In the twelve years Lewis Hine worked for the National Child Labour Committee (hereafter NCLC), he took well over five thousand photographs.Footnote 1 These pictures captured the child labourers of the United States from the southern textile factories to the Appalachian mines to the streets across the nation. Appearing in the widely read philanthropic journal Charities and Commons (later The Survey), Hine's photographs were hugely popular among the reforming classes of the early twentieth-century United States. Owen Lovejoy, director of the NCLC during Hine's tenure, once wrote in a letter to Hine, “The evils inherent in the system were intellectually but not emotionally recognized until your skill, earnestness, devotion, vision and artistic finesse focussed the camera intelligently, sympathetically and effectively on social problems involved in American industry.”Footnote 2 However, Hine envisioned a far wider audience than The Survey's readership for his work and set about distributing his photographs to a nationwide viewership. He presented “stereopticon” lectures where slides of his photographs accompanied speeches condemning child labour, and assembled exhibit panels pairing particular photographs with often inflammatory text. Hine even packaged and rented out the stereopticon lectures and exhibit panels for exhibitions around the country, trying to control how other reformers used and presented his photographs.Footnote 3 In journals, newspapers and exhibitions, Hine's photographs shocked and educated audiences, publicizing the plight of child workers.
All in all Lewis Hine's child-labour photography consists of some of the most famous social-documentary photographs ever taken. However, while fairly developed in some areas, in others Hine's photography remains surprisingly understudied. Historians have almost exclusively focussed on the images of children in mills and factories. In contrast, Hine's photographs of child street labourers – of which there are almost a thousand – have remained virtually unstudied.Footnote 4 Yet while reformers typically focussed their energies on children in mills and factories during the first decade of the twentieth century, by 1911 the NCLC was arguing that the risk to street traders was perhaps more serious than any other form of juvenile labour.Footnote 5
Figure 1 is an exhibit panel Hine arranged entitled “Moral Dangers.” This panel was one of Hine's most circulated exhibits: as well as featuring in exhibitions, it was used in his lecture “The High Cost of Child Labor,” and then reproduced alongside the lecture in the Child Labor Bulletin.Footnote 6 In this panel, Hine made the case that the street trades were every bit as dangerous as the apparently self-evident perils of working in mills and factories, if not more so. As this panel shows, the dangers of street labour did not derive in the most part from the labour itself. Instead it was inherent in children's use of adult urban spaces. Unlike the factory children, for whom it was the monotonous and repetitive toil or the physically dangerous machinery that would ruin them, for street workers their trades were only the means by which they were introduced to danger. It is worthy of note that, in his work for the NCLC, Hine took several pictures of children not labouring but “jest hangin’ around” or playing on the streets.Footnote 7 The children may not have been working, but they were disrupting urban space and using it in unintended ways. Most importantly, the children's use of street space enabled them to evade adult supervision and, with it, adult control. Social reformers bemoaned the loss of supervision in urbanizing America while criminologists argued that delinquency was the direct result of the fact that “the restraining eye of the village community [was] no longer upon [the children].”Footnote 8 Unseen and with their own incomes, children labouring on the streets were objects of worry for middle-class reformers. Hine's photographs tackled these anxieties. Although the environments they inhabited and the activities they undertook needed changing, child labour reformers wanted to keep street labouring children as they were in the photographs: stationary, controlled and, above all, watched.
Lewis Hine, “Moral Dangers,” reproduced in “The High Cost of Child Labor,” in the NCLC's Child Labor Bulletin, 3, 4 (Feb. 1915), 17. This and all other illustrations are available at Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, National Child Labor Collection, at www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc.
