1911 Mobile newsboy strike part of a wave of labor unrest around the world

In August 1911, one group of newsboys in Mobile engaged in a brief two-day strike. Viewed in isolation, the strike was an event of little significance except to those involved. Seen in perspective, the incident was part of a wave of labor unrest around the world. It also may have been connected to newspaper competition and political changes in the Port City.

In England, in what became known as the Great Unrest, hundreds of strikes erupted in 1911 involving nearly a million workers. Among other labor actions, between 1900 and 1914, thousands of newsboys in the United States and Canada engaged in strikes against newspapers and news agencies.

The socialist Industrial Workers of the World, often just called the “Wobblies,” stirred up some of the strikes against newspapers and other industries. The Wobblies sought to overthrow the free market and to create a “workers’ commonwealth.” The union was active along the docks of the Gulf Coast and in the Piney Woods timber industry.

We don’t have any evidence that the Wobblies or other labor organizers were behind the newsboy strike in Mobile. But the youths certainly would have been aware of what fellow newsboys and adults had been up to around the country and the world.

In nearby New Orleans, 250 newsboys marched to Lafayette Square in July 1911 in protest of two papers raising their price to carriers. The New Orleans Daily States and the New Orleans Item raised the wholesale price of their 2-cent papers from 1 cent to 1 ½ cents.

The strikers littered the streets with shredded newspapers, beat up scabs, and marched in a night parade. The strike ended when the papers raised their retail price to 3 cents and restored the newsboys half-price discount.

In Mobile, newsboys also erupted when faced with a cut in their wholesale discount. The Mobile Daily Item told its carriers in August 1911 that it was reducing the subscription price of the newspaper from 15 cents to 10 cents a week. For each subscription, 6 cents would go to the paper and 4 cents to the carrier. The Item published weekday afternoons and Sunday mornings.

The Item may have cut its subscription price in its circulation war with the morning Mobile Register. The Item’s 12,000 readers was just under the Register’s 14,000.

The youths who delivered the Item on subscription routes objected to the new pricing. On the night of Sunday, August 20, one of youths visited the home where many of the carriers lived. He called on them to meet at the Central Trade Council Hall on Monday morning, August 21, to form a union and strike against the Item.

At the meeting, the carriers formed Newsboys Union No. 1. But the President Judge of the Central Trades Council ruled that it couldn’t recognize the group as a labor union because it had been put together solely to call a strike.

Nevertheless, a committee of youths from the new union met several times that morning with the Item’s management. The carriers demanded 6 cents for their share of the new price. The carriers also demanded that the paper pay them 6 cents for delivering deadheads, or free copies. Deadheads went to political friends and relatives of the editor, publisher, or other employees of the newspaper. The managers responded that the paper couldn’t make a profit supplying subscriptions at the price the newsboys demanded. The managers said they were open to arbitration of the dispute.

On the afternoon of August 21, apparently encouraged by outsiders, more than 150 carriers struck the Item. To get public support for their strike, the newsboys handed out flyers explaining their demands and paraded in the streets.

To deliver papers to subscribers, the Item turned to loading them in cars and having the drivers drop the papers off. The striking newsboys put out pickets who attacked anyone attempting to deliver the paper and destroyed any copies they could. The newspaper got police officers to ride with its drivers and immediately sought an injunction against the newsboys. Police also arrested several of the Item’s striking carriers.

It also began to appear that the Item’s competitor, the morning Mobile Register, had a hand in the newsboys’ strike. Police arrested several Register employees for taking copies of the Item from carriers and tossing them in the trash. Among those arrested from the Register: J. O. Stuardi, the former Item circulation manager who had switched to the Register circulation department, Norman Stuardi, Leslie Stevens, E. C. D’Olive, and John Allman.

The Item’s management and members of the newsboys union met twice the afternoon of August 23. The newspaper’s advertisers may have begun asking about credits for their ads in papers that weren’t being delivered, adding to the pressure to settle the dispute.

The managers and newsboys agreed to ask the newly created three Mobile City Commissioners to arbitrate the dispute. The two sides also agreed that the route carriers would get 5 or 6 cents a week for each paper delivered regardless of what the arbiters decided and the carriers agreed to return to work.

