Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff, your
Speaker 1: weekly reminder that we can do good things instead of
Speaker 1: just always doing bad things, but not in an ontological
Speaker 1: moral way. Just to I'm your host, Margaret Kildre, and
Speaker 1: with me today is my guest Andrew T.
Speaker 2: Andrew Hi good.
Speaker 3: I was debating whether I had enough time to off
Speaker 3: off my sneak a little slice of orange.
Speaker 2: But I don't worry listeners.
Speaker 3: By the time this is done, I'll have eaten this
Speaker 3: full orange and you'll you'll either know or you won't.
Speaker 4: You can always tell when somebody's like a seasoned podcast
Speaker 4: or by like, how well could I sneak this snack?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I just thought I had a little more intro time.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I'm sorry. Usually I do, but I'm doing
Speaker 1: this thing where I'm lazier with my intros now it's
Speaker 1: sucking great.
Speaker 3: Keep me on my on my orange toes. Okay, so
Speaker 3: I'm holding up for the zoom. You see, I have
Speaker 3: this much orange. This is going to be gone by
Speaker 3: the time okay, by the time we finish.
Speaker 1: It's a good choice of podcast snack too, right. It's
Speaker 1: compared to like chips or something right where there's nothing Oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, well, chips, you just gotta really lean lean
Speaker 3: far back and kind of like you gotta you close
Speaker 3: your mouth first and then close your teeth lips first,
Speaker 3: that teeth, which is pretty unnatural, but it kind of works.
Speaker 1: Secrets of the podcasters, see, this is the only thing
Speaker 1: I bring to the table.
Speaker 2: Literally.
Speaker 1: Well, I've spent all my time trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what I can fidget with and what I can't fidget
Speaker 1: with while I'm recording. M I can fidget with the
Speaker 1: microphone sorry, the headphone cable that's twisty. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that one's good. I can't flick open and close a
Speaker 1: knife or a lighter. They make noise.
Speaker 3: I gotta I got a USB dongle that I flip
Speaker 3: back and forth or yeah. I guess I just sort
Speaker 3: of worry it a little bit. It's probably really bad
Speaker 3: for it. I mean, I just realized, so I stole
Speaker 3: my friends. As I'm really I'm holding it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't really matter if it's bad or not.
Speaker 2: This is not the one I bought.
Speaker 1: So speaking of being good dear friends, Yes, so Andrew,
Speaker 1: you know a bunch of people can collectively withhold their
Speaker 1: labor and it's called a strike.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, I'm trying.
Speaker 3: I'm finding out this is this is uh strike. Strikes
Speaker 3: are in the air, and I guess to the extent
Speaker 3: that I can be loving it, I guess I'm loving it.
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay, Yeah, It's one of these things that like
Speaker 1: is like really cool after the fact, but I feel
Speaker 1: like during a strike. I've never been on strike for
Speaker 1: more than like five minutes. My boss immediately caved because
Speaker 1: though we were one hundred percent of his workforce, but
Speaker 1: it actually is probably really hard to be on strike,
Speaker 1: but they it sounds really cool later or from the outside.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I uh, well, currently I am on strike. I
Speaker 3: am a Writer's Guild of America member. We are on strike.
Speaker 3: At the time of this recording. I think we're closing
Speaker 3: on fifty days. I have not kept track. Also, I
Speaker 3: had a very dark moment a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 3: because you know, there's so many you know, so much
Speaker 3: of the history of the strike and the previous strikes
Speaker 3: is about like how many days it's been.
Speaker 2: And I had a real dark moment where I.
Speaker 3: Was like, were they counting weekdays or like work days
Speaker 3: or calendar days, because I was like, if it was
Speaker 3: fucking work days I'm going to lose it. But we
Speaker 3: are closing in on half the length of the previous strike, which,
Speaker 3: for boring business reasons, is I don't know how likely,
Speaker 3: but I would say most the people with the most
Speaker 3: experienced in this would say with medium confidence that it
Speaker 3: is likely that we're going to be somewhere around there. Also,
Speaker 3: but there are so many more variables this time than
Speaker 3: last time, So who really knows?
Speaker 2: Of course I certainly don't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but yeah, we're probably, you know, with like sixty
Speaker 3: percent confidence, closing in on about halfway done with this shit.
Speaker 3: And you know, I'm less tired that I thought, but
Speaker 3: more tired than I want to be.
Speaker 4: It's just what the Writer's Guild of America is asking
Speaker 4: for is so unbelievably reasonable and fair that it's so
Speaker 4: embarrassing for these networks and streaming companies. It's like, you
Speaker 4: guys are so fucking greedy and disgusting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say, the well, and that that sort
Speaker 3: of alludes to if we want to talk about the
Speaker 3: actual any details of the registract, the thing that probably
Speaker 3: is the biggest variable for everyone, including themselves, is the
Speaker 3: prevalence of the streaming companies, who.
Speaker 2: From what I understand what I'm seeing.
Speaker 3: They don't want to have anyone, but they also have
Speaker 3: this real ethos of a tech company as opposed to
Speaker 3: a traditional traditional media company and traditional media companies, though
Speaker 3: they are, like any company, pretty anti union. You know,
Speaker 3: Disney's worked with the unions for quite a long time
Speaker 3: and they have a reasonable relationship. Whereas Netflix, well, you know,
Speaker 3: I guess in one way of looking at it, Netflix
Speaker 3: has worked with unions its entire existence. But on the
Speaker 3: other way of looking at it, or sorry, Netflix Studios
Speaker 3: has not Netflix the original DVD Store probably did. But
Speaker 3: the other way of looking at it is the people
Speaker 3: that founded Netflix the DVD Store come from a culture
Speaker 3: that's virulently anti union in Silicon Valley. So so those
Speaker 3: folks really bring a different vibe. You know, there's entities
Speaker 3: like Amazon who Amazon on Studios.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't know all the business.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure in an unsourced way, I will just
Speaker 3: say with more confidence that I probably should that they're
Speaker 3: sort of a lost leader slash vanity project for Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 3: Another very anti union individual, Apple Studios, which is notorious
Speaker 3: for one of the business practices we're striking against. Of
Speaker 3: many rooms, you know, they they create television and movies
Speaker 3: at a loss leader for their little screens.
Speaker 2: So does it matter to them?
Speaker 3: It's unclear. So those are the things we don't know.
Speaker 3: What we do know is, you know, they can't make
Speaker 3: this ship without.
Speaker 4: Writers and soon without actors.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, Well, SAG voted.
Speaker 4: To strike, but they're not on strike yet, is that correct?
Speaker 2: SAG voted.
Speaker 3: The membership of SAG voted to authorize a strike against
Speaker 3: the WGA. I am sorry, against the AMPTP, the American
Speaker 3: Motion Picture Television Producers's too.
Speaker 1: Many acronyms in every labor related sece. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: one of the problems with labor unions and the things
Speaker 1: that they fight against.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's the problem with more than four people. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: is you just you need a fucking acronym and then
Speaker 3: you start dividing yourselves up. But so they voted to
Speaker 3: they are still negotiating with these studios, and they have
Speaker 3: the membership has given their negotiating committee and leadership by
Speaker 3: an overwhelming margin, the right to call a striketh and
Speaker 3: I have no idea how their negotiations are going.
Speaker 2: And really no one does.
Speaker 3: That was one thing that kind of came out of
Speaker 3: the writer's negotiation. Is the rumors swirling around after the
Speaker 3: fact were laughable.
Speaker 2: They were two to one completely false.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I almost in fact the actual outcome of
Speaker 3: what apparently happened, or at least what was reported in negotiation.
Speaker 3: That was kind of the one rumor that wasn't really
Speaker 3: out there, which is that things it was not close
Speaker 3: and things like fell apart clearly and rapidly, like very
Speaker 3: very early s you yeah, so on strike? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: on strike. Sorry, thanks for letting me know that is why.
Speaker 3: And been on strike either, thank you. Yes, I've never
Speaker 3: been on strike before. I don't think this is This
Speaker 3: would be only the second union I've belonged to when
Speaker 3: I was a teenager as a grocery bagger. This is
Speaker 3: probably because it was Michigan.
Speaker 2: Somehow.
Speaker 3: We were organized under ua W, which seems must have
Speaker 3: simply been a regional thing because.
Speaker 1: The unions wouldn't think what they can get sometimes.
Speaker 2: Couldn't really seem a forgetting that you've in LA.
Speaker 4: I was around for the last strike and it was long.
