Introduction

Selling and delivering newspapers was one of the first and most formative experiences of America’s youth throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet its history has been obscured by myth and mired in cliché. Crying the News takes the job of newspaper peddling seriously as work and not just as an object of romance or reform. It shows how child street labor changed over time in practice and in perception, while remaining integral to the survival of working-class families, the socialization of their children, and the fortunes of a major industry. Boys and girls found both opportunity and exploitation in the news trade, and they came to personify the spirit of capitalism and its discontents. This book aims not simply to distinguish history from myth but to explore the relationship between the two—to dissect how newsboys’ dual careers as workers and symbols shaped each other, creating wealth for some and meaning for many.

Press Philanthropy and the Politics of Want

To better recruit and discipline their young distribution force, newspaper publishers and circulation managers in the 1880s became pioneers of corporate welfare. Led by Joseph Pulitzer in St. Louis, E. W. Scripps in Detroit and Cincinnati, Victor Lawson in Chicago, and George Booth in Grand Rapids, Michigan, they organized newsboy banquets, excursions, clubs, schools, and marching bands. They also sponsored newsboy boxing tournaments and fielded newsboy baseball teams. A dozen eastern newspapers formed their own newsboy baseball league. Newsboys took full advantage of these programs, as well as the newsboy homes and reading rooms founded by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, but they also organized unions, struck for better pay and working conditions, and participated in political campaigns and protests. Ultimately, they sought justice over charity.

Son of the Forgotten Man

The Great Depression exposed newsboys to the vicissitudes of the market and the power of the state in new ways. They formed unions, joined strikes, and, for a time, came under federal protection. Publishers argued that newsboys were not employees but independent contractors who should be exempt the Fair Labor Standards Act and other New Deal measures. Caught up in this tug-of-war between a paternalistic capitalist press and an expansive welfare state, the American newsboy became a contested figure in popular culture, appearing in WPA murals, proletarian novels, and other works as a symbol of working-class resentment more than as an icon of bourgeois virtue. The shrill, restless son of the Forgotten Man, he helped America reassess the merits of laissez faire capitalism and recalibrate government’s responsibility to citizens young and old.

Sidewalks of Struggle

Long at issue, the moral legitimacy of juvenile street trading became a major concern in the Progressive Era. Parents, publishers and reformers asserted their right to define news peddling as a public good or a social evil. Efforts to control children’s labor underlay the campaigns to abolish newsboys’ night work and stop their fighting, gambling, smoking, spitting, drinking, swearing, and sexual activity. Investigators amassed damning evidence of these practices, but their findings also reveal the industrial pressures, parental logic, and working-class customs that allowed them. Unable to abolish news peddling by children, adults regulated it by establishing newsboy unions, clubs, courts, and “republics.” However, the success of their efforts depended entirely on the boys’ cooperation, making them agents rather than mere targets of progressive reform.

Disorder in the Air

Newsboys proliferated after the Civil War as the newspaper industry flourished but then reemerged as a social problem during the depression years of 1873 to 1877. Writers and artists such as Horatio Alger and J. G. Brown portrayed them as symbols of the uplifting potential of industrial capitalism, while white southerners turned them into emblems of Republican misrule. The New York press celebrated real Bowery newsboys such as Steve Brodie. But authors of sensational urban guidebooks cast these youths as enfants terribles whose discontents threatened the social order. Swept up in the burgeoning labor movement, newsboys mounted noisy strikes in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. Catholic and Protestant philanthropists responded by founding homes for newsboys or advocating that they be licensed and supervised. Contrary to their mythic counterparts, real newsboys exposed and challenged the economic inequities of Gilded Age America.

Roar of the Tabloids

1920s America contained a cacophony of feuding factions pitting guardians of tradition against the forces of modernity. Small-town America detested the vice and depravity of the metropolis. White supremacists resented the black and immigrant hordes invading their neighborhoods and workplaces. And fundamentalists felt bullied by godless advocates of evolution. Such conflicts reverberated in the nation’s newspapers, especially in the sensational tabloid press. The children who peddled these papers were not mere merchants of discord, but also its agents. As predominately immigrant, sexually precocious city kids from non-teetotaler, non-Protestant, working-class families, they represented the troubling symptoms of modernity over tradition. They played a central role in Jazz Age journalism, politics, social reform, race relations, and labor struggles, thereby challenging the notion that children’s economic value diminished as their emotional value rose in the early decades of the 20th century.

Bitter Cry of Progress

New laws call for new stories, and in the early 1900s those stories were increasingly told by muckraking journalists, documentary photographers, and social reformers. Upton Sinclair, Lewis Hine, Jane Addams, and many others focused on the evils of street work, including sexual bartering. But circulation managers professionalized and stepped up their newsboy welfare work. The proliferation of precociously cute newsboy images in advertisements and comic strips further neutralized reform efforts and legitimized newspapers’ use of child labor. Ethnic newspapers multiplied during this period and developed their own sales and distribution forces. Also propelling newspapers into the new century were automobiles, which presented newsboys with a new occupational hazard. Pushed and pulled by the commercial interests of publishers, and the social agendas of reformers, and the economic needs of their families, this generation of newsies rose up to assert their own vision of progress.

Rumblings in the West

No newsboys were more militant than those on the urban frontier. Though primarily self-employed, most identified with the interests of labor over capital, as reflected by the many unions and protests they organized between the 1880s and early 1900s. Newsboys mounted strikes and boycotts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. They distributed union circulars and marched in Labor Day parades. Boys also distributed newspapers in the Hawaiian Islands and Yukon gold fields. Western newsboys represented all races and ethnicities, including Native Americans. They encountered work hazards unknown to their eastern counterparts, such as mountain lions, prairie fires, and gunfighters. Like the newspaper they sold, these children were catalysts of social change. As rugged individualists who relied on cooperation more than competition, they exemplified the contradictory values of their communities.

Voice of Young America

With their distinctive dress, speech, and style, newsboys formed one the most conspicuous youth subcultures in early America. Predominately Irish, they also earned reputations as brawlers, gamblers, and consummate theatergoers. The era’s most prominent artists, writers, and performers transformed them into symbols of Young America itself and drew them into campaigns to promote temperance, nativism, westward expansion, and war with Mexico. More than any other personification of the age, newsboys represented the liberating potential of a democratic society driven by a wide-open market economy. Yet they also epitomized the bamboozlement of mass politics and the sham of self-interest masquerading as concern for the greater good. Their shrill cries and saucy ways alternately annoyed and amused their elders, but these incorrigible habits also helped them to survive the hardships of street life.

Rising with the Sun

Poverty and politics spawned the emergence of newsboys in antebellum New York. The New York Sun, founded in 1833 by the radical printer Benjamin Day, was the first successful penny newspaper in the United States and the first to use hawkers and carriers on a large scale. Before this date, newspapers circulated through the colonies and early republic via carriers and postriders of various ages and conditions, including apprentices and slaves. Day’s newsboys—many of them poor immigrants—earned both wages and profits as they served Whigs, Democrats, and members of Day’s own Workingmen’s Party. This generation of newsboys did not simply distribute newspapers but stirred up demand for them with their cries of murders, hoaxes, and slave revolts. Their ranks included future turfman Bill Lovell, actor-comedian Barney Williams, and entrepreneur Mark Maguire, the original “King of the Newsboys.”