History in the Margins

I first ran across Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) when I was doing research on American foreign correspondents as part of the background for The Dragon from Chicago. He looked like a fascinating character, but he was a generation (or maybe even two generations) earlier than Sigrid Schultz, so I gave him a nod and went on my way. When he recently crossed my path again (1) I decided to give him a closer look.

Davis is best known today as a war correspondent, but in his time he was also famous as a novelist, dramatist, adventurer, and man about town. At one point, he had three plays running on Broadway at the same time. His novels were best sellers. (At least one of them is still in print.) Moreover, several of his books were turned into movies. Much later, one was the basis for a short series on the Wonderful World of Disney. (2) He partied with the Gilded Age’s literary and theatrical elite, and was often the subject of the news as well a reporter of the same. H.L. Mencken, who was known for his caustic wit not for fanboy flattery, once described him as “the hero of our dreams. ” In short, Davis was a Celebrity.

Born in Philadelphia during the American Civil War, Davis came from writing people. His father was the editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger and his mother, Rebecca Harding Davis, was a well known novelist and journalist in her own right. (3)

After attending Lehigh University and Johns Hopkins without completing a degree, Davis entered the newspaper business, with a little help from his father. He worked as a reporter for The Philadelphia Record for three months before he was fired for incompetence. (Davis claimed his editor didn’t like him because he wore gloves on cold days. ) He went on to work for two other Philadelphia papers, The Philadelphia Press and The Philadelphia Telegraph. While at The Press, he went undercover at a saloon where criminals were known to hang out. There he gained the confidence of a gang of burglars who were terrorizing the saloon and was instrumental in their capture—an adventure that allowed him to write about burglary from the inside. (4)

From Philadelphia, Davis moved to New York, where worked first as a reporter for The Evening Sun and later as the managing editor for the illustrated magazine Harper’s Weekly.

After three years at Harper’s Weekly, he left to devote himself to his own writing. He published several popular travel books based on his experiences as a roving reporter for a variety of publications. His travels also provided the raw material for his fiction, which generally centered on a “gentleman-adventurer” who bore a resemblance to Davis himself.

In 1896, Davis added war correspondent to the mix, when William Randolph Hearst, owner and editor of the New York Journal, who went on to build the Hearst media empire, commissioned Davis to cover the Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule. (5) Davis’s stories from Cuba helped created a new American interest in the rebellion.

He went on to report on the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, the Spanish -American War (1898) (6) the Second Boer War (1899-1902) , the Russo-Japanese War (1905), the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), the attempted revolution in Venezuela (1902), and what was then called the Mexican Punitive Expedition (1916) . His war reporting in this period was much like his travel writing, with a swashbuckling style, vivid metaphors, and a romantic vision of war. He often worked in isolated locations, and placed himself in the middle of an adventure. (Even though he lived in a tent and wrote on a typewriter perched on a cracker box, he didn’t exactly rough it. It took several pack animals, and a servant or two, to carry the kit he took into war zones, which included luxuries like a folding bathtub. (7)

By the time World War I began, in late July, 1914, Davis was the best-known and best-paid reporter in the United States. It was a foregone conclusion that he would head to Europe to report on the Great War.

On August 5, 1914, Davis and fellow correspondent Frederick Palmer,—who was also an experienced war correspondent, though in a less heroic mold—sailed for Europe on the Lusitania, with the expectation of receiving credentials from either the British or the French government that would allow them to travel with their armies and file reports on the war from the front. When they arrived, they discovered that Britain, French and Belgium not only refused to issue war correspondent credentials to foreign reporters, but they banned reporters from the war zone. Davis and Palmer ignored the restrictions and made their way to Brussels, armed with U.S. passports and letters from their editors, and prepared to take their chances with the dangers of operating outside the system.

Living in a hotel in Brussels, rather than camping near the front, was a new experience for Davis. So was the war itself. It was not an adventure. It was not romantic. He laid out the difference in a powerful piece he wrote for Scribner’s Magazine after the Germans marched into Brussels:

“As a correspondent I have seen all the great armies and the military processions at the coronations in Russia, England, and Spain, and in our own inaugural parades down Pennsylvania Avenue, but those armies and processions were made up of men. This [the German army] was a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute power of a steam roller. And for three days and three nights through Brussels it roared and rumbled, a cataract of molten lead…like a river of steel… a monstrous engine.”