Just as they struggled to control actual newsboys, Hine and the NCLC struggled to control the symbol of the child street labourer in American culture. As Figure 1 demonstrates, even those opposed to child labour in mills and factories did not necessarily see child street labour as dangerous or wrong. While Hine worked to frame child street labour as one of the worst types of child labour, to others, however, the photographs played out fundamental American myths, including “rags-to-riches” with newsboys appearing as “little businessmen” on the rise. The resulting fight over what child street labour meant has remained hidden in the historical record, yet to Hine, the NCLC, and American cities, child street labourers were every bit as important as their counterparts in factories and mills, and their symbolism even more contested.Footnote 9
This article contrasts the different framings of child street labourers in the first decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 10 Touching on subjects from the history of masculinity, urban history and art history, this study demonstrates how photographs of street children encapsulated discussions of what boyhood should look like in Progressive Era America and how children should use urban space.Footnote 11 The first section considers how Hine employed two tropes in his framing of child street labourers, “the boys in danger” and the “dangerous boys.” To examine Hine's frames, I have tried to situate the photographs within the textual and visual contexts audiences would have encountered them.Footnote 12 The second section looks at the figure of the “little businessman”: what he symbolized, how he was used, and why the NCLC feared him. Reformers and antireformers were not, however, the only characters in this story. The final section examines the actions of the children who worked on the street. Their actions further complicated the imagined child street labourer as they appropriated symbolic representations of street work for their own ends. Thus not only are the child street-labour photographs examples of NCLC propaganda and contested symbolism in American culture; they also serve as rare windows through which historians can examine child street labourers' lives, actions and choices.
BOYS IN DANGER AND DANGEROUS BOYS
Taken in 1908, Figure 2 was among the earliest photographs of child street labour that Hine took. The child in the photograph is not particularly remarkable: John Howell was, in many ways, a typical child labourer. He was nine years old, probably one of the younger newsboys in Indianapolis but by no means the youngest, and like most of the newsboys Hine photographed, Howell was committing no crime: in Indianapolis in 1908 there were no laws or ordinances regulating child labourers on the street.Footnote 13 Yet this photograph is noteworthy. For once, we catch a glimpse of Hine himself. His shadow and the shadow of the camera give us a rare view of Hine at work. These were not clandestine photographs, indeed Hine occasionally posed the children himself and paid them for their time.Footnote 14 He also mediated the image of the child before it reached the audience through the use of captions and accompanying text, suggesting to audiences how they were meant to understand any given image. The boy in Figure 3, for example, could simply depict a child enjoying his velocipede and not a shocking example of child labour if it were not accompanied by the caption.
5 yr. old Willie, one of Washington's youngest news-boys. He is a kind of free-lance, helps other boys out, and roams around the city on his little velocipede, with all the recklessness of extreme youth. Gets lost occasionally. He was so immature that he couldn't talk plain, and yet he was pretty keen about striking people for nickels.Footnote 15
Lewis Hine, “John Howell, an Indianapolis newsboy, makes $.75 some days. Begins at 6 a.m., Sundays. (Lives at 215 W. Michigan St.) Location: Indianapolis, Indiana.” 1908, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Lewis Hine, “5 yr. old Willie, one of Washington's youngest news-boys. William Frederick Tear, 490 Louisiana Ave., Washington, D. C. Location: Washington (D. C.), District of Columbia.” 1912. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
In exhibit panels, as well as in captions, Hine added context to seemingly innocuous photographs in order to deliver a message: these were boys in danger. One panel, for example, “He Is a Messenger Boy,” contained the photograph of a well-presented messenger boy complete with buttoned-up shirt and tie, a complete contrast to the typical images of boys of the “delinquent” type.Footnote 16 Next to the messenger boy, however, Hine wrote, “He is a victim / His work gives him / by personal contact / an intimate / acquaintance with / vice and crime / starts him downhill.”Footnote 17 This text altered the image's meaning: the upright boy has become a victim of the streets. Thus, even if the NCLC could not control the real child on the street, Hine had great power over the images of the street labourers.
Figure 4 illustrates what was by far the most common composition Hine employed. A lone newsboy carrying many newspapers plied his trade in a city street. Hine stood well away from the boy, creating a wide frame which the boy was too small to fill. In many photographs, the boy stood alone on an empty street. However, this shot, with the adults moving in and out of the frame, was also a favourite of Hine's. We, the viewers, see only the child's face. The busy adults paid little attention to the street trader, thus their presence paradoxically emphasized the boy's isolation and vulnerability. In fact, the only one who seemed to see the little boy is the viewer of the photograph. In the text surrounding such images, Hine was even less subtle. In the exhibit panel, “Tomorrow's Citizens,” Hine accompanied pictures of street “boys in danger” with the phrase “You must decide this question [of street trades].”Footnote 18 The underlining of “You” was Hine's own addition. Through his use of photography and the interaction of image text, Hine thus cast the viewer in the role of protector: the audience must act to help the little boy for no one else would.
