Newsboys' Strike: 120th Anniversary

July 23, 2019

Newsboys' Strike: 120th Anniversary - Day 3

February 23rd 1908
Boys Selling Newspapers on Brooklyn Bridge
Lewis Hine, photographer
wikimediacommons

As I've been putting this project together, I have been thanking my year 2000 self over and over for being so diligent and meticulous in my note keeping on these articles, especially as they're so easily confused. I wrote the dates of the newspapers on the back of every page, I made myself a list of all the articles I had, by paper, and by date. I even organized all my extra research about the newsboys themselves in a binder with tabs and labels and everything. Even before I was a historian by a university degree, I was a historian at heart and in mind. I knew, as I do know even better now, that if you don't label documents and they fall out of memory, they become almost useless, because it's the time and provenance that makes historical things valuable to us today. Without labels, without interpretation, without dates, it becomes so much of yesterday's trash and no one will be able to glean much of anything from it. This is why we value history - because it teaches us about ourselves and how far we, as humans, have traveled.

You may have noticed that I haven't offered much of a commentary on the actual articles yet. Part of that is because of a shortage of time on my end (we moved just a month ago!), but I'm also wanting these articles to be out there to be read and thought about on their own. I'm curious how people in today's world would view this newsboys' strike now. What do you think about it so far?

How do you view their violence? Do you think it's justified or glorified?
In today's context, what does their struggle mean to you?

Above all, I hope people today will view the newsies as a product of their world - whether you agree with their motives and methods or not. There's much to be learned from their fight. The only question that remains is this: What do you learn from it?

Here are the articles for Day 3 of the Newsboys' Strike - 23 July 1899:

A couple notes:

*I realize a lot of the print is pretty small. I've found that the best way to view the articles is on a smart phone where you can manually zoom in. Or, another way I found is if you click on the image so it opens in the blog's photo scroll, right click the photo and select "Open in New Tab" and then when you roll your mouse over the image, it shows a magnifying glass. Once you click that you can look at the text close up! Phew, I hope that all makes sense!

**Please respect all my hard work and investment. Please do not copy, store, or share these photos elsewhere without permission and proper linking back to this blog as well as correctly referencing where all the articles come from. Without the references, they pretty much become useless.
Thank you!

NEW YORK TRIBUNE

New York Tribune
23 July 1899
part 1

New York Tribune
23 July 1899
part 2

NEW YORK TIMES

New York Times
23 July 1899

NEW YORK DAILY HERALD

New York Daily Herald
23 July 1899
part 1

New York Daily Herald
23 July 1899
part 2

The character Denton in Disney's movie Newsies is a reporter for The New York Sun. As you can see below, the newspaper article from The Sun is some of the most detailed and lenthy you'll see about the strike. The paper, however didn't cover the entire strike and coverage drastically petered out toward the end of it. In fact, I don't think I ever found a concluding article stating the result of the strike. The coverage of the strike by each paper is interesting in and of itself!

NEW YORK SUN