1.2 Dreaming War Through Media: The Reporter Who Made Himself King by Richard Harding Davis (1896)

If “The Two-Gun Man” relied on simple interactions, some definition of dignity relayed through a quiet dedication to duty, and agreements made through hard-won handshakes, this story instead focuses on the complicated ways that capitalism and technology breed a desire for success. Forget countless hours of toiling away: this is about how you get over on someone. Critical to such an endeavor is an understanding of news media and technological medium. 

Richard Harding Davis’ “The Report Who made Himself King” opens with a comment that stands as the stories central conceit: “The Old Time Journalist will tell you that the best reporter is the one who works his way up.”  Working your way higher is first and foremost about beguilement and legerdemain. 

That process of punching up becomes the operating principle as Davis details the various transformations of Yale-educated Albert Gordon, from New York journalist to Opekian King to man-on-the-run. When we begin Gordon is a successful reporter. However he has never lived his dream of being a war correspondent. The reason: there has never been an on-going war during Gordon’s tenure as a journalist. Surely this can be fixed, he thinks.

Eager to get out of the fast-paced world of New York, Gordon accompanies Captain Leonard T. Travis, a veteran of the Civil War, to the fictional Island of Opeki in the Pacific Ocean. Gordon is to serve as secretary to Travis, who is an American consul. Both gigs were created with little regard for politics and even less care for those living in Opeki. As Davis writes “The consulship to Opeki was instituted early in the '50s, to get rid of and reward a third or fourth cousin of the President’s, whose services during the campaign were important, but whose after-presence was embarrassing.” The position was offered as a favor—one that served both interested parties. 

A picture of Davis; I imagine Gordon looks like this!

When Travis and Gordon arrive, they meet three white men. Two are former British military (unbeknownst to Gordon) and the third is an American who works for the Yokohama Cable Company named Stedman. Almost immediately Travis leaves as he finds the country and its distance from the US to be beneath him. Gone in the middle of the night, all that remains is a note designating Gordon as the new consul. Stedman, whose job has been to wire back news from the island is soon made Gordon’s secretary. Published in the era of cinema’s birth, Davis’s story signals the emerging ways media would change presidential elections and politics. The cable is a character.

At 58 pages long this is the longest story of the first volume and it unfolds through a series of transformations and exchanges. Through snide narrative remarks, it becomes apparent that the object of the narrative’s derision is not the colonial enterprise, so much as it is Gordon’s own self-assurance, which is driven by an individual desire to be a successful war correspondent.  The self-righteous Gordon repeatedly invokes the Monroe Doctrine and the importance of non-interference, all the while he hopes to unify the island through an embrace of American values. 

Davis was friendly with Theodore Roosevelt

With nationalism dripping from his every move, he explains to Stedman that “we, as the representatives of the United States Government, must be properly honored on this island. We must become a power.” This is the flexing of guns, germs and steel. This new goal for the island's fantastic four of imperialism (Gordon, Stedman, 2 Brits) is doomed, though. It is Gordon’s job and sense of self that will unravel him.

The best way to gauge power and respect is to implement a treaty. With Travis' absence, Gordon attempts to coordinate an agreement between two warring tribes on the island, the Opeki, led be Ollypybus, and the Hillmen, led by Messenweh. While Messenweh agrees, he reveals that the Hillmen have already in fact signed another agreement. This other treaty was authored by Germans who recently arrived on a ship named Kaiser. Gordon convinces the two kings to let him claim such a title after expressing concern that the Germans will exploit all the inhabitants of Opeki. 

After brandishing his guns, the American reporter claims he is capable of expelling the Germans through force. Life for the dishonest man never could be that simple. Unable to defeat the German army with his paltry supply of weapons, Gordon turns to the cable. Thrilled by the chance for war, he dictates a story sent over the wire by Stedman.

With disregard for all, he mis-characterizes the interactions he has had with the Germans. Weaving a fictional tale of German aggression against America. Finally, Gordon believes he has made it. The rewards he envisions are greater than any political reality for his chance has come—Gordon can live out his dream of being a war correspondent.

Once word gets to the States, the government asks for more information, promising a strong military presence to protect Gordon and the American name. There is a problem: Gordon’s already exaggerated story of warfare has ballooned even further through a "game of telephone." In the world of communication, even if there is were no audible noise, messages often change. Eager to make reality align with fiction Gordon, at first, considers murdering members of the Opeki tribe.

But this won’t work. Instead he sends a cable back, trying to clarify what actually happened. Gordon’s own ignobility is then matched by that of another journalist. He discovers that the man receiving the other end of the cable was further embellishing the story in an effort to raise the stock of the Yokohama Cable Company. The cable operator was after his own dream—money.

Though Overton was not the fiction editor at the time, Davis had been published in Colliers

Gordon is informed via the cable that the government will soon attack Opeki, pummeling the island with artillery. There is one possibility for survival: Gordon and Stedman must leave the island.  As the story concludes Gordon, still unable to come to grips with his own role in the ensuing violence, grasps at self-importance, whispering to Stedman “we have not lived in vain.” The reporter of false news is now the unwitting target of the American military.

A moral tale wrapped in a fictional version of present events (the scholar John D. Seelye suggests that Gordon is himself modeled after Davis, and that the island of Opeki becomes a stand in for American annexation of Samoa), “The Reporter Who Made Himself King” derides the small lies and deceptions that rest at the foundation of imperialism. There is a thin strain of optimism: dishonesty may rule but for so long before it is devastated by a greater power.

The mythologies of the West that were important to “The Two-Gun Man” are only a small part of the fanatical capitalist dream that Davis attributes to Gordon and America as a country. It is the story’s success that Davis draws the lines between such a dream and the realities of colonial violence.

You can read “The Report Who made Himself King” at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/407