Newsboy funerals: tales of sorrow and solidarity in urban America.

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.

Historians have only recently begun to write an emotional history of the United States, to trace how people's feelings of love, anger, jealousy, and grief are not so much natural, immutable impulses as reflections of changing social structures and movements, passing fads and fancies, new ideas and technologies. (5) Capturing such reflections is difficult, especially when dealing with poor youths who did not often commit their feelings to paper. Newsboys usually were literate; some did write letters and even memoirs. But most expressed their sorrow ritualistically, and so it is to these rituals we must look if we wish to discover who they were and how they really felt about matters of life and death.

Newsboys were legion in nineteenth-century America and they came from the lowest ranks of society. They were the sons--and occasionally the daughters--of day laborers, piece workers, and petty traders. Many were immigrants or the children of immigrants. In the 1850s and 1860s New York and Philadelphia claimed between five hundred and six hundred newsboys, most of whom came from poor Irish or German families. This juvenile labor force swelled in the 1880s and 1890s as the number of daily and Sunday newspapers quadrupled, circulations doubled, and eleven million new immigrants (mainly Jews and Italians) poured into the country. (6) By the turn of the twentieth century there were more than five thousand newsboys in big cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago, and two thousand in smaller cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. (7) Most newsboys were between six and fifteen years old, the age working-class children typically entered the adult labor force. But adults also sold papers if they had lucrative routes or corners or needed to get through hard times.

Unlike Skinney, relatively few newsboys were orphans. Most lived in cramped apartments with one or both parents, but any number of events--the arrival of a new baby, the loss of a job, money disputes, and domestic violence--could send parents and children reeling in opposite directions. Thousands of children wound up living or working on the streets of New York in the 1850s. They were feared and reviled as street rats and guttersnipes, vagrants and beggars. Yet they were also admired and ministered to. In 1854, the Rev. Charles Loring Brace opened the first Newsboys' Lodging House, a kind of cheap hotel for working boys, and dozens of similar institutions sprang up across the country.

Whether they lived with or apart from their families, young people of all classes were familiar with death. In the 1870s nine out of ten Americans over fifteen had lost a parent or a sibling. (8) Child mortality rates were high, though declining, throughout the second half of the century. In Massachusetts, for example, infants died at a rate of 205 per thousand in 1865 and 190 per thousand in 1900. The odds of survival improved as one got older, but the average life expectancy in the United States then stood at forty-seven years. Death rates were higher for the working class than for the general population due to their more dangerous jobs and less adequate medical care, sanitation, and diet. (9) Skinney, if his name is any indication, may well have died from the effects of malnutrition. Nationwide, the biggest killers of children were infectious diseases such as diphtheria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhoid, and measles. Accidents accounted for about 10 percent of deaths of children. Statistically, children of working, renting, unemployed, illiterate, foreign-born, African American, or city-dwelling parents died at a much higher rate than did other children. In short, poverty killed, and urban poverty killed the most. (10)

Some commentators thought such familiarity with death inured poor children to the ravages of grief. This was the message of a sketch in Frank Leslie's Illustrated News paper that depicted a tenement funeral in New York's notorious Five Points slum district in 1865. (fig. 1) Neighbors watch impassively from stoops, sidewalks, and upper-story windows as four men load a small wooden coffin into a horse-drawn hearse. Oblivious to the solemnity of the moment, three boys drag a dog through the mud by its hind leg. (11) A generation later the crusading police reporter Jacob Riis took perverse consolation in the heartlessness of the slum child. "If the delights of life are few, its sorrows do not sit heavily upon him either," he wrote. "He is in too close and constant touch with misery, with death itself, to mind it much. To find a family of children living, sleeping, and eating in the room where father or mother lies dead, without seeming to be in any special distress about it, is no unusual experience." (12)

Riis mistook distress shown for distress felt. He also failed to recognize that sitting with the dead at home was part of Irish, Jewish and other ethnic mourning customs. (13) Yet he accurately observed that these customs differed according to the age of the deceased and the resources of the survivors. Infants were often buried in anonymous paupers' graves, or, in cases of extreme poverty, abandoned. "Seventy-two dead babies were picked up in the streets last year," wrote Riis of New York in 1890. "Some of them were doubtless put out by very poor parents to save funeral expenses." (14) Older children, whose individuality was more manifest, usually merited a humble service and their own grave. Working men received the biggest funerals, for they died at a more rapid clip than women and school-age children, and the economic repercussions of their death were more devastating to their families. (15)

