DAVIS, RICHARD HARDING 1864-1916

War correspondent

Dashing.

When World War I erupted in 1914, Richard Harding Davis was America's preeminent war correspondent. The son of an editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the well-known writer Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis, Richard went to Lehigh University where he became a star half-back but neglected his studies. Asked to leave, he became a journalist. He had covered Cuban attempts to gain independence from Spain for two years before the United States intervened in 1898. His articles for the Hearst press, including the graphic "The Death of Rodriguez"—describing the execution by firing squad of a captured rebel—strengthened American opinion to come to the aid of the Cubans. Davis's good looks and personal flamboyance contributed in large measure to the romantic image of the war correspondent. H. L. Mencken called him the "hero of our dreams." In addition to the Spanish-American War, he covered the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Mexican Revolution.

Out of Retirement.

By 1914 Davis had retired to his home in Mount Kisco, New York, to write plays and stories, when the papers began telling of the mobilization in Europe. Davis was offered the princely sum of $600 a week plus expenses by the Wheeler syndicate and $1,000 apiece for four articles by Scribner's. He accepted both offers and took his wife to London. The Wilson administration refused to name him as the one American correspondent who would be allowed to accompany the British troops (Davis was a friend and supporter of Wilson's rival Theodore Roosevelt), so he went to Brussels, just in time to witness the entry of the German army into the defeated city. King Albert had ordered the Belgians not to oppose the occupation, and Davis's description of the stream of German soldiers as "one unbroken steel-gray column…twenty-four hours later is still coming…not men marching, but a force of nature like a tidal wave, an avalanche" became a classic of war reportage.

Arrested.

Davis was arrested on three separate occasions for following the German army without proper credentials. In his passport picture Davis was wearing a (British) West African Field Force uniform. He persuaded a series of German officers that despite the uniform he was indeed American, but without credentials he would inevitably be detained again. Finally he proposed a plan: a German major would put a statement in his pass-port that he was a "suspected spy" and set him on the road to Brussels, fifty miles away. If he was found off the road, or failed to reach Brussels in two days, he was to be shot on sight. He bluffed his way past three guard posts and, exhausted, flagged down a German car, prepared to be arrested. The driver was old and somewhat dense and simply delivered Davis to Brussels, where he arranged for better credentials.

The Western Front.

Davis observed the utter destruction of cities such as Louvain and Soissons. In his 1914 book, With the Allies, he wrote of the unattended piles of bodies: "After death the human body is mercifully robbed of its human aspect. You are spared the thought that what is lying…in the wheatfields staring up at the sky was once a man. It appears to be only a bundle of clothes, a scarecrow that has tumbled among the grain it once protected." He found the deliberate shelling of the ancient cathedral at Rheims shocking. German officers claimed that the placement of French batteries had made it unavoidable, but Davis determined that the French positions were a mile away and that the Germans had methodically shelled the cathedral for four days. By the end of his first tour in Europe, Davis no longer saw the war as a conflict over imperial interests but as a clash between the forces of good and evil. He promoted American entry as a moral duty and became one of the foremost advocates of intervention.

Home, Briefly.

In 1915, at age fifty, Davis returned home to see his newborn daughter and to train with the army at Plattsburgh in upstate New York. That experience weakened him physically, as he suffered from angina. He returned to Europe for the late fall and early winter of 1915-1916, spending time in France and Greece but, increasingly ill, returned home in February. On 11 April 1916, just short of his fifty-second birthday, he suffered a fatal heart attack in his study at Crossroads Farm. His reputation for both bravery and integrity assured the persistence of his reputation as one of the great war correspondents of all time.

Sources:

Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975);

Arthur Lubow, The Reporter Who Would Be King: A Biography of Richard Harding Davis (New York: Scribners, 1992).

Richard Harding Davis

The American journalist Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) was also a fiction writer and dramatist whose swashbuckling adventures were popular with the American public.

Richard Harding Davis was born into a well-to-do and rather pious Episcopalian family in Philadelphia. His father, an editorial writer, and his mother, a well-known fiction writer, often entertained Philadelphia artists and visiting actors and actresses, and the boy from the start was completely at ease with celebrities. After graduating from Episcopal Academy and Lehigh University, he studied political economy during a postgraduate year at Johns Hopkins University. In 1886 Davis became a reporter for the Philadelphia Press. The editor and other reporters confidently expected the cocky young dandy to fall on his face, but he shortly proved to be a superb reporter and a talented writer. From 1888 to 1890 he was in New York writing special stories for the Sun. He also published two volumes of short stories, Gallegher and Other Stories (1891) and Van Bibber and Others (1892). At the age of 26 he became the managing editor of Harper's Weekly and soon was writing accounts of his worldwide travels, which were collected in books such as Rulers of the Mediterranean (1894), About Paris (1895), and Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America (1896).

As a picturesque and alert correspondent for New York and London newspapers, always appropriately attired for each adventure, Davis covered the Spanish War and the Spanish-American War in Cuba, the Greco-Turkish War, the Boer War, and—toward the end of his life (he died in 1916)—World War I. He based a number of books upon his experiences. More short stories filled 10 volumes, including The Lion and the Unicorn (1899), Ranson's Folly (1902), and The Scarlet Car (1907). A number of Davis's novels covered the international scene; notable were Soldiers of Fortune (1897), The King's Jackal (1898), Captain Macklin (1902), and The White Mice (1909). In addition, Davis wrote about two dozen plays, of which dramatizations of Ranson's Folly (1904), The Dictator (1904), and Miss Civilization (1906) were the most successful.

The critic Larzer Ziff in The American 1890's admirably summarized Davis's significance: "He demonstrated to those … who would listen that their capacity for excitement was matched by the doings in the wide world. But he also demonstrated to an uneasy plutocracy … that their gospel of wealth coming to the virtuous and their public dedication to genteel manners and gentlemanly Christian behavior were indeed justified."

Further Reading

For a complete list of Davis's writings consult Henry Cole Quinby, Richard Harding Davis: A Bibliography (1924). Two studies relate the author to his background admirably: Fairfax D. Downey, Richard Harding Davis: His Day (1933), and Gerald Langford, The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of a Mother and Son (1961).

Additional Sources

Lubow, Arthur, The reporter who would be king: a biography of Richard Harding Davis, New York: Scribner; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992. □

Richard Harding Davis 1864–1916, American author and journalist, b. Philadelphia; son of Rebecca Harding Davis . After attending Lehigh and Johns Hopkins universities, he became a reporter in Philadelphia and later was on the New York Evening Sun. His stories and articles were soon attracting attention, and with the publication of Gallegher and Other Stories (1891), a collection of tales about a newsboy-detective, his reputation as a fiction writer was established. In 1890 he became managing editor of Harper's Weekly and began making trips in its behalf to various parts of the world. As a foreign correspondent he covered all the wars of his day and published several books recording his experiences; his war dispatches were colorful and dramatic, frequently at the expense of accuracy. Besides collections of short stories, his other writings include the novels Soldiers of Fortune (1897) and The Bar Sinister (1903) and the plays The Dictator (1904) and Miss Civilization (1906).

Bibliography: See his Adventures and Letters (ed. by his brother, C. B. Davis, 1917); biography by A. Lubow (1992).

Davis, Richard Harding. See Dictator, The.