This gave the labor dispute a political cast. The city had just adopted the commission form of government, considered to be a progressive reform for good government that would break the power of ward bosses.

Progressive reformers in Alabama and across the nation had been working to sweep away old aldermanic forms of city government. Reformers associated mayors and councils with political rings, ward healers, spoils, cronyism, and corruption. Progressives in Mobile sought to replace the mayor and board of aldermen with what they considered a more business-like, three-member commission. The three members would rotate terms as mayor and divide up duties of city administration.

Current elected city officials, staff, and those who benefited from the existing system opposed the change. The Mobile Item early on supported a commission government. But when the campaign for the commission began in earnest, the Item switched sides and supported the aldermanic forces.

That put the Item at odds with the Register, which supported the measure. The Register’s progressive Democrat owner, Frederick I. Thompson, worked with the city’s Progressive Association, a coalition of businessmen and professionals, to lead the fight for the commission.

The two sides fought bitterly. Old political alliances and friendships broke. The two newspapers’ advertisers undoubtedly pressured the publishers to support their sides of the issue.

On June 5, 1911, Mobilians turned out in large numbers to approve the commission government, 2,227 to 1,401. It was the largest turnout of voters in some time.

The Birmingham News gave much of the credit for the success of plan to the Register. “Too much cannot be said in praise of The Mobile Register for the splendid fight it made in behalf of Commission Government,” the News opined. “The victory of the good government forces would have been impossible but for the clean, intelligent and fearless campaign of this journal.”

We don’t know the result of the commission’s arbitration in the newsboy strike. As had been the case in other newsboy strikes around the country, there may have been no formal announcement. The paper may have just spread the word that the two sides had agreed and the strike was over.

The Item’s opposition to adopting the commission government would seem to have made it unlikely the new commissioners would support the newspaper’s position. Plus the newsboys already seem to already have won the dispute with the Item agreeing to increase carriers’ share to 5 or 6 cents of each subscription.

Newsboys Union No. 1 doesn’t appear to have outlived the strike. The carriers had managed to flex their muscle and to show managers at the Item, and the competing Register as well, that they could seriously disrupt newspaper distribution if their interests were harmed. The newsboys proved, to the delight of some and the surprise of many, that they could organize and win a strike.

Sources
Vincent DiGirolamo, Crying the News, A History of America’s Newsboys. (Oxford University Press, 2019), 414, 418

N.W. Ayer & Son's American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1914, 33

“News of Mobile and its vicinity,” New Orleans Times-Democrat August 22, 1911 3:5; “Newsboys Strike In Mobile,” Atmore Record August 24, 1911 1:3

“News of Mobile and its vicinity,” New Orleans Times-Democrat August 23, 1911 6:4

“News of Mobile and its vicinity,” New Orleans Times-Democrat August 24, 1911 11:4; “Newsboys Strike In Mobile,” Atmore Record August 24, 1911 1:3; “Strike of Newsboys Will Be Arbitrated,” Montgomery Advertiser August 24, 1911 3:4

David E. Alsobrook, “Patrick J. Lyons,” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Online: http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2163. Accessed March 9, 2020

“Commission Government Wins in Mobile,” Fairhope Courier June 9, 1911 4:2; “Mobile Throws Off Shackles,” Birmingham News June 6, 1911 4:1

The short, interesting life of the Mobile Times

Mobile Times November 11, 1932

The Mobile Times existed barely seven years, but it provides an interesting chapter in Mobile’s newspaper history.

Mobile Times paperboy

Erik Overbey photo, The Doy Leale McCall

Rare Book and Manuscript Library

The six-day-a-week afternoon Times hit the streets in late October 1932. That was an even worse year during the Great Depression to start a newspaper than 1929, when the competing afternoon Mobile Press began. Earlier in 1932, after four years of a costly war for readers and advertisers, the Press absorbed its rivals, the morning Mobile Register and its companion afternoon paper Mobile News-Item. The merged operations then consisted of the afternoon Press, the morning Register, and the Sunday Press Register. The victorious Press Register discontinued the News-Item.

