Case Study 13.1: Yellow Journalism and the Spanish-American War

"The press association dispatches, the syndicate fiction, and the editorial utterances... have been more powerful in bringing about a state of public feeling than the deliberate arguments of the partisans of war." — E.L. Godkin, Editor, The Nation, 1898

Overview

The Spanish-American War of 1898 is the foundational American case study in commercially motivated print propaganda — a case in which the economic incentives of newspaper competition, the propaganda techniques of sensationalist journalism, and the genuine political grievances of a colonial population intersected to produce both a media spectacle and a war. It is also a case in which the distinction between accurate reporting, exaggeration, and deliberate fabrication was systematically blurred — in ways that should feel entirely familiar to anyone who has followed contemporary media coverage of international conflicts.

This case study examines three questions: (1) What did the yellow journalism press actually do during the run-up to the Spanish-American War? (2) How did specific propaganda techniques manifest in the coverage of the USS Maine explosion? (3) What does the case tell us about the relationship between commercial print media, propaganda, and political outcomes?

The Context: Cuba, Spain, and American Imperial Ambitions

By 1895, Cuba had been under Spanish colonial rule for four centuries. A guerrilla insurgency — the second major Cuban independence movement of the 19th century — had been ongoing since February 1895. Spanish Governor-General Valeriano Weyler, appointed in 1896 to crush the insurgency, responded with a reconcentración policy: forcing civilian populations into garrisoned towns to deny the guerrillas their support base. The conditions in the reconcentration camps were genuinely catastrophic — inadequate food, contaminated water, minimal medical care — and Cuban civilian deaths were real and substantial. Estimates vary, but historians believe between 150,000 and 400,000 Cubans died from disease and starvation in the camps between 1896 and 1898.

The yellow press did not invent this suffering. But it made choices about how to frame, amplify, and sometimes fabricate around this real suffering that are textbook examples of propaganda technique.

The United States also had substantial economic interests in Cuba: American investment in Cuban sugar production totaled approximately $50 million (roughly $1.7 billion in 2024 dollars); trade between Cuba and the United States was significant. The McKinley administration was managing competing pressures: business interests that wanted stability (and were initially not enthusiastic about war, which would be destabilizing), humanitarian sentiment about Cuban suffering, and a growing strategic argument — advanced particularly by Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt at the Navy Department — that American power required Caribbean strategic bases.

This was the environment into which Hearst and Pulitzer inserted their circulation war.

The Circulation War: Hearst vs. Pulitzer

William Randolph Hearst purchased the New York Morning Journal in 1895 and immediately began a circulation war against Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. The competition was intense, personal, and commercially motivated: each paper tried to out-sensationalize the other to sell more copies.

Hearst cut the Journal's price to one cent (undercutting the World's two-cent price), hired away Pulitzer's best staff (including the cartoonist R.F. Outcault, who drew "The Yellow Kid," giving the style its name), and invested massively in dramatic presentation: larger headlines, more illustrations, multiple-column stories, and a tone that prioritized emotional impact over accuracy.

The Journal and the World dispatched teams of reporters and illustrators to Cuba with explicit instructions to find, and dramatize, stories of Spanish brutality. The most famous story about this practice — Hearst's supposed telegram to illustrator Frederic Remington ("Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war") — cannot be verified. Remington's own account of his assignment and Hearst's journalist James Creelman's secondhand report of the telegram were published years after the fact, and no original telegram has been found. But whether or not the specific anecdote is accurate, it accurately captures the spirit of the enterprise: reporters were sent to Cuba with the expectation of producing outrage-generating material, regardless of what was actually happening.

Propaganda Techniques in Practice

The yellow press coverage of Cuba demonstrated at least five propaganda techniques in systematic and documentable form:

Emotional amplification of genuine suffering: The reconcentración camps were a genuine atrocity. Weyler's policy produced real civilian deaths. Hearst and Pulitzer's coverage dramatized this suffering in ways designed to produce maximum outrage: graphic illustrations of skeletal Cuban women, stories of Spanish soldiers bayoneting Cuban children, accounts of prisoners tortured and executed without trial. Some of these stories were accurate. Some were exaggerated. Some were fabricated. The propaganda technique was not pure invention — it was selective amplification, choosing the most extreme instances (and sometimes inventing beyond them) while providing no context about the complexity of guerrilla warfare or Cuban political divisions.

