OUR MAN IN HAVANA
It wasn’t the first time that Harry Scovel had found himself in a Cuban jail. In the past, however, he’d been imprisoned by the Spanish for his unauthorized coverage of the Cuban insurrection. This time it was his own side—the U.S. Army—that had clapped him in the calaboose. He was there for violating a cardinal rule of reporting by making himself part of the story. In the eyes of the army, he was there for a far more serious offense. Pondering his possible fate, he might have envied the vermin whose cell he was sharing. Not only had he struck an officer, but the officer happened to be the commanding general.
Sylvester Henry Scovel had always been a rebel. Born in Pittsburgh in 1869 to Sylvester Finian Scovel, a Presbyterian minister, his middle name honored his maternal uncle, Henry Woodruff, who had evidently been a paragon of deportment. He’d so often heard “Why can’t you be more like your Uncle Henry?” from his mother that he never used his hated middle name in adulthood. For friends who may have considered “Sylvester” too stuffy, he answered to “Harry.”
When Scovel was 14, his father was named president of the University (now College) of Wooster, and the family moved to Ohio. Harry entered the school’s preparatory division but scotched his father’s dream that he might become the fourth in a line of Scovel ministers. Avowing atheism and declaring for a career in engineering, he enrolled in the University of Michigan but distinguished himself more in crusading against the fraternity system than excelling in his studies. He dropped out his sophomore year.
Scovel was determined to report on Cuba’s resistance to Spanish oppression.
After a series of jobs around the United States that constituted a course of practical education, Scovel landed in Cleveland and achieved a measure of success as the general manager of the Cleveland Athletic Club. It’s possible that doors were open to him through a collateral branch of the family that included Philo Scovill, an entrepreneur, banker, and railroad director. Harry nonetheless made a name for himself by opening membership in the club to hitherto untapped social classes, including young Irish boxers from the working class. He even wrote the libretto to an operetta about early Cleveland that played to standing-room-only audiences for three nights.
Scovel also became a member of Troop A, an independent military company formed after the civil unrest surrounding the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Known variously as the First City Troop and the Black Horse Troop, it had become a unit of the Ohio National Guard. Its members hailed largely from the upper