Children also encountered the mysteries of death outside the family. They listened to fire-and-brimstone sermons in church and read stories about fallen heroes in school. Some boys and girls incorporated these teachings into their play, reciting morbid nursery rhymes and staging funerals for their pets or dolls. (16) Newsboys supplemented these lessons with those learned on the job and in the cheap theaters they patronized almost religiously. Newsboys virtually trafficked in death, shouting headlines of" 'orrible murders," "bloody battles," and "tragic accidents." On slow news days children such as Henry Dockter in New York would invent shocking or humorous cries to attract customers: "Extra! Extra! Big shipwreck in the subway! Two dead men found alive!" (17) Death to them was a commodity, a source of profit. Yet the reported death of a beloved president or a famous general could also be a deeply felt vicarious experience similar to that engendered by a novel or a play.

Newsboys loved the theater and therein formed their most basic ideas about death, damnation, and resurrection. Those who frequented the gallery of the Bowery Theatre were called "aficionados of death" because they so enjoyed a bloody finale. (18) They would recite the last words of the expiring hero or villain right along with the actors, never failing to point out a missed line. The boys were generous with their applause, yet they would hiss and boo if a character expired too quickly or without sufficient agony or pathos. The most talented boys would later reenact their favorite death scenes on the street or in declamation contests at the Newsboys' Lodging House. (19) (fig. 2)

The play that made the biggest impact on the spiritual thinking of newsboys in the antebellum era was Uncle Tom's Cabin. The New York stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's sensational 1852 novel led to the formation of the "O-de-Ram Society," a club open to all newsboys who vowed to be good enough to become angels in heaven like Little Eva. It took its name from the boys' mispronunciation of the hymn Uncle Tom sang to Eva on her deathbed, "O, de Lamb, de bressed Lamb." According to one journalist:

The tender-hearted little fellows used to cry, as all the rest of us did, over Eva's dying advice and farewell to Uncle Tom; and they also resolved, with Uncle Tom, to meet the dear child in Heaven. That vision of innocence and beauty was the absolute incarnation of angelhood; and the scene amid which she nightly took her mimic departure for the Land of the Blessed was to them an actual foretaste of eternal life. (20)

Not only did Uncle Tom's Cabin stir the moral imagination of newsboys, it taught them to grieve together in public, which they did whenever one of their own died.

Some accounts of newsboy funerals come to us via evangelical reformers like Brace. The deaths and burials they recorded in most detail were usually of children who died as a result of their years on the street or from some selfless act. For example, "Mickety," the first boy to sign the ledger of the Newsboys' Lodging House and the first to expire there, died of consumption, "perhaps brought on by exposure in early days," said Brace, "when he slept in boxes or on the damp ground." In one of his many short sermons to newsboys Brace told how Mickety grew so weak one afternoon that he had to lie down on the counter of a newspaper shop. His friends wanted to call a carriage, but he would not let them, "feeling too modest to ride in a carriage in the day." According to Brace, "The boys clubbed together and bought a handsome mahogany coffin, and buried him in Greenwood, paying the whole expenses themselves." (21)

Greenwood was one of the lush new suburban cemeteries or "memorial gardens" that had begun to replace overcrowded churchyards. Fancy hardwood caskets were another new phenomenon in the 1850s. Protestants in the antebellum era regarded ostentatious funerals as vain and sinful. Rich and poor alike buried their dead in simple fashion, with friends and neighbors--usually the womenfolk--taking responsibility for laying out the body and arranging the service. The Civil War, which claimed nearly 620,000 men and left tens of thousands of widows and orphans, profoundly changed Americans' attitudes toward death and mourning. Death declined as a theme in popular literature, and, when taken up, was treated much more euphemistically. Funerals became more elaborate, especially in cities. Families started hiring undertakers to prepare the deceased for burial. A "decent" funeral came to include a lacquered hearse, ornate casket, floral wreaths, and rented banners, crape, gloves, and sashes. (22) It was this commercialized fu neral that the newsboys--symbols of commerce themselves--saw as the ideal.