After the Germans took Brussels, Davis learned that the Germans were no more willing to give credentials to reporters than the combatant powers on the other side.

Davis attempted to get closer to the front. (In a taxi!) He had a pass from the German military governor of Brussels that allowed him to travel around Brussels; he hoped it would allow him to travel through the German lines. It did not. He was arrested as a spy and threatened with execution. He talked his way out of danger by promising to walk back to Brussels and check-in with every German officer along the way.

Later, having made his way to the front on the British and French side, he was arrested by the French army as he traveled from Reims to Paris. He used both arrests as fodder for the type of stories for which he was famous, but the war was wearing him down.

In the fall of 1915, Davis left France for the Balkans, at the beginning of the German advance into Serbia. He arrived in Salonika in November, just in time to report on the French retreat from Serbia, only two weeks after they arrived. Together with British photographer James Hare, Davis traveled into Serbia to report on the last Allied fighters there. They found a small British artillery unit commanded by two teenaged British officers, who were dug into a Serbian hillside, protecting the rear of the retreating army. Davis’s story on the unit, “The Deserted Command,” was heroic and heartbreaking.

Davis’s last and most famous story was written after an encounter in Salonika with an American who had volunteered as a medic in the British army. “Billy Hamlin,” the pseudonym Davis gave him, was tired, bitter, disillusioned, and ready to desert. Four war correspondents who had gathered for a drink in a hotel room talked him into going back. “The Man Who Knew Everything” was a new type of story for Davis. It was gritty and realistic, unlike the romantic heroism of his earlier work, and in many ways was a criticism of the heroic brand of war correspondent that he himself had embodied.

It is possible that Davis would have gone on to make a leap to the modern style of war reporting that was taking shape in the hands of younger journalists like John Reed (1887-1920) (8) But he never got the chance. Declaring to a friend that “By gravy, this war is my Waterloo. I’m going home,” he headed back to New York. He died there a few weeks later, at the age of 52.

“The Man Who Knew Everything” ran in the September 1916 issue of Metropolitan Magazine, five months after Davis’s death.

(1) Charles Dana Gibson used Davis as the model for the dashing young men who danced, bicycled, and otherwise frolicked with his eponymous Gibson Girls. (As opposed to the short, balding older men who tried unsuccessfully to flirt with the gorgeous young women.) He—Davis, though I suppose you could make the same claim about Gibson— is credited with making the clean-shaven look popular among young men. Perhaps a reaction to the epic beards sported by many Civil War veterans in the second half of the nineteenth century?

(2) “The Adventures of Gallagher,” the story of a newspaper copy boy with aspirations of becoming a reporter who solves crimes in the Wild West. I remember it mainly as a source of frustration because we always seemed to catch an episode in the middle of the story, which meant I never knew how it started or ended.  Grrr.

(3) I originally mistyped that as “write” and was tempted to let it stand.

(4) This was the period when “stunt journalism” was big. Think Nellie Bly (1864-1922), who became famous for going undercover to expose corruption and injustice. Her book Ten Days in a Mad-House documented the horrific conditions she observed when she posed as a mental patient in a New York asylum. But I digress.

(5) Hearst also commissioned noted artist Frederick Remington to illustrate Davis’s articles. It was a golden age of illustration, as well as “yellow journalism.” In a probably apocryphal exchange, Remington is alleged to have cabled Hearst “Everything is quiet here. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.” Hearst’s (also alleged) response: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” It is an engaging story that first appeared in 1901 and gained traction in the 1930s when distrust of the Hearst media was on the rise. It has became a standard element of histories of the Spanish-American war and Hearst biographies ever since, but it appears to have no more truth than Marie Antoinette’s thoroughly debunked extortion to “Let them eat cake!” Once again, I digress.

(6) In which he hobnobbed with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, and helped create the legend surrounding them. In some accounts, he charged up San Juan Hill alongside them. In others, Roosevelt made him an honorary member of the regiment in thanks for rescuing some of its members who were wounded. Maybe. Maybe not. If nothing else, my guess is that Davis’s stories of sitting around the campfire with Teddy and the boys, drinking and telling stories, is probably true.

(7) His kit , which he discussed at length in Notes From a War Correspondent (1905),  became part of his persona as a journalist-adventurer

(8) Best known for his work on the Russian Revolution, Reed was a journalist-adventurer in his own right.