Book Review: Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society by Metzgar Jack

employer cause by touting the myth of the “self-made man” who had started life as a humble newsboy. DiGirolamo acknowledges that some successful people had once been newsboys, but he argues that this was hardly the norm. Although not well-remembered today, young newspaper sellers frequently organized themselves into collective bargaining agencies such as the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, the radical Industrial Workers of the World, and, in the mid-1930s, the Committee for Industrial Organization. In the early 1920s, there was even a short-lived Boston News Stand Girls’ Union. Newsie unions frequently struck, usually over what amounted to wage cuts or the termination of the right to return unsold papers. Occasionally these work stoppages turned violent. Sometimes newspaper owners or their agents employed heavy-handed adult enforcers to attack newsboy strikers and destroy their unions. Alternatively, around 1910, industry executives attempted to undermine newsie unionism by sponsoring “newsboy clubs” and “newsboy republics” that offered excursions, summer camps, lessons in “Americanization,” and other diversions. Additional praiseworthy aspects of Crying the News are DiGirolamo’s use of illustrations and the impressive extent of his research. The book contains 178 images, 33 reproduced as color plates. DiGirolamo explicates each picture while skillfully integrating references to them into his text. His research is exhaustive. Some 106 of the 698 pages in the book are devoted to endnotes. DiGirolamo has examined hundreds of diaries, memoirs, novels, newspaper accounts, poems, paintings, posters, lithographs, photographs, films, and archival resources, as well as dissertations, books, and scholarly articles relevant to his work. Crying the News also has two helpful indexes, one for names and one for subjects. This book should be consulted by all researchers, teachers, and students interested in labor studies, child labor, social and cultural history, and labor history and activism. Lay readers of American history will also enjoy this well-written and accessible narrative.