“We lose sight of the sadness of war when we are confronted with the big headlines in the newspapers that exploit bombardments and battles, and the blowing up of ships, and the victory of one side or the other. We do not see the limbs of men torn asunder, nor hear the choking cries of the wounded as they drift down with the sinking ships. We do not think of the shocking desolation that will sweep over the hearts of the mothers and the wives and the sisters of the poor fellows who go under. All this is hidden from us … It is on woman that war falls heaviest.”— Kit (Kathleen Blake Watkins), the Mail and Empire, May 7, 1898
If ever a war was pushed forward by the press, it was the Spanish-American War. The mysterious explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbour in February 1898 prompted several major newspaper publishers — in particular, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer — to call for military action against Spain’s decaying empire. After hostilities broke out in April 1898, correspondents often wondered whether they were covering the conflict or directing how it was fought.
Among the journalists who covered it was Canada’s first officially accredited female war correspondent. Although Toronto’sMail and Empire sent “Kit” (Katherine Blake Watkins, known after 1898 as Kit Coleman) as a publicity stunt to boost circulation, expecting her to cover the conflict through the lens of so-called women’s concerns, she filed reports that depicted realities of war, both grim and mundane.
From Famous American Men and Women: A Complete Portrait Gallery of Celebrated People, 1896.
Starting in 1889, Coleman wrote and edited “Woman’s Kingdom” for the Saturday edition of the Toronto Daily Mail; the series continued after the paper merged with the Empire in 1895. It was one of the paper’s most popular features thanks to her decision to stretch the column beyond domestic advice into the realms of literature, politics, and science. “I simply detest fashion,” she observed in 1892, “and I think it is paying us women a poor compliment to imagine we cannot take an interest in the highest and the very deepest questions of the day.”
Throughout the 1890s, Coleman occasionally travelled across Europe and North America, covering topics ranging from poor social conditions to celebrations in London for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, in 1897. Despite her editorial freedom, she was periodically reminded to drop in conventional women-targeted stories if she skipped over them for a few weeks. Among her fans was Wilfrid Laurier, who admitted he read her work because he never knew what she would take on next.
When war broke out in Cuba, she wanted to see the battles firsthand. Gaining accreditation wasn’t easy: male colleagues threw up obstacles against her and at least two other American female writers. While Hearst and Pulitzer had posted female correspondents in Havana before the war, the two sidelined them out of fear for their safety. Charles H. Hand, a reporter for the British paper the Daily Mail, wondered “what kind of a newspaper proprietor was it, who would send a tenderly nurtured lady around amidst the hardships, the bullets, the yellow-fever germs of a Cuban war?”
Front page of the second section of the May 7, 1898, Mail and Empire.
But the Mail and Empire believed there was enough exploitable novelty value to support Coleman’s efforts. Her reports would provide the human side of the conflict, supplementing both the work of their own male reporters and stories taken from the Associated Press, the New York Herald, and the London Times. Her request for accreditation was so unusual that, when the approval came from United States Secretary of War Russell A. Alger, it was still written as if for a man.
The May 7, 1898, edition of the Mail and Empire announced that Coleman was heading south. “Her letters and dispatches,” the paper noted, “will be read with peculiar interest, both on this account and because of the accurate expression and picturesque style which have characterized all her work.” A week later, her regular reports began, appearing throughout the paper (“Woman’s Kingdom” switched to syndicated material during her absence).
Her travels began in Washington, D.C., where, on May 16, she talked to Alger about her desire to sail to Cuba. He feared that the temporary army camps, with their hot, rough conditions, were no place for a lady. When she said she envisioned being attached to a relief corps or missionary group, Alger became more receptive. “I will further you on your way as far in me lies, and I may tell you that if you get into any serious difficulties at any time and will wire the War Department we will try to make it all right for you,” he told her.
Before leaving for Tampa, she assured readers that she was going to Cuba voluntarily and wanted to be a successful war correspondent. “If anything should happen to me — by which, I suppose, is meant death by yellow fever or a stray bullet, the Mail and Empire cannot be held in any way responsible for such accident. I am going of my own free will and desire.”
Scene on the dock, Port Tampa, ca. 1898. Stereographic prin. (Library of Congress, 93516589)
Coleman was stuck in Tampa for weeks as she tried and failed several times to secure passage to Cuba. Her reports mixed discussion of American battle strategy with sentimental depictions of soldiers in training waiting for deployment. She estimated that roughly 50 journalists from around the world were also stuck there and noted that several feared they would be recalled by their papers if they couldn’t secure passage. She often ate alone or kept company with the hotel’s pet monkey and tropical birds. “The woman war correspondent had been called the unknown quantity,” she wrote. “She is carefully ostracized. She is not young and pretty. Generals will have nothing to do with her. She shall be left behind. The great army of pressmen shall move forward jeering at her. She shall not produce ‘copy.’”
Working on more flexible deadlines than her male colleagues, she was often produced scoops. Even Hand was impressed when she uncovered word of a secret arms shipment to Cuban rebels. One evening, Hand was amazed to see Coleman introducing military officials to the male reporters. “Before the evening was out,” Hand wrote, “she gave us the full details of an expedition to send arms and stores to the insurgents — news which we had unsuccessfully been trying to get.” It was suspected that one of the reasons she failed to secure passage was an unconfirmed arrest for ignoring military censorship rules when she sent a coded message to her editor about a troop shipment to Cuba.
A short story from the May 19, 1898, Mail and Empire announcing Kit's arrival in Tampa, Florida.
