Socialists targeted Mobile newsies in their war on the free market

Seven-year-old Phares D. Beville sells the Mobile Item in Bienville Square
in 1914. Photo by Lewis W. Hine.

In the early 1900s, America’s socialists made the colorful newsboys on the streets of Mobile another exhibit in their campaign against youths working in paying jobs.

The activists especially disapproved of newsies. They said the youths were corrupted by profanity, gambling, fast women, and even “the dubious frankfurter,” which the authors of the 1914 book Children in Bondage claimed was the boys’ chief nourishment. And horror of horrors, “Frequently in one night a boy drinks from five to six cups of coffee.”

A group of wealthy and influential Northern leftist progressives founded the National Child Labor Committee on April 15, 1904, to campaign against children working such jobs. New York sociology teacher and highly talented photographer Lewis Wickes Hine quit his job at the Ethical Culture School in 1908 to become the committee’s official photographer. Hine traveled the country photographing children and adults at work.

Hine brought his camera to Alabama in 1910, 1911, 1913, and

1914. Alabama was an odd choice for Hine to spend so much time in. In 1903, the Yellowhammer State had made it illegal for children under 12 to work in factories. And Pennsylvania had more kids working in non-farm jobs than all the states of the former Confederacy combined.

In Alabama, Hine photographed youths servicing machines in cotton mills and laboring for coal mines. On the Gulf Coast, he took photos of boys working on oyster boats and girls shucking oysters for a canning company. In the cities, he shot images of boys delivering telegraphs and dry goods and selling newspapers on street corners.

Hine arrived in the Port City in 1914. Among other subjects, he photographed several newsboys, all of whom appeared to be selling the afternoon Mobile Item. This choice of newspaper street sellers likely wasn’t by chance. The competing morning Mobile Register was owned by Frederick I. Thompson, a leftist progressive Democrat. Although the Register also used newsboys, they don’t appear in Hine’s photos.

It seems highly possible that Thompson invited Hine to Mobile and helped him find subjects for his photo shoots. Hine needed some local contacts to acquaint him with places that employed the children he photographed. Not all of the locations were obvious or easy to find.

According to the National Archives, Hine recorded information about every photograph. He created a ruse to interview the children he photographed and then scribbled notes on paper hidden inside his pocket. He believed that he had to be “double-sure that my photo data was 100% pure—no retouching or fakery of any kind.” While Hine may not have faked his info, he wasn’t always accurate. Or his assumptions about his subjects didn’t accurately reflect the facts.

Of Hine’s four photos of Mobile newsies, he recorded the name of just one of his subjects, and then only a first name, “Ferris.” Thanks to the research of historian Joe Manning, who has been identifying the children in Hine’s photos and interviewing descendants, we know that “Ferris” is actually Phares Demoville Beville. Friends and family just called him “P. D.,” or Pee Dee.

Hine’s photo shows a 7-year-old Phares selling the Mobile Item on the sidewalks of Bienville Square on October 22, 1914. His caption read, “Tiny newsie who did not know enough to make change for investigator. There are still too many of these little ones in the larger cities.”

Hine photographed Phares and his other subjects sympathetically. He believed his photos would more effectively serve his cause if the children looked likable and deserving of attention.

Peter D. Beville, top left, father of Phares,

and a story about his International Motor Truck

company in Mobile.

Phares, and others like him, weren’t penniless orphans sentenced to living on the streets in dirty shirttails. At the time Hine took the photo, the Beville family was quite well off. In 1912, Phares’ parents moved from Florida to Mobile, where his father Peter founded the P. D. Beville Supply Co., an International Motor Truck distributor, in 1915. The Bienville Square corner where Hine photographed the young Phares was just two blocks north from his father’s business.

Peter Beville’s business merged with a competitor in 1918 and in 1922 Peter built a four-story building to house his dealership on the northwest corner of Government and Conception streets at a cost of $100,000, more than $1.5 million in today’s dollars.

