Yelling the Yellows

The 1890s were the heyday of America’s newsboys. The nation’s newspapers rose in number and circulation and its cities swelled with poor immigrant families in need of extra income. African Americans also gravitated to the news trade but encountered much opposition due to Jim Crow segregation. Jacob Riis introduced photography as a tool of reform. Newsgirls came under special scrutiny due to their sexual vulnerability. As ubiquitous in popular culture as they were on city streets, newsies became versatile symbols of enterprise and exploitation in songs, stories, and the sassy color comic strip that gave “yellow journalism” its name. Newsboys’ cries stoked the jingoism that sparked America’s “splendid little war” abroad and rekindled the acrimony that fueled labor unrest at home. They expressed their own discontent in dozens of strikes, climaxing in 1899 with a two-week tussle with those two “great octopuses” of New York journalism, Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World and William Randolph Hearst’s Evening Journal, all of which helped to remake and reawaken the American working class.