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.
“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 the historical event for art, entertainment and essential truths, as when these striving children come to a liberating realization: “That they matter.”
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 labor and free speech; the freshness of pears and the kick of plug tobacco.
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.
