Part One: The Newsies on Strike: Soaking Scabs & Taking Names

Margaret talks with writer and podcast host Andrew Ti about how an informal union of children shut down the nation’s biggest newspapers and won their rights.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff, your
weekly reminder that we can do good things instead of
just always doing bad things, but not in an ontological
moral way. Just to I'm your host, Margaret Kildre, and
with me today is my guest Andrew T.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Andrew Hi good.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
I was debating whether I had enough time to off
off my sneak a little slice of orange.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
But I don't worry listeners.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
By the time this is done, I'll have eaten this
full orange and you'll you'll either know or you won't.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
You can always tell when somebody's like a seasoned podcast
or by like, how well could I sneak this snack?

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (00:43):
I just thought I had a little more intro time.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Oh no, I'm sorry. Usually I do, but I'm doing
this thing where I'm lazier with my intros now it's
sucking great.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
Keep me on my on my orange toes. Okay, so
I'm holding up for the zoom. You see, I have
this much orange. This is going to be gone by
the time okay, by the time we finish.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
It's a good choice of podcast snack too, right. It's
compared to like chips or something right where there's nothing Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
Yeah, yes, well, chips, you just gotta really lean lean
far back and kind of like you gotta you close
your mouth first and then close your teeth lips first,
that teeth, which is pretty unnatural, but it kind of works.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Secrets of the podcasters, see, this is the only thing
I bring to the table.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Literally.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Well, I've spent all my time trying to figure out
what I can fidget with and what I can't fidget
with while I'm recording. M I can fidget with the
microphone sorry, the headphone cable that's twisty. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that one's good. I can't flick open and close a
knife or a lighter. They make noise.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
I gotta I got a USB dongle that I flip
back and forth or yeah. I guess I just sort
of worry it a little bit. It's probably really bad
for it. I mean, I just realized, so I stole
my friends. As I'm really I'm holding it.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
It doesn't really matter if it's bad or not.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
This is not the one I bought.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
So speaking of being good dear friends, Yes, so Andrew,
you know a bunch of people can collectively withhold their
labor and it's called a strike.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Oh boy, I'm trying.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
I'm finding out this is this is uh strike. Strikes
are in the air, and I guess to the extent
that I can be loving it, I guess I'm loving it.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Okay, Okay, Yeah, It's one of these things that like
is like really cool after the fact, but I feel
like during a strike. I've never been on strike for
more than like five minutes. My boss immediately caved because
though we were one hundred percent of his workforce, but
it actually is probably really hard to be on strike,
but they it sounds really cool later or from the outside.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
Yeah, I uh, well, currently I am on strike. I
am a Writer's Guild of America member. We are on strike.
At the time of this recording. I think we're closing
on fifty days. I have not kept track. Also, I
had a very dark moment a couple of weeks ago,
because you know, there's so many you know, so much

(03:15):
of the history of the strike and the previous strikes
is about like how many days it's been.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
And I had a real dark moment where I.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Was like, were they counting weekdays or like work days
or calendar days, because I was like, if it was
fucking work days I'm going to lose it. But we
are closing in on half the length of the previous strike, which,
for boring business reasons, is I don't know how likely,

(03:46):
but I would say most the people with the most
experienced in this would say with medium confidence that it
is likely that we're going to be somewhere around there. Also,
but there are so many more variables this time than
last time, So who really knows?

Speaker 2 (04:01):
Of course I certainly don't.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
Yeah, but yeah, we're probably, you know, with like sixty
percent confidence, closing in on about halfway done with this shit.
And you know, I'm less tired that I thought, but
more tired than I want to be.

Speaker 4 (04:19):
It's just what the Writer's Guild of America is asking
for is so unbelievably reasonable and fair that it's so
embarrassing for these networks and streaming companies. It's like, you
guys are so fucking greedy and disgusting.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yeah, I would say, the well, and that that sort
of alludes to if we want to talk about the
actual any details of the registract, the thing that probably
is the biggest variable for everyone, including themselves, is the
prevalence of the streaming companies, who.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
From what I understand what I'm seeing.

Speaker 3 (05:01):
They don't want to have anyone, but they also have
this real ethos of a tech company as opposed to
a traditional traditional media company and traditional media companies, though
they are, like any company, pretty anti union. You know,
Disney's worked with the unions for quite a long time
and they have a reasonable relationship. Whereas Netflix, well, you know,

(05:26):
I guess in one way of looking at it, Netflix
has worked with unions its entire existence. But on the
other way of looking at it, or sorry, Netflix Studios
has not Netflix the original DVD Store probably did. But
the other way of looking at it is the people
that founded Netflix the DVD Store come from a culture

(05:46):
that's virulently anti union in Silicon Valley. So so those
folks really bring a different vibe. You know, there's entities
like Amazon who Amazon on Studios.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
You know, I don't know all the business.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
I'm pretty sure in an unsourced way, I will just
say with more confidence that I probably should that they're
sort of a lost leader slash vanity project for Jeff Bezos.
Another very anti union individual, Apple Studios, which is notorious
for one of the business practices we're striking against. Of
many rooms, you know, they they create television and movies

(06:26):
at a loss leader for their little screens.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
So does it matter to them?

Speaker 3 (06:34):
It's unclear. So those are the things we don't know.
What we do know is, you know, they can't make
this ship without.

Speaker 4 (06:42):
Writers and soon without actors.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Right, yeah, Well, SAG voted.

Speaker 4 (06:51):
To strike, but they're not on strike yet, is that correct?

Speaker 2 (06:54):
SAG voted.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
The membership of SAG voted to authorize a strike against
the WGA. I am sorry, against the AMPTP, the American
Motion Picture Television Producers's too.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Many acronyms in every labor related sece. Yeah, this is
one of the problems with labor unions and the things
that they fight against.

Speaker 3 (07:17):
Yeah, it's it's the problem with more than four people. Yeah, yeah,
is you just you need a fucking acronym and then
you start dividing yourselves up. But so they voted to
they are still negotiating with these studios, and they have
the membership has given their negotiating committee and leadership by

(07:40):
an overwhelming margin, the right to call a striketh and
I have no idea how their negotiations are going.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
And really no one does.

Speaker 3 (07:51):
That was one thing that kind of came out of
the writer's negotiation. Is the rumors swirling around after the
fact were laughable.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
They were two to one completely false.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
And yeah, I almost in fact the actual outcome of
what apparently happened, or at least what was reported in negotiation.
That was kind of the one rumor that wasn't really
out there, which is that things it was not close
and things like fell apart clearly and rapidly, like very
very early s you yeah, so on strike? Yeah, yeah,

(08:29):
on strike. Sorry, thanks for letting me know that is why.
And been on strike either, thank you. Yes, I've never
been on strike before. I don't think this is This
would be only the second union I've belonged to when
I was a teenager as a grocery bagger. This is
probably because it was Michigan.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Somehow.

Speaker 3 (08:48):
We were organized under ua W, which seems must have
simply been a regional thing because.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
The unions wouldn't think what they can get sometimes.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Couldn't really seem a forgetting that you've in LA.