Thomas Enoch Sharp served as the editor of the Times and probably was one of the principal investors. Born in Butte, Montana, in 1890, Sharp started his career as a reporter, but after 1921 he edited papers in El Paso, Memphis, and Buffalo before coming to Mobile.

Staffers at the Times included the legendary Chandler sisters, Miss Nettie and Miss Mary. The sisters, who were no relation to Ralph Chandler, publisher of the Press Register, began working on the Register when it was owned by John L. Rapier. The newly formed Press Register in 1932 didn’t pick up the sisters, who went to work for the Mobile Times when it began publication later that year. Nettie served as an editor in the society department with Mary as her assistant. One reporter said the sisters reminded her of Aunt Pittypat in Gone With the Wind.

Another reporter who went to work for the Times after the Press and Register merger was William “Bill” Gormley. For the Times he covered the 1931-32 sensational trial of the Dyson brothers for the murder of Henry M. Butler, Jr., a prominent Mobile Real estate agent, who had been carrying on an affair with the wife Raymond Dyson of Fairhope.

There was plenty of news to go around for all the newspapers. Reporting on prohibition, rumrunners, criminals, and trials was the bread and butter of newspapers around the country during the 1930s. Sensational front-page headlines and stories from around the nation lured readers in Mobile and elsewhere daily to the Times, Press, and Register.

While there was plenty of news, there wasn’t a lot of money. In September 1938, the Times got an infusion of much-needed cash from Texas newspaper magnate Charles E. Marsh, who bought the newspaper along with Sharp and Carl M. Smith, who had been an advertising executive of the Mobile Press Register. Marsh brought in W.S. Zschach (or Sohach) from his other operations to take charge of circulation while Sharp directed news operations and Smith ran the business and advertising departments and served as president of the company. The new owners announced retirement of a $35,000 bond issue.

Marsh and his business partner Ephraim Silas Fentress had become millionaires by buying and operating newspapers in Texas in the early 1900s. By 1930, Marsh owned newspapers in 15 Texas cities, including the capital of Austin, and a dozen more papers in other states. From 1930 to 1934, Marsh joined forces with Eugene Pulliam, to establish General Newspapers Incorporated. Together they bought 23 newspapers in seven states.

Author Robert A. Caro points out that Marsh, “Having made money, he liked to play the patron with it.” One of those he played patron to in the late 1930s was a young, rising Texas politician named Lyndon Baines Johnson. Both Marsh and Johnson were liberal Democrats and ardent supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Marsh supplied the money to buy the support Roosevelt, Johnson, and other liberal Democrats needed to get and keep power. Whether investing in newspapers or politicians, what Marsh most wanted was for those he supported to appreciate and respect his views and submit to his wishes.

The Times styled itself as a Democrat newspaper while the Press Register listed itself as Independent. But Independent didn't mean non-partisan and both papers supported the Democrat Party.

Marsh’s money-making ways weren’t working in Mobile. In 1939, the Times had a circulation of just 12,275. The competing afternoon Press had a daily circulation of 24,604, the morning Register had 21,148, and the Sunday Press Register 42,229.

In January 1939, Frank S. Coffin, Frederick I. Thompson, who was the former publisher of the Register and News-Item and current publisher of the Alabama Journal in Montgomery, along with three other men advanced the Times $6,000. Still the Mobile Times couldn’t get the advertising and subscriptions it needed to be profitable and the newspaper suspended publication on April 3, 1940.

In the spring of 1941, Sharp bought the Prichard Printing Company and published and edited The Citizen. Incorporated only since 1925, Prichard was a town of 4,580 residents north of Mobile and the Citizen was a weekly with just 718 paid subscribers.

Interestingly enough, Sharp bought the Citizen from John Maurice Will and his partner Floyd H. Powell. After selling the Citizen, Will joined the staff of the Press Register and became one of its most esteemed reporters, best known for his coverage of religion and education.

Register Established Early Radio In Mobile

In radio’s early years, the broadcasting of news grew rapidly, but it was the growth of advertising on the new medium that alarmed newspapers publishers nationwide. 

A large part of radio’s increase in advertising during the Great Depression came at the expense of newspapers, which suffered a decline in ads. After 1933, both newspaper and radio advertising fell off.

Publishers responded to the changes created by the new medium by buying and starting radio stations themselves. 

