by David Nasaw
The Boston newsies took their republic seriously, as Davis had hoped they would. Now that they had the power to make the laws and enforce them in their own courts, they would try to bring them into harmony with the demands of their trade.
To the delight of the adults, the boys’ first official acts were raising the minimum ages (for bootblacks from ten to twelve and newsies from ten to eleven) and lowering the curfew (from 10 P.M. to 8 P.M. for all street traders). The boys were not motivated in either of these decisions by the belief that children did not belong on the streets. They were simply trying to bring some order into their trade. Restricting the younger kids removed the competition of little ones who relied on cuteness and innocent looks to steal customers from established newsies. Cutting back the curfew reduced working hours without decreasing sales or profits. If adult customers knew that the curfew was going to be enforced and that they would not be able to find newsies or bootblacks on the streets after eight, they would get their papers and shines earlier in the evening, leaving the boys free to go home—or to the movies. When, a year and a half later, the boys realized that their eight o’clock curfew was too early on those special nights “like the night of the million dollar South End fire” when people stayed out late, they petitioned the School Committee for permission to extend the curfew for these occasions. The committee, impressed by their arguments, accepted their proposal.29
The cornerstone of the republic was the newsboys’ court. With its boy judges (none older than fourteen), its mock-judicial style, and the wisdom embodied in its judgments, the court made quite an impression. In an article for Outlook magazine, Lyman Beecher Stowe reported enthusiastically on his visit to the court. “On the bench sat two boy judges, one a Polish Jew, who was acting as presiding Judge, and the other a Negro.” The first case involved a twelve-year-old who had been caught jumping on and off streetcars. The judge reprimanded him, warning him that hopping cars was “not only dangerous … but there’s no money in it, because they was covered at the terminal by the big fellers an’ there isn’t hardly anybody gets in between there an’ this crossing. So you run the risk of gettin’ hurt and losin’ your license for nothin’.”30 (Translation: Most streetcar riders boarded downtown at the station where they bought their evening papers. The independent newsie, jumping on and off the cars, would consequently find few customers to sell to.)
Judgments such as this were accepted by the boys because they were so eminently reasonable. The judge was not moralizing or treating the accused as an irresponsible minor. He was not even saying that “hopping cars” was wrong because it was dangerous. He was merely pointing out that the potential profit involved in hopping this particular streetcar was not worth the risk of bodily injury.
Boston. Downtown newsies jumped on and off streetcars like this one, selling their papers in the aisle, then moving on to other cars full of potential customers. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)
The next case was that of a boy charged with illegally lending his badge. “The mother of the boy who had lent the badge appeared and explained that they did not need the money which the boy made, and that she and his father would much rather he would not sell papers. She urged the Court to revoke his license.
“The young Judges then questioned the boy. If the family did not need the money, why did he want to sell papers? He wanted to earn some pocket money. Didn’t his parents give him any spending money? They never had. At this point the Court asked the mother whether she was able and willing to give the boy some spending money. She said she was, and she finally agreed to give the boy 20¢ a week, provided he would give up selling papers. The boy agreed, and the Court sealed the bargain by canceling the license.”31
Here too, the court, fully cognizant of the child’s point of view, reached a solution to the problem acceptable to both parties. Not all cases were settled as easily as these and not all judgments rendered with as much common sense and as little moralizing. Still, the court provided its adult observers with a changed perspective on the boys’ capacities for self-government. The boys behaved with a maturity and dignity befitting their situation. They displayed respect for one another and for the law which, in this courtroom at least, they were committed to upholding.
Not least among the wonders of the court were its judges, all of whom were newsies elected by their peers. An article in Survey magazine for December 2, 1911, entitled “Horatio Alger, Then and Now,” described the 1911 election for new judges. The election assembly was called to order by sixteen-year-old Judge Harry Hornstein, “one of the original newsboys court judges,” who exhorted the newsies to see “the best boys win out, no matter what their color or religion or school is.” The five candidates presented their positions, the votes were taken and counted, and Michael Berman, Abe Resnick, and Henry Brown were duly elected. Brown was, the article reported, “a colored boy from Dorchester.”32
When Lyman Beecher Stowe visited the newsboys’ court, he carefully observed this black judge (or perhaps another) deferring to his Polish Jewish colleague. While the latter was active in every stage of the proceedings, the black judge sat quietly on the bench saying little, if anything. At the conclusion of the session, Stowe approached the white judge to ask why the “colored judge appear[ed] to take so little part. … ‘Oh [the boy answered wistfully] he does his share all right, only he kinder lies low because, you see, some people don’t like niggers.’ ” Stowe, impressed and moved by the courage and tolerance of the boys who, despite the racism rampant in their community, had seen fit to elect a black judge, took this as one more sign of the boys’ capacity for self-government. He concluded his article with the plea that other cities follow the Boston example.33
Stowe was going to be disappointed. Though, according to Philip Davis, cities “from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon” inquired about the Boston system, only Birmingham (Alabama) and Milwaukee “adopted [it] in whole or in part.”