Another newsboy who realized this emerging ideal was John Ellard in Philadelphia. (fig. 3) Nicknamed Didley Dumps, Ellard was a small hump-backed boy who slept in newspaper bags in printing offices before churchmen founded a Newsboys' Home in 1858. Ellard lived at the home for a year and a half; he attended Wednesday classes and Sunday services, saved and loaned money to his colleagues, and eventually became proprietor of a little newsstand next to the county building. Never of strong constitution, Ellard had to be carried back and forth to work on the shoulders of the other boys. In November 1859 he caught a severe cold from which he never recovered. A biography written by a director of the home, F. Ratchford Starr, and published by the American Sunday School Union describes his last days in great detail. Starr refused to withhold the doctor's grim prognosis from Ellard:

I felt it my duty to acquaint him with it at once. The poor lad revolted at the thought of death, and irritably denounced the physician and declared he would go out the next day. But this was not to be. The hand that now held him was the relentless hand of the angel of death. I felt most sensibly that much was to be done for his soul, and that there was but a brief and uncertain period in which to do it. (23)

Ellard died a "happy death" in the manner of Little Eva. During his last days he prayed with his friends and guardians, forgave two outstanding loans, and made up with a boy with whom he had quarreled. Three newsboys were praying at his bedside when he died on December 15, 1859 at the age of sixteen. He was given a "grand" funeral that included a cortege of fifty-six newsboys, six of whom carried his body from the home on Pear Street to St. Joseph's Church. At Sixth and Chestnut they passed Ellard's newsstand, which had been draped in black crape and tied with white ribbon, "indicating that the adornment was for one of tender years." (24)

Processions, according to the Atlantic Monthly, were "a source of great gratification to the street boy," and funeral parades were no exception. (25) Most memorable were the corteges of prominent soldiers or statesmen. Newsboy funerals were self-conscious imitations of these lugubrious ceremonies. In 1861, Brace explicitly compared newsboy Johnny Morrow's funeral procession with that of Col. Elmer Ellsworth, the twenty-four year-old commander of New York's Eleventh Regiment and the first Union combat fatality of the Civil War. While Ellsworth's "grand funeral procession, with slow and mournful step, and wailing music was following down Broadway," said Brace, "another coffin was being followed, with many tears, by little children and poor boys, in the city of Brooklyn." (26) (fig. 4)

Morrow was seventeen when he died. His family had emigrated from England when he was about ten. They were poor; his father was a hard-drinking, frequently out-of-work carpenter. Morrow, who limped due to a childhood accident, helped support the family by peddling newspapers and matches, scavenging for coal and wood, and selling little stools that his father made. Nevertheless, his father beat him regularly for his low earnings and growing appetite. Morrow and his brother eventually ran away from home. They ended up at the Newsboys' Lodging House, where Morrow befriended theological students, attended classes, and dreamed of becoming a clergyman himself. At age sixteen he published his life story, A Voice from the Newsboys, to earn money for college. Unfortunately, he died the next year after undergoing surgery on his bad leg. He bled to death when he tried to change the dressing himself rather than trouble his doctor to do it.

Morrow's funeral procession started from the State Street Congregational Church, which had been filled to capacity with students from three Sabbath schools and the Newsboy's school in New York. After eulogies by Brace, two ministers, and Morrow's attending physician, the mourners marched to Evergreen Cemetery. His gravestone identified him by occupation: "Johnny Morrow, the Newsboy, died May 23, 1861, aged 17." (27) (fig. 5)

Newsboys had two things in common with the more celebrated recipients of public funerals. One was their sex: the funeral cortege appears to have been an exclusively male privilege. The other was their hero status. During the post-war years New Yorkers of every age and rank witnessed impressive memorial parades for President Lincoln (1865), Admiral Farragut (1870), Horace Greeley (1872), and Ulysses S. Grant (1885).28 Their effect on children's inchoate notions of mortality and propriety cannot be overestimated. Although news selling was an unreliable form of subsistence labor, it had been idealized in art and literature since the 1840s as a patriotic, character-building occupation in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin. As the market for children's literature burgeoned in the 1860s and 1870s stories featuring newsboy heroes proliferated in books and magazines. (29) Real boys like Mickety, Ellard, and Morrow were easily cast as heroic figures. In eulogizing Morrow, the Rev. W.A. Bartlett of the New York Theolog ical Seminary unabashedly asserted that he "was no less a hero than any who ever fell on the field of battle." Morrow himself evoked a military allusion in his autobiography when he wrote "the newsboy's cause is a warfare on the battle-field of life, where he who fights the hardest comes off triumphant from strife." (30)

Another advocate of newsboys was Col. Alexander Hogeland, a military man himself. Hogeland was one of the many emulators of Brace's pragmatic form of child saving. He founded the Newsboys' and Bootblacks' Association and Night Schools in Louisville, Kentucky, and, like Brace, was a well-traveled lecturer and author. He, too, published an account of his years among the newsboys and compiled a book of inspirational readings for young people. His most dismal duty was burying indigent members of the Association. He said he was often the only adult present besides the undertaker or a widowed parent. Among those he buried in 1881. were Fred Fisher, who had asked that his life savings of thirty-three dollars be spent on his funeral; Jimmy Hart, who died after his foot was crushed in an accident; and twelve year-old Robert Maxie, who for some reason was buried outside the fence of the local Cave Hill Cemetery. Hogeland tried to persuade the newsboys that it didn't matter how or where they were buried:

