Newsboys and organized labor
In honor of Labor Day in the US, this excerpt from Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys by Vincent DiGirolamo looks at how newsboys or newsies organized themselves and joined in contemporary labor movements to fight for better working conditions as child laborers on the west coast of the United States in the 1890s.
San Francisco was probably the strongest union town in the West, as friendly to organized labor as Los Angeles was hostile to it. The local newsboy union organized during the Great Upheaval of 1886 disappeared with the decline of the Knights of Labor, but it reemerged in 1892 when a thousand San Francisco hawkers and carriers mounted a successful two- day strike against the Daily Report and the Evening Post over a rate hike that excluded newsstands and bookstores. The boys got subscribers to boycott the paper and persuaded two clothing stores to withdraw their advertising. The newspaper reinstated the old rates. The boys followed up their victory by organizing another union that marched “200 strong” in uniform caps, coats, and short pants in the city’s massive Labor Day parade.
The great strikes and other dramatic events of the period brought many newcomers into the field and reduced profits, prompting the boys to reorganize in August 1894 under new leaders who instituted a badge system. The San Francisco Newsboys’ Union showed its strength in October 1896 when its members boycotted three afternoon dailies, the Post, Bulletin, and Report, for discontinuing their “check system” of exchanging old papers for new editions. At an indignation meeting on the second day of the strike, Eugene “Happy” Dougherty mounted a carriage step at the corner of Geary and Grant Avenue, near Union Square, and addressed several hundred fellow strikers in what the Chronicle called “true newsboy eloquence:”
Say, it’s just like this, fellers. Der punks wot runs der papers wants ter put us up der flume. Now we’re out here ter express our free feelin’s, and we ain’t a going to propose to take no such guff. Say, didn’t we pick up der Bulletin a while ago and advertise der bloomin’ sheet and help it out of a hole? An’ before that we built up the Report. An’ what would der Post be widout us? We made der papers and now dey want ter do us dirt. All we want you blokes ter do is ter take yer ads out and buy der Oakland papers.
As in the 1892 strike, two clothiers withdrew their ads in support of the strike. The union also got help from across the bay in Oakland, where 150 Newsboys’ Union members paraded up Broadway in solidarity and a sympathetic publishersupplied the strikers with two wagonloads of papers to sell. The story faded from the headlines after five days with no settlement reported. The Scripps- McRae syndicate acquired the Report in 1898 and turned it into the city’s first penny daily, but the hostility of the newsboys proved fatal to the enterprise after two years.
San Francisco’s union newsboys, now numbering three hundred, struck all the afternoon papers again for seven weeks in the summer of 1903 over a price increase. The anti- union Los Angeles Times took perverse delight in reporting that the union of “toughs” organized by William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner to injure the Bulletin had now turned on their masters. It alleged that the union was a school for crime and that the “king bee” had embezzled enough funds to open a saloon. Two years later, with a membership of one thousand, the newsboys’ union launched its most raucous and politically charged strike. It targeted the Bulletin, a newspaper hostile to the corrupt Union Labor Party regime of Mayor Eugene Schmitz, the newsboys’ biggest ally. “We recognize in him our sincere friend,” resolved the union during the previous election, “and we will use all the influence we possess to assist him to a second term.” Schmitz and political boss Abe Ruef instigated the strike to silence the Bulletin’s crusading editor, Fremont Older. The commissioner of public works had earlier denied permits to Bulletin and Chronicle newsboys and targeted them for obstructing sidewalks. On the eve of the 1905 strike Mayor Schmitz addressed a mass meeting of newsboys in a rented hall on O’Farrell Street and urged them to hawk a pro- administration daily on the exceptional terms of four copies for a nickel. He also distributed badges designating them union newsboys. “Our relations with the newsboys was entirely pleasant until the Mayor addressed them,” Bulletin owner R. A. Crothers complained. “We have not even been requested by the boys — there is no ‘union’ by the way — to change our rate.”
For several days, newsboys, aided by miscellaneous “roughs,” cut the tugs of Bulletin delivery wagons, stoned shops that displayed the paper, slugged and clubbed its reporters, carriers, and vendors, and snatched copies from the hands of purchasers. These “outrages” occurred with so little police interference that the sheriff was asked to preserve order. His men arrested nine boys between the ages of 10 and 15, including Irish, Italian, and African Americans. Mayor Schmitz eventually published a letter in a friendly newspaper asking the strikers to refrain from violence but assuring them of his sympathy for their cause. To show their support, he and Boss Ruef supplied fireworks and a brass band for 350 striking newsboys to parade down Market Street. The Bulletin withstood the violence and hoopla, a rash of boycotts and libel suits, and even the kidnapping of Older, eventually seeing the administration brought down on charges of graft after the 1906 earthquake.
Vincent DiGirolamo is a member of the History Department at Baruch College of the City University of New York. A former newspaper reporter, editor, and documentary filmmaker, he received his B.A. from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, M.A. in Comparative Social History from UC Santa Cruz, and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. He lives in East Setauket, New York.