Lewis Hine, “Small newsie down-town, Saturday P. M. May 7th, 1910. Witness E. N. Clopper. Location: St. Louis, Missouri.” 1910. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
The image of the “boy in danger” was a common portrayal of boys working on the street. As early as 1868, Louisa May Alcott depicted the symbolic “boy in danger” in her short story “Our Little Newsboy.” The protagonists, a middle-class couple, come across a small newsboy late at night trying to sell his last few papers so he can go home. He suffered terribly from the cold weather, from a cruel and exploitative guardian, and from lack of food. Just like Hine, Alcott also addressed the audience directly, she appealed to parents hurrying home to their children to spare a thought for the poor child working on the street.Footnote 19 Therefore, by the early twentieth century, when Hine started to photograph newsboys, he already had a cultural image of the newsboy on which to base his compositions. Through his repeated use of the “boy-in-danger” frame, Hine helped to establish it fully as one of the main images of the boy street worker. Reproduced in journals and on exhibition panels, and repeatedly cited by other child-labour reformers, the boy-in-danger frame quickly became central to the NCLC's rhetoric.Footnote 20
The dangers that Hine's small, vulnerable boys faced were multiple. Like Alcott's little newsie, Progressive Era reformers believed that newsboys' labour on the streets threatened the children's physical health. They were cold, had irregular meals and risked their very limbs “flipping” (jumping on and off) streetcars.Footnote 21 These were not, of course, symbolic dangers only faced by symbolic boys but the real experiences of many newsboys. “Car Cripples Newsboy” was uncommon enough to make headline news in Indianapolis in 1909 yet seems to have been a fairly regular occurrence across the country.Footnote 22 Although dangers to children's physical health undoubtedly appalled child-labour reformers, they were not the major concern of the NCLC. As George A. Hall, then secretary of the New York Child Labor Committee, said at the annual meeting of the NCLC in 1911, “the main objection to street trading for young boys is the almost certain impairment of morals, if this work is continued regularly for any length of time.”Footnote 23 Hine horrified the members of the NCLC with his photographs showing boys working in and around saloons late at night and with accompanying captions such as “Smaller boy … goes into saloons and sells his last papers. Then comes out and his brother gives him more. Joseph said, ‘Drunks are me best customers.’”Footnote 24 NCLC director Owen Lovejoy's investigation into street workers in New Haven, commissioned in the wake of a report by Hine on the situation there, found boys purchasing cigars, liquor and even cocaine and opium for customers. Furthermore, the boys frequented saloons and the red-light district.Footnote 25 In contrast to factory children, whose labour, reformers' thought, was so monotonous and physically dangerous that they would undoubtedly become drones with broken bodies, the street children had too much stimulation particularly of an immoral and psychologically dangerous nature.
Hine portrayed the boys in this frame as friendless, unprotected and in danger: a far cry from the “sheltered childhood” of middle-class children. For maternalists, only a gradual development under the supervision of a loving mother and within the protective confines of the home could a child be expected to transition smoothly to adulthood.Footnote 26 This understanding of child rearing had become the dominant middle-class ideal by the early twentieth century and attainment of the “sheltered childhood” for one's own children emerged as one of the most prominent markers of middle- and upper-class status.Footnote 27 It would be with this image of the middle-class “sheltered” child in mind that Hine and the NCLC hoped audiences would view the child-labour photographs. In opposition to the true, sheltered childhood, the experience, precocity and lack of supervision of the “boys in danger” appeared even more shocking, and the consequences, reformers and child development experts argued, could be disastrous for the individual children and even the future of the United States.Footnote 28
With age and all the wrong experiences, “boys in danger” turned into “dangerous boys.” While Hine and other reformers pictured younger boys as vulnerable and in need of protection, older newsies symbolized delinquency and a dangerous precocity. Although Hine was not alone in drawing links between street labour and delinquency – the NCLC repeatedly claimed that those children brought before juvenile courts were overwhelmingly from the ranks of children, boys and girls, involved in the street trades – Hine certainly did his part in establishing this image of the male child on the street.Footnote 29 His frames of the older newsboys look strikingly different to his typical “boy-in-danger” composition.
