Social Movements: The Newsboys' Strike

By Eliza Tucker

This is a busy week for a lot of our members (have fun at Romantic Times, ladies!), so I'm posting again!

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Socialist movement gained momentum throughout the Western world. Unions and labor parties sprung up, comprised of working- and middle-class people who were tired of eighty-hour work weeks, low pay, and minimal occupational support. While men and women began to demand better treatment, children toiled, tucked into windowless hovels.

In 1899, ten thousand of New York City's homeless kids locked themselves into lives identical to adults', complete with full days of sweatshop work with little to no time devoted to schooling or play. The most prodigious of these urchins learned to read and took independent jobs as street vendors, messengers, and newspaper boys and girls.

Newspaper sales increased during the Spanish-American War, but the costs of supporting field reporters and running the press had risen. During the war, New York's media moguls had raised the wholesale prices of their papers from fifty cents per hundred papers to sixty cents per hundred, without raising the customer's price.

The price hike cost the newsies, mostly orphans and runaways between the ages of six and fifteen, an average of fifty cents a week. In a time when a bed in a lodging-house could be bought for ten cents a night, and meals for six cents a piece, the price increase hit the children on fundamental levels. While magnates like Joseph Pulitzer (the New York World) and William Randolph Hearst (the New York Journal) decided to go back on their initial promise of lowering the price after the war, the kids took a cue from the adults and went on strike.

This seems to be the season for strikes. Although the Brooklyn and New York street railway strike has subsided and peace once more reigns, the newsboys and messenger boys of the great city have gone on strike. The newsboys refuse to handle the New York World and Journal (newspapers) unless they are allowed a larger margin of profit, and the messenger boys insist on shorter hours and better pay.

These strikes, while they cause some annoyance and inconvenience, are hardly worthy of serious thought in comparison with the dreadful struggle that is taking place in Cleveland. In that city, a street railway strike has assumed such terrible proportions that the strikers have gone to the length of using dynamite to blow up cars with passengers in them.

-- The Great Round World, vol. XI, The Great Round World Company, New York, 1899.

World and Journal newsies stopped selling papers from July 19 through August 2. Overshadowed by the Cleveland railway strike, the papers' editors "laughed off the children's strike--at first. But they found themselves outsmarted and outnumbered as the newsies succeeded in organizing a metropolitan boycott of the Hearst and Pulitzer dailies. Led by the Brooklyn Union District Master Workboy, Spot Conlon, attired in his pink suspenders, the Brooklyn boys marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to join forces with their Manhattan comrades. Together, the boys not only shut down street circulation of the afternoon Journals and Worlds in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island City, and up and down the Atlantic seaboard, but they enlisted the public in their crusade by staging a series of parades, open-air rallies, and a huge mass meeting at the New Irving Hall." (The Chief: the Life of William Randolph Hearst, by David Nasaw, Houghton Mifflin Books, 2000).

The children put a severe dent in the papers' circulation: the World alone suffered a sales decrease from 360,000 to 125,000 during the two-week strike (Big Town, Big Time, by David Nasaw, New York Daily News, 1999).

The editors took notice. Instead of lowering the distribution price, they offered the kids an acceptable compromise: the ability to return unsold papers at the end of the day. This policy may sound familiar to those of us involved in the publishing industry--major publishers allow booksellers to return remainders.

The Newsboys' Strike garnered the notice of then-governor Theodore Roosevelt, who eventually championed child labor reform

The Love Cycle: Romance Novels and the Working Girl

By Eliza Tucker

At the turn of the twentieth century, London, Paris, and New York attracted dreamers and bohemians. Young suburban women who, when finished with as much school as their parents deemed necessary, shuffled into big cities in search of employment. Excited by stories of girls making the munificent sum of $8 per week, young women went from milliner to florist, factory to laundry-room in search of the ideal job and the ideal wage.

The Industrial Revolution set more than just machines in motion. Working-class women were thrust into close proximity to men on a continual basis in every part of their lives. Girls were allowed to walk city streets, to dine with men in certain establishments, and to date without supervision without suffering much in the way of tarnished reputations. In many ways, the working-class woman enjoyed more freedom than the lady of fashion.

With literacy on the rise, romance lived in the dress factories and sweatshops, where the hopeful young employees read books during breaks, hoping for better lives. In The Long Day by Dorothy Richardson, the narrator considers the role of fiction in the lives of working girls of her era, New York City in 1905:

Promptly at half-past twelve the awakening machinery called us back to the workaday world. Story-books were tucked away, and their entranced readers dragged themselves back to the machines and steaming paste-pots, to dream and talk as they worked, not of their own fellows of last night’s masquerade, but of bankers and mill-owners who in fiction have wooed and won and honorably wedded just such poor toilers as they themselves.

This entertaining discourse over the daily task of box-making follows:

IN WHICH PHOEBE AND MRS. SMITH HOLD FORTH UPON MUSIC AND LITERATURE

Don't you never read no story-books?" Mrs. Smith asked, stirring the paste-pot preparatory to the afternoon's work. She looked at me curiously out of her shrewd, snapping dark eyes as she awaited my answer. I was conscious that Mrs. Smith didn't like me for some reason or other, and I was anxious to propitiate her. I was pretty certain she thought me a boresome prig, and I determined I'd prove I wasn't. My confession of an omnivorous appetite for all sorts of story-books had the desired effect; and when I confessed further, that I liked best of all a real, tender, sentimental love-story, she asked amiably:

"How do you like 'Little Rosebud's Lovers'?"

"I've never read that," I replied. "Is it good?"

"It's fine," interposed Phoebe; "but I like 'Woven on Fate's Loom' better--don't you?" The last addressed to Mrs. Smith.

"No, I can't say that's my impinion," returned our vis-à-vis, with a judicious tipping of the head to one side as she soused her dripping paste-brush over the strips. "Not but what 'Woven on Fate's Loom' is a good story in its way, either, for them that likes that sort of story. But I think 'Little Rosebud's Lovers' is more int'resting, besides being better wrote."

"And that's just what I don't like about it," retorted Phoebe, her fingers traveling like lightning up and down the corners of the boxes. "You like this hot-air talk, and I don't; and the way them fellows and girls shoot hot-air at each other in that there 'Little Rosebud's Lovers' is enough to beat the street-cars!"

Phoebe goes on to tell the story of 'Little Rosebud's Lovers,' which is complete with an exotic setting (South Carolina), two lovely sisters (but only Rosebud had a demeanor to match her physical beauty; the other, Maud was jealous and spiteful), and Harvard-grad lover (who turned out to be 'a villain of the deepest dye'). The story-book fans go on to discuss the plot holes in a way that would fit well on a current-day lit forum:

"Where did she get the money to come to New York with?" interrupted the practical Phoebe. "That's something I don't understand. If she didn't have no money to hire a room at a hotel down in South Carolina for overnight, I'd like to know where she got the money for a railroad ticket."

"Well, that's just all you know about them swells," retorted Mrs. Smith. "I suppose a rich man's daughter like that can travel around all over the country on a pass."

The banter continues for a chapter, and gives us a great look into the origins of romance, while the book glimpses how average girls fit courtship and passion into otherwise taxing lives. Write on, romance authors!