Newsies strike, seize a press and force publishers into a price compromise

Summary

Child street vendors known as the "newsies" organized a citywide strike after publishers raised the wholesale price of papers. The group voted to strike, occupied a disused press, published their own leaflet and won a negotiated rollback and buyback guarantee from publishers after political pressure involving Gov. Theodore Roosevelt.

The newsboys who sell newspapers across New York City voted to strike after publishers raised the wholesale price they pay for papers, and the action grew into a citywide labor confrontation that ended with a negotiated compromise.

The group, led in public by Jack Kelly, declared, “We’re on strike,” after a plan to withhold sales from the publisher’s distribution windows. The strike quickly expanded from a handful of newsboys on the Bowery to an organized campaign across Manhattan, Brooklyn and other boroughs.

The strike’s organizers moved to amplify their demands by seizing access to an unused printing press in a newspaper publisher’s cellar and producing their own leaflet to explain the newsies’ grievances. The effort included a rally at a theater owned by Miss Medda Larkin and publication of a strike paper that drew broad public attention and drew criticism from the publisher’s office.

Katherine Plummer, a reporter who had written about the newsies,…

Newsies strike, seize a press and force publishers into a price compromise

Summary

Subscribe to keep reading