Figure 5 is the most famous example of Hine's “dangerous boys.” The shot is much closer. Rather than appearing small, the boys fill the frame. Their confrontational gaze and adult-styled clothes, not to mention the fact that all three were smoking, made the boys seem like adults before their time and fairly threatening. Hine framed the photograph intentionally. In this case, as in others, he took multiple shots of the children to get the most effective image possible. It is telling that this image, rather than the other drafts, became the most famous and enduring. In one draft, Raymond Klose, the middle boy in Figure 5, appeared more in danger than dangerous: he stood at a distance, not smoking, and trying to sell his papers.Footnote 30 In another draft, the two smaller boys from this image were pictured again. The frame is very similar yet there were no newspapers included in the photograph, thus undermining the NCLC's central contention that it was through work and through selling papers that the boys achieved a dangerous and unnatural precocity.Footnote 31 Perhaps the most interesting draft, however, is shown in Figure 6. Here we have a very similar picture to Figure 5; however, there is an African American newsboy smoking and holding papers alongside the white newsies. Although the boys were clearly well integrated and they seemed at ease with one another, this picture was the only draft which included a nonwhite boy. It is impossible to know why Hine chose to cut the African American boy out of the image; perhaps including him was taking the dangers faced by the newsboys too far or perhaps he believed that only white children deserved to be, or even could be, saved. It is noteworthy that southern child labour reformers often appealed to southern racism, arguing that black children were growing tall in the fields, while white children were suffering in the factories and mills.Footnote 32 Whatever the reason, African American street labourers were usually excluded from Hine's photographs and from the frames of both the “boy in danger” and the “dangerous boy.”Footnote 33
Lewis Hine, “11:00 A. M. Monday, May 9th, 1910. Newsies at Skeeter’'s Branch, Jefferson near Franklin. They were all smoking. Location: St. Louis, Missouri.” 1910. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Lewis Hine, “11:00 A. M. Monday, May 9th, 1910. Newsies at Skeeter's Branch, Jefferson near Franklin. They were all smoking. Location: St. Louis, Missouri. v.2.” 1910. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
The two figures of the “boy in danger” and the “dangerous boy” worked together in child labour reformers' rhetoric. Hine was not subtle in connecting the two figures. One technique was to depict both types of boy on the same exhibit panel, such as in Figure 7, “Juvenile Crime.” In this panel, Hine placed the photographs to imply that boys in danger were funnelled into lives of delinquency and crime through their street labour. The images are then accompanied with text arguing that regardless of the boy, if on the street long enough, he will become delinquent.
Lewis Hine, “Juvenile Crime,” exhibit panel (1913 or 1914). Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Together the boy in danger and the dangerous boy symbolized both the threat of allowing unregulated child labour on the streets to continue and the hope that some of the newsboys could still be saved if only the nation would intervene. However, the domination of these interconnected symbols did not go unchallenged in American cultural understandings of boys who worked on the streets. A rival understanding, which reformers explicitly tried to eradicate, was the image of the “little businessman.” Again, middle-class adults contrasted the image of the juvenile street seller to the figure of a middle-class boy, but this time it was the effeminate, mollycoddled, middle-class child who came up wanting.
