in response to Luce’s initiatives) for the education of naval officers on technology, strategy, tactics, and logistics, as well as history, geography, and international law. President Cleveland’s Secretary of the Navy, Hilary Herbert, used the Naval War College as a general staff for drawing up a war plan against Britain, given the possibility of war with Britain over the Venezuelan-British Guianan boundary dispute. 15 It was Naval War College’s staff which, together with naval intelligence personnel, drew up the plan for Commodore Dewey’s attack on the Spanish Pacific fleet in Manila Bay—the “Kimball plan.” 16
The successful conduct of the Spanish-American War marked the fruition of the efforts of the Naval Institute, the ONI, and the Naval War College. Besides legitimating the existing institutions of the Navy, however, the war with Spain also fostered a demand for new institutions. The McKinley administration established the Naval War Board to serve as an advisory body to the Navy Secretary and to coordinate war planning and operations. Ten days after the signing of the armistice, on August 12, 1898, the Naval War Board advised that the United States should control the Caribbean and the Central American isthmus; it recommended the construction of the Panama Canal (consistent with Mahan’s precept that the fleet should not be divided but be able to go between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans). It called for the acquisition of naval stations on Cuba, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and on either end of the proposed Panama canal; it also called for the establishment of naval bases on Pago-Pago, the Samoan islands, the Hawaiian islands, Guam, Manila, and the Chusan islands. Most of this would come to pass.The Spanish-American War also “revealed the need for a naval general staff.” Navy Secretary John D. Long therefore created the General Board in 1900 for strategic planning, modeled after the Prussian general staff (and the Naval War Board). The General Board became “the senior military council of the nation” and was mandated to advise the Navy Secretary on “any matter it deemed important” as well as on the annual construction needs of the fleet. 17
Other institutional developments followed quickly: the creation in 1903 of the Joint Army-Navy Board for the purpose of interservice planning; the formation of an independent Marine Corps within the Navy Department between the years 1900 and 1920; and the establishment of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations in 1915. These institutions contributed to the strategic adjustment of the 1890s both directly (by serving as forums for planning and strategy) and indirectly (by serving as the loci for the creation and dissemination of new ideas concerning the American Navy). The Spanish-American War proved the worthiness of naval organizations established for the instruction of personnel, collection of information, planning of operations, and coordination of tactics. The war also prompted the creation of the Naval War Board and the General Board.
Table 5.1: The Cost of the New Navy (millions)
| Fiscal Year | New Construction | Maintenance and Operation | Total Navy Outlays | Ships Added |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1890 | $4.8 | $6.6 | $22.0 | 3 battleships |
| 1892 | 10.8 | 7.1 | 29.2 | 1 battleship |
| 1894 | 12.5 | 7.2 | 31.7 | 0 battleships |
| 1896 | 7.7 | 8.3 | 27.1 | 3 battleships |
| 1898 | 22.2 | 15.0 | 58.8 | 3 battleships, 3 monitors |
| 1900 | 10.7 | 15.9 | 56.0 | 2 battleships, 2 cruisers |
| 1902 | 14.4 | 20.2 | 67.8 | 2 battleships, 2 cruisers |
| 1904 | 32.4 | 27.9 | 103.0 | 1 battleship, 1 cruiser |
| 1906 | 31.8 | 29.2 | 110.5 | 1 dreadnought |
| 1908 | 20.2 | 45.3 | 118.0 | 2 dreadnoughts |
| 1910 | 24.7 | 48.8 | 123.2 | 2 dreadnoughts |
Sources: New Construction and Maintenance and Operations expenditures are from Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1917, 276, cited in Paolo E. Coletta, A Survey of U.S. Naval Affairs 1865-1917, (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1987) Appendix H, 238; Navy Department outlays are from Series Y 457–465, “Outlays of the Federal government: 1789 to 1970,” Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975), 1114–5; and shipbuilding figures are from George C. Davis, A Navy Second to None (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 168, cited in Coletta, A Survey of U.S. Naval Affairs, Appendix F, 237.
Naval Capabilities
Indicators of the Navy’s capabilities further point to the significant impact of the Spanish-American War on strategic adjustment. Whereas the U.S. Navy of 1890 ranked twelfth in the world, by 1915 it was “one of the world’s most powerful fleets,” able “to project immense power abroad.” 18 The biggest changes in naval spending and shipbuilding coincided with and followed the Spanish-American War. The figures below (see table 5.1) illustrate the growth of naval spending. Spending on new construction rose from $5 million in 1890 to $22 million in 1898, and to between $20 and $32 million annually in the early 1900s. Spending on maintenance and operations rose from around $7 million a year in the early 1890s to more than double that by 1900. Aggregate Navy Department outlays soared in 1898 and in the years following.
Once the war ended, the government quickly moved to expand the U.S. naval fleet. Congress lifted the range restrictions and tonnage limitations on battleships in 1899, and the $78 million appropriation bill passed in 1900 was the largest in the history of U.S. peacetime expenditures. By 1900 the United States stood sixth among the world’s naval powers in battleships commissioned or under construction, and by 1902 the U.S. Navy was rated fourth in the world (behind Great Britain, France, and Russia). Soon thereafter, in 1906, Congress called for the construction of the most powerfully armed, most heavily armored, and longest-range battleships ever: the dreadnoughts. 19
In sum, the events of 1898 resulted in strategic adjustment in terms of lasting changes in the allocation of national resources, improvements in the quality and functions of naval institutions, and the redefinition of American grand strategy.
Historians show an overwhelming consensus on the importance of the Spanish-American War and the year 1898. The war with Spain was “a turning point in American history,” one which forced a “revolution in foreign affairs” and caused a “radical” reassessment of U.S. defense policy. The Spanish-American War forged a “new empire” for the United States; it marked the “acquisition of empire” which “placed new demands on the navy.” 20 After 1898, European writing on the “American peril” would no longer use the future tense. The historian Ernest R. May notes that whereas “diplomats and writers rarely spoke of the United States in the same breath with the six recognized great powers—Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Italy” in the 1890s, by “the beginning of the twentieth century they included it almost invariably.” 21
Yellow Journalism as a New Institution
If the Spanish-American War both accelerated and consolidated U.S. strategic adjustment in terms of the historical changes in the ideas, institutions, and capabilities of the U.S. Navy, then we need to understand the reasons behind the war.
Partisan politics cannot explain the decision to go to war, despite the prominence of party politics and partisan differences in the late nineteenth century—a time when the Republican party controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. Although they were supporters of American manifest destiny and economic internationalism, the Republicans were cautious about interfering in Spanish-Cuban relations and reluctant to go to war. 22 It was the minority-party Democrats who advocated U.S. intervention in Cuba and who had used the Cuban issue for partisan reasons since 1896.
Nor can an argument based on economic interests account for the decision. Business interests and conservative newspapers resisted American intervention in Spanish colonial relations. Indeed, Mark Hanna and the conservative Journal of Commerce consistently opposed American belligerence. One study that looked at the effect of news about U.S.-Spanish relations and changes in stock prices found that in eight instances of news about increasing tensions with Spain (between February 1896 and March 1898) stock prices fell, and in five instances where peaceful settlements were reported as news (between March and December 1896) stock prices rose. 23 Military intervention by the United States would put the $50 million of American investment in Cuba at risk. 24 Indicatively, the Spanish blamed jingoes and jingoism— and not American businessmen or economic imperialism—for the U.S. intervention in Cuban affairs. Nor was the Spanish-American War managed by President McKinley as others contend, as will be argued below.
If the war cannot be explained by party politics, economic forces, or presidential design, how then do we explain the impact of the yellow press? An application of the new institutionalism to the political communication of the 1890s provides some answers, I suggest.
