Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  The children maintained order on the streets by respecting one another’s property rights. They did not recognize the rights of railroads to the “stuff” on the tracks or the rights of landlords to the copper wire left behind in empty houses, but children who had built up a trade on a corner deserved to have their property protected.

  Adult observers were astounded by the children’s loyalty to one another and their unwritten laws. Jacob Riis questioned one thirteen-year-old newsie as to why he didn’t try to take away the “corner” from the older boy who owned it. “He has no more right to the corner than you have,” Riis egged the boy on. “Why don’t you fight him for it?”

  “ ‘He’s my boss,’ was the dogged reply.

  “ ‘But suppose some stronger fellow drove him away?’

  “The answer was prompt:

  “ ‘I’d get other boys and get it back for him.’ …

  “ ‘Did you ever hear of anyone taking a boy’s corner—just taking it?’

  “ ‘I heard of it, but I never knowed it. It is his corner.’ ”9

  In Milwaukee, Alexander Fleisher engaged another newsie in the same dialogue; he, too, was intrigued by the boys’ commitment to their laws. Right, not might, seemed to rule on the streets. Fleisher asked one of the bigger boys why he didn’t take over the “Palm Garden,” one of the better spots for selling papers. The boy answered that he would not even consider moving into territory “owned” by others. “If the policeman did not interfere, the other boys on the street would, and in the end it would be impossible for him to sell papers at all.”

  By collectively legitimizing the property rights of established street traders, the children brought order to the streets and provided for a smooth transition from generation to generation. When traders got ready to leave the streets for other work, they could hand over title to their corners—and their customers—to younger brothers or sell it to the highest bidders. There was a going rate for each piece of real estate, established by the children who bid on it. Once the new owner paid the price, the location became his. Any child who wanted to work there had to pay him a commission.10

  The children enforced their laws in their own ways. The police were not going to do it for them. The standard punishment for trespassing was being chased away and, if caught, beaten up. Dominic Pavano, who had been chased off a corner at Park Row near City Hall, explained to a New York Child Labor Committee investigator that “a big boy, stranger to him, accosted him, asked him how much he made, and then took the money from him by force and ran away, telling him he would be killed the next time he came there.” Harry Browne had also been “chased off” a corner that did not belong to him. Harry complained to the investigators that “it was very hard for a ‘white boy’ to make anything at paper selling [because] the Jews and Italians hung together to hold the most profitable places and corners.” Harry would either not admit or had not yet figured out that his problem had less to do with race than with the territorial imperatives of street trading. He had been chased away not because he was “a white boy,” but because he had been horning in on someone else’s trade and territory.11

  Most newsies did not get into trouble as Dominic and Harry had. They stayed away from “owned” corners or made a deal with the owner. The unwritten laws of the street were so well known and obeyed that there was little need for violence. Mervyn LeRoy, the Hollywood producer, recalled in his autobiography that in San Francisco, just after the 1906 earthquake, “newsboys had to battle it out for choice corners.”12 But his experience was exceptional. Other autobiographical accounts and the dozens of published and unpublished newsboy studies report little in the way of violence. The children were too busy trying to earn money to waste time fighting one another. They were, in fact, so well organized and law-abiding that one New York City truant officer complained that the small boys who should have been looking to the police for “protection as to trade and territory” were looking to the older newsies instead.13

  Most newspaper circulation managers relied on the boys to regulate their own street trades. They not only refrained from interfering, but did what they could to enforce the boys’ unwritten laws by refusing to sell papers to newsies who did not properly “own” the territory they sold from. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer informed its readers in October 1917, “Newsboys hold squatter title to corners and buy and sell them from each other. The newspapers have no financial interest in the corners, but, with the police, recognize established ‘titles’ in the interest of order.”14

  Unwritten laws governed the boys’ behavior in the newspaper offices and distribution centers as well as in the streets. The sooner the boys got their papers in the afternoon, the sooner they could start selling them; no newsie wanted to be stuck in line while outside in the streets customers began looking for their afternoon editions. In most cities, the boys established and followed a simple seniority system. The older newsies got their papers as soon as these arrived from the press rooms. When they had been served, the rest of the boys lined up to get theirs.15

  The circulation managers and their assistants worked with the boys to smooth out kinks in the distribution system. In Portland, Oregon, where there had been “continual fighting and hard feeling over the Saturday night places” on the line, the “circulator,” a former newsie, proposed a solution. The “regular midnight boys” who sold every night would get their papers first, followed by the “boys who only sell Saturday nights.” The new procedure, it was hoped, would “eliminate some of the hard feeling and wrangling.” The boys, knowing that the better regulated the distribution process, the sooner they would all get their papers, agreed to give the proposal a trial run. If it worked they would support it; if not, they would return to the old system. The decision, in any event, would be theirs.16

