Tag: Events

Some notable arrests of the newsboy strike

Over the course of the newsboy strike of 1899, many of the strikers were arrested. These are five of the most notable cases:

Moses Burns, age 11, was the first newsboy striker to be arrested for the cause. According to The Brooklyn Eagle, Burns was “a perfect demon and had tried to brain another boy who wanted to sell papers.”

Emil “H. H.” Kahune, age 15, was notable mainly because of the response the other strikers had to his arrest. They followed him to the police station, bringing him candy and fruit and begging for him to be released. He appears to have been well-loved.

Samuel Wolkinsky and John Armstrong, ages 13 and 14, are notable for the nature of their crime. While most of the boys were arrested for beating up scabs or disturbing the peace, these two were arrested for cruel and unusual punishment, forcing a scab to eat his own papers.

Henry “Major Butts” Butler, age unknown, was a major leader in the strike. He took over the Upper Manhattan union after Kid Blink stepped down, and met with many newspaper executives to arbitrate. Sources vary on the details, but it seems that at an arbitration meeting he either accepted a bribe of $400 to end the strike, or refused it and demanded $1000 instead. In any case, he was then arrested for blackmail and fined $5.

Louis “Kid Blink” Balletti, age unknown but probably either 16 or 18, is one of the most well-known of the strikers, and at the time of his arrest was one of the most powerful. Shortly before his arrest, he was accused of selling out the strike and accepting a bribe of $400 to return to work. That night he was chased through the streets by a group of strikers wanting to beat him up. An officer saw the running boys and grabbed the one who appeared to be leading them. He was surprised to learn that the boy he’d arrested was the famed Kid Blink himself. At the station, Kid Blink claimed his name was Louis Ballatt, likely to hide his Italian heritage and receive better treatment from the police. He was fined $5. After his arrest, Kid Blink stepped down as union leader.

The Floral Horse Shoe

On July 24, 1899, the striking newsboys held a rally at Irving Hall to discuss the strike and keep spirits up and so on. The politician John J. Foley brought a bouquet of flowers shaped like a horseshoe to the rally, saying he would give it to whichever boy gave the best speech. According to three different papers, Kid Blink won the floral horseshoe, with Race Track Higgins coming in a close second.

Then a week goes by. Things start to go bad for the strikers. Kid Blink sells out the strike for $400 from the newspapers. (That, by the way, is more than $11,000 in today’s money. So I in no way blame him for taking the deal.) He loses favour with the strikers and they decide they don’t really like him any more.

Then a day or two later, Race Track Higgins goes to the press and tells them that actually, Kid Blink didn’t win the horseshoe at all. HE won the horse shoe, and he sold it to Kid Blink. Then Kid Blink had his picture taken with it and claimed he won it himself.

Given the fact that three separate newspapers reported that Kid Blink won the horseshoe, my best guess is that Race Track Higgins was lying to defame Kid Blink because he doesn’t like him anymore.

It’s sort of comforting to know that kids were just as petty in getting back at people they didn’t like in 1899 as they are today.

(By the way, if anybody knows where I can find this photo of Kid Blink with the floral horse shoe, or any other photo of Kid Blink for that matter, please do tell me because I haven’t been able to find anything myself.)

“Young Mush” Meyers and the cop

In the early days of the newsboys’ strike, the strikers were not afraid to use violence to make their point. Their main method for dealing with people selling the boycotted papers was to steal their merchandise and then beat the person selling it. This meant that nobody except very large, muscular men could sell the World or Journal without getting attacked. Any younger boys who wanted to sell could occasionally do so, but only if they had police protection.

One day, a kid showed up. He was small, and he was selling
the Journal. The strikers tried to talk to him, but he refused to stop selling the papers, and with the police officer standing right there, they knew they couldn’t resort to their usual methods without getting arrested.

However, the strikers knew
that they have to stop him because if a kid that small can get away with
selling the boycotted papers, the morale of the strikers would break.

Then “Young Mush” Meyers shows up. And he says 

“That cop’s too fat to run fast, and I’ll get him after me if you’ll tend to the scab when he gets away.”

So he goes up to the boy casually, and
just grabs a stack of this boy’s papers and bolts. And of course the cop
chases after him, much to the delight of the boy who thinks he’s being avenged.
Until he notices the other fifteen other boys converging on him. When they had finished giving him a black eye and a bloody nose, the boy agreed to join the strike.

The New York Sun, which reported on this incident, doesn’t make it clear if Mush was correct to think he could outrun the police officer. It’s possible that he got arrested for his troubles, or it’s possible he got away. We may never know. What we do know is that he was willing to bet his freedom on his ability to run for the sake of the larger strike. And that is incredibly brave.

A Brief Overview of the Newsboy Strike of 1899

Many people’s primary source of knowledge about the newsboy strike of 1899 is the Disney movie/musical Newsies. While this is a wonderful story, there are several aspects of it that are not quite true to historical fact. This post is a quick overview of the historical strike, focusing on the ways it differed from the Disney version.

The strike lasted about two weeks, and involved about 5,000 Manhattan newsboys, 2,000 from Brooklyn, and was taken up by the newsboys in 14 other American cites. The boys’ demands were that The New York Journal and The New York World stop charging the war-time price of sixty cents per hundred papers and lower their prices back to the fifty cents they had charged before the war now that the Spanish-American War was over and the demand for papers had decreased.

One of the biggest differences between the real-life strike and the movie/musical was the scope of the strike. In the Disney version, the newsies were striking against all the papers and weren’t selling anything at all. The real-life newsboys were striking only against two papers: The New York Journal and The New York World. The rest of the papers, including the Sun, Times, and Tribune were all being sold as normal, and in fact even more than normal because of the decline in sales of the two papers the strike was against.

Another major difference between the real strike and the Disney version was the methods used by the strikers against people selling the boycotted papers. The Disney version features the kids mostly talking to and reasoning with the people who don’t support the strike, and includes lines like “We can’t beat up on other kids” and “We all stand together or we don’t stand a chance.” The real newsboys were far less pacifist in their methods. They were recorded in many cases ripping stacks of papers out of other boys’ hands and tearing them up, then beating the sellers up. They also flipped the carts carrying bundles of papers to other parts of the city, and threw things at the newspaper executives. This declined significantly after the rally where the strike leaders told the kids to lay off the violence, but the early days of the strike were far from the peaceful protest of Disney’s story.

The leadership of the real-life strike was also a bit less centralized than in Disney’s version of the story. The musical focuses primarily on one leader figure: Jack Kelly. In real life, things were a bit more messy. The face of the strike and the one most commonly cited as the leader was Louis Baletti (Ballatt), more commonly known as Kid Blink. But there were many other leaders, including the union president David Simons (Simon, Simonds, Symonds), Brooklyn leader “Race Track” Higgins, “Toby Duck” the leader in Trenton, and many others. Some of these boys are made background characters in Newsies, but none are given the leadership roles they had in reality.

The end result of the strike was not the clear-cut victory of the Disney version. The papers refused to lower their prices, but did offer to buy back the papers the newsboys were not able to sell. Once this offer was made, most of the newsboys returned to work and the strike ended.

I hope this post was enlightening for those of you who didn’t know the whole history of the strike. If you have questions, let me know.