Speaker 4: It was long, and like most of not not my
Speaker 4: specific parents, but most of my friends' parents worked in
Speaker 4: the entertainment industry, whether that be writers themselves or crew
Speaker 4: or makeup and things like that.
Speaker 1: And it was long. It was long.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so yeah, it's long. I mean we'll see. Well
Speaker 3: that is the other thing. Yeah, as you mentioned, really,
Speaker 3: the the other thing that is new on our side
Speaker 3: this time is we have much stronger solidarity from especially
Speaker 3: the teamsters. Yeah, and from and yeah, well you know,
Speaker 3: without telling them how to do their jobs or their
Speaker 3: wink not jobs, they could certainly be doing some of
Speaker 3: those things a little more if they want. We would
Speaker 3: love it.
Speaker 4: But is there anything up top that is there any
Speaker 4: call to action or anything that you have for listeners
Speaker 4: of our show?
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, you know what, No, there isn't anything.
Speaker 2: The one thing I will say is you will know
Speaker 2: what to do.
Speaker 3: The Writer's Guild is being much much more communicative than
Speaker 3: they were even in prior labor actions that weren't a strike,
Speaker 3: and I do commend them for that. That was the
Speaker 3: thing when I ran for the WJ board, I was like,
Speaker 3: you guys are very obtuse, and I would have to
Speaker 3: change that.
Speaker 1: Actually for a bunch of writers, right, yeah.
Speaker 2: And they did.
Speaker 3: They have done a much much better job of communicating,
Speaker 3: so to that end. So, for instance, like I've seen
Speaker 3: people like independently on Twitter saying things like I'm going
Speaker 3: to cancel my Netflix in support, and that is not
Speaker 3: what anyone's asking for right now. And you'll know when
Speaker 3: and it will be more effective if you actually basically
Speaker 3: if we all do things together and coorporately.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so no need to cancel on.
Speaker 3: Netflix or anything like that yet, but you know, feel
Speaker 3: free to tweet at them and call them uh, weird
Speaker 3: weird dickheads on the street if you want.
Speaker 1: Well, today we're going to talk about another strike that
Speaker 1: you already have exceeded in length, but we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about a strike that closed out the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: It won important concessions from some of the most powerful
Speaker 1: men in the US. It changed the way that people
Speaker 1: in this country talk about child labor, and most importantly,
Speaker 1: speaking of Disney, it gave us a sick musical with
Speaker 1: kids an old time outfits, singing and dancing in the
Speaker 1: streets of New York. Amazing, because today we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about the Newsboys Strike of eighteen ninety in New
Speaker 1: York City.
Speaker 2: I can't wait.
Speaker 1: Yeah cool, I will say this.
Speaker 3: I have not seen the musicals but on the other day,
Speaker 3: we we've been doing sort of people have been organizing
Speaker 3: theme days at the strike and at Disney. The other
Speaker 3: day was Newsy's Day, and I was not aware that
Speaker 3: it was happening. So there, I was just like, you know,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of like cosplay Raga muffins around right now,
Speaker 3: and I just I wasn't sure what was happening.
Speaker 2: And I was just like.
Speaker 3: And then it was Newsy's Day, and I was like, Okay,
Speaker 3: this is fine. The Disney lot is huge. I could
Speaker 3: I could stand elsewhere if I don't want to be
Speaker 3: around it.
Speaker 5: But I was.
Speaker 2: It was more that I was just surprised by It's.
Speaker 3: It's that thing where you just kind of like you're
Speaker 3: in a crowd and all of a sudden you're like,
Speaker 3: what the fuck is with all the.
Speaker 2: Like fraid like overhauls.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like a lot of a lot of grease, like
Speaker 3: grease paid on faces right now?
Speaker 2: What the fuck is happening?
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to talk about what an informal gang
Speaker 1: of fairly violent teenagers shut down the nation's biggest newspapers
Speaker 1: and won their rights. So let's talk about Newsy's. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about the people that you're going to cost play
Speaker 1: affs tomorrow amazingly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm ready. I mean, look, my vibe is already
Speaker 2: kind of like that.
Speaker 3: So I was just like, I mean, I'm not like
Speaker 3: out of line, but I was like, this is aggressive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, fair enough, especially once you have to learn
Speaker 1: all the singing and dancing, which, okay, we're going to
Speaker 1: get to it. The singing and dancing is historically accurate
Speaker 1: in terms of how they are represented. But all right,
Speaker 1: so you've got newspapers, right, and they used to be
Speaker 1: the main way that people got news. They go back
Speaker 1: to the seventeenth century. But I'm not going to do
Speaker 1: that to you, although I will say that China actually
Speaker 1: had something similar to newspapers in like the second and
Speaker 1: third century. Obviously like well before the Western world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Europe as usual is about a thousand years behind. Newspapers
Speaker 1: as we currently know them, or maybe remember them might
Speaker 1: be more accurate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're at just another juncture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, anything could happen that probably is a newspapers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. They started around the early sixteen hundreds in
Speaker 1: the Holy Roman Empire, and specifically it's no Germany and newsboys.
Speaker 1: The idea that children are the means of distribution goes
Speaker 1: back really far, at least as far as seventeen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: when horsemen were delivering the paper like house to house
Speaker 1: in colonial America and post colonial America. That was when
Speaker 1: it was not colonial anymore, well different kind of colony, right,
Speaker 1: horsemen were delivering the paper, and then they were like,
Speaker 1: maybe we can make kids do this and then barely
Speaker 1: pay them. So they did. And you have two methods
Speaker 1: of distribution of papers, right, You've got door to door
Speaker 1: delivery and then you've got like direct sales, usually on
Speaker 1: the street, and usually it's a kid coming up and
Speaker 1: being like, please miss the bomby lass pape, you know
Speaker 1: or whatever.
Speaker 3: It's always mista yeah, yeah, that's the real vibe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I get it, I get it. And so this
Speaker 1: has been children for a very very long time. There
Speaker 1: was a brief period where the door to door was
Speaker 1: no longer children in the end of the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: just the direct But then around the nineteen twenties or so,
Speaker 1: it got back to the like kind of classic Americana
Speaker 1: thing of the like boy on a bicycle riding around
Speaker 1: on his paper route or whatever, uh huh. And so
Speaker 1: in the city kids sell the newspapers. They walk around
Speaker 1: the streets being like extracts or read all about it.
Speaker 1: Disgraced former president Donald Trump has been arrested, or whatever
Speaker 1: the news is that day. Maybe it'll be the onion
Speaker 1: headline that he's been executed. Most of these newsboys were
Speaker 1: kids or young teens from poor families. A lot of
Speaker 1: them were homeless, and a lot of them were orphans too,
Speaker 1: but not all of them, not even most of them.
Speaker 1: Most boys started as young teenagers, but kids as young
Speaker 1: as six sold papers, and some kept selling into adulthood,
Speaker 1: but most didn't.
Speaker 2: I don't know those.
Speaker 1: Because they died or found better jobs or probably worse jobs, honestly, right,
Speaker 1: there were some girl newsies, especially from families without boys
Speaker 1: to send off to work. There was this whole stir
Speaker 1: when the twenty eighteen stage version of Newsies included girl newsies,
Speaker 1: and people were like, oh, you're making it woke or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they just like nothing's more woke than just like true,
Speaker 3: you know, true turn of the century desperation. I know,
Speaker 3: because you look yeah, yeah, of a greater equalizer than
Speaker 3: you think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, actually we're gonna talk about some of that too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there were girls they and even the twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: news that they were like, well, we look back and
Speaker 1: here's here's all of these photos of girl newsies, and
Speaker 1: then you can actually find quotes that we'll get into
Speaker 1: later about even during the strike there were girl newsies,
Speaker 1: you know, predominantly boys and boys is the best I
Speaker 1: can kind of put together. Their ethnicity varied decade to decade,
Speaker 1: in city to city. I've got the most information about
Speaker 1: New York City, so that's what I'm going to go
Speaker 1: into for a long time. For decades, ninety percent of
Speaker 1: the New York newsies were Irish, like either you know,
Speaker 1: directly from Ireland or children of immigrants. I think sometimes
Speaker 1: it was like literally like kids who smuggled themselves to
Speaker 1: America as children without parents. But most of the time
Speaker 1: you're talking about like the kids and grandkids of immigrant families.
Speaker 1: By the time we're talking about today, it is more diverse.
