Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  They had done their best but lost the battle and the war. Even had their strike been 100 percent effective, it would not have brought Hearst to the bargaining table. He and the other publishers did not need the newsies, as they had in the past. There were other outlets for their papers. The eleven- to fifteen-year-olds were helpful but no longer necessary in the distribution process.

  The loss of the strike weapon was symbolic of the street traders’ loss of power and status. While few had ever engaged in strikes, they knew that such actions had occurred in the past or elsewhere and could, if necessary, be employed where they worked. The possibility of unionizing and striking, even if never called on, protected their interests and their self-image. Children whimpered for their rights; adults struck or threatened to strike to protect theirs. Without the strike weapon, the street traders had no mechanism for forcing the adults they worked with to treat them as business associates rather than children. They were losing their special place on the streets and their special status as little merchants.

  * The progress of the strike was reported in the New York Times, Daily Tribune, Sun, Herald, Mirror, People (the Socialist Labor Party weekly), and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, none of which had raised their prices and none of which were struck. As might have been expected, these papers, especially the Sun, had a field day, cheering the boys on in what they described as a mock-epic struggle of dirty-faced Davids against the twin Goliaths.

  † The only newsboys’ union to survive the strike that had precipitated its organization was the Boston Newsboys’ Union.

  End of an Era

  The events of 1918–19 signal the close of an era in the history of urban childhood. Children would continue to work in the city but never again would they occupy the place the street traders had. Future child laborers would not be granted the same degree of autonomy and freedom at work on the streets. The adults they worked with would treat them as children, nothing more, nothing less.

  The reign of the street traders was a brief one, no more than a moment in the history of childhood and the history of the city. By the 1920s the children of the city had been pushed to the side by the automobile, which cut off their play and work space, by tougher and better-enforced child labor laws, and by adults who moved into the trades they had once monopolized.

  The substitution of adults for children was a gradual one. From the 1890s on, year by year, the downtown business, entertainment, and shopping districts brought more and more people into the city. Improved interurban and suburban transportation systems made the commute simpler than ever, better street lighting encouraged people to stay out later, and department stores, restaurants, theaters, and movie palaces gave them more to do. Sidewalks on the busier streets became as congested as the inner rooms of tenement house flats. As pedestrian traffic increased, so did business for street traders. The more business, the more profits, the more adults.

  The first of the street trades to be taken over was the shoeshine business. Greek and Italian immigrant adults joined the children who blacked boots in the central business districts. With little money and less fanfare, they erected shoeshine stands on the streets, in saloons and railroad terminals, and on the ferries to greet the burgeoning armies of white-collar workers in need of shiny shoes. Within only a few years, the adult bootblack barons had succeeded in cornering the market on downtown shines. According to a 1903 confidential report to the New York Child Labor Committee, “The business of blacking boots has become so concentrated and systematized that it can now be described only as an industry.”1

  In New York City, Italian immigrants controlled the new “industry.” Elsewhere, according to the 1908 Immigration Commission, the major force was a group of Greek immigrants who had built parlors in cities across the nation and imported young boys to work in them. The imported Greek shineboys had little in common with the other street traders. They worked from six in the morning until nine or ten at night, slept in overcrowded, underventilated rooms rented by their padrones, and survived—day after day—on bread and olives or cheese. For this they received, in addition to their room and board (and an initial sum paid to their parents) an average of $120 to $180 a year. Any tips collected went directly to the padrone.2

  The child labor reformers, incensed—and rightly—by the situation, did what they could to stop the importation or, at the very least, free the boys from what amounted to indentured servitude. They were stymied at every turn by the boys’ reluctance to testify against their padrones. By American standards, the boys were paid miserably and treated worse. By Greek standards, their food, clothing, and shelter were adequate; their pay, outstanding. Some of the imported boys, like Nicholas Gerros of Cincinnati, even got the chance to go to night school. Had they been given the opportunity to renounce their contracts and return to Greece, few would have accepted. No matter how bad conditions were, they lived better than they had in the Greek slums they’d left behind.3

  Throughout the country, bootblack parlors and stands—with or without imported boys from the Old World—were forcing independent child bootblacks out of the business. As Philip Davis reported from Boston in 1915, “The old-fashioned bootblack who knocks about the streets with his shine-box over his shoulder in quest of trade is gradually being eliminated.”4 In New York City, as we have already seen, the boys who shined on the ferries worked for wages. Child labor investigators in Tennessee and North Carolina found that most black boys who shined shoes after school and during weekends and holidays worked for adults who owned and operated the downtown parlors. The few who continued to work on their own were reduced to clustering outside saloons and railroad terminals, literally begging for shines. In Wilmington, North Carolina, one investigator reported finding “little colored boys … gathering in front of the station entrance with their bootblack boxes and crying, ‘Throw us some money, boss, and watch us scramble for it.’ ”5

  A southern city, 1901. A bootblack identified only as being from a southern city. (Detroit Photographic Company, LC)

