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Title: Yellow Fever
Author: Ted Neachtain
ISBN: 0966788311
Description:
Yellow Fever is a historical novel set at the turn of the 20th Century as the United States emerges as an imperial power, partly as a result of the newspaper war being waged by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The folly, danger, hubris and excitement of that era is skillfully portrayed by the Ted Neachtain, a former newsman. Set in New York, Washington, Tampa, and Havana the suspense page-turner features a young reporter who becomes involved with leading figures of the day -- including a show girl who turns out to be lethal lover. Among the historical characters featured in the novel are Theodore Roosevelt, who rises from New York Police Commissioner to President of the United States, publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, writer Stephen Crane and reporter Richard Harding Davis, Gen. John Pershing and a variety of well rendered characters. All these characters – including Rough Riders and Buffalo Soldiers – are thrown into the brief, bloody Spanish-American War in Cuba, where the United States loses its innocence in the ambitions, folly and heat of the Cuban battle fields.
Yellow Fever was written by Ted Neachtain. The author, a former US Army officer, is a former newsman from New York and New Jersey. Neachtain spent years in competitive metropolitan newspaper battles and is intimately familiar with the nuances of newspaper life. He is also an expert on the United States at the turn of the Century and has painted an exciting portrait of the age.
Some of the themes explored in the book are the use of manufactured publicity to affect government policy, the birth of the celebrity culture, the folly of ego and pride in international affairs, and the misplaced use of force to bring about social change. At the same time, Neachtain writes a lively narrative that explores the “what might have been’s” with some of the historical features of the day.
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Highlights
It was the end of a century. A new kind of war raged on Manhattan streets: Medium Moguls fighting for newspaper circulation, and brewing a war to free an oppressed small nation. A young, naive reporter finds himself in the midst of it all, including murder, together with famed correspondents Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane:
- "Davis left a trail of broken noses, and among the ladies, broken hearts. He never sought fisticuffs, but many times he defended his own, or a friend's honor."
The reporter finds himself entangled with a seductive showgirl:
- "Annie sat in a plush chair as we talked. Her wrapper fell open, revealing a white nightgown. And some ankle. But she made no move to close it. I thought it odd that it was nearly 3 p.m., and she was still wearing a nightgown. But, I didn't make a comment on it."
The period was one of expansion, exuberance, and experience:
- "Lately, there have been certain books, and films about the era, and a phrase has been coined, The Gay Nineties. It's a false phrase, I believe. There was little gay about the period, now that I look back on it.
And, the plight of Cuba:
- "I hadn't known that many Americans wanted to free Cuba. Or that they had mounted armed expeditions for that purpose. "
- "Those people will get you killed," Crane said pleasantly, before downing another cocktail.
Manhattan, murder, and a war all wrapped up in the screaming headlines of yesterday's newspapers.
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Excerpt from Chapter 1:
MARCH 1896 - NEW YORK
The first time I saw Richard Harding Davis was at 4:30 p.m. on a rainy Tuesday in March 1896. He was sitting in my chair. Well, it wasn't really my chair. It was the chair and desk that Mr. Chapin, the assistant city editor of The World, had told me to use when I returned from my assignment. Desks and chairs were sparse in those days for freelancers working on space rates for New York City newspapers.
I had waited for two days for an assignment from Chapin, and now, as I stood dripping rain behind the chair, it looked like I would have to do battle for the chance to write it before deadline.
The story was simple enough. About 11 that morning a body had been pulled from the lower East River. They called them "floaters" in those days. For all I know they still call them that. But it's been some time since I was last near the East River. At my age I don't pay attention to such things, though I do read the New York papers, and they still do devote much coverage to what we called "police news." Some things never change.
The police news assignment was my chance to get a position on the staff of The World. New York newspapers in those days worked with permanent staff, and a floating staff of freelancers who worked on space rates. The freelancers were generally men who could not latch onto a permanent job because they drank too much, or otherwise were unreliable. Some were young men like myself who had come into Manhattan from other towns, other newspapers, looking for a chance. It wasn't difficult to get an assignment as a freelancer, but it was tough to shine at it. The permanent staff got the best assignments, and a freelance needed luck. It was with me that day.
Mr. Chapin had called me over that afternoon and told me to chase the floater. His regular police beat reporters were busy with other work. It seemed a simple two-paragraph item, at best. I thanked Mr. Chapin and walked rapidly out of the third-floor city room. I didn't wait for the slow elevator. I bolted for the stairs. This was my chance to show my stuff.
I ran down Park Row to South Street in a light rain. I wasted precious minutes hunting for the pier where some longshoremen had found a body tangled in the pilings. By the time I arrived the police and dock workers had fished the corpse out of the dirty river. They hadn't covered it, and no one seemed to be looking around for a blanket. They just stood there and nervously stared at the body.