Speaker 4 (09:02):
I was around for the last strike and it was long.
It was long, and like most of not not my
specific parents, but most of my friends' parents worked in
the entertainment industry, whether that be writers themselves or crew
or makeup and things like that.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
And it was long. It was long.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
Yeah, so yeah, it's long. I mean we'll see. Well
that is the other thing. Yeah, as you mentioned, really,
the the other thing that is new on our side
this time is we have much stronger solidarity from especially
the teamsters. Yeah, and from and yeah, well you know,

(09:48):
without telling them how to do their jobs or their
wink not jobs, they could certainly be doing some of
those things a little more if they want. We would
love it.

Speaker 4 (10:00):
But is there anything up top that is there any
call to action or anything that you have for listeners
of our show?

Speaker 3 (10:09):
Oh my gosh, you know what, No, there isn't anything.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
The one thing I will say is you will know
what to do.

Speaker 3 (10:21):
The Writer's Guild is being much much more communicative than
they were even in prior labor actions that weren't a strike,
and I do commend them for that. That was the
thing when I ran for the WJ board, I was like,
you guys are very obtuse, and I would have to
change that.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Actually for a bunch of writers, right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
And they did.

Speaker 3 (10:43):
They have done a much much better job of communicating,
so to that end. So, for instance, like I've seen
people like independently on Twitter saying things like I'm going
to cancel my Netflix in support, and that is not
what anyone's asking for right now. And you'll know when
and it will be more effective if you actually basically

(11:05):
if we all do things together and coorporately.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
So yeah, so no need to cancel on.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
Netflix or anything like that yet, but you know, feel
free to tweet at them and call them uh, weird
weird dickheads on the street if you want.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Well, today we're going to talk about another strike that
you already have exceeded in length, but we're going to
talk about a strike that closed out the nineteenth century.
It won important concessions from some of the most powerful
men in the US. It changed the way that people
in this country talk about child labor, and most importantly,

(11:41):
speaking of Disney, it gave us a sick musical with
kids an old time outfits, singing and dancing in the
streets of New York. Amazing, because today we're going to
talk about the Newsboys Strike of eighteen ninety in New
York City.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
I can't wait.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
Yeah cool, I will say this.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
I have not seen the musicals but on the other day,
we we've been doing sort of people have been organizing
theme days at the strike and at Disney. The other
day was Newsy's Day, and I was not aware that
it was happening. So there, I was just like, you know,
there's a lot of like cosplay Raga muffins around right now,

(12:24):
and I just I wasn't sure what was happening.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
And I was just like.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
And then it was Newsy's Day, and I was like, Okay,
this is fine. The Disney lot is huge. I could
I could stand elsewhere if I don't want to be
around it.

Speaker 5 (12:40):
But I was.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
It was more that I was just surprised by It's.

Speaker 3 (12:43):
It's that thing where you just kind of like you're
in a crowd and all of a sudden you're like,
what the fuck is with all the.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Like fraid like overhauls.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
Yeah, like a lot of a lot of grease, like
grease paid on faces right now?

Speaker 2 (12:57):
What the fuck is happening?

Speaker 1 (13:01):
Well, we're going to talk about what an informal gang
of fairly violent teenagers shut down the nation's biggest newspapers
and won their rights. So let's talk about Newsy's. Let's
talk about the people that you're going to cost play
affs tomorrow amazingly.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yeah, I'm ready. I mean, look, my vibe is already
kind of like that.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
So I was just like, I mean, I'm not like
out of line, but I was like, this is aggressive.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
Yeah, no, fair enough, especially once you have to learn
all the singing and dancing, which, okay, we're going to
get to it. The singing and dancing is historically accurate
in terms of how they are represented. But all right,
so you've got newspapers, right, and they used to be
the main way that people got news. They go back
to the seventeenth century. But I'm not going to do

(13:44):
that to you, although I will say that China actually
had something similar to newspapers in like the second and
third century. Obviously like well before the Western world. Yeah,
Europe as usual is about a thousand years behind. Newspapers
as we currently know them, or maybe remember them might
be more accurate.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah, we're at just another juncture.

Speaker 3 (14:07):
Yeah, anything could happen that probably is a newspapers.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah, totally. They started around the early sixteen hundreds in
the Holy Roman Empire, and specifically it's no Germany and newsboys.
The idea that children are the means of distribution goes
back really far, at least as far as seventeen ninety nine,
when horsemen were delivering the paper like house to house
in colonial America and post colonial America. That was when
it was not colonial anymore, well different kind of colony, right,

(14:36):
horsemen were delivering the paper, and then they were like,
maybe we can make kids do this and then barely
pay them. So they did. And you have two methods
of distribution of papers, right, You've got door to door
delivery and then you've got like direct sales, usually on
the street, and usually it's a kid coming up and
being like, please miss the bomby lass pape, you know
or whatever.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
It's always mista yeah, yeah, that's the real vibe.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yeah, I get it, I get it. And so this
has been children for a very very long time. There
was a brief period where the door to door was
no longer children in the end of the nineteenth century,
just the direct But then around the nineteen twenties or so,
it got back to the like kind of classic Americana
thing of the like boy on a bicycle riding around

(15:21):
on his paper route or whatever, uh huh. And so
in the city kids sell the newspapers. They walk around
the streets being like extracts or read all about it.
Disgraced former president Donald Trump has been arrested, or whatever
the news is that day. Maybe it'll be the onion
headline that he's been executed. Most of these newsboys were

(15:44):
kids or young teens from poor families. A lot of
them were homeless, and a lot of them were orphans too,
but not all of them, not even most of them.
Most boys started as young teenagers, but kids as young
as six sold papers, and some kept selling into adulthood,
but most didn't.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
I don't know those.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
Because they died or found better jobs or probably worse jobs, honestly, right,
there were some girl newsies, especially from families without boys
to send off to work. There was this whole stir
when the twenty eighteen stage version of Newsies included girl newsies,
and people were like, oh, you're making it woke or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
Yeah, they just like nothing's more woke than just like true,
you know, true turn of the century desperation. I know,
because you look yeah, yeah, of a greater equalizer than
you think.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
Yeah, actually we're gonna talk about some of that too. Yeah.
So there were girls they and even the twenty eighteen
news that they were like, well, we look back and
here's here's all of these photos of girl newsies, and
then you can actually find quotes that we'll get into
later about even during the strike there were girl newsies,
you know, predominantly boys and boys is the best I

(17:00):
can kind of put together. Their ethnicity varied decade to decade,
in city to city. I've got the most information about
New York City, so that's what I'm going to go
into for a long time. For decades, ninety percent of
the New York newsies were Irish, like either you know,
directly from Ireland or children of immigrants. I think sometimes
it was like literally like kids who smuggled themselves to

(17:21):
America as children without parents. But most of the time
you're talking about like the kids and grandkids of immigrant families.
By the time we're talking about today, it is more diverse.
Eighty percent of the kids were from immigrant Irish, Italian
and Jewish families, but not all of them were. There
were black newsies, and by and large, Newsy life poverty

(17:42):
being a great equalizer, was not segregated, right right, right.
Sometimes various kids had nicknames that referred directly to their race. Sure,
there's a lot of slurs age old tradition. Yeah, yeah,
I'm sure that doesn't happen anymore. Obviously, a twelve year
old would never get named after some Oh god, two

(18:07):
of the black Newsies. I found one of his named
William Reese, and I'm not going to say his nickname
on air. It's not the really bad one. It's just
another one that I'm not going to say on air.
And then another one of the black Newsies was named
the Black Wonder. And there was an Indigenous Newsy named
Bob the Indian, one of the presidents of the Newsboys
unions in eighteen ninety nine. We're gonna talk about this.

