Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  Of all the children’s strikes, the shineboys’ provided the nonstruck newspapers with the best copy. Here was the perfect strike: no individual or business was going to suffer, and the mostly Italian boys—with their exaggerated accents—were even more colorful in print than the newsies with their “deses” and “dems.” The shineboys, for all the good cheer with which their action was reported, did not leave their stands to amuse the rest of the city. They had real grievances and no other way to force their employers to act on them.

  The boys who shined on the Staten Island and East River ferries were employed by a Vincent Catoggio, who owned all the “concessions” on the ferries and made between twelve and fourteen thousand dollars a year from them. While the boys slaved away, Catoggio, they claimed, lived like a prince with diamond rings on all ten fingers. To make matters worse, the boss had recently instituted a new and, for the boys, degrading system. To make sure that no boy pocketed the proceeds from a shine, Catoggio required them to ring a bell each time they got a customer.

  “Of coursa, we go on a strika,” Looking-glass Wadalup (named for the quality of his shines) was reported as having said only days after the newsies had led the way with their strike. “Da bossa he maka all da mona, and he wanta maka da men rings upa da shina same like da monka ringa de bell in de circ. Nexta ting we know he wanta putta colla and chaina ona da men sama lika jocko.”

  The boys threatened to throw their stands into the sea should their demands not be met. Catoggio offered them a 20 percent wage increase to six dollars a week. They took it, though as “Tony Rocco, who shines shoes on one of the Staten Island boats,” confided to a reporter, the boys were still looking for seven dollars. “We maka our union stronga first. Then we strika for the seven doll.”30

  Like the bootblacks, the messengers were galvanized into action by the newsies’ example. As the Sun reported, “The boys haven’t any more cause of complaint now than they have always had, but simply yielded to the strike epidemic.” The boys, it was true, were not striking to overturn recently established practices, but they were not playacting, as the Sun implied. Their major grievance was the “tax” they were charged for their uniforms and, in the case of the American District boys, for clean white linen collars. “Mind yer,” one of the boys told a reporter, “they take 50¢ a week out for uniforms and before yer wear one out yer’ve paid for it a half dozen times over. But d’yer own it then? Not on yer life. They takes it away, gives yer one that some large boy has grown out of, and keep right on taking yer 50¢ a week.”31

  The boys wanted nothing more than what was due them as American workers and citizens: the right to buy and wash their own uniforms and collars. The American District and Western Union boys also objected to their companies’ policy of shifting their work hours and not telling them until the night before when they were going to work. They demanded as well full pay for every telegram they carried out of the office, not simply for those which were delivered.32

  The messengers’ strike was called for July 24, just four days after the newsies went out. Though the boys from the different companies had different demands—and different schedules—they tried to coordinate their actions. If they were successful, they could close down the city or, at the very least, slow down Wall Street. The Postal Telegraph Company boys were the first to go out. “They made things lively downtown … and seriously impaired the company’s service” until the police arrived to chase them away. That afternoon the Western Union boys joined the strike, but trooped back to work when the district manager agreed to their demands. The American District boys waited until the next day, payday, to walk out.33

  As might have been expected from the difficulty the boys had coordinating their actions, their strike was going nowhere. The boys had been in such a hurry to get started, they had not bothered to form a union—even a weak one, as the newsies had. Their lack of organization did not help their cause. Neither did help come from the older boys, out of school, out of work, and only too ready to take the places of the striking messengers. As the Tribune reported on July 27, three days after the boys had walked out, the strike “like a badly charged rocket has about fizzled out, after a few weak sputters.”34

  It is difficult to imagine a different outcome. The companies and the business community had too much at stake to allow the boys to close down shop for even an afternoon. The city could survive without shined shoes or afternoon papers, but not—in this era, at least—without its telegrams. In Cincinnati, when the boys struck, the companies and their clients hired cabs to deliver the strikebreakers and their messages. Elsewhere, the strikes were quickly broken by a combination of intimidation, cabs, scabs, and police guards.35

  The messenger boy strikes of 1899 achieved little. The boys’ grievances remained simmering until 1910, when a new generation took up where the old one had left off—unfortunately with much the same results. Though the boys in 1910 had a solidly organized union behind them and assistance from union organizers and other sympathetic adults, they were no match for their employers. In New York, in 1910, and in Detroit, where the boys struck for higher rates in 1914, the telegraph companies beat them down with the telephone and with “Bowery bums” hired by the day. The bums were paid at rates much higher than the boys. Once the strikes were broken, the boys were offered their old jobs—at the old rate of pay.36

  New York City, 1896. The photograph on top shows three independent bootblacks looking for shines on a busy city street. Above is one of the new “stands” that was putting the independents out of business. Few customers would pay a nickel to a boy with a shoeshine box when for the same price they could sit on a throne on one of the stands. (Alice Austin Collection, Staten Island Historical Society)

  In unionizing and striking to protect their rights and their profits, the children were behaving precisely as they believed American workers should when treated unjustly. Unions and strikes were part of the urban environment. It was the rare working-class boy or girl who did not have a father, brother, sister, or relative who was a union member or sympathizer. The papers the children hawked were full of stories—and not unsympathetic ones—about strikes for better wages and working conditions. The New York City boys who struck in 1899 had that very week hawked papers with banner headlines describing the strike of the Brooklyn streetcar operators. The Boston boys who struck in May of 1901 had spent a good part of the preceding month shouting headlines about the brewers’, plumbers’, linesmen’s, and machinists’ strikes.

