EXTRA! EXTRA! The Newsboy Strike Episode!
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Extra, extra. Read all about it. Stuff You Should Know releases an episode on the newsy strike of 1899. Oh, boy. I knew you were going to say something like that, by the way. I did, too, but I didn't know what. That's what it turned out to be. Yeah, that's the beauty of you.

Thanks, man. Never know what you're going to get. I appreciate you appreciating me. So apparently we're way, way, way behind the curve because Stuff You Missed in History Class did an episode on this like all the way back in 2009. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So...

It's time we did this, I guess. A hundred something years on from the actual strike. Yes. It needs to be covered by us. Yeah. So we can, are we copying them now? If it's 14 years later or whatever? Yeah. Yeah. We just go on the Stuff You Missed in History class site and figure out new topics. Jeez. Who was the host back then? Who knows? It was such a rotating cast at that point. Who knows? Yeah. I mean, this is before Tracy and Holly. Yeah.

Yeah, shout out Tracy and Holly, keeping it on lockdown at Stuff You Missed in History class for years now. That's right. They got the reins and they were like, mine. Yeah. And the horse is like, stop jerking me around. Yeah. So you mentioned 100 plus years or something. This was a, if you're wondering what a Newsy is, it was a horse.

paper delivery person, usually a paper boy or a news boy, although we will see there were other people delivering papers in New York City. Yeah. And they went on strike in 1899. A bunch of boys, generally boys, got together and were like, hey, we're tired of making 30 cents a day. We want to make like 50 cents a day.

Yeah, and 30 cents a day sounds like a very small amount. It actually was about $11 in today's money, which is still a pretty small amount to survive in New York City. And a lot of those newsboys, it turns out, were just barely surviving. Like a lot of them were pretty much every single one of them was working class tops. I don't think there was any middle class at the time, and there certainly weren't any like aristocratic newsboys around.

So like you were working class at best if you even had a home, if you were not an orphan, if you were not living on the streets. And almost all of them were at the time like very marginalized communities like Irish kids, Jewish kids, black kids, like.

it was a neat kind of like cross section of America that had, or New York at least at the time, that had been kind of thrown together, put together at this job. And there was a lot of them doing it too. Something like 10 to 15,000, depending on who you asked at what decade. But from what I saw, Livia helped us with this. And I think she said something like 15,000 at the time of the strike we're talking about, which is 1899. Yeah. And most of these kids were

probably tweens and teens. You know, some of them were as young as six and seven years old, of course. Some of them were late teenagers, even reports of some of them being like 20, 21 years old when it came to sort of leading these organization or leading these meetings and this strike. But

They were generally teens and tweens. And like I said, they weren't all boys. There were some girls. There were some married women. There were some disabled adults. Really, mostly boys, though. And these were all, regardless of who it was, these were all people that, like you said, were looking to, you know, say, you know, I made 30 cents today. I'll give 25 cents to my family and I'll get a box of cookies for a nickel.

Oh, you could buy a car for a nickel back then. I actually did some, because spending power is different than, you know, just what would that be in today's dollars. Right. And I did look up in 1900 what you could get for some of this for like, you know, 10 to 30 cents. Oh, cool. Lay it on us. Well, a box of cookies was a nickel. Okay, so the car thing was wrong? Right. Yeah.

I'm sorry to disappoint you. Okay. A box of cereal was a dime. A can of Campbell's soup was a dime. A package of Quaker oats was a dime. Seven pounds of potatoes was a dime. Wow. Literally. Wow. And you could get a lot of steak, too. Meat wasn't as expensive as you might think. So it was kind of weird in that way. But that just kind of shows you a little bit of what 30 cents a day would buy you.

Um, and you know, the, the way these boys were doing it, they were basically free agents. They didn't work for the newspaper or work for a company. They would go out and hustle on their own by these, um, bundles of newspapers, um, like a hundred newspapers and then sell them at a markup. So generally like, Hey, uh,

What was the original price that they were charging? 50 cents per bundle of 100 is what the papers charged the newsboys at first. Yeah, and they would sell them for generally a penny a piece, but sometimes mark them up to two or three cents. But...