No, boys, our heavenly Father cares as much for the soul of little Robert as for the richest in the land, and will cause the moon and stars to shine there as brightly as if it rested under a monument of marble on the Cave Hill side of the fence. (31)

It is doubtful that many of the boys were convinced. Ellard, Morrow, and Fisher all revealed their fear of being buried in a potter's field. Such fears were widely shared by working-class youth, as is evident in this little street rhyme from Milwaukee in the 1880s: "Rattle his bones over the stones. He's only a pauper nobody owns." (32) It was all too common, Riis observed, for the "little army of waifs" to be reunited "in the trench in the Potter's Field where, if no medical student is in need of a subject, they are laid in squads of a dozen." (33) (fig. 6)

In contrast to these stark burials was the princely funeral of fifteen year-old Sammy Stout in Louisville in 1883. Hogeland described it as "one of unusual solemnity." (34) The service was held at the Association's headquarters on West Jefferson Street. "Sympathizing friends sent quite a supply of blooming flowers," said Hogeland, "while eight of the newsboys' late companions acted as pall-bearers." An illustration of the burial shows the eight boys carrying Stout's flower-laden ebony casket from a horse-drawn hearse toward an open grave. (35) (fig. 7) Each boy is wearing a dark suit and clutching a cap in his free hand as he trudges over the snowy ground. Above them Looms the Association banner, properly draped in mourning, followed by the boy's aunt, also heavily veiled, and still more boys. Their lame dog Jack watches the procession while the gravedigger, shovel in hand, stares into the glass walls of the hearse. Hogeland and the officiating minister stand over the grave ready to lead the final prayers. Th ere is no telling if the picture captures the ceremony with any degree of accuracy. What it does depict is a vision of the ideal funeral. Hogeland's express purpose in dwelling on these matters was to encourage righteous behavior by helping youths to appreciate "the uncertainty and shortness of life."

Songs about dying newsboys conveyed a similar message to a different audience. They typically sought to instill a sense of noblesse oblige among the middle-class--those who could afford pianos and parlors. One of these songs, "Found Dead in the Street," written in 1882 by the music instructor of the Louisville House of Refuge, was dedicated to Hogeland. Its climactic verse goes:

Once more hear him cry, "My papers, who'll buy?
  Oh! Is there not some one that cares though I die?"
A shivering chill, and then all is still,
  While softly the snow-flakes come down from the sky. (37)

Other songs were tributes to real boys. The 1893 song 'The Little Newsboy's Death," for example, documented in verse the espirit de corps of those who worked with newsboy Johnny Vantanno. (fig. 8) According to the song's dedication, shortly after Vantanno was struck down by a street car his friends "took his bundle of evening papers and sold them, turning the money over to his mother, one of the boys remarking, 'She needs de stuff, see?"' (38)

Pathetic deaths and pitiful rhymes also characterized much of the poetry written about newsboys during this period. Poems such as Miss H.R. Hudson's "The Newsboy's Debt" (1873), Mrs. Emily Thornton's "The Dying Newsboy" (1886), Madeline S. Bridges' "The Newsboy" (1900), and Irene Abbott's "Only a Little Newsboy" (1903) appeared in Harper's, Leslie's, and other popular magazines. Written primarily by women, these works sought not to expose and ameliorate deadly social conditions, but to remind readers of their sacred duty to aid the least of Cod's children. Thus these poets and songwriters shared much in common with evangelical philanthropists like Brace, Starr, and Hogeland: they all saw newsboys' deaths as opportunities for moral instruction.