(18:28):
He actually lays out the demographics and you'll be, you'll be.
The way that this kid does demographics is interesting. It
is two fifth Jews, one fifth Irish, one fifth Italian,
and one fifth everyone else, including black kids, girls, disabled folks,
people pretending to be disabled called fakers. Oh my god,
because somehow both girl and disabled are ethnicities.

Speaker 3 (18:51):
Yeah, I guess that's an organizing principle of sorts.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
It's just other.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
Yeah, yeah, oh god, fair enough, I suppose.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah, you know, and like whatever, like they were you know, ahead.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Not dis alert to labor unions today. You take what
you could. You know, there's got to be something, but
by at large they're the right thing.

Speaker 1 (19:17):
And overall this actually puts them leagues ahead of other
contemporary unions. I didn't write this part into the script,
but a bunch of different times I've had to do
research into just how racist a lot of the late
nineteenth century unions in the United States were not all
of them, and there's some like particular standouts, but a
lot of them more like this is for white people only.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
Yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
But I mean that that is a real side of
the labor movement. Even today, it is like there there is,
you know more there is and there should be even
more than there is lip service to to, you know,
especially racial diversity. But it is still like it doesn't

(20:03):
take long to dig into the like and find some
of those class not race folks or you know which
you're like, yeah, you know, in a country that had
race based chattel slavery, you can't really disentangle those two
things as much as you'd like.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
And also when you look at the history of American
labor unions, you'd be like, you know, if they had
been class not race in the late nineteenth century, things
would be a little better, like because they were like race,
because they specifically excluded people constantly. It's like they were
some of the perpetuators of this racism. And part of
the reason that race needs to be included just as
its own thing in the conversation, yeah, is because of

(20:42):
the fucking work that they did of racism.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
Right still on the ballance, Well, listen where you can't
completely you can't make your perfect allies and you know
they are they are the right ones.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, totally. Well, there's this thing going around right now
where people are talking about like the people who know
all of the right things to say are less likely
to be your friends, like your actual allies in times
of crisis than the person like as like a trans woman,
like the kind of person who's gonna like be confused
in misgender me but like still be like whatever, don't
mess with her, you know, versus the people who will
like very carefully say everything right but actually have like

(21:17):
more hate in their hearts. And I, yeah, that's my
like vibe about the way that these children were handling race.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
But I don't Yeah, I don't know. I I go
back and forth.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
I mean I think there are both yeahs of folks. Yeah,
but you're right, yes, that all all four quadrants of
those things do exist.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
Yeah, totally. So you got these newsies and their job
is that they buy newspapers and they sell them at
a set markup. And this is like the main way
newspapers get sold is they get sold to children. The
markup always changes, but overall it would be like you're
buying one cent papers for half a cent, two cent
papers for one cent, three cent papers for two cents,

(22:01):
and then you turn around and sell them for the
the cover price. These kids are not employees. They are
independent contractors sort of. The bosses like officially they like
avoiding hiring people, right because then you then you have
to like provide them labor law stuff. There wasn't a
ton of labor laws stuff, right, but it was still
a nice way to skirt it. And they still wanted
to limit the kid's autonomy. The cover price had to

(22:23):
be the same. Some newspapers divvied up the territory that
the kids could sell in. Others made more extreme demands,
like a newsy couldn't choose which papers to sell. They
had to sell like all of If you want to
sell this paper, you also have to sell like all
of the boss's cronies newspapers too, you know. Being independent
contractors made newsies hard to organize. So did the fact
that they were literally children. Newspapers generally didn't buy back

(22:49):
unsold copies of the paper. This is a big part
of this whole thing. So a newsy was stuck quote
eating the remaining papers. And I really like this because
the slang they always used the kids were like, oh,
I got to eat me papes or whatever, right, And
if you read articles, they're always like, wow, look at
that inventive slang the kids have eating the papers. And
it's just like funny now, because like eating the cost

(23:10):
of something is a like I don't even see that
as like slang. That's just a way of describing a thing,
you know, right right right anyway, So they they worked
it late into the night to sell these papers to
minimize their losses. Right, if you didn't sell all your papers,
you're just out all fucking night. Some papers would offer
discounts to kids who showed up early to pick up

(23:32):
their papers, which led pressure to kids to drop out
of school in order to sell papers. By eighteen ninety nine,
ten to fifteen thousand newsboys worked the street of New
York City, screaming the headlines until late into the night,
many of them sleeping on the streets. They made about
twenty five to thirty cents a day, which is a
completely meaningless number because you're talking about hundred years ago.

(23:53):
That's twelve dollars a day in today's money. Jesus, Like
that sucks. Yeah, well, you know it. Yeah, it's a
lot of money for a wee child, yeah, totally, is
often the sole breadwinner of their family.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Yeah. God, that's fucking wild.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
And so they didn't make a lot of money doing this,
and they they sold. Some of them sold their leftovers
at a loss to the night boys, who had the
even worst job of selling the like discount papers laid
into the night right. A few of them became bosses
sort of like these older newsies would hoard large stashes
and then sub hire helpers to run out and sell,

(24:38):
like on street corners and stuff. This was probably the
result of crewing up to hold onto prime territory and
or just people perpetuating expectation.

Speaker 2 (24:48):
Right, It makes sense.

Speaker 3 (24:49):
I mean it's it's yeah, it's it's like that system
immediately creates incentives to like just just do your little
quasi crime empire on whatever block.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Yeah, and you know be like, hah, I'm rich. I
get fifty cents a day. Yeah, you know, new Zy
life was fucking hard. The conditions were bad, the pay
was bad. The independent contractor thing left them in competition
with each other over territory, and this was a fairly
violent thing. You hold onto your pitch as long as
you can physically defend it, and so they're a very

(25:21):
feighty bunch. This will come out to be to their advantage.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
Right, I mean, look, the tidy version of this is, yeah,
like they're independent contractors because it was to the papers
benefits to have them, you know, sub not like they
have them just precarious at all times.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:42):
And I will say one tidy thing about this writer
strike is that because we are also independent contractors, and
the business practice lately has been more and more time
off between shows if you're on a TV writer, or
like doing free work for a long time if you're
a movie writer. We are also very used to not
working for a long time, Like that's a good point,

(26:05):
that is, so, yeah, the thing that they have been
using as a cudgel against us has actually helped us
in this strike.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
And yeah, again we're talking about very different things, I understand.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
No, no, I mean a little example, I was like, I'm
going to find a strike that feels like, I is
a good way to talk about the writer's strike. That
is how I picked this topic.

