These images depict the conditions newsboys as young as eight years old were forced to live with. Most were either orphans or immigrants, which is why they were forced to work the long hours of adults, either to provide for themselves or their families. Before the strike it was not uncommon to find young newsboys sleeping on the streets, as depicted above, because if they didn’t sell every paper they bought, they were either forced to work into the night in hopes of selling them or they were forced to throw the paper away and lose money, as they couldn’t sell the same paper the next day. Pulitzer and Hearst who ran the World and the Journal, were 52-year-old white men, which automatically put them in a higher class than the young newsboys but add to that fact they are now both valued at 30 million each just shows how far the separation of their classes was and why they thought it was acceptable for them to continually demand more for newsboy bundles while simultaneously not caring about how their overcharging was hurting those who only made pennies a day. Kid Blink, a leader of the strike, summed it up nicely, ““Ten cents in the dollar is as much to us as it is to Mr. Hearst the millionaire. Am I right? We can do more with ten cents than he can do with twenty-five… If they can’t spare it, how can we? I’m trying to figure how 10 cents on 100 papers can mean more to a millionaire than it does to newsboys, an’ I can’t see it!” (Fraga).
Fraga, Kaleena. “How the Real-Life Newsboys Who Inspired 'Newsies' Took on Their Bosses - and Won.” All That's Interesting, All That's Interesting, 6 Oct. 2021, https://allthatsinteresting.com/newsboy-strike-of-1899.