None of that adds up to 30 cents. So I'm trying to reckon with all that. I think that they didn't necessarily make it through the entire bundle in a day. They might have some left over and they had to eat that cost. Totally makes sense, Josh. That's my take. That's what I got from it. No, I think you're right because that reckons with a little thing here at the end as far as what the newspapers offered them. Right. Exactly. And so these kids would work sunup.

to sundown, they would be on the street shouting out the headlines all day long, selling papers. I read a contemporary account who talked about how, like, when you walk down the street, they run up to you and, like, essentially make you buy their newspaper. And it was like a hardscrabble life. Like, the impression that we have of it is like,

These tough little kids who all smoked cigarettes and cigars and like gambled and and, you know, played craps and stuff like that. Like that was real. It was even worse than that. Like we have almost a romanticized version of it. It was that plus grittier is the life that these kids were living, hustling on the street, selling newspapers every day and in different places around the country. Chuck, they had like rules, but New York was not one of those places. Yeah.

When you say contemporary... Contemporaneous-ary? I just wondered if you... Since it's a thing now with the show. I've tried to push past it. You just grabbed me by the ankle and dragged me back and I fell on my face as I was...

Pulled down. But other than that, it's good. What I was hoping you would say is like, no, it was contemporary. It was contemporary. Geez, now I'm confused. Like I read it in Vice last week. It's about the news voice strike. Shut up, Chuck. Okay, so what is it? Contemporaneous would be what I meant to say. And contemporary is today? Yeah. I'm so sick of this. I am too. Dumb, stupid words.

I'm just going to say I read an account from the time that I'm speaking of. Oh, that's nice. You know there's a word for that. Yeah, but I don't know what it is.

All right. So let's get into this. You said other cities were a little more organized with rules and like, hey, you can only work so many hours and maybe you have to be a part of an actual organization or something and you got to wear a uniform. New York was the Wild West. This was a time when William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were really running the show with their big time papers, The New York World. Well, I guess I should read it.

the opposite way, the New York Journal and the New York World, respectively. And so the Spanish-American War comes along in April of 1898, and news was hotter than ever. Everyone wanted to get their hands on a newspaper. So they said, hey, this is a good chance to raise the price on these newsies, on these newsboys, to 60 cents from 50 cents because covering wars is expensive. This will also help us cover this war.

Yeah, it was a legitimate price increase. And the World and the Journal were not the only papers that did that to pay for their rather expensive coverage of the war. And the newsboys at the time were like, this is fine. It makes sense because we're selling so many more papers than we normally do. We're actually probably a little better off even at the 60 cent per bundle price point.

Yeah, because we're selling out.

And other papers returned to their, as the circulation went down, the other papers went to their pre-war prices per bundle. But the Journal and the World did not. And that really stuck under these little newsboys' craw. And this gets very colorful here pretty soon. Oh, my God. Some of these quotes are just amazing. Sort of strap in.

We also have to set up sort of the time in which this took place in the late 1800s. It was just a strike-heavy, union-heavy time. There was a trolley strike going on in Brooklyn and Manhattan that even though the adults were the trolley drivers, a lot of these Newsies parents maybe worked in that field or they were sympathetic.

So these kids got involved and they were, you know, throwing rocks at scab drivers and stuff like that. So, you know, they knew what striking was all about and sort of the strong arm version of how to go about a strike. And there were also other newsboy strikes before this, like in the in the few years preceding in Boston, Dallas and Detroit.

So this strike of 1899, like if you type in newsboy strike, all you're going to get back on the internet is the strike of 1899. Yeah, for sure. And the reason that it differentiated itself from other strikes was in scope, in depth, in organization. Like in just a few days, as we'll see, like these kids went from a bunch of ragtag, you

you know, rough and tumble seven-year-olds to forming like a union and like defending themselves in the face of being run over by greedy fat cats, essentially. Yeah. I mean, it's just a couple of weeks, really. Yeah. The whole thing was less than 14 days. Yeah. And they also led Boston, Detroit, and Dallas in nicknameery. Yeah, they did. Yeah. The kids in New York definitely had the nicknames down.

All right. I think it's a pretty good setup. You know, Chuck, I've got to agree with you as well on your take on the setup. Okay. All right. We'll take a break and we'll talk about the literal tipping point right after this. If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know. Check it out.

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No.

There were some newsboys in Queens and Long Island City that found out that one of the journal delivery people that brought the bundles to these guys was stealing papers from their bundles and shorting them on each bundle. And they were like, this is not going to stand, my friend. And they literally tipped over his wagon, chased him off and stole the papers. And this was...

