August 31, 2009 • 13 mins
At the turn of the century, New York paperboys formed the backbone of the city's paper distribution network. When publishers increased the cost of wholesale papers in 1899, the newsboys went on strike. Learn more in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert, joined by Sarah Dowdy. Okay, Sarah, Hi Katie.
So I've been trying to get you all morning to
agree to do this podcast in dialect, which you won't. Sorry,
(00:26):
but you have to at least throw in something. I
can read some quotes in a semi dialect about that. Okay,
that's that's good enough. Today we're doing The Newsboys Strike
of eight nine, as in news Ees the musical, but
the real story, not the Disney one. So. Newspapers have
been around for a while, obviously, but they really started
(00:46):
picking up speed at the beginning of the nineteenth century
when prices went way down and consequently circulation goes up
um And by the mid nineteenth century there were about
four hundred dailies and three thousand weeklies in the US.
But there were two big ones. Two big ones, the
New York World owned by Joseph Pilitzer and the New
York Journal owned by William Randolph Hurst, the two big
(01:10):
guys in the newspaper publishing business. Yeah, and the competition
between these two guys gets so intense that they start
sensationalizing their stories, just making up stuff. Basically, libel is
not a big deal at the time, but this is
the start of yellow journalism, which actually got its name
from one of the cartoon characters in the paper. Right.
(01:33):
And at the time, Pulitzer and Hurst were busy trying
to sabotage one another by stealing away each other's writers
and cartoonists. And one cartoonist, Richard Outcohol I'm sorry, I
don't know how to say his name, came up with
the character of the yellow Kid, and he appeared in
one newspaper which was in color, and people loved him,
and so of course the other publisher promptly stole him away,
(01:55):
and the Yellow Kid became the emblem of yellow journalism. Really,
but these two papers just go at each other, and
they would also kind of create stories of their own
or blow stories that did exist out of proportion. They
essentially drive the United States into war with Spain, which
is pretty unbelievable if you think about it, that the
(02:16):
Spanish American War is largely the responsibility of two newspaper publishers.
Such as the power of the media, it's good for
sales apparently to do not start a war on the podcast.
But New York City was also home of the newsboys,
it was, and the first one was probably about eighteen
(02:37):
thirty three, ten year old, selling copies of the New
York Sun on the street. And this is different because
before then, newspapers used to be sold in stores or
sold through subscription. So you'd have newsboys or paper boys
who would you know, just like today, come to your house,
deliver your paper. That's the subscription that's already existing. Now,
(03:00):
the newsies were out on the street hawking these things well,
and they bought them wholesale. They weren't working for say,
the New York Journal of the New York World. They
had to buy a big bundle of them, like a
hundred um for fifty cents, and they wouldn't the papers
wouldn't buy back the unsold papers, so huge risks. You
(03:22):
had to sell one hundred or you were out. And
most of these boys were really poor, from you know, tenement.
Their little kids too, someone as young as about six
years old. Six of the youngest one I saw. So
imagine that, you know, you have a hundred papers that
you're trying to sell. You're six years old you you're
going to stay out as late as you can until
(03:42):
the next paper comes out, basically trying to sell what
you have to to make your profit. When I like
that if they couldn't sell them, they would just make
up headlines and start, you know, yelling about like a
bridge collapsing, extracts to read all about the bridge that
never happened. It's like, oh um a twenty. So people
(04:03):
would buy the papers. But Hurst and Pulitzer saw their
profits go down in the summer of eighty, which is
after the Spanish American War, which they had seen their
profits go up, right, so it's only natural that they
would go down, But they decided to take advantage of it,
and they didn't want to charge their customers any more
money because they didn't think they'd go for it. So
(04:24):
instead they came up with the crafty plan to make
the new seas pay instead. So a hundred papers were
now sixty cents instead of fifty cents and a dime
is a huge difference in eighteen ninety nine for a
poor lone newsboy. Yeah, so the boys go on strike
demanding that these two publishing giants lower their prices back
(04:47):
to fifty cents, and that was their only real demand.
They didn't have anything about working hours or buying back
the papers or anything. They just wanted things to go
back to where they were, which wasn't even that great,
so it's not an unreasonable request. But New York was
kind of in the middle of a strike fever at
this time. The streetcar employees were striking, the freight handlers,
(05:08):
on the railroad peers, the telegraph messenger boys. So everybody
was worked up about better conditions or rights or whatnot.
