Our Kickstarter has launched!

I am excited to announce that the Kickstarter to fund digitizing the World Documents has officially launched! These documents include Pulitzer’s correspondence, his code book, financial information, and more for the summer of 1899 during the newsboy strike.

These documents are held at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Each page costs 25 cents to digitize, so we estimate the whole thing will take about 60 USD, or 80 CAD, which is what we are asking.

There are some exciting incentives for people who donate a bit more. Click HERE to see the campaign and to donate!

Thank you so much for all the support you have shown this blog over the years, and I look forward to continuing to work together in the future!

1000 Tumblr followers

Over the past 24 hours, I have gained 11 followers on Tumblr, putting me over the 1000 follower mark. I am honoured and humbled that so many of you have chosen to follow this blog and to read and care about the things I post.

In light of reaching this milestone I have two very exciting things to announce:

First, the historical collective I work with is launching a Kickstarter to fund digitizing the World documents from the summer of 1899. These documents include Joseph Pulitzer’s correspondence, memos sent to him from his business manager, financial records, his code book, and more. This will let us learn about the strike from a different perspective. The cost of digitizing the files will likely be about 60 USD, which is about 80 CAD, which is what we’re asking for. If we get a bit more we may be able to find other documents such as birth certificates or arrest records of some of the strikers, or finding and translating local newspapers from the time. There are also some great perks if you donate so check it out! It will be live in the next few days so keep an eye out for it.

The second exciting announcement is that once we’ve collected and analyzed the documents, we will be writing a book about the strike. This will likely take the form of a collection of essays, photos, maps, and primary sources about the strike and the culture surrounding it. We are still early in the writing process and it will likely be a while before the book is ready to sell, but we are very excited to finally share this project with you.

Thank you so much to everybody who has followed this blog, recommended it to others, liked or reblogged posts, or asked a question. I appreciate every single one of you and I look forward to interacting with you even more as we go forward.

The Newsboy Lodging House

Tumblr user explorethecosmosandfallinlove asked:

hi i have no idea if this blog is still active it is very late and i am very tired but i was just wondering what you knew about the lodging houses? how they were laid out, what the conditions were like, if the rooms were separate or like all together or a combination? thanks!

Yes this blog certainly is still active! I know a fair amount about the lodging houses, so here we go!

The lodging houses were created to help the homeless youth of New York City after it was discovered that they didn’t trust most of the free programs in the city, thinking the Sunday Schools and the like were just there to trick them and send them to jail. Seeing this, people who wanted to help homeless children decided to create a system that would give the children a bit more freedom while still keeping them off the dangerous streets at night.

The first of the lodging houses was opened at 9 Duane St. in March 1854, offering a bed and a bath for six cents, and a meal for an additional four. It allowed only boys and also turned away anybody who was found to have living parents. However, children of all races and religions were allowed to stay in the house. Boys were not allowed to smoke or swear in the house, but as long as they followed the rules and kept the midnight curfew they were allowed to come and go as they pleased.

As the house became more established, they also opened a school and required all children staying there to attend either a morning or an evening class. The house was also open during the day as a trade school, teaching not only the residents but also the surrounding community trades such as sewing or cooking.

The building at 9 Duane St. had six levels. The first was rented out to shops, the second held the dining room, kitchen and laundry, as well as sleeping quarters for the servants and the superintendent, the third had the school, gymnasium, check-in desk and washrooms, the fourth and fifth floors were the dormitories, and the top floor held a gymnasium. Above that was an attic full of extra beds that could be filled if there was a particularly cold night.

Most boys stayed in the dormitories with rows of bunk beds, but some paid a few extra cents for the opportunity to sleep in a more private bed partitioned from the others by curtains, known as “dude rooms”. In 1904, the Duane St lodging house also opened the “Waldorf Room” which cost 15 cents for the privilege of a room with only five other boys in it. Every bed had a locker assigned to it where boys could safely keep their belongings for the night.

