Roar of the Tabloids

Abstract

1920s America contained a cacophony of feuding factions pitting guardians of tradition against the forces of modernity. Small-town America detested the vice and depravity of the metropolis. White supremacists resented the black and immigrant hordes invading their neighborhoods and workplaces. And fundamentalists felt bullied by godless advocates of evolution. Such conflicts reverberated in the nation’s newspapers, especially in the sensational tabloid press. The children who peddled these papers were not mere merchants of discord, but also its agents. As predominately immigrant, sexually precocious city kids from non-teetotaler, non-Protestant, working-class families, they represented the troubling symptoms of modernity over tradition. They played a central role in Jazz Age journalism, politics, social reform, race relations, and labor struggles, thereby challenging the notion that children’s economic value diminished as their emotional value rose in the early decades of the 20th century.