Speaker 1: Eighty percent of the kids were from immigrant Irish, Italian
Speaker 1: and Jewish families, but not all of them were. There
Speaker 1: were black newsies, and by and large, Newsy life poverty
Speaker 1: being a great equalizer, was not segregated, right right, right.
Speaker 1: Sometimes various kids had nicknames that referred directly to their race. Sure,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of slurs age old tradition. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure that doesn't happen anymore. Obviously, a twelve year
Speaker 1: old would never get named after some Oh god, two
Speaker 1: of the black Newsies. I found one of his named
Speaker 1: William Reese, and I'm not going to say his nickname
Speaker 1: on air. It's not the really bad one. It's just
Speaker 1: another one that I'm not going to say on air.
Speaker 1: And then another one of the black Newsies was named
Speaker 1: the Black Wonder. And there was an Indigenous Newsy named
Speaker 1: Bob the Indian, one of the presidents of the Newsboys
Speaker 1: unions in eighteen ninety nine. We're gonna talk about this.
Speaker 1: He actually lays out the demographics and you'll be, you'll be.
Speaker 1: The way that this kid does demographics is interesting. It
Speaker 1: is two fifth Jews, one fifth Irish, one fifth Italian,
Speaker 1: and one fifth everyone else, including black kids, girls, disabled folks,
Speaker 1: people pretending to be disabled called fakers. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: because somehow both girl and disabled are ethnicities.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess that's an organizing principle of sorts.
Speaker 2: It's just other.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, oh god, fair enough, I suppose.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and like whatever, like they were you know, ahead.
Speaker 3: Not dis alert to labor unions today. You take what
Speaker 3: you could. You know, there's got to be something, but
Speaker 3: by at large they're the right thing.
Speaker 1: And overall this actually puts them leagues ahead of other
Speaker 1: contemporary unions. I didn't write this part into the script,
Speaker 1: but a bunch of different times I've had to do
Speaker 1: research into just how racist a lot of the late
Speaker 1: nineteenth century unions in the United States were not all
Speaker 1: of them, and there's some like particular standouts, but a
Speaker 1: lot of them more like this is for white people only.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and.
Speaker 3: But I mean that that is a real side of
Speaker 3: the labor movement. Even today, it is like there there is,
Speaker 3: you know more there is and there should be even
Speaker 3: more than there is lip service to to, you know,
Speaker 3: especially racial diversity. But it is still like it doesn't
Speaker 3: take long to dig into the like and find some
Speaker 3: of those class not race folks or you know which
Speaker 3: you're like, yeah, you know, in a country that had
Speaker 3: race based chattel slavery, you can't really disentangle those two
Speaker 3: things as much as you'd like.
Speaker 1: And also when you look at the history of American
Speaker 1: labor unions, you'd be like, you know, if they had
Speaker 1: been class not race in the late nineteenth century, things
Speaker 1: would be a little better, like because they were like race,
Speaker 1: because they specifically excluded people constantly. It's like they were
Speaker 1: some of the perpetuators of this racism. And part of
Speaker 1: the reason that race needs to be included just as
Speaker 1: its own thing in the conversation, yeah, is because of
Speaker 1: the fucking work that they did of racism.
Speaker 3: Right still on the ballance, Well, listen where you can't
Speaker 3: completely you can't make your perfect allies and you know
Speaker 3: they are they are the right ones.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. Well, there's this thing going around right now
Speaker 1: where people are talking about like the people who know
Speaker 1: all of the right things to say are less likely
Speaker 1: to be your friends, like your actual allies in times
Speaker 1: of crisis than the person like as like a trans woman,
Speaker 1: like the kind of person who's gonna like be confused
Speaker 1: in misgender me but like still be like whatever, don't
Speaker 1: mess with her, you know, versus the people who will
Speaker 1: like very carefully say everything right but actually have like
Speaker 1: more hate in their hearts. And I, yeah, that's my
Speaker 1: like vibe about the way that these children were handling race.
Speaker 2: But I don't Yeah, I don't know. I I go
Speaker 2: back and forth.
Speaker 3: I mean I think there are both yeahs of folks. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but you're right, yes, that all all four quadrants of
Speaker 3: those things do exist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. So you got these newsies and their job
Speaker 1: is that they buy newspapers and they sell them at
Speaker 1: a set markup. And this is like the main way
Speaker 1: newspapers get sold is they get sold to children. The
Speaker 1: markup always changes, but overall it would be like you're
Speaker 1: buying one cent papers for half a cent, two cent
Speaker 1: papers for one cent, three cent papers for two cents,
Speaker 1: and then you turn around and sell them for the
Speaker 1: the cover price. These kids are not employees. They are
Speaker 1: independent contractors sort of. The bosses like officially they like
Speaker 1: avoiding hiring people, right because then you then you have
Speaker 1: to like provide them labor law stuff. There wasn't a
Speaker 1: ton of labor laws stuff, right, but it was still
Speaker 1: a nice way to skirt it. And they still wanted
Speaker 1: to limit the kid's autonomy. The cover price had to
Speaker 1: be the same. Some newspapers divvied up the territory that
Speaker 1: the kids could sell in. Others made more extreme demands,
Speaker 1: like a newsy couldn't choose which papers to sell. They
Speaker 1: had to sell like all of If you want to
Speaker 1: sell this paper, you also have to sell like all
Speaker 1: of the boss's cronies newspapers too, you know. Being independent
Speaker 1: contractors made newsies hard to organize. So did the fact
Speaker 1: that they were literally children. Newspapers generally didn't buy back
Speaker 1: unsold copies of the paper. This is a big part
Speaker 1: of this whole thing. So a newsy was stuck quote
Speaker 1: eating the remaining papers. And I really like this because
Speaker 1: the slang they always used the kids were like, oh,
Speaker 1: I got to eat me papes or whatever, right, And
Speaker 1: if you read articles, they're always like, wow, look at
Speaker 1: that inventive slang the kids have eating the papers. And
Speaker 1: it's just like funny now, because like eating the cost
Speaker 1: of something is a like I don't even see that
Speaker 1: as like slang. That's just a way of describing a thing,
Speaker 1: you know, right right right anyway, So they they worked
Speaker 1: it late into the night to sell these papers to
Speaker 1: minimize their losses. Right, if you didn't sell all your papers,
Speaker 1: you're just out all fucking night. Some papers would offer
Speaker 1: discounts to kids who showed up early to pick up
Speaker 1: their papers, which led pressure to kids to drop out
Speaker 1: of school in order to sell papers. By eighteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: ten to fifteen thousand newsboys worked the street of New
Speaker 1: York City, screaming the headlines until late into the night,
Speaker 1: many of them sleeping on the streets. They made about
Speaker 1: twenty five to thirty cents a day, which is a
Speaker 1: completely meaningless number because you're talking about hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: That's twelve dollars a day in today's money. Jesus, Like
Speaker 1: that sucks. Yeah, well, you know it. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: lot of money for a wee child, yeah, totally, is
Speaker 1: often the sole breadwinner of their family.
Speaker 2: Yeah. God, that's fucking wild.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so they didn't make a lot of money doing this,
Speaker 1: and they they sold. Some of them sold their leftovers
Speaker 1: at a loss to the night boys, who had the
Speaker 1: even worst job of selling the like discount papers laid
Speaker 1: into the night right. A few of them became bosses
Speaker 1: sort of like these older newsies would hoard large stashes
Speaker 1: and then sub hire helpers to run out and sell,
Speaker 1: like on street corners and stuff. This was probably the
Speaker 1: result of crewing up to hold onto prime territory and
Speaker 1: or just people perpetuating expectation.
Speaker 2: Right, It makes sense.
Speaker 3: I mean it's it's yeah, it's it's like that system
Speaker 3: immediately creates incentives to like just just do your little
Speaker 3: quasi crime empire on whatever block.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know be like, hah, I'm rich. I
Speaker 1: get fifty cents a day. Yeah, you know, new Zy
Speaker 1: life was fucking hard. The conditions were bad, the pay
Speaker 1: was bad. The independent contractor thing left them in competition
Speaker 1: with each other over territory, and this was a fairly
Speaker 1: violent thing. You hold onto your pitch as long as
Speaker 1: you can physically defend it, and so they're a very
Speaker 1: feighty bunch. This will come out to be to their advantage.
