Don Martin, Soldier of the Pen – Introduction

This daily blog has the ambition to bring back to life WWI war correspondent Don Martin, and to make a contribution to the history of American journalism as a contribution to the centennial celebration of the Great War. It is written for the one-hundredth anniversary of Don Martin's death and the end of the Great War, World War I. 

The Great War, which began in August 1914, finally ended in November 1918, just a month after Don Martin’s death from Spanish influenza in France. Much has been written about World War I and the eventual important involvement of the United States. The American public did not go joyfully into this far-off conflict. There was strong opposition to sending an army, and President Woodrow Wilson’s narrow reelection victory in 1916 was helped by the slogan “He kept us out of the war.” When Wilson changed his mind in 1917, the United States Committee on Public Education was set up to engage Americans in supporting the war. It carried out a successful campaign to get Americans to support sending their sons to fight, to provide financing through Liberty Bonds, and to produce an immense amount of munitions, military equipment, clothing and food. 

From the beginning of American involvement with the Great War, control and later censorship of the press was enforced by the American government, initially in line with America’s declared “neutrality”. Reports from the war front by American war correspondents were problematic. Eminent American war correspondent Richard Harding Davis, who had covered many wars including the Spanish American and Boer War in South Africa for the New York Herald, went over when the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914 for the New York Tribune. Upon observing the German takeover of Brussels and Louvain, he found he could not give a “neutral” report on what he saw happening, and his editors declined to print his dispatches because they ran counter to America’s “neutrality.” Davis returned to the U.S. and wrote a best seller about his WWI experiences. He suffered a heart attack and died in April 1916. 

In 1914, the leaders of the allied governments took actions to stop and prevent reporting. British Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, had reporters banned from the Front at the start of the war. A few reporters lived as fugitives near the Front, sending back their reports. Eventually, the British Government in April 1915 accredited selected war correspondents, but kept them under rigid censorship. In America the Woodrow Wilson administration at first attempted to censor not only newspaper accounts of the war but books and magazines. This caused a strong reaction by the press in the effort to gain journalistic freedom. Walter Lippmann, a highly respected journalist and commentator, warned at the time that manipulation of the press through government's "public relations" was highly dangerous.

  However, by 1918 the situation was different. Dr. Margaret Spratt, reviewing Chris Dubbs' book American Journalists in the Great War (Roads to the Great War, Nov 7, 2017), wrote: By the time the U.S. entered the war in 1917, attitudes about the usefulness of the war correspondent had evolved. Rather than viewing them, at best, as nuisances, and at worst, as unwitting spies, the military embraced the significance of accurate and sympathetic reporting. As General Pershing noted, "In this war, I consider a trained newspaperman worth a regiment of cavalry" (p. 203).

    War correspondents became fully integrated into the military system as mouthpieces for the 'official' version of events The U.S. military welcomed and accommodated representatives from American newspapers and organizations near the front – but under strict control and censorship rules.  The major news organizations competed to provide the best coverage of the war, sending their best reporters to serve as ‘war correspondents’. James Gordon Bennett,Jr., owner of the New York Herald, selected his top political journalist, Don Martin, to cover the American Expeditionary Forces in France.