John R. Rathom

John R. Rathom (1868–1923) was a journalist, editor, and author based in Rhode Island at the height of his career. In the years before World War I, he was a prominent advocate of American participation in the war against Germany. His claims that his newspaper staff uncovered foreign espionage plots were eventually revealed as largely fraudulent, though his reputation as an heroic anti-German crusader endured. He later engaged in a long public dispute with Franklin Delano Roosevelt early in the future president's career. He cut a large figure in the world of journalism and as a conservative spokesman on such issues as anti-Bolshevism and the League of Nations.

Time magazine described him as a firm believer in the old newspaper saying, "Raise hell and sell papers."

The man who called himself John Revelstoke Rathom was probably born John Solomon in Melbourne, Australia, on July 4, 1868. The story he told of his early years is at many points unverifiable, at others questionable, and at others demonstrably false. An exhaustive review of Rathom's accounts by the staff of the Providence Journal, the paper where he gained national notoriety, documents the problems in the historical record.

Rathom did not attend Harrow in England as he claimed. Nor did he report on the British military campaign in the Sudan in 1886 for the Melbourne Argus. His tales of adventures in China, including service in the Chinese Navy, are likely fictions as well. His claim to have joined the Schwatka Expedition to Alaska in 1878–80 can not be verified. He probably arrived in the U.S. in 1889—he provided various dates—and then worked for short periods at several Canadian and American newspapers on the West Coast.

He joined the San Francisco Chronicle as a staff correspondent in 1896. Two years later, during the Spanish–American War, the Chronicle sent him to Cuba. In his ensuing adventures, all dubious, he was badly wounded, returned to the U.S. with yellow fever or malaria, and escaped from a medical isolation camp. He sailed to South Africa, he later said, to cover the Boer War, but no evidence supports him. His claim that he was twice wounded there is equally suspect. His boast that he counted General Kitchener as a friend from that time until the general's death in 1916 has been called "moonshine."

...
Wikipedia