Speaker 3: Right, I mean, look, the tidy version of this is, yeah,
Speaker 3: like they're independent contractors because it was to the papers
Speaker 3: benefits to have them, you know, sub not like they
Speaker 3: have them just precarious at all times.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I will say one tidy thing about this writer
Speaker 3: strike is that because we are also independent contractors, and
Speaker 3: the business practice lately has been more and more time
Speaker 3: off between shows if you're on a TV writer, or
Speaker 3: like doing free work for a long time if you're
Speaker 3: a movie writer. We are also very used to not
Speaker 3: working for a long time, Like that's a good point,
Speaker 3: that is, so, yeah, the thing that they have been
Speaker 3: using as a cudgel against us has actually helped us
Speaker 3: in this strike.
Speaker 2: And yeah, again we're talking about very different things, I understand.
Speaker 1: No, no, I mean a little example, I was like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to find a strike that feels like, I is
Speaker 1: a good way to talk about the writer's strike. That
Speaker 1: is how I picked this topic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's a it's a strike against a
Speaker 3: media empire. And yeah, specifically the independent contractor thing is like,
Speaker 3: like that is what we are as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But one of the other things about how hard
Speaker 1: their lives was is that no one knew their lives
Speaker 1: were this hard because the newspapers, with the only source
Speaker 1: of information in the city, had a really strong incentive
Speaker 1: to paint an idyllic picture of newsboy life, about these
Speaker 1: plucky entrepreneurs who worked for themselves and were able to
Speaker 1: support their families with like plenty of like idle time
Speaker 1: and joy or whatever in their lives, you know. And
Speaker 1: so this like newsy singing and dancing thing is there's
Speaker 1: a media construction from one hundred and twenty years ago at.
Speaker 3: Least, oh right, oh my god, right, and nothing sanitizes
Speaker 3: the people. You're like subjugating quite like, yeah, controlling their story.
Speaker 1: God, yeah, some of them, some of the homeless kids
Speaker 1: or some of the orphans lived in Newsboy House lodging houses.
Speaker 1: The first one opened in eighteen fifty four for homeless
Speaker 1: kids who didn't trust the existing infrastructure, because a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of people don't trust shelter, the shelter
Speaker 1: system often in this case in eighteen fifty four, it
Speaker 1: would like funnel kids into jail, right, and so they're like,
Speaker 1: the hell with that, and so they're sleeping on the streets.
Speaker 1: So some people set up lodging houses, and this actually
Speaker 1: seems good, like honestly pretty right. It was five or
Speaker 1: six cents a day. You got a bed and a
Speaker 1: bath and I think food. I've read different things that
Speaker 1: have implied different things about that. Kids. You could come
Speaker 1: and go whenever you wanted, as long as you were
Speaker 1: home by midnight. But it's like if you missed curfew,
Speaker 1: it's still come in the next day. You know, you
Speaker 1: just can't come in at midnight. The first one was
Speaker 1: only for boys. I don't know that there are other
Speaker 1: ones that included girls or not, but they they were
Speaker 1: open to all religions and races and the fact that
Speaker 1: they weren't segregated is like actually a fairly big deal,
Speaker 1: right right, right, right, Although in researching this, I learned
Speaker 1: segregation for poor families got worse in America than the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. In the nineteen thirties or so, it got
Speaker 1: more like some of the way that they did public
Speaker 1: housing in the nineteen thirties like made segregation more intense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, but that that sort of just feels like, yeah,
Speaker 3: as things get worse, and you know, no offense to
Speaker 3: white folks, but like there is when when that rhetoric
Speaker 3: and that type of push gets amped up, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of regrettably and somewhat mysteriously, you know, poor white folks.
Speaker 2: I would say, take the bait more off, but that
Speaker 2: I think they should.
Speaker 1: Yeah about like blaming blaming racialized others for the problems.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's like, you know, it's a
Speaker 3: surprisingly profitable playbook, I think for horrible people.
Speaker 1: Yep. I think that is the history of that's like
Speaker 1: the main actual history of twentieth century, nineteenth century and
Speaker 1: twenty century labor in the America. And it's like not
Speaker 1: the way.
Speaker 3: That I mean, it's enough arguably the main main cudgel
Speaker 3: for everything. I mean, you know, when when it's at
Speaker 3: points when I've been thinking, like you know, or or
Speaker 3: arguing with folks about like is my podcasts as racist?
Speaker 2: Like what is the point?
Speaker 3: And I to me, I've come to the conclusion that like,
Speaker 3: I mean racism, American racism might be the folk roum
Speaker 3: with which the world literally ends, or humanity literally ends.
Speaker 3: Like that is the gasoline. Yeah, that like has allowed
Speaker 3: all the other horrors to like exist potentially. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't know, We'll see, We'll see what the history books
Speaker 3: that don't get written say.
Speaker 1: But if you want a history book that wait, hold on,
Speaker 1: how many to turn us into an ads? And yes, okay, wait,
Speaker 1: what else is a cudgel? Is cudgels from cudgel vendors,
Speaker 1: our sponsor sticks with which to hit scabs, scabs, sticks
Speaker 1: buy them?
Speaker 3: Now, anything anything could be used to hit a scab.
Speaker 3: And you know what, it's very very twenty first century.
Speaker 3: But now, of course, for the writer's strike, just you know,
Speaker 3: Twitter is your cudgel to snitch on a scab.
Speaker 1: Or And here's some other ads that may or may
Speaker 1: not also be for scab intimidating purposes and we are back.
Speaker 1: So uh, let's see. So you have these lodging houses
Speaker 1: and there's no smoking or cussing, and eventually later boys
Speaker 1: were required to attend either a morning or an evening
Speaker 1: class if they wanted to stay there. Because it's like
Speaker 1: a very like reformer vibe, right, and so all these
Speaker 1: people who are like, we're going to save these kids
Speaker 1: or whatever, but again, like that often goes really bad. See,
Speaker 1: I don't know the Catholic church, but yeah, in this
Speaker 1: particular case, I'm not aware. I've only found positive representations.
Speaker 1: I don't know, that's but right. And boys there could
Speaker 1: learn trades, including sewing and cooking. Those were literally the
Speaker 1: only two trades that I saw mentioned. Every bed had
Speaker 1: a locker for their stuff, and over the course of
Speaker 1: forty years, a particular lodging house claimed that a quarter
Speaker 1: of a million different kids stayed there. And you're paying,
Speaker 1: like you're sleeping in these like bunk beds in these
Speaker 1: like giant halls or whatever, right, but you're also like
Speaker 1: sleeping warm and not dying, and it's like a pretty
Speaker 1: good deal. And not all of the orphan newsies, probably
Speaker 1: not most of them were anywhere near so lucky as
Speaker 1: the kids who stayed in these houses. In eighteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: a man named Charles Loring Brace described the condition of
Speaker 1: some of them. Quote, I remember one cold night seeing
Speaker 1: some ten or a dozen of the little homeless creatures
Speaker 1: piled together to keep each other warm beneath the stairway
Speaker 1: of the New York Sun Office. They used to be
Speaker 1: a mass of them at the Atlas Office, sleeping in
Speaker 1: lobbies until the printers drove them away by pouring water
Speaker 1: on them. Jesus, Yeah, could you imagine in that fucking asshole,
Speaker 1: who would do that?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 3: That, I mean obviously maybe not obviously, like I would
Speaker 3: have trouble I think doing that, but not you know,
Speaker 3: I know that I would have trouble doing that. However,
Speaker 3: I think the evidence is like, yeah, our alleged humanity
Speaker 3: is much easier to strip away.
Speaker 1: That's true. Yeah, that's true. All of us have like
Speaker 1: we would never do things that. Clearly the large percentage
Speaker 1: of people do when yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, the number of people that say I would not
Speaker 3: commit an atrocity does not comport with the number of
Speaker 3: people who when asked to commit atrocities.
Speaker 2: So like totally something's up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, someone like wrong, pour water on these freezing children,
Speaker 1: or you lose your job, you know, yeah yeah, or
Speaker 1: even like I'm annoyed and I don't want to step
Speaker 1: up whatever. People are bad. Yeah, yeah, so most of them,
Speaker 1: most of the Newsies weren't homeless. Most of them were
Speaker 1: sent out by their parents to buy papers and sell
Speaker 1: them and bring that money home. And one of my
Speaker 1: favorite facts I learned about newsy is a cultural thing
Speaker 1: about them is that, according to the superintendent of the
Speaker 1: boarding houses, newsies insist that they eat their pie first
Speaker 1: at dinner. If they couldn't get pie, they would riot,
Speaker 1: chanting pie, pie, pie and throwing food around. The boys
Speaker 1: demand their pie.
Speaker 2: All right. Yeah, it's been a minute since I've loved
Speaker 2: pie that much.