Dehumanization of the enemy: Spanish authorities — and "Spain" as an abstraction — were consistently depicted in terms of essential cruelty, barbarity, and racial inferiority. General Weyler was dubbed "The Butcher" in Journal headlines and referred to in terms that would be immediately recognizable to any student of dehumanizing propaganda: animal metaphors, accusations of sexual predation, comparisons to historical figures of maximum evil. The technique is the same as in Der Stürmer, adapted to a commercial context: once the enemy has been dehumanized, any action against them is morally justified.

The authority of print as a truth-conferring mechanism: In the 1890s, newspapers were the primary source of information about distant events for most Americans. There was no radio, no television, no competing information stream. If the Journal said Spanish soldiers had murdered Cuban women and children, readers had no mechanism for verification and a cultural expectation that newspapers, as institutions of public record, would not fabricate such things. The yellow press exploited this authority systematically, publishing stories that were fabricated or drastically misrepresented while carrying the full credibility of print publication.

Strategic timing and repetition: The coverage was not occasional; it was daily. Every day's Journal and World carried new Cuba stories — new atrocities, new outrages, new demands for American action. The cumulative effect of daily repetition, independent of any single story's accuracy, was the construction of a factual and emotional reality in which Spanish rule of Cuba was unambiguously monstrous and American intervention was unambiguously necessary. This is the illusory truth effect operating through the newspaper's natural publication rhythm.

Patriotism as frame: The coverage consistently embedded the Cuba crisis within a patriotic narrative: American honor required defending the weak Cuban people from Spanish tyranny; to accept the situation was to accept American humiliation. This framing served multiple purposes: it made opposition to intervention seem unpatriotic, it connected individual readers' emotional identity (their sense of themselves as Americans) to support for the policy the newspapers were promoting, and it suppressed the alternative frame (that intervention was imperial expansion driven by economic interest) by making it seem ungenerous or cowardly.

The USS Maine: A Case Study Within a Case Study

On the evening of February 15, 1898, the USS Maine — an American battleship stationed in Havana Harbor at the request of the American consul, ostensibly to protect American citizens during a period of tension — exploded. 266 American sailors and officers were killed. The cause of the explosion was unknown.

The yellow press coverage of the Maine explosion is perhaps the most documented single instance of print propaganda in American history. The responses of Hearst's Journal and Pulitzer's World to an event whose cause was genuinely unknown demonstrate nearly every major propaganda technique in the print arsenal.

The New York Journal coverage, February 16, 1898:

The front page headline — in the largest typeface the paper had ever used — read: "DESTRUCTION OF THE WAR SHIP MAINE WAS THE WORK OF AN ENEMY." This was presented not as a hypothesis, not as a possibility, but as established fact — on the day after the explosion, before any investigation had begun, before any evidence had been collected. The sub-headline: "Naval Officers Think the Maine Was Destroyed By a Spanish Mine." Note the hedging in the subhead: "Think" — but the main headline contained no such qualification.

The Journal offered a $50,000 reward "for the detection of the perpetrator of the Maine outrage" — simultaneously assuming that there was a perpetrator (that the explosion was not an accident), framing the event as an "outrage," and positioning the paper as the investigating authority. This last move is remarkable: the newspaper as the institution responsible for bringing Spanish criminals to justice.

The World was only slightly less aggressive: its initial coverage suggested the explosion was caused by a torpedo or mine but was more willing to acknowledge uncertainty. Within days, as it became clear that readers wanted outrage rather than caution, the World largely abandoned its hedging.

"Remember the Maine!"

Within days of the explosion, Hearst's Journal had coined the phrase "Remember the Maine!" — and more importantly, completed it: "Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!" The phrase was designed to function exactly as such propaganda slogans function: as a compressed emotional trigger, requiring no argument, bypassing deliberation, invoking both the specific event and its assigned meaning (Spanish guilt) simultaneously. The phrase spread from the newspapers to political speeches to popular culture. It became the emotional shorthand for the war.

What the investigations actually found:

The Navy's official inquiry in March 1898, chaired by Captain William Sampson, concluded that the Maine had been destroyed by an external explosion — consistent with a mine, though the board did not formally assign blame. This conclusion supported the intervention narrative and was treated by the yellow press as vindication. Spain's own investigation concluded that the explosion was internal.

Subsequent investigations have not resolved the question definitively: - A 1974 investigation by Admiral Hyman Rickover, using more sophisticated analysis, concluded that the most likely cause was an internal explosion in the forward ammunition magazine — probably a coal bunker fire that ignited adjacent munitions. This finding suggested the explosion was accidental. - A 1998 National Geographic Society investigation using computer modeling reached more ambiguous conclusions, finding evidence potentially consistent with both internal and external causes.