In screenwriting terms, this would be called the inciting incident. Right. This is where the gun is introduced in Act One. Sure. You've been going to that one a lot lately. But it's the only one I know. I love it. Think about it, though. Like a bunch of little kids tipped over a wagon, chased away the adult driver and stole a bunch of papers. Like that was what they did. And that's a really great indicator or, I guess, example of what –

A bunch of little kids can do if you put enough of them together and tick them all off at the same time. It's like ants, like how ants can just do all sorts of amazing things if they collectively combine their strength. Same thing with 7 to 15-year-olds. Well, other people have said it before me, but there is no scarier group of humans on Earth than a group of young boys. Yes, exactly.

And I imagine all of these kids, too, all of these boys are just like 15,000 Scott Farkas and Grover Gills. That's who I imagine. The two bad kids from A Christmas Story. Absolutely. And their brains aren't fully formed yet, so they're not capable of making rational decisions. Right. And there's a mob mentality. And I'm just telling you, if you're on the streets and you see a group of nine teenage boys...

run in the other direction. Yeah, that's a great, that's great advice. And I'm telling you, it's not me. It's a well-known fact. Okay. I'm not disputing it at all. Yeah, especially you. You better get out of there, my friend. Yeah, I'm pretty, pretty bad at fighting. Me too. Because actually, I don't know. I've never been in a fight. I can tell you firsthand that I'm not.

All right. So that tipping point you said, which, by the way, I don't think was a bad pun. I think it was quite apt. Yeah, thanks. That kind of like ignited something in these newsies. Like they were they had already been bristling for a little while under that rate hike that they knew was unfair, that they were really upset at the world in the journal about. And it was enough to kind of like light a fire under a few hundred of them, at least, who gathered in City Hall Park.

outside of City Hall, of all places. About 300 of them rallied and basically said, Journal, world, if you guys don't bring your bundle, price per bundle, back down to pre-war levels, we're going to strike. We're mad right now. There's enough of us who are mad right now. We're going to put a hurting on you. You better listen to us.

That's right. And they also said, you know, we're smart enough to know that they needed someone to kind of head this thing up. They'd seen these unions and other strikes popping up. And even with their little unformed brains, they knew that they couldn't just be a bunch of ants at this point. They had to have some leadership and some organization, as all great unions do. And they elected an 18-year-old, maybe 21. And this is where things get interesting because

Contemporaneous accounts don't always get the names right, so there's a lot of different versions of names and ages. Yeah. But this kid was a Jewish boxer. His name was either Dave Simons or Simmons with a D or Simmons with two Ms and a D. Right. But let's just call him Dave Simons. Yeah, that's what most people call him. He was the lead dude, right? The president. Yeah.

He was the prez. The second in command, as far as I could tell, and the one who actually is probably the most well-known out of all these guys, was an 18-year-old Italian-American kid with red hair and a disabled eye. He was either blind in the eye or it was impaired in some way, shape, or form. And as a result, they called him Kid Blink.

And his real name was Louis Belletti, Louis Dallet, Ballot, or Battelle, depending on which old-timey newspaper you consult. But the one I've seen most of all is Louis Belletti. But everybody called him Kid Blink. So those two were essentially in charge. And then one other really important one who became increasingly important as time went on was a guy named Racecar Higgins from Brooklyn. And he's my hero. He's the one I like the most. Yeah.

Yeah, Livia just dug up some more fun names, which is why we love Livia. Crutch Morris, not bad. No. Hunch Maddox. Can't imagine that kid had good posture. Right. And Muggsy McGee was another one. I don't know if you dug up and found any more. No, Muggsy McGee was the winner. I was like, there's none that are better than that. So let's just keep it at Muggsy McGee. Would you mess with those kids? No. No.

No, I wouldn't even be comfortable walking past them under normal circumstances when they were trying to sell me a paper. I'd be like, just give me 10. Right. So a couple of days later, this is July 20th by this point, the newspapers had said, no, thank you. We're going to keep our prices the same. And so they sent their delegates out and told all the newsies all over New York City that

Stop selling these two newspapers, which is interesting. It wasn't like, hey, we're not going to sell newspapers anymore. They were targeting these two in particular, which is a little different than maybe your average strike. Yeah.

They also said if you don't stop selling those newspapers, you're going to get your face punched in, which was a direct quote. So these kids, these newsies stopped selling. And I get the impression that they were like you said, they were selling other papers. But it seems like as the strike kind of really started to settle in, like they were basically striking most of the time. And they would kind of patrol the streets of New York, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens,

Where else? Long Island, maybe? Okay. Where else? What's the other one? Give me one more. Up there in the north. Harlem? Sure. And what else? Home of Yankee Stadium. Yankeeville? The something. The Bronx. There's a fart named after it. Is there really? Oh, the Bronx Cheer? Yeah, Bronx Cheer. I never realized that was a fart. I always thought it was another name for like a raspberry.

