Read All About It! Kids Vex Titans!

Lewis Wickes Hine/Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division “Newsies the Musical,” a coming Disney Broadway production, recounts a strike waged in 1899 by New York newsboys like the rugged street urchins pictured.

By DAN BARRY

Published: March 2, 2012

THERE is no sugar-pushing nanny traveling by umbrella this time, no conflicted lion seeking therapy from a meerkat and a warthog. Even so, the premise for “Newsies the Musical,” the latest Disney property to reach Broadway, seems just as rooted in Disneyesque whimsy: A dese-and-dose scrum of newsboys unites to lead a strike against the most powerful media titans of Old New York.

Right. And next: “Eight Is Enough,” a murder-mystery musical about a maiden living with seven Smurf-like men who won’t stop whistling.

But here’s the thing. That strike? It happened, ya mug. It happened.

There really was a newsboy strike in 1899 that unsettled the empires of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. There really were thousands of children using muscle and wit to thwart delivery of Pulitzer’s Evening World and Hearst’s Evening Journal — that is, De Woild and De Joinal.

There really was a newsboy called Kid Blink, on account of an absent eye. And a Crutchy Morris. And a Racetrack Higgins. And a Spot Conlon, over from Brooklyn. They may not have performed choreographed dances of solidarity along Park Row, but these Davids did unite for a just cause, standing up for the collective power of many and the individual worth of all.

Not to get all highfalutin on yiz. Naturally, “Newsies the Musical” — which begins previews on March 15 at the Nederlander Theater — has taken liberties with the facts of the Newsboy Strike of 1899, as did “Newsies,” the Movie Flop of 1992 on which it is based. Pulitzer was in Maine, not Manhattan, when the newsboys struck. One of his daughters was not a muckraking reporter who fell for a newsie. And while Theodore Roosevelt was the governor of New York at the time,

he had no bully-bully role in the episode. The Kids Who Shouted the News “But facts are not what drama is,” explained the actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, based on the Disney film by Bob Tzudiker and Noni White. “I don’t care that Pulitzer was in Maine.” Mr. Fierstein is right, of course. Having won four Tonys in four separate categories, he has more than a passing knowledge of what works in theater. In the case of “Newsies the Musical,” which had a successful run last year at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., he said that he wanted to plumb Jeremy Jordan, center, in “Newsies the historical event for art, entertainment and essential truths, as when these the Musical,” starting previews striving children come to a liberating realization: “That they matter.” March 15. Now for what brung it all about.

Newsboys were once the town criers of the cities, street-hardened ragamuffins shouting out headlines sensational enough to justify the penny purchase. Jacob Riis, the great chronicler of the New York underclass, described them as orphans and runaways who lived rough, played craps and slept “with at least one eye open, and every sense alert to the approach of danger.” Coppers, that is, along with thieves and the occasional goo-goo, or reformer.

Newsboys so captured the American imagination that they became “an open symbol,” according to Vincent DiGirolamo, a history professor at Baruch College and the author of a coming book about newsboys. They represented both capitalism’s exploitative evils and its by-your-bootstraps charms; child Joseph Pulitzer, a target of an 1899 labor and free speech; the freshness of pears and the kick of plug tobacco. newsboy strike. Dime novels and magazines featured inspirational stories about newsboys (“Will Waffles; or, The Freaks and Fortunes of a Newsboy”). Do-gooders established lodging houses for newsboys. Parker Brothers came out with a newsboy game. There was even a Newsboy’s Prayer:

Now I lays me down to sleep

I prays de Lord me soul to keep

And if de cop should find me — den

I prays he’ll leave me be. Amen.

By the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 many New York newsies were schoolchildren from immigrant and working-class families. According to the historian David Nasaw, who unearthed the long- forgotten story of the Newsboy Strike in his 1985 book “Children of the City: At Work and at Play,” publishers needed a reliable work force to push their newspapers for a few hours in the afternoon — “and these newsboys were perfect.” To cover some of the expense of their own war, the one over newspaper circulation, Pulitzer and Hearst targeted the lowly newsboys by adding a penny to the nickel price for 10 newspapers. The newsies, by the way, were not reimbursed for the “papes” they failed to sell.

Few complained as long as the war drove street sales of extra editions — the Twitter feeds of their day. But, sadly for newspapers, the war was brief. By the summer of 1899 the newsies of The Journal and The World were still paying 6 cents per 10, but selling fewer papers. This made them cranky.

Igniting their resentment was the discovery that a Journal deliveryman out in Long Island City was cheating newsies by selling bundles of newspapers that were, shall we say, a bit light. Their emphatic response, including overturning his wagon, energized the newsboys congregating every afternoon outside the newspaper buildings along Park Row, across from City Hall Park.

A cluster of schoolboys, waifs and streetwise teenagers threatened to strike if the price for The Journal and The World didn’t return to a nickel for 10. When they refused, the newsies began shouting their own headlines — Strike! Don’t buy De Joinal! Don’t buy De Woild! — and waylaying any scab who dared to defy them.

Imagine the glee of other newspapers covering this improbable event. Not only could they embarrass two competitors as heartless scoundrels making fortunes on the backs of urchins, but they could also luxuriate in the Bowery-inflected argot of newsboys called Barney Peanuts, Jimmy the Goat and Hunch Maddox.