BUSINESS BOYS AND CORRUPTED GIRLS
Historians such as David Macleod and Gail Bederman have argued that the closing of the frontier, the ascendancy of the mother's role in homemaking and child rearing, and the decline of middle-class self-employment combined to create an uneasiness about the state of middle-class masculinity in the early twentieth century.Footnote 34 Furthermore, as early as the 1880s, it was the rough masculinity of the working classes, with its groundings in physical prowess, pugnacity and sexuality, to which middle-class men turned for a new model of manly behaviour.Footnote 35 By the 1890s, Americans had coined new words to describe a distinctly middle-class effeminate man: “sissy,” “pussy-foot” and “overcivilized.” Middle-class men projected fears over their own masculinity onto their sons, whom they deemed to be growing up weak and effeminate.Footnote 36 These anxieties took shape in the common figure whom literary critic Leslie Fiedler has named the “Good, Good Boy”: effete, feminized and decidedly middle-class.Footnote 37
Just as working-class masculinity showed middle-class men what adult manliness should look like, working-class boys seemed to symbolize true boyhood. The image of the “little businessman” contrasted dramatically with the “Good, Good Boy.” Though the “little businessman” may have played tricks and been involved in petty crimes, at heart the boy was good-natured and good-humoured. While assertive and willing to fight if necessary, he was also generous and kind. Instead of being mollycoddled by overbearing mothers like the “Good, Good Boy,” the little businessman generally worked to support widowed mothers and poor sisters.Footnote 38 The newsboys were also a far cry from the exploited wage-earning factory children – an important distinction in understanding opposition to reform of child street labour. In contrast to factory children exploited by greedy employers, boy street vendors were entrepreneurs and self-employed.Footnote 39 Even anti-child-labour organizations, such as the Illinois Child Labour Committee, sometimes argued that street selling, if properly regulated, was “highly beneficial and profitable as a business training for boys.”Footnote 40 Unsurprisingly, the newspapers themselves furthered this vision of newsboys. The Chicago Daily News, for example, officially referred to their newsboys as “business boys.”Footnote 41 Business boys epitomized masculine boyhood and, when juxtaposed to the seemingly effeminate middle-class boy, the newsboy seemed to have an enviable, entrepreneurial lifestyle.
The NCLC explicitly positioned themselves in opposition to this understanding of child street labour and sought “to disprove once and for all the idea that the boy who sells papers today is on the straight road to the White House.”Footnote 42 In Figure 8, another exhibit panel Hine prepared, Hine himself tackled the little-businessman image directly by accompanying the pictures of street traders with the caption “You Expect Him To Be President: The most Delinquent Boys Come From Street Trades.” It is unsurprising that Hine was concerned with the “little-businessman image” for it undermined his control of what his photographs signified. For example, when Hine accompanied his picture of Isaac Boyett, a messenger boy, with the caption “The 12 year old proprietor, manager and messenger of the Club Messenger Service,” viewers might have seen, instead of a boy in trouble, a young entrepreneur with much potential.Footnote 43 Indeed it was so ingrained in the American ethos that Myron Adams, a prominent New York social worker, lamented that child labour reformers seemed like “iconoclasts” when they worked to undermine the “little-businessman” character.Footnote 44
Lewis Hine, “At the University of Experience,” exhibit panel (1913 or 1914). Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
The image of the street boys as free and having fun had a long cultural history. Horatio Alger was famously responsible for its popularity. The titular character of one of his many novels, Rough and Ready, was in fact a newsboy.Footnote 45 Even Charles Loring Brace, a nineteenth-century advocate for child-labour reform, fell prey to this interpretation of newsboys:
With a boy “Arab of the streets,” one always has the consolation that despite his ragged clothes and bed in a box or hay barrage, he often has a rather good time of it, and enjoys many of the delicious pleasures of a child's roving life, and that a fortunate turn of events may at any time make an honest, industrious fellow of him.Footnote 46
The fortunate turn of events that Loring Brace makes mention of invariably appeared in Alger's books in the form of the intervention of a pseudo-parental middle-class man whose support helped the little businessman into middle-class respectability. The Alger myth, however, in contrast to Alger's actual narratives, largely ignored this interventionism. Instead, the Alger myth, as presented by capitalists such as millionaire banker Randolf Guggenheimer, maintained that the hard work and honesty of the street boy alone would ensure his rise to the top of American society.Footnote 47
The “Alger myth” of boys on the streets as “little businessmen” certain to rise from rags to riches had an enormous impact on American culture. Try as they might to reframe the newsboy, the “little-businessman character” continued to undermine attempts by the NCLC to reform child street-labour regulations. When the committee tried to push for stricter laws in the District of Columbia, an article from the Washington Post deemed the attempt “mollycoddling,” which would “unduly restrict [newsboys'] opportunity to rise above the mediocre class.”Footnote 48 Indeed, some middle-class men even advocated labour to improve the manliness of their own sons. William James, the influential philosopher and psychologist, for example, proposed sending middle-class boys “to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December” to “get the childishness knocked out of them.”Footnote 49 These ideas directly interfered with reform attempts and thus the struggle to regulate child street labour was often played out in the struggle to control the newsboy image in American culture.