The lodging houses were quite popular. Between their start in 1854 and the publication of Darkness and Daylight in 1892, they claim to have housed 250,000 children. Some of these children remained in the city and were helped to find their own apartments individually or in groups, others were sent to families out West looking for farmhands, some of whom ended up being formally adopted by those families.

The information in this post mainly comes from the book Darkness and Daylight by Helen Campbell. If you want to learn more about the lodging houses, you can check out that book, my “lodging house” tag, or the website “No 9 Duane Street”.

Thank you for the question and if anybody else has anything they want to ask please feel free to do so!

Court Records of Louis “Kid Blink” Balletti

In 1905, Louis “Kid Blink” Balletti was arrested on suspicion of murder. (He was later acquitted.) Recently my friend Liv visited New York and visited the municipal archives to search for the records about his case. Here is what she found:

Complainant: Citizens of the State of New York
Defendant: Louis Balletti
Residence: 1 Roosevelt
Sex: M
Age: 24
Color: W
Nativity: U.S.
Nature of Complaint: Homicide
Date of Complaint: Thursday, June 1, 1905
Officer: Rooney
Precinct: 2nd St.
Date of Arrest: June 1
Disposition of Case: Transfer to Coroner

This information was on microfilm, so unfortunately a picture of the full document is not available. However, a fragment can be seen here (Kid Blink is the second line):

Most of the information in this document is things we already knew, but it does confirm a lot of things, such as that this trial did happen, that Kid Blink was 24 in June of 1905, and also that the “Kid Blink” mentioned in the papers was the same Louis Balletti who we know lived at 1 Roosevelt St.

Who was Niney Donegan?

Question from Tumblr user snowie-sparks:

Do you have any more information regarding “Niney” Donegan. Like maybe on his life as a gangster and leader of the Yakey Yakes? I mean the guy intrigues me. He seems like quite the character. I’m surprised Disney didn’t include him in the film or broadway show

Thanks for the question! I had a lot of fun looking into this. I put off writing this because I was so interested in learning more about him before answering. You’re right that he’s quite the character and that’s probably exactly why Disney chose not to include him. (That and they probably didn’t do enough digging to know he existed, and even if they did they don’t want another visibly disabled character.)

I’ve found a few sources on Niney, mostly related to his trial. Keeping in mind that newspapers at the time were incredibly unreliable, especially the Evening World where much of this is sourced from, here’s what I could find.

Thomas “Niney” Donegan was orphaned at the age of five. He grew up in a neighbourhood know as “The Gap”, in a lodging house on Hamilton St., between Munroe and Cherry, infamous for the number of criminals to come out of there. He lost both his left eye and one finger on his left hand in fights as a child. He was known by many nicknames, including “Niney,” “Nine-Eye,” “Nine-Fingered Tom,” “One-Eyed Donegan,” and “Nine-Fingered, One-Eyed Donegan.”

It is unclear when Donegan became a newsboy, but he was certainly selling papers during the strike of 1899. If his arrest records are to be believed, he was 13 at the time. Donegan seems to have had a relatively small role in the strike, although one article does claim he was briefly elected president of the union after Kid Blink was accused of scabbing. There is also an article from 1901 naming him as a member of a newsboy basketball team organized by the lodging house, and a friend of Kid Blink’s.

Donegan’s first brush with the law was when he was twelve years old. He was caught stealing old barrels near Fulton Market and selling them to peddlers. In August of 1899, he was charged with assault and highway robbery for jumping a man on Park Row to steal his watch, and a few years later he was brought in again for pickpocketing and served six months at the Catholic Protectory. A few months after his release he was given another six months for stealing shoes, and a few years after that he was charged with being drunk and disorderly and released on a $500 bail.

At least some of these crimes were likely in connection with his involvement with the Yakey Yake gang. The gang leaders taught him to steal and other such skills from a young age, and he soon joined their ranks as a full member. He became the leader of the Yakey Yake Gang sometime in the early 1900s after their founder, James Brady, fled to New Jersey.