Speaker 1: But okay, I mean, you know, I don't know in
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, yeah, food is like.
Speaker 3: Right, the one I guess it also, though, is like
Speaker 3: this thing where you're like, right, these are these are children?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Like children children?
Speaker 1: Yeah, these are like six to eighteen. If folks liked you,
Speaker 1: you got a nickname. Most of the characters that we'll
Speaker 1: talk about today have nicknames. But there's a couple that
Speaker 1: I didn't work into the script that I just want
Speaker 1: to read out. You've got kid Fish, You've got Scabooch,
Speaker 1: You've got Crutch and Morris, You've got Barney Peanuts, you
Speaker 1: got little slur for jew that's not actually what they
Speaker 1: call them. Uh. You got fishbone skinnies, you got cheek Grubber,
Speaker 1: you got Friedman, Frockets, young Monks, and hungry Joe.
Speaker 2: It's pretty good. I know, I feel like I feel
Speaker 2: like the nickname game. I mean, obviously, I guess you
Speaker 2: know why.
Speaker 3: I was going to say something very everyone fancies some
Speaker 3: solves like a real nickname person. But you know what,
Speaker 3: I probably wouldn't be better than anyone else at the
Speaker 3: nickname game.
Speaker 2: I'm realizing, I guess I say it out loud.
Speaker 1: They also gave nicknames to their adult supporters, like three
Speaker 1: women who were like news vendors with newstands. There was Aunt,
Speaker 1: there was Beauty, and then Hannah Kleff's nickname was just Fight.
Speaker 1: And I was a train hopper for a while, and
Speaker 1: everyone had like tough as fuck names, right, I have
Speaker 1: never met anyone with a name that goes as hard
Speaker 1: as some lady just named Fight. Why she called that,
Speaker 1: I don't know, fairly referenced.
Speaker 2: Lovely.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, so those were the news with old fight
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, totally. I wouldn't mess with her, I
Speaker 1: know that much.
Speaker 3: I you know, I feel like there's like a twenty
Speaker 3: four cent chance it's a because she was quite a
Speaker 3: gentle soul life.
Speaker 1: No, that's true.
Speaker 2: The nickname game price falls just about those percentages.
Speaker 1: You never know, but yeah, no, totally, Like little John
Speaker 1: could be very small or very large, isn't in between.
Speaker 1: This woman is either tough as nails or will like
Speaker 1: spends all day taking kittens out of trees. And yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's polarizing. That's all you know about a nickname.
Speaker 1: It's either the thing or not the thing very much.
Speaker 1: So totally poor poor beauty okay or not? Yeah no, yeah,
Speaker 1: So these are the newsies, and across the country, but
Speaker 1: especially in New York City, they actually go on strike
Speaker 1: like kind of a lot. And it's interesting because there's
Speaker 1: not much institutional memory that you're talking about when you're
Speaker 1: talking about a job that someone holds free maximum of
Speaker 1: eleven years. Most people probably for three or four years,
Speaker 1: you know, right. In eighteen eighty six, the Brooklyn Times
Speaker 1: raised its price to newsboys and woos Wlliamsburg to one
Speaker 1: in an eighth cent, while it stayed one cent in
Speaker 1: downtown Brooklyn. It only took a one day strike to
Speaker 1: get that solved. The newsies refused to buy the paper,
Speaker 1: and they refuse to let anyone else buy the paper either.
Speaker 1: All papers were one cent after that. In eighteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: this is my favorite, these little strikes. In Montgomery, Alabama,
Speaker 1: the newsboys went on strike against a labor union, the
Speaker 1: Knights of Labor, an American labor federation. They weren't technically
Speaker 1: a union. They're like a weird Have you heard the
Speaker 1: Nice of Labor?
Speaker 2: Nope?
Speaker 1: They should be so cool, right, they are the Nice
Speaker 1: of Labor. They're a semi secret society. They come before
Speaker 1: any other labor union stuff in America, and they're so boring.
Speaker 1: They're just whenever you read about them, they're like they're
Speaker 1: like the milk toast liberals. They're like, yeah, the not aggressives,
Speaker 1: the not radicals, you know.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, it's it's all the you know, the names.
Speaker 3: I think that's the thing though, It's like it's like
Speaker 3: what you're saying about uh acronyms?
Speaker 2: Yeah, was that before we started rolling it? Might have been.
Speaker 1: I was complaining about acronyms of labor unions before we
Speaker 1: started rolling. There's too many of them.
Speaker 2: But I think it's like, yeah, anyway, truly like the names.
Speaker 2: When the names get picked, those those are the good names.
Speaker 3: Get taken so long ago that yeah, almost by definition,
Speaker 3: if institution has been going on long enough, it might
Speaker 3: have an amazing name, but it has gone quite soft
Speaker 3: if it still exists totally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe the Knights of Labor used to be an
Speaker 1: actually secret society before they became semi secret, and maybe
Speaker 1: they like function up and ruled. But yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know about that, but I do know they raised their
Speaker 1: newsboy prices from thirty five cents per hundred to fifty
Speaker 1: cents per hundred copies of their paper, so the news
Speaker 1: struck flinging mud at scabs. This embarrassed the shit out
Speaker 1: of the Knights of Labor because they were a labor federation.
Speaker 1: I actually couldn't track down the results of the strike.
Speaker 1: I'm I think it was successful, but I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is, that is the thing.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's it's less but not I don't know enough.
Speaker 3: I know it has, you know, happened I think recently ish,
Speaker 3: but it is like the employees of labor unions and
Speaker 3: more but more often like things like nonprofits or places
Speaker 3: that are nominally doing good. Really, it is a little
Speaker 3: shocking how little people practice what they preach with their
Speaker 3: actual direct employees.
Speaker 1: Totally.
Speaker 2: It's fucked up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, if you want to destroy a nonprofit, unionize
Speaker 1: its workers. It should be the easiest workplace in the
Speaker 1: world to unionize. Yeah, and shout out to anyone who's
Speaker 1: a union organizer in a nonprofit world, you are doing
Speaker 1: very important work.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty nine, we get another strike in New
Speaker 1: York City. This one is a lot like the one
Speaker 1: that came aft ten years later, to the point where
Speaker 1: literally I had to spend a while being like is
Speaker 1: this a typo? When I would read eighteen eighty nine
Speaker 1: and all these newspapers because this was gonna sound whatever.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm going to say these things, but you
Speaker 1: all don't know the rest of the story yet, so
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound prescient yet. Two newspapers, The Evening Sun
Speaker 1: in the Evening World tried to hike their rates from
Speaker 1: fifty cents to sixty cents. The Newsboys of Manhattan Brooklyn
Speaker 1: both struck and of course an important part of striking
Speaker 1: is stopping scab labor. So they followed delivery wagons. They
Speaker 1: pelted the delivery wagons with rocks. They threw mud at
Speaker 1: a political cartoonist who was against the strike. I didn't
Speaker 1: realize how much flinging mud was like a literal thing
Speaker 1: instead of a metaphorical thing in the nineteenth century. And
Speaker 1: they burned stacks of the newspapers in the street. They
Speaker 1: would like run and capture them and then just set
Speaker 1: them on fire. Hell yeah, yeah, and apparently like dance
Speaker 1: around the bond fires and shit, hoot and holler, and.
Speaker 2: It really is. It's true.
Speaker 3: It's like the just thinking of like where you'd even
Speaker 3: get mud in Manhattan is kind of freaking me out.
Speaker 3: Oh it wasn't paved yet, Yeah right, no, I know, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's definitely what a different era. Yeah, during this strike,
Speaker 3: an eleven year old an Italian by the name of
Speaker 3: Joseph Baldy, he tore up the newspapers of a kid
Speaker 3: who was scabbing, so the cops arrested him. So another
Speaker 3: eleven year old, a Polish kid named Arthur Lufft, hit
Speaker 3: the cop of the bail stick. And I know what
Speaker 3: you're thinking, what the fuck is a bail stick? And
Speaker 3: I don't know what the fuck a bail stick is
Speaker 3: because I assume it's a pole you used to bail
Speaker 3: hey or move bales of hay. But the only Google
Speaker 3: results for bailstick are New York Times from the turn
Speaker 3: of the century talking to various people hitting and killing
Speaker 3: each other with bail sticks in the city. Oh god,
Speaker 3: so I'm guessing that they are a common improvised weapon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, is it? Like, I mean, the thing that you
Speaker 2: bail hay with is like a little book right now?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know, Oh yeah, or like something you.
