by David Nasaw
Anna Reed’s 1916 Seattle study did not include figures on the percentage of youth who sold papers. Extrapolating from her data, however, we find that 12 percent of sixth-graders, 11 percent of seventh-graders, and 14 percent of eighth-graders regularly sold on the streets. Here, too, the figures probably under-represent the percentage of boys selling, since they exclude those who worked occasionally or were not working the day of the survey and those who, for their own reasons, preferred not to answer in the affirmative when asked if they sold papers after school.23
Of the dozens of newsboy studies, these were the only ones that attempted to figure out the percentage of city boys who sold papers. The others were more concerned with collecting data to reinforce their contention that street trading led directly to juvenile delinquency. To provide themselves with evidence establishing the connection, child labor reformers scoured the juvenile courts, jails, asylums, houses of refuge, and reformatories for ex-newsies. They found what they were looking for. A 1911 memo from the secretary of the New York Child Labor Committee summarized the findings that would be used again and again to prove the connection between street work and juvenile crime:
“New York Juvenile Asylum (1911), 31% were newsboys.
Rochester, N.Y., Industrial School (1903), 75% were newsboys. (Buffalo boys only counted.)
Hart’s Island, N.Y.C. (1906), 63% were newsboys.
Catholic Protectory, N.Y.C. (1911), 50% were newsboys.
House of Refuge, at Randall’s Island, N.Y.C. (1911), 32% were newsboys.
Glen Mills, Pennsylvania (1910), 77% were newsboys. (Philadelphia boys only counted.)”24
The data were impressive, but they proved nothing. What the reformers either did not understand or conveniently ignored was that most city boys, delinquent or not, sold papers on the street. As Justice Harvey Baker of the Boston Juvenile Court reported to a New York Child Labor Committee investigator, it was “very difficult to determine what part, if any, the selling of papers plays in the delinquency of the boys who come before this court. Since most of the Jewish boys … sell papers, if we are to have any delinquent Jewish boys at all, we are bound to get a large number of newspaper sellers among them.”25 The judge’s remarks could have been generalized to other city boys. Since most had, at one time or another, sold papers, most of those in trouble would have had a history of paper-selling.
The children who hawked their papers on the street enjoyed their work. The excitement, the noise, the ever-changing aspects of street life provided a needed antidote to a day spent in a crowded, stuffy classroom. Watching children from his post as superintendent of the United Jewish Charities of Cincinnati and chief investigator of a study of newsboys in that city, Maurice Hexter found few children who preferred their hours in the classroom to those spent working on the street. “The school represents a task: street work is an enjoyment.”26
The street was the ideal workplace: it was outdoors, alive with activity, and away from the prying eyes of teachers and parents. When, in 1918, a University of Chicago graduate student asked 378 newsies if they enjoyed their work, 87 percent responded that they did. Other investigators, employing less scientific methodologies, came to the same conclusion.27
The children who worked after school were serious about earning money, but they were not ready to leave their childhood behind. Though they now had responsibilities—to their families and to themselves—these responsibilities did not prevent them from having fun whenever and wherever they could. “Children” could play all afternoon. “Adults” had to work all day. But eleven- to fifteen-year-olds, suspended somewhere in between, needed to squeeze their work and their play into the hours they had to themselves between the end of school and the moment they had to be home for dinner.
The gap between dismissal time at school—three o’clock—and working people’s quitting time—after five, generally—was to the street traders’ advantage. It gave them time to play before their customers hit the streets for the trip home. Unfortunately their play time, circumscribed as it was by work schedules, was too abbreviated to allow them to travel far from the streets where they would begin work later in the afternoon. Their “playgrounds” would necessarily have to be located near their workplaces.
The children who worked together came together to play before and after the rush hours. With an intensity that startled the investigators sent to observe their habits, they converted the public space they shared with adults into their “playgrounds” and proceeded to “kick the can,” match pennies, and play ball—oblivious to the adults who got in their way. In midtown Manhattan, groups of newsies played in the Times Square subway station that served as the distribution point of the afternoon papers they would soon have to sell. When they were bored with “rough-housing” underground, they “went upstairs to the Square, secured a couple of tin cans, and, in the midst of the heavy traffic of Broadway between 42nd and 43rd Street, engaged themselves in a mad and aimless competition in kicking the can.” An investigator from the New York Child Labor Committee looked on in amazement as the boys dashed after the can in and out of traffic, dodging automobiles and streetcars. “More than once did it seem that one or the other of them would be run over, and many a [street]car and automobile stopped in its own tracks in the middle of the block to avoid running over them. There were frequent collisions with people on the sidewalk, men and women, who might just as well not have been there for all the attention the boys paid them.”