The present state of historical knowledge is this: the cause of the Maine explosion remains genuinely uncertain, but the most technically sophisticated analyses have consistently found internal explosion (accident) at least as likely as external explosion (Spanish attack). The yellow press's confident attribution to Spanish action was not supported by the available evidence even at the time — and is almost certainly false.

The Road to War and the Press's Role

The United States declared war on Spain on April 25, 1898 — seventy days after the Maine explosion. The war lasted approximately ten weeks; Spain was decisively defeated, and the Treaty of Paris (December 1898) transferred Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to American control or influence. The United States had acquired an overseas empire.

What was the yellow press's role in producing this outcome?

Historical opinion has shifted significantly from the simple Hearst-created-the-war narrative. Contemporary historians emphasize:

1. McKinley administration war planning had begun before the Maine explosion, driven by strategic considerations largely independent of press coverage.

2. Congress's war authorization reflected political pressure and economic interests extending far beyond Hearst's readership.

3. Popular support for intervention predated the Maine explosion and had multiple sources: genuine humanitarian concern about the reconcentración camps, longstanding American ambivalence about European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the imperial arguments being made by influential strategic thinkers.

But the revisionism should not be pushed too far. The yellow press demonstrably did several specific things:

• It created an emotional environment in which diplomatic resolution became politically difficult. Public opinion, inflamed by months of atrocity coverage, demanded decisive action.
• The "Remember the Maine!" campaign specifically foreclosed the possibility that the Maine explosion was accidental — foreclosing it at the level of public emotional reality, regardless of what the evidence might show.
• The press coverage gave wavering politicians cover for intervention: they could point to public demand, generated substantially by the press, as justification.

The structural lesson, as argued in the Debate Framework in the main chapter, is more important than the specific causal question: the yellow journalism case demonstrates that commercially motivated print propaganda can create the emotional and factual conditions in which specific political outcomes become nearly inevitable — not by determining outcomes unilaterally, but by narrowing the range of outcomes that are politically sustainable.

What Journalism Historians Now Say

The historiography of yellow journalism has evolved through several phases.

The early 20th century conventional narrative — that Hearst and Pulitzer were villains who manufactured a war — was largely accepted through the mid-20th century and influenced the development of professional journalism ethics. The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics, the emphasis on verification and fact-checking in journalism education, and the "objective journalism" norm that emerged in the early 20th century were all, in part, responses to what yellow journalism had demonstrated about the damage irresponsible press behavior could do.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, revisionist historians pushed back against the simple narrative: the war had multiple causes, press coverage was one factor among many, and the press was responding to as well as creating public sentiment.

The current synthesis — represented in the work of scholars like W. Joseph Campbell (Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, 2001) and David Nasaw (The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, 2000) — acknowledges the press's significant role in shaping the emotional and factual environment of 1898 while rejecting the simple "Hearst caused the war" narrative. Campbell has done important archival work demonstrating that several specific "yellow journalism" stories (including the Remington telegram) are myths or unverifiable anecdotes — but he also documents extensively the genuinely sensationalist, accuracy-indifferent character of Hearst's coverage.

For our purposes as propaganda analysts, the key finding is this: yellow journalism was propaganda in the structural sense whether or not Hearst consciously thought of it that way. The techniques it used — emotional amplification, dehumanization, false authority, strategic repetition, patriotic framing — are propaganda techniques. Their deployment in service of commercial interests does not make them less manipulative; it may make them more dangerous, because the commercial framing obscures the political function.

Discussion Questions

1. The Maine's explosion has never been definitively attributed to Spanish action, and the balance of evidence suggests it was probably accidental. If that is true, the yellow press's "Remember the Maine!" campaign was built on a false premise. Does this mean the Spanish-American War was "caused by a lie"? What is the most historically accurate and analytically careful way to characterize the relationship between the false attribution and the war?

2. Hearst was a private citizen pursuing commercial interests. Goebbels was a government official pursuing state ideological goals. Does this difference in status affect your moral evaluation of their propaganda activities? Why or why not?

3. Joseph Pulitzer, who built his career on sensationalist journalism, later endowed the Pulitzer Prize as the most prestigious award in American journalism — and it has often been given for exactly the kind of accountability journalism that yellow journalism suppressed. What does this suggest about the relationship between media proprietors' commercial practices and their stated values?

4. Apply the Propaganda Model's five filters to Hearst's New York Journal in 1898. Which filters are most clearly operating? Which are least applicable to a 19th-century newspaper?