Speaker 3: Paid it it is with so visceral Like anytime you're
Speaker 3: like anytime you talk about like, yeah, I guess original labor,
Speaker 3: whether it's like you know, pick axes and axe handles
Speaker 3: or axes or whatever it is. I'm just like, I mean,
Speaker 3: I know it's good that humanity is not built like
Speaker 3: that anymore.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it' there's like there's some like questions around
Speaker 1: the efficacy of violence as relates to labor actions, and
Speaker 1: like also the morality of violences related to labor actions
Speaker 1: that like and.
Speaker 3: I guess guns really changed a lot of that shit.
Speaker 3: That's true, that's true. Yeah fuck so yeah, so so
Speaker 3: Arthur left. The eleven year old hits the cop with
Speaker 3: a bail stick and then leads a crowd of one
Speaker 3: hundred kids to de arrest their but Arthur is also arrested.
Speaker 3: This is how we have their names. It's like from
Speaker 3: criminal records. Both of them are taken to Enemy of
Speaker 3: the Pod, the Tombs in New York City. If anyone
Speaker 3: has someone goes to the Tombs on your cool people
Speaker 3: bingo card, go ahead and mark that square. Basically everyone
Speaker 3: gets sent to the Tombs. It's this very depressing jail
Speaker 3: in Manhattan. Even though the most newsboys were not formally organized. Okay,
Speaker 3: so that was that strike.
Speaker 1: And so even though most newsboys were not formally organized,
Speaker 1: they were also more reliable for solidarity than other people
Speaker 1: were with them, so they were constantly sticking up for
Speaker 1: other strikes, much like the Screen Actors Guild is now
Speaker 1: sticking up for you. During the eighteen ninety four Pullman
Speaker 1: strike in Chicago, which was a train strike, there was
Speaker 1: a boycott organized newspapers that printed articles against the boycott
Speaker 1: found that the newsies would drop those papers into the sewers.
Speaker 1: So suddenly the press had to be a little bit
Speaker 1: more positive about the strike because the eleven year olds
Speaker 1: who sold their ship wanted to be on the right
Speaker 1: side of history.
Speaker 2: I mean it is like really funny.
Speaker 3: It's like you're almost talking about like, yeah, the newsy
Speaker 3: is being the last mile in terms of delivering media.
Speaker 3: Is some real like Elon Musk, the fascist buys Twitter
Speaker 3: kind of shit where you're like, yeah, just like the
Speaker 3: last the last mile can really influence shit.
Speaker 2: You're right, that is those people have no power.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I wish that Twitter was run by a
Speaker 1: bunch of eleven year olds. It would be substantially better
Speaker 1: than it is under Elon Musk.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it sounds the problem is not like humor wise,
Speaker 3: it is, but fascism wise.
Speaker 2: It's. Yeah, the problem is that's like a real Nazi
Speaker 2: eleven year old.
Speaker 1: Yeah you no, no, but no, it needs to be run
Speaker 1: by a whole bunch of actual several Yeah, not one
Speaker 1: old man who likes to pretend that he is young
Speaker 1: and acts like he is young.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, a grip of children for CEO.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, that is the new motto of every.
Speaker 3: Good The only good billionaire is like ten million children.
Speaker 1: In a trench coat.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there's way more strikes than just these. Many
Speaker 1: went unremembered, like literally, like there's like one in eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety three in New York City that the only reference
Speaker 1: that we have to it was a kid giving a
Speaker 1: speech later being like, hey, we won an eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: We're gonna win now, and like and maybe there's other
Speaker 1: references to it that I couldn't find, but the news
Speaker 1: are being you know, it's like it's the history isn't
Speaker 1: recessarily just written by the victors. It's written by the newspapers, right.
Speaker 3: Right, And so in this case, the losers yeah totally
Speaker 3: yeah boom, you don't want to admit that lost.
Speaker 1: And so there weren't too many people speaking for the
Speaker 1: voiceless street kids, and mainstream labor wasn't actually helping them
Speaker 1: very much either. So the strike of eighteen ninety nine
Speaker 1: wasn't out of the blue. It's still ruled, and let's
Speaker 1: talk about it, just kidding us. Let's give more context, hahaha,
Speaker 1: all contexts, context all the way down. Baby, don't worry.
Speaker 1: Most of the context people hitting cops with sex. It's great.
Speaker 2: Context is the real text.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, just means with text, I don't actually know
Speaker 1: the oediblagy.
Speaker 2: I mean it has to be. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in eighteen ninety eight, the US had a little
Speaker 1: war with Spain. It was called the Spanish American War.
Speaker 1: We're not going to get into it, but it is
Speaker 1: worth knowing that it was like like newspaper people like
Speaker 1: took credit for starting that war. I don't remember which one.
Speaker 1: I didn't write it into the script. It's worth knowing
Speaker 1: that war means good headlines means good newspaper sales, and
Speaker 1: so unfortunately for the newspaper companies, but fortunately for I
Speaker 1: don't know, human life, the war didn't last very long.
Speaker 1: During the war, it was a seller's market, and newspapers
Speaker 1: jacked up their prices and they charged the newsboys sixty
Speaker 1: cents per one hundred copies instead of fifty cents. And
Speaker 1: some newsies were like, the hell with this, you can't
Speaker 1: raise their prices, but most of them were like, you
Speaker 1: know what, war sells, It's fine. We're selling so many
Speaker 1: more papers. We more than make up for it in bulk,
Speaker 1: even though I have a lower profit margin. But then
Speaker 1: the war ended, and all the papers lowered their prices
Speaker 1: back down to fifty cents, except two of them, the
Speaker 1: two biggest papers in New York City, decided they quite
Speaker 1: liked making more profit, thank you very much, And they
Speaker 1: didn't care that they're already starving newsboys would have to
Speaker 1: starve harder. These two papers, they're run by men. People
Speaker 1: still remember today. Most people don't realize that they're villains.
Speaker 1: I think people pretend all the time that these two
Speaker 1: were fierce, right, that they were bitter enemies. That's just
Speaker 1: not true. They were like in competition with each other,
Speaker 1: and they worked constantly together against the real enemies children. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know how'll just say that.
Speaker 3: I mean watching watching this happen firsthand, Like you know,
Speaker 3: as as this writer, the writer's build. We are striking
Speaker 3: against a conglomeration of companies who I don't even know
Speaker 3: who that should be fighting each other. It is shocking
Speaker 3: the amount of solidarity. I mean, without getting into the weeds,
Speaker 3: it is like some companies within the studios that were
Speaker 3: striking against stand a profit much more from the systems
Speaker 3: that they're trying to uphold. Yeah, and it is truly
Speaker 3: shocking that places like I don't know, we'll say, like
Speaker 3: a CBS is handing the entity Netflix, which will one
Speaker 3: day destroy, literally handing them ammunition with this strike, with
Speaker 3: this action.
Speaker 1: No that they the enemy always has saw the giant
Speaker 1: corporations always have solidarity with each other. It's so hard
Speaker 1: to write when you talk about like newspapers or Netflix. Right,
Speaker 1: it's like I like watching TV. I presume you like
Speaker 1: writing TV. Like the the union people in the newspapers
Speaker 1: like making these papers. It's literally just the companies, the
Speaker 1: institutions themselves, not necessarily the individuals within it inside some
Speaker 1: of the individuals at the top who when I'm like
Speaker 1: the enemy, you know, it's like, yeah, so these two
Speaker 1: the enemy of children are men named Joseph Pulitzer and
Speaker 1: William Randolph Hurst Senior. Pulitzer is of course remembered as
Speaker 1: the namesake for the Journalism Prize. These two together invented
Speaker 1: what's called yellow journalism aka clickbait. More ways, they disrupted.
Speaker 1: They came in and disrupted traditional newspapers.
Speaker 2: They actually they disrupted actual informa.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. Yeah. They led with sex and violence and
Speaker 1: huge misleading headlines. One of them like invented the headline
Speaker 1: that actually goes across the entire paper instead of just
Speaker 1: like being at the top of the little column. And
Speaker 1: they also well, okay, two things. One is that they
Speaker 1: collaboratively decided to not raise, to not lower their prices together, right,
Speaker 1: because if only one of them had these were these
Speaker 1: were in a huge fight with each other, right, and
Speaker 1: so if only one of them had lowered their prices, like,
Speaker 1: it would have gone bad for them, right. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but friendly competition. Okay. The other thing that they did
Speaker 1: is they developed this whole trick where the real customer
Speaker 1: was their advertisers. But they get people to pay you
Speaker 1: for the right to get ads shoved down your throat.