Speaker 3 (26:24):
Yeah, I mean it's a it's a strike against a
media empire. And yeah, specifically the independent contractor thing is like,
like that is what we are as well.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
Yeah. But one of the other things about how hard
their lives was is that no one knew their lives
were this hard because the newspapers, with the only source
of information in the city, had a really strong incentive
to paint an idyllic picture of newsboy life, about these
plucky entrepreneurs who worked for themselves and were able to
support their families with like plenty of like idle time

(26:53):
and joy or whatever in their lives, you know. And
so this like newsy singing and dancing thing is there's
a media construction from one hundred and twenty years ago at.

Speaker 3 (27:03):
Least, oh right, oh my god, right, and nothing sanitizes
the people. You're like subjugating quite like, yeah, controlling their story.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
God, yeah, some of them, some of the homeless kids
or some of the orphans lived in Newsboy House lodging houses.
The first one opened in eighteen fifty four for homeless
kids who didn't trust the existing infrastructure, because a lot
of a lot of people don't trust shelter, the shelter
system often in this case in eighteen fifty four, it
would like funnel kids into jail, right, and so they're like,

(27:37):
the hell with that, and so they're sleeping on the streets.
So some people set up lodging houses, and this actually
seems good, like honestly pretty right. It was five or
six cents a day. You got a bed and a
bath and I think food. I've read different things that
have implied different things about that. Kids. You could come
and go whenever you wanted, as long as you were

(27:57):
home by midnight. But it's like if you missed curfew,
it's still come in the next day. You know, you
just can't come in at midnight. The first one was
only for boys. I don't know that there are other
ones that included girls or not, but they they were
open to all religions and races and the fact that
they weren't segregated is like actually a fairly big deal,
right right, right, right, Although in researching this, I learned

(28:21):
segregation for poor families got worse in America than the
twentieth century. In the nineteen thirties or so, it got
more like some of the way that they did public
housing in the nineteen thirties like made segregation more intense.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yeah, I mean, but that that sort of just feels like, yeah,
as things get worse, and you know, no offense to
white folks, but like there is when when that rhetoric
and that type of push gets amped up, you know,
sort of regrettably and somewhat mysteriously, you know, poor white folks.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
I would say, take the bait more off, but that
I think they should.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
Yeah about like blaming blaming racialized others for the problems.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's like, you know, it's a
surprisingly profitable playbook, I think for horrible people.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
Yep. I think that is the history of that's like
the main actual history of twentieth century, nineteenth century and
twenty century labor in the America. And it's like not
the way.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
That I mean, it's enough arguably the main main cudgel
for everything. I mean, you know, when when it's at
points when I've been thinking, like you know, or or
arguing with folks about like is my podcasts as racist?

Speaker 2 (29:42):
Like what is the point?

Speaker 3 (29:43):
And I to me, I've come to the conclusion that like,
I mean racism, American racism might be the folk roum
with which the world literally ends, or humanity literally ends.
Like that is the gasoline. Yeah, that like has allowed
all the other horrors to like exist potentially. Yeah, I

(30:04):
don't know, We'll see, We'll see what the history books
that don't get written say.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
But if you want a history book that wait, hold on,
how many to turn us into an ads? And yes, okay, wait,
what else is a cudgel? Is cudgels from cudgel vendors,
our sponsor sticks with which to hit scabs, scabs, sticks
buy them?

Speaker 3 (30:27):
Now, anything anything could be used to hit a scab.
And you know what, it's very very twenty first century.
But now, of course, for the writer's strike, just you know,
Twitter is your cudgel to snitch on a scab.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
Or And here's some other ads that may or may
not also be for scab intimidating purposes and we are back.
So uh, let's see. So you have these lodging houses
and there's no smoking or cussing, and eventually later boys

(31:07):
were required to attend either a morning or an evening
class if they wanted to stay there. Because it's like
a very like reformer vibe, right, and so all these
people who are like, we're going to save these kids
or whatever, but again, like that often goes really bad. See,
I don't know the Catholic church, but yeah, in this
particular case, I'm not aware. I've only found positive representations.

(31:28):
I don't know, that's but right. And boys there could
learn trades, including sewing and cooking. Those were literally the
only two trades that I saw mentioned. Every bed had
a locker for their stuff, and over the course of
forty years, a particular lodging house claimed that a quarter
of a million different kids stayed there. And you're paying,
like you're sleeping in these like bunk beds in these

(31:50):
like giant halls or whatever, right, but you're also like
sleeping warm and not dying, and it's like a pretty
good deal. And not all of the orphan newsies, probably
not most of them were anywhere near so lucky as
the kids who stayed in these houses. In eighteen sixty six,
a man named Charles Loring Brace described the condition of
some of them. Quote, I remember one cold night seeing

(32:11):
some ten or a dozen of the little homeless creatures
piled together to keep each other warm beneath the stairway
of the New York Sun Office. They used to be
a mass of them at the Atlas Office, sleeping in
lobbies until the printers drove them away by pouring water
on them. Jesus, Yeah, could you imagine in that fucking asshole,
who would do that?

Speaker 3 (32:29):
Right?

Speaker 2 (32:31):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
That, I mean obviously maybe not obviously, like I would
have trouble I think doing that, but not you know,
I know that I would have trouble doing that. However,
I think the evidence is like, yeah, our alleged humanity
is much easier to strip away.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
That's true. Yeah, that's true. All of us have like
we would never do things that. Clearly the large percentage
of people do when yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
Right, the number of people that say I would not
commit an atrocity does not comport with the number of
people who when asked to commit atrocities.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
So like totally something's up.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Yeah, totally, someone like wrong, pour water on these freezing children,
or you lose your job, you know, yeah yeah, or
even like I'm annoyed and I don't want to step
up whatever. People are bad. Yeah, yeah, so most of them,
most of the Newsies weren't homeless. Most of them were
sent out by their parents to buy papers and sell
them and bring that money home. And one of my

(33:34):
favorite facts I learned about newsy is a cultural thing
about them is that, according to the superintendent of the
boarding houses, newsies insist that they eat their pie first
at dinner. If they couldn't get pie, they would riot,
chanting pie, pie, pie and throwing food around. The boys
demand their pie.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
All right. Yeah, it's been a minute since I've loved
pie that much.

Speaker 1 (33:59):
But okay, I mean, you know, I don't know in
nineteenth century, yeah, food is like.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
Right, the one I guess it also, though, is like
this thing where you're like, right, these are these are children?

Speaker 2 (34:14):
Yeah? Like children children?

Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, these are like six to eighteen. If folks liked you,
you got a nickname. Most of the characters that we'll
talk about today have nicknames. But there's a couple that
I didn't work into the script that I just want
to read out. You've got kid Fish, You've got Scabooch,
You've got Crutch and Morris, You've got Barney Peanuts, you
got little slur for jew that's not actually what they
call them. Uh. You got fishbone skinnies, you got cheek Grubber,

(34:39):
you got Friedman, Frockets, young Monks, and hungry Joe.

Speaker 2 (34:45):
It's pretty good. I know, I feel like I feel
like the nickname game. I mean, obviously, I guess you
know why.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
I was going to say something very everyone fancies some
solves like a real nickname person. But you know what,
I probably wouldn't be better than anyone else at the
nickname game.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
I'm realizing, I guess I say it out loud.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
They also gave nicknames to their adult supporters, like three
women who were like news vendors with newstands. There was Aunt,
there was Beauty, and then Hannah Kleff's nickname was just Fight.
And I was a train hopper for a while, and
everyone had like tough as fuck names, right, I have

(35:28):
never met anyone with a name that goes as hard
as some lady just named Fight. Why she called that,
I don't know, fairly referenced.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
Lovely.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah. Yeah, so those were the news with old fight
Yeah yeah, yeah, totally. I wouldn't mess with her, I
know that much.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
I you know, I feel like there's like a twenty
four cent chance it's a because she was quite a
gentle soul life.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
No, that's true.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
The nickname game price falls just about those percentages.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
You never know, but yeah, no, totally, Like little John
could be very small or very large, isn't in between.
This woman is either tough as nails or will like
spends all day taking kittens out of trees. And yeah,
like it's polarizing. That's all you know about a nickname.
It's either the thing or not the thing very much.

(36:28):
So totally poor poor beauty okay or not? Yeah no, yeah,
So these are the newsies, and across the country, but
especially in New York City, they actually go on strike
like kind of a lot. And it's interesting because there's
not much institutional memory that you're talking about when you're
talking about a job that someone holds free maximum of

(36:50):
eleven years. Most people probably for three or four years,
you know, right. In eighteen eighty six, the Brooklyn Times
raised its price to newsboys and woos Wlliamsburg to one
in an eighth cent, while it stayed one cent in
downtown Brooklyn. It only took a one day strike to
get that solved. The newsies refused to buy the paper,

(37:12):
and they refuse to let anyone else buy the paper either.
All papers were one cent after that. In eighteen eighty seven,
this is my favorite, these little strikes. In Montgomery, Alabama,
the newsboys went on strike against a labor union, the
Knights of Labor, an American labor federation. They weren't technically

(37:33):
a union. They're like a weird Have you heard the
Nice of Labor?

Speaker 2 (37:38):
Nope?

Speaker 1 (37:39):
They should be so cool, right, they are the Nice
of Labor. They're a semi secret society. They come before
any other labor union stuff in America, and they're so boring.
They're just whenever you read about them, they're like they're
like the milk toast liberals. They're like, yeah, the not aggressives,

(38:00):
the not radicals, you know.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
Right, Yeah, it's it's all the you know, the names.

Speaker 3 (38:08):
I think that's the thing though, It's like it's like
what you're saying about uh acronyms?

Speaker 2 (38:13):
Yeah, was that before we started rolling it? Might have been.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
I was complaining about acronyms of labor unions before we
started rolling. There's too many of them.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
But I think it's like, yeah, anyway, truly like the names.
When the names get picked, those those are the good names.

Speaker 3 (38:31):
Get taken so long ago that yeah, almost by definition,
if institution has been going on long enough, it might
have an amazing name, but it has gone quite soft
if it still exists totally.

Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah, maybe the Knights of Labor used to be an
actually secret society before they became semi secret, and maybe
they like function up and ruled. But yeah, I don't
know about that, but I do know they raised their
newsboy prices from thirty five cents per hundred to fifty
cents per hundred copies of their paper, so the news
struck flinging mud at scabs. This embarrassed the shit out

(39:03):
of the Knights of Labor because they were a labor federation.
I actually couldn't track down the results of the strike.
I'm I think it was successful, but I don't know.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
Yeah, it is, that is the thing.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
I mean, it's it's less but not I don't know enough.

Speaker 3 (39:20):
I know it has, you know, happened I think recently ish,
but it is like the employees of labor unions and
more but more often like things like nonprofits or places
that are nominally doing good. Really, it is a little
shocking how little people practice what they preach with their
actual direct employees.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
Totally.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
It's fucked up.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, Like, if you want to destroy a nonprofit, unionize
its workers. It should be the easiest workplace in the
world to unionize. Yeah, and shout out to anyone who's
a union organizer in a nonprofit world, you are doing
very important work.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
In eighteen eighty nine, we get another strike in New
York City. This one is a lot like the one
that came aft ten years later, to the point where
literally I had to spend a while being like is
this a typo? When I would read eighteen eighty nine
and all these newspapers because this was gonna sound whatever.
I'm like, I'm going to say these things, but you
all don't know the rest of the story yet, so

(40:20):
it doesn't sound prescient yet. Two newspapers, The Evening Sun
in the Evening World tried to hike their rates from
fifty cents to sixty cents. The Newsboys of Manhattan Brooklyn
both struck and of course an important part of striking
is stopping scab labor. So they followed delivery wagons. They
pelted the delivery wagons with rocks. They threw mud at
a political cartoonist who was against the strike. I didn't

(40:42):
realize how much flinging mud was like a literal thing
instead of a metaphorical thing in the nineteenth century. And
they burned stacks of the newspapers in the street. They
would like run and capture them and then just set
them on fire. Hell yeah, yeah, and apparently like dance
around the bond fires and shit, hoot and holler, and.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
It really is. It's true.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
It's like the just thinking of like where you'd even
get mud in Manhattan is kind of freaking me out.
Oh it wasn't paved yet, Yeah right, no, I know, yeah,
it's definitely what a different era. Yeah, during this strike,
an eleven year old an Italian by the name of
Joseph Baldy, he tore up the newspapers of a kid

(41:24):
who was scabbing, so the cops arrested him. So another
eleven year old, a Polish kid named Arthur Lufft, hit
the cop of the bail stick. And I know what
you're thinking, what the fuck is a bail stick? And
I don't know what the fuck a bail stick is
because I assume it's a pole you used to bail
hey or move bales of hay. But the only Google

(41:44):
results for bailstick are New York Times from the turn
of the century talking to various people hitting and killing
each other with bail sticks in the city. Oh god,
so I'm guessing that they are a common improvised weapon.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, is it? Like, I mean, the thing that you
bail hay with is like a little book right now?

Speaker 1 (42:06):
Yeah, I don't know, Oh yeah, or like something you.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
Paid it it is with so visceral Like anytime you're
like anytime you talk about like, yeah, I guess original labor,
whether it's like you know, pick axes and axe handles
or axes or whatever it is. I'm just like, I mean,
I know it's good that humanity is not built like
that anymore.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yeah, no, it' there's like there's some like questions around
the efficacy of violence as relates to labor actions, and
like also the morality of violences related to labor actions
that like and.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
I guess guns really changed a lot of that shit.
That's true, that's true. Yeah fuck so yeah, so so
Arthur left. The eleven year old hits the cop with
a bail stick and then leads a crowd of one
hundred kids to de arrest their but Arthur is also arrested.
This is how we have their names. It's like from
criminal records. Both of them are taken to Enemy of

(43:07):
the Pod, the Tombs in New York City. If anyone
has someone goes to the Tombs on your cool people
bingo card, go ahead and mark that square. Basically everyone
gets sent to the Tombs. It's this very depressing jail
in Manhattan. Even though the most newsboys were not formally organized. Okay,
so that was that strike.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
And so even though most newsboys were not formally organized,
they were also more reliable for solidarity than other people
were with them, so they were constantly sticking up for
other strikes, much like the Screen Actors Guild is now
sticking up for you. During the eighteen ninety four Pullman
strike in Chicago, which was a train strike, there was

(43:48):
a boycott organized newspapers that printed articles against the boycott
found that the newsies would drop those papers into the sewers.
So suddenly the press had to be a little bit
more positive about the strike because the eleven year olds
who sold their ship wanted to be on the right
side of history.

Speaker 2 (44:06):
I mean it is like really funny.

Speaker 3 (44:08):
It's like you're almost talking about like, yeah, the newsy
is being the last mile in terms of delivering media.
Is some real like Elon Musk, the fascist buys Twitter
kind of shit where you're like, yeah, just like the
last the last mile can really influence shit.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
You're right, that is those people have no power.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
Yeah. Yeah, I wish that Twitter was run by a
bunch of eleven year olds. It would be substantially better
than it is under Elon Musk.

Speaker 3 (44:42):
Yeah, it sounds the problem is not like humor wise,
it is, but fascism wise.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
It's. Yeah, the problem is that's like a real Nazi
eleven year old.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
Yeah you no, no, but no, it needs to be run
by a whole bunch of actual several Yeah, not one
old man who likes to pretend that he is young
and acts like he is young.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
Yeah. No, a grip of children for CEO.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
Yeah, absolutely, that is the new motto of every.

Speaker 3 (45:14):
Good The only good billionaire is like ten million children.

Speaker 1 (45:18):
In a trench coat.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
Yeah, So there's way more strikes than just these. Many
went unremembered, like literally, like there's like one in eighteen
ninety three in New York City that the only reference
that we have to it was a kid giving a
speech later being like, hey, we won an eighteen ninety three,
We're gonna win now, and like and maybe there's other
references to it that I couldn't find, but the news

(45:45):
are being you know, it's like it's the history isn't
recessarily just written by the victors. It's written by the newspapers, right.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
Right, And so in this case, the losers yeah totally
yeah boom, you don't want to admit that lost.

Speaker 1 (46:01):
And so there weren't too many people speaking for the
voiceless street kids, and mainstream labor wasn't actually helping them
very much either. So the strike of eighteen ninety nine
wasn't out of the blue. It's still ruled, and let's
talk about it, just kidding us. Let's give more context, hahaha,
all contexts, context all the way down. Baby, don't worry.

(46:22):
Most of the context people hitting cops with sex. It's great.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
Context is the real text.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
Yeah, totally, just means with text, I don't actually know
the oediblagy.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
I mean it has to be. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:35):
So in eighteen ninety eight, the US had a little
war with Spain. It was called the Spanish American War.
We're not going to get into it, but it is
worth knowing that it was like like newspaper people like
took credit for starting that war. I don't remember which one.
I didn't write it into the script. It's worth knowing
that war means good headlines means good newspaper sales, and

(46:58):
so unfortunately for the newspaper companies, but fortunately for I
don't know, human life, the war didn't last very long.
During the war, it was a seller's market, and newspapers
jacked up their prices and they charged the newsboys sixty
cents per one hundred copies instead of fifty cents. And
some newsies were like, the hell with this, you can't
raise their prices, but most of them were like, you

(47:20):
know what, war sells, It's fine. We're selling so many
more papers. We more than make up for it in bulk,
even though I have a lower profit margin. But then
the war ended, and all the papers lowered their prices
back down to fifty cents, except two of them, the
two biggest papers in New York City, decided they quite

(47:41):
liked making more profit, thank you very much, And they
didn't care that they're already starving newsboys would have to
starve harder. These two papers, they're run by men. People
still remember today. Most people don't realize that they're villains.
I think people pretend all the time that these two
were fierce, right, that they were bitter enemies. That's just

(48:02):
not true. They were like in competition with each other,
and they worked constantly together against the real enemies children. Yeah,
I don't know how'll just say that.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
I mean watching watching this happen firsthand, Like you know,
as as this writer, the writer's build. We are striking
against a conglomeration of companies who I don't even know
who that should be fighting each other. It is shocking
the amount of solidarity. I mean, without getting into the weeds,

(48:36):
it is like some companies within the studios that were
striking against stand a profit much more from the systems
that they're trying to uphold. Yeah, and it is truly
shocking that places like I don't know, we'll say, like
a CBS is handing the entity Netflix, which will one
day destroy, literally handing them ammunition with this strike, with

(48:59):
this action.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
No that they the enemy always has saw the giant
corporations always have solidarity with each other. It's so hard
to write when you talk about like newspapers or Netflix. Right,
it's like I like watching TV. I presume you like
writing TV. Like the the union people in the newspapers
like making these papers. It's literally just the companies, the

(49:24):
institutions themselves, not necessarily the individuals within it inside some
of the individuals at the top who when I'm like
the enemy, you know, it's like, yeah, so these two
the enemy of children are men named Joseph Pulitzer and
William Randolph Hurst Senior. Pulitzer is of course remembered as
the namesake for the Journalism Prize. These two together invented

(49:49):
what's called yellow journalism aka clickbait. More ways, they disrupted.
They came in and disrupted traditional newspapers.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
They actually they disrupted actual informa.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
Yeah, totally. Yeah. They led with sex and violence and
huge misleading headlines. One of them like invented the headline
that actually goes across the entire paper instead of just
like being at the top of the little column. And
they also well, okay, two things. One is that they
collaboratively decided to not raise, to not lower their prices together, right,

(50:21):
because if only one of them had these were these
were in a huge fight with each other, right, and
so if only one of them had lowered their prices, like,
it would have gone bad for them, right. Yeah, yeah,
but friendly competition. Okay. The other thing that they did
is they developed this whole trick where the real customer
was their advertisers. But they get people to pay you

(50:43):
for the right to get ads shoved down your throat.
So they're getting paid on both sides, which is why
it's worth pointing out that we hear at cool zone
Media give you the choice, eh, eh, it's either free
with ads or you pay us and then there's no ads.
I tried to write this snarky, but honestly, I think
it's actually a really important difference between trying to get
paid on both sides of it. Yeah, so that came

(51:07):
off so genuine, Yeah, I'm with you. Yeah, And uh so,
if you are one of our paid subscribers on cooler
zone Media, which is currently an Apple podcast and eventually
hopefully be also available for Android.

Speaker 4 (51:23):
You can soon stop asking, I'll tell you, yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
Stop asking Sophie about it, unless it's already happened, in
which case it's funny to ask Sophie. You can find Sophie.

Speaker 4 (51:35):
Don't ask, right, Okay, Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
So either listen to ads or don't, depending on which
choice you've made.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
Or you can choose to do both.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
Choose both.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
That is a way to double support.

Speaker 3 (51:55):
If you, the listener want to want to get get
an extra weird gold star.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Yeah, yeah, And we're gonna make extra weird gold Stars
and send them to you as long as you just
add us on Twitter at I read. Okay, okay. To
talk about Pulitzer, if you take out the whole mistreatment
of children thing, Pulitzer starts off looking okay. He was
a Hungarian Jewish immigrant to the US who fought for

(52:21):
the Union in the Civil War, and stopping slavery wins
a lot of points in my book. Right, there's a
lot of like pretty mediocre people who did that thing,
and I'm like, well you did that thing. That was
a big one, you know. He also rode freight trains,
around after the war looking for work, and I just
think that's esthetically cool. My grandfather used to do that.

(52:45):
He worked sixteen hour days to break his way into journalism.
His coworkers treated him very well and with respect and
gave him the nickname Joey the Jew because they didn't
actually treat him with respect. And then he got himself
into office as a Republican. And I feel like it's
worth saying anytime I mentioned the word republican in the

(53:05):
nineteenth century on the show, that I need to point
out that this means the opposite of what it means today,
republican other kind. Yeah, totally og And you know, you
end his story here and he's great, but he was
really into capitalism. So eventually he left the Republicans and
joined the Democrats. Now that the shadow of the Confederate

(53:27):
so he was dropping away.

Speaker 3 (53:28):
Other kind, but not as much the other kind as
yea for the other kind.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
Yeah, around the time it was starting to shift. I
think at least anti slavery was more important to him
than being pro free market was. Soon he spent his
time both trying to control people through elected office and
controlling people through the news. He was fairly upfront about this.
He started the Saint Louis Post Dispatch. He crushed some

(53:52):
unionizing there. He moved to New York City. He bought
The New York World. He built it up to be
the biggest paper in the country, of the circulation of
six hundred thousand copies. And then you've got Hurst. Hurst
was a rich wasp who was raised by a rich
fuck wasp. He claimed to be a progressive democrat the
working classes friend, but he was not. And then he

(54:12):
later became a fierce anti communist and conservative who loved Hitler,
literal Hitler. And then he built himself a castle overlooking
the ocean.

Speaker 3 (54:20):
So, yeah, which we're remarkably chill about. Honestly, it's I know,
but you know what if we if we include the
architecture of every Nazi lover, where would we be as
a society?

Speaker 1 (54:38):
You know, I want to look in the ocean?

Speaker 3 (54:41):
Yeah, yeah, the castle park concentrated on the castle park,
not the Nazi part.

Speaker 1 (54:46):
Yeah yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (54:49):
You get them to build it, and then you will
still drive forwards, come on, totally.

Speaker 1 (54:54):
Yeah. Anyway, there are villains, fuck them both. They decided
to fuck over literal children. The literal children who had
built their fortune, not just random children, but literally the
ones who had built their fortune by going out late
at night, starving, screaming extra extra, read all about it.

(55:15):
The children were like, nah, fuck that. So they went
on strike. And this strike is actually fairly typical of
a Newsy strike, although larger in scale, and so the
prices stayed high. The war has ended, the prices stay high.
So on July eighteenth, eighteen ninety nine, the one thing
I think people get wrong about this is me being potentic.

(55:35):
The one thing people get wrong about it wasn't just
like one day they raised the prices and people were like, no,
more right, The prices hadn't gone down, And then eventually
people were like, but we're literally starving. We can't do
this right. Our profit margin cannot you know, going from
twenty five cents a day to like, I don't know,
eighteen cents a day or less is not a doable thing.

(55:55):
So on July eighteenth, eighteen ninety nine, newsboys in Long
Island City, only time that that will ever come up
in any history book ever, the only thing that's ever
happened in Long Island City. They turned over a wagon
for the new York Journal and they're like, man, fuck this.
And they might have announced this as a strike, but
I think it was just an insurrectionary labor action, like

(56:15):
completely unorganized. The next day, Newsy's in Manhattan Brooklyn were like, oh,
it's a strike. They formed a union. It was called
the Newsboys Union. They elected officers and they refuse to
take papers to sell, and of course, just as importantly,
they refuse to let anyone else take papers to sell
as well. The president on paper was a guy named

(56:38):
David Dave Simmons, who doesn't even get a cool nickname. Literally,
his nickname was Dave.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
That is I disagreed, that is cool.

Speaker 5 (56:46):
Okay, name is no, name is David, and you go
by David, quotes Dave and then Simmons. It was like,
that's so bonkers, it's I think it's quite cool.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
No, all right, all right, I'm here because he gets
presented as like the boring guy, right yeah, because he
was not a good speaker and he mostly like gave
speeches about like the numbers and how things were going.
But this actually makes sense because okay, he'd been selling paper.
He's twenty one when this starts, he's like the oldest
of them. He'd been selling paper since he was eight,

(57:21):
and he was an amateur boxer who would like prize
fight on the street, my god, and he had a
prime spot for selling papers because anyone who wanted it
could have it. They just had to lick him as
how he used it and no one could do it.
I suspect this is how he ended up the president
of the union. It was not his charisma, it was

(57:43):
his Yeah, don't fuck with Dave. You're right in a
world full of like, I don't know hid fish and yes,
don't fuck with Dave.

Speaker 2 (57:53):
Dave.

Speaker 3 (57:53):
Dave is the actual scariest motherfucker are out.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
That's terrifying. Who is he?

Speaker 3 (57:59):
Oh? His name is David. He goes by Dave. What
he doesn't need a better nickname? Yeah, gotcha, loud and clear.

Speaker 1 (58:10):
Yeah. I bet other people try to give him nicknames
and he just punched them. You know, they're like, I'm Dave. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (58:20):
I like.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
I like how entertained Andrew is by this entire bit.

Speaker 2 (58:23):
It's just so weird. It's it's just it's like, who do.

Speaker 1 (58:30):
You know? You could be anything? He could be danned off,
I mean.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
Yeah, literally anything.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
Yeah, So I say he was the leader. He's the
leader on paper, because the leadership in this organization was very,
very informal, so you might imagine this was technically a union,
but it was not a bureaucratic engine. People were generally
more loyal to their regions than to any central leadership.
For example, you had spot Conlin over in Brooklyn, who

(58:57):
was the leader there. He always wore pink suspender and
he got the best line in the nineteen ninety two
Disney version of this when he shows up with a
slingshot and he says, never fear, Brooklyn is here. And
I don't know if he was as small as he
was in the I couldn't find enough information about spot

(59:18):
Conlin in the movie. He's like the small kid who's
like the scary boss of Brooklyn that you don't want
to mess with. The strike's method was fairly simple. You
stop the papers from getting sold. However you feel like
stopping the papers from getting sold. Anyone selling the papers,
kid or adult, would get mobbed up, possibly beaten up,

(59:38):
depending on what you're reading, and have his papers destroyed
or just followed around by people yelling scab, scab, scab
all day. Soon most scabs joined the strike.

Speaker 3 (59:50):
Yeah, not like a little little shave and just like
seeing you're on the wrong side of things.

Speaker 1 (59:57):
Yeah, totally, totally. So at one point, a scabbing kid
was with a scabby kid was selling papers and he
was being guarded by a cop. Like directly, this cop
was like defending his one kid. So a news he
named Young Mush spoke up and Young Mush got his
name because he had a girlfriend, and that was like mushy, like, ew'
go girlfriend, Yeah, your name is young Mush. I love it,

(01:00:23):
he said, basically, And this is like a direct quote
from a newspaper, but I don't believe the direct quotes
from newspapers around this. He said, quote that CoP's too
fat to run fast, and I'll get him after me
if you'll tend to the scab when he gets away.
So Young Mush walks up, snatches the kid's papers and
just takes off running. The cop chases him, and fifteen
strikers beat up the scab. The scabbing kid runs off.

(01:00:47):
They catch up with him a few blocks away and
are like, so, are you with us, and he's like, yeah,
I'm with you, and then he yeah, that day helps
bring down someone who's trying to smuggle some papers into Brooklyn.

Speaker 3 (01:00:58):
Yeah, I'm I'm you know, yeah, it's sort of like
those are the tools you got.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
And I understand, yeah totally.

Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
I was thinking actually about this because one of the
as far as I know, I don't know the formal
process for what the Writer's Guild will do about scabs.
The thing I've heard the most, which again I'm not
one hundred percent sure how like true this is or
what the process is, but it is a little funny
that one of the things the Writer's Guild of America

(01:01:27):
can hold over potential scabbers is that you will not
be allowed or potentially I think in you know, I
guess it would have to be incredibly egregious. You would
have your health insurance taken away, or you would not
be able to join the guild and get guild health insurance.
Oh yeah, And it is a little bonkers that truly,
Like the reason they have this cudgel is because America

(01:01:47):
is so fucked up.

Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
That's totally.

Speaker 3 (01:01:51):
Like withholding health insurance is like a pretty terrifying thing.

Speaker 1 (01:01:56):
It's like actually fairly comparable to beating someone up. Both
some of them are your health will get worse yeah,
although I would rather take like get beat up when
I'm thirteen by some other thirteen year olds, which happened
to me on a regular basis, then like die of
cancer untreated or whatever, you know, right right, I'm not trying.
It's just I'm just it's amazing that yeah, our country.

Speaker 3 (01:02:19):
It is just it's just so yeah, it's just wild
that like this the truly the one piece of leverage
we have over scabs, honestly is this thing where I'm like,
oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
And it is possible, it's possible that the other papers
were playing up all of the violence to sell papers. Right,
For the most part, the striker's goal was the destruction
of newspapers and the and scabers no scabs no longer,
choosing to continue in that behavior rather than specifically through violence.

(01:02:55):
But I don't know. I believe that there was a
decent amount of violence, and I don't know to what
degree it was exaggerated by all the newspapers. It's the
golden era of newspapers lying, and this strike just fucked
up the paper's profit margin. The public loved the newsies,

(01:03:16):
advertisers dropped, circulation dropped about seventy percent. The strike spread
to New Jersey quick enough through delegates that were sent
out to different regions and also just people other people
acting on their own through like sort of insurrectionary means.
And it was joined in the end by And I'm
going to pull up the list Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx,

(01:03:38):
Staten Island, Long Island City, Mount Vernon, Newark, Troy, Clifton,
Jersey City, Hoboken, Elizabeth, New Jersey, Trenton, Plainfield, Fall River, Massachusetts,
New Haven, Norwalk, Norwalk. I don't know un to pronounce
New England names. Cincinnati, Ohio. Yeah, maybe it just actually
said New York.

Speaker 4 (01:03:54):
I don't know, we should deserved to read it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:01):
Cincinnati, Ohio, Lexington, Kentucky. Also probably Queens. Queens wasn't on
the list that I found, but another place pointed out
that all the Burroughs, Yeah I.

Speaker 2 (01:04:14):
Got to be Queens. I know, I was the biggest Burrow.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
Yeah right, I.

Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
Think physically it's the biggest.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
Okay, Queen's is where I've spent more time than any
of the others actually, But so yeah, this strike is
now referred to, or at the time it becomes referred to,
as the most successful strike in the history of the
city and several regional papers have been trying to creep
up their wholesale prices. Immediately were like, oh never mind,
I like being fifty cents. That's cool with me. Hurst

(01:04:45):
himself was run off by a crowd of newsies at
one point. Well, which might be why like the Empire
he struck back, which we'll hear about on Wednesday.

Speaker 2 (01:04:58):
Wow, yes, you know who came up with that?

Speaker 3 (01:05:02):
A writer, A writer's old writer wouldn't exist without us?

Speaker 4 (01:05:08):
Amazing. Wow, Andrew, do you have anything you'd like to plug?

Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
Just doing this racist? Please give us a listen.

Speaker 3 (01:05:19):
If you like this vibe with I'll just say one
point one less research. If it's all vibes that no
facts you're looking for, Jos, this racist is a place
to go, Sophie, what do you got?

Speaker 4 (01:05:41):
We have a new show on cools and Media that
launched recently. If you're listening in current time, it's called
Sad Oligarch. It is hosted by j Canrahan and it
is an investigative series that dives into the mysterious deaths
of all the Russian billionaire oligarchs that just keep falling
out windows stairs, stabbing themselves in Eating Poison and it's

(01:06:06):
really good and Jake's the best, so please listen, and
it's on all the things.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
Hell yeah, and if you like children fighting against oligarchy.
I'm currently kickstarting a tabletop role playing game called PA
Number City that I'm one of the writers for. And
one of the character classes you can play is a
rat king, who is an orphaned child who eats mushrooms
to communicate with rats and sends them out as swarms
against his enemies and or her enemies or their enemies.

(01:06:35):
And you can find it by googling the Number City.
Probably you don't even tape Kickstarter. It's not a lot
of things named Pa Number City, true, but it's one
of them.

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
But you know what, if there's another one, there's definitely
a rat king that's true.

Speaker 1 (01:06:54):
Oh and you can hear Jamie Loftus, Cool Zone Media's
own Jamie Loftis and me and a few other people
playing Pu Number City on YouTube if you look at
our Kickstarter there's a link to it in a bunch
of other places. But we play a game of it,
and you can hear Jamie Loftus as a rat king
based in Jamie piled Yeah. See you all, Wednesday.

Speaker 4 (01:07:18):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
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