The Beville family lived at a fashionable address, 902 Government Street just west of Broad Street. By the time Phares was a teen, his family had moved about a mile away to the just as fashionable western edge of the city to a large two-story home at 110 South Georgia Avenue.

The Bevilles paid pricey tuitions for Phares and his older brother Newell to attend the University Military School in Mobile and later to enroll in Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. So the Beville family wasn’t poor and dependent on the few pennies Phares brought in selling newspapers on downtown streets. And, even though at 7 years old Phares “did not know enough to make change” for Hine, the youngster’s education clearly wasn’t neglected.

Many of Hine’s other photographic subjects had similar stories. One of those other subjects was a 9 year old cash girl in Gayfer’s Department Store. Of her, Hine wrote, “At first glance the home conditions with a one-armed father and several children in the family would indicate that her small wages were needed, but when we found that the father is able to do certain kinds of work, and that they have relatives who are well-to-do, there was no doubt that the family could get along without her working. In almost all the cases investigated, the need for the child's earning was very small.”

In fact, that was the point that Hine and others of the NCLC wanted to make: The families didn’t need the income from their children’s work. Dad, and maybe mom, too, earned enough to sustain the family. Hine’s photos meant to evoke a Dickensian nightmare of greedy capitalists employing children for low wages. The photographer, as much as said so. “The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work.”

Selfish employers were the only reason children worked, according to this view. Somehow, the children and their parents had been stripped of their free will by the free market. Hine and his socialist buddies never explained how low wages enticed children to work when families didn’t need their incomes.

Modern audiences are conditioned to reflexively reject any notion of children working. In the 1600s and 1700s, however, adults expected children to work. Until the 1940s and perhaps later, parents moving from rural areas to mill towns and cities believed children needed to help support the family, just as they had on the farm. Many other adults believed that disciplined work helped build an individual’s character.

As the U.S free market made families more prosperous, fewer kids worked. The number of U.S. children working reached a high point around 1910, not long before Hine came to Mobile. In that year, about 20 out of 100 kids worked. Of each of those 20, more than 14 worked on farms. Out of those 14, more than 12 worked on family acres. By 1930, just a little more than 6 out of 100 children worked. Of that statistical 6, nearly 5 worked on the family farm. Prosperity essentially allowed parents to buy their children’s education out their earnings, going without extra income brought in by their kids.

By 1938 when Congress passed the Fair Labor Act, the law against child labor that also gave us the minimum wage, it was mostly a symbol of a state of affairs that already existed.

In the early 1900s, Hine and his socialist allies had been in a hurry to create the impression that work was a form of exploitation from which children must be protected. The only way to do that was to place the government between parents and their children. The parents had to be prevented through law from letting their children work and then forced to send their kids to schools operated by local governments. Then the government would confiscate the parents’ hard-earned income to pay for the schools. Socialists never seem to worry about the government taking the income parents needed to raise their families.

Hine’s photos and the NCLC investigations unwittingly confirmed that newsboys and other working youths were growing up in good homes. In fact, P. D. Beville’s life after Hine photographed him was a testament to the solid family life his father and mother provided and to the fact that Phares’ work as a youth helped build his character.

Phares left Washington & Lee University in late 1929, a few months before he was to graduate and returned home because his 12-year-old brother Lewis had died. The Great Depression had started and Phares stayed in Mobile to help his parents. He sold trucks with his father and served as treasurer for the business. Apparently, Phares had learned how to make change. But they weren’t selling many trucks during the Depression and the family business eventually closed its doors in the early ’30s.

In 1934, the Mobile Press Register, successor to both the Item that Phares had worked for as a child and its Register competitor, hired Phares in the circulation department. After 18 months he entered the accounting department for a year before switching to the advertising department for nearly 17 years.

Not long after starting at the paper, Phares took to the petite and pretty Alice Barclay Lesesne, who worked for the Society Department. They may have known each other through their families’ social connections before working together. The couple announced their engagement in September 1939 and were married  on January 15, 1940. The Press Register provided a honeymoon cruise to Cuba.