“We tells him dat it’s got to be two fer a cent or nuthin,” explained a newsboy called Boots, according to The Daily Tribune. “The bloke sez, ‘Go ahead and strike,’ and here we is. Dat’s all.”

They found leaders, the pugilistic David Simons and loquacious Kid Blink, a k a Red Blink, a k a Muggsy Magee. They appointed officers, formed committees and disrupted distribution. One man dared to sell the boycotted papers in Union Square, The New York Sun reported, and “in less time than it takes to tell it, his stock of papers had been ripped into a thousand pieces, his hat had been jammed down over his eyes, and he was being punched by a score of boyish hands.”

The headiest moment came when, with the blessing of Dry Dollar Sullivan, a former newsboy and Tammany Hall mucky-muck, the newsboys held a rally at New Irving Hall, a colorful auditorium close to the Bowery. Its security was often provided by the gangster Monk Eastman, who would cut a notch in his club for every skull it cracked. (He supposedly whacked some innocent sap to make it an even 50.)

More than 2,000 newsboys jammed seats and windowsills; another 3,000 flooded the streets. Several took the stage, including Kid Blink, who buttoned his shirt and combed back his red hair before urging solidarity and speaking essential truth.

“I’m tryin’ to figure out how 10 cents on a hundred papers can mean more to a millionaire than it does to a newsboy,” he said to cheers and huzzahs. “And I can’t see it.”

Then Hungry Joe Kernan, the “newsboy mascot,” sang a sad song about a one-legged newsie, and the strikers went shrieking into the streets, imbued with the knowledge of their vital importance to the newspaper business.

“These kids are — kids!” Mr. Nasaw said. “But they just have this sense of total outrage over what Hearst and Pulitzer are doing to them. And they know damn well that they’re not only distributing the paper, they’re shouting the headlines.”

James McGrath Morris, the author of “Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power,” agreed. “What it boils down to is that Hearst and Pulitzer won’t give in on a couple of pennies,” he said. “And Pulitzer was once an impoverished waif himself.” All the while Pulitzer’s aide de camp Don Seitz was sending coded telegrams about the strike — which was spreading to other cities and cutting deeply into circulation and advertising dollars — to the publisher’s estate in Bar Harbor, Me. Because he was nearly blind, Pulitzer had Seitz’s reports read aloud to him, including these words: “A menacing affair.”

As the days dragged on, some newsboys turned on one another, amid speculation that a couple of their leaders had been bought off. According to The Daily Tribune, for example, Kid Blink showed up on Park Row one morning sporting a new suit of clothes and leaving a trail of whispers that he was flashing a wad of bills.

Meanwhile Seitz’s reports to Pulitzer continued. “The loss in circulation due to the strike has been colossal,” he wrote. “It is really remarkable the success these boys have had.”

Finally, in the strike’s second week, titans and newsboys compromised. Although the publishers would continue to charge 6 cents for 10 papers, they agreed to buy back any papers the newsies were unable to sell.

Mr. Morris, Pulitzer’s biographer, maintains that the strike failed; the concession meant little to the publishers, in part because they gave the newsboys credit, not cash, for unsold papers. But Mr. Nasaw sees the strike as a stunning, if qualified, success. Consider: a bunch of kids from the tenements and streets altered the operations of men powerful enough to influence presidential elections.

Then, like yesterday’s news, it was over. The newsboys’ union didn’t disband so much as it simply ceased to be. And the newsies returned to their street corners to shout “Extry! Extry!” about stories other than their own, before becoming mostly a vestige of the past by World War II.

Nearly a century would pass before the Newsboy Strike of 1899 received its due, and then only because Mr. Nasaw came upon a footnote buried in a two-volume survey of American journalism. He wrote his book, and then Disney made its failed movie musical, which, as bad as it is, has nevertheless developed a cult following.

Mr. Fierstein has reimagined the strike — and the movie — for a Broadway musical, which begs for a fast- moving, seamless plot. He said that he wanted to evoke issues of turn-of-the-century America, including women’s suffrage and child labor, while retaining “the passion of the boys.”

Out went attempts to be entirely faithful to the newsboy dialect, amid worries that it was too hard to decipher. Out too went the movie’s lifeless love story between a newsie’s sister and the protagonist, Jack Kelly (played by a young Christian Bale).

Now, in the Broadway-bound show, Jack has a new love interest: a Pulitzer daughter and newspaperwoman who is uninterested in writing for the society page. He also has a new talent, drawing.

There is a more complicated Pulitzer, a more involved Roosevelt. And the character Medda, the saucy proprietor of a music hall played in the movie by Ann-Margret, is now a black woman, based loosely on Aida Overton Walker, a popular vaudevillian. Still, Mr. Fierstein said, the musical remains true to the historical event’s central meaning. “The power of the individual,” he said. “And the power of we.”

But what about the real Kid Blink? And Crutchy Morris, Spot Conlon, Racetrack Higgins and the rest? In the end they stomp-danced their way off the public stage and returned to join the roiling millions of New York strivers who live and die without ever creating a headline.

As a philosopher named Boots once said, “Dat’s all.”

Accessed March 6, 2012. New York Times, published March 2, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/theater/disneys-newsies-the-musical-comes-to-broadway.html