The 1880s and 1890s witnessed dramatic changes in philanthropy, trade unionism, and the funeral industry, all of which affected newsboys' mourning rituals. A new generation of professional charity workers appeared; many of them were college trained women who practiced "scientific philanthropy" in settlement houses, orphan asylums, juvenile courts and reformatories. They saw child street trading as part of the problem, not the solution, to urban poverty, delinquency, and homelessness. They accused newsboy homes and associations of perpetuating that which should be abolished. (40) Meanwhile, the labor movement, hobbled during the depression of the 1870s, bounced back. The Knights of Labor increased its membership seven-fold among skilled and unskilled workers in the mid-1880s. It led colorful marches for the eight-hour day, advocated producer cooperatives, and ran candidates for political office. Newsboys also formed unions and mounted strikes during this period. Their unions were usually short-lived and their strikes unsuccessful, but their identification with organized labor was strong. (41)

Undertakers also professionalized at this time. They formed the National Funeral Directors' Association in 1882, and promoted embalming and other changes in funeral services. Most morticians were small businessmen who earned $4,000 to $5,000 a year, but some had grown into large companies. One establishment in New York occupied an entire building on Eighth Avenue. It had salesrooms on the ground floor, vaults in the basement, and an auditorium, "larger than a village church," on the second floor. Fitted with pews and an organ, it was the site of four to five services a day, some of which were officiated by the president of the company, an ordained minister. The upper stories housed a floral shop and a casket factory. The firm had only one hearse, but it was considered "the most remarkable one outside of India." Long as the longest electric streetcar, it carried mourners on the inside, bore the casket atop the roof, and required a team of eight horses to pull it. (42) At the other end of the spectrum were "cir cular" hearses, smaller, lightly built vehicles named for their rounded corners and elliptical windows. Those painted white were used exclusively for the funerals of children. (43)

The floral arts also evolved and sometimes featured innovative occupational designs. In 1886, William Henry Ortel, better known in St. Louis as "Dutch Hiney, King of the Newsboys," received an arrangement that included copies of the Post-Dispatch, Globe-Democrat, Republican, and other local papers, all bordered by half opened buds of white roses. Placed diagonally across the arrangement were the words 'Latest Edition' in purple immortelles, surrounded by white carnations. Created by Tony Faust, the city's leading florist, it measured 16 by 14 inches and rested on a small stand. It is not clear who paid for the offering, but it may well have come from Ortel's fellow workers. According to the Post-Dispatch, "A large number of newsboys of all age and descriptions attended the funeral service and followed the body to its last resting place." (44)

There were six thousand funerals a day in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and they cost Americans a hundred million dollars a year. (45) In 1897, the New York World estimated that one poor family on the Lower East Side spent over $140 on a funeral, which included sixty dollars for the casket, thirty dollars for five coaches, and $10.50 for the hearse. (46) Middle class reformers decried the fact that poor families paid between seventy-five and three hundred dollars for a "proper burial." Many of these critics advocated cremation as a cheaper alternative. But cremation was never popular with the working class. Many regarded it as a repulsive form of scientific management, the aim of which, according to one Pittsburgh labor paper, was to reduce "the body to a shovelfull of ashes" and thereby bury people in smaller packages. (47)

To meet the rising cost of burying their dead many working-class families took out burial insurance or joined burial clubs, which, for a few cents a week, offered similar protection. Between 1882 and 1902 more than three million children were insured for burial, earning insurance companies a hundred million dollars a year in premiums. (48) Jacob Riis and Benjamin Waugh, president of the English Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, were two of the many reformers who wanted to ban children's insurance on the grounds that it gave parents incentive to let their children die, or, in Waugh's words, to finance the "little funeral" and the "big drink." (49) Child insurance plans continued nonetheless. In 1892, a group of prominent citizens established the News Boys Association of Detroit to promote the boys' "moral, social, personal and intellectual and religious welfare," and to provide for the "relief of the sick" and "the burial of the dead." (50) Participating newsboys paid weekly dues, and thus bec ame accustomed to saving for their death and that of their comrades.

The custom of buying family plots was also popular at this time. When Chicago newsboy Ole Jacobson, better known as Young Waffles, died of exposure on a government pier in 1894 at the age of twenty-five, he was found with only one possession: a water-soaked deed to a grave in a family plot in Graceland Cemetery. Except for his spot, it was fully occupied by his parents and four siblings. As historian John Gillis has noted, such plots made modern cemeteries into domestic spaces devoted to the symbolic reconstruction of the family. This shift matched middle-class perceptions of heaven itself as a domesticated haven. (51)

Nevertheless, it was Waffles' comrades, not his family, who laid him to rest. A "soliciting committee" of three boys secured the coffin at cost and raised money for other expenses. The Chicago Tribune reported that less than half the city's usual number of newsboys was on the streets the day of his funeral. Waffles had been a fixture downtown for fifteen years, and one hundred of the older news vendors gathered at the morgue for a final look. Also in attendance were several ex-newsboys who had become regular employees of the newspaper. "They were the forerunners of the entire craft," reported the Tribune, "and for two hours a steady steam of individuals from the old man who sells papers at the entrance to the La Salle Street tunnel to the 4-year old beginner, filed by the coffin, and many a one came out with two white streaks down an otherwise dirty face."