She described Tampa as “a succession of moving pictures each striking, unusual, passing quickly, gone almost as soon as they are here” that was “the most remarkable bit of ground on the top of the earth at this moment.” But after the remaining troops in training left in June, she found little to write about. It was “difficult to resist the impulse that takes one to pack one’s bag, hurry to the train that every night steams northward, and forever shake the dust of Tampa from one’s hair and eyes,” she wrote.
While the Mail and Empire reported on July 15 that Coleman would soon provide dispatches from the frontlines, her requests to sail continued to be denied. One near-miss involved a medical ship: she was allegedly denied passage because American Red Cross founder Clara Barton took an instant dislike to her.
Coleman finally achieved her goal in late July, when, after having spent three weeks in Key West, she boarded the supply ship Niagara. Her first glimpse of Cuba came in Guantanamo Bay on July 28. Though active hostilities were winding down, she found plenty of material in their aftermath. She described Spanish soldiers in a field hospital as “living ghosts of men” with “eyes sunken far in their sockets burning like lamps on the edge of extinction.” She described the city of Santiago as “beautiful on the first glance, horrible in its squalor and dirt and stench.” Santiago felt “as it you were cut off from everything that is fresh and sweet and wholesome. You feel as if in some weird dream you have drifted into a city in fairyland, but a fairyland in which dwell disorderly and dilapidated fairies. The place looks utterly hopeless.”
Coleman reached San Juan Hill, the site of future president Theodore Roosevelt’s military triumph, during the first week of August. She described the mounds where soldiers were buried following the battle, including one that used “the lid of a meat can” as a grave marker. She mentioned seeing the remains of a soldier she had previously met; his eyes had been picked out by vultures. “The awful sun of the tropics was beating down on hill and jungle and ravine,” she wrote. “Strange and suffocating odours began to arise. The vegetation was giving out subtle and deadly stenches. Not a breath of air reached this horrible tangle.”
The American army made few allowances for her: she wore a “boy’s rubber suit” to protect herself from physical assault and rape, rode her horse astride, and slept on the ground in the open hills outside Santiago.
She witnessed the suffering of poorly trained and equipped American soldiers. When returning to Tampa alongside them, she observed the lack of food, medicine, and water. Like other correspondents, she donated her supply of quinine and other medical items and assisted the lone doctor aboard. “Sixteen days in a loathsome transport, with 133 men in every stage of sickness, living on rotten rations and apparently forgotten by country for which they were suffering,” she wrote years later. “One becomes a machine. There is nothing but pity, or sympathy, or hope to feed upon. There is little even for despair. It is the last to go, and then only the body lives, the bones move, the dull brain answers only to the call of duty, the dull ears heed not the outcries of the sick, the dull eyes see not the ghastliness of gaping wounds. It is all the same! What matter if the feet slip in blood instead of rain?”
Back in Toronto, the Mail and Empire’s “Flaneur” column published a letter on August 20 citing an American newspaper editor’s praise for Coleman’s coverage. Calling it “the best work I have seen since the war broke out,” the anonymous editor said it was the type of journalism that would make readers think.
Overall, she filed more than 30 stories (an additional five were lost in transport). Some imitators claimed they had also gone to cover the war, but she was, as far as she knew, the only woman who officially received a pass from the American government.
Front page of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal from August 13, 1898, announcing the end of fighting.
During her return trip, she stopped in Washington to marry Theobald Coleman, a physician. Army officials asked whether she wanted to go on a national lecture tour, but she refused: “If I tell the women of the United States the awful things I have seen, you will have riots on your hands,” she noted during an address to the International Press Union of Women Journalists in Washington. When readers wondered why her trip had not produced a book, she responded in a March 1899 column that “the public had got tired of war stories and wanted no more of the Yanko-Spanko experiences.”
When Coleman returned to Canada, she was financially exhausted and recovering from malaria, but the paper’s business manager denied her further economic assistance. She remained with the Mail and Empire until 1911, when she quit over a salary dispute and editorial changes to “Woman’s Kingdom.” The paper edited out her final goodbye. She launched a syndicated column that ran in papers across the country (but not the Mail and Empire — she refused to allow it) until her death in May 1915. In 1988, she was inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame.
Honouring Kathleen “Kit” Coleman: Interview with Dr. Barbara Freeman
War coverage left its scars: Coleman’s initial sense of adventure turned to horror once she’d seen the human toll. She generally adopted anti-war views, although she went along with the Mail and Empire’s editorial support for the Boer War between 1899 and 1902 (she considered covering that conflict, but her husband vetoed the idea). When World War I began, she spoke out against the patriotic fervour it spawned among Canadians, saying she feared it would lead to Armageddon. She urged compassion for people on both sides of the war.
“Bless your hearts, fellows,” she wrote in August 1914. “If the papers didn’t give some sort of war news, you would be in a state of intolerant rage and the newspaper offices might as well shut up and send the editors and cubs on a long holiday.”
Sources: The Correspondents’ War by Charles H. Brown (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967); Kit Coleman Queen of Hearts by Ted Ferguson (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1978); Kit’s Kingdom: The Journalism of Kathleen Blake Coleman by Barbara M. Freeman (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989); the Winter 1988 edition of Journalism History; the April 21, 1898, May 7, 1898, May 21, 1898, May 26, 1898, May 31, 1898, June 10, 1898, June 23, 1898, July 28, 1898, August 8, 1898, August 13, 1898, August 16, 1898, August 20, 1898, and March 4, 1899, editions of the Mail andEmpire; and the August 23, 1914, edition of the Vancouver News-Advertiser.
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