It’s unusual for media myths to be embraced partially — a half-embrace, as it were, of those prominent tall tales about journalists and their supposed exploits.

On assignment for Hearst

But half-embrace is how a new book treats the hoary media myth of William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of 19th Century.

Hearst supposedly made the declaration in a telegraphic reply to the artist Frederic Remington, who was on assignment in Cuba for Hearst’s New York Journal.

The exchange of telegrams purportedly went this way:

Remington: “Everything this quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.”

Hearst: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

Clay Risen’s new book, The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders and the Dawn of the American Century, does a half embrace of that well-known but thoroughly dubious tale. Specifically, Risen treats Hearst’s supposed reply as improbable but embraces the Remington portion.

And he does so flatly, writing: “Remington telegraphed Hearst to tell him that there was no war, and that there wasn’t going to be one.”

Risen repeats the purported Remington message: “Everything this quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.”

He then says Hearst “allegedly, infamously, replied, ‘Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’

“In fact,” Risen adds, “it’s unlikely Hearst wrote anything of the kind. … Whatever his reply, Remington ignored him and left Cuba.”

As sources, Risen cites two books, Frederic Remington and the Spanish-American War and The Chief, David Nasaw’s fine biography of Hearst. Both are secondary sources published before my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, which devotes a chapter to dismantling the presumptive Remington-Hearst exchange. (I first addressed the Remington-Hearst tale in 2000, in an article for the peer-reviewed Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.)

The Remington-Hearst anecdote, I wrote in Getting It Wrong, “lives on despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation” — the purported telegrams have never turned up; Hearst denied such an exchange, and Remington, apparently, never discussed it. The anecdote’s sole original source was an exaggeration-prone journalist named James Creelman, who mentioned the purported exchange in a book of reminiscences in 1901. But Creelman did not explain how or when he learned about it.

For those and other reasons, the tale is almost certainly untrue. And that goes for the Remington portion, which Risen, deputy op-ed editor at the New York TImes, embraced in his book. It’s highly unlikely Remington wrote anything close to “Everything this quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war.” His work and words give lie to that supposed message.

Cuba at the time was scarcely trouble-free: It was in the midst of an island-wide rebellion against Spanish colonial rule and that armed conflict — that war — was the very reason Hearst sent Remington and Davis to the island. Remington hardly found everything “quiet” in Cuba when he arrived in early January 1897, in the company of the correspondent Richard Harding Davis.

As I discussed in Getting It Wrong, Remington sketches, as published in Hearst’s Journal, “depict unmistakable (if unremarkable) scenes of a rebellion — a scouting party of Spanish cavalry with rifles at the ready; a cluster of Cuban non-combatants trussed and bound and being herded into Spanish lines; a scruffy Cuban rebel kneeling to fire at a small Spanish fort; a knot of Spanish soldiers dressing a comrade’s leg wound.”

The subject matter impugns the notion that Remington had found “everything … quiet” in Cuba.

Remington sketch, Cuba 1897

What’s more, the headlines accompanying the sketches emphasized the conflict in Cuba. Remington’s work appeared in the Journal beneath headlines such as “Cuban War Sketches Gathered in the Field by Frederic Remington” and “Frederic Remington Sketches a Familiar Incident of the Cuban War” (see nearby).

Following his return to New York, Remington wrote a letter to the Journal’s keenest rival, the New York World, in which he described the Spanish regime in Havana as a “woman-killing outfit down there in Cuba.”

In 1899, Remington described the assignment to Cuba in a magazine article that further challenges the notion “everything” was “quiet” in Cuba when he was there in early 1897.

“I saw ill-clad, ill-fed Spanish soldiers bring their dead and wounded into” Havana, Remington wrote, “dragging slowly along in ragged columns. I saw scarred Cubans with their arms bound stiffly behind them being marched to the Cabanas,” a fortress near Havana harbor. The country-side, Remington said, “was a pall of smoke” from homes of Cubans that had been set afire.

He wrote that he shook his fist in anger at Havana as he left for New York aboard a passenger steamer in mid-January 1897, saying he looked forward to returning only in the company of 100,000 American soldiers.

Remington’s sketches and words, I wrote in Getting It Wrong, “leave no doubt that he had seen a good deal of war-related disruption in Cuba. The island during his brief visit was anything but ‘quiet.'”

Still, I noted, “it remains some-thing of a mystery why Remington never publicly addressed Creelman’s anecdote.”

In any event, the evidence is overwhelming that the Remington-Hearst anecdote is false. And it is not divisible; if one half is apocryphal, the other must be, too.

A half-embrace is wholly untenable.

WJC

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• ‘War Lovers’: A myth-indulging disappointment
• Juan Williams new book repeats Spanish-American War myth
• BBC calls Hearst’s vow apocrytphal, quotes it anyway
• No, ‘Politico’ — Hearst didn’t vow to ‘furnish the war’
• No, ‘Politico’: Hearst did not cause the Spanish-American War
• ‘They even started wars’: Nonsense in the Economist’s holiday double issue
• About that Hearst quote on public’s fondness for entertainment
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• ‘Getting It Wrong’ wins SPJ award for Research about Journalism