I introduced myself. Two policemen, beefy fellows in tight uniforms, grunted. Then they looked down at the girl. She was about 20, I guessed. Pretty, very pretty, though her hair was all tangled. She wore a brown dress, but no coat. Rain sprinkled her face. Her arms were out flung, as if she were reaching for something. Nothing in this life.
"Do you know who she is?" I asked, looking from face to face. One of the policemen grumbled, "Ah, them coroners' men can look through her pockets. I've not the heart for it." His brogue matched his red face. I knelt and searched for pockets in the twisted, soaked dress. There were none. The girl looked like she would awaken at any moment, and scream at my impertinence.
"She doesn't seem to have any wounds. No bullet or knife holes," I said.
"No," the second cop agreed. His helmet was too small for his large head. "From the looks of her, I would say she was a jumper. From the bridge." He looked upriver in the mist, toward the Brooklyn Bridge.
I stood there nervously wondering how I was going to turn an anonymous death as this one was, into a job on The World. To tell the truth, until that point the only other corpse I had ever seen was my grandmother, who had died three years earlier, when I still lived in Pittsfield.
I had been a newspaper reporter in Pittsfield, but I had left there a month before, deciding that I must work on The World. It was the newspaper, the one all newspapermen worth their salt read, and wanted to work for. They considered it to be the stuff, in a term of the day. That meant that it was the most important rag in the United States. Joe Pulitzer had made The World the single most influential paper anywhere. "Well, she ain't goin' anywhere," said one cop. He walked to the end of the pier. I looked at the dock workers. "Do you have anything we could cover her with. We can't leave her like this." A man nearly black with coal dust returned with a dirty oil cloth.
Within the hour the body was taken away by the coroner's in a battered ambulance. I walked down to the coroner's office, where I waited for an hour until a note brought a distracted doctor to my side.
"Are you a relative?" he asked. I mumbled something which he didn't hear.
"She died by drowning. She has a broken arm. Probably happened when she hit the water." He sighed.
"She was also pregnant."
He asked me to wait, to sign some papers. I told him I would return. He shrugged and went back into his workroom.
I trudged through the wet streets to police headquarters near Mulberry. The sergeant at the main desk had no more information than the original telegraph report of a floater. I went up to the second floor detectives' office. There, with his fat legs up on a wicker waste basket pulled close to his swivel chair, a red-face detective sat smoking a long cigar. He had just come from a saloon, I discovered soon enough when he breathed in my direction.
"What in hell you want?" he barked, as I looked nervously around the room.
The desks were in disarray, papers everywhere. Nothing seemed in order. I told him about the girl. He snorted, and then shifted the cigar in his mouth. "Another goddam leaper. We get two, three a day in here. Don't pay much attention to them. Somebody comes by and gives us an identity, we'll go over to the morgue. Girls killing themselves everyday in this town, fella."
"You'd be surprised how fast folks forget ya." I left him to his cigar and inertia. At this stage I was worried that this assignment was not going to turn out as I had planned. In fact, I doubted that I had more than a few brief paragraphs about the girl's death. Nothing much to recommend me to Mr. Chapin, let alone Joe Pulitzer.
I stood out in the rain for some time, depressed and wondering if I shouldn't just buy a ticket back to Pittsfield while I still had the funds. I didn't have a hat and the rain trickled down my neck. For no important reason, I returned to the coroner's office. I was in luck, if you could call it that.
I arrived, shaking rain from my tweed coat, to see a distraught woman questioning the doctor with whom I had spoken. She said she was looking for her niece. She gave a description, and it fitted the dead girl. The doctor nodded, and took her into his workroom. I followed. There, on a large metal tray, lay the girl. The doctor had not sewn her back up. The woman took one look, and fainted. We carried her outside. The doctor helped me bring her around. Despite the shock, the woman began to speak. Between sobs, she told me the story. The dead girl's name was Jeanne Armiter, from Peekskill, where her parents lived. She was 21, and she had come to Manhattan the year before, to work. Her parents let her go, the aunt said, on the proviso that she live with the aunt. Miss Armiter had worked in a small department store on East 15th Street. In the hat department.
When I asked if Jeanne had a beau, the aunt nearly fainted again. She mumbled a name, that of a fellow who was a clerk in the same shop. I had enough at that point. I rudely looked at my pocket watch. It read: 4:05 p.m. I hadn't much time. I bolted from the coroner's office. It has bothered me since that I didn't properly apologize to the aunt. But, it's too late for that now.
After running back to Park Row, and up the grimy staircase to the third floor, was also worried that I would be out of luck because I wouldn't have time to pull it together for Mr. Chapin. Fortunately, he was not in sight when I headed for the desk and chair he had told me earlier I could use. It was near one of the dirty, smudged windows, but I was glad it had some milky light.