But it didn't work for some of them, like the
messenger boys, because they didn't have effective leadership. It was just,
you know, kind of a bunch of boys yelling about
stuff and throwing some stones and then it ended. But
(05:30):
that's not what happened with the news. The news boys
had a little kid, Blink, a s kid who was
blind in one eye, who was basically their leadership, and
the boys refused to sell papers. But not only did
they refuse to sell, they harassed all the scabs and
for the newsstands that continued to sell the journal in
(05:53):
the world, they would mob them and steal the papers
and rip them up. And as Pulitzer and Hurst started
to fight back and hire these big burly guys to
sell papers in front of the publishing houses. The boys
even would go after them, create huge mobs to go up.
(06:15):
Grown go up against grown men. And it doesn't sound
that scary, like, you know, six year olds coming up
like musty with rocks. But most of them weren't. They
were a little bit older, like ten or eleven, and
they had all grown up in the streets and they
were pretty tough kids, and we were not going to
stand for it. Still, you get there's one episode at
Fort Street in Vanderbilt with fifty strikers going against some
(06:37):
of these bigoons of pulitzer and hursts. Another with three
hundred strikers. So even if they're six years old or so,
a lot and have you ever been attacked by a
small child, And they I think even took papers out
of citizens hands. Who want Yeah, this one episode with
(06:59):
the three hundreds strikers, they see five men selling, they
jumped them and scattered the papers all over the street,
and then these people start picking them up and reading
the kind of chief Scates sticking two papers up off
the ground, and the newsies grabbed the papers out of
their hand and rip them up and they had publicized
their strike pretty well. They put up signs everywhere. I
(07:21):
was saying one of them, the reds have killed a guy.
What sells the extras, so seriously, don't buy. And they
were explaining to people what the problem was. We did
like their little their code of ethics. Yeah, they didn't
go after the older women who sold papers. Uh, these
were a lot of the women weren't joining the strike.
(07:43):
It was kind of a youth movement, I guess, And
they didn't attack them. And kid Blink even said that
he didn't like it. He wished that they wouldn't sell
the journal in the world, but he wasn't going to
go after a woman. He was quit in the paper
as saying, a feller can't soak a lady. Is Katie's
count dialect? It's not real dialect, y'all? Another time would
(08:05):
common Sarah to do it. But they did have some
support they did. They the Carlem Newsboys actually organized into
a union and the several of the boroughs sent delegates
to a new zy board. Basically, they also got some
support from the News Dealers and Stationers Association and x
(08:28):
Assemblyman Philip Whiz. They told them now keep up the fight,
don't violate the law, don't use dynamite, but stick together
and you will win. I'm sure if it was a provocation, No,
no dynamite. The other papers were thrilled that their journal
in the world, we're going against each other like this
because they were having to sell more. And actually it's
(08:50):
paid off because Katie and I did a lot of
our research through the New York Times for the Night,
which has archives from where they're offering this the strike story,
because the actual papers couldn't really or wouldn't, and the
newspaper accounts are really weird. We both had a really
good time reading them this morning. That's why we keep
talking about dialect because they printed the kids like that.
(09:14):
They actually all the quotes are written in dialects. So
instead of certainly they say sweetenly meeting it like really,
but that's what they did, and it's it's kind of patronizing,
like they didn't take them seriously and wanted to paint
them and this in this sort of way, but the
other side of ways kind of Dickenzie. I doubt a
style permits right now, but it does go along with
(09:37):
this sensationalism. Tootect. Yeah, but a lot of kids during
a strike are going hungry because a lot of them
are homeless and some of them work to support their
own families. So all this time they're not making those
nickels and dimes. Is a big deal, and it's going
(09:58):
on for a while. The journal in world keep on
saying that they're doing fun, they're not having any problems,
but they really are hurting. Their sales go down sixty percent,
and they're getting to the point where they've got to
break some kind of deal with the news sees, and
so they come to an agreement that price for that
(10:18):
stack of a hundred papers is still going to be
sixty cents. They're not going to bring it back down
to fifty, but they will take back on sold papers
for refund. And that kind of leads into child labor
concerns because if they can return these papers, and that
might mean they don't have to stay up till past midnight,
a six year old selling papers. Yeah, it kind of
(10:40):
gives you the option to give up at the end
of the day you're not selling if the stories aren't good,
to just cut your losses. And after the strike, people
did start meeting to find out what the plight of
the news hees was and realized how young some of
these kids were and how dangerous some of the conditions were.