  St. Louis, May 1910. A photograph of “Burns Basement Branch.” The boys have lined up to get their afternoon papers from the assistant circulation manager. The older boys are at the front of the line, the younger ones just behind. (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)

  Newsies, unfortunately, did not always get along so famously with the adults they did business with. The boys helped to organize their own distribution systems when they could. There were, however, times and places where this was not possible. In cities where the boys were too spread out for centrally located distribution offices to serve them all, the circulation managers hired truckers to deliver the papers at their corners. Though this system saved the hustlers a great deal of time, it made it more difficult for them to join together to protect their interests. In Cincinnati, for example, the boys, isolated from one another geographically, found themselves at the mercy of the supply men who, according to Maurice Hexter, regularly extorted bribes to insure delivery “at the earliest possible moment, when the demand for the edition is strongest. One little chap told [Hexter] that he usually gave his supply man a silk shirt for Christmas”—probably in addition to weekly bribes.17

  When the publishers and circulation managers were too thickheaded to understand the children’s worth or their potential organized strength, the boys had to—and did—take special measures to bring them back to their senses. In Boston, where the newspapers in 1901 unilaterally changed the distribution procedures, the newsies appealed directly to the publishers for a return to the status quo. When, as should have been expected, the publishers refused to listen to their grievances, the boys organized themselves into a union, applied for and were granted an AFL charter, and sent off an official delegation to bargain with the manager of one of the city’s leading dailies. When they were again rebuffed and even humiliated by the manager, who refused to negotiate and “took occasion to make sport of [their union, the boys] declared a boycott.… The result was a surprise not only to the manager of the paper but to the newsboys themselves. The circulation of the paper fell off rapidly and advertisers complained. The manager invited the Union to a conference.” In the end, the boys won everything they demanded—and more.18

  The s
treet traders carried with them from their home blocks the inchoate sense of unity that had suffused their play communities. Just as in their play communities they had experienced what Huizinga referred to as the feeling of being “ ‘apart-together’ in an exceptional situation,”19 so downtown were they united by their shared isolation from the adult world that surrounded them. They were separated from the other inhabitants of the downtown shopping, entertainment, and business streets by age, class, and need. They were different—and they could not but perceive that difference every time they shouted their wares, collected their tips, or made their way back home to their working-class neighborhoods.

  In the long run, the unity born of that difference made their experience at work more enjoyable and more profitable. The children trusted one another rather than the adult suppliers, circulation managers, and deliverymen. Their trust and cooperation made it easier for them to establish and enforce their own territorial laws. And those laws, in turn, smoothed the conflicts and eliminated the contests that might have arisen between them.

  The child labor reformers who observed and reported on the boys at work were surprised by the degree to which they cooperated with one another. In their relationship with their adult suppliers and customers, the little hustlers were little demons. But in their relationship to one another, they were friendly and supportive. Street trading was not a solitary but a group activity. Multiple connections—work, play, classroom, and neighborhood ties—held the children together in friendship, not rivalry.

  Philadelphia, 1910. This Lewis Hine photograph shows us three newsies who work together every afternoon and on Saturday nights till midnight. The middle boy, Morris Goldberg, is Jewish; his companions, “the Mellitto Boys,” are Italian. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  The child experts attributed such attitudes and behavior to the children’s lower evolutionary state. Children, as G. Stanley Hall argued (persuasively enough to convince observers of children as astute as Jane Addams), were in their development recapitulating the evolution of the human species. Adolescents at play and at work embodied the savage personality in their eschewal of individualistic competition for the comforts of membership in and solidarity with the group.20 The experts—and there were dozens of them who accepted Hall’s formula—were unable to see beyond their own theoretical framework. The children’s community of the streets was no atavism, but a response to their social situation. The children worked together because they had more fun that way and earned almost as much money.21 They cooperated because solidarity with other children meant protection for all against the adults they did business with.

  Unions and Strikes

  Joseph Pulitzer, nearly blind, so sensitive to sound he exploded when the silverware was rattled, and suffering from “asthma, weak lungs, a protesting stomach, insomnia, exhaustion, and fits of depression,”1 managed his newspapers in absentia for the last twenty years of his life. Nearly every day he received memos from the New York World office providing him with the information he required: financial reports, circulation figures, summaries of lead stories and features, lists of headlines in the World and its rivals, office gossip, and evaluations of key personnel. In July of 1899, a new subject appeared in the memos. Don Seitz, managing editor and chief correspondent, noted that the paper had “had some trouble to-day through the strike on the part of the newsboys.” A July 21 memo headed “On the Newsboys Strike” reported further that the strike would “probably be sporadic for some days” but assured Pulitzer that “we have the situation well in hand.” Twenty-four hours later, the tone of the memos had changed: “The newsboys strike has grown into a menacing affair.… It is proving a serious problem. Practically all the boys in New York and adjacent towns have quit selling.” By the twenty-fourth, panic had set in. “The advertisers have abandoned the papers and the sale has been cut down fully 2/5.… It is really a very extraordinary demonstration.”2

  Indeed it was. The New York City newsies had formed their own union and gone out on strike against not only Pulitzer but also William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the rival New York Journal. Before their strike was over, the boys would succeed in seriously cutting back circulation of the two afternoon papers and forcing the two most powerful publishers in the nation to alter their distribution practices.