During the height of his fight with Mobile Press publisher Ralph B. Chandler, Mobile Register publisher Frederick I. Thompson launched WODX, 1410 AM, with the first broadcast at 8 p.m. on Feb. 7, 1930, from the Register building.

Not surprisingly, the initial broadcast featured Thompson’s City Hall protégé Mayor Harry T. Hartwell as the principal speaker. Other program guests included state Senator John Craft, city commissioners Cecil Bates and Leon Schwarz, Mobile Board of Revenue President Arthur D. Davis, J. C. Prine, Estes D. Baker, M. A. Boykin, H. E. Booth, and Thompson himself. After these speakers were done, the station played a musical program that included “On Mobile Bay” until 2 a.m.

After the merger with the Press, the new owners sold the station to Thompson’s co-owners, Hunter Watkins and William Pape, and it broadcast under the call letters WALA.

Photos from the Erik Overbey collection in the McCall Library at the University of South Alabama.

Political Disputes Become Personal as Publisher, Congressman Nearly Come to Blows in 1925

Stories of 19^th century newspaper editors being challenged by their opponents to settle disputes with a duel are legendary. Rarely do you hear of newspapermen in the 1900s being challenged to settle a matter of honor with a duel.

But in the mid-1920s, Mobile Register publisher Frederick I. Thompson received a personal

John McDuffie

challenge that many of those involved thought might lead to violence. The challenge came from John McDuffie, U.S. representative from the First Congressional District of Alabama.

Thompson and McDuffie were already political enemies, backing different factions of the Democrat Party. They also disliked each other personally.

When an editorial in the Sunday, May 31, 1925, Register seemed to imply that McDuffie was connected to bootleggers in Mobile, McDuffie determined to settle his differences with Thompson face to face. McDuffie boarded a train June 5 in Mobile for Birmingham, where Thompson was staying at the time.

In Birmingham by 7:30 a.m., McDuffie went to the Comer Building where Thompson had his offices. There he stood on the corner waiting for Thompson.

“I stood there…unarmed. I never carried a pistol and had no idea of using one,” McDuffie later said. “But I did have the intention to meet him as he came to his office and have it out, man to man.”

Comer Building in Birmingham

After McDuffie had waited for more than an hour, his close friend, Theodore K. Jackson Sr., a Mobile Attorney, persuaded McDuffie that it wasn't dignified for a U.S. congressman to lie in wait for another man.

Jackson got McDuffie to go to the Tutwiler Hotel where they were joined by two more friends, Tom Bragg and Robert Mangum, both Alabama Power Co. officials. Early that afternoon, McDuffie wrote Thompson a letter demanding a retraction of the Sunday editorial or to meet him in the lobby of the hotel and hinting at fisticuffs to settle their dispute.

Thompson wrote back that McDuffie wrongly interpreted the editorial. Thompson also refused to meet him at the Tutwiler, informing McDuffie that he conducted all his business from the Age-Herald building where McDuffie was welcome to come by. McDuffie refused and wanted Thompson to meet him at a place he considered neutral.

The two men continued to exchange letters by messengers into the next day, but the best McDuffie could get out of Thompson was a letter confirming that the Register had never intended to reflect on McDuffie’s personal honor or intimate that he was controlled by bootleggers in Mobile.

McDuffie left Birmingham feeling that he had “made a fizzle of the whole thing.”

A few years later, McDuffie had a revenge of sorts. Many of his associates were backers in creating The Mobile Press in 1929. In 1932, the Press absorbed the Register and helped drive Thompson out of the newspaper business. Eventually, McDuffie’s daughter, Cornelia McDuffie Turner, joined the newspaper’s staff and served as the Press Register’s society editor for many years.

Business Leaders Essential to Success of Mobile Press Over Competitor Register

Merchants National Bank, the tall building in the background, opened its new headquarters in 1929, the same year the stock market crashed and The Mobile Press began publication. Officers of Merchants bank and two other banks in Mobile were investors in the Press. Such backing helped ensure the Press' eventual success over its competitor, The Mobile Register.

The Mobile Register usually gets most of the attention from historians, but it is really The Mobile Press that won the newspaper wars during the Great Depression and survives until today.