They were jumping trolley cars to get around, and many
(11:02):
of them lost limbs that way, and they were poor,
and they were staying up too late, and there was
no effort at all to regulate any of it now
and some of the suggestions at the time this doesn't
sound very progressive nowadays, but one was to not allow
boys under ten on the street after nine pm, or
to get parental consent from all the boys parents. Uh.
(11:27):
And then a suggestion that sounds pretty good actually, that
they should all be badged and uniformed. Yeah, so if
you think it would make it a little safer. So
a lot of them used to go around and selling
at places like saloons and would say that, you know,
drunk men said bad things to them, but they would
also tip them well, so that's where they went. But
clearly most people don't want a seven year old in
(11:48):
a saloon um. But industrialized states did start to have
some child labor restrictions in the late nineteenth century, but
most didn't start until the Russian in the Fair Labor
Standards Act of nineteen thirty eight finally set a minimum
working age of fourteen and sixteen with certain conditions, right,
(12:09):
and there were a lot of other industries that were
going through this as well. At the time, mill workers
were notoriously badly treated. And actually the newspaper industry itself
starts to change a lot after this, so something like
the news's plight would become less of an issue. Anyways,
Over time, as newspapers started to have syndicated columns, syndicated comics,
(12:32):
just little things you could plug into your paper that
were available nationally, sensationalized journalism was less of the selling point, right,
And we had at the time of the strikes found
a little ad that we enjoyed that said, please don't
buy the Evening Journal and World because the newsboys has striked,
so with something to remember. If you'd like to learn
more about strikes and labor unions, come to the website
(12:56):
and check out the blog on our homepage at www
dot House of Works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Let us know what you think. Send an email to
podcast at how stuff Works dot com and be sure
to check out this Stuff you missed in history class
blog on the how stuff Works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert, joined by Sarah Dowdy. Okay, Sarah, Hi Katie.
So I've been trying to get you all morning to
agree to do this podcast in dialect, which you won't. Sorry,
(00:26):
but you have to at least throw in something. I
can read some quotes in a semi dialect about that. Okay,
that's that's good enough. Today we're doing The Newsboys Strike
of eight nine, as in news Ees the musical, but
the real story, not the Disney one. So. Newspapers have
been around for a while, obviously, but they really started
(00:46):
picking up speed at the beginning of the nineteenth century
when prices went way down and consequently circulation goes up
um And by the mid nineteenth century there were about
four hundred dailies and three thousand weeklies in the US.
But there were two big ones. Two big ones, the
New York World owned by Joseph Pilitzer and the New
York Journal owned by William Randolph Hurst, the two big
(01:10):
guys in the newspaper publishing business. Yeah, and the competition
between these two guys gets so intense that they start
sensationalizing their stories, just making up stuff. Basically, libel is
not a big deal at the time, but this is
the start of yellow journalism, which actually got its name
from one of the cartoon characters in the paper. Right.
(01:33):
And at the time, Pulitzer and Hurst were busy trying
to sabotage one another by stealing away each other's writers
and cartoonists. And one cartoonist, Richard Outcohol I'm sorry, I
don't know how to say his name, came up with
the character of the yellow Kid, and he appeared in
one newspaper which was in color, and people loved him,
and so of course the other publisher promptly stole him away,
(01:55):
and the Yellow Kid became the emblem of yellow journalism. Really,
but these two papers just go at each other, and
they would also kind of create stories of their own
or blow stories that did exist out of proportion. They
essentially drive the United States into war with Spain, which
is pretty unbelievable if you think about it, that the
(02:16):
Spanish American War is largely the responsibility of two newspaper publishers.
Such as the power of the media, it's good for
sales apparently to do not start a war on the podcast.