Shortly after midnight on the morning of January 10, 1905, Donegan hid in the shadows near the corner of Catharine and Madison, waiting for James Brennan: leader of the rival Cherry Hill gang with whom he had recently argued over ten cents in a game of either poker or pool (sources vary). When Brennan came into view, Donegan shot him, twice in the head and twice in the chest, before fleeing the scene. Donegan was found by the police a few nights later at the home of his sister Maggie. Rumour among the Yakey Yakes was that Donegan had called the police to come get him himself, believing turning himself in would make him less likely to be killed for his crime.

Donegan was tried by the New York Supreme Court in March of 1905, and sentenced to sixteen years and two months in Sing Sing prison on a charge of first-degree manslaughter. During his trial, Donegan’s lawyer argued that he ought to get a reduced sentence because in killing Brennan he had taken out a bad man who had been a trouble to police for years. The court records claim he was 19 years old at the time, but newspaper reports give ages ranging from 18 to 24. I haven’t found any evidence of what happened to Niney after that. Later census records show a man born in New York named Thomas Donegan living in Saint Louis, but there is no evidence one way or another that this is the same man.

This is a photo of Donegan, originally printed in the Evening World on March 7, 1905 and edited slightly by me to reduce distortion in the original image:

Sources and more information:
”Newsboys Get New Leaders.” The Sun [New York City] 28 July 1899: pp. 2.
”Here are Newsboy Highwaymen.” The Sun [New York City] 4 Aug. 1899: pp.9.
“Murder by Two Yakey Yakes.” The Sun [New York City] 10 Jan 1905: pp.1.
”9-Eyed Donegan is at ‘De Bat’.” The Evening World [New York City] 28 February 1905: pp. 3.
“Thomas Donegan Admits he Slew James Brennan.” The Evening World [New York City] 2 March 1905: pp. 5.
Sing Sing Prison Records for Thomas Donegan, 3 March 1905
“Nine Eyed Donegan Gets 16 Years in Jail.” The Sun [New York City] 4 March 1905: pp. 11.
“The Wickedest Boy on the East Side.” The Evening World [New York City] 7 March 1905: pp. 8.

Who was Charles E. Chapin?

Last night I encountered the following bit of information about the man who edited the Evening World during the time of the strike:

In 1898 Pulitzer hired Charles E. Chapin to run the Evening World. As editor, Chapin embraced the sensational, showing little empathy for the victims of the mayhem featured in his paper. Only once, after the September 1901 assassination of President William McKinley, did the World take a solemn tone, and this was near the beginning of Chapin’s tenure. From then on, the editor took a no-holds-barred approach to the news. He reveled, for example, in accounts of the 1904 General Slocum steamboat fire on the East River, which cost 1,000 lives, and, six years later, rejoiced at getting an exclusive photograph of the assassination attempt on Mayor William Jay Gaynor. He had little tolerance for timid editors or writers, firing those who ran afoul of his iron rule, and the paper’s staff loathed him. In 1918, however, fate caught up with Chapin, when, facing financial insolvency and mental instability, he murdered his wife. Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to commit suicide, he instead became the ironic figure of disdain in his own newspaper’s headlines. The acerbic editor ended his days incarcerated at Sing Sing, editing the prison newspaper and planting roses; he died in 1930.
Chronicling America

I mentioned this to some friends, and they – especially my friend Liv – were just as intrigued as I was and started doing research. So below are some sources if you want to know more.

A memoir Chapin wrote in prison
The paper Chapin edited in prison
American Heritage piece about him
New York Post article
City of Smoke
Revolvy

Annual Feast of the Newsboys

Caption from musicalcuriosity:

Friday, December 1st, 1899- The Sun

The boys gathered in the school room at the Duane Street Lodging House, and were than brought in 200 at a time in to the dining room. I’ll include a transcription under the cut. The dinner was paid for by William Waldorf Astor. Dinners were also held at all the city’s prisons.

“The ‘strikers’ and the ‘scabs’ of recent memory sat down together in peace and harmony and all, with a common impulse, reached way over their plates loaded with turkey and vegetables and grabbed their pumpkin pies.