Several characteristics distinguish the historical (or sociological) version of the new institutionalism. 25 For one, history is not efficient. The normal state of affairs is more likely to be one of disorder, dissonance, inconsistency, and incongruity than one of a singular “order.” Politics “is essentially open-ended and unsettled” given the number, interrelation, and complexity of human institutions. Political life manifests multiple, clashing institutions. 26 The new institutionalism attends to matters of timing (the conjuncture of one institution with another) and temporality (the impermanence of institutions). 27 Institutions exist in no necessary relationship with other institutions; they have different origins and founding periods; they are nonsimultaneous. 28 The new institutionalism is also cognizant of power—i.e., the institutions’ “purposive or intentional” quality. Institutions exist in relation to elites, interests, and other institutions, and they “control (or attempt to control) the behavior of persons or institutions other than themselves.” The constructed and reconstructed rules of institutions are the product of human intent, aimed at particular ends. The rules of institutions “partake of the actors’ personal motives and ambitions.” 29 Applied to the sensational press at the end of the nineteenth century, the new institutionalism directs our attention to the changing and interconnected institutional orderings in the sphere of political communication, 30 to the timing and temporary quality of institutions, and to the use of power within them. 31 I take up each of these in turn.
Four “relatively independent” orderings figured in the political communication of the late nineteenth century. One ordering that factored into the emergence of the yellow press as an institution was the means by which the electorate learned of politics. Newspapers became independent of political parties as sources of publicly available information about politics and government. A second ordering was the commercialization of the news business as newspaper publishing became highly profitable. A third ordering was the working relationship between journalists and politicians—the standard practices of government public relations as they were at the time. A fourth ordering consisted of the content of the press—the political information being communicated by the press—in this case, the sensational content of the news. The particular conjunction of these orderings in the late 1890s allowed the yellow press to influence U.S. politics and American expansionism. In neither the decades immediately preceding the 1890s nor those immediately following was the sensational press so able to influence national affairs. 32
Newspapers and Political Communication
Americans of the 1890s read their newspapers. The literacy rate approached 90 percent. There were about 1,900 daily newspapers and 14,000 weekly newspapers then in circulation. 33 With the high rates of voter turnout in the 1890s (turnouts ranged between 70 and 80 percent of eligible voters from 1840 through 1896), the press was in a position to exert considerable pressure on public opinion. 34 The competition for voters was especially intense in the larger cities of the East and Midwest, where 46 percent of Americans in 1900 were either first-generation citizens or immigrants themselves (36 million of the country’s population of 76 million). 35
Newspapers had been conduits of political information for a long time, of course; they had been explicitly affiliated with the political parties since the 1830s. Newspapers, not very profitable for most of the nineteenth century, needed the capital provided by political advertisements, and political parties needed the forum provided by the newspapers for publicizing rallies, informing voters, and explaining politics to their partisans. Loyal editors were rewarded with patronage jobs. 36 These press-party ties began to deteriorate over the latter half of the century, however, such that newspaper partisanship by the 1890s evolved into “a new style of limited partisanship,” one independent of political party.
The press could thus serve as an instrument of reform. Newspapers would be “the master, not the tool, of party.” Newspapers could present facts and relevant arguments, and thereby facilitate the education of voters. If political position could be determined by reason—rather than by heritage or emotion (to exaggerate somewhat)—then party affiliation no longer had to be reflexive. Newspapers, like the voters themselves, would be party members by choice, according to the interests of their editors and publishers. 37
As the newspapers grew independent and became to varying degrees part of the reform movement, they reinforced the educational and reformist movements within the two parties. Grover Cleveland used educational politics to win the presidential election of 1892 (rather than relying on the torchlight marches typical of former elections); he was aided by the reformist Mugwumps in his electoral victory. Once in office he promulgated reforms of the civil service and of the tariff system. The Republican party also relied heavily on newspapers in response to the surge of educational politics and the weakening of party ties. It set up a “literary bureau” for disseminating information on the tariff in the 1888 election, and in the 1892 election established a newspaper office which clipped and sent out newspaper articles to party papers around the country.
As the historian Michael McGerr reports, “the papers of both parties” in the election of 1892 “applauded the campaign of education” and the focus on the “facts.” Indeed, McGerr finds that “traditional party journalism was crippled” by the end of the nineteenth century. 38 It is indicative of this newfound independence that a number of Republican papers—including the New York Times, the New York Evening Post, and the Boston Herald— deserted the 1884 Republican presidential ticket, just as a number of prominent Democratic papers would later bolt from the presidential ticket of the Democratic Party in 1896. 39
In short, in a world of educational politics with newspapers independent of political party, the overwhelming majority of Americans in the second half of the 1890s were learning about politics and foreign affairs only as mediated by the press. The press was poised to play an independent role in political communication, capable of affecting national politics as it had not previously.
The Structure of the News Industry
A second ordering of political communication of the 1890s was the commercial status of the U.S. newspaper industry: newspaper publishing was becoming big business. Advertising sales were for the first time being based on actual circulation figures. Advertisers were no longer being penalized for using pictures rather than copy; and advertising in newspapers was becoming very attractive to businesses, given the rise of the middle class and a national market for goods and services. The ratio of advertising content to newspaper editorial matter changed from about 30:70 in 1880 to about 50:50, and above, by 1900. Newspapers’ advertising revenues rose sixfold in just thirty years’ time, from a total of $16 million in 1870 to more than $95 million by 1900. 40
Technological developments made the growth in circulation and profitability possible, and the new production methods provided another incentive for the move away from partisanship: with a partisan press, newspapers’ markets were limited a priori to a little more (or less) than 50 percent of potential customers, whereas the logic of news production was to maximize circulation and minimize per-copy costs.
The new economics of the news industry—derived from the technological improvements, the inflow of advertising dollars, and the increase in newspaper circulation—made newspaper publishing extremely competitive. New York City alone had eight morning newspapers, seven evening papers, and more than fifteen weekly papers of general interest. Newspapers hired star reporters, vigorously promoted their own publications, and priced their newspapers at one or a few cents each (in contrast to the “six cent” business and financial papers) in order to gain greater circulation and an edge on their rivals. 41 Newspapers, which previously had hired few reporters, began to fill their staffs with them, since news stories had begun to replace editorials as newspapers’ most important feature. The new reporters were more likely than their predecessors to view journalism as a profession, to have gone to college, and to believe in the desirability of professional training.
Given the size of metropolitan New York and the resources—and ambitions—of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, Pulitzer’s New York World (purchased in 1883) and Hearst’s New York Journal (purchased in 1895) competed vigorously and viciously. 42 The two papers introduced the use of banner headlines set in heavy type and spanning several columns; they were the first to use line drawings and illustrations in their papers and hired portrait artists and cartoonists to this end; they invested in faster telegraph transmission of images and copy; they hired the best talent (Richard Harding Davis, Sylvester Scovel, Frederic Remington, Stephen Crane, and James Creelman, among others); and they constantly advertised their own news coverage and circulation figures. What the Journal and the World began became standard industry practice. 43
Politicians and the Press
A third ordering of political communication was the relationship between public officials and members of the press: journalists rather than politicians set the agenda with respect to U.S. policy on Spain and Cuba. White House press relations were “somewhat haphazard” under McKinley, one historian of journalism, Robert Desmond, reports. “Even with the Spanish-American War in progress [the White House] was not regarded as a source of news warranting special coverage.” Reporters infrequently went to the White House and rarely saw the President. 44 Not until the war was underway did the President and his staff develop some of the standard public relations practices assumed today as a matter of course: centralizing the control of information, regulating correspondence (specifically, that originating from the Caribbean and the Philippines), dedicating space in the White House for reporters’ use, and observing unwritten conventions in their relationship with the press. 45
Before the war the White House had no public relations apparatus. Neither the President and his staff nor the federal government as a whole was equipped to assemble basic information, distribute within the government that information which did arrive, or inform the public of government policies and actions. Public officials responded neither quickly nor emphatically to false and misleading news coverage, and only occasionally did government personnel use the news media to promote their own positions. “Politicians showed deference to the press,” and used the newspapers for gathering information for their own use. 46 The press, and not government public relations, determined what voters knew about their government. And it was the press, and not private consultants or opinion polls, that provided politicians with a gauge of public opinion.
