Crying the News

From Benjamin Franklin to Ragged Dick to Jack Kelly, hero of the Disney musical Newsies, newsboys have long intrigued Americans as symbols of struggle and success. But what do we really know about them? Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys is the first book to place this idealized occupational group at the epicenter of American history, analyzing their inseparable role as economic actors and cultural symbols over a century of war and peace, prosperity and depression, exploitation and reform. It chronicles their lives from the 1830s to the 1930s in every region of the country, and on the railroads that linked them. While focusing mainly on boys, the book also examines the role of girls and grown-ups, blacks and whites, immigrants and natives, the elderly and disabled, arguing that the capitalist press exerted a vital yet overlooked influence on working-class families that is essential to understanding the American experience.

Features

• Shows how newspaper sellers and carriers fared in a variety of paid and unpaid labor systems, from slavery, indentured servitude, family labor, and the padrone system to wage work, piece work, petty commerce, and corporate capitalism.

• Traces how city children adapted to new modes of transportation and distribution, such as streetcars, subways, bicycles, and automobiles.

• Reveals how laws regulating child street labor were products of children’s collective action as much as the efforts of adult reformers.

• Documents the innovative uses of newsboy banquets, excursions, sports teams, marching bands, clubs, schools, and reading rooms to recruit and discipline children’s labor.

• Illuminates the cultural process by which artists, novelists, photographers, and advertisers transformed capitalism’s most woeful victims into its most appealing proponents.

Praise

“These waifs, urchins, street Arabs, ragamuffins, gamins, juvenile delinquents and guttersnipes, as they were called, now have their Boswell in Vincent DiGirolamo.”  —Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal

“Rescuing ‘newsies’ from the condescension of history with inventive curiosity and stunningly wide research, Vincent DiGirolamo has restored these crucial child laborers—boys and girls, white and black— to their central place in American cities. His revelations about hawking the news offer an ingenious guide to understanding the changing relations between labor and capital and between print media and society in the United States.”  —Nancy F. Cott, Harvard University

“Richly researched, incisively analytic, and compellingly written, Crying the News cuts through the nostalgic myths that envelop the newsboy and lets us enter into their lives, with their distinctive banter, camaraderie, argot, dress, rituals, and ethics. A vivid window into the nation’s first urban youth culture and the evolution of news media, this book offers a stunning example of a history that treats the young as active agents who were far more capable and competent than contemporary society assumes.”  —Steven Mintz, University of Texas at Austin

“Crying the News offers a century of American history through the lens of one of our most iconic characters—the newsboy. DiGirolamo focuses on the intimate relationship between news criers and capitalism. Newsboys’ voices animate the narrative and deepen our understanding not only of their lives, but also of their communities and their nation.”  —James Marten, Marquette University

“Traditionally a stock figure in American history and culture, the newsboy finally sheds his (and her) picaresque, picturesque, and marginal status in Vincent DiGirolamo’s comprehensive and revelatory study. At once a social, cultural, labor, reform, journalism, and capitalist history, Crying the News is an amazing feat of research and writing that, with extraordinary scope and meticulous detail, captures the diverse experience of the ‘newsies’ as it reveals how we cannot fully understand a hundred  years of US life without reckoning with these children and young adults.”  —Joshua Brown, CUNY Graduate Center