Working Children in the History of American Periodicals

Abstract

Working Children in the History of American Periodicals Jewon Woo (bio) Cub Reporters: American Children's Literature and Journalism in the Golden Age. By Paige Gray. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019. 132 pp. $28.95 (paperback). Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys. By Vincent DiGirolamo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 712 pp. $40.95 (hardcover). In histories of American periodicals, we rarely encounter stories about children who participated in newspaper production and management by working as newsies. Although we are familiar with the newsboy archetype from a range of popular culture representations, from Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick to the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Newsies, newsies have not received enough scholarly attention. Perhaps this is the case because the majority of children working as newsies were born into the political and economic margins of American society, and also because their often temporary and replaceable labor was considered insufficiently impactful on the development of the newspaper. It is remarkable, then, that two recent studies shed light on them. Vincent DiGirolamo's Crying the News and Paige Gray's Cub Reporters demonstrate that children not only played an important role in the newspaper industry and journalism but also shaped the meaning of American childhood through their involvement in periodicals. Writing at the intersections of history, journalism, and children's literature, Gray, a literary critic, and DiGirolamo, a historian, reclaim these children's legitimate place in political, cultural, and economic history during a time when American periodicals were evolving quickly and expansively. DiGirolamo's Crying the News offers a comprehensive and compelling history of American newsboys from the rise of the penny press in the 1830s to the New Deal era of the 1930s. The appearance of the cheap daily press in the early nineteenth century not only signaled rising demand for mass-produced print commodities but created demand for contingent laborers in the field of print, including the children for whom paper-peddling became essential to their survival. As DiGirolamo [End Page 192] insists, even though we cannot estimate exactly how many children worked for the newspaper, "distributing newspapers was one of the first and most formative occupational experiences of America's youth" and newsboys formed "one of the nation's first urban youth subcultures" (3, 41). Unsurprisingly, we learn of famous leaders in various fields who sold newspapers in the street as children, including inventor Thomas Edison, President Grover Cleveland, writer Jack London, and columnist Walter Winchell. DiGirolamo quotes from their memoirs and biographies to offer first-hand accounts of former newsboys' experience. In addition to such testimonies, the author reveals the ubiquity of newsboys whose names were rarely recorded, finding their traces in literature, as well as posters, art, and photographs, many of which are reproduced in thirty-three beautiful color plates. DiGirolamo's historically contextualized close readings of these visual artifacts bring newsboys to zestful life for the reader. His book emphasizes that the newsboy's role was not limited to selling and distributing newspapers but expansive enough to reshape the newspaper business, social reform movements, children-related government policies, and even literary representations of children. DiGirolamo depicts newsboys as vulnerable to social volatility as well as resilient, capable of meaningful economic and political participation in that society. DiGirolamo's Crying the News encapsulates the dynamic history of the newsboy as "a story of opportunity and exploitation, profit and loss, agency and victimization" (551). If DiGirolamo offers a panoramic view of the newsboy across a century of American journalistic history, Gray's Cub Reporters focuses on the Golden Age of children's literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the conjunction of journalism and literature was particularly important. Literary realism in this period imitated a journalistic approach to the human experience because the market economy and rapid urbanization compelled writers to reconsider ways of portraying society as realistically as possible, while the newspaper "narrativizes" using the art of storytelling essential to its commercial success in the competitive market. Writing from a literary critic's perspective, Gray uses the term artifice to characterize this overlapped area between children's literature and journalism where children participate in the meaning-making process...