  The story of the 1899 strike has never been told. In his mammoth history of journalism, Frank Luther Mott refers to it in a sentence.3 No one else, to my knowledge, has ever given it that much notice. Children bringing down big-city newspapers by unionizing and striking is too improbable a scenario for anyone, even historians, to take very seriously.

  The children of the city, as we have seen, took their money-making seriously. When their earnings were threatened, they did what they had to in order to protect them. They cemented their informal communities of the street into quasi-formal unions, held mass meetings, elected officers, declared strikes, paraded through the streets shouting their demands, “soaked scabs,” and held together as long as they possibly could. Along the way, they tried to have a good time. The children’s strikes were serious matters, but they were also occasions for community celebration, for marching en masse up the avenue, for playing dirty tricks, for making and wearing signs, and for ganging up against troublesome adults, especially the boss’s still loyal employees and the police who tried to protect them.

  The New York City newsies were, in 1899, in the enviable position of being irreplaceable. Their successors, as we shall see, would not be so well situated. As it became apparent through the early decades of the new century that there was money to be made selling papers, more and more adults would move into the business, setting up news distribution companies or opening and operating independent newsstands. At the turn of the century, however, the children were still, by far, the major distribution source for the afternoon dailies. Publishers and circulation managers could threaten, intimidate, and try to bully them back to work when they struck, but they could not replace them.

  The event that was to lead to the newsies’ strike of 1899 was the wholesale price increase that Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World had instituted in 1898 at the height of the Spanish-American War circulation boom. The publishers, especially Hearst and Pulitzer, had been spending far more money competing with one another in extra editions, splashy front pages, and eyewitness reports than they could hope to recoup on advertising and sales.4 By raising prices to newsies from five cents to six cents for ten papers, they expected to reduce their losses to manageable levels.

  The boys, as long as they were making money hawking extra editions with horror-story front pages, did not protest the price increase. By the summer of 1899, however, as the news grew tamer and the headlines shrank, they began to feel the pinch of the penny increase.

  City Hall Park, New York City, late 1890s. Hawking the World on the steps of City Hall. These children had probably walked a number of blocks from their homes to City Hall to sell their papers. Without papers to sell, they would have been out of place; with them, they became as much a part of the landscape as the adult businessman to their right. (Alice Austin Collection, Staten Island Historical Society)

  It is difficult to say where or precisely how the strike began. The first reported actions took place in Long Island City, where the newsies discovered that the Journal deliveryman had been cheating them. On July 18, they took their revenge by tipping over his wagon, running off with his papers, and chasing him out of town. Flushed with success and in a fighting mood, the boys “decided to make a stand against the World and [Journal] for 50¢ per hundred.” (This had been the price before the increase.) They demanded a price rollback and gave notice to their supply men that they were no longer going to buy the Hearst or Pulitzer papers. According to Don Seitz, who reported on all this in his letter to Pulitzer in Bar Harbor, the news of the Long Island City action traveled quickly into Manhattan, where “a young fellow named Morris Cohen, who sells about three hundred Worlds a day in City Hall Park got hold of the boys
and got them to strike.”5

  Seitz notwithstanding, it is unlikely that Cohen by himself precipitated the strike in Manhattan. (His name was never to appear in any of the newspaper reports of the strike.) The boys who sold papers downtown, in the City Hall and Wall Street districts, gathered every afternoon outside the newspaper offices on Park Row, nicknamed Newspaper Row, and in City Hall Park. Most were students who worked part-time, but there were a significant number—many more than there would be in later years—who had left school entirely to hustle for a year or so until they were old enough to find steadier, more lucrative employment. The full-time hustlers sold the morning papers and the early editions of the afternoon ones. They were joined after three o’clock by the schoolboys, who arrived in plenty of time for the afternoon rush. During the spring and summer of 1899, the boys’ afternoon discussions must have been punctuated by denunciations of Pulitzer and Hearst and strategic discussions on how to fight back. When word arrived about the Long Island City action, the downtown newsies, perhaps called together by Cohen, put away their red-hots, closed down their crap games, and assembled in City Hall Park. That afternoon, July 19, they organized their union and announced that they would strike the next day unless Pulitzer and Hearst rolled back their prices. Officers were elected, a “committee on discipline” chosen, strategy debated, and delegates sent out to spread the word to the newsies at Fifty-ninth Street and in Harlem, Brooklyn, Long Island City, and Jersey.6