The press’s domination of political communication was especially striking after the sinking of the Maine. The overwhelming sentiment in the nation’s newspapers was one of retribution. The sensational press, calling for action against Spain, roiled public opinion, incited a majority of Congressmen to act (Congressmen who faced elections in the fall of 1898), and condemned the caution shown by the President. 47 Indeed, when the Naval Board of Inquiry concluded that the Maine had been sunk by a mine, “Republican congressmen and editors warned the President that if he did not lead the country into a popular war, others would.” 48 No community or occupational group was immune to the “war fever.” Not even the vocal opposition of much of the clergy and religious press, a silence on the part of Civil War veterans (the Grand Army of the Republic), and the disapproval of many successful businessmen could check what had become the “unshakable conviction” of the necessity of war. Congressional Republicans abandoned their support for McKinley to join their partisans across the aisle in support of Cuba. 49
Government spending followed the reporting of the sensational press. Whereas Congress had cut back expenditures from the levels of previous years in early 1898, after the sinking of the Maine Congress approved additional government spending for two extra artillery regiments, new buildings, the manufacture of smokeless powder, and the arming of the navy militia. 50 And when the President proceeded on May 6 to ask Congress for $50 million in emergency defense appropriations, the House and Senate passed the measure unanimously. 51
But President McKinley equivocated over the decision to go to war. On the one hand, McKinley was an extremely astute politician. He did ultimately inform the Congress of the nation’s readiness to go to war. And the war with Spain did take national politics beyond the North-South divide and did result in a more internationally minded Republican party and United States, both objectives of the President. The Spanish-American War was perhaps also the most popular war in U.S. history, and one with obvious, long-term international significance.
On the other hand, McKinley was loath to go to war. A devout Methodist, the President made repeated statements in his speeches and conversations, both before and after the war, in opposition to armed conflict. He was “anxious to do the right thing, what the country and the world would consider just and honorable.” 52 The President made a number of attempts to settle the Cuban issue peaceably (once through a cash settlement with Spain, another time with the intercession of the Vatican). Nor did McKinley do much to prepare the Army or the Navy for any forthcoming conflict. The President’s health also deteriorated considerably in late March and early April 1898. 53
The combination of an increasingly impatient Congress, an outraged public—both excited by the yellow press—and an intransigent Spain demanded that the President advocate military intervention if he were to hold the Republican party, and the country, together. 54 The President may have carefully and artfully steered the United States toward war against Spain, but it was the yellow press that created the political environment forcing McKinley to act. 55 The press, rather than the President, the Republican party, or the State Department, incited the United States to go to war. 56
The Content of the Press
Newspapers, becoming a medium of popular entertainment, began moving away from exclusive coverage of politics and commerce to emphasize crime, sex, sports, women’s features, and comics. 57 Leading the way in the publication of newspapers that appealed across gender, social class, and ethnic background were Pulitzer (and the New York World) and Hearst (and the New York Journal). 58 Pulitzer and his imitators represented the “new journalism,” one that sought out unusual and dramatic incidents to report to their wide-cast audiences. They did not see entertainment as inconsistent with the presentation of facts (in contrast to the present-day ethos of “responsible journalism”). The new journalism was also called “the journalism that acts”—or, more typically, “yellow journalism.” 59
About one-third to one-half the newspapers in the United States in 1896 had been characterized as “yellow.” St. Louis had three newspapers that could be labeled as sensational; Boston had five; Philadelphia had four; and Chicago had three. Significantly, none of these cities had newspapers that could be called “conservative.” Even the newspapers that were neither explicitly sensational nor conservative in outlook were influenced by the yellow press into changing their editorial positions in the direction of sensational reporting. 60
Pulitzer and Hearst turned the Cuban issue, culminating in a series of sensational events in 1897&-;1898 and then the sinking of the Maine, into high drama. The two publishers (who also believed in the liberty of Cuba and of the Cubans) were able to use the Cuban situation to alter the content of newspapers. 61 When the World reported the capture of American citizens on the schooner Competitor in 1896 (playing up the barbarism of the Spanish governor and the right of U.S. citizens to due process), its weekly circulation rose by an average of more than 216,000 newspapers a day (in comparison to the same week of the preceding year) and other newspaper editors across the country expressed similar outrage over Spanish policies. 62 Next came the arrest of star World correspondent Sylvester Scovel and the death of dentist Ricardo Ruiz, both in February 1897; the imprisonment and rescue of Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros in August 1897; and the publication of the de Lôme letter on February 10, 1898. 63 The World and the Journal featured these stories, and they were also picked up by the Associated Press wire as well as disseminated across the United States via the two papers’ news services. Both Ruiz’s widow and Cisneros received the audience of President McKinley at the White House. 64
No story was bigger than the sinking of the Maine. Newspaper headlines around the country cried out for war: “Destruction of Warship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy”; “American Women Ready to Give Up Husbands, Sons, and Sweethearts to Defend National Honor”; and “Wherever Americans Gather, the Word ‘War’ Awakens Wild Enthusiasm.” More than one hundred newspapers around the country exhibited pro-war headlines in the days immediately following the sinking of the Maine. The World used pictures of maimed victims and cartoons to emphasize the point that “Uncle Sam” had to settle the Cuban issue; it carried a questionable story about an English munitions expert who had patents on mines made for Spain; and it ran a daily count of the total number of days since the disaster, accompanied by editorial criticism of McKinley’s inactivity. One headline, asked, referring to the President: “Will Anything Make Him Fight?”
The Journal, the World’s rival, went further. When a dubious story smuggled out of Havana reported that divers had found an eight-inch diameter hole in the Maine, the Journal jumped on the story with its biggest available headline: “War! Sure!” and beneath this “Maine Destroyed by Spanish.... This Proved Absolutely by Discovery of the Torpedo Hole.” Other Journal headlines read “The Maine was Destroyed by Treachery” and “Whole Country Thrills with War Fever.” The Journal also employed artists’ sketches to imagine what the Maine looked like under water; it offered a $50,000 reward for information on the perpetrator of the deed; and it began to raise funds for the building of a monument for the 266 victims of the Maine explosion and, to this end, established a committee of “the governors of fifteen states, the mayors of fifty-two cities,” and other prominent public and private persons. All of this took place before the official investigation had even started. 65
The Journal dedicated an average of eight and a half pages a day during the week of February 17, 1898, to news, editorials, and pictures of the Maine disaster. Indeed, the Journal’s circulation more than doubled after the sinking of the Maine, going from an average of 417,000 newspapers a day during the week of January 9, 1898, to an average of more than a million newspapers a day on the 17th and 18th of February. The Journal’s circulation averaged just under a million newspapers a day in early April 1898. 66
In short, the condition of political communication in the 1890s enabled the yellow newspapers to sensationalize the Cuban issue in the competition for circulation. In so doing, the New York and national press was able to drive U.S. foreign policy and, given the diplomatic stalemate between the United States and Spain, induce the American public and the U.S. Congress to support intervention. 67
Timing
None of these four orderings—of the role of the press in political communication, the structure of the news industry, government-press relations, and the standard content of the news—exhibited the above characteristics in either the period before or after the 1890s. The stars sometimes come into line, as Orren and Skowronek suggest. 68
Before the late nineteenth century, newspapers were in a less advantaged position for mobilizing the electorate: there were fewer immigrants, lower literacy rates (20 percent illiteracy in 1870) and lower turnout rates in federal elections. Then, with the turn of the century, came restrictions on immigration, further political reform, a drop in voter turnout (falling from 73 percent in 1900 to 61 percent in 1920), and the rise of other news media.
As economic enterprises, newspapers were distinctly smaller, less profitable, and less sophisticated technologically and editorially prior to the 1890s. After 1900, the more conservative and more responsible newspapers began to regain the ground they had lost to the yellow press. Indicatively, the daily circulation of the New York Times rose from 9,000 papers in 1895 to 25,000 in 1897, 82,000 in 1900, and 192,000 in 1910. 69
Government-press relations also changed with the advent of the Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson presidencies. These and later presidential administrations were able to use the power of publicity to their own advantage. 70 It may even be argued that the transition to the modern presidency in the sense of a public and open presidency began with McKinley himself, as Lewis Gould, Robert Hilderbrand, and Martha Kumar suggest. They note McKinley’s explicit use of public relations strategies, his speaking tours, and the use of White House staff for public relations purposes. 71 After the Spanish-American War, the White House and federal government would no longer be content to stand passive vis-à-vis “active” journalism. Instead, government officials used public relations and courted members of the press in the attempt to control political communication.