But New York City was also home of the newsboys,
it was, and the first one was probably about eighteen
(02:37):
thirty three, ten year old, selling copies of the New
York Sun on the street. And this is different because
before then, newspapers used to be sold in stores or
sold through subscription. So you'd have newsboys or paper boys
who would you know, just like today, come to your house,
deliver your paper. That's the subscription that's already existing. Now,
(03:00):
the newsies were out on the street hawking these things well,
and they bought them wholesale. They weren't working for say,
the New York Journal of the New York World. They
had to buy a big bundle of them, like a
hundred um for fifty cents, and they wouldn't the papers
wouldn't buy back the unsold papers, so huge risks. You
(03:22):
had to sell one hundred or you were out. And
most of these boys were really poor, from you know, tenement.
Their little kids too, someone as young as about six
years old. Six of the youngest one I saw. So
imagine that, you know, you have a hundred papers that
you're trying to sell. You're six years old you you're
going to stay out as late as you can until
(03:42):
the next paper comes out, basically trying to sell what
you have to to make your profit. When I like
that if they couldn't sell them, they would just make
up headlines and start, you know, yelling about like a
bridge collapsing, extracts to read all about the bridge that
never happened. It's like, oh um a twenty. So people
(04:03):
would buy the papers. But Hurst and Pulitzer saw their
profits go down in the summer of eighty, which is
after the Spanish American War, which they had seen their
profits go up, right, so it's only natural that they
would go down, But they decided to take advantage of it,
and they didn't want to charge their customers any more
money because they didn't think they'd go for it. So
(04:24):
instead they came up with the crafty plan to make
the new seas pay instead. So a hundred papers were
now sixty cents instead of fifty cents and a dime
is a huge difference in eighteen ninety nine for a
poor lone newsboy. Yeah, so the boys go on strike
demanding that these two publishing giants lower their prices back
(04:47):
to fifty cents, and that was their only real demand.
They didn't have anything about working hours or buying back
the papers or anything. They just wanted things to go
back to where they were, which wasn't even that great,
so it's not an unreasonable request. But New York was
kind of in the middle of a strike fever at
this time. The streetcar employees were striking, the freight handlers,
(05:08):
on the railroad peers, the telegraph messenger boys. So everybody
was worked up about better conditions or rights or whatnot.
But it didn't work for some of them, like the
messenger boys, because they didn't have effective leadership. It was just,
you know, kind of a bunch of boys yelling about
stuff and throwing some stones and then it ended. But
(05:30):
that's not what happened with the news. The news boys
had a little kid, Blink, a s kid who was
blind in one eye, who was basically their leadership, and
the boys refused to sell papers. But not only did
they refuse to sell, they harassed all the scabs and
for the newsstands that continued to sell the journal in
(05:53):
the world, they would mob them and steal the papers
and rip them up. And as Pulitzer and Hurst started
to fight back and hire these big burly guys to
sell papers in front of the publishing houses. The boys
even would go after them, create huge mobs to go up.
(06:15):
Grown go up against grown men. And it doesn't sound
that scary, like, you know, six year olds coming up
like musty with rocks. But most of them weren't. They
were a little bit older, like ten or eleven, and
they had all grown up in the streets and they
were pretty tough kids, and we were not going to
stand for it. Still, you get there's one episode at
Fort Street in Vanderbilt with fifty strikers going against some
(06:37):
of these bigoons of pulitzer and hursts. Another with three
hundred strikers. So even if they're six years old or so,
a lot and have you ever been attacked by a
small child, And they I think even took papers out
of citizens hands. Who want Yeah, this one episode with
(06:59):
the three hundreds strikers, they see five men selling, they
jumped them and scattered the papers all over the street,
and then these people start picking them up and reading
the kind of chief Scates sticking two papers up off
the ground, and the newsies grabbed the papers out of
their hand and rip them up and they had publicized
their strike pretty well. They put up signs everywhere. I
(07:21):
was saying one of them, the reds have killed a guy.
What sells the extras, so seriously, don't buy. And they
were explaining to people what the problem was. We did
like their little their code of ethics. Yeah, they didn't
go after the older women who sold papers. Uh, these
were a lot of the women weren't joining the strike.