No, I think you're right, but it sounds like a fart. Okay. All right. Well, you just changed it big time. I think you improved it, frankly. Yeah. So all of these kids are walking around with, from what I saw, horseshoes, baseball bats, barrel staves, wheel spokes.

Like clubs, essentially. And we're like, if we catch you selling the Journal of the Record other newsies, we're going to beat you. We're going to give you a beating. I don't care if you're an adult. I don't care if you're a kid. You can't sell these anymore. And a lot of people got beaten by these kids, especially on day one and two. Period. Yeah, I realize it didn't sound like I was completing that sentence, but that was it.

That's all right. There was a little bit of police action at first, but not much because the police had their hands full with this trolley strike. But there were some contemporaneous accounts in those...

or at least some newspapers back then, of a handful of kids getting rounded up. Some went to like a juvenile system. It was called a juvenile asylum. Others went to child protective agencies. But generally, the cops weren't like rounding up these boys right and left because they had their hands full already. But on the same day that a few of these boys happened to be rounded up, which I guess was probably the 20th or 21st. Yeah.

Yeah, the Evening Post said that a 14-year-old led a crowd of boys marching through Manhattan. They're chanting, like, things are escalating pretty fast around here. They were chanting, we don't sell no worlds and journals. Hooray for the strike. Yeah, there's a great anecdote. I love this so much. On one of these marches,

They went down Wall Street and some of the brokerage employees leaned out of the windows and threw ticker tape, gave them a ticker tape parade. I love it. And then even better, if it couldn't get any more like old timey New York, one of the street cleaners who was like indubitably wearing a white suit with a white pith helmet.

turned on a fire hydrant to kind of get rid of all the ticker tape. And all the little kids who were striking and beating people and smoking cigarettes played in the fire hydrant. Yeah. They probably had a coffee can to angle that stream. Yeah. That was such a...

A New York movie thing. Like, growing up in the suburbs of Georgia, I always saw those movies. It was like, man, they really got it made. Yeah. Playing in the fire hydrant? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I've never seen one. I've never been able to play in one. Nah. We were country boys. We had sprinklers. Yeah, exactly. And slip and slides. Yeah. Boring. Do you remember those? I used to get a headache from slip and slide because you just hit the ground so hard.

Yeah, it's because you were sliding on a napkin, basically. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So I wasn't the only one. No, no, no. They were very dangerous. In fact, I'm not sure if you can even still buy those. Oh, yeah. I wonder if you can or not. You know, with the soft kits today, it would have to be padded. Right. They worry about things like chronic traumatic encephaly and all that stuff. Exactly. So where are we, Chuck? Okay.

Well, we're at the point where the strike is getting bigger and like reaching all points of New York. And these kids are impressing everybody with the fact that there were so many of them that they were so well organized. Like this thing started to spread to New Jersey and Connecticut and Rhode Island. And they were like lighting a fire under Newsboys, you know, in the northeast. And just like a couple of days, right? It spread far and wide out of New York City. Oh, yeah.

So on Saturday, which was just a couple of days after the strike started, there was more mob violence and strike action. Another journal delivery wagon was tipped over. Anytime they could get their hands on journal or world newspapers, they would take them and destroy them.

Um, and what, something really significant happened to at this, up to this point, it had essentially just been the news boys who were striking, but women who started, who sold newspapers, um, joined the strike too. They joined them. And that was an enormous deal. That was a big deal. In a way, it kind of legitimized it in the minds of other people.

Oh, absolutely. And, you know, even though this is a couple of weeks, it kind of went back and forth as far as, you know, public support, people getting on board and helping out because as we'll see later. Well, let's just hold on to that. OK. Some other people helped join the strike, too, but we'll get to that later. But in the meantime, the Journal and the World were like, this is actually starting to have an impact on our bottom line already. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Big time. They were behind closed doors, very worried. Advertising or advertisers were like, hey, no one's reading your paper, so there's no one seeing our ads. Like, I want my money back. Yeah. And I think that was probably the biggest problem right out of the gate is not only are they not selling papers, but now they're going to be giving money. I don't know if they did, but we're asked to give money back to advertisers. Yeah. I can't give this hair cream away.