Denver, 1910–20. “Newsboys Alley—Waiting for the paper to issue.” A photograph of the “alley” where the newsies congregated in the afternoons to await delivery of their papers. The smallest of the children were probably just hanging around to play with the bigger ones. The two men (right and center) were probably assistant circulation managers. (Mrs. Ben Lindsey Collection, LC)
The game continued until the boys’ attention was distracted by a wind-blown hat. Almost magically, they sensed its presence, halted their game, and turned “as one to pursue” it, knowing that whoever caught it was in line for a nice tip from the owner. The hat retrieved and returned, and the tip pocketed, the boys went back to the game, which continued for a time, interrupted only momentarily by the argument that broke out when the can hit Bull Head Gus in his bull head.28
In Birmingham, Alabama, according to a local observer, the newsies “congregate[d]” in front of the newspaper office downtown, where they spent the “hour or so before the papers came off the press … matching pennies, rolling dice, fighting, using foul and profane language and creating bedlam in general.”29
In Chicago, where most of the action was concentrated at the Loop, the boys who sold newspapers picked them up in the alleys behind the publishers’ offices. The newspapers did their best to provide the children with all the entertainment they needed—right there in the alleys. The closer the boys were kept to the presses, the sooner they could be sprung on the city with the latest editions. The American offered the newsies free lunches. The Daily News invited vendors to set up stands inside the alley. “Almost at the entrance is a small booth where ‘red-hots’ and ice cream are sold for a penny a-piece, and ‘pop’ for two cents a bottle. Just beyond this is a restaurant where cheap lunches are on sale. On one side of the alley is a man sitting under an umbrella selling ice cream from a freezer. Upstairs … is a penny lunch stand.… Just at the west entrance of the alley is a store where dime novels, dice, cards, cigarette papers and tobacco are kept on sale and prominently displayed in the window.” If the reformers who visited the alleys are to be believed (and in this they probably are), the boys spent their afternoons shooting craps, pitching pennies, trading dirty stories among themselves and with the older vagrants who took shelter there, and stuffing themselves with “trash.”30 The newsies had no time to waste. They had to squeeze a full day’s play into the brief interval that separated the end of school from the start of the rush hour.
The street traders lived a dual existence on the downtown streets of the city. The str
eet was their background, but it was their workplace as well. Though outsiders might have been confused by the sudden switch from child at play to little merchant at work, the children themselves knew precisely what they were doing. They played as long as they could and then, as the rush hour began in earnest, put away their dice, their red-hots, their baseballs, and their gossip to go to work. Like Superman emerging from the phone booth, industrious little hustlers appeared where carefree children had stood moments before. Alexander Fleisher, visiting a newspaper distribution center in Milwaukee, was amazed at the transformation worked by the arrival of the papers. “When the edition comes from the press, the boys line up before the grating and receive their papers and rush out.… The place takes on a businesslike air and everything goes with snap and order.”31
The children worked such miracles without the prompting of adults. The afternoon was too short to waste. Once their papers were ready and their customers about to hit the streets, they set to work. Schedule and pace were determined by the rhythm of the rush hour. As it began to build, they eased their way into their trading. By the time it had reached its peak, they were all business. Arms and legs in perpetual motion, they chased customers up and down the block, shouting their wares at the top of their lungs.
The children stationed themselves along the streets with the heaviest pedestrian traffic. Their own neighborhoods were crowded with people but not always the right kind. The newsies needed customers with change in their pockets. They did not have to travel far to find them. Streetcars and trolleys cost a nickel each way, a considerable sum for part-time child workers. Fortunately the residential areas where most of their families lived were not far from the downtown shopping, business, and entertainment districts. In New York City, the Lower East Side children traveled to the City Hall area or to the East River bridges to sell their wares; the Upper East Side and West Side children walked into midtown to do their peddling and newspaper hawking.
The children set up shop outside the department store exits, in front of the subway stations and elevated stops, and at the entrances to the bridges, ferry terminals, and train stations, wherever they could be sure of meeting up with homebound workers. In Mount Vernon, the boys crowded “about the [trolley] cars that deposit passengers at the corner of Fourth Avenue and First street.… Every passenger who alights is immediately besieged, and the boys tumble over each other in order to make the first sale.… A similar situation may be witnessed at the New Haven Railroad Station at the time the evening trains come in.”32 In Newark, the boys gathered at the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western depot and the Pennsylvania Railroad station. The Hoboken and Jersey City boys sold their wares outside the entrance to the “tubes” and the ferry station.33
In the smaller cities, where the business, entertainment, and shopping streets were concentrated in a circumscribed area, boys hawked their papers along the main business streets. In Yonkers, they gathered along Main Street and in Getty Square.34 In Rutland, Vermont, a “busy town of 15,000 persons” visited by Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee, the entire population of fifteen newsies worked the “principal streets from 4:30 to 6:30 every afternoon.”35
Hawking papers was fun, but it was also work that required physical exertion and no small amount of careful planning. Children who expected to earn decent money on the streets had to apply themselves to mastering the economics of their trade.
Newsies needed a “stake” to get started. Some borrowed money from their mothers, many got it from friends. Their “stake” bought them their first batch of papers. From that point on, they would hold back enough from each day’s sales to buy tomorrow’s papers from the circulation manager.
The newsies had to decide for themselves how many papers to purchase each afternoon and on Sundays. That was no easy task. Newspapers, unlike Spearmint gum, Hershey’s chocolate with almonds, pencils, and handkerchiefs, went bad if not sold immediately. Every paper purchased from the circulation manager had to be unloaded before the next edition came out.