It was in Milwaukee that the system got its truest test. The Milwaukee Newsboys’ Republic, established in 1912, was modeled on the Boston one. The boys elected their own congressmen, policemen, and judges; they wrote their own laws and held their own newsboys’ court. According to the published reports, the Milwaukee experiment proved as successful as the Boston original. Taxpayer money was saved as cases were shifted from the Juvenile Court to the newsboys’ court, and the street trader laws, which had been “practically useless” because unenforceable, were rescued from oblivion.34
Though the boys no doubt accepted and supported the republic because it gave them the power to regulate their own trade, the adult reformers who celebrated the experiment in Milwaukee were more impressed by the “splendid opportunity” it furnished “for the training of future citizens.” According to Outlook, the republic “bids fair to make for law and order among the boys who have always constituted one of the worst problems of the social workers.… It cannot fail to be a splendid instrument for the making of future citizens of the United States. When one considers the cosmopolitan character of Milwaukee’s population, this little democracy, with its American Chief Justice, its German President, and its Russian-Jew Vice-President, becomes an important agent for the assimilation of our second and third generations of foreigners.”35
Common sense and practical success did not lead to longevity or expansion for these experiments in self-government. Philip Davis and Perry Powell, his counterpart in Milwaukee, might have trusted the children to regulate their own trade with justice, efficiency, and wisdom. But these were exceptional men. Elsewhere (and in Boston after Davis’s retirement), it was the accepted wisdom that the street traders were too young, too foreign, and too common to be given any responsibility at all. The self-government plans foundered because they gave the children precisely what most adults, including the reformers, were convinced they should not have: a degree of autonomy on the streets. The newsboys’ republics might have succeeded in putting back into operation long-disregarded ordinances and statutes, but they had accompl
ished this at a price most reformers were not willing to pay. When given the choice, most preferred allowing the laws to remain unenforced to giving the children the responsibility for managing their own affairs.
The Boston Newsboys’ Republic survived only as long as Philip Davis remained Superintendent of Licensed Minors. His successor, on taking office, disestablished the republic and replaced the court’s newsie judges with an appointed adult. As might have been expected, the boys refused to accept the new superintendent’s authority. Instead of cooperating to enforce the laws, as they had done under their republic, they pulled together to evade his futile attempts to police the streets by himself. According to one investigator, Davis’s successor was quickly and easily outwitted by the children he was supposed to be supervising. “The boys know him too well and give warning up and down the line as soon as he comes in sight.” Madeleine Appel, in her own informal canvas of the busier Boston districts, found that less than one half of the boys were properly licensed. The majority hawked their papers in open violation of the laws.36
Boston, January 23, 1917, 4 P.M. “Group of newsies selling in front of South Station. Four of them said they were eleven years old. Saw no badges in evidence.” (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)
In the long run, it was those adults who believed in the sanctity of the laws who suffered the most from the failure of the experiments to take root. Without the children’s cooperation, the street trader laws were unenforceable—and the children knew it. Try as they might, the reformers could not solve the problem. They rewrote the laws, shifting responsibility for enforcement from police to school officials and back again. It made little difference. The children had learned from experience that as long as they cooperated to regulate their own trade and evade laws they considered unreasonable there was little the officials could do. The children were too many, and the strength of their informal ties too strong, for the adults to succeed in regulating their activities on the street.
* Boston has in 1892 passed the first city ordinance requiring newsies to apply for and wear badges when selling on the streets. By 1915, eleven states and several municipalities had similar legislation.21
† As Davis himself later admitted, his idea was not original, but modeled on the George Junior Republic in upstate New York and the Newsboys’ Association in Toledo, Ohio.
Working Together
The reformers could not help worrying about the street traders. How, they wondered, could eleven- to fifteen-year-olds care for themselves away from home, school, and the block? What the adults failed to understand was that the children who left school and home to work downtown were not abandoned like orphans to the storm. They entered the life of an active, organized community with its own structures of authority, law, and order. The streets were not jungles and the children were not savages.