  Boys who worked on their own were not going to lure customers from the parlors—and they knew it. Most stayed away from the downtown sections of the city, except on holiday eves, Saturday nights, and Friday afternoons in the Jewish districts, when everyone on the streets appeared to be in the market for a shine. Many independent bootblacks worked only in locations scorned by adults. Where there were no parlors in sight, they had a fair chance of getting enough shines to make it worth their while. In New York City, shineboys could be found offering cut-rate two-cent shines to the bums in the Bowery. In Chicago, the boys clustered with their wooden boxes at Madison and Halsted—“Hobo land.” Anthony Sorrentino, who shined shoes on the weekends, worked the wholesale fruit and vegetable markets on Saturday afternoons. On Sundays he covered “the cheap hotels and lodging houses, cat houses, and taverns on West Madison Sreet.”6

  The children, if we can believe the testimony of two of them, contributed to their own decline and fall. As Harpo Marx notes in his autobiography, shining shoes was hard work. It also required some investment of capital. Joe E. Brown, the future comedian, unable to invest the proper amount, had to run away from his first customer. He was ashamed to admit that he owned only a can of black polish and could not shine tan shoes. George Burns was as deficient, though not nearly as sensitive, a bootblack. With the profits earned by selling newspapers, he recalls, “I bought a can of polish for a nickel and got myself a little wooden box that I hung on a strap over my shoulder. I’d walk along the street selling shines for either two or three cents. For three cents I’d use a little polish, for two cents I’d just spit and rub. All I had was black polish, so if a customer had brown shoes, I’d sell him a newspaper.”7

  New York City, 1910. “While the boss exchanges gossip with a neighbor, this bootblack keeps his mind on the job.” This Lewis Hine photograph shows one of the new “stands” that put the independent shineboys out of business or forced them to become employees of the stand owners. (Lewis Hine Collection,
NCLC)

  The demise of the errand boys and messengers is told in much less detail. They fell victim to the telephone, the most efficient and, after the introduction of message-unit pricing, the cheapest way for businesses, small and large, to communicate with their customers.

  In most city neighborhoods, the candy stores, grocers, and druggists were the first to get phones. The whole neighborhood wrote down the phone numbers and used them as their own. When calls came in, kids were roused and sent out to bring back the person wanted on the phone. As the number of phones—business and residential—increased in the first decades of the new century, the need for children to bring people to phones or carry messages from business to business or business to home decreased. Many errand boys and part-time messengers were automated right off the streets.8

  Of all the city’s street traders, the newsies held their place on the streets the longest, until they too fell prey to adult competition. The children could not outbid adults for the better street locations; they could not raise the money to get licenses or build permanent enclosed stands; they could not sell morning or early afternoon papers while school was still in session; they could not even guarantee their customers dry papers when it was raining or snowing.

  The independent child hustlers were squeezed out of business from two directions: by the adult dealers at their weather-proofed, all-day newsstands and by the new breed of professional circulation managers called into existence to extend circulation and bring order to the one area in the business that had lagged behind the others in efficiency and organization.

  By the second decade of the new century, the era of extras by the score and widely fluctuating circulations had passed into history. Advertisers demanded regularity in the circulation of evening as well as morning papers. They were unwilling to take chances—as the newsies had to—on sudden tragedies boosting circulation. They wanted guarantees that the editions in which they advertised would reach a certain minimum number of customers—day after day after day.

  The easiest way to build stable circulations was to bind customers to buy by the week or month instead of on the spur of the moment. Home delivery to subscribers guaranteed circulation managers—and advertisers—a secure circulation base. As C. M. Schofeld of the Worcester (Massachusetts) Gazette informed his fellow circulation managers at their annual convention in 1917, “Advertisers Invariably Prefer Home Delivered Newspapers to Street Sales: A publisher wants home delivered circulation for several reasons. A street sale paper is uncertain, as it depends on the weather, the number of people on the street, and the boys on the street corners.” Home delivery, on the contrary, was as regular as clockwork. Customers paid for their papers by subscription and had them delivered daily to their front stoops, regardless of the weather, the day of the year, or the size of the headlines.9

  The circulation managers went to work to change the balance between street sales and subscriptions. They offered coupons, contests, and special inducements to subscribers. They divided the metropolitan areas into districts and the districts into delivery routes. Motorized trucks replaced horsedrawn wagons and pushcarts. Improved distribution systems, more efficient mailing rooms, and better wire-tying machines enabled them to get the late editions to the outlying districts before the city boys were even home from school.10

  The expansion of home delivery cut into street sales. Morning papers had always been delivered to the homes, but evening papers had been exclusively the preserve of the newsies and the adult dealers. Now, as afternoon paper sales began to shift from the streets to home delivery, the hustlers found themselves with fewer and fewer customers—and this at a time when they were already suffering from the competition of adult newsstand owners.