If the children bought too many papers, they would have to swallow the loss on the unsold copies or stay out all night to sell them—and that became progressively more difficult as it got later and the street traffic thinned. If, on the other hand, they bought too few, they stood in danger of losing customers. Adults were creatures of habit and creatures in a hurry. They would buy from the same boy at the same spot as long as he guaranteed them the latest edition. If he ran short once, they would cross the street to another newsie—and probably continue to do so until he too ran short.36
Philadelphia, 1910. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)
The children could expect no help from the circulation managers they worked with. The newspapermen were entirely untrustworthy. They cared only about boosting circulation and to do so would regularly pressure the boys to buy more papers than they could sell.37 The newsies had to figure out what their probable sales would be—and buy just that amount of papers. To arrive at an accurate figure, they had to sift and sort a number of diverse factors: the time of day the papers were ready for distribution, the weather, the day of the week, the season of the year, the number of papers sold the day before, the number and importance of the sports scores, and, most crucially, the size and content of the headlines.
Afternoon circulations were never as constant as morning ones, which were more likely to be sold by subscription. While many readers considered the morning paper a necessity, few thought the same of the afternoon editions. Customers might forego the late papers altogether or, on big news days, buy several editions of several different papers. It was the headlines that made the difference.
The children lived for the great headlines, the red-faced, bold-type banner catastrophes that sold out editions. Murder, mayhem, riot, war, natural disaster: this was the stuff their dreams were made of. A half century after he had left the streets of Toledo, Ohio, Joe E. Brown, the comedian, still remembered vividly that “the biggest week I had in the newspaper business was the week following President McKinley’s assassination. He lived for a week after he was shot at the Exposition in Buffalo and throughout that week interest in the news was at fever pitch.” Brown sold more Toledo Bees and Blades than he had ever dreamed possible.38
Banner headlines, no matter how dramatic, did not sell themselves. It was the boys’ job to create the excitement that brought customers running. The children had no time for digesting the significance of the headlines, feeling sorrow at the tragedies, or mourning the dead. They devoted all their energy and ingenuity to communicating to the public in a language it could understand.
Harry Golden, the writer, sold papers on the Lower East Side and was on the streets the day Leo Frank was lynched for the murder of fourteen-year-old Mary Phagan. His first thought when he saw the headline of Frank’s death in red ink was that “the word ‘lynched’ would have little meaning for Jewish immigrants.” He translated it to “murder” and ran through the streets shouting the news.39
When the Titanic sank, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burst out in flames, or during the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War scare, and World War I, the newsies did their best to excite and incite the public into buying their papers. The children of the city were adept at converting disaster into profit. They played the newspapers’ game as well as the city editors and reporters did. Their news as they presented it was always current, always exciting, always provocative. They took what the headline writers gave them and added the appropriate emphasis and detail. When the news was dull, they cheated a bit. George Burns jokingly recalls making up catastrophes on slow news days. “Sometimes I’d have eight or nine papers left over, and to get rid of them I’d run through the streets hollering things like ‘Extra! Extra! Ferry Boat sinks in East River!!’ or ‘Big Gun Battle in Sharkey’s Restaurant!!’ One day when I was stuck with eleven papers I took off down the street yelling, ‘Extra! Extra! Huber’s Museum Goes Down in Flames!!!’ Well, I was selling newspapers like hotcakes, when all of
a sudden I felt a hand on my shoulder. It turned out to be a disgruntled customer. He held the paper in front of my face and said, ‘What are you pulling, kid? There’s nothing in this newspaper about a fire at Huber’s Museum!’
“For a split second I didn’t know what to say. Then I blurted out, ‘I know, that’s such an early edition the fire hasn’t started yet!’ and ran.”40
Burns was not the only newsie who embellished the news to sell more papers. During the Great War there was a virtual epidemic of false headlines. In Cleveland, according to a story in Editor and Publisher, city officials were so disturbed by the boys’ blatant distortion of the news that they threatened to prosecute those who shouted “false and amazing statements.… In extreme cases … offenders may be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.” In New York City, where it was claimed the boys hollered louder than anywhere else in the world, the problem was even greater. In October 1917, a New York Times article, headed “Police Move to Stop Noise of Newsboys: Public Annoyed by Shouting of War Calamities for Which There is No Basis,” reported that the police department had received scores of complaints about newsboys making up the news. “Knowing the people to be keenly interested in European events, the newsboys, to stimulate sales, often take advantage of popular concern by converting occurrences of no significance in Paris, London or Petrograd into stupendous disasters. This practice has unnerved men and women who have relatives in the service and to whom the war is of vital and personal concern. Not only in the city but in the suburbs newsboys have aroused neighborhoods late at night with their fictitious sensations.” Police Commissioner Woods promised to do his best “to stop this nuisance” but made it clear that there were no specific laws forbidding the practice. Only when the citizens took the time to swear out complaints against the newsboys would the problem be solved.41