Disorder in the Air

Abstract

Newsboys proliferated after the Civil War as the newspaper industry flourished but then reemerged as a social problem during the depression years of 1873 to 1877. Writers and artists such as Horatio Alger and J. G. Brown portrayed them as symbols of the uplifting potential of industrial capitalism, while white southerners turned them into emblems of Republican misrule. The New York press celebrated real Bowery newsboys such as Steve Brodie. But authors of sensational urban guidebooks cast these youths as enfants terribles whose discontents threatened the social order. Swept up in the burgeoning labor movement, newsboys mounted noisy strikes in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. Catholic and Protestant philanthropists responded by founding homes for newsboys or advocating that they be licensed and supervised. Contrary to their mythic counterparts, real newsboys exposed and challenged the economic inequities of Gilded Age America.