The goal of “getting the childishness knocked out” of boys expressed by men concerned with middle-class masculinity was strikingly different to the “sheltered childhood” advocated by maternalists. In fact, one of the reasons it appeared boys were growing up weak was the increasing dominance of maternalistic ideals of childhood and childrearing. Historian Rebecca Jo Plant has demonstrated how the interwar period witnessed the emergence of an antimaternalist critique and has studied how Philip Wylie's infamous postwar “momism” critique accused middle-class, middle-aged moms of effeminizing American boys. Although Plant acknowledged that these ideas had their roots before the period she studied, exactly how maternalism and masculinity clashed in Progressive Era America has yet to be investigated.Footnote 50 Yet it is evident that, in attempts to control what the image of the newsboy signified, tensions between the two ideologies were at work well before Wylie's critique.
The symbol of the newsboy, and Hine's photography of boy street workers in particular, thus emerged as the terrain on which the discourse over child street labour took place. To achieve reform, the NCLC had to ensure that the “boy in danger”/“dangerous boy” dualism was the dominant model for viewing the figure of the male child labourer in the street. Yet control over the newsboy image was more than just about child labour; it was a microcosm for tensions in middle-class culture over what childhood and adolescence should look like.
While middle-class adults fought for control of what boys working on the street meant, in many ways the image of the female street trader was far less problematic. Disparate middle-class groups, and working-class parents as well, all expressed the view that girls should not sell on the streets.Footnote 51 As children and females, their presence was doubly inappropriate. Yet, despite qualms, girls worked as basket sellers, stall tenders, and newsgirls across the United States, and although they were a much smaller presence on the streets in most urban areas than boys, they often figured more largely in the discourse surrounding child street labour.Footnote 52 Even the Bridgeport police commissioner, who was opposed to too tight controls of boys selling on the streets and clearly saw male newsboys as little businessmen, argued for the introduction of newsboy licenses in order to “get rid of the newsgirls.”Footnote 53 The problematic nature of girls trading on the streets had as old a pedigree as the idea of seeing newsboys' work as enterprising and manly. In the same paragraph praising the life of a newsboy, Charles Loring Brace wrote, “With a girl vagrant it is different. She feels homelessness and friendlessness more; she has more of the feminine dependence on affection; the street-trades too are harder for her … Then the strange and mysterious subject of sexual vice comes in.”Footnote 54 Evidently, even those as a rule not opposed to child street labour perceived dangers for girls working on the streets.
Newsgirls learnt bad manners and general unladylike behaviour through their work – Hine once commented that newsgirls “use viler language than the newsboys do” – yet the main danger adults envisaged newsgirls facing was undoubtedly sexual vice.Footnote 55 With a disposable income and their roles as street traders taking them in and out of saloons, around the red-light districts and around the streets in general late at night, girls, reformers feared, would fall prey to the temptations of high life, fashion, and men.Footnote 56 In the worst cases, the girls “becoming so familiar with the practices of the district, [would] take up the profession of the neighbourhood [prostitution].”Footnote 57 Reformers implied that they would become prostitutes, not directly through selling papers, but through the familiarity with inappropriate spaces that their work would give them. The city street was a dangerous place for girls to occupy. Hine's photography of newsgirls, with the perilous streets as a backdrop, provided the NCLC with visual documentation of the reality of girls working on the street. The symbolism of these photographs, however, was far less contested than the image of the newsboy.
