Newsboy Strike: Day 5 - Saturday, July 22, 1899
World and Journal bribe men to sell papers
Who was striking? Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Long Island City, Mount Vernon, Newark, Fall River, Jersey City NJ, Hoboken NJ, Elizabeth NJ, New Haven Conn
On July 22, businesses started pulling their ads from the New York World and New York Journal because they weren’t selling. This was when the papers realized that the strike had the power to do them serious economic damage. They started to bribe people to sell their papers, offering them $2 per day, plus 40c per hundred papers sold. They recruit 100 men from Bowery lodging houses, but most of them back out after talking it over with the newsboys.
Kid Blink told the Tribune that this bribery only encouraged them to destroy the stock of anybody selling the papers because they knew they weren’t losing money since they were being paid off.
Unable to speak to Hearst on the previous day, a group of strikers waited for him outside his office when he arrived that morning. He invited Kid Blink, Jim Seabook, Jim Gaity and Dave Simmons up to his office to talk. They asked him if he would lower the price of the paper. He asked what the World was going to do, and they told him if he arbitrated they probably would too. He said he would talk it over with his staff and get back to them on Monday if he decided to arbitrate. The strikers took this as an encouraging sign.
Around 1 PM, a few hundred boys demonstrated in front of the World and Journal offices in Park Row holding banners. The police give up trying to disperse the crowd, taking instead to standing in front of the World building to protect it from being damaged.
The boys then marched to the Battery and through Broadway, picking up stones as they went and stoning a distribution wagon when they found one. Two of the ringleaders were arrested. Two other boys were arrested for parading illegally in Park Row, and three others for fighting.
All in all, the strike was gaining ground. Many of the cities and towns around New York joined the strike in solidarity with their New York brethren. The New York Herald described the strike as “one of the most successful labour upheavals in recent years.”
Sources on this day:
The Herald: “Newsboys’ Strike Promises Success”
New York Times: “Striking Newsboys are Firm”
New York Times: “Newsboys May Be Uniformed”
New York Tribune: “Newsboys’ Word Stands”
The Sun: “Newsboys’ Strike Swells”
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