‘That’s a regular trick of the newsies,’ explained the superintendent. ‘They always eat pie first.’“

Comment from historyofchildhood:

The eating of pies first was a popular tradition among the newsboys. It was in fact so important that missing them could result in total chaos. In 1902 a similar banquet was hosted on Christmas by the Salvation Army. Towards the end it was discovered that “There was a shortage of mince pie for a time, and the youngsters thought that they were being overlooked.” They started throwing whatever food they could get their hands on saying “they did not want turkey, but wanted more pie.” They were only settled when a Miss Sickles appeared with her arms full of plates of pie.

The scene was described in an article in the New York Tribune Dec. 26, 1905 and discussed in Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas.

The Prosecution of Don Carlos Seitz, Part 2

Reposted with permission from Erster Stories.

We’re back to grill Don Seitz on more shady dealings! Last time we pinned him to one year in jail (assuming we can’t find a contract that would make his course of action, while still forceful and shady, absolutely valid). If you haven’t read that one, you can do so here. So one year in jail, not bad, right? But we are so far from done. Next, I think I can nail him with a fraud charge for things he discusses in the same memo. The World makes a lot of claims, both in Seitz’s notes to Pulitzer and in its public articles, that the strike is over before every other newspaper says it’s over. That could be a whole other post about why Seitz chose to repeatedly lie about that if he didn’t think it was over, or why he made the concessions he made to the strikers if he did think it was over.

Assuming he was lying, though (which I do mostly because I despise him), we can absolutely catch him on something bad: where he mentions telling the advertisers that the strike was over and that they could return to advertising in the Evening World.

Media has always made money off of advertising. The advertisers pay money to put their ads out there so that the media they sold the ad to can distribute it and get the advertisers more exposure. However, if the paper was still being boycotted, it’s safe to say that the World probably wasn’t holding up their end of that deal to their full extent, even if they did have people who were still selling. This means that at least to some extent, the advertising money would go right into the World’s pocket and the advertisers would get nothing from it. So, if Seitz was lying about the strike being over, he would also be lying to his advertisers and making money off of it.

Originally, I thought this might be an exploitation charge, because it fits in definition, “to take unfair advantage of a person,” additionally since the examples cited on US Legal involve deception for monetary gain. But that’s not it, because exploitation doesn’t appear in the New York Penal Code. After much despair that I wouldn’t be able to catch him on anything for this that’s prosecutable in New York, my friend Baden suggested I look into the definition of fraud.

Fraud’s a pretty wide category, so the penal code gets more specific than the general definition. I think I have him on something known as a scheme to defraud in the penal code, also known as the intent to defraud. The definition of a scheme to defraud reads essentially as follows:

“1. A person is guilty of a scheme to defraud… when he engages in a scheme constituting a systematic ongoing course of conduct with intent to defraud more than one person or to obtain property from more than one person by false or fraudulent pretenses, representations or promises, and so obtains property from one or more of such persons.
2. In any prosecution under this section, it shall be necessary to prove the identity of at least one person from whom the defendant so obtained property, but it shall not be necessary to prove the identity of any other intended victim.”

Systematically ongoing… check. Fraudulent pretenses… check. Obtains property… well, money isn’t exactly property, is it? The US Legal definition of intent to defraud comes to the rescue here, defining it in less legalese as follows:

“Intent to defraud is the intention to deceive others. It involves a specific intention to cheat others, for causing financial loss to others or bringing financial gain to one’s self.”

So financial gain does count. And we can certainly pinpoint at least one victim since plenty of people were likely advertising in the Evening World.

So what is his sentence? As usual, the sentence depends on the degree of the crime. The difference between the first and second degree of a scheme to defraud mainly lies in the number of people that fell victim to the scheme or the amount of money they made. It’s first degree if it involves 10 or more people, or earned them in excess of $1,000 dollars. I can’t confirm which degree we’re talking about with only the information in the memo, but the second degree is a class A misdemeanor and first degree is a class E felony. That’s up to a year for the misdemeanor, and more than a year for the felony.