Speaker 1: So they're getting paid on both sides, which is why
Speaker 1: it's worth pointing out that we hear at cool zone
Speaker 1: Media give you the choice, eh, eh, it's either free
Speaker 1: with ads or you pay us and then there's no ads.
Speaker 1: I tried to write this snarky, but honestly, I think
Speaker 1: it's actually a really important difference between trying to get
Speaker 1: paid on both sides of it. Yeah, so that came
Speaker 1: off so genuine, Yeah, I'm with you. Yeah, And uh so,
Speaker 1: if you are one of our paid subscribers on cooler
Speaker 1: zone Media, which is currently an Apple podcast and eventually
Speaker 1: hopefully be also available for Android.
Speaker 4: You can soon stop asking, I'll tell you, yeah.
Speaker 1: Stop asking Sophie about it, unless it's already happened, in
Speaker 1: which case it's funny to ask Sophie. You can find Sophie.
Speaker 4: Don't ask, right, Okay, Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So either listen to ads or don't, depending on which
Speaker 1: choice you've made.
Speaker 2: Or you can choose to do both.
Speaker 1: Choose both.
Speaker 2: That is a way to double support.
Speaker 3: If you, the listener want to want to get get
Speaker 3: an extra weird gold star.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And we're gonna make extra weird gold Stars
Speaker 1: and send them to you as long as you just
Speaker 1: add us on Twitter at I read. Okay, okay. To
Speaker 1: talk about Pulitzer, if you take out the whole mistreatment
Speaker 1: of children thing, Pulitzer starts off looking okay. He was
Speaker 1: a Hungarian Jewish immigrant to the US who fought for
Speaker 1: the Union in the Civil War, and stopping slavery wins
Speaker 1: a lot of points in my book. Right, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of like pretty mediocre people who did that thing,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, well you did that thing. That was
Speaker 1: a big one, you know. He also rode freight trains,
Speaker 1: around after the war looking for work, and I just
Speaker 1: think that's esthetically cool. My grandfather used to do that.
Speaker 1: He worked sixteen hour days to break his way into journalism.
Speaker 1: His coworkers treated him very well and with respect and
Speaker 1: gave him the nickname Joey the Jew because they didn't
Speaker 1: actually treat him with respect. And then he got himself
Speaker 1: into office as a Republican. And I feel like it's
Speaker 1: worth saying anytime I mentioned the word republican in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century on the show, that I need to point
Speaker 1: out that this means the opposite of what it means today,
Speaker 1: republican other kind. Yeah, totally og And you know, you
Speaker 1: end his story here and he's great, but he was
Speaker 1: really into capitalism. So eventually he left the Republicans and
Speaker 1: joined the Democrats. Now that the shadow of the Confederate
Speaker 1: so he was dropping away.
Speaker 3: Other kind, but not as much the other kind as
Speaker 3: yea for the other kind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, around the time it was starting to shift. I
Speaker 1: think at least anti slavery was more important to him
Speaker 1: than being pro free market was. Soon he spent his
Speaker 1: time both trying to control people through elected office and
Speaker 1: controlling people through the news. He was fairly upfront about this.
Speaker 1: He started the Saint Louis Post Dispatch. He crushed some
Speaker 1: unionizing there. He moved to New York City. He bought
Speaker 1: The New York World. He built it up to be
Speaker 1: the biggest paper in the country, of the circulation of
Speaker 1: six hundred thousand copies. And then you've got Hurst. Hurst
Speaker 1: was a rich wasp who was raised by a rich
Speaker 1: fuck wasp. He claimed to be a progressive democrat the
Speaker 1: working classes friend, but he was not. And then he
Speaker 1: later became a fierce anti communist and conservative who loved Hitler,
Speaker 1: literal Hitler. And then he built himself a castle overlooking
Speaker 1: the ocean.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, which we're remarkably chill about. Honestly, it's I know,
Speaker 3: but you know what if we if we include the
Speaker 3: architecture of every Nazi lover, where would we be as
Speaker 3: a society?
Speaker 1: You know, I want to look in the ocean?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the castle park concentrated on the castle park,
Speaker 3: not the Nazi part.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: You get them to build it, and then you will
Speaker 3: still drive forwards, come on, totally.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyway, there are villains, fuck them both. They decided
Speaker 1: to fuck over literal children. The literal children who had
Speaker 1: built their fortune, not just random children, but literally the
Speaker 1: ones who had built their fortune by going out late
Speaker 1: at night, starving, screaming extra extra, read all about it.
Speaker 1: The children were like, nah, fuck that. So they went
Speaker 1: on strike. And this strike is actually fairly typical of
Speaker 1: a Newsy strike, although larger in scale, and so the
Speaker 1: prices stayed high. The war has ended, the prices stay high.
Speaker 1: So on July eighteenth, eighteen ninety nine, the one thing
Speaker 1: I think people get wrong about this is me being potentic.
Speaker 1: The one thing people get wrong about it wasn't just
Speaker 1: like one day they raised the prices and people were like, no,
Speaker 1: more right, The prices hadn't gone down, And then eventually
Speaker 1: people were like, but we're literally starving. We can't do
Speaker 1: this right. Our profit margin cannot you know, going from
Speaker 1: twenty five cents a day to like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: eighteen cents a day or less is not a doable thing.
Speaker 1: So on July eighteenth, eighteen ninety nine, newsboys in Long
Speaker 1: Island City, only time that that will ever come up
Speaker 1: in any history book ever, the only thing that's ever
Speaker 1: happened in Long Island City. They turned over a wagon
Speaker 1: for the new York Journal and they're like, man, fuck this.
Speaker 1: And they might have announced this as a strike, but
Speaker 1: I think it was just an insurrectionary labor action, like
Speaker 1: completely unorganized. The next day, Newsy's in Manhattan Brooklyn were like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's a strike. They formed a union. It was called
Speaker 1: the Newsboys Union. They elected officers and they refuse to
Speaker 1: take papers to sell, and of course, just as importantly,
Speaker 1: they refuse to let anyone else take papers to sell
Speaker 1: as well. The president on paper was a guy named
Speaker 1: David Dave Simmons, who doesn't even get a cool nickname. Literally,
Speaker 1: his nickname was Dave.
Speaker 2: That is I disagreed, that is cool.
Speaker 5: Okay, name is no, name is David, and you go
Speaker 5: by David, quotes Dave and then Simmons. It was like,
Speaker 5: that's so bonkers, it's I think it's quite cool.
Speaker 1: No, all right, all right, I'm here because he gets
Speaker 1: presented as like the boring guy, right yeah, because he
Speaker 1: was not a good speaker and he mostly like gave
Speaker 1: speeches about like the numbers and how things were going.
Speaker 1: But this actually makes sense because okay, he'd been selling paper.
Speaker 1: He's twenty one when this starts, he's like the oldest
Speaker 1: of them. He'd been selling paper since he was eight,
Speaker 1: and he was an amateur boxer who would like prize
Speaker 1: fight on the street, my god, and he had a
Speaker 1: prime spot for selling papers because anyone who wanted it
Speaker 1: could have it. They just had to lick him as
Speaker 1: how he used it and no one could do it.
Speaker 1: I suspect this is how he ended up the president
Speaker 1: of the union. It was not his charisma, it was
Speaker 1: his Yeah, don't fuck with Dave. You're right in a
Speaker 1: world full of like, I don't know hid fish and yes,
Speaker 1: don't fuck with Dave.
Speaker 2: Dave.
Speaker 3: Dave is the actual scariest motherfucker are out.
Speaker 2: That's terrifying. Who is he?
Speaker 3: Oh? His name is David. He goes by Dave. What
Speaker 3: he doesn't need a better nickname? Yeah, gotcha, loud and clear.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I bet other people try to give him nicknames
Speaker 1: and he just punched them. You know, they're like, I'm Dave. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I like.
Speaker 1: I like how entertained Andrew is by this entire bit.
Speaker 2: It's just so weird. It's it's just it's like, who do.
Speaker 1: You know? You could be anything? He could be danned off,
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, literally anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I say he was the leader. He's the
Speaker 1: leader on paper, because the leadership in this organization was very,
Speaker 1: very informal, so you might imagine this was technically a union,
Speaker 1: but it was not a bureaucratic engine. People were generally
Speaker 1: more loyal to their regions than to any central leadership.