And the public started to get behind it. And that was the real danger was once New York City is like, no, no, no, these boys have a point. Then I don't care if you're Hearst or Pulitzer, you're kind of SOL. Yeah. So there's a managing editor named Don Seitz of The World, and he was one of Pulitzer's second in command. And he said in a memo, the people seem to be against us. They are encouraging the boys and tipping them. So, yeah, it kind of spread.

to just the rest of New York. Like this issue that was really specific to this group of kids, like people started to sympathize with them and support them. And yeah, that's bad news for the management that's being struck against.

Absolutely. One thing they tried, and there were all sorts of little ways they tried to get their paper out there, you know, over the course of this couple of weeks. But they said, all right, we'll round up people that don't have homes. These guys that are on the street, we'll get them to sell, you know, these adults to sell the paper. Had about 100 men signed up to SCAB, and the next morning they didn't show up. So they decided not to sell.

I don't know. I guess the newsboys got to them, but I don't know if it was by threat or what, but they decided not to do it. Well, that was definitely like the two pronged approach that the strikers originally took in the first few days. It was appealing to other people's general sense of compassion and justice. And then also I also have the leg of an old dining room table in my other hand. So which one do you want? You want the pamphlet or you want the dining room table leg? Yeah.

That's right. Things really changed. There was another turning point just a few days in on the 24th of July when they were supposed to meet with Hearst. The arbitration committee was all set up and Hearst would not meet with them. So, you know, that first rally was about 300 kids. That night they had about 2,000 at New Irving Hall and other accounts say it could have been 5,000, 8,000, just thousands of these young boys, which had to be terrifying. Yeah.

And had a one of the big guys, the New York Times said he was one of the larger boys. Nick Myers chaired that meeting, I guess, as some muscle along with a couple of other muscles. Right. Yeah. Joe Bernstein and William Reese, also known as the Yellow Barrel Lemonade Man of Printing House Square. What does that even mean? He sold lemonade out of a yellow barrel at Printing House Square.

Oh, okay. That's why I sent you that eBay of that lemonade cup. I get it now. Yeah. Josh sent me a, if you grew up in the 80s, if you saw this thing, a wave of nostalgia would wash over you. But a lot of times at theme parks, it would sell lemonade in these yellow plastic barrels. Yep. And now I know why. Did you buy one? No, I just looked at it for a little while.

All right. But those guys, William Reese and Joe Bernstein, were armed with what the New York Times described as far-reaching switches to keep everybody in line during this meeting. And like you said, the meeting was at New Irving Hall near Union Square. And New Irving Hall, where this incredibly important newsy strike meeting was held, the one where they really kind of came together and assembled –

is now Irving Plaza, owned by Live Nation. It's available for corporate events, and it features an upscale VIP lounge as well. I went to a lot of great shows at Irving Plaza back when I lived up there. Yeah? Yeah, great venue. What did you see? Oh, boy. I saw Pavement there. I saw Ween there. I saw Calexico there. Okay. Those are the three that come to mind. That's good enough. You're three for three. So, yeah, Irving Plaza, still there today.

And available for corporate events. Race Track Higgins got up there, gave a great speech, got everyone pretty pumped up to stay strong. Yeah, I love this quote. He said, this is another quote, he said, we can do it hands down and no whipping if we keep our eyes skinned. I guess that's our eyes peeled. That's what I'm taking it as, yeah. Yeah. He had another quote, too.

You want me to read that one too? Yeah. Have I won the part of Racetrack Higgins? Yeah, because I've got another quote I want to say too. All right. He also said the journal had offered two bucks a day, which if they were making 30 cents a day, $2 a day, that's a huge, huge pay increase at the time. For sure. And he said that kid wouldn't take it because the journal refused to contract and pay hospital expenses. Because the kid was worried about getting beaten for selling the papers. Right.

Thank you. I saw another. Well, it took me a minute, actually. I read that three times before it sunk in what he was saying. No, I like it. I didn't realize he was being facetious. Yes. I found another quote in, I think, the Zinn Education Project, the legacy of Howard Zinn. They had a great article on this. And they dug up a quote from a kid who was talking to the Jersey City Evening Journal. Did you see this one? Mm-mm.

He said, we Zones has got to stand by one another in these times. Because if we don't, sure as hell, we'll get it in the neck from them capitalists. Love that kid. Can you imagine like an eight-year-old saying that to a newspaper reporter? I love it. It's like that British girl complaining about the ice cream prices. Did you see her? No. It's a viral video going around now. It's very funny. Okay.

She's outraged at the ice cream price. She said, ice cream prices are too damn high. No, you should watch it. It's pretty funny. Okay. Did you ever watch that Throat Whistler yet? No. Man, I even forwarded it to you again. I know. I appreciate it. It's sitting in my inbox. I've just been doing a lot, man. I've done everything from recycled old light fixtures to set up a drip water system in the last 24 hours.