All right, now that we have the modern charge, it’s time to do some more digging. Was this illegal back in 1899? I checked back in the 1965 Penal Law book that so kindly outlined things that were new between this version and a copy from 1909, and found that the charge (indexed as 190.60) doesn’t even exist in the 1965 book. While Article 190 exists, it only goes up to 190.35. I suppose there must have been an addendum to the article later on to expand the kinds of fraud charges contained in it.

In conclusion, Don Seitz was a rat and I’m frustrated that I can’t get him in trouble for swindling his advertisers. But boy, he would get in so much trouble for that today.

I hope you enjoyed coming on this adventure with me! I’ll certainly do more of these if I encounter any more shady activity by anyone at the World or the Journal. I’m really quite motivated to make something stick to them now because I’m convinced they did something illegal that they actually could’ve gotten in trouble for at the time. Do let me know if any of you discover anything else that might fit the bill!

The Prosecution of Don Carlos Seitz, Part 1

Reposted with permission from Erster Stories.

We’re back with more criminal law in the strike era! As promised, I have multiple things that I can talk about when it comes to Don Carlos Seitz and the things he admits to doing in his notes to Pulitzer. I had a lot of fun doing this because I have a hatred for Don Seitz and his inability to function as an ethical human being, so I’m super excited to expose the World’s business manager as the awful person he is.

For this post, I wanna discuss a memo where he openly admits to making threats in an attempt to quash the Sun and other papers that are a part of the “Publisher’s Association” that choose to write about the strike. He specifically mentions approaching one reporter from the Sun, although he also says that he plans to speak with plenty of other papers as well. His language is backhanded and shady, and the way he describes it just feels a bit criminal. He writes, “I preferred to scare them badly and get their cooperation in the end.”

It’s definitely a nasty thing to do, but is that a prosecutable crime? Actually, yes. According to the New York Penal Code, the definition of coercion fits our bill pretty well. When it comes to the penal code, there are always many paths a singular definition can take. One version of coercion in the second degree is defined as follows:

“A person is guilty of coercion in the second degree when he or she compels or induces a person… to abstain from engaging in conduct in which he or she has a legal right to engage… by means of instilling in him or her a fear that, if the demand is not complied with, the actor or another will… Perform any other act which would not in itself materially benefit the actor but which is calculated to harm another person materially with respect to his or her health, safety, business, calling, career, financial condition, reputation or personal relationships.”

Sound familiar? Seitz is essentially threatening the reporters to stop fueling the strike by writing about it, for fear that the newsies will strike against them next. And the newsies striking against these other papers can’t exactly be proven to directly benefit the World, but it would cause material harm to the business and financial condition of the reporters and papers that he’s threatening. That’s either a class A misdemeanor, which could get him anywhere from 15 days to a year in jail, or a class E felony, which is upwards of a year of jail time. According to this correction history record, the main difference between the misdemeanor and the felony is the fear of physical harm or property damage, and that in most cases the first-degree charge is the way to go.

So while that may be illegal in a modern court of law, was it illegal at the time? It’s difficult to confirm, but I found some copies of older penal law books that I think have the answer. According to the 1969 penal law book, the contents of a coercion charge, which is indexed as Article 135.60 (or 135.65 for the same crime in the first degree), appear at the earliest in section 530 of the 1909 copy. The 1906 copy I found has similarly organized sections to 1909, and the numbers go up to 963. So from there, I’m making a safe bet that the first reference to a second-degree coercion charge has already been addressed in penal law at the time of the strike.

So, wow! Unlike with Hearst, we actually can pin him to a crime he could actually be tried for in the era. Unless it wasn’t a crime, of course. As fishy as the description in this letter may sound, and as aggressive a tact as Seitz takes, there’s a possibility that the members of the Publishers’ Association signed an agreement not to slander the other members and Seitz is just aggressively reminding them of said contract. Now, we can’t confirm this one way or the other since we have no record of such a contract, but it’s a possibility I wanted to bring up that would clear the charge.

I know, I know, these criminal law articles are turning out inconclusive so far for one reason or another, but that’s the nature of the law. It’s not always based on what we feel should be wrong. And the one for tomorrow is buried in an even deeper line of questioning than the two we’ve already examined. If we were able to prove it, though, it would be the worst crime we’ve covered yet.

