Newsboy funerals: tales of sorrow and solidarity in urban America

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2002 by Vincent DiGirolamo

In a small write-up about the death of a newsboy, the Boston Globe observed in 1890 that there was "nothing more pathetic in all the 'short and simple annals of the poor' than some of the scenes connected with the burial of one of their number." The reporter noted that "the surviving members of the fraternity gladly forego their meals for an entire day, if necessary, for the sake of bringing flowers to lay upon the cheap coffin." The writer then described the exchange between a "deputation" of newsboys and a prominent florist over the order of a ten-dollar wreath:

"And, Mister, we want his name fixed in it somehow," said the spokesman.

"Certainly," said the obliging clerk, "what is his name?"

"We allus called him 'Skinney,' cos he was a lean little rat."

The clerk demurred against embalming in flowers this somewhat striking cognomen, on the ground that the feelings of the family might be hurt.

"He ain't got no family," stoutly maintained his comrades. "He b'longs to us fellers as much's anybody, and we won't have nothin' but Skinney--that or nothin'. We pays for it, and we've got a right to boss it. Who'd know who 't was by any other name?"

The article ended with a direct appeal to Globe readers: "Do something besides drop a sympathizing tear. The tear is all right if it materializes into dollars and cents." Signed, "THE NEWSBOYS' FRIEND." (1)

While many Bostonians no doubt skimmed over this little item unmoved by its blatant sentimentalism, such a callous response can only blind modern readers to its deeper meanings. The story's value no longer rests in its capacity to elicit tears or tips, but to reveal the historical significance of one of the more obscure rituals of childhood--newsboy funerals.

Newsboy funerals were pitifully elaborate rituals of pomp and poverty. Most children of the poor were buried as members of a family, church, or ethnic group, not a trade. But between the l850s and the 1910s dozens of orphaned or homeless newsboys in Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Louisville, St. Louis, Chicago, and other cities were publicly laid to rest by their peers and the institutions that ministered to them. In addition to flowers, newsboys took up collections for coffins, plots, and gravestones. They hired hearses, undertakers, and ministers. They drafted letters of sympathy, passed resolutions of condolence, and marched in funeral trains through the same streets in which they sold their papers.

If we take the view that newsboy funerals were stories that young people told about themselves, then what exactly were they saying, to whom were they speaking, and for what purpose? One way to answer these questions is via an ethnographic reading of several such funerals. Most historical studies of child mortality and mourning practices have focused on the home, but newsboy funerals compel us to expand our understanding of children and death beyond the domestic and into the public sphere. (2) Indeed, they enable us to see children's grief not simply as products of familial loss, religious faith, or even journalistic convention, but as expressions of class feeling.

Take the story about Skinney. While the haggling between the florist and the newsboys reads more like fiction than reportage, it demonstrates that the boys regarded themselves--and were regarded by others--as a "fraternity," as members of an organized body that had a right to mourn a fellow trader. When the florist objected to their request because it might offend the feelings of relatives, the boys asserted the primacy of their own feelings, the value of their own relationship with the deceased, and the power of their own money to "boss" the job. Their streety dialect served to contrast the lowness of their station with the nobility of their gesture. The fact that Skinney's friends knew him by a nickname speaks not to the superficiality of their association, but to its totality. "Who'd know who t was by any other name?" they asked. Who indeed? To this day we know the boy only by his nickname and through the tribute of his friends, among whom the journalist counted himself. The writer's closing appeal for cha rity further shows how a newsboy's death occasioned concern not just for the deceased, but for all members of the trade.

Given their association with the press it is not surprising that stories of newsboys' short lives, tragic deaths, and humbly ostentatious funerals occasionally found their way into the papers. Yet they were also the subject of tracts, sermons, poems, memoirs, illustrations, and not a few Tin Pan Alley tearjerkers. These sources are all part of the vast consolation literature that nourished what Karen Halttunen refers to as "the sentimental cult of mourning." (3) So lachrymose are works of this genre that Ann Douglas has called them "exercises in necrophilia." (4) Such phrases unfortunately imply that middle-class Americans were deluded, if not perverted, in their most cherished beliefs. Sentimentalism, argues Douglas, was the way the bourgeoisie, particularly women and ministers, feigned concern yet evaded responsibility for the evils of a capitalist industrial order they were helping to usher in. It was an unconscious strategy, says Halttunen, for middle-class Americans to distinguish themselves as a class w hile still denying the class structure of their society. Working folks who adopted these forms and rituals, she says, were simply trying to establish a public claim to bourgeois gentility. Newsboys were both exemplars and casualties of capitalism, and thus could hardly avoid being sentimentalized in song and story. Yet even these sources suggest a more complex pattern of cultural influence. Moreover, if we read between the lines of these tracts and songs and human interest stories, we can glimpse the social and emotional lives of working-class kids.