Newsies of Mobile Deserve to Have Their Story Told

Each New Year newspaper carriers presented their subscribers with a "memorial" souvenir booklet of well-wishes for the year ahead. The purpose, of course, was to get a tip.

In the above photo, carriers of The Mobile Daily Item and their supervisor pose for a photo to go on the front of their memorial. In 1916, Mobile Register owner Frederick I. Thompson bought the Item and kept it as separate afternoon paper to complement the morning Register.

Compare these well-dressed newsies to those in a previous post photographed by socialist photographer Lewis Hine who visited Mobile in 1914. One of the newsboys in the Hine's photos is selling the Item.

What do you think accounts for the difference in the way the newsies are dressed in the different photos? Did the boys in the Hine photos simply have on their working clothes? Did the boys in the above photo have to turn in these dress clothes after the photo was snapped?

We don't know much about the history of newsboys in Mobile and they deserve to have their story told.

Know Any Newsboys From the 1920s or '30s?

"There are a number of these young
newsboys in the Alabama cities"

In October 1914, socialist photographer Lewis Hine brought his camera to Mobile and took the photos of the newsboys on this post. The photos are from the Library of Congress

Until about the mid-1800s, The Mobile Register and most other newspapers didn’t sell the paper by the individual copy. In fact, in the 1830s the Register forbid its carriers from selling copies of the paper on the street or to deliver them to anyone other than regular subscribers.

The reason for this was simple. Newspapers needed to budget on a regular income and they could do that only with readers who usually paid in advance for a year’s subscription. And an individual paper cost too much for most people on the street to afford.

"One of Mobile's young newsboys
who begins work at daybreak."

There is no general history of Mobile newspaper boys, also called newsboys and newsies. Newspapers in big Eastern cities used newsboys first, but generally the Register and other small-city dailies used boys as street vendors about the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century.

The newsboys weren’t employees of the newspapers. They bought papers from the publishers and sold them as independent agents. Because they were not allowed to return unsold papers, the newsboys often worked late to hawk every last copy.

"7-year-old Ferris. Tiny newsie who did not
know enough to make change for investigator.
There are too many of these little ones
in the larger cities." The paper is The Mobile Item.

In 1899, New York City newsboys went on a two-week strike to get a better deal from Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Morning Journal. Strikes weren't limited to big cities. Newsies struck in Butte, Montana, in 1914, and in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1920.

With unemployment growing in the late 1920s, men began replacing boys as paper carriers. The 350 street vendors for Mobile’s two competing newspapers, The Mobile Register and The Mobile Press, jostled one another for space on the city’s street corners. The conflicts sometimes became violent as the carriers burned bundles of their competitor’s newspapers and overturned delivery trucks.

"Newsboy."

Major changes were in store for newspaper carriers after World War II, but that is a topic for another post.

Do you know anyone who was a newsboy in the 1920s or '30s? How did he like it?