Finally, the content of newspapers changed. Whereas Pulitzer and Hearst had initiated the sensational journalism of the 1890s, the yellow press fell out of favor in the twentieth century with the further spread and acceptance of professional standards and the continued rise of objective science. News coverage became less partial and more balanced. A turning point in the history of the yellow press came with the death of President McKinley in 1901. Before he was assassinated the New York Journal had printed editorials, cartoons, and a poem endorsing the use of violence against the President. Hearst’s Journal and the yellow journalism in general quickly fell out of favor with the public. 72 By the 1920s what remained of the sensational press occupied a distinct, separate niche: tabloid journalism. 73
In sum, the yellow press was able to play the part it did in American politics in the 1890s because of the simultaneous development and interrelationship of the role of newspapers as a medium of communication in a highly mobilized American society, the development of newspaper publishing as a large and profitable commercial enterprise, the condition of government public relations, and the dramatic content of newspapers. For a short while, at least, the yellow press was able to dominate political communication for millions of voters, members of Congress, and even a politically adept President. 74
There were also larger structural conditions that made Americans receptive to sensational reporting. One was the growing military and economic threat posed by the existing great powers. The European powers were vigorously exploring further colonial and commercial opportunities. Their growing fleets, those of Britain and Germany especially, posed increasing dangers to American coastal cities. 75 The other structural condition was the industrialization and internationalization of the U.S. economy, in conjunction with the economic depression of the 1890s. International markets could provide the salve for the economy by consuming (excess) American goods. 76 The U.S. trade balance in merchandise turned positive for the first time in 1894 (and would remain positive until 1971), and Latin America and the Far East were the most promising regions for economic expansionism. 77 The transformation of American foreign relations “reached its climax in the 1890s,” remarks Walter LaFeber. 78 The structure of the international system and the economic reorientation of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century provided the larger political context that enabled political communication about U.S. foreign policy—specifically, the interventionist sentiment expressed by the yellow press—to play a distinct role in American political development. 79
Power
The yellow press was the creature of Hearst and Pulitzer, their own editors and reporters, and their imitators. Pulitzer and Hearst were intent on outdoing each other and their fellow New York newspaper publishers. Their ambitions altered an industry, just as the efforts of their editors and reporters changed conventions of news reporting and newspaper content. Editors wanted themselves to decide what was interesting or important political news (rather than have the political parties decide for them); publishers wanted higher circulation and increased revenues; reporters aggressively sought out news stories in their quest for prominence (e.g., by going to Cuba themselves rather than depending on government officials as news sources); and editors and reporters alike sought to grab the attention of their reading audience through provocative writing, the unprecedented use of headlines, and the new employment of pictures.
It is therefore a mistake to claim that “sensational journalism had only a marginal impact,” on national politics because of the split between the conservative and sensational newspapers over U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba and the implications of the Maine disaster. 80 The division in the American press cannot explain the “emotionally intense and threatening” response of members of Congress to the Maine disaster. Nor does the presence of opposing styles and editorial positions of American newspapers in the 1890s effectively cancel out the press’s influence: the yellow press had the greater circulation, enjoyed the larger circulation growth, and set the new technical and reporting standards for the news industry. To say that absent the sensational press McKinley would not have acted otherwise 81 ignores the effect the cumulative coverage of the Cuban issue, culminating in the reporting on the Maine explosion, had on both the public and Congress after the death of José Marti in 1895.
“The journalism that acts” acted. It was the press—not public officials and not the voters—that was determining political communication. The yellow press did not simply relay presidential and congressional policy to the public, nor did it merely respond to popular demands. Instead, the sensational newspapers reported actual, distorted, and fabricated stories about the situation in Cuba in order to catch the attention of their readers and thereby gain circulation.
Nor is it accurate to claim that “Hearst played on American prejudices” and “did not create them.” 82 The press could not “reflect” what the public had no prior knowledge of, and had not previously articulated. 83 It was the “new journalism” that gave specific form, content, and direction to vague and unspecified public sentiment. Even were one to accept the claim that the newspapers “did not fabricate the major events that moved the United States”—such as the de Lôme letter and the Maine explosion 84 —the yellow press was able to heighten the public’s awareness of and reactions to these “major events” and link them with the preceding news of Cuba. In fact, as late as December 1897 it could be claimed that the McKinley and Cleveland positions were identical, but that American nonintervention could not persist if “some satisfactory end to the struggle is not reached before long.” The yellow press brought an end to American patience. 85 It was not that the Spanish-American War was “an unwanted war”; it was a war that the yellow press wanted, the American people wanted, and the Congress and the President both eventually wanted.
The Press of the 1890s as a New Institution
The press—and not President McKinley, not the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, not economics, and not predestiny—succeeded in initiating the war against Spain. 86 Although it is true that the origin of the American war with Spain had little relation to its actual consequences, 87 the press was able to tell a story, a tale of American manifest destiny, that was capable of bridging the pre-war and post-war experiences. The wave of hysteria accompanying the Maine explosion continued on as “delirium” over the victory of Commodore Dewey in Manila harbor and intense popular enthusiasm about the overall triumph of the Spanish-American War. The popular and political support for the acquisition of the Philippines, Hawaii, and other international territories allowed President McKinley to forge an imperial United States. 88
The new institutionalism sheds significant light on the development and then decline of sensational journalism. In terms of the institutional orderings, the evolution of the party-newspaper relationship was distinct (albeit not wholly so) from the changing economics of the newspaper industry. Similarly, the altered conventions of newspaper content in the 1890s were phenomena separate from the norms of government-press relations. An emphasis on the incongruities and asymmetries of politics further allows us to appreciate the exceptional circumstances of the yellow press’s emergence. It is not to be expected that a sensationalizing press would have powerfully affected members of Congress and the White House alike; it is novel for the editorial content of much of the press to run contrary to the policy preferences of the political party in control of the legislative and executive branches; it is highly unusual for new publications to determine news coverage at the expense of more respected older news organizations; and it is atypical for distorted and even fabricated news reporting to become accepted by much of the news industry.
We also see the contradiction between the realignment of partisan politics in 1894 and 1896 and the bipartisan support for intervention in Cuba and for American expansionism more broadly. Yet this contradiction is consistent with the new institutionalism’s focus on the dissonance and disorder of political history. 89
The study of the fluid and temporal quality of politics inherent in the new institutionalism allows us to appreciate the realm of the possible. The news media may constitute a distinct political actor, even if they do not exert significant independent effects. More usually, news coverage is the artifact of party balance, national security needs, and divisions within and between the legislative and executive branches of government. 90
Strategic Adjustment and the Media of the 1990s
The orderings of political communication that enabled the press to incite the Spanish-American War, and that therefore led to the strategic adjustment of the 1890s, are once again in evidence.
With about two-thirds of Americans saying that the television is their primary source of news, and with more than 95 percent of Americans trusting what they see on television, the major over-the-air television networks and CNN are able to reach millions of Americans immediately and intimately. More than 90 percent of Americans saw televised broadcasts of the Gulf War, for instance. Television constitutes the most powerful and direct link between the electorate and political leaders, analogous, perhaps, to how the sensational papers of the late 1890s were able to reach out to a broad audience unheedful of the established “six cent” press. Now, as then, the newer media—television in the 1990s—are capable of driving public opinion.
The structure of the news industry is also conducive to the “CNN Effect,” given the size and concentration of the media industry. Fourteen companies now control half or more of the daily newspaper business; three companies receive half or more of television revenues; and the total number of corporations dominating all media (newspapers, book publishing, television, and motion pictures) comes to just twenty-two (since corporations may be dominant in more than one medium). Nine out of the fourteen leading newspaper publishers are members of the Fortune 500. The telecommunications legislation of 1996 accelerates this trend. And CNN, despite its initial revolutionary promise, covers politics and government in much the same way as do the other major networks. 91
The relationship between members of the new media and U.S. public officials shows a further parallel. Journalists have become increasingly critical of, even cynical about, national politics, politicians, and public policy. At the same time, they have become increasingly celebrated and affluent. 92 The result is that journalists, especially television personalities, enjoy increasing independence from any one politician or political party in their reporting of news about national politics and government.
