Bitter Cry of Progress

New laws call for new stories, and in the early 1900s those stories were increasingly told by muckraking journalists, documentary photographers, and social reformers. Upton Sinclair, Lewis Hine, Jane Addams, and many others focused on the evils of street work, including sexual bartering. But circulation managers professionalized and stepped up their newsboy welfare work. The proliferation of precociously cute newsboy images in advertisements and comic strips further neutralized reform efforts and legitimized newspapers’ use of child labor. Ethnic newspapers multiplied during this period and developed their own sales and distribution forces. Also propelling newspapers into the new century were automobiles, which presented newsboys with a new occupational hazard. Pushed and pulled by the commercial interests of publishers, and the social agendas of reformers, and the economic needs of their families, this generation of newsies rose up to assert their own vision of progress.