The Golden Age of American War Correspondents: Part One (1870-1895)

To recap the state of American newspapers after the end of the Civil War in 1865: this was the beginning of their most successful period ever. New printing technology meant that thousands of papers (let alone pages!) could be turned out in a day, enough so that larger papers could print multiple editions (or even "extras", outlined in red at the top). The vast surge in immigration, increasingly from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, meant that there was a vibrant and diverse set of papers in many languages. There was now a global network of telegraph cables and lines carrying messages across the world's oceans and land masses, while huge steamship liners (think "Titanic"), each with thousands of passengers now traveled regularly between major ports. The biggest American papers were in New York (there literally side by side on Park Row in Manhattan) and Chicago (the two largest cities, and both expanding faster than any previous in human history). Because of the cost of reporting news from great distances (using the cables could cost $10 a WORD), the idea of a "wire service" was created: an international business, with many foreign branches, that would provide the news, for a fee, to a host of subscribing papers. That model started with the Associated Press, founded in 1846 (still very active today, and usually simply known by its initials- the "AP").

All of this meant that there was a vast number of potential readers, particularly interested in exotic and dramatic stories (since only wealthy Americans could yet afford to travel outside North America). Many Americans would buy and read more than one paper in a day. Combine that with the ferocious competition between papers (30 or so at any given time in New York City alone, and another 20 in Chicago)- and you have

an immense need for reporters to feed those papers with sensational stories. I have described the first few "war correspondents" to date (in "Early Days"- the Mexican and Civil Wars). But it is now from the 1870s on, that that role takes on celebrity status. There now developed two distinct tactics such correspondents could take: first, to cover war stories at the decision-making level (presidents, monarchs, generals and other top officers). These dignitaries were by now recognizing the need for a symbiosis familiar today, roughly translating as "I give you access and information, you give me the best possible publicity." Obviously this option involved only reporters from papers with the largest circulations (at this point those reporters were entirely male). Or reporters (here including a few women) could focus on the humanitarian issues of the vast majority affected by war- on the experiences of common soldiers, but also on hospitals, civilians in war-torn cities, refugees. This option could certainly involve far more danger than the first, including exposure to contagious diseases, being under fire, and being arrested, or even executed, as a spy! The first reporter I will introduce would go even further, reporting actual atrocities. In modern terms, he not only reported news, but raised issues of human rights (building on an old ethical debate- does war have "laws" of conduct?).

Though you may not sympathize with the problem very much, at this particular time there weren't that many wars to report. There were the last set of battles, mostly small-scale, between the US Army and Native Americans in the West (concluding in 1890). The biggest war in Europe (between 1815 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914) was the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), in which France, then under Emperor Napoleon III, was rapidly defeated by a league of German kingdoms (promptly unified afterward as the "German Empire"). One of the Americans who reported on this war is the first subject of this post, an Irish-American from Ohio with the righteous name of Januarius Aloysius MacGahan (supposedly his first name came from his parents honoring Catholic St. Januarius on his birthday!).

MacGahan came from a humble background, but got a break into journalism through a distant relative, Gen. Phil Sheridan, the top Union cavalry commander in the last part of the Civil War. After the Franco-Prussian War (which he covered for the New York Standard), MacGahan began a short but very exciting career as a "roving correspondent": going on immediately to cover a short war in Spain. But he seems to have had an exceptional taste for adventure (if not outright risk-taking!). The Russian Empire, already the world's largest country, was at this time launched on a brutal series of wars of conquest in Central Asia against a set of relatively small Moslem monarchies, culminating in the invasion of the Khanate of Khiva. Khiva, in modern terms, controlled an oasis and a large river basin (the Oxus) east of the Caspian Sea, north of Afghanistan and covering the modern country of Uzbekistan and its surroundings (it's visible on the map below on the border with Turkmenistan).

The Russians had tried invading twice before; in 1717 practically the whole army had been wiped out by the Khivans, and in 1839 cold had killed most of the camels needed for transportation. This time they prepared carefully, including doing careful mapping and using several armies to converge on the capital (also called Khiva, surrounded by hundreds of miles of harsh desert). MacGahan, now the St. Petersburg correspondent for The New York Herald, started from Saratov, a major port on the Volga River in southern Russia. He was by now fluent in Russian (and would marry a Russian after this trip). There he met with American diplomat Eugene Schuyler, who was also investigating the massive Russian operation (and who would collaborate with MacGahan later, as we shall see). The two traveled together for a time, but then MacGahan broke off, presumably on a camel, to join with one of the Russian invasion armies, under Gen. Kaufmann. He witnessed that army's capture of walled Khiva on June 10, 1873, and his vivid stories were carried in major U.S. papers (like so many correspondents from then to now, he would later turn them into a best-selling book).

