John R. Rathom

John Revelstoke Rathom (1868–1923) was an Australian-born American journalist, editor, and writer based in Rhode Island and employed as the editor of The Providence Journal at the height of his career. In the years before America entered World War I, Rathom assisted British Intelligence at Wellington House as an agent of influence by publishing British propaganda, including false or exaggerated allegations of German war crimes, as articles in The Providence Journal. These articles were widely republished by other American newspapers and helped ensure American entry as an ally of the British Empire in the war against Imperial Germany. Rathom's claims that his newspaper routinely uncovered German espionage plots were also later revealed as fraudulent, although 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 political spokesman advocating Anglophilia, anti-White ethnic sentiment, the Special Relationship, and anti-communism, while denouncing the League of Nations.

Time magazine described him as a firm believer in the old newspaper saying, "Raise hell and sell papers." In 2004, The Providence Journal acknowledged that most of Rathom's coverage was a fraud: "In truth, the Providence Journal had acquired numerous inside scoops on German activities, mostly from British intelligence sources who used Rathom to plant anti-German stories in the American media." Upon his death in 1923, Time magazine reported that Rathom's two newspapers were "said to be one of the most money-making magazine combinations in the U. S."

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."

By his own account, in his next position as staff correspondent for the Chicago Times-Herald (later the Chicago Record Herald) he became "one of the best known newspaper men in the country." He covered the 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire with great distinction. Rathom himself called that story "a classic of deadline journalism."

Rathom became a naturalized American citizen on March 25, 1906, in Chicago. He later claimed that he cherished the congratulatory telegrams he received on that occasion from William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. McKinley had died more than four and a half years earlier.

Rathom misrepresented his personal life as well. On July 5, 1890, he married Mary Harriet Crockford in Canada. In 1899, he began an affair with Florence Mildred Campbell in San Francisco. His wife returned home to Canada, ending their relationship. Soon Rathom and Campbell were living together as husband and wife, though no record of their marriage has surfaced. The first Mrs. Rathom only sued for divorce in 1908, naming Campbell as co-respondent, and the marriage was dissolved in 1909. For the previous three years Rathom and Campbell were representing themselves to Providence society as husband and wife. Evidence from family correspondence suggests that Campbell began to style herself Mrs. Rathom in 1903. All Rathom's various biographical accounts omitted his first marriage.