Hearst and the Journal’s Incitement Policy

Reposted with permission from Erster Stories.

One of my favorite things to explore is criminal law. This comes from years of watching Castle and other crime shows that make solving crimes and pinning sentences to criminals really fascinating. And it turns out that I’ve been able to apply it here as well! This has to do with a telegram from the 24th of July that the business manager of the World, Don Seitz, wrote to Pulitzer regarding the strike. The note’s in code, but decoded (using pages from Pulitzer’s codebook) it reads something like this:

“Situation serious but improving. Morning Journal firm, will not cut [price]. Dealers beginning to take Evening World again. 344 special men put out today. Damage to circulation $80,000. Much rioting. Police have taken up matter actively. Carvalho has persuaded William Randolph Hearst to end Morning Journal’s policy of incitement.”

I was very curious about this “policy of incitement” thing. Often when I dig into criminal law, it begins with a simple question: is ________ illegal? Often, it feels like it should be, but the law can surprise you with the things it allows, especially this far back in history.

In order to answer the question, “is incitement illegal?” I had to know what incitement was. As I’ve learned through being a child of the Internet, when you need a definition, a quick Google search is generally a good place to start. Definitions are even more useful because sometimes terminology changes across different legal codes or gets oddly specific, so having a general sense of what an incitement charge entails helps when finding a charge in the penal code that fits the bill. According to the Internet, “Incitement is the encouragement of another person to commit a crime.” Upon further inspection, this is indeed illegal in a modern U.S. court of law, although specifics vary depending on your jurisdiction.

Now that we know it’s illegal, it’s time to turn to the New York Penal Code. This is where I began to run into issues. Like I said before, the penal code gets oddly specific since the sentences vary depending on what it is the criminal did. In this case, while there is no direct charge for incitement, there is one for inciting to riot. This is part of Article 240, Offenses against Public Order, which contains everything from loitering to criminal anarchy.

Here, we encounter one issue: the memo doesn’t exactly tell us what Hearst was inciting people to do. Although he was engaging in incitement, and there’s a possibility based on the other contents of the telegram that he was inciting to riot, we can’t exactly prove that. But it is possible to pin him to a charge of conspiracy in the fifth degree. The key phrase here is that he works to “cause the performance of such conduct” (that conduct being illegal conduct). So it’s not necessary for him to perform it himself, and this definition is more general so we don’t need to know what he incited people to do.

So we got him, Hearst is a piece of trash who broke the law and should’ve been jailed for up to a year for conspiracy, right? Wrong. I did some more digging, as when I was looking at that definition of incitement article, I found some references to a case in 1969 that caused an update to the current standard for incitement being illegal, which is known as the imminent lawless action test. This was indeed established during the Brandenburg v. Ohio case in 1969, and essentially states the following:

“Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action.”

The imminent lawless action article presents another case that Brandenburg v. Ohio expanded upon: Schenck v. United States in 1919. This case brings up an important discussion that directly involves incitement but calls the general principle of a conspiracy charge into question as well. the main thing this case covered was the difference between free speech as protected in the First Amendment and incitement. America prides itself on allowing people to say whatever they want, and this is actually the first instance I could find of the Supreme Court tackling a limit on free speech like this.

Schenck v. United States is the first discussion we see of incitement being made illegal, even in a weaker definition than we have today. The same sorts of arguments against incitement being illegal can be used against conspiracy as well, especially because a prosecution for conspiracy doesn’t need to prove that they actually took the action, caused the action to occur, or that an agreement even occurred with written acknowledgment. And the first time I can find them trying to tackle this on a federal level is twenty whole years after the strike was over.

So, while Hearst may have been a rat and incited children to riot, in the context of the time we can’t prosecute him for it, as no one even thought to start getting people in trouble for it for another twenty years. However, I thought this was a fun jump down a rabbit hole into criminal law! And don’t worry, I have plenty of other criminal charges I can pin on other people at the World (looking at you, Seitz), so I’ll definitely talk through those as well. Just remember, the law is constantly developing, and it may not be as straightforward as you think.