Read All About It! Kids Vex Titans!
Lewis Wickes Hine/Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
“Newsies the Musical,” a coming Disney Broadway production, recounts a strike waged in 1899 by New York newsboys like the
rugged street urchins pictured.
By DAN BARRY
Published: March 2, 2012
THERE is no sugar-pushing nanny traveling by umbrella this time, no conflicted lion seeking therapy from a
meerkat and a warthog. Even so, the premise for “Newsies the Musical,” the latest Disney property to reach
Broadway, seems just as rooted in Disneyesque whimsy: A dese-and-dose scrum of newsboys unites to lead a
strike against the most powerful media titans of Old New York.
Right. And next: “Eight Is Enough,” a murder-mystery musical about a maiden living with seven Smurf-like
men who won’t stop whistling.
But here’s the thing. That strike? It happened, ya mug. It happened.
There really was a newsboy strike in 1899 that unsettled the empires of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph
Hearst. There really were thousands of children using muscle and wit to thwart delivery of Pulitzer’s Evening
World and Hearst’s Evening Journal — that is, De Woild and De Joinal.
There really was a newsboy called Kid Blink, on account of an absent eye. And a Crutchy Morris. And a
Racetrack Higgins. And a Spot Conlon, over from Brooklyn. They may not have performed choreographed
dances of solidarity along Park Row, but these Davids did unite for a just cause, standing up for the collective
power of many and the individual worth of all.
Not to get all highfalutin on yiz.
Naturally, “Newsies the Musical” — which begins previews on March 15 at
the Nederlander Theater — has taken liberties with the facts of the Newsboy
Strike of 1899, as did “Newsies,” the Movie Flop of 1992 on which it is
based. Pulitzer was in Maine, not Manhattan, when the newsboys struck.
One of his daughters was not a muckraking reporter who fell for a newsie.
And while Theodore Roosevelt was the governor of New York at the time,
he had no bully-bully role in the episode.
The Kids Who Shouted the News
Jeremy Jordan, center, in “Newsies
the Musical,” starting previews
March 15.
“But facts are not what drama is,” explained the actor and playwright
Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, based on the Disney film by Bob
Tzudiker and Noni White. “I don’t care that Pulitzer was in Maine.” Mr.
Fierstein is right, of course. Having won four Tonys in four separate
categories, he has more than a passing knowledge of what works in theater.
In the case of “Newsies the Musical,” which had a successful run last year at
the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., he said that he wanted to plumb
the historical event for art, entertainment and essential truths, as when these
striving children come to a liberating realization: “That they matter.”
Now for what brung it all about.
Newsboys were once the town criers of the cities, street-hardened
ragamuffins shouting out headlines sensational enough to justify the penny
purchase. Jacob Riis, the great chronicler of the New York underclass,
described them as orphans and runaways who lived rough, played craps and
slept “with at least one eye open, and every sense alert to the approach of
danger.” Coppers, that is, along with thieves and the occasional goo-goo, or
reformer.
Joseph Pulitzer, a target of an 1899
newsboy strike.
Newsboys so captured the American imagination that they became “an open
symbol,” according to Vincent DiGirolamo, a history professor at Baruch
College and the author of a coming book about newsboys. They represented
both capitalism’s exploitative evils and its by-your-bootstraps charms; child
labor and free speech; the freshness of pears and the kick of plug tobacco.
Dime novels and magazines featured inspirational stories about newsboys
(“Will Waffles; or, The Freaks and Fortunes of a Newsboy”). Do-gooders
established lodging houses for newsboys. Parker Brothers came out with a newsboy game. There was even a
Newsboy’s Prayer:
Now I lays me down to sleep
I prays de Lord me soul to keep
And if de cop should find me — den
I prays he’ll leave me be. Amen.
By the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 many New York newsies were schoolchildren from
immigrant and working-class families. According to the historian David Nasaw, who unearthed the longforgotten story of the Newsboy Strike in his 1985 book “Children of the City: At Work and at Play,” publishers
needed a reliable work force to push their newspapers for a few hours in the afternoon — “and these newsboys
were perfect.”
To cover some of the expense of their own war, the one over newspaper circulation, Pulitzer and Hearst targeted
the lowly newsboys by adding a penny to the nickel price for 10 newspapers. The newsies, by the way, were not
reimbursed for the “papes” they failed to sell.
Few complained as long as the war drove street sales of extra editions — the Twitter feeds of their day. But,
sadly for newspapers, the war was brief. By the summer of 1899 the newsies of The Journal and The World
were still paying 6 cents per 10, but selling fewer papers. This made them cranky.
Igniting their resentment was the discovery that a Journal deliveryman out in Long Island City was cheating
newsies by selling bundles of newspapers that were, shall we say, a bit light. Their emphatic response, including
overturning his wagon, energized the newsboys congregating every afternoon outside the newspaper buildings
along Park Row, across from City Hall Park.
A cluster of schoolboys, waifs and streetwise teenagers threatened to strike if the price for The Journal and The
World didn’t return to a nickel for 10. When they refused, the newsies began shouting their own headlines —
Strike! Don’t buy De Joinal! Don’t buy De Woild! — and waylaying any scab who dared to defy them.
Imagine the glee of other newspapers covering this improbable event. Not only could they embarrass two
competitors as heartless scoundrels making fortunes on the backs of urchins, but they could also luxuriate in the
Bowery-inflected argot of newsboys called Barney Peanuts, Jimmy the Goat and Hunch Maddox.