The children, as we have seen, took care of one another at play on the block. They continued the practice on the downtown streets of the city where they worked every afternoon. Big kids watched after smaller ones, experienced hustlers taught newcomers the rules of the game, streetwise veterans took the rookies under their protection. As an editorial writer in the trade journal Editor and Publisher observed of the newsies, “To the credit of the bigger lads be it said, the younger boys, if they behave decently and honorably are actually pushed in and helped by the elder.”1
Instead of bullying or beating up the little ones, the older hustlers entered into cooperative business relationships with them. The newsies had their own apprenticeship system. Children starting out on the streets could, if they chose—and many did—work as “strikers” for older boys. In return for a commission of up to 50 percent, the big boys provided the strikers with papers to hawk, a place to sell, and protection when necessary. While the big boys expanded their coverage and their profits, the younger ones were spared the hassle of dealing with circulation managers, paying cash in advance for their papers, and having to worry about those they could not sell.2
The older children helped out the younger ones as a matter of course and because it was good for business. It was the accepted wisdom on the streets that customers would rather buy from a cute young kid than an adolescent who needed a shave. The little ones were also better salesmen. While the older boys were too mature and dignified to run up and down the streets shouting their wares, “the youngster,” according to Maurice Hexter in Cincinnati, “takes keen delight in making his voice resound because he just ‘loves to holler’ and looks upon salesmanship as a game.”3
Though self-interest was no doubt behind much of the elder boys’ cooperation with the rookies, there were many instances where the big ones had nothing to gain from helping out but helped out nonetheless. Harry Bremer, an investigator for the National Child Labor Committee, discovered on a Saturday night visit to Jersey City that the younger children who sold the Sunday World on Saturday evenings got their papers from the older newsies, who routinely went “over to the World Building in New York … to bring back a supply for all.” The same informal arrangement held among the Elizabeth, New Jersey, newsies. “The older boys go in to New York City about four o’clock Sunday morning and bring papers out” for themselves and the younger boys to sell.4
There was nothing in the least extraordinary about such cooperative relationships. Children of different ages were quite accustomed to working and playing together on the streets. Today, when children are more likely to accept the propriety of strict age grading carried over from the classroom, fifth-graders play only with fifth-graders, fourth-graders with fourth-graders. At the turn of the century, such age segregation made little sense. Though most of the boys, as David Macleod has observed, probably preferred playing with children no more than three years younger than they were,5 children regularly worked and played on the streets with their siblings and with their siblings’ friends and classmates. The arrangement benefited everyone. Older street traders got the use of younger brothers and sisters as unpaid assistants, the little ones got to stay out on the streets with their older brothers and sisters, and parents rested easier knowing that the older children were watching over the younger.
A good many of the tiniest street traders—who appeared to be alone—were in fact working with older siblings. A concerned citizen who lived on Madison Avenue in New York City contacted the Charity Organization Society in 1906 to report a boy no more than six years old who she claimed was selling papers in all sorts of weather on the street corner. The society, a reform group which investigated such cases, sent out a special “visitor,” who promptly reported back that the child in question was neither abandoned nor orphaned nor the victim of parental exploitation. He was simply helping out his big brothers, who owned the corner newsstand.6 In Chicago, another concerned citizen, this one a lawyer, made a similar request to the Illinois Humane Society. Touched by the plight of a “girl about eight years old who has only one leg [and] sells papers at 18th Street and Wabash,” the lawyer informed the society that he had “on evenings bought all of her papers and at other times [given] to her 20¢, 30¢, and 50¢.” He asked the Humane Society to find out if the girl were indeed a worthy recipient of charity. The investigator sent out on the case never did find the little girl; but he did track down her mother, who admitted readily that the girl sold papers on the street, but always in the company of her brother. Surely, the mother asked the investigator, there could be nothing wrong with a little girl helping out her big brother. As the investigator departed, the mother asked that he please see that the gentleman who had been leaving the large tips was thanked for his kindness.7
Not all family groupings were as innocent as these. The good samaritans who worried about the little ones alone on the streets never seemed to notice their big brothers—for a very good reason. The big boys stayed out of sight so that the little ones would appear to be by themselves. Living tableaux were artfully constructed to elicit sympathy, sales, and tips from well-meaning customers. Tiny, innocent-looking children properly presented were wor
th their weight in pennies. The well-tutored “waif,” standing alone on a corner meekly holding out some item for sale, was hard to resist. Only the trained observer would look for the older sibling across the street.
William Hard, a Chicago journalist, followed ‘Jelly,’ an Italian newsboy, one Saturday night on the way to the elevated railway station to meet his ten-year-old sister. “She had dressed herself for the part. From her ragged and scanty wardrobe she had chosen her most ragged and her scantiest clothes. Accompanied by his sister, ‘Jelly’ then went to a flowershop and bought a bundle of carnations at closing prices. With these carnations he took his sister to the entrance of the Grand Opera House. There she sold the whole bundle to the people coming from the performance. Her appearance was picturesque and pitiful.… As soon as the flowers were sold and the people had gone away, ‘Jelly’ took his sister back to the elevated station. There he counted the money she had made and put it in his pocket. He then handed her out a nickel for carfare and, in addition, a supplementary nickel for herself.”8
The children of the street cooperated with one another for purposes other than deceiving potential adult customers. They worked together to regulate their trade and protect their profits from the employers, suppliers, circulation managers, and publishers, who were interested in soaking the last ounce of profit from their labor. The eleven- to fifteen-year-olds who worked every afternoon on the downtown streets of the city did not have to read Locke or Rousseau to understand that, without some form of “social contract,” life on the streets would be pure hell. Each downtown district had only a finite number of busy intersections, streetcar stops, train stations, and good “corners.” Had all the children battled daily for the few key spots, none would have had time or energy left to sell their wares.