The idea for The Mobile Press was born at a conference in Mobile of engineers and executives of the Alabama Power Co. and the International Paper Co. Over lunch at the conference, Mobile attorney Thomas M. Stevens told Alabama Power President Thomas W. Martin of his desire to establish a newspaper in opposition to publisher Frederick I. Thompson’s Mobile Register.

Martin suggested Stevens consult Victor H. Hanson, publisher of The Birmingham News, which in 1927 had absorbed Thompson’s Age-Herald. Hanson, unwilling to undertake the Mobile venture himself, contacted Ralph Bradford Chandler, founder of Scripps-Howard’s Birmingham Post.

Hanson highly recommended the project to Chandler and got him to meet with Stevens in Hanson’s Birmingham office in January 1928.

Intrigued with the idea of starting a newspaper in Mobile, Chandler spent the next few months surveying the possibilities in the Port City and negotiating with those willing to back the venture. In an indication of the intensity of feelings against Thompson among business leaders, Chandler secured an agreement from the presidents of the three Mobile banks to underwrite $100,000 from Mobile investors provided that Chandler also furnish $100,000.

Walter D. Bellingrath

To finance his share of the newspaper, Chandler approached wealthy Mobile capitalist Joseph Frederick McGowin. McGowin, born on a farm in Brewton, Ala., in 1867, became a successful lumber mill operator in his 20s and moved in 1891 to Mobile where he bought a bankrupt wholesale hardware business and transformed it into a highly profitable enterprise.

By the late 1920s, he was one of Mobile’s pre-eminent citizens as the head of real estate, financial, automobile and construction firms. He also served as one of the directors of the Merchants National Bank.

Besides backing Chandler, McGowin also bought shares in the newspaper company. Other stockholders included some of the city’s most prominent citizens: 

• Former Mayor Albert P. Bush
• Merchants National Bank President Ernest F. Ladd
• First National Bank President D. Paul Bestor Jr.
• Coca-Cola bottling magnate Walter D. Bellingrath
• Drug and real estate businessman J. C. Van Antwerp
• Alabama, Tennessee and Northern Railroad President John T. Cochrane
• Attorney Thomas M. Stevens
• Musical instrument and citrus dealer W. H. Reynalds
• Lumber and hardware supplier W. B. Patterson
• And about 17 other businessmen and professionals.

The stockholders of the Press represented an informal interlocking directorship of the city’s major businesses, banks and industry. Even with all those business and political forces working against him, however, Thompson proved to be his own biggest obstacle. But that is a subject for another post.

A genteel reporter with a nose for hard news

The first reporter hired by publisher Ralph B. Chandler when he began The Mobile Press in 1929 was Frances Ruffin Durham.

A genteel woman with a nose for news, Durham graduated from St. Joseph’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland. She broke in as a police reporter on The New Orleans States during World War I, when male reporters were in short supply.

She had to persuade editors at the States of her worth. One of those editors was Semmes Colston, grandson of Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes. Colston disliked women on newspapers and didn’t hesitate to say so.

One of Durham’s first assignments took her to the New Orleans city dump. She wrote a touching story about waifs who had changed a field of refuse into a garden spot. Other newspapers around the country picked up the story and Durham’s city editor conceded that “the new girl belongs.”

When World War I ended, Durham came to Mobile. Political opponents of liberal Frederick I. Thompson, publisher of The Mobile Register, relied on her reporting their views in Victor Hanson’s Birmingham News and Frank P. Glass’ Montgomery Advertiser. She also reported for the weekly Mobile Post until Chandler hired her for The Mobile Press and contributed features to Georgia newspapers. H. L. Menken’s American Mercury, among others, published her fiction.

With the merger of the Press and the Register in 1932, Durham became the first society editor of The Mobile Press Register.

Personal Sidebar

The above photo of Durham was taken by Wilson Burton, a photographer at the Blue Light Studio in Mobile. He later became the photographer for Hammel’s Department Store and remained there for years. The Mobile Press Register published a feature article about him on June 22, 2008. You can also view some of his photos online. His cameras were donated to the University of South Alabama.

Burton was married to one of my cousins, Gladys Pierce.