It also had an occupant. It was easy enough to recognize Richard Harding Davis sitting lazily in the chair I wanted to be in. He wore a light gray suit, high collar and tightly knitted tie of small red and white stripes. He smoked a cigarette, a novelty in that room of cigar smokers and chewers. Davis was recognizable from the Gibson pen and ink portraits of him in all the leading magazines. Davis was the epitome of the New York man-about-town. He was a man's man, and also crushing with the Ladies.
He must have felt my sweaty presence behind him, because he turned in his chair, and said, "Oh, hello. You must be a new fellow. My name is Davis," he said, smiling. "Say hello to Steve Crane." He nodded to a sallow-looking young fellow slumped in the next chair. Crane nodded. I barely nodded in return.
"You should really carry an umbrella," Davis said. "The fellows here will laugh at you, but, you'd keep dry."
I shot a nervous look at the big wall clock which ran the lives of all in that building. It was getting late, and I decided that, star reporter or not, Mr. Davis would have to be dislodged. "Mr. Davis, I"m sorry, but Mr. Chapin told me to sit here when I returned from assignment. I don't have much time." Davis immediately popped out of the chair.
"Sorry, fellow. Didn't realize you were working here. C'mon Steve, let's go get a drink." With a nod, Davis walked away, followed by the barely awake-looking Crane. He, I noticed before grabbing paper and pencil, was more poorly dressed than I was. Crane was never much of a dresser, and this failing caused many to think he was a lazy Bohemian, instead of a serious journalist and writer. Crane was serious about many things, but not the ones that counted for first impressions.
I bent to my writing. I had composed a lead paragraph in my head while trotting back to Park Row, and it flowed easily, but the second and third pages were difficult. After that I had no trouble writing. I stopped at six pages, and walked nervously to Mr. Chapin's desk.
He sat at a desk on a raised platform. We later came to call it "The Pulpit." Chapin looked at my pages, then said, without looking up at me, "Didn't think you'd come back." I mumbled something and wandered back to my chair. Within minutes a copyboy, a youth named Rosenbloom, with a large nose, came by and said, "Mr. Chapin said to keep it coming." He wanted more. I was surprised. I had enough color notes to describe the dead girl in detail, her clothing, and the look on the policemen's faces. I put everything I had into the story. Naturally, I didn't write anything about the doctor telling me she had been in the family way. We did not refer to such things in those days. I gave Chapin the extra pages. He was busy reading through a pile of copy before him, snapping orders to a squad of copyboys, and occasionally laughing at something only he saw as funny. Before I left the World building that night I stopped at his desk and asked if there was anything he wanted me to handle the next day.
He looked up, startled. "See me tomorrow," he grunted in his sour way. I left, and to save carfare, walked to 23rd St. and Seventh Avenue, where I had a small room in a cheap boardinghouse.
I was in the city room by noon the next day. I grabbed a paper, scanned the front page, and was surprised to see my story on it, under a double-column headline which read:
Woman Drowned
Aunt Identifies Niece
Tells How Girl Lived And Died
I was in such shock that I could not make out the words I had written only the day before. I sat numbly at a desk. The copy editors had shortened my story. It was not quite as florid as I had written it, but essentially it was the same. I felt a pat on my back as I reread it. I turned to see Richard Harding Davis standing behind my chair. "Nice job, that," he said, smiling. "Had a nice feel to it. Most of them, you know, they aren't as neat. I've had my share of floaters." He nervously readjusted his derby. "Keep that up and you'll soon be on staff." He laughed. "They'll probably have to put you on staff to keep you from making too much money doing freelance. "Say, what are you doing for lunch? I'm to meet Crane. He won't mind if you come along. But first I think you ought to tell me who you are. I already know your name, of course, but it would be polite of you to introduce yourself." He laughed again, an easy laugh. I stood. "My name is James Comming Botwright, and I'm from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I graduated from Yale, and I've worked on a paper in Pittsfield." I also bowed. A minutes later we were walking on Park Row, heading for a German beer hall Davis said served the best wurst in town. The phrase made him laugh, so he repeated it a few times for his own enjoyment.
Davis was in excellent spirits that day, but then RHD always seemed to grasp life by both handles. I didn't know it at the time, but Dick Davis did not take up with every tramp reporter he came across. In fact, he snubbed most of the breed.
Crane was waiting for us when we got to the beer hall in Chambers Street. He looked the same, sallow, unshaven, and wearing what seemed like the same suit of dusty black coat and unpressed trousers.
"Steve, meet Jim Botwright of Yale and Pittsfield, Mass. He wants to be a reporter." Crane smiled. Dick called for beers and platters.
"Of course, gentlemen, you're my guests." He said it forcefully, to quash any possible protest. There was none. In truth, I was nearly flat broke.
The beer arrived and we raised our steins in toast. "To adventure, and to report it," Dick said. Crane grunted. When the food was before us, Crane and I dug in, while Dick talked, and only picked at his plate. The wurst, I recall, was as good as Davis had promised. That was the day of the good 25-cent lunch, including a large slice of apple pie for dessert. I had been making do for weeks on free lunches in saloons. I had quickly tired of day-old boiled eggs and older cold cuts. I can remember that meal as if it were yesterday. Funny, I can't remember right off what I ate yesterday. The memory plays tricks.
Davis turned to me and asked what I wanted to do. I rubbed the wet stein on the wood bench before answering.
"Well, I'd like to get a chair on The World. I haven't done any writing outside of newspapers."
"I think you'll get your wish," Dick said. "But, for me, I'd rather work for Mr. Hearst. He's more liberal with his pocketbook. Mr. Pulitzer (he pronounced it 'Pew-litzer') is too cranky for me. I'm doing specials for Hearst. Want to keep my hand in, y'know. Sort of miss the run. I had a fine time on The Evening Sun. Jolly fine pals, there.
"I don't quite understand why you continue to write for newspapers when you can get $500 from Scribner's?" I said.
"It's the excitement, of course," Davis said. After Davis paid the bill we stood for a moment on the pavement, enjoying the sun which had broke through the clouds which had covered the city for days. Crane smiled and marched off down the street. Davis watched him go.
"That fellow has a wonderful future, if he lasts," he said in a low, serious voice.
We walked back to The World, chatting about New York. Chapin greeted us in the city room with a scream, "Goddamit. Where in hell have you been? Anyone who wants to work for The World had better be in this newsroom when an editor needs him. Chapin had a whining bark, a snarl one never got used to. It terrified most of the staff. Strangely, it didn't bother me that day.
"He was my guest at lunch, Mr. Chapin," Davis said easily. Chapin looked at Davis and walked away stiffly.
"Sit down. He'll forget it," Dick said. Davis treated Chapin as he would any other person, despite Chapin's rank and personality. Much has been said in jest about Richard Harding Davis, but the truth was he was a gentleman, even when he was dealing with the rude and nasty individuals we met in high and low places in our work. He went to war repeatedly, but Dick never lowered his standards, not even when he was on a dirty battlefield one thousand miles due east from civilization.
Many blackguards learned to their dismay that Davis brooked no scorn for his manner, or dress. Davis left a trail of broken noses, and among the ladies, broken hearts. He never sought fisticuffs, but many times he defended his own, or a friend's honor. Many fools miscalculated and saw only the Brooks Brothers finery, and not the heavyweight's muscle underneath it. Davis was not intimidated by princes, kings or queens. Or even newspaper publishers. Or even such fearsome creatures as city editors like Chapin. He treated them with the same respect he showed to waiters. A man like Chapin must have realized that he was unable to terrorize Davis and that realization made Chapin nervous around Davis.
I often think today about my awareness in those days--what I knew, and what I thought I knew. I knew that I wanted to be I knew I could make it, with the right breaks. I was nothing if not optimistic.
What I didn't know would fill books, perhaps one like this. I didn't know that the war going on between Mr. Hearst and Mr. Pulitzer had wider application than how many papers each sold in the dirty-opulent, rich-poor city. Or, that I would become one of the active participants in this war. Or that I would help push the United States into war, a war as simple and short as ever engaged in. or, as stupid a war ever to take the time and talents of Americans. And a war that killed.
I knew nothing then of war. Oh, yes, wars were fought in places like Greece, where Stevie Crane and Dick Davis had gone. But the America I knew had been at peace for 30 years. War was old-fashioned.
I met many of the players in the game that led to the battleground. I don't mind admitting that at the time I didn't understand, or suspect their motivations, or drives. I didn't always understand my own. It took years before I understood the forces that pushed me. I'm not entirely certain now that I understand them completely. Maybe that's maturity. All I know is that the world seemed to be 1,000 yards ahead in that foot race.
I cannot honestly say that I realized that in one day. It took some time, but we had that in those days. Nothing but time.
Later that same afternoon, as I sat ignored by the irate Chapin, I noticed two other men at his desk. One was tall, with a Van-Dyke beard. He was dressed all in black, like a mortician. He was waving his arms, and I could hear his rambling oaths across the city room.
"That son of a bitch mayor is not going to tell me where my delivery wagons cannot go. I will not stand for it, you hear." Chapin and the other man tried to calm the tall man.
I heard Chapin say, "We'll take care of it, sir. Don't you worry about it. Don't you worry." The bearded fellow spun on his heel and waved one arm angrily. Then he started to topple. He had collided with a deep metal trash bin. For a second it was as if the bearded man would fall head first into it. The soft-spoken man caught him in time, however, and righted him. Then the tall man was led by the arm out a nearby door.
And so I got my first look at Joe Pulitzer.
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