Viewings were rarely held at city morgues, but apparently an exception was made in this case. Waffles' funeral is also noteworthy in that his fellow newsboys did not deem it necessary to invite a minister to conduct the service. Despite the massive turnout, and a funeral that included a hearse, casket, and all the trimmings, no clergyman was in attendance. The boys said they were afraid to ask a minister for fear of being refused. They conducted the ceremony themselves; as the casket was lowered into the grave one of the pall bearers picked up a handful of earth, threw it on the coffin, and said, "Dust to dust." The others followed his example, said the Tribune, "and the obsequies of 'Waffles' were over." (52)

Although working-class and middle-class males generally regarded excessive grieving as effeminate, there is little to suggest that newsboys held back tears or felt embarrassed at expressing their sorrow. According to Brace, sobbing and singing went hand in hand at Johnny Morrow's funeral: "sobs sounded in the stillness as the news boys, with voices hoarse with feeling, sang--'There's a rest for the weary--A rest for thee'." (53) On learning of Ellard's death, a former colleague wrote from Memphis, Tennessee, to say that "it made the tears come out, and I could not stop for half an hour." (54) Likewise, a letter from the mother of New York newsboy Willie Crawford acknowledging the receipt of his life savings of $40.50 had a similar effect when read aloud at the lodging house. "Many of them were moved to tears, for they all had a rough affection for Willie," said one news account. Another reported that the boys "sobbed and cried as if they had lost their only friend on earth, and in their simple, rude way expre ssed their regret for their lost companion." (55)

If newsboys ignored masculine prescriptions against mourning too hard., they generally conformed to those against mourning too long. On the walk home from Morrow's funeral, for example, rival gangs from Brooklyn and New York clashed in a rock-throwing "war" that left one boy with a bloody head and sent another to jail for twenty days. (56) Such were the limits of their unifying inconsolability.

Like members of any respectable labor fraternity, newsboys sometimes passed resolutions of sympathy when a prominent person or one of their own passed away. They sent them to newspapers for publication and saw that they were forwarded to relatives of the deceased. When Ulysses Grant died, for example, Chicago newsboys expressed their sorrow both publicly and collectively. On July 30,1885, several hundred of them marched to city hall seeking an audience with the mayor. Since he was out of town they met with the chief of police. The boys presented him with a unanimous resolution stating, in part, "whereas, we, the newsboys of Chicago, though comprising the most humble of the callings, trades, or professions, feel that it is our privilege to give expressions of regret and sympathy so universal." They ordered a copy to be sent to Grant's family, bowed their heads for a final prayer, and left. Their action was taken seriously. Within weeks Grant's son, Col. Fred Grant, acknowledged receipt of the resolution and th anked the newsboys on behalf of his mother and family. (57)

New York newsboys passed a similar resolution after the death of fifteen year-old Willie Crawford in 1898. They wrote:

Whereas, Willie Crawford was a good fellow, and
Whereas, He was always square and honest, and
Whereas, He should have lived longer, we, his partners and friends when
he was alive, hereby
Resolve, That it is no more than right to let his mother know what a
good fellow he was when he was with us, and
Resolve, That we feel just as bad about his going so far away as we can,
 and
Resolve, That we sympathize with his mother.

Conversely, some resolutions reveal newsboys' shame over the failure of fellowship. Such was the case with Little Joe Every, who was routinely robbed of his papers and otherwise "misused" by the bigger boys. The night he died in 1895 one hundred boys met in front of city hall and passed a resolution declaring that "Everybody is sorry he has died." Afterwards, the boys took up a collection and chose four delegates to accompany Joe's small, plain coffin as it was transported in a donated hearse from the county hospital to Holy Cross Cemetery at Flat-bush. There was no funeral service, but each delegate placed a flower on the coffin, which bore a metal plate purchased by the boys. It read, "Little Joe, Aged 14. The Best Newsboy in New York. We All Liked Him." (58)

Cleveland, Ohio newsboy Alfred Williams also received a plaque from his comrades after he killed himself. The eleven year-old drank poison and died on October 11,1900. His friends buried him nine days later under a memorial that sought to put his last act in perspective. It read, "This boy committed suicide because of the hardships of life." (59)