Finally, the content of the news has changed. With the economics of the television industry and the smaller news hole that television allows have come brevity and sensationalism. The rise of “infotainment,” television’s abridged and sensationalized content, is increasingly evident in the news programs and such shows as Dateline or 60 Minutes. Political news is less dominated by what is published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other prestige news organizations, and more determined by television; newspapers are forced to analyze news that has already been broken by the broadcast media. The hierarchy among news organizations typical of the postwar years, where the broadcast media followed and deferred to the print media, has eroded to the point that television is now seen as the more innovative and important medium, independent from and beyond the control of the prestige print media. Networks (and cable), like Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World, are in a position to dominate the political discourse that could define U.S. international interests.
Even the broader structural preconditions are aligned: the United States finds itself in an indeterminate international system that allows for considerable latitude in foreign policy. It again faces a period of wrenching economic change typified by growing gaps between the highest and lowest income groups, a large and controversial influx of immigrants, and an ongoing transformation of the workplace and economy that has created new technologies and accentuated international competition. The news media, and the televised media in particular, are thus in a position to exert significant, independent impact on U.S. strategic adjustment. 93
All this suggests the probable influence of the CNN Effect. As former Secretary of State James A. Baker attests, “The ‘CNN Effect’ has revolutionized the way policymakers have to approach their jobs, particularly in the foreign policy arena.” One scholar’s study of the CNN Effect comes to the same point: “Virtually every official interviewed agrees that the rise of the Cable News Network has radically altered the way U.S. foreign policy is conducted.” 94 Recent events, such as the Gulf War, the handling of North Korea, and the U.S. interventions in Somalia and Haiti suggest as much. 95
One key consequence of the CNN Effect, it has been argued, is that large numbers of American casualties—not to mention wars of attrition—become increasingly unattractive to policymakers in a world where televised images of injured and killed Americans are subject to immediate national and even international publicity. It may also be the case that the distinct conditions of and the reporting on the Gulf War are partly responsible for delaying the implementation of the more fundamental changes and choices evoked by the new international environment. The coverage and framing of U.S. involvement in the Gulf War, Somalia, North Korea, Bosnia, and Haiti is no doubt setting the path for future naval and strategic developments.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the comments made on earlier drafts of this chapter by members of the workshops on the “Politics of Strategic Adjustment” held in Austin, Texas (April 1994) and Monterey, California (February 1995). I am especially grateful for the particular contributions of Chris Ansell, Russ Burgos, Walter Dean Burnham, Emily Goldman, Lewis Gould, Scott James, Patti MacLachlan, John Nerone, Ed Rhodes, Mark Shulman, Edward Smith, Peter Trubowitz, Harrison Wagner, Charles Whitney, Keith Whittington, and Wes Widmaier.
Endnotes
Note 1: Godkin, a leading Progressive and founder of the Nation, is cited in Marcus M. Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War (New York: Russell & Russell, 1932), 125. Back.
Note 2: David E. Jeremiah, “Beyond the Cold War,” Proceedings (Naval Review 1992), 52–57; Ernest R. May , “National Security in America’s History,” in Rethinking America’s Security eds., Graham Allison and Gregory Treverton (New York: Norton, 1992), 94–114; Colin Powell, “U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead,” Foreign Affairs 71 (Winter 1992/93), 32–45; Michael Vlahos, “Culture and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy 82 (Spring, 1991), 59–78; Michael Vlahos, “A Global Naval Force? Why Not?” Proceedings (March 1992), 40– 44; Paul D. Wolfowitz, “Clinton’s First Year,” Foreign Affairs 73 (January/ February 1994), 28–43. Also see R. Harrison Wagner, “What was Bipolarity?” International Organization 47 (Winter 1993), 77–106. Back.
Note 3: Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Vintage Books, 1987). Back.
Note 4: For overviews of the press’s (and news media’s) impact on American history, see Douglass Cater, The Fourth Branch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959); Edwin Diamond and Robert A. Silverman, White House to Your House (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); William A. Gamson, What’s News? (New York: Free Press, 1984); Bartholomew Sparrow, Uncertain Guardians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Back.
Note 5: David F. Trask, The War With Spain in 1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 475. Back.
Note 6: The networks themselves may also fail to take the time to check out their stories or their sources; the temptation is to go with the captivating visual image. Mort Rosenblum, Who Stole the News? (New York: Wiley, 1993), 180– 81; Ben Bagdikian in “Theodore H. White Seminar,” November 19, 1993, The Joan Shorenstein Barone Center, Harvard University, p. 46. Back.
Note 7: This is not to say that the news media are the only cause of these actions. For a recent nuanced investigation of the CNN Effect, see Warren Strobel, Late Breaking Foreign Policy: The News Media’s Influence on Peace Operations (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1997). Back.
Note 8: For a study of the Navy’s changes in organization and resources in response to the Second World War and then between 1945 and 1950, see Bartholomew Sparrow, From the Outside In: World War II and the American State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 161–257. Back.
Note 9: In fact, by 1890 “American battleships compared quite favorably with the best in Europe’s navies and in some cases, as in secondary batteries and armor, improved upon them”—and the U.S. Navy was using American (not foreign) ship designs. Paolo E. Coletta, A Survey of U.S. Naval Affairs, 1865–1917 (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1987), 52. Back.
Note 10: Friedberg, Weary Titan, 142–43; Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), 203–5; Julius Pratt, Expansionists of 1898 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964 [1936]), 12–17. Back.
Note 11: Robert E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-interest in America’s Foreign Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 29; John A. S. Grenville and George Berkeley Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 290, 307. Back.
Note 12: George W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 27–31; Paolo E. Coletta, A Survey of U.S. Naval Affairs; Kenneth J. Hagan, This People’s Navy (New York: Free Press), 228–29. Among the “others” was the U.S. Senator from Maine and former Secretary of State (under Benjamin Harrison) James G. Blaine. See Pratt, Expansionists of 1898, 22–25. Back.
Note 13: Coletta, Survey of U.S. Naval Affairs, 25. In the following year, 1874, Congress passed the Marine Schools Act, which set up a permanent system of naval training for both the Navy and Merchant Marine. (The Naval Academy had been established in 1845.) Back.
Note 14: Coletta, Survey of U.S. Naval Affairs, 27–28; Trask, War With Spain in 1898. Back.
Note 15: Coletta, Survey of U.S. Naval Affairs, 44. The Navy proceeded to send Commander Charles B. Gridley to the Great Lakes in order to secretly organize four squadrons of ships for the purpose of destroying the Welland Canal. Grenville and Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy, 171–72. Back.
Note 16: The Kimball plan, contingent on the United States going to war against Spain, had been conceived in the mid-1890s and was reviewed in the summer of 1897. Its objective was to neutralize the naval threat of the Spanish fleet in the Philippines. John Dobson, Reticent Expansionism: The Foreign Policy of William McKinley (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988), 79. Back.
Note 17: Paolo E. Coletta, The American Naval Heritage in Brief (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1978), 166; Grenville and Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy, 299–300. Back.
Note 18: Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Makers of Naval Policy, 1798–1947 (Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1980), 205. Back.
Note 19: Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power, 32–33; Hagan, This People’s Navy, 232. Back.
Note 20: James C. Bradford, “Introduction,” in Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War & Its Aftermath ed., James C. Bradford (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1993), xiii–xvi; Osgood, Ideals and Self-interest in America’s Foreign Relations, 27; Trask, War With Spain in 1898, 486; Lewis L. Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1982), 138; Grenville and Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy, 290; LaFeber, New Empire, 416; Coletta, Survey of U.S. Naval Affairs, ii; Sprout and Sprout, Rise of American Naval Power, 223; Hagan, People’s Navy, 228–29; Ernest May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power, (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 263– 66. Nicolas Spykman sees the events of 1898 as a symbolic “turning point” in U.S.-British relations: Great Britain now recognized the supremacy of the United States in the Caribbean—the “American Mediterranean.” Nicolas Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942), 81–82. Back.
Note 21: May, Imperial Democracy, 6. Back.
Note 22: See, for example, LaFeber, New Empire; Pratt, Expansionists of 1898. Back.
Note 23: Joseph E. Wisan, The Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 456; Pratt, Expansionists of 1898, 22, 233–34. See Lewis Gould for a compelling case against the exaggerated influence ascribed to the Reick Telegram, which a number of scholars have argued proved the impact of big business on McKinley’s decision to go to war. Gould, “The Reick Telegram and the Spanish-American War: A Reappraisal,” Diplomatic History 3 (Spring 1979), 193–99. Back.
Note 24: Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1980), 63. Back.
Note 25: The historical or sociological strand of new institutionalism stands in contrast to the rational choice version of the new institutionalism, also referred to as the positive theory of institutions. The rational-choice institutionalism seeks to explain the endurance of political norms and processes through the accounts of individual decisionmakers. Institutions allow individuals to achieve “structure-induced equilibria,” according to this school; institutions furnish stability since stable equilibria are not to be found in individual “tastes.” See William Riker, “Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions,” American Political Science Review 74 (1980), 432– 46; Kenneth Shepsle, “Studying Institutions: Some Lessons from the Rational Choice Approach,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 1 (1989), 131–47; Terry Moe, “Interests, Institutions, and Positive Theory: The Politics of the NLRB,” Studies in American Political Development 2 (1987), 236–99; and Kenneth Shepsle and Barry Weingast, “The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power,” American Political Science Review 81 (1987), 85–104). Back.
Note 26: Paul DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “Introduction,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis ed., Walter W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1–38; James March and Johan Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” American Political Science Review 78 (1984), 734–49; James March and Johan Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions (New York: Free Press, 1989); Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order: Notes for a ‘New Institutionalism,’” in The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations eds., Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994); Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis eds., Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–32. Back.
Note 27: March and Olsen, “The New Institutionalism”; Orren and Skowronek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order”; Thelen and Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics.” Back.
Note 28: Orren and Skowronek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order,” 323–25. Back.
Note 29: Ibid., 325; DiMaggio and Powell, “Introduction”; Thelen and Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics”; Ronald Jepperson, “Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis eds., Walter W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 143–64. Back.
Note 30: Orren and Skowronek refer to both “orderings” and “institutions.” They imply that institutions are of a larger scale, when they write of the institutions of family organization, republicanism, and judicial regulation. “Beyond the Iconography of Order,” 324. Back.
Note 31: In contrast to the “old institutionalism,” the new institutionalism attends to the informal quality of institutions; it focuses on their interactions with other institutions; and it is more theoretically developed (and theoretically explicit). In contrast to behavioralism, the new institutionalism holds that institutions do not necessarily allow for the optimization of individual preferences, that institutions may be inefficient, and that they cannot be reduced to the aggregate of individual behaviors. Back.
Note 32: In the polling data, and without a comprehensive study of the content of American newspapers at the time, I am necessarily making a structural argument about the probable influence of the yellow press consistent with the circumstantial evidence and the existing secondary literature available. Back.
Note 33: Charles H. Brown, The Correspondent’s War (New York: Scribner’s, 1967), 10. This compares to approximately 1,500 dailies today. Back.
Note 34: Turnouts in the non-Southern states were well in excess of 80 percent from 1876 through 1900, and in 1896 turnout in the five crucial Northeast and Mid-East states, including Iowa, exceeded 95 percent. Back.
Note 35: The U.S. population stood at 63 million persons in 1880 and rose to 72 million persons by 1890. The majority of Americans lived in the Northeast and Mid-East. There was also increasing urbanization. The number of Americans living in cities of one million or more almost doubled between 1890 and 1900 (from 3.6 to 6.4 million persons) and New York City itself included more than 3.4 million persons. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, 21–22. Back.
Note 36: Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 14–17. Back.
Note 38: Ibid., 78, 120–21, 132–33. Back.
Note 40: Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 93; Sidney Kobre, The Yellow Press and Gilded Age Journalism (Tallahassee: n.p., 1964), 7. Back.
Note 41: Brown, Correspondent’s War, 10. As the great muckraker Lincoln Steffens summarized in 1897, “Journalism today is a business.” Brown, Correspondent’s War, 20. Also see McGerr, Decline of Popular Politics, 108. Back.
Note 42: Pulitzer and Hearst used the Cuban issue not only to outdo each other, but also as an opportunity to beat their other competition, which included the New York Herald and the New York Sun, among others. Brown, Correspondent’s War, 126–27; Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War, 115. Back.
Note 43: Brown, Correspondent’s War, 132–34; Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War, 101. The historian Lewis Gould notes that it is too simple to assign primary blame for the conflict to Hearst and Pulitzer, since they did not create the real differences between the United States and Spain and spoke for only a small part of the journalism community see his Spanish- American War and President McKinley, 24. Yet the Journal and the World were at the vanguard of a broad and pervasive trend in American journalism as manifested in the Associated Press dispatches, the use of the Journal and World news services, and the imitation engendered in other, less sensational newspapers. Publications that followed the Journal and World’s lead included Dana’s New York Sun, Bennett’s New York Herald, and the Chicago Tribune. Other interventionist papers included the New Orleans Times-Democrat, the Atlanta Constitution, the Indianapolis Journal, and the Charleston News and Courier. Back.
Note 44: Robert W. Desmond, Windows on the World: The Information Process in a Changing Society 1900–1920 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980), 92. Also see Robert C. Hilderbrand, Power and the People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 8–9. Gould, Hilderbrand, and the historian John Offner each contend that McKinley was unaffected by the sensational press. Gould, Spanish-American War and President McKinley, 25; Hilderbrand, Power and the People, 27; John L. Offner, An Unwanted War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 158. Yet the President spoke frequently of the sensational press in early 1898. McKinley and his closest associates on numerous occasions referred explicitly to the “sensational newspapers” and the “blatherskite sheets.” The sensational newspapers were “scavengers” and the product of “degenerate minds.” The sensational papers published “falsehoods,” they imagined events and influences where none existed, they made “vile slanders” against the President, and they exerted undue influence over members of Congress and “a too-easily-led public.” See George B. Cortelyou, “March 16–December 13, 1898,” Diaries of George B. Cortelyou, 1897–1901. Papers of George B. Cortelyou, Library of Congress. See also Cortelyou, Wednesday, February 15, 1899, Cortelyou Diaries. Back.
Note 45: Martha Joynt Kumar, “The President and the News Media,” in Guide to the Presidency ed., Michael Nelson, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1996), 843–44; Hilderbrand, Power and the People, 11, 31. Back.
Note 46: Gerald F. Linderman, The Mirror of War: American Society and the Spanish- American War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), 153, 162. Back.
Note 47: The press was not all of a kind, of course. See note 80. Back.
Note 48: McKinley’s assistant secretary remarked that the normally conservative (and Republican-controlled) Senate was being taken over by “a spirit of wild jingoism.” George B. Cortelyou, “Transcript of shorthand notes of G.B.C. under date of Saturday, April 16, 1898, in Clayton’s Quarto Diary 1898 by H.O.W.,” Cortelyou Diaries. Cortelyou had earlier noted that “the report of the Maine disaster” had a “bad effect” on “the feeling in Congress.” There was “a great deal of opposition to a suggested armistice or anything in the nature of delay.” Cortelyou, Tuesday, March 29, 1898, Cortelyou Diaries. Back.
Note 49: Graebner, Foundations of American Foreign Policy, 331; May, Imperial Democracy, 137–47. Hilderbrand’s claim that “the [P]resident felt little threatened by the readers of the yellow press, who lacked the political influence to harm his policy” ignores the voter demographics of the period and McKinley’s responsibilities as head of the Republican party—with elections forthcoming in November of 1898. Hilderbrand, Power and the People, 27–28. Back.
Note 50: Wisan, Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press, 408–9. Back.
Note 51: Hilderbrand describes the President’s proposal as an “aspect of McKinley’s influence on public opinion.” But Hilderbrand’s portrayal of the early months of 1898 is one that is altogether too calm and too deliberate in the face of the vociferous yellow press. Hilderbrand’s account gives short shrift to the defensiveness of McKinley’s action. Nor does it convey much sense of the President’s turmoil in the face of the increased likelihood that the United States would have to intervene militarily in Cuba. Hilderbrand, Power and the People, 20. Back.
Note 52: George B. Cortelyou, “Transcript of shorthand notes of G. B. C. under date of Sunday, March 27, 1898, in Clayton’s Quarto Diary 1898 by H.O.W.,” Cortelyou Diaries. McKinley himself was moved to say before the war that “should the cruelty be so long continued and revolting that the best instincts of human nature are outraged by it and should opportunity arise for bringing it to an end, and removing its cause without adding fuel to the flame of the contest, there is nothing in the law of nations which will condemn as a wrong doer, the State which steps forward and undertakes the necessary intervention” (undated, Subject File “Spain War, 1897–98 and undated,” Papers of William R. Day, Library of Congress [William Day was Assistant Secretary of State, federal judge, and a close friend of the President]). As Trask points out, “nothing could have been more distasteful to the pacific McKinley than war.” War with Spain in 1898, 474. Back.
Note 53: See George B. Cortelyou, “March 20–April 1898,” Cortelyou Diaries. Also see Linderman, Mirror of War, 27–35. Back.
Note 54: See Brown, Correspondent’s War, 140–41, 144–48; Offner, An Unwanted War, 150–57; Ephraim Smith, “William McKinley’s Enduring Legacy: The Historiographical Debate on the Taking of the Philippine Islands,” in Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War & Its Aftermat, ed., James C. Bradford (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1993); Trask, The War With Spain in 1898, 31–44, 49–54; Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War, 109–32; and Wisan, Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press, 422–42. Gould, Offner, Trask, and others cite the impressive speech made by Senator Redfield Proctor (R., VT) to explain the increased belligerence of Congress following the Maine disaster. Gould, Presidency of William McKinley, 77; Offner, An Unwanted War, 131–35, 229–32; Trask, War With Spain in 1898, 36). (Proctor spoke on the deplorable condition of the reconcentrados and on the struggle of a million and a half Cubans for independence from Spain). Yet this belligerence on the part of Spain was amply manifest before the speech; the speech itself was widely covered in the press; and Proctor’s address bought into the premise of the sensational newspapers—that the United States should for humanitarian reasons interfere in Spanish-Cuban relations. Back.
Note 55: The stories reported in the Journal and the World were also read out loud in Congress. “Staid newspapers that hesitated to repeat verbatim some particularly gruesome item from the Journal would relay it to its readers the next day as a statement read on the floor of the Senate or as testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.” When a rebel general, Antonio Maceo, was killed in a skirmish, for instance, the press claimed “murder” and the Senate appointed a special committee to investigate the “Maceo Assassination.” Walter Karp, The Politics of War (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 58–59. Back.
Note 56: The President testified indirectly to the influence of the yellow press in a message delivered to Congress after the war: the destruction of the battleship Maine “stirred the nation’s heart profoundly,” and “[s]o strong” was the belief that United States-Spanish relations were at a crisis over the Cuban issue “that it required but a brief executive suggestion to the Congress to receive immediate answer to the duty of making instant provision for the possible and perhaps speedily probable emergency of war, and the remarkable, almost unique spectacle was presented of an unanimous vote of both house on the ninth of March, appropriating fifty million dollars ‘for the national defense and for each and every purpose connected therewith, to be expended at the discretion of the president’.” William McKinley, Message to Congress, December 5, 1898. Back.
Note 57: James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald was the original “penny press” paper, established in 1833. Other independent papers formed in the late 1870s and early 1880s in explicit rejection of party affiliation included the Chicago Daily News, the Kansas City Evening Star, and the Newark Evening News. These papers had neither the political commitment nor the mass audiences of Pulitzer’s New York World or Hearst’s New York Journal. Back.
Note 58: On Pulitzer, see George Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). With their crusades against the trusts of the day, monitoring federal, state, and local government, and efforts on behalf of the workingman, Hearst and Pulitzer prepared the way for the muckrakers of the early twentieth century. Kobre, The Yellow Press and Gilded Age Journalism, 75–78. Back.
Note 59: Joyce Milton, The Yellow Kids: Foreign Correspondents in the Heyday of Yellow Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), xiii; Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War, 83. “Yellow” referred to the New York World’s use of yellow ink, initiated in 1896, for printing “Hogan’s Alley.” The star of Hogan’s Alley, the most popular cartoon comic in New York, was the impudent and hyperactive ringleader of the Hogan Alley gang, the “Yellow Kid.” Back.
Note 60: Brown, Correspondent’s War, 19; Linderman, The Mirror of War, 157; Milton, Yellow Kids, 43; Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History: 1690– 1960, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 539–40. Back.
Note 61: Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War, 131–32. Back.
Note 63: Brown, Correspondent’s War, 85–87, 95–102; Dobson, Reticent Expansionism, 56–57; Milton, Yellow Kids, 70–71, 196–202; Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War, 11, 83–91; Wisan, The Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press, 222–24. Hilderbrand writes that Cuba “commanded virtually no public interest” in the summer of 1897. Hilderbrand, The Power of the People, 13. The de Lôme letter called McKinley “weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd” as well as a “would-be politician” (politicastro). Interestingly, de Lôme’s letter not only attacked President McKinley but also criticized the New York Journal. See Gould on McKinley’s interpretation of the de Lôme letter: that Spain was stalling for more time. Presidency of William McKinley, 73–74. Back.
Note 64: Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 251; Kobre, Yellow Press and Gilded Age Journalism, 286–88; Linderman, Mirror of War, 158–59. The Chicago Tribune was as vehement as the New York Journal and the New York World. It used both papers’ news services; the San Francisco Examiner, owned by Hearst, used the Journal’s news. Both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Times-Herald, moreover, had to keep up with their competitors. San Francisco and Cincinnati were also centers of the yellow press. Smaller papers, on their part, naturally “tended to borrow some of the techniques and manners of the big journals.” It is only a slight overstatement to claim that “readers everywhere got sensational, exaggerated accounts of the Cuban insurrection.” Kobre, Yellow Press, 279; Mott, American Journalism, 548; Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish- American War, 6. Back.
Note 65: Brown, Correspondent’s War, 123; Milton, Yellow Kids, 225–26; Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War, 102–3; Wisan, Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press, 391–92. When the Spanish battleship Vizcaya made a reciprocal visit to New York on February 18, the Journal introduced its readers to a new card game, “The Game of War With Spain,” the object of which was to sink the Vizcaya. The Journal thoughtfully provided its readers with a map to see if they were in range of the Vizcaya’s guns. Meanwhile, the World published a Sunday feature reminding New Yorkers that the Spanish battleship could fire its shells all the way to the Harlem River and the “suburbs of Brooklyn.” Milton, Yellow Kids, 228; Wisan, Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press, 393. Back.
Note 66: Wisan, Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press, 388, 391. Back.
Note 67: Gould, (Presidency of William McKinley and Trask, War with Spain in 1898) both emphasize the intransigence of the Spanish in their explanations of why the United States went to war. On the moral and religious dimensions of the American feelings toward Latin America and the Far East see Pratt, Expanionists of 1898. Back.
Note 68: Orren and Skowronek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order,” 322. I should point out that Orren and Skowronek use their framework to explain the disorder common in politics, whereas I use it to explain an instance of a temporary order (the yellow press) amid the disorder of conflicting multiple institutions in politics. Back.
Note 69: Schudson, Discovering the News, 115; Brown, Correspondent’s War, 18–19. There was also the matter of economics. Coverage of the Spanish-American War, with the extra transportation and transmission costs, the large numbers of reporters employed, and the extra editions was expensive; the World lost money in 1898. Back.
Note 70: Desmond, Windows on the World, 94–96; Michael Bernard Grossman and Martha Joynt Kumar, Portraying the President: The White House and the News Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 20–21; Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies for Presidential Leadership (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1986), 59–63, 224–25. Theodore Roosevelt was already a master of public relations as a member of the McKinley administration, where Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt appears to have successfully covered up the Navy’s investigation of the Maine explosion, for instance, and he was proficient at leaking information to the press and then vehemently denying doing so. Milton, Yellow Kids, 221–22, 235; Offner, An Unwanted War, 123. Back.
Note 71: See Hilderbrand, Power and the People; Gould, Presidency of William McKinley; Kumar, “The Presidency and the News Media.” Back.
Note 72: See Emery and Emery, Press and America, 265; Linderman, Mirror of War, 169–70; Mott, American Journalism, 540–41. The editorial statement found on the body of Leon Czolgosz, the assassin, read “If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” Ambrose Bierce’s quatrain published in the Journal read as follows: “The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast/Can not be found in all the West/Good reason, it is speeding here/To stretch McKinley on his bier.” (Kentucky Govenor Goebel had been assassinated in 1900). Back.
Note 73: The yellow press was not the tabloid press—publications not taken seriously by either politicians or serious readers, and recognized as containing stories known to be untrue. The yellow press well preceded the tabloids (referring to the actual size of the newspaper pages); the tabloids dated from the 1920s. The tabloids were also far less political than the yellow press. The New York Daily News had front-page stories on politics in only two editions throughout all of 1924, for example; it featured scandal, sports, and sex instead. Furthermore, the tabloid press deliberately promoted falsehoods. The yellow press, in contrast, may have contained inaccurate or deliberately misleading reporting, but was published with the understanding that distortion or misrepresentation was justified as long as it was consistent with the truth (e.g., of Spanish cruelty, the virtue of the American people). Emery and Emery, Press and America; 363–68; Mott, American Journalism, 666–73. Back.
Note 74: The argument for the singular impact of the yellow press is also consistent with the works of May, Grenville and Young, Graebner, Osgood, Trask, and others that refer to the importance of “irrational public opinion,” “national outrage,” the “new consciousness,” “congressional impatience,” “an ungovernable burst of popular emotion,” and a “fire-storm of political emotion.” But these terms are not assigned any historical or theoretical significance. Much of John Offner’s history is in fact consistent with the argument offered here. See his An Unwanted War, xi, 117, 122, 230, 232. See also Gould, Presidency of William McKinley, 75. Back.
Note 75: Graebner, Foundations of American Foreign Policy, 305–6; Grenville and Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy, 208–10; Coletta, American Naval Heritage in Brief, 147–48; Coletta, Survey of U.S. Naval Affairs, 44; LaFeber, New Empire, 363–64, 377. Back.
Note 76: LaFeber, New Empire, 326. Also see ibid., 172–75, 184–96, 326–27, 370–79. Back.
Note 77: The value of U.S. exports of manufactured goods rose from $112 million in 1887 to $213 million in 1897, and that of semi-manufactured goods rose from $37 million in 1887 to $98 million by 1897. The total value of U.S. exports rose from $703 to $1,032 million over the same period. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975), Series U 213–224. Exports to the Far East, although smaller, rose from $20 million in 1887 to $39 million by 1897. Back.
Note 78: LaFeber, New Empire, 326. Back.
Note 79: Thelen and Steinmo note that institutional change or a new salience accruing to institutions can emerge as a result of “broad changes in the socioeconomic or political context.” Thelen and Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” 16. Back.
Note 80: Offner, An Unwanted War, 123, 229; Gould Presidency of William McKinley, 62–63, 90; Gould, Spanish-American War, 24; Hilderbrand, Power and the People, 27; Schudson, Discovering the News, 88–120. The New York Tribune, the New York Evening Post, the New York Times, the Journal of Commerce, the Chicago Daily News, and the Boston Transcript among other papers all opposed war with Spain. Kobre, Yellow Press and Gilded Age Journalism, 291– 92; Mott, American Journalism, 532. The communications scholar Michael Schudson also rejects the argument of a powerful yellow press. See Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 23. Schudson dismisses the independent role of the press by arguing that explanations of the Spanish-American War by contemporary historians made no mention of the special impact of the press. Yet the timing of an argument would seem to be unrelated to the matter of its validity. Back.
Note 81: Offner, An Unwanted War, 123. Back.
Note 82: Offner, An Unwanted War, 229. Yellow journalism was much more than Hearst, of course. It was the rivalry between Pulitzer and Hearst; it was the influence of the Journal and the World on other newspapers in New York, such as the Sun, the Herald, and the Tribune, and throughout the United States; and it was the effect of the editorial and marketing leadership of the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers on the U.S. newspaper industry. Schudson also finds that “there is little indication” that the yellow press influenced policymaking. He consults two sources in support of his contention: Lewis Gould’s Spanish-American War and President McKinley, and an unpublished dissertation on Minnesota newspapers and the Cuban issue. Schudson, Power of News, 24. Back.
Note 83: Gould, Presidency of William McKinley, 63; Offner, An Unwanted War, 229. Back.
Note 84: Offner, An Unwanted War, 229. But even this claim is wrong: it was the Journal that published the de Lôme letter; it was the Journal staff who rescued Evangelina Cisneros to great popular acclaim; and one of the prominent Americans arrested in Cuba, Sylvester Scovel, was himself a newspaper reporter. Back.
Note 85: Outlook Magazine 54 (December 4, 1897), 795, quoted in Dobson, Reticent Expansionism, 45. Back.
Note 86: The press also made a difference by neglecting potential news. A number of important diplomatic developments that took place in the six (crucial) weeks following the destruction of the Maine went unreported, and there was almost no reporting of the fact that the Spanish government requested a joint investigation of the wreck, a request rejected by the U.S. government. Wisan, Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press, 417–19; also see Milton, Yellow Kids, 334. Back.
Note 87: Osgood, Ideals and Self-interest in America’s Foreign Relations, 42; Trask, The War with Spain in 1898, 476. Back.
Note 88: See Richard Hofstadter, “Manifest Destiny and the Philippines,” in Daniel Aaron, America in Crisis (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1952), 187–90; Gould, Spanish-American War and President McKinley, 84, 105; Grenville and Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy, 286–88, 298; Milton, Yellow Kids, 265; Smith, “William McKinley’s Enduring Legacy”; and Trask, War With Spain in 1898, 452–56. As McKinley told an aide soon after the war: “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny.” George B. Cortelyou, Monday, June 8, Cortelyou Diaries. The historian Graebner notes that “Few Americans attempted to justify the war against Spain except in terms of humanitarianism,” and that the religious press was a part of this wave of humanitarian sentiment. Not only was President McKinley himself religious, but also all the religious press except for the Quaker and the Unitarian publications were for the annexation of the Philippines and Hawaii. The “dictates of civilization and humanity impelled” the United States to assist the Cuban revolution, annex Hawaii, keep the Philippines, and intervene in China. Graebner, Foundations of American Foreign Policy, 352–53 and Grenville and Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy, 266. Back.
Note 89: See especially Orren and Skowronek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order.” Back.
Note 90: On the lack of political independence typical of the news media, see W. Lance Bennett, “Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States,” Journal of Communication 40 (1990), 103–25; Daniel C. Hallin, The “Uncensored War” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1973). Back.
Note 91: See Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 4th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 18, on the concentration in the news industry. See Matthew Robert Kerbel, Edited for Television: CNN, ABC, and the 1992 Presidential Campaign (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), on the similarity of CNN with ABC and the other major television networks in election campaign coverage. Back.
Note 92: See David Broder, Behind the Front Page (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee (New York: Farrer, Straus, and Giroux, 1988); Howard Kurtz, Media Circus (New York: Times Books, 1993); and Thomas Patterson, Out of Order (New York: Knopf, 1994). It should also be admitted that public officials have learned how to use media practices and routines to their advantage (recall the Nixon administration’s “Deep Throat,” the Reagan administration’s handling of the news media during the early and mid-1980s, and the facility by which the Bush administration conducted its public relations campaign against Iraq before and during the Gulf War). Back.
Note 93: There is, of course, no analogous economic depression at this time of writing. Back.
Note 94: James A. Baker III, “Report First, Check Later,” The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 1 (Spring 1996), 7; Warren P. Strobel, “The CNN Effect,” American Journalism Review, May 1996, 34. Strobel goes on to argue that the existence of the CNN Effect does not mean that it determines policy. Back.
Note 95: Bartholomew Sparrow, “The Presidency and the World,” in The Presidency and the Political System, ed. Michael Nelson, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1995). Back.
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