I love it. I'll know that you've watched it when you just call me like crying with laughter. Okay. Fair enough. So at this meeting, things are going good. They're getting more organized than ever, but they also decided that they needed to, it was sort of being counterproductive. They thought to go around town, beating everybody senseless for selling papers. So they said, all right, we need to, we need to stop this. We're not going to beat up scabs anymore. Um,

Olivia included another quote, sarcastic calls of, oh, certainly. And I love how she spelled that. And they said, you know, this is like you mentioned the flyers. This is when the flyers really came out where we're going to take a more above board approach. We're going to put flyers in the hands of the people of New York that say, hey, just give us a chance to make a living, appeal to their good nature. And like you said, sense of justice, right?

And that seemed to really turn the tide of public opinion on their side was when they were like, hey, these poor kids, you know, they're trying to go about this the right way now. Yeah. And there were scabs that that.

that were willing to step up and do it, but they were kind of few and far between. Like they had a really hard time finding people who were willing to scab against these newsies. They just kind of won the hearts and minds of New Yorkers. So they had all this support and not just New York. I mean, like you said, it spread throughout New Jersey, New England. There were other sympathetic strikes that it inspired in Nashville, Tennessee, Lexington, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Ohio, like New

This all happened in just a few days time at a time where there were no one was walking around with like a smartphone and had access to social media. This was all spread generally by word of mouth. And it spread so well that other kids from other towns came to New York to coordinate with the leaders of the New York City strike. That's what happened in just a few days. Yeah.

Yeah, and also, ironically, being spread by other newspapers covering this thing. Yeah, that's a really good point. You're right about that, because I'm sure that's how a lot of them heard. The World and the Journal did not write a single word about this. I imagine, yeah. That was very strategic by William Hearst, because as we'll see, the Journal and the World were like the—

the everyday person's like champion. Like if you were being screwed over, the world and the journal were on your side. And yet they wouldn't concede this price reduction to these striking newsboys, right? So that was very strategic not to say anything, whether in public or in articles. But like you said, other papers around New York covered it breathlessly. Yeah. Should we take a break while you catch your breath? Yeah, thank you.

All right. We'll be right back and we'll talk about sort of as this thing goes along and then winds up and what happens right after this. If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know. Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasen, featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today. Hi.

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Let's go places. So, Chuck, I told you that racetrack Higgins was my favorite, right?

Out of the top three, Kid Blink, Dave Simon, and Racetrack Higgins. The reason why he's my favorite is because out of those three, he's the only one that wasn't a total scale who accepted payoff to end their participation in leading the strike by the two newspapers.

Yeah. Is that the case? The only place, the only source that I saw that didn't seem pretty much certain that these guys had both been paid off, including contemporaneous quotes from newsies who believe this, was Livia, actually. All right. So what are we going to do about Livia? I think what she was doing was taking a really like...

A cautious approach because it never has been proven, but it does seem to be pretty much certain that at the very least Kid Blink took a payoff. Yeah. So the idea is that Kid Blink and Dave Simon were paid about 400 bucks each.

from those two companies to end the strike. They denied it. Simon was like, go ahead, search me, which, you know, that means nothing just because he didn't have the money on him right then. He's like, they'll never search my keister. Oh, God.

And Kid Blink, you know, gave a pretty big speech and it sounds like he was a pretty decent public speaker. So they kind of he kind of convinced everyone that it wasn't true in the moment. But, yeah, I think I agree with you. It seems like they probably did. Yeah. Because not only were there quotes from newsies later on who one of them said we would have gotten more, but the leaders got bought off.

I think there was a quote from Don Seitz, the managing editor, who right after this happened said the backbone of the strike has been broken. And they did it by targeting the leaders. And that $400, that was a lot, man. That's like $15,000 today to people who were like making $0.30 a day at best. It's like four plus years of work for them. It would have been really, really tough to turn down.

The thing is, is when you have like leaders who are inspiring people and leading like people who are really like coming from a just cause, you want them to be untouchable. Right. So, I mean, they're human. They were kids still. I mean, one of them was 18. The other one was 21 tops. If he wasn't 18, this is more money than they probably ever would have seen in one place in their life.

I can't really blame them for turning it down, but I'm still deeply disappointed that they didn't. Because Kid Blink was your guy. He would have been. So Race Car Higgins is my guy because he didn't get bought off. Right. Oh, that's right. I forgot it was Race Car Higgins. So Simon, regardless of whether or not he took money...