  The newsies were themselves independent merchants, but that did not prevent them from patterning their organizations after labor unions, calling them “unions,” and applying directly to local and national federations for certification and support. The Boston boys who joined the AFL in 1901 were so serious about their union affiliation that they raised money to send newsie Thomas Mulkern to the 1906 Annual Convention, where he introduced a resolution calling on the adult unionists to “make a special endeavor during the coming year to organize the newsboys throughout the country.” In Detroit, the boys in 1914 appealed directly to the Detroit Federation of Labor for assistance when the News unilaterally broke its unwritten agreement with them. In Chicago, where in 1912 the Hearst papers locked out the pressmen in a complicated, long-simmering dispute, the newsies not only refused to handle any struck dailies but tried their best to prevent Hearst’s imported scabs from selling them. The strike was a bloody one, with more than one newsboy’s head smashed before it was over.

  Fortunately for the newsies, such actions were rare. So, too, were the occasions on which the boys felt compelled to unionize and strike to protect their interests. As long as business was good, the publishers were content to abide by their unwritten agreements with the newsies. For a decade and a half after the 1901 Boston strike, business was good—so good on the retailing end that adults were encouraged to move into the distribution business. By the beginning of World War I, a significant number of adults, some of them independent newsstand owners and operat
ors, others employees of large distributing companies, had joined the children on the streets.

  As had occurred during the Spanish-American War, circulation increased during the World War I years; but costs, propelled upward by a newsprint shortage and wartime revenue measures, rose even faster. Publishers struggling to maintain their profit margin or simply survive had to raise their advertising rates or their prices.37 Since competition with other papers and with the magazines prevented them from boosting the advertising rates, they attempted to balance the books by charging the public more for their papers. The newsies and the independent dealers assumed that they would retain the same percentage of the selling price under the new price structures. They were mistaken.

  The Pittsburgh papers were among the first to boost their prices. In December of 1916, the newsies were informed that under the new price structure they would take home a much smaller percentage of the sales price than they had been getting. Outraged by the publishers’ unilateral decision to break what they considered a long-standing though unwritten agreement, the boys refused to sell any papers at the new prices. According to Editor and Publisher, “a virtual boycott was placed … on the sale of newspapers in the city.” Regrettably, the boycott did not hold long enough to force the publishers to the bargaining table. Recognizing that the boys were not going to voluntarily return to work, the publishers set out to force them back—or replace them entirely. They erected newsstands at key locations throughout the city and staffed them with loyal adults. The boys, unable to keep papers off the stands or customers from the papers, were forced to concede defeat and call off their strike.38

  In Seattle, Minneapolis, and New York City, the newsies reacted as the Pittsburgh boys had to the publishers’ attempts to unilaterally change the unwritten agreements that governed their street trades. They were no doubt encouraged, as their predecessors had been, by the example of adult union members, who were in these same years resorting more frequently to strikes to redress their grievances. The second wave of newsboy strikes occurred during a period, 1916–18, in which more than a million adults struck each year—“more,” according to David Montgomery, “than had ever struck in any year before 1915.”39

  The Seattle and Minneapolis newsies had better luck than their Pittsburgh counterparts, in large part because the publishers in those cities were less prepared for battle. The Seattle newsies had, for the past seventeen years, abided by an agreement reached between their former union and the publishers. In 1917, when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, citing increased paper costs, broke the agreement by raising its prices and changing its pricing structure, the boys quickly organized—or, more properly, resurrected their old union—and went out on strike. Both the AFL-affiliated Central Labor Federation and the rival IWW chapter offered assistance. The Post-Intelligencer, out on a limb as the only paper to have raised its prices and be struck, caved in at once.40

  In Minneapolis, the newsies also went on strike the moment the publishers raised their prices. They were, from all accounts, enormously successful. On the third of July, the day after the strike, the New York Times reported: “Virtually no newspapers were sold or delivered in Minneapolis today, several hundred vendors and carriers having gone on strike.” The publishers, not about to surrender to a bunch of children, tried to get their papers into the streets with scab vendors. The newsies attacked, “several severe riots” ensued, and, according to Editor and Publisher, the governor intervened, notifying “the Mayor and Chief of Police that unless the disturbances were stopped immediately, he would suspend them from office.” The pressure from the top forced the publishers to the bargaining table.41

  The Minneapolis boys had been so militant—and so successful—in pressing their demands that they frightened into existence a new coalition of concerned citizens and reform groups. The “concerned citizens” blamed the “recent boycott” not on the publishers, but on “the effects of street life upon growing boys.” The boys were obviously learning the wrong things on the streets: to organize, protest, strike, and survive. The only solution was to remove them from the streets—and quickly—before another generation was similarly corrupted. “We believe it would be for the ultimate welfare of the newsboys themselves to eliminate their business entirely.”42

