The Spanish-American War As a Bourgeois Testing Ground Richard Harding Davis, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane
David Kramer The Spanish-American War as a Bourgeois Testing Ground Richard Harding Davis, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane The men who hurried into the ranks were not the debris of American life, were not the luckless, the idle. The scapegraces and vagabonds who could well have been spared, but the very flower of the race, young well born. The brief struggle was full of individual examples of dauntless courage. A correspondent in the spasms of mortal agony finished his dispatch and sent it off. —Rebecca Harding Davis, l898l y implying the death of a heroic but doomed newspaperman in the charge at Las Guisimas, Rebecca Harding Davis was, fortunately, premature. Davis’s son, Richard, who witnessed the incident, made a similar misapprehension Bwhen he reported, “This devotion to duty by a man who knew he was dying was as fine as any of the courageous and inspiring deeds that occurred during the two hours of breathless, desperate fighting.” The writhing correspondent was Edward Marshall of the New York Journal who, hit by a Spanish bullet in the spine and nearly paralyzed, was nonetheless able to dictate his stirring account of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Taken to the rear and his condition deemed hopeless, Marshall somehow survived his agony and after a long convalescence was restored to health. Marshall would later capitalize on his now national fame by penning such testimonials as “What It Feels Like To Be Shot.”2 Fundamentally, the Spanish-American War was fought for and, to a lesser degree, by the middle and upper classes—Rebecca Harding Davis’s the very flower of the race, young well born.
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