BEYOND CONTESTED SYMBOLS
Through this controlled framing of street labourers, boys and girls, Hine sought to construct the role of the viewer as one with the power to act on behalf of the powerless child labourer. Whether being corrupted by the urban environment or exploited by ignorant immigrant parents, Progressive Era child-savers repeatedly depicted child street labourers as powerless, helpless victims of situations beyond their control. Even as delinquent and dangerous boys, the children were not “bad” because of their choices, but because of the corruption of working on the streets. In the words of Jane Addams, the children were “little lambs, caught up in the brambles.”Footnote 58 Thus while child-labour reforms were as much about controlling children as about protecting them – the problem with many child labourers was that they were “uncontrollable” or “ungovernable” – the rhetoric of reformers diminished the agency of child street labourers.Footnote 59
Even the contrasting “little-businessman” figure owed its construction more to popular literature, particularly the Alger myth, than to the actual experiences of newsboys. The symbolic representations of the newsboy in American culture were always divorced from reality. This is not to say that children did not experience many of the events imagined for them: children were seriously injured by streetcars, raped by strangers, and drawn into lives of crime.Footnote 60 However, the most fundamental difference between real street traders and cultural imaginings of them was that children on the street were not simply helpless victims.
Indeed, much of what Progressive Era reformers tried to control were the choices that child street labourers made. The most fundamental of these choices was, unsurprisingly, the choice to work. There was no Fagin figure that child-labour reformers could blame for exploiting children. While they often tried to portray immigrant parents as exploitative, this construction was never commonplace or particularly successful.Footnote 61 Rather, immigrant parents were more often depicted as ignorant of the realities of child street labour.Footnote 62 Furthermore, while the employers of children appear fairly frequently in Hine's photographs from the mills and mines, adults appear only occasionally in Hine's photographs of street children. When they do appear, they are either middle-class adults too busy with their lives to bother with the plight of the “boy in danger,” customers indirectly supporting the continued use of child labour but not actively exploiting children, or, far more infrequently, an adult directly involved in the newspaper industry. Figure 6 is one of the few examples of this third type. In it the adult, who clearly worked at the newspaper distribution branch, stands to the side facing the newsboys, bringing to mind the images of mill children Hine photographed with foremen standing over them. Yet the frame in Figure 6 is far less successful than similar ones of factory children and Hine very rarely employed it. Unlike factory or mill children, whom reformers characterized as exploited by their employers, the children on the street were self-employed – they “exploit[ed] themselves.”Footnote 63 Children's self-employment (or self-exploitation) made street work a distinctive form of child labour and directly contributed to the “little-businessman” figure. It also made regulation difficult as most legislation only prohibited the employment of children.Footnote 64
Children chose how they worked. When reformers decried the dishonesty of newsboys in working the “last-paper” or incorrect-change tricks – in which children would attempt to dupe passersby into buying a paper or handing over more money than necessary – the child-savers were not so much demonstrating the dangerous, immoral lessons of the newsboy trade as, albeit inadvertently, highlighting how newsboys adopted and adapted clichés about street children. Consider, for example, the case of the two brothers in Figure 9. Hine used this photograph in Figure 1, the exhibit panel “Moral Dangers.”
Lewis Hine, “9:30 P. M. A common case of ‘team work.’ Extra late Saturda[y. At] it again at 6 A. M. Sunday, Hartford, Conn. Location: Hartford, Connecticut.” 1909. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
In this case, the older brother waited outside a saloon as his younger brother went in to sell “his last papers”; on doing so he came out so his brother could hand him more. For Hine, this photograph highlighted the dangers newsies faced in frequenting saloons and picking up dishonest habits. On the exhibit panel, above the photograph, Hine wrote, “Street trades also are hazardous because they expose children to moral dangers more deadly than circular saws.” Hine then described in the article and lecture which accompanied the photograph, “The exhibit shows us … Leo and Willie just returned from the reform school to which they were sent as a result of street work.”Footnote 65 If we consider the photograph in another way, however, we can see two clever young boys (not named Leo and Willie at all) who used to their own advantage the image of the poor, exploited newsboy who just wanted to go home.Footnote 66 Presumably the younger boy fitted the stereotype better and that was why he entered the saloon while his brother waited outside. He told Hine “Dey buy me out so I kin go home [sic].” The boys probably also played on the stereotype of the ignorant, uneducated newsboy as well and short-changed customers. The decision to work in a saloon was no accident either. As the younger brother said, “Drunks are me best customers.”Footnote 67 Economic concerns, as well as the temptations and excitement of saloons, made newsboys decide to visit them. Children chose to work on the streets and in vice districts and saloons.
