The most tenacious myth in American journalism tells of a purported exchange of telegrams in January 1897 between  newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and the artist Frederic Remington.

Remington

Supposedly, in answering Remington’s telegram, Hearst vowed to “furnish the war” with Spain, which broke out 15 months later, in April 1898.

Despite repeated efforts to debunk it, the tale about Hearst’s reckless vow lives on — a story just too delicious to be discarded.

So I found intriguing the news the other day that the Hearst Foundations — which Hearst set up in the 1940s — have agreed to a $200,000 grant to the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, N.Y.

Most of the money, $150,000, is to put toward extensive restoration work on the museum’s main building, which dates to 1810. The remainder, $50,000, is for educational purposes, if matched by the museum before year’s end.

Hearst

The grant — the foundations’ second to the Remington museum since 2009 — represents a reminder and a renewal of sorts of the long ago Hearst-Remington association.

In early 1897, Remington and the writer Richard Harding Davis arrived in Cuba on assignment from Hearst’s New York Journal to cover the rebellion against Spanish colonial rule, the conflict that gave rise to the Spanish-American War.

It was a coup for the Journal to have lined up talent such as Remington and Davis, who were paid handsomely for what was to be a month-long assignment.

It was during that assignment when the purported exchange of the telegrams supposedly took place — an exchange described by neither Hearst nor Remington, but by James Creelman, a Hearst correspondent who was in Madrid at the time.

The tale of Hearst’s vow is almost surely apocryphal, for reasons I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

Among the reasons (typically overlooked) is that Hearst denied having sent such a message. Remington, apparently, never discussed the anecdote, which Creelman recounted, without documentation, in a memoir published in 1901.

Further reason for doubting the tale is that Spanish authorities controlled incoming and outgoing telegraphic traffic from Havana. They surely would have intercepted and called attention to Hearst’s incendiary message to Remington, had it been sent.

Additionally, the anecdote rests on irreconcilable illogic. As I write in Getting It Wrong, it “would have been absurd for Hearst to vow to ‘furnish the war’ because war— specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule — was the very reason Hearst sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.

“Anyone reading U.S. newspapers in early 1897 would have been well aware that Cuba was a theater of a nasty war. By then, the Cuban rebellion had reached island-wide proportion and not a single province had been pacified by Spain’s armed forces.”

Hearst’s Journal gave prominent display to Remington’s sketches beginning in late January 1897, following the artist’s return to New York after a stay in Cuba of just six days.

The Journal gushed over Remington’s work, introducing his sketches with extravagant headlines such as:

“War Sketches Gathered in the Field by Frederic Remington; The Gifted Artist, Visiting Cuba Especially for the Journal, Describes with Pen and Pencil Characters That Are Making the War Famous and Infamous.”

Remington, though, grumbled that his work did not reproduce well in Hearst’s newspaper.

The artist returned to Cuba for Hearst in June 1898, to cover the Cuban campaign of the Spanish-American War. He did not distinguish himself.

Overweight and ailing, Remington suffered in the Cuban summer. He seldom was near the front and became what biographers Peggy and Harold Samuels termed “the chronicler of the battle’s rear.”

Remington died in 1909. The museum devoted to his work was established in Ogdensburg in 1923.

The museum’s executive director, Ed LaVarnway, said by phone yesterday that the Hearst Foundations’ grants to the museum weren’t made in recognition of the late 19th century association between Hearst and Remington.

But Hearst representatives knew about those connections and about the anecdote about the purported exchange of telegrams, he said.

Vital to securing the latest grant, LaVarnway noted, was Gilbert C. Maurer, a Hearst Foundations director and a benefactor of St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., Remington’s hometown. Canton is 18 miles from Ogdensburg.

He “was in the museum’s corner,” LaVarnway said of Maurer, formerly the chief operating officer of Hearst Corp., which William Randolph Hearst established 125 years ago.

WJC

Recent or related:

• Read Chapter One: ‘Furnish the War’
• Those ‘warmongering’ papers of William Randolph Hearst
• As if Hearst ‘were back with us,’ vowing to ‘furnish the war’
• The ‘anniversary’ of a media myth: ‘I’ll furnish the war’
• Obama, journalism history, and ‘folks like Hearst’
• Yellow journalism: A sneer is born
• ‘War Lovers’: A myth-indulging disappointment
• Halberstam the ‘unimpeachable’? Try myth-promoter
• A debunker’s work is never done
• ‘Getting It Wrong’ receives major shout-out in ‘New Yorker’