The Yellow Kid, by R.F. Outcault, 1 January 1897
14 May 2020
Yellow journalism denotes lurid and sensationalist news reporting, that which today we would associate with tabloids and click-bait headlines. It’s especially associated with the turn of the twentieth century news reporting and with jingoistic support for the Spanish-American War in 1898. It is epitomized by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and the papers of his rival, William Randolph Hearst.
But why yellow?
The name is a confluence of two cultural trends, the availability of cheap, popular literature and the newspaper comic strip.
The first trend is the popularity of lurid and sensational novels in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and the moral panic that this literature generated. Such literature and associated panics have been a regular feature in literary history. Every new technological development brings a new wave. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen such panics over comic books, television, Dungeons and Dragons, video games, and the internet. In the eighteenth century, it was the novel that was corrupting people’s, especially young women’s, minds. In the nineteenth century, it was the advent of cheap paper and printing that allowed pulp fiction to be churned out at low cost, often printed with garish yellow and red colors to catch the eye. Yellowback books was a term that was often used.
An early reference to such yellow literature is by poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant and others of the American Copyright Club in 1843:
Cheap literature, scattered through the country, saps the provincial press, and supplants it by degrees in the popular favor: paper after paper decays and withers, breathing a blessing upon its deadliest enemy. The general flood of pamphlets sweeps the land, and puts at nought all petty distinctions of district and neighborhood, and settles down, at its leisure, into a dark, slimy, universal pond. It is for you, the American people, to judge what fruit has grown of this planting. You have seen this crimson and yellow literature triumphant on every hand: bought every where—read every where.
Ten years later, on 3 March 1853, the New York Daily Tribune blamed yellow-covered literature for corrupting the minds of young women and causing them to elope with “adventurers”:
The popular notions on the subject, fomented by the “yellow-covered” literature of the day are exceedingly lax and mistaken. The young Miss who elopes from the parental roof to marry some adventurer who was probably unknown to her last year, is often represented as a girl of rare spirit, who does a remarkably clever and admirable thing. We hold, on the contrary, that, in a great majority of cases, her elopement is unwise, giddy, ungrateful, immodest, and evinces a lascivious appetite and reckless disposition.
And by 4 June 1857, the Chicago Daily Tribune was lamenting that such lurid content had made its way into journalism:
The land is perfectly flooded with yellow-covered literature of the French school, only the yellow covers are left off; the magazine form is abandoned, and it now appears in the more popular and respectable dress of newspapers, embellished with pictures to catch the eye.
And the panic is summed up in a piece in Pennsylvania’s Tyrone Star of 8 March 1859:
An “out and out” sewer of the lowest obscenities [...] whose presence is less safe to family virtue than the foulest “yellow backs” that ever emanated from the “hell-holes” of impurity in a New York or a Paris.
Such complaints about yellow literature persisted into the twentieth century.
The second trend that led to the creation of the phrase yellow journalism is that of the comic strip, or more particularly, one of the first comic strips. In 1895, cartoonist Richard F. Outcault began drawing the first newspaper comic strip, titled Hogan’s Alley, for Pulitzer’s New York World. (See also Hogan’s Goat.) The strip quickly became better known by its iconic character, the Yellow Kid, sort of the Bart Simpson of his day, and was quickly renamed after the character. In 1896, Hearst hired Outcault away from Pulitzer and the strip began appearing in Hearst’s New York Journal American. Since the strip wasn’t copyrighted, Pulitzer continued to publish a competing Yellow Kid strip in the World, drawn by George Luks. So, for a time, two sensationalist New York newspapers used the Yellow Kid to compete with one another.
A 13 December 1896 review of the staider New York Herald in Georgia’s Macon Telegraph sums up the character of Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s papers:
There is no appeal made to low taste; there is no assumption that the average reader is a person of vulgar mind; there is no catering to an alleged “demand” for the spice of lubricity; there is no concession to the “yellow kid” abomination.
And by 1897 we see the term yellow journalism appear. The New York Press ran the headline “Victory for Yellow Journalism” on 31 January 1897. This appears to be the first use of the phrase, although I cannot locate a copy of the article to determine the exact context.
The next month, on 18 February 1897, the New York Tribune referenced the Press’s use of the term in an article on the increasing hostilities between Spain and the United States and how Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s papers were fomenting war fever:
Here, for instance, are the two representatives of what our neighbor, “The New York Press,” so felicitously calls “yellow journalism”; one of them would declare war against Spain because one of its correspondents—who wasn’t doing anything to Spain except maintaining communication and confidential relations with the Cuban insurgents with whom Spain is at war—has been arrested by the Spanish authorities and held for trial; the other would also declare war against Spain because one of the highest-priced, and consequently most trustworthy, correspondents discovered that a woman related to one of the insurgent chiefs was stripped and examined three times in the presence of men by the Spanish authorities, the third time on an American steamer.
And ten days later, the Macon Telegraph ran an editorial on the same subject:
Yellow Journalism and War.
The country has already seen and felt the absurdity of the sand-lot agitation which shook the senate on Thursday. Like an aspen leaf, it trembled with excitement at the touch of yellow journalism.
So, we have a long-standing practice of referring to lurid and sensational literature as yellow, and we have two sensationalist and jingoistic papers, both of which publish versions of the comic strip the Yellow Kid, throw in some patriotic fervor, and yellow journalism emerges.
Sources:
“Black Mail Editors.” Chicago Daily Tribune. 4 June 1857, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Bryant, William Cullen, et al. An Address to the People of the United States. New York: American Copyright Club, 1843, 11. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.
“New and True Journalism.” Macon Telegraph (Georgia). 13 December 1896, 20. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, January 2018, s.v. yellow, adj. and n., yellowback, n.
“Runaway Marriages.” New York Daily Tribune. 3 March 1853, 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“Wise Limitations of the War Power.” New York Tribune. 18 February 1897, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“Yellow Journalism and War.” Macon Telegraph (Georgia). 28 February 1897, 12. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.