A while back, my niece Sophie convinced me to watch the Disney live action musical Newsies. The 1992 film features an 18 year old Christian Bale as a homeless New York City newsboy who organizes an unauthorized strike against the biggest newspapers in the city. The story is peppered through with real names, like Joseph Pulitzer and Teddy Roosevelt, so I was pretty sure it was at least loosely based on a real story, and it made me wonder if Boston’s newsboys had ever gone on an equally adorable strike. I uncovered the story of a real-life newsboy strike in Boston in 1894, but it didn’t have that much in common with the movie. In the course of researching the 1894 strike, I learned a lot about newsboys as an emblem of child labor in Boston during the Progressive Era, at a time when reformers thought it better to provide protections that would legitimize child labor rather than eliminating it.

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Boston’s Newsboy Strike Newsboys shoot pool at their club Newsboys at the Globe Selling flowers in the street A young seamstress delivers her handiwork Selling fruit in the street A newsboy who is too young for the silver badge Gathering scraps to sell as firewood A street vendor displays his silver license badge At the Newsboy Reading Room Selling firewood in Boston’s streets A young ash sifter in Boston Newsboys at the Boston Journal Boston newsboys Newsboys at the Globe Newsboy from Emma Brown’s book Ned Nevins was a fictional Boston newsboy

• Brown, E. E. (Emma Elizabeth). (1879). Child toilers of Boston streets. Boston: D. Lothrop.
• de Chantal, Julie. ““Extra! Extra!”: Boston Regulates Child Labor in the Streets, 1880–1895.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 13 no. 2, 2020
• Groeger, Cristina. “Demythologizing Newsboys — A Review of “Crying the News.”” The Metropole, Jun 7, 2021
• Rosenberg, C. M., & Reed, L. C. (2014). Child labor in Greater Boston: 1880-1920. Arcadia Publishing.
• Nackenoff, Carol, “Horatio Alger, Then and Now,” Newsboy: The Official Publication of the Horatio Alger Society, vol L no 6, Dec 2012
• Palmer, Lewis E, “Horatio Alger, Then and Now,” The Survey, Dec 2, 1911
• Vert, E. J. “EDUCATIONAL INTELLIGENCE.” The Journal of Education, vol. 72, no. 10 (1796), 1910
• Annual Report of the State Board of Charity of Massachusetts, Volume 32. Wright and Potter Printing Company, State Printers, 1911
• A Directory of the Charitable and Beneficent Organizations of Boston. A Williams and Co, Boston, 1880
• Potenza, B., & Potenza, B. (2023, August 17). “Harry E. Burroughs and the Burroughs Newsboys.” The West End Museum – Boston’s Neighborhood Museum.
• “Education: Read All About It!” Time, Jan 31, 1955
• 1894 News Articles (some paywalled)
  • July 10 Chicago strike
  • July 13 strike in twin cities
  • July 13 Theater outing was arranged by the Newsboy Reading Room
  • July 14 Newsboys at the theater the night before the strike
  • July 14 Police kick strikers out of the Globe counting room
  • July 14 Strikers attack scabs, destroy papers
  • July 14 600 strikers
  • July 17 Cleveland strike
  • July 21 A day in the life of a 6 year old newsboy
  • Juvenile Knights of Labor in Boston (1886)
• All our photos above are from Lewis Hine via the Library of Congress