Newsboys (Newsies) (1908-1910)

Who the newsies were

In the decades around 1900, city newspapers were sold on the street by children. Newsboys, and a few newsgirls, bought papers wholesale and resold them on corners, at train stations and ferry landings, and in and out of streetcars and saloons. Because they paid for their papers up front, they carried the risk of unsold copies. In July 1899 thousands of New York newsboys struck against Joseph Pulitzer's World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal after the publishers raised the price of a bundle of 100 papers from 50 to 60 cents; the strike ended after about two weeks when the papers agreed to buy back unsold copies. That strike later inspired the 1992 Disney film Newsies and the Broadway musical.

Street selling was often done before and after school rather than instead of it, which made it look different from mill or mine work. The National Child Labor Committee's investigators argued that the late hours, truancy and smoking that went with it did real harm, and Hine's newsboy photographs and captions were part of that case.

The Frankfort Street photograph, 1908

The lead image here is an early picture from Hine's Committee work. Its caption card reads Group of Newsboys on Frankfort Street near World Building, records the witness as Fred McMurrry, and carries the Hine number 33-A, a very low number in the Committee's sequence of about 5,126. The Library of Congress dates it February 1908, the first year of Hine's work for the Committee. The World Building, headquarters of Pulitzer's New York World, stood on Park Row at the corner of Frankfort Street, across from City Hall, at the heart of the city's newspaper district.

Six boys crowd toward the camera against a dark wall, most holding thick bundles of folded papers under their arms. They range from small boys to teenagers. At the left edge a man in a bowler hat stands with a cigarette in his mouth, half cut off by the frame. The faces are lit hard against the darkness, and nobody poses: some look at the camera, some past it.

St. Louis, May 1910

In May 1910 Hine spent time in St. Louis photographing newsboys; one researcher who has studied the series counts 85 newsboy pictures from that month. His St. Louis captions emphasize age and size. One reads, in full, Tommy Hawkins, 5 year old newsie 40 inches high. Another describes 6 yr. old Eddie, a regular newsie whose brothers all sell. A third records a 7-year-old selling at 7th Street and Washington on a Saturday afternoon, with the witness E. N. Clopper. Edward N. Clopper was the Committee's secretary for the Mississippi Valley, and in 1912 he published Child Labor in City Streets, a study of newsboys, bootblacks and other street traders that describes boys rising early to reach the newspapers' branch offices and the heavy smoking common among them.

Those branch offices appear in Hine's pictures too. The photograph captioned Skeeters Branch, dated May 5, 1910, shows a newspaper branch in a ramshackle wooden shed plastered with tobacco advertisements, with a single boy standing in the street outside.

Why the newsboy pictures matter

Hine's newsboy pictures put faces, ages and street corners to a kind of child labor that was easy to overlook because it happened in plain sight. Historians have paid them less attention than his factory pictures. Oenone Kubie, writing in the Journal of American Studies in 2016, notes that neglect and argues that the newsboy in reform photography was often a symbol, tied to ideas about masculinity, enterprise, urban danger and immigrant families, and that this symbolic figure could be far removed from the reality of street work. Looking at Hine's captions alongside the pictures is one way to see both the evidence he gathered and the case he was making.

The photographs in this archive

This page treats the newsboy pictures as a series. The lead image is the Library of Congress print of the Frankfort Street group (Hine no. 33-A). The archive also holds the St. Louis portraits of Tommy Hawkins and of Eddie, the 7-year-old at 7th and Washington, the Skeeters Branch street view, and New York pictures from 1910 captioned N.Y. Newsies and Newsie, 125th St. The Skeeters Branch print held here shows the branch building and a single boy, not a group of newsboys. Many other newsboy photographs from Rochester, Utica, Syracuse, Schenectady and Wilmington, Delaware, can be found in the archive's street trades pictures.