The newsboys could perform the role of bold young businessman as easily as they performed pitiable, weary boys in danger. One journalist who reported on how newsboys would make practical businessmen cited his own experience with one newsboy, George. On being asked why he sells his paper at four cents instead of the regular three cents, George pertly replied, “Gee mister, I got to make something, ain't I?” The journalist was so won by his charms and sense of business that he gave the boy a nickel and held him up as a paragon of entrepreneurial American virtue.Footnote 68 Another newsboy, on being told the law had been changed and he would no longer be allowed to work, listed the positive attributes that any child-labour proponent would be happy to hear:
I gives most of what I make to my mother an’ she needs it … a boy what don't work ’sure to get into meanness … out in the open air … it ain't like working in the mills where the work's hard and the mills hot, but newsboy work aint goin’ to hurt no one at all.Footnote 69
The boys' skill at playing on the stereotypes of the adults they came into contact with earnt them extra tips and kept them in work and on the streets.
Thus while Hine, reformers, and anti-reformers clashed about how viewers should read Hine's photography, the street labourers themselves not only continued to work but also exploited both stereotypes to their own ends. In doing so, children participated in the discussion of what child street labour meant. Middle-class, adult constructions of the “newsboy” or “messenger boy” were not created in a vacuum, but rather in dialogue with children who must be viewed as subjects and not merely objects in the production of American culture.
After 1918, however, independent newsboys and -girls in the business and recreational districts of the city gradually diminished in number.Footnote 70 The end of World War I marked the end of a boom time for newsboys. Although children continued to work in the city after 1918, they never again held the same position they once had. Their decline was due not just to a lack of demand for papers, but also to an increase in suppliers. Newsboys faced increasing competition from newsstands and adults in all-weather booths.
Although newsboys and other child labourers were slowly declining in number after 1918, circumstances were not going well in general for the NCLC. Just two years prior to 1918, the NCLC had won a huge legislative victory with the passage of the Keating-Owens Act which prohibited interstate sales of goods manufactured by children. Yet the Supreme Court decision of 1918 which found the 1916 Child Labor Act unconstitutional drastically undermined NCLC efforts at a national level.Footnote 71 Furthermore, the maternalism on which the NCLC and many other Progressive Era reform groups had been based was falling out of favour. Middle-class women turned away from the reform activities of the settlement houses. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has convincingly argued, to the women of the 1920s and 1930s the maternalist reformers of the previous era, such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, looked like aging ladies in lavender.Footnote 72 Thus while child labour remained an issue and the NCLC continued to lobby for stricter laws, they never again enjoyed the prominence and widespread support they had during the Progressive Era. Furthermore, with decreasing funds, the NCLC voted to reduce Hine's salary in 1918. He quit his post and never returned to child-labour photography.Footnote 73
While Hine's photography has remained important, the “boy-in-danger” frame has not lasted. The Alger myth has dominated contemporary views of children who worked on Progressive Era streets. The lives of the newsboys in the Disney musical and Broadway play Newsies are the carefree, hedonistic and masculine lives of the “little businessmen.”Footnote 74 Where the “boy-in-danger” composition had once occupied such prominent places in the city and in reformers' discourse, by the middle of the twentieth century they were neither heard nor spoken about. Historians have not yet seen fit to bring them back into discussions. Those who study children in Progressive Era America have focussed on children in institutional settings, be it delinquent boys and girls in reformatories and juvenile courts, children at play in playgrounds and the Boy Scouts, or child labourers in mills and factories.Footnote 75 Historians focussed on Hine's photography have followed this trend and have neglected Hine's photographs of child street labourers. However, at the time, the boys and girls who worked on the street, and the figure of the little newsie in particular, were evoked repeatedly in discussions about what childhood should be like and how to order the city in early twentieth-century America. In the multiple readings of Hine's child street-labour photographs, tensions among middle-class groups played out. Always present, however, were the real children, whose actions and choices subverted both reformers' and antireformers' constructions and appropriated these constructions for their own ends.