“We tells him dat it’s got to be two fer a cent or nuthin,” explained a newsboy called Boots, according to The
Daily Tribune. “The bloke sez, ‘Go ahead and strike,’ and here we is. Dat’s all.”
They found leaders, the pugilistic David Simons and loquacious Kid Blink, a k a Red Blink, a k a Muggsy
Magee. They appointed officers, formed committees and disrupted distribution. One man dared to sell the
boycotted papers in Union Square, The New York Sun reported, and “in less time than it takes to tell it, his
stock of papers had been ripped into a thousand pieces, his hat had been jammed down over his eyes, and he
was being punched by a score of boyish hands.”
The headiest moment came when, with the blessing of Dry Dollar Sullivan, a former newsboy and Tammany
Hall mucky-muck, the newsboys held a rally at New Irving Hall, a colorful auditorium close to the Bowery. Its
security was often provided by the gangster Monk Eastman, who would cut a notch in his club for every skull it
cracked. (He supposedly whacked some innocent sap to make it an even 50.)
More than 2,000 newsboys jammed seats and windowsills; another 3,000 flooded the streets. Several took the
stage, including Kid Blink, who buttoned his shirt and combed back his red hair before urging solidarity and
speaking essential truth.
“I’m tryin’ to figure out how 10 cents on a hundred papers can mean more to a millionaire than it does to a
newsboy,” he said to cheers and huzzahs. “And I can’t see it.”
Then Hungry Joe Kernan, the “newsboy mascot,” sang a sad song about a one-legged newsie, and the strikers
went shrieking into the streets, imbued with the knowledge of their vital importance to the newspaper business.
“These kids are — kids!” Mr. Nasaw said. “But they just have this sense of total outrage over what Hearst and
Pulitzer are doing to them. And they know damn well that they’re not only distributing the paper, they’re
shouting the headlines.”
James McGrath Morris, the author of “Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power,” agreed. “What it boils
down to is that Hearst and Pulitzer won’t give in on a couple of pennies,” he said. “And Pulitzer was once an
impoverished waif himself.”
All the while Pulitzer’s aide de camp Don Seitz was sending coded telegrams about the strike — which was
spreading to other cities and cutting deeply into circulation and advertising dollars — to the publisher’s estate in
Bar Harbor, Me. Because he was nearly blind, Pulitzer had Seitz’s reports read aloud to him, including these
words: “A menacing affair.”
As the days dragged on, some newsboys turned on one another, amid speculation that a couple of their leaders
had been bought off. According to The Daily Tribune, for example, Kid Blink showed up on Park Row one
morning sporting a new suit of clothes and leaving a trail of whispers that he was flashing a wad of bills.
Meanwhile Seitz’s reports to Pulitzer continued. “The loss in circulation due to the strike has been colossal,” he
wrote. “It is really remarkable the success these boys have had.”
Finally, in the strike’s second week, titans and newsboys compromised. Although the publishers would continue
to charge 6 cents for 10 papers, they agreed to buy back any papers the newsies were unable to sell.
Mr. Morris, Pulitzer’s biographer, maintains that the strike failed; the concession meant little to the publishers,
in part because they gave the newsboys credit, not cash, for unsold papers. But Mr. Nasaw sees the strike as a
stunning, if qualified, success. Consider: a bunch of kids from the tenements and streets altered the operations
of men powerful enough to influence presidential elections.
Then, like yesterday’s news, it was over. The newsboys’ union didn’t disband so much as it simply ceased to be.
And the newsies returned to their street corners to shout “Extry! Extry!” about stories other than their own,
before becoming mostly a vestige of the past by World War II.
Nearly a century would pass before the Newsboy Strike of 1899 received its due, and then only because Mr.
Nasaw came upon a footnote buried in a two-volume survey of American journalism. He wrote his book, and
then Disney made its failed movie musical, which, as bad as it is, has nevertheless developed a cult following.
Mr. Fierstein has reimagined the strike — and the movie — for a Broadway musical, which begs for a fastmoving, seamless plot. He said that he wanted to evoke issues of turn-of-the-century America, including
women’s suffrage and child labor, while retaining “the passion of the boys.”
Out went attempts to be entirely faithful to the newsboy dialect, amid worries that it was too hard to decipher.
Out too went the movie’s lifeless love story between a newsie’s sister and the protagonist, Jack Kelly (played
by a young Christian Bale).
Now, in the Broadway-bound show, Jack has a new love interest: a Pulitzer daughter and newspaperwoman
who is uninterested in writing for the society page. He also has a new talent, drawing.
There is a more complicated Pulitzer, a more involved Roosevelt. And the character Medda, the saucy
proprietor of a music hall played in the movie by Ann-Margret, is now a black woman, based loosely on Aida
Overton Walker, a popular vaudevillian. Still, Mr. Fierstein said, the musical remains true to the historical
event’s central meaning. “The power of the individual,” he said. “And the power of we.”
But what about the real Kid Blink? And Crutchy Morris, Spot Conlon, Racetrack Higgins and the rest? In the
end they stomp-danced their way off the public stage and returned to join the roiling millions of New York
strivers who live and die without ever creating a headline.
As a philosopher named Boots once said, “Dat’s all.”
Accessed March 6, 2012. New York Times, published March 2, 2012.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/theater/disneys-newsies-the-musical-comes-to-broadway.html