Phares served in the Army for two years during World War II and returned to the newspaper at the end of the war. In Mobile, Phares and Alice raised two daughters, volunteered in community groups such as the YMCA and Kiwanis, and were active members in their Presbyterian Church.

From starting as an advertising salesman at the Press Register, Phares worked his way up to local display advertising manager and eventually became national advertising manager. He also was a major stockholder before the paper was sold to the Newhouse family in 1966. Phares worked until retiring in 1977 at age 70.

Phares died in 1991 at the age of 83. His wife Alice died in 2004 at the age of 92.

By the time Phares died, paperboys selling newspapers on the street had nearly disappeared from Mobile. Seven-year-old little merchants were long gone. Mobile had grown far beyond the compact small city it had been in Phares’ paperboy days. After World War II, newspaper carriers delivered papers to suburban subscribers from bicycles.

By the late 1960s, adults often replaced teen paper carriers as schools developed more programs that took up boys’ time. Supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, with better working hours and conditions, competed for the teen work force. The rising affluence of the general population also made it less necessary for many teens to go to work.

But what really brought an end to boys selling papers on the street were coin-operated newspaper vending machines, invented in 1947. Their use began slowly and then surged in the early 1970s. The vending machines were once a common sight in Mobile and every other American city. They lined railroad passenger platforms, airport concourses, stood outside hotels and restaurants, and could be found on almost every busy street corner.

As newspaper prices rose in the late 1990s, the vending machines began to lose favor with the public and publishers alike. The machines were mechanical and couldn't accept dollar bills, only coins. The only choice customers had was to carry a pocket full of quarters or dollar coins. At the same time, Sunday editions had become so bulky that only a limited number of copies could be placed in the boxes.

The few youths who still sold papers on the street could be found at busy intersections during rush hours. When traffic stopped for the red light, the youths rushed into the street to hawk papers to the motorists waiting for the light to change to green. Because of the danger of injury from moving cars, the city eventually cracked down on the practice.

By the time Phares’ wife Alice had died, people were switching to getting their news, entertainment, and other information online. The newspaper vending boxes, like the paperboys they replaced, became less and less necessary. The Press Register began pulling its vending machines from the streets and they have all but disappeared now as well.

Sources 

Edwin Markham et al. Children in Bondage: A Complete and Careful Presentation of the Anxious Problem of Child Labor-its Causes, Its Crimes, and Its Cure. (Hearst's international library Company, 1914) 223; Joe Manning, “Phares Beville, Mobile, Alabama,” Lewis Hine Project, Mornings on Maple Street. Online: https://morningsonmaplestreet.com/2015/01/01/phares-beville. Accessed January 13, 2020; “It’s His Castle of Achievement,” The Harvester World, Volume 14, number 12, December 1923, 5-6. Online: http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/ihc/id/11531/. Accessed January 15, 2020; Bill Kauffman, “The Child Labor Amendment Debate of the 1920's,” Mises Institute. January 29, 2018. Online: https://mises.org/library/child-labor-amendment-debate-1920s-0. Accessed January 12, 2020; Jeffrey A. Tucker, “The Trouble With Child Labor Laws,” Mises Institute. February 11, 2008. Online: https://mises.org/library/trouble-child-labor-laws. Accessed January 14, 2020; “Teaching With Documents: Photographs of Lewis Hine: Documentation of Child Labor,” National Archives. Online: https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/hine-photos. Accessed January 9, 2020; Mobile Press Register, Inc., et al. v. Joseph F. McGowin, II, Individually and as Executor and Trustee under the last Will and Testament of Everette Leonard McGowin et al. 1 Div. 680. Supreme Court of Alabama. November 17, 1960. Online: https://law.justia.com/cases/alabama/supreme-court/1960/124-so-2d-812-1.html