Intro - lesson 20

One of the best-known New Yorkers in the late 1800s was not a person at all. He was a character in a wildly popular newspaper comic, known as the Yellow Kid. For a time, the Yellow Kid appeared in two newspapers simultaneously, the New York World and the New York Journal, which competed to own the comic.

The struggle over the Yellow Kid was part of a larger "newspaper war" in New York City during the 1890s. Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, faced off against William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the Journal, in a battle to dominate the city's newspaper market. Their struggle over newspaper sales would provoke a real war: the Spanish-American War.

The artist who created the Yellow Kid, R. F. Outcalt, first sold his comic in 1895 to Pulitzer's World. The comic was set in New York's poor, roughand- tumble ethnic neighborhoods and featured a bald-headed street urchin dressed in a bright yellow nightshirt. The Yellow Kid was an instant success. Newspaper comics were new at the time, and Pulitzer's World enjoyed a significant increase in sales.

Not to be outdone, Hearst lured Outcalt to the Journal by promising him more money. In response, Pulitzer hired another cartoonist to draw his own version of the cartoon. Before long, the two newspapers were flooded with images of the Yellow Kid and became known as the "Yellow Kid Papers" or "Yellow Papers."

The rivalry between the World and the Journal extended beyond the Yellow Kid cartoons. In their struggle to attract readers, the two "Yellow Papers" developed an exaggerated style of reporting, and their sensational news stories were soon dubbed yellow journalism. Among these fabricated stories were news reports about other countries. Spain's brutal suppression of a Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule proved to be a favorite subject. Yellow journalism helped inflame public support for instigating war against Spain. In this lesson, you will learn why the United States went to war against Spain and why this conflict proved a significant event in American foreign relations.