Having made his reputation, MacGahan returned to the Middle East when a rebellion broke out against the ruling (Turkish) Ottoman Empire in present Bulgaria in April 1876. That area, inhabited by Orthodox Christians, had originally been an empire of its own, but it had been conquered by the Moslem Turks in 1396. The Ottoman Empire was in decline by this time from its peak as a world power in the early 1500's (Greece for example had won its independence in 1832). As it happened, Eugene Schuyler had just been reassigned as a junior diplomat from Russia to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (now called Istanbul). Schuyler, MacGahan, and other Westerners heard rumors of atrocities against Bulgarian civilians from students and teachers at Roberts College in the capital. The two Americans joined with a small group of European diplomats and journalists on an investigation. The revolt had been poorly planned, but the Turkish government had responded by sending in a Moslem militia, the "Bashi Bazouks" (literally the "Crazy Heads"), who operated outside government authority. The travelers reached the area in today's southwest Bulgaria right after the militia had slaughtered thousands of men, women, and children across many villages. MacGahan reported in particular about what is now called the Batak Massacre (for the village), and included graphic (for the time) accounts of the rapes of local women before the wholesale executions. On his return, he submitted his story, alongside Schuyler's official diplomatic report which had similar details; both were carried with big headlines especially in Britain (note the religious angle, of brutality by Moslems against Christians). Below is a map of the Rhodope Mountains on the present Bulgaria/Greece border (Batak is shown southwest of Plovdiv), and a photo of MacGahan.

It is what happened next that makes MacGahan's reporting of exceptional significance. Up to this time, the official British foreign policy, at this point in the hands of Conservative Prime Minister Disraeli, had been opposition to Russia (and its expansion, especially if directed against the Ottomans). At stake was Russian access to the Straits, the narrow ice-free waterways leading from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. But now the accounts of the Bulgarian massacres were seized upon by the leader of the Liberal Party opposition, William Gladstone. He turned the descriptions into a pamphlet on the "Bulgarian Horrors" that sold 200,000 copies in a few weeks. Public opinion in Britain began to shift rapidly against the Turks. Russia then, with the excuse of protecting fellow Orthodox Christians, declared war on the Ottomans and invaded Bulgaria. The Turks appealed to Britain, but Disraeli, reluctantly and fatefully, decided this time on neutrality, due to what he called "the state of public feeling." After a brief (though very bloody) struggle, in what is called the Russo-Turkish War, the Russians broke through the Bulgarian mountains and threatened Constantinople itself. MacGahan, exulting in his influence, again accompanied one of the Russian armies. In March 1878, the Treaty of San Stefano established Bulgaria as a semi-independent nation (though for the time being still technically within the Ottoman Empire).

Sadly, MacGahan did not get long at all to savor his fame. He died of typhus (some sources say typhoid) in Constantinople, in June 1878, just short of his 34th birthday. But, if one goes to his little hometown of New Lexington, Ohio, today, you will see two commemorations: his tombstone (also see below), marked "The Liberator of Bulgaria," and a large statue of him, created by a Bulgarian in 1982. An important legacy in itself, but he has had a much larger impact- that of expanding the foreign reporter's role to include exercising a moral conscience, in contrast to a stance of objectivity. Such publicizing of human rights abuses can, as he showed, be capable of affecting governments and public opinion. Many journalists since (whether knowingly or not) have followed his example.

For the next story, a fast forward from MacGahan and Bulgaria in 1878, to the U.S. in 1894. The good news for this new time is that it's the peak of the Gilded Age, as the U.S. outstrips its rivals, Germany and Britain, in economic growth, becoming the largest economy on the planet (to today). The bad news is that the process includes the rise of massive corporate monopolies (known as "trusts"), resulting in the wholesale exploitation of workers (including women and children); and, in the Southern states, large-scale lynchings and disenfranchisement of Black men, in order to establish the Jim Crow apartheid system that will last into the 1960's. The year 1894 is also one of economic crisis in America (the "Panic of 1893", with millions unemployed), the worst situation before the Great Depression. In this context, another war correspondent, James Creelman, will, like MacGahan, gain much attention by a story about atrocities (though with more dubious evidence, and on the other side of the world, in East Asia).