  Though children would continue to hawk papers on city streets through the 1920s and 1930s, and on into the middle decades of the century, the balance between street hustlers and residential carriers would shift dramatically. The working-class city kids who had once been the bulwark of the afternoon sales force were reduced to a distinct minority by circulation managers who sought out a “better class” of boys to deliver subscribers’ papers to the front porch.

  Any child with the money to buy papers could hawk them on the streets. Carriers had to meet specific requirements—and agree to abide by a set code of laws—before they were given routes. In St. Paul, Minnesota, the carriers for a major daily were required “to pay for their papers one month in advance and in addition deposit, upon taking charge of their routes, a sum of money equivalent to two weeks’ paper bill.” In Lincoln, Illinois, the Courier-Herald hired only boys “who have telephones in their homes and own bicycles.” Such requirements limited and sanitized the carrier force. In Seattle, Anna Reed noted that the “carriers,” unlike the street hustlers, were seldom foreign-born” and almost never of southern European birth.” In Yonkers, Margaret Beard found that while over one third of the carriers were “American,” with another 25 percent Irish, English, or Scotch, only 5 percent of the street hustlers were American and only 5 percent more Welsh or Scottish. The differences were as significant in their fathers’ occupations: the carriers’ fathers were more than twice as likely as the street sellers’ to be store owners, factory bosses, white-collar workers, or professionals.”11

  The work of the carriers had little in common with that of the street traders. Though the newspaper publishers made much of the training they gave their boys, the carriers learned less on their routes than the street traders did on their corners. As employees—employees who were children and treated as such—they were required to follow adult orders from the moment they got their routes until they outgrew them. They were told what to wear, how to ride their bicycles, what to say to their customers, when to pick up their papers, how to fold them, and where to put them. At the Indianapolis News, which William Scott, author of Scientific Circulation Management, described as the paper with the best circulation department in the nation, there were no less than twenty-one different categories of rules governing the boys’ behavior. As Scott put it, “The outstanding fact about the … rules is the absolute control, amounting to a ‘benevolent despotism’ exercised by The News over its distributing force.”12

  Though eclipsed in numbers and importance by adults and home-delivery carriers, the street hustlers did not disappear from the city’s streets. City boys, fifteen, sixteen, and older, continued to hawk their papers on the streets, though never—after 1920—in the same numbers or with the same profitability or degree of freedom as earlier in the century. As Harry Shulman of the New York Child Labor Committee observed in 1931, the importance of the boys to the newspapers lay not in “the actual number of copies they [sold], which is an inconsequential drop in the circulation bucket, but [in] the value which accrues from having these newspapers thrust before the public eye with a fever of energy which only youngsters are willing to display. The child news-seller is omnipresent; in restaurants, at theatres, movies, prizefights, on the street, in subway and elevated trains.… He is good indirect advertising and for that reason his use is apparently not discouraged by tabloid newspaper publishers.”13

  Here stands the final epitaph to the newsies and their fellow street traders. The children who had once rocked the Hearst and Pulitzer empires were now prized by the publishers for their value as “good indirect advertising.” How the mighty had fallen.

  Epilogue

  The early twentieth-century city was a city of strangers. Most of its inhabitants had been born or raised elsewhere. Only the children were native to the city—with no memory, no longing, no historic commitment to another land, another way of life.

  The children of the city grew up with the city and with the century. They were present when the nation won its “splendid little war” with Spain and built its empire. They observed the first automobiles chugging through the streets. They played in the freshly dug tunnels and then rode the subways. They window-shopped in the department stores and joined the crowds in the downtown entertainment districts n
ow glowing with electric lights. They were there when the movies were born and watched as that small cottage industry became big business, its studios transported from New Jersey to Hollywood, its theaters transformed from storefront nickelodeons to lavish movie palaces.

  The streets that they grew up on were self-contained environments, separate from those of home and parents. Children who stayed at school and work until dinnertime grew up regarding home as the place they left in the morning and returned to at night: it was not nor could it be the center of their existence. Work, money, and the fun that money bought were located on the streets of the city.

  The boys who found their fun outside the home would as adults continue to seek their amusements elsewhere. The girls who had spent their early years working inside as little mothers would, in a similar fashion, continue to spend more time at home. There was nothing new in this. For generations previously, workingmen had left home and family for the saloon while the women had found their companionship closer to home. What was new to the twentieth-century city was the quality, quantity, and pull of the amusements that drew both boys and girls into the streets. Though they would not have occasion, in childhood or adult life, to share equally in the life of the city, both boys and girls would grow up believing there was nothing wrong or selfish or irresponsible or immoral about using one’s earnings to have fun or seeking that fun outside the bosom of the family. Families that generations before might have worked, played, worshiped, and celebrated together did less of this in the new century. Aside from a small but vocal army of mid-century moralizers prattling about the joys and virtues of “togetherness,” no one seemed to mind. Leisure time was too important to be wasted or sacrificed to the abstract virtues of family solidarity.