Speaker 1: For example, you had spot Conlin over in Brooklyn, who
Speaker 1: was the leader there. He always wore pink suspender and
Speaker 1: he got the best line in the nineteen ninety two
Speaker 1: Disney version of this when he shows up with a
Speaker 1: slingshot and he says, never fear, Brooklyn is here. And
Speaker 1: I don't know if he was as small as he
Speaker 1: was in the I couldn't find enough information about spot
Speaker 1: Conlin in the movie. He's like the small kid who's
Speaker 1: like the scary boss of Brooklyn that you don't want
Speaker 1: to mess with. The strike's method was fairly simple. You
Speaker 1: stop the papers from getting sold. However you feel like
Speaker 1: stopping the papers from getting sold. Anyone selling the papers,
Speaker 1: kid or adult, would get mobbed up, possibly beaten up,
Speaker 1: depending on what you're reading, and have his papers destroyed
Speaker 1: or just followed around by people yelling scab, scab, scab
Speaker 1: all day. Soon most scabs joined the strike.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not like a little little shave and just like
Speaker 3: seeing you're on the wrong side of things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, totally. So at one point, a scabbing kid
Speaker 1: was with a scabby kid was selling papers and he
Speaker 1: was being guarded by a cop. Like directly, this cop
Speaker 1: was like defending his one kid. So a news he
Speaker 1: named Young Mush spoke up and Young Mush got his
Speaker 1: name because he had a girlfriend, and that was like mushy, like, ew'
Speaker 1: go girlfriend, Yeah, your name is young Mush. I love it,
Speaker 1: he said, basically, And this is like a direct quote
Speaker 1: from a newspaper, but I don't believe the direct quotes
Speaker 1: from newspapers around this. He said, quote that CoP's too
Speaker 1: fat to run fast, and I'll get him after me
Speaker 1: if you'll tend to the scab when he gets away.
Speaker 1: So Young Mush walks up, snatches the kid's papers and
Speaker 1: just takes off running. The cop chases him, and fifteen
Speaker 1: strikers beat up the scab. The scabbing kid runs off.
Speaker 1: They catch up with him a few blocks away and
Speaker 1: are like, so, are you with us, and he's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm with you, and then he yeah, that day helps
Speaker 1: bring down someone who's trying to smuggle some papers into Brooklyn.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm I'm you know, yeah, it's sort of like
Speaker 3: those are the tools you got.
Speaker 1: And I understand, yeah totally.
Speaker 3: I was thinking actually about this because one of the
Speaker 3: as far as I know, I don't know the formal
Speaker 3: process for what the Writer's Guild will do about scabs.
Speaker 3: The thing I've heard the most, which again I'm not
Speaker 3: one hundred percent sure how like true this is or
Speaker 3: what the process is, but it is a little funny
Speaker 3: that one of the things the Writer's Guild of America
Speaker 3: can hold over potential scabbers is that you will not
Speaker 3: be allowed or potentially I think in you know, I
Speaker 3: guess it would have to be incredibly egregious. You would
Speaker 3: have your health insurance taken away, or you would not
Speaker 3: be able to join the guild and get guild health insurance.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, And it is a little bonkers that truly,
Speaker 3: Like the reason they have this cudgel is because America
Speaker 3: is so fucked up.
Speaker 1: That's totally.
Speaker 3: Like withholding health insurance is like a pretty terrifying thing.
Speaker 1: It's like actually fairly comparable to beating someone up. Both
Speaker 1: some of them are your health will get worse yeah,
Speaker 1: although I would rather take like get beat up when
Speaker 1: I'm thirteen by some other thirteen year olds, which happened
Speaker 1: to me on a regular basis, then like die of
Speaker 1: cancer untreated or whatever, you know, right right, I'm not trying.
Speaker 1: It's just I'm just it's amazing that yeah, our country.
Speaker 3: It is just it's just so yeah, it's just wild
Speaker 3: that like this the truly the one piece of leverage
Speaker 3: we have over scabs, honestly is this thing where I'm like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And it is possible, it's possible that the other papers
Speaker 1: were playing up all of the violence to sell papers. Right,
Speaker 1: For the most part, the striker's goal was the destruction
Speaker 1: of newspapers and the and scabers no scabs no longer,
Speaker 1: choosing to continue in that behavior rather than specifically through violence.
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I believe that there was a
Speaker 1: decent amount of violence, and I don't know to what
Speaker 1: degree it was exaggerated by all the newspapers. It's the
Speaker 1: golden era of newspapers lying, and this strike just fucked
Speaker 1: up the paper's profit margin. The public loved the newsies,
Speaker 1: advertisers dropped, circulation dropped about seventy percent. The strike spread
Speaker 1: to New Jersey quick enough through delegates that were sent
Speaker 1: out to different regions and also just people other people
Speaker 1: acting on their own through like sort of insurrectionary means.
Speaker 1: And it was joined in the end by And I'm
Speaker 1: going to pull up the list Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx,
Speaker 1: Staten Island, Long Island City, Mount Vernon, Newark, Troy, Clifton,
Speaker 1: Jersey City, Hoboken, Elizabeth, New Jersey, Trenton, Plainfield, Fall River, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: New Haven, Norwalk, Norwalk. I don't know un to pronounce
Speaker 1: New England names. Cincinnati, Ohio. Yeah, maybe it just actually
Speaker 1: said New York.
Speaker 4: I don't know, we should deserved to read it.
Speaker 1: Cincinnati, Ohio, Lexington, Kentucky. Also probably Queens. Queens wasn't on
Speaker 1: the list that I found, but another place pointed out
Speaker 1: that all the Burroughs, Yeah I.
Speaker 2: Got to be Queens. I know, I was the biggest Burrow.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, I.
Speaker 2: Think physically it's the biggest.
Speaker 1: Okay, Queen's is where I've spent more time than any
Speaker 1: of the others actually, But so yeah, this strike is
Speaker 1: now referred to, or at the time it becomes referred to,
Speaker 1: as the most successful strike in the history of the
Speaker 1: city and several regional papers have been trying to creep
Speaker 1: up their wholesale prices. Immediately were like, oh never mind,
Speaker 1: I like being fifty cents. That's cool with me. Hurst
Speaker 1: himself was run off by a crowd of newsies at
Speaker 1: one point. Well, which might be why like the Empire
Speaker 1: he struck back, which we'll hear about on Wednesday.
Speaker 2: Wow, yes, you know who came up with that?
Speaker 3: A writer, A writer's old writer wouldn't exist without us?
Speaker 4: Amazing. Wow, Andrew, do you have anything you'd like to plug?
Speaker 2: Just doing this racist? Please give us a listen.
Speaker 3: If you like this vibe with I'll just say one
Speaker 3: point one less research. If it's all vibes that no
Speaker 3: facts you're looking for, Jos, this racist is a place
Speaker 3: to go, Sophie, what do you got?
Speaker 4: We have a new show on cools and Media that
Speaker 4: launched recently. If you're listening in current time, it's called
Speaker 4: Sad Oligarch. It is hosted by j Canrahan and it
Speaker 4: is an investigative series that dives into the mysterious deaths
Speaker 4: of all the Russian billionaire oligarchs that just keep falling
Speaker 4: out windows stairs, stabbing themselves in Eating Poison and it's
Speaker 4: really good and Jake's the best, so please listen, and
Speaker 4: it's on all the things.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, and if you like children fighting against oligarchy.
Speaker 1: I'm currently kickstarting a tabletop role playing game called PA
Speaker 1: Number City that I'm one of the writers for. And
Speaker 1: one of the character classes you can play is a
Speaker 1: rat king, who is an orphaned child who eats mushrooms
Speaker 1: to communicate with rats and sends them out as swarms
Speaker 1: against his enemies and or her enemies or their enemies.
Speaker 1: And you can find it by googling the Number City.
Speaker 1: Probably you don't even tape Kickstarter. It's not a lot
Speaker 1: of things named Pa Number City, true, but it's one
Speaker 1: of them.
Speaker 3: But you know what, if there's another one, there's definitely
Speaker 3: a rat king that's true.
Speaker 1: Oh and you can hear Jamie Loftus, Cool Zone Media's
Speaker 1: own Jamie Loftis and me and a few other people
Speaker 1: playing Pu Number City on YouTube if you look at
Speaker 1: our Kickstarter there's a link to it in a bunch
Speaker 1: of other places. But we play a game of it,
Speaker 1: and you can hear Jamie Loftus as a rat king
Speaker 1: based in Jamie piled Yeah. See you all, Wednesday.
Speaker 4: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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