Even though we think he did. He resigned as president. He said, I'm going to continue to support the strike. Supposedly was elected treasurer, which would be a really weird thing to do. Someone who just accepted a payout. But this is a point where things, you know, papers started reporting all kinds of different stuff about.

who was leading at the time. The New York Times said it was a kid named Morris Cohen. The Sun had two different stories that contradicted one another. One said that they voted two kids in to replace Simon and Kid Blank named Yak Egg and 90. If you're hanging out with a kid named 90 or Yak Egg, you need to move. Yeah.

You need to move very quickly. Yak egg. That's so weird. It is. The same paper talked about a different meeting on the same day, on the 28th, with a kid named Young Monix as the chief that replaced Blink.

And then the Times said, no, it's an executive committee, basically, from the different delegates that are running it. And best we can tell is there wasn't a real firm leader at this point. Right. Kind of like for what you – one reason is what you talked about was –

They wanted someone that was untouchable and they didn't know if they could trust anyone. Right. And so this was, I mean, that Don Seitz quote about the backbone being broken turned out to be pretty true. Like after those two left their positions of leadership, the strike just kind of, it just got a little chaotic and disassembled for a couple of days at least. It was just kind of chaotic. And yet they still continued on. They just did it in a decentralized way.

And then I think on the 27th of July, Thursday, the thing's been going on for a week now. Kid Blink, after having like talked his way out of like being beaten within an inch of his life for accepting a payoff from the journal in the wreck or the world.

He shows up on the street with a new suit and flashing a bunch of bills. And depending on the account you read, he was either beaten or was about to be beaten when the cops arrested him, potentially for his own protection. He was taken to jail. But that's like, OK, maybe Dave Simons did or didn't. I think his behavior made it seem very fishy.

So I suspect him. Kid Blink, it's like it's just a given, you know, if that's true. That's the that's the key. Like, it's entirely possible that that was rumor. They got printed in a newspaper that today we look back and we're like, oh, it was in the newspaper. So it must be true. It's possible that was just totally a rumor or something like that. But I still say Kid Blink is guilty, guilty, guilty. Yeah.

It was around the same time that there was a compromise offered by the newspapers. They went to the union committee and said, hey, what if we go down to 55 cents? The union turned that down.

This is when they started to get the support. I mentioned some other people kind of joined in later, you know, a whole week later. And these were the newsstands. The people who ran the newsstands said, all right, we're not going to sell those papers anymore. Maybe we'll keep some here out of you. And if you really, really want one, we'll quietly sell it to you. But they weren't pushing the world in the journal at newsstands. Right, which is almost as bad as just not carrying it at all.

Yeah.

The newsboys organized. They reorganized, I guess I should say, in a much more like uniform, coherent way under kind of the leadership of a couple of the adults that own newsstands and apparently seem to steer everything in a very honest direction.

Yeah, there was a newsstand owner named Abraham Lipman who said, all right, why don't you guys elect an adult here? There are adult newsies. And here's a guy. His name's James Neal. He's 50 years old.

I know it seems a little weird that he's still alive. But elect him as president. You might get a little further. They did. Racetrack Higgins, your boy, became vice president. And Neil said, you know, the adults in the room said, all right.

We need to get really organized. We need to have badges. We need to get together with other labor organizations. We need to district up and have delegates and really get this thing going. But it was a little too little too late at this point because at this point these kids needed the money. I mean, they were they were doing this because they were didn't have much in the way of means.

And so to be out of work for a week in a row was a big deal. And so their stamina sort of started to wane. Yeah. And for a while, one kid said that they ain't got no wives or families. So they could take the pressure. But, you know, a week of not making any money when you're relying on 30 cents a day, that's a big deal, right?

So it makes sense that the strike just kind of started to peter out a little bit, but it does make you wonder how far it would have gotten had they organized like that from day one. That would have been amazing. And I imagine there was some parental pressure because I think a lot of this, a lot of times if these kids weren't just on their own, a lot, you know, most of this money went back to the family. Right.

And so, you know, mom and dad, you would think at some point was like, hey, we need this 30 cents. We need three cans of soup. And 50 pounds of potatoes. Yeah. So on, I guess, Monday, July 31st is it was the death knell of the strike. One of the groups of newsstands said this strikes a failure. They passed a resolution. It just seems really mean.