  The New York City publishers were among the last of the big-city publishers to raise their afternoon prices. (Could they have remembered what had happened the last time they’d tampered with the newsies’ profit margin?) On January 16, 1918, without advance notice, they made their move. Every New York and Brooklyn afternoon paper which had sold for a penny raised its price to two cents. The vendors were informed that 0.6 cents, or 30 percent of the new selling price, would go to them; the remainder was for the publishers. The newsies objected immediately and strenuously to the new pricing formula and demanded a return to the old one (under which they had received 40 percent of the selling price).43

  The strike began in Brooklyn but quickly spread to Manhattan and from there to the Bronx. There were battles at the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, uptown at 125th Street and Eighth Avenue, and everywhere else scabs tried to peddle the struck papers.

  For the first week of the strike, the boys were rather successful in keeping the papers away from the scab newsies. According to the Tribune, “In the greater city the only papers to circulate freely were ‘The Call,’ … and ‘The Brooklyn Times,’ … These two papers were peddled everywhere by iron-lunged ‘newsies,’ who besought all to ‘help the newsies win the big strike.’ ”44

  The newsies kept the scabs off the streets, but they could not keep papers out of customers’ hands. The newspaper distribution business had changed in the twenty years since the boys had last gone on strike. Though still a fixture on the streets, the children were no longer the essential link between publisher and customer they had been in 1899. In New York City, the boys had been helped out by a series of legal restrictions on the construction of newsstands. By the second decade of the century, however, such restrictions had been effectively nullified by the graft that greased the palms of the city officials who approved the licenses. Permanent enclosed stands—owned and operated by independent dealers or employees of large distributing companies—had been erected on street corners, in subway stations, ferry houses, train terminals, office buildings, and hotel lobbies.45

  When the strike began, the adults who owned their own stands went out with the boys. The company-owned stands not only stayed open, but “did land office business” selling to customers who ordinarily got their papers from the boys or the independents.46 The publishers, reported their journal, Editor and Publisher, were “ready to fight to a finish.” Within days of the strike, they chartered a new company to build and operate even more newsstands and arrange delivery to private homes and apartment buildings.

  With the police guarding the stands that remained open, the publishers building new ones, and the public unwilling to do without its papers, the newsies and small dealers were outgunned and outmaneuvered. On February 7, they called off their strike, accepting a compromise proposed earlier in the week. The boys agreed to accept the new pricing structure in return for a guarantee that they would be able to return their unsold papers for full refund.47

  The compromise held for six months, until the War Industries Board, citing the ongoing white paper shortage, outlawed “refunds,” charging that the practice of allowing the boys to return unsold copies encouraged them to buy more than they could sell.48 The boys were back where they had started—with one crucial difference. They knew now that they were not able to win a strike against the publishers.

  Unable to strike, but unwilling to let the matter pass without a struggle, the newsies decided to selectively boycott the Hearst papers. Hearst, never their favorite, was, they believed, ripe for a tumble. He was a bully, a millionaire, and, as the publisher of the only major New York City paper urging a negotiated end to the war, suspiciously sympathetic to the Germans. He was also, they claimed, the publisher most re
sponsible for raising prices in January.

  The boys and the independent adult dealers who joined them expected that some of the publishers would support them, or at least look the other way. To their surprise and dismay, only the Tribune, which had been waging its own war against Hearst, took their side. Every other publisher backed Hearst by directing its circulation managers to deny papers to vendors who joined the boycott.

  For the first few days of their boycott, the boys managed to outwit the publishers arrayed against them. Some of the boys bought a few copies of a Hearst paper “for no other purpose than to make themselves eligible to buy other evening papers.” Others “did in” the scab newsies and raised such a commotion that customers were frightened away or encouraged to honor the boycott.

  The boys held out as long as they could, which, in this case, was not long at all. The publishers took no chances. At their insistence, city officials moved quickly to revoke the licenses of all newsstand operators and newsies who refused to sell the Hearst publications. Under a newly invented interpretation of their licensing authority, the officials charged that vendors who did not offer all publications for sale were not serving the public and were, thus, no longer entitled to their licenses. The boys and their adult allies hired lawyers, enlisted local politicians, and even got Al Smith, the Democratic candidate for governor, to intervene on their behalf, to no avail. The boycott ground on, less and less effectively, through August and into the fall. Only the Tribune, still violently anti-Hearst, kept it in the news by reporting daily on the activities of Andrew Stanton, president of the Newsboys Union, as he journeyed through the city, enlisting empty declarations of support from adult unions with nothing else to offer. The carpenters, boilermakers, painters, engineers, housesmiths and bridgemen, cement and concrete workers, bluestone cutters, flaggers, bridge and curb setters, metal lathers, sheet metal workers, blacksmiths, steamfitters, and United Hebrew Trades all expressed their support for the boys and their union. Unfortunately, victory in the union halls did not compensate for defeat in the streets. And the boys had been defeated.49