One death and burial that demonstrated interracial working-class solidarity was that of nineteen year-old Aaron "the slave" Charity, a black newsboy from Wilmington, South Carolina. (fig. 9) Charity lived in the Newsboys' Lodging House and worked on the New York side of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was engaged to be married to "a pretty mulatto girl" when he took sick in the winter of 1899. As he lay on his deathbed Charity expressed his fear of potter's field. The New York World and Steve Brodie, a famous ex-newsboy, spared him that fate by treating him to a "first class funeral." Charity's body was laid in state at the lodging house,

where scores of his former colleagues filed past to pay their last respects. A minister gave a funeral oration on "The Value of Manliness" and a chorus of newsboys sang "Nearer My Cod to Thee." Two hired carriages carried a delegation of newsies to Mount Olivet Cemetery on Long Island, where Charity's body was interred in a private plot. (60)

Newspapers were frequently called upon to help bury newsboys. In 1880, Ceorge W. Peck, publisher of the Milwaukee Sun, furnished an omnibus so newsboys could accompany the remains of their friend, "little" Dan Palmer, to the grave. This philanthropic act was reported not by the Sun but by its competitor, the Sentinel. Similarly, in 1893 Lucius Nieman of the Journal granted the request of a delegation of newsboys who showed up in his office, "hands washed and hair combed," to borrow money to save fourteen year-old Freddy Munk, one of twenty-five Journal newsboys, from burial in a potter's field. "And if I lend you the money, how will you pay it back?" Nieman reportedly asked. "We're willing to donate our pay for the next two months, sir," one of them said. "That ought to be enough to do it." Nieman feigned that it was a sound business proposition and agreed to go along with it if he could make a small donation. His contribution paid for the entire funeral. (61)

Running obituaries was another way newspapers paid tribute to newsboys. Most big city dailies published death notices only of their more prominent citizens, but newsboys were the exception. Ellard's demise was reported by two newspapers in Philadelphia and one in Baltimore; Morrow's exit was written up by the New York World, Sun, and Tribune, as well as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. And Crawford's losing battle with consumption was the subject of no fewer than four articles in New York City papers. They told of his origins in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and the fact that he was a champion speller at the Newsboy's Lodging House. (62)

Some newsboys took the initiative of writing the obituaries themselves and submitting them to the periodicals they sold. In July of 1900 the editors of Success magazine ran one such notice saying, "This morning, one of our faithful newsboys handed us the following, which we publish in all its originality:--

Joseph Rathburn, beter known as "Whistlin' Jo," dide last nite, he was a delicate litle feller and was sick only a week. Us fellers wanted him to go to the hospital or hay a doctor, but he dident bleve in them he said. His folks was dead but he was workin hard to get a educaitn and be a big musician like he said his father was, but he couldent make it go, an' we are all aful sory he dide cause we had great hopes for him." (63)

Crawford the spelling champ could surely have helped polish up this draft, but what's noticeably absent from this obituary besides proper spelling and grammar is the religious rhetoric of their middle-class protectors. In the resolutions, too, the boys' language is secular not sacred. There is no mention of the deceased going to their heavenly reward, enjoying eternal rest, meeting their Maker, joining the angels, or even reuniting with relatives. The boys simply praise their companions' qualities and unsentimentally lament their death, which in their cosmology was mainly just a big gyp. "He should have lived longer," declared Crawford's friends.

In whatever literary form they have survived, such utterances ought to be taken seriously as vernacular expressions of genuine sentiment. The same principle applies to newsboy funerals, for even sentimental accounts of them can provide a way into the heads and hearts of working-class youth. Their words and rituals are just the surface ripples of a vast inner ocean of emotion which historians have long found inaccessible. To be sure, many newsboy funerals reflect the influence of the middle-class adults who helped the boys to bury each other, but newsboys did not simply ape bourgeois standards of propriety and spirituality. Rather, they drew on a host of cultural influences, both bourgeois and plebeian, to develop their own codes of affection and rituals of mourning. Just as in their strikes and boycotts, newsboys demonstrated a kind of craft and class consciousness when they laid a fellow hawker to rest. This is most apparent if we define class consciousness broadly, along with Raymond Williams, as "a structu re of feeling." (64) Newsboy funerals clearly show how poor children felt in class ways.

These rituals also compel us to reconsider just how injurious or ennobling life was on the streets. Most Americans have learned to distrust Horatio Alger's formulaic novels in which plucky street boys pull themselves up by their bootstraps, progressing from rags to respectability in each and every volume. The death and burial of real newsboys described by writers, reformers, and the children themselves remind us that a certain "downward mobility," measurable in six-foot increments, was the fate of more than a few of them. Moreover, their funerals force us to redefine respectability not as some vague middle-class virtue, but in concrete working-class terms as the boys defined it themselves. Respectability, to them, was taking care of their own, which somehow became more important in death than in life.

