Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [963]
Back in New York City, the insurgent government established a junta to generate U.S. support for the war effort. It was led by Tomas Estrada Palma, who worked out of the Wall Street-area office of a sympathetic and prominent New York lawyer. The junta organized mass meetings (including a week-long Cuban-American Fair at Madison Square Garden in May 1896). It cultivated contacts with investors, merchants, and politicians. And it issued news releases, many of which prettified the struggle for American readers or fabricated guerrilla triumphs out of thin air. To raise money for the war, the New York leadership also set up a Cuban League for local supporters. Militants like Teddy Roosevelt and Charles A. Dana of the Sun were members; so were conservative businessmen like J. Edward Simmons, former president of the New York Stock Exchange, railroad chief Chauncey M. Depew, and John Jacob Astor.
Americans were receptive to the junta’s message. Schoolbook accounts of inquisitors and conquistadors had convinced many of the inherent depravity of Spaniards. Others equated the Cuban struggle for freedom with the USA’s own War of Independence.
Particular interests had particular reasons for urging American involvement. The AFL, led by Gompers’s Cigarmakers Union, called for support short of war. Metropolitan sugar and shipping interests, appalled at the damage to their property and disruption of their business, sought to end the fighting, either by pressuring Spain into conceding autonomy or by annexing the island outright. Leading Wall Streeter Frederick R. Coudert admitted that “it makes the water come to my mouth when I think of the state of Cuba as one in our family.” Yet many metropolitan businessmen remained wary of being pulled into war.
“BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD!”
Those still on the fence about Cuba found it increasingly hard to stay there, given the blasts of prorebel publicity emanating from the New York City press. Joseph Pulitzer had counseled moderation during Cleveland’s saber-rattling over Venezuela in 1895, but he favored Cuban self-government and steered the World toward support of the rebellion. His relatively temperate campaign was soon outdone by one of typhoon proportions issuing from a competing New York newspaper under the control of William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst, born in San Francisco in the midst of the Civil War, had been fortunate in his parents. George Hearst had accumulated a fortune in silver and copper mining, as well as the proceeds from a million-acre ranch in Porfirio Diaz’s Mexico, and Phoebe Hearst provided a disciplined Episcopalian upbringing. After an aborted Harvard education he headed to New York City, beelined his way to the World Building, and spent a year there apprenticing in journalism. Then he returned home, turned the San Francis-co Examiner into a profitable reform sheet, and, in 1895, decided to run a newspaper in New York City. His mother, who had inherited her husband’s estate in 1891, sold off $7.5 million of her shares of Anaconda Copper and turned the proceeds over to William.
Hearst moved to Manhattan, took up quarters in Madison Square, and bought the Morning Journal, a paper operating out of the Tribune Building on Park Row. The Journal, once a scandal sheet known informally as the “chambermaids’ delight,” had now, under more proper but less profitable management, sunk to a circulation of seventyseven thousand (the World’s was 450,000). Hearst dropped the Jour nafs price to a penny, expanded its size, imitated the World’s format, and stole away its reporters by offering fabulous salaries and byline credits. Hearst adopted Pulitzer’s social and political