On the evening of February 15, 1898,
a massive explosion tore through the battleship U.S.S. Maine
in Havana Harbor, Cuba.
The explosion sank the vessel,
killed over 260 sailors
and shocked the American public.
Days later,
William Randolph Heart’s newspaper, The New York Journal,
ran a sensational headline.
But how did Hearst know Spain was to blame?
Well, he didn’t.
Unverified sensationalism was Hearst’s stock-in-trade.
This was “yellow journalism,”
born out of the New York newspaper circulation wars of the 1890s.
By the mid-1890s,
the Spanish empire had lost nearly all of its colonial possessions
in the Western Hemisphere
besides Puerto Rico and Cuba.
With the Monroe Doctrine of 1823,
the U.S. had declared European assertions of power in the Americas
as "dangerous to our peace and safety."
In 1895,
Cuban revolutionaries rose up against Spanish rule.
[Andie Tucher, Historian:] The United States is also beginning to feel
that here is a people who have been colonized
by a brutal imperial power.
It feels so resonant to their own experience,
to the United States' own experience,
its own birth.
[David Nasaw, Author: The Chief:] Hearst sees a developing story in Cuba,
where the bad guys are the Spanish,
the damsel in distress is the Cuban people
and the hero is going to be William Randolph Hearst and the American government
that’s going to rescue these poor Cubans.
In 1895,
the same year as the Cuban rebellion,
Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World began publishing
a satirical cartoon about New York’s slums,
called "Hogan’s Alley."
The bright, colorful cartoon featured a memorable character,
“Yellow Kid,”
outfitted in an oversized, yellow nightshirt.
[Mitchell Stephens, Professor NYU:] The audience for newspapers was expanding
as the cities were expanding.
A lot of these people were immigrants.
A lot of these people didn't read English all that well
or speak English all that well.
In 1896,
in an effort to spur sales of his New York Journal,
Hearst hired the Hogan’s Alley cartoonist away from Pulitzer
and continued a fierce war for talent between the two publishers.
[Stephens:] This is before radio and certainly before television,
before films were really catching on.
Comics brought color to these printed forms of entertainment
that were arriving in people's homes.
Critics began calling the publishers’ methods “yellow-kid journalism,”
or “yellow journalism” for short.
Yellow journalism gave rise to a new form of newspapering.
[Tucher:] It usually meant lots of sensation,
lots of screaming headlines and enormous type,
lots of illustrations, drawings, cartoons,
lots of pages of cartoons.
[Stephens:] It was wild, loud, brash,
that it was jingoistic.
These were years where newspapers in New York City
start to accumulate circulations that reached a million.
This is a new mass audience
And the approach worked.
Flashy presentation and sensationalized reporting
increased circulation for both publishers.
As the Cuban rebellion swelled,
the intensity of yellow journalism was increasing.
[Stephens:] And with yellow journalism and competition between Pulitzer and Hearst
came large headlines,
big illustrations,
more photographs in newspapers.
Some Americans called for the Spanish to withdraw from the island
and even sent material support to the Cuban revolutionaries.
[Tucher:] The Spanish have been ruling Cuba with enormous brutality for quite some time.
Cuba is very close,
Cuba is 90 miles off of Florida.
There are a lot of interests at stake here.
There are economic interests.
There's agricultural interest.
Cuba provides crops that are important for the United States.
With tensions between the U.S. and Spain mounting,
the American Navy ordered the U.S.S. Maine to Havana harbor
in January 1898.
By February, yellow journalism was peaking
and tensions with Spain were at a boiling point.
Then, the explosion.
[Nasaw:] Hearst immediately publishes on his front pages
a variety of stories going after the Spanish,
all made up.
[Stephens:] His reporting was sensational.
It was exaggerated.
It was, in many cases, distorted.
One Hearst headline even offered a $50,000 reward
for information leading to who caused the explosion.
Pulitzer’s New York World also published similar sensational coverage.
[Stephens:] And it was effective in
helping drive the United States to war with Spain over Cuba.
On April 25,
the U.S. declared war on Spain.
Yellow Journalism helped foster a political climate
that was conducive to war.
[Tucher:] Hearst's competition with Pulitzer
became the defining moment of journalism
in the late 19th century.
It really just went beyond.
Neither one could step back.
Neither one could control it.
It came to its head with the Spanish-American war.
The two countries fought the Spanish-American war for eight months,
in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
By the time Spain and America signed the peace treaty on December 10, 1898,
over 3,000 Americans and an estimated 55,000 Spaniards had died.
In 1976,
American naval investigators concluded that
the Maine explosion was likely caused by a fire
that ignited its ammunition stocks.