During this same general period of the late 1800s, Japan has been undergoing an even more dramatic transformation than the U.S. Its rulers had imposed exceptional isolation from the early 1600s on, with the goal of preserving its feudal culture from Western colonization and Christianization. An expedition of warships from the U.S. abruptly ended that isolation in 1853, bringing about the rapid collapse of the government (the Tokugawa shogunate), and the revival of imperial rule (the Meiji Restoration, from 1868 on). In a single generation, Meiji officials brought in Western experts and converted the nation into the dominant industrial economy of East Asia. In the process, Japan also absorbed, through its much greater contact with the West, the reality, and continued threat, of a world dominated by European colonial empires. Its response was to modernize its weaponry as well as its manufacturing, and to begin to look in its neighborhood for territory to exploit for vital resources (especially coal and iron ore) which it lacked within its own borders. The remainder of this post will cover the consequences, as Japan first exploits weak neighbors (Korea and China). It will then move on to challenge a European Great Power (Russia) directly. American correspondents will flock to cover the resulting wars (the First Sino-Japanese, with China in 1894-95, and the Russo-Japanese, in 1904-05), especially the latter.

It's a complex story, and I will greatly oversimplify it here. But it is an important one, as a case study of how the modern media can shape opinion across whole societies- and here specifically of how the Western press coverage of the time would help to fundamentally alter foreign perceptions of Japan. The story starts in Korea, traditionally dominated by its much larger neighbor, China, for millennia. By now, though, the last imperial dynasty of China, the Qing (imposed in 1644 by northern outsiders, the Manchus) was on the verge of collapse. It had already suffered disastrous defeats at the hands of Britain (which founded its coastal colony in Hong Kong) and France. Some Chinese intellectuals and top officials, hampered by massive corruption and incompetence at the top, had sought to follow Japan's path of rapid industrialization. By now China did have a fleet of ironclad warships, but didn't have the leadership, modern army, or industrial infrastructure to withstand Japan. Japan in turn was worried by the possibility that a Great Power, most likely Russia this time, would take advantage of Chinese weakness and become a serious danger (especially by taking over Korea). The Korean monarchy was also very unstable, which led by 1894 to a direct collision between China and Japan. In this First Sino-Japanese War, Japan's modernized army won a quick victory, securing a "protectorate" over Korea and seizing the island of Taiwan. China's new navy was destroyed in a single battle. One of Japan's land armies broke through the Chinese to another major objective in Manchuria, China's northeast province: the town of Lushun, called by Westerners "Port Arthur." It was located at the end of a long peninsula jutting into the Yellow Sea part of the Pacific, and was positioned to control a deep harbor protected by mountains (see map below- Lushun is labeled in red).

That's where the next journalist enters the story.

In November 1894, a group of Western journalists, including Creelman, gathered on a hill above Port Arthur to watch the Japanese army enter the city. Creelman (see photo below, plus contemporary illustrations, Western and Japanese, of the Japanese capture of Port Arthur)

was a correspondent for one of the largest American papers, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Born in Canada, he was now 46, and had already had a colorful career: investigating the notorious Hatfield-McCoy feud in Appalachia, and interviewing the famous Lakota chief, Sitting Bull, as well as Leo Tolstoy and Pope Leo VIII. But what he would write next would be his most controversial piece ever. He claimed to have witnessed the wholesale slaughter of Chinese civilians by the Japanese soldiers: the so-called "Port Arthur Massacre." He wrote:

When the Japanese troops poured into Port Arthur they saw the heads of their slain comrades hanging by cords, with the noses and ears gone...A great slaughter followed. The infuriated soldiers killed everyone they saw. I can say as an eyewitness that the wretched people of Port Arthur made no attempt to resist the invaders. The Japanese now claim that shots were fired from the windows and doorways, but the statements are utterly false. No attempt to take prisoners was made. I saw a man who was kneeling to the troops and begging for mercy pinned to the ground by a bayonet while his head was hacked off with a sword...An old man on his knees in the street was cut almost in two...All day the troops kept dragging frightened men out of their houses and shooting them or cutting them to pieces...All through the second day the reign of murder continued. Hundreds and hundreds were killed. Out on one road alone there were 227 corpses...Next day I went...to see a court-yard filled with mutilated corpses. As we entered we surprised two soldiers bending over one of the bodies. One had a knife in his hand. They had ripped open the corpse and were cutting the heart out. When they saw us they cowered and tried to hide their faces. I am satisfied that not more than one hundred Chinamen were killed in fair battle at Port Arthur, and that at least 2000 unarmed men were put to death. It may be called the natural fury of troops who have seen the mutilated bodies of their comrades, or it may be called retaliation, but no civilized nation could be capable of the atrocities I witnessed at Port Arthur.

https://www.worldlymind.org/creelarthur.htm#detail

Note that Creelman did include what he saw as some excuse (the execution and mutilation of a scouting party). But what mattered about his report was two-fold: first, that not only did the Japanese deny the story, but so did at least one of the other correspondents present (another one did confirm Creelman). Second, and much more importantly, the story broke globally as the Western view of the Japanese was in transition. Since their opening to trade and tourism, and rapid adoption of the West's industrial economy and technologies, Westerners had become fascinated by Japan's ancient and unique culture, especially by its arts and sophisticated crafts (soon sought after by wealthy collectors). Its woodblock prints had directly inspired the Impressionists in France. Japan was described as both interesting and quaint (a place where trees were grown in miniature form!). But, in light of their sweeping military success against much larger China, followed by this apparent "barbarity," those perceptions were swiftly reevaluated. The Japanese government complained to the American ambassador, calling Creelman's report a "gross exaggeration." But what really mattered was not the "truth" in this case, but how it affected Western views, especially of leaders. For example, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany promptly used a racist phrase of the time, calling the Japanese the "Yellow Peril," and thereby justifying the Triple Intervention, in which Russia, France, and Germany in 1895 stripped Port Arthur's peninsula from Japan. That humiliation would in turn feed anti-Western feelings in Japan (especially after Russia seized Port Arthur). In the U.S., the idea of Japan as a security threat would take hold for the next half-century, leading soon to drastic restriction of Japanese immigration (and ultimately contributing to the confrontation at Pearl Harbor in World War II). These tensions will also fuel the next major war in East Asia, to be covered in a future post: the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).

That concludes this blog segment! Such an exciting and pivotal time to be a war correspondent (still almost entirely the province of educated white males, at the pinnacle of European imperialism in world history). Such correspondents, numerous and increasingly celebrated, with massive audiences, could still move freely across national borders and battlefields, and could report in general safety (due to their privileged origin) and with minimal censorship, even if their reports had significant negative effects for the host government (as I've covered for the Ottoman Turks and Japanese). In the next post, I'll continue explaining this period of journalistic freedom and celebrity, and this time mostly the story is set right in the backyard of the U.S., in Cuba: i.e., how newspapers covered the Spanish-American War, in 1898. We'll see how hundreds of reporters strutted and scrambled for more sensational war stories, and in the process helped in the election of a famous president. More soon!

Bibliography:

Glenny, Misha. "The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-1999." Penguin Books, 1999.

Heraclides, Alexis, and Ada Dialla. "The Bulgarian atrocities: A bird's eye view of intervention with emphasis on Britain, 1875-78," in "Humanitarian intervention in the nineteenth century." Online version- https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526125125/9781526125125.00016.xml

Herlihy, Patricia. "Eugene Schuyler and the Bulgarian Constitution of 1876," in "Russia, Europe, and the Rule of Law," ed. by F.J. Ferdinand Feldbrugge, 2005. Found on Google Books.

MacGahan, Januarius. "Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria- with Mr. Schuyler's Preliminary Report," 1876. Found on Google Books.

Morris, Jr., Roy. "The Pen & the Sword: A Brief History of War Correspondents," https://www.warfarehistorynetwork.com. Accessed 9/30/2022.

Walker, Dale. "Januarius MacGahan." Ohio Univ. Press, 1988.

Articles from Wikipedia.org: "Januarius MacGahan," "History of Bulgaria," "Eugene Schuyler," "Russo-Turkish War", "First Sino-Japanese War," "Port Arthur Massacre"