This caring is best symbolized by their efforts to save each other from the potter's field. Johnny Morrow was most articulate about what such an ignominious ending represented. In comparing his parents' graves, he wrote:

I thought of my own precious mother, whose remains had slumbered for years in a quiet and beautiful spot, marked with a clean and tasteful slab of marble; and then of my dear father, who was buried in a very different way almost uncared for, in the Potter's Field. Some very sad thoughts came up in my mind. (65)

Morrow was an atypical newsboy for having attended seminary and written a book, but he was able to half express what many of them felt--that there was a correlation between the quality of one's grave and the condition of one's soul. They felt that to be buried in a potter's field was to be denied eternal rest. A pauper's funeral was not just the last indignity; it was an everlasting one. Newsboys wanted better for their families and for each other, and expressed such feelings in their words and actions.

A hero's funeral, however humble, allowed newsboys to assert their collective and individual identities. It was their way of saying that they were not just street rats and guttersnipes, but human beings; not just vagrants and beggars, but members of a trade, and not just anonymous hawkers, but individuals who had names. That's why Skinney's friends were so intent on honoring him by the name they knew him by, even if inscribed in such an ephemeral form as flowers. The fact that we can still remember obscure boys like Skinney, Mickety, John Ellard, Johnny Morrow, Fred Fisher, Jimmy Hart, Robert Maxie, Johnny Vantanno, Dutch Hiney, Young Waffles, Willie Crawford, little Joe Every, Alfred Williams, Aaron "the slave" Charity, Dan Palmer, Freddy Munk, and Whistlin' Jo Rathburn suggests that the efforts of those who buried them were not in vain. Only through ritual could the death of one enhance the status of all.

Department of History

Princeton, NJ 08544

[MUSICAL NOTES NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]

ENDNOTES

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Peter J. Eckel. I would like to thank April Masten for her extraordinary help in writing it, and Margaret Darby, Jennifer Delton, Bert Hansen, Eric Love, Bruce Pegg, Peter Stearns, Dror Wahrman, and participants of the New England Seminar in American History at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts for their valuable comments.

(1.) Newsboys' Reading Rooms of Boston (Boston, 1890), 5.

(2.) See Richard A. Kalish, "The Effects of Death Upon the Family," in L. Pearson, ed., Death and Dying (Cleveland, 1969), 79-107; David E. Stannard, "Death and the Puritan Child," American Quarterly Vol. 26, No. 5 (1974), 456-76; and Peter G. Slater, "'From Cradle to the Coffin': Parental Bereavement and the Shadow of Infant Damnation in Puritan Society" and Peter Uhlenberg, "Death and the Family," in N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes, eds., Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective (Urbana, 1985), 27-43 and 243-52. On the significance of public mourning rites among the poor in England during the early industrial age see Thomas Laqueur, "Bodies, Death and Pauper Funerals," Representations Vol. 1, No. 1 (Feb. 1983), 109-31. See also the essays in Gillian Avery and Kimberley Reynolds, eds., Representations of Childhood Death (New York, 2000).

(3.) Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982), 130, 195.

(4.) Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977), 200, 12. See also Douglas' "Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States, 1830-1850," in David E. Stannard, ed., Death in America (Philadelphia, 1975), 49-68.

(5.) See Peter N. Steams and Jan Lewis, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New York, 1998).

(6.) The number of U.S. dailies rose from 574 in 1870 to a high of 2,600 in 1909; two-newspaper towns became four-newspaper towns, and their average circulation more than doubled from 4,532 to 9,312. Six cities set the pace; New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, and San Francisco boasted 277 daily and Sunday newspapers in 1909 with a combined circulation of over 16 million. See Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York, 1937), 65, 718-19, 728, 732. For immigration figures see Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921 (Arlan Heights, III., 1982).

(7.) "The News-Boys," The Child's Paper Vol. 3, No. 10 (Oct. 1854), 37; Ninth U.S. Census (1870), Table LXV.--Occupations, 604-15; John E. Fitzgerald, "Street Life in Boston in the '70s," The Hustler Vol. 1 (March 1911), 3. See also David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and At Play (New York, 1985) and Vincent DiGirolamo, "Crying the News: Children, Street Work, and the American Press, 1830s-1920s," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1997, 3-4, 305-06.

(8.) Daniel E. Sutherland, The Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860-1876 (New York, 1989), 127.

(9.) Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Pt. 1, Series B, 193-200, 201-213, 63.

(10.) