Nov. 21st, 2021

skygiants: Nellie Bly walking a tightrope among the stars (bravely trotted)
The thing about Joyce Milton's The Yellow Kids: Foreign Correspondents in the Heyday of Yellow Journalism is that yellow journalism is pretty definitively unethical but it also does make for some extremely good narrative.

-- I didn't get much of the unethical thing from the book, for the record. This is a BYOER (bring your own ethical reservations) text, for the most part; the book is broadly more interested in recounting the Adventures Of journalists in and around the Spanish-American and Greco-Turkish wars of 1896-98 rather than pursuing any broader analysis of the implications of American journalists running around playing the roles of not just propagandists but also in some cases activists, spies, and paramilitary professionals. It's a collection of historical anecdotes and snippets of biographpy strung together, sometimes to confusing effect (I personally wish Milton would warn us when she's about to switch to referring to people by their nicknames) -- but dang, the anecdotes are fun!

Milton's personal favorite yellow journalist is Sylvester H. "Harry" Scovel, a pugnacious World reporter who famously got in a public fistfight with the commanding general of the Spanish-American war on the day that victory was announced. Scovel apparently became a personal friend of Cuban general Maximo Gomez and, in addition to writing a lot of scathing pieces about Spanish abuses in Cuba, did a certain amount of conveying messages to the rebel camp from the U.S. government; unsurprisingly, he was arrested multiple times by Spanish officials as a spy and very nearly executed.

(One of the best primary-source anecdotes in the book involves two friends of Harry Scovel's -- one reporter and one soldier-of-fortune working for Gomez -- who set out on an ill-advised prison rescue attempt, got halfway there, realized they weren't going to make it, and instead got very drunk in a jungle cabin and wrote maudlin letters to their imprisoned friend, then apparently stole each other's letters and started ragging on each other in the margins:

[the soldier-of-fortune, in the margins of the reporter's letter] By the way, this Rea is a holy terror. How long have you known him? He is even now standing on the table and telling me (or trying to) the length of time this war has been going on.

THIS IS SO CUTE. I hope the letters did make it to Scovel and that they cheered him up enormously; they would have me.)

In between running around Cuba setting bad precedents for journalistic immunity, Scovel married a beautiful society wife, who promptly insisted on coming with him to Alaska to cover the Yukon gold rush ... after which he had to abandon her in the Klondike when he went on a temporary trip into town to find a telegram waiting from his boss saying that he had to catch the next train home or he'd lose his job. Where's my movie about the 1890s socialite surviving a solo sojourn on the Yukon trail?

Anyway. Speaking of socialites, my favorite yellow journalist is Cora Taylor, a Boston socialite turned baronet's wife turned runaway bride turned high-class bordello madam turned war correspondent -- Cora was still in the runaway-bride-slash-bordello-madam phase of her career when she met Stephen Crane (author of The Red Badge of Courage) in Florida, and upon beginning a Grand Romance they somehow managed to talk the Journal into hiring both of them to cover the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. They also rescued a puppy named Velestino from the battlefield:

The need to have someone to look after Velestino when Stephen and Cora returned to the front became the justification for hiring two teenage servants, the Ptolemy twins, who themselves required more looking after than the dog. And even with two full-time babysitters, the puppy kept getting lost until [Harry] Scovel bought it a collar and a leash, a solution that does not seem to have occurred to Cora or Stephen.

I also want a movie about this household. It should be directed by Wes Anderson, probably.

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