And they're like, we're not supporting us any longer. That almost was a signal to everybody else from what I can tell that it was almost kind of okay to start selling the journal in the world again. And on August 1st, the New York strike officially was over.

Yeah. And the one big thing we didn't mention was that they did accept an offer finally. Oh, yeah. Kind of an important point. They accepted the offer of 60 cents along with the caveat that they could return unsold copies for a full refund. And that seemed like you're dead on the money on what you said at the beginning. Like, that was a big deal. If they...

Let's say you sell 100 papers during wartime and you go out and you're like, man, I think I'm going to do it. I'm going to get another bundle. And you sell 10 newspapers out of that bundle of 100, then that'll bury you as a business. So being able to return those...

They saw it as a big win at least, or maybe they just tried to make themselves feel better and say it was a big win. But it seems to me like being able to get refunds for unsold papers was a pretty big deal. It seems like a big win to me for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Because, yeah, you've got to sell those papers. They are not any good tomorrow. That's literally yesterday's news, you know? That's right. Yeah.

If you hadn't figured that out by now, I wanted to make sure it was spelled out. So that union, though, it might seem like, wow, they unionized like two days before the strike ended. What a waste. That's not at all correct. This union continued on and grew more and more powerful and more and more disciplined, too. And as other strikes kind of came up over the years, they would support them. And they had a decent amount of clout, actually. Yeah.

Yeah. So good for them. Wouldn't that be funny if we just ended the show without mentioning Christian Bale? Yeah. That'd be awesome. People would lose their minds. Of course, Disney made a movie about this. It was a musical called Newsies, 1992. And young Christian Bale played a fictional character inspired by real people. But a fictional guy named Jack Kelly. But there is a character named Blink and a character named Race.

So they, you know, they definitely took some real people, made them slightly fictionalized and then made them sing. Yeah. And neither Christian Bale nor any of the other stars had any acting or any singing and dancing experience. And I read like oral history about the flop that was Newsies when it came out in theaters.

And one of the leads was like, yeah, if you watch closely for those dance numbers, they'll suddenly either like zoom way out or pan in really closely so you can't actually see us dancing. We'll be like in a crowd of other people or else it'll be like an extreme close-up on us because they weren't any good. And I think even whether they had been good or not was a moot point. It was a weird gamble that Disney took. Yeah. Introducing live action musicals.

That were not at all in fashion at the time and hadn't been for a couple decades by then. Jeffrey Katzenberg was like, we're bringing them back. And America said, no, you're not. And he said, and we're going to do it in the form of a newspaper delivery boy strike. Christian Bale survived. He did. And, you know, the movie ended up being a pretty big cult hit. Yeah, I've never seen it. Have you? No, I didn't. I watched parts of it today, but...

It was a Broadway show after that as well. Yeah. And it won like two Tonys. So in its format as a Broadway show, they rewrote some of the songs and stuff. It did very well. It just was not meant to be a movie. Yeah.

That's it for Newsies, everybody, and the Newsies strike in particular. That's right. If you want to know more about that kind of thing, go watch Newsies and see what you think. Or go to Broadway and see Newsies and see what you think. And then let us know what you think. And in the meantime, it's time for a listener mail.

I'm gonna call this critically email that just came in okay. We like we like to read these from time to time sure Not just read emails of praise hey guys listen every day. There's nothing new I listen to the archives I would like to ask you guys to refrain from laughing chuckling chortling giggling and so on it's very annoying You do this incessantly just get serious about the subject are you guys comedians? Or are you trying to inform the public?

I think this guy's new. He might not be around for very long. No, he said he listens every day. For like the last two days. Maybe it's a hate listen. I don't know. Another thing I'd like to call you guys out on here. I was listening to the archives and the way you guys supported the Black Panther Party was nothing less than treason. Those were communists, anarchists, Marxists with guns.

I love this guy. Yeah, I'm just going to leave it anonymous. Okay, it's probably for the best.

Well, thanks a lot, Anonymous. We do love to get criticized sometimes, and it's a legitimate bone you pick there, but I'm afraid we're probably not going to change the way that we do the show. That's a very kind way of responding. If you want to be like Anonymous and get in touch with us and be like, stop doing this, so we can be like, no, we're not going to stop doing that, we love those. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Let's go places.

Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasin', featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today. Hi.

I feel so lucky to collaborate with Megan and how perfectly she put my experience into words. Listen to Chasen from my new album, Infinite Icon, on iHeartRadio or wherever you stream music. Don't forget to visit InfiniteIcon.com to pre-save my album. Sponsored by 1111 Media.