(07:43):
It was kind of a youth movement, I guess, And
they didn't attack them. And kid Blink even said that
he didn't like it. He wished that they wouldn't sell
the journal in the world, but he wasn't going to
go after a woman. He was quit in the paper
as saying, a feller can't soak a lady. Is Katie's
count dialect? It's not real dialect, y'all? Another time would
(08:05):
common Sarah to do it. But they did have some
support they did. They the Carlem Newsboys actually organized into
a union and the several of the boroughs sent delegates
to a new zy board. Basically, they also got some
support from the News Dealers and Stationers Association and x
(08:28):
Assemblyman Philip Whiz. They told them now keep up the fight,
don't violate the law, don't use dynamite, but stick together
and you will win. I'm sure if it was a provocation, No,
no dynamite. The other papers were thrilled that their journal
in the world, we're going against each other like this
because they were having to sell more. And actually it's
(08:50):
paid off because Katie and I did a lot of
our research through the New York Times for the Night,
which has archives from where they're offering this the strike story,
because the actual papers couldn't really or wouldn't, and the
newspaper accounts are really weird. We both had a really
good time reading them this morning. That's why we keep
talking about dialect because they printed the kids like that.
(09:14):
They actually all the quotes are written in dialects. So
instead of certainly they say sweetenly meeting it like really,
but that's what they did, and it's it's kind of patronizing,
like they didn't take them seriously and wanted to paint
them and this in this sort of way, but the
other side of ways kind of Dickenzie. I doubt a
style permits right now, but it does go along with
(09:37):
this sensationalism. Tootect. Yeah, but a lot of kids during
a strike are going hungry because a lot of them
are homeless and some of them work to support their
own families. So all this time they're not making those
nickels and dimes. Is a big deal, and it's going
(09:58):
on for a while. The journal in world keep on
saying that they're doing fun, they're not having any problems,
but they really are hurting. Their sales go down sixty percent,
and they're getting to the point where they've got to
break some kind of deal with the news sees, and
so they come to an agreement that price for that
(10:18):
stack of a hundred papers is still going to be
sixty cents. They're not going to bring it back down
to fifty, but they will take back on sold papers
for refund. And that kind of leads into child labor
concerns because if they can return these papers, and that
might mean they don't have to stay up till past midnight,
a six year old selling papers. Yeah, it kind of
(10:40):
gives you the option to give up at the end
of the day you're not selling if the stories aren't good,
to just cut your losses. And after the strike, people
did start meeting to find out what the plight of
the news hees was and realized how young some of
these kids were and how dangerous some of the conditions were.
They were jumping trolley cars to get around, and many
(11:02):
of them lost limbs that way, and they were poor,
and they were staying up too late, and there was
no effort at all to regulate any of it now
and some of the suggestions at the time this doesn't
sound very progressive nowadays, but one was to not allow
boys under ten on the street after nine pm, or
to get parental consent from all the boys parents. Uh.
(11:27):
And then a suggestion that sounds pretty good actually, that
they should all be badged and uniformed. Yeah, so if
you think it would make it a little safer. So
a lot of them used to go around and selling
at places like saloons and would say that, you know,
drunk men said bad things to them, but they would
also tip them well, so that's where they went. But
clearly most people don't want a seven year old in
(11:48):
a saloon um. But industrialized states did start to have
some child labor restrictions in the late nineteenth century, but
most didn't start until the Russian in the Fair Labor
Standards Act of nineteen thirty eight finally set a minimum
working age of fourteen and sixteen with certain conditions, right,
(12:09):
and there were a lot of other industries that were
going through this as well. At the time, mill workers
were notoriously badly treated. And actually the newspaper industry itself
starts to change a lot after this, so something like
the news's plight would become less of an issue. Anyways,
Over time, as newspapers started to have syndicated columns, syndicated comics,
(12:32):
just little things you could plug into your paper that
were available nationally, sensationalized journalism was less of the selling point, right,
And we had at the time of the strikes found
a little ad that we enjoyed that said, please don't
buy the Evening Journal and World because the newsboys has striked,
so with something to remember. If you'd like to learn
more about strikes and labor unions, come to the website
(12:56):
and check out the blog on our homepage at www
dot House of Works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Let us know what you think. Send an email to
podcast at how stuff Works dot com and be sure
to check out this Stuff you missed in history class
blog on the how stuff Works dot com home page
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