Vincent DiGirolamo

Associate Professor

Department of History

Baruch College, CUNY

Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Q: Describe the focus of your book. 

A: Crying the News tells the story of some of the most familiar and fabled figures in American history: newsboys. It interrogates the myths surrounding these children and reconnects them to the industry in which they worked, the communities in which they lived, and the events in which they participated. It’s an epic story that spans from the Market Revolution of the 1830s to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It encompasses all regions of the country and highlights the role and representation of girls, blacks, immigrants, the homeless, the elderly, and the disabled in the trade. In the largest sense, Crying the News is a subaltern history of print capitalism.

Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

A: Like a lot of books, it grew out of desire to read a book that didn’t exist. I got the idea for it thirty years ago while running the trails behind UC Santa Cruz. I envisioned writing not just a sweeping social history of America’s newsboys but a newsboys’ history of the United States, one that reexamined major eras and events from their perspective, from the pavement up, so to speak. I was inspired by labor historian Herbert Gutman and the new cultural historians of the 1990s, who used seemingly marginal figures, texts, or events to illuminate entire societies or epochs.

Q: What archives or research materials did you use?

A: Some advisers warned that I wouldn’t be able to find enough source material, but I persisted. I began by following the footnotes of urban, journalism, and social welfare historians such as Robert Bremner, Alfred McClung Lee, and Walter Trattner, which led me to the vast reform literature: the published and unpublished papers of the Children’s Aid Society, then crudely stored at its New York headquarters; the Juvenile Protective Association records at Hull House in Chicago, and the New York Child Labor Committee records at the state library in Albany. I also consulted obscure trade journals such as the Proof-Sheet and the Newsdealer, and the archive of the International Circulation Managers Association in Reston, Virginia. These I supplemented with memoirs, traveler’s accounts, city guides, and of course newspapers and periodicals. This was before much was digitized. I relied on microfilm and the hand-written newspaper indexes I found in libraries and historical societies. A year-long fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society helped me piece together the early part of the story, but I also traveled to archives in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, Hartford, Boston, Buffalo, Rochester, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Toledo, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Every trip, for business or pleasure, became a research trip.

I also focused on waif fiction and urchin art—novels, paintings, and illustrations of street children—to trace popular attitudes toward them. I discovered that Horatio Alger’s 1868 novel Ragged Dick was a relative latecomer to this genre. I received access to a treasure trove of visual material, including advertisements and sheet music, collected by Peter J. Eckel, who was a devotee of Father John Drumgoole, the superintendent of St. Vincent’s Newsboys Home in New York.  One of Peter’s prized possessions was a scrapbook kept by the superintendent of the Newsboys’ Lodging House on New Chambers Street between 1875 and 1910. The Eckel Collection is now part of Princeton University’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Although I cast a wide net, there were still gaps in my understanding of news peddling in the Civil War, on railroads, and in the Far West until newspapers and other collections became word-searchable. Then the problem became too much material.

Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

A: The book’s main service to journalism history, I think, is to illuminate the underside of the newspaper industry. I approached the topic from the perspective of a labor historian whose subjects just happened to be children and just happened to work in the newspaper industry. This approach ultimately led me to put the fields into conversation with each other and, hopefully, contribute to all three. Many historians note how widely newspapers circulated in American cities or across the hinterland, but they rarely elaborate on this all too human process as if it were incidental to the papers’ social or political influence. I see distribution as central to the journalistic enterprise and a compelling story in its own right. As British folklorist John Brand said in 1795, “nothing can be foreign to our enquiry, much less beneath our notice, that concern the smallest of the Vulgar; of those little Ones who occupy the lowest place, though by no means of the least importance in the political arrangement of human Beings.” I took this as my motto.

One of my findings is that newspapers were among the most important institutions of American childhood, providing not just income for millions of young people, but also a host of social welfare programs, such as newsboy clubs, bands, teams, trips, meals, schools, scholarships, and reading rooms. You won’t find more innovative or extensive offerings from the YMCA, Boy Scouts, or any other youth group. Far from being grateful and compliant, newsboys engaged in scores of strikes and boycotts, and they supported those of printers and other workers, all of which confirms newspapers’ reputation as a “conflict industry.” Newsboys also took part in political campaigns, working for or against their publishers. They hawked campaign biographies, put up and tore down candidates’ posters, and toured the country as stump speakers.

The issues examined in the book are still relevant today. Newspaper hawkers and carriers were the original gig workers, and they remain so. But they’ve now been joined by some sixty million unwaged independent contractors in all sectors of the economy. Newsboys also help us understand the perennial problem of fake news, the insidious influence of media monopolies, the use and abuse of press philanthropy, the longstanding prominence of socialists in reform circles, and the resurgence of youth activism.

Q: What advice do you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?

A: Learn to work well with others. It takes a lot of individual effort and commitment to write a book, but I couldn’t have written this one outside academia; it gave me the role models, the confidence, and the credibility I needed to undertake the project, and the necessary financial and intellectual base to complete it. This base included greater access to research grants and fellowships, an international community of scholars who read and critiqued my work, and conferences and seminars that enabled me to sharpen my arguments and attract the attention of agents and editors. Colleagues in the profession invested in my work literally and figuratively, and they are now helping to bring it to the attention of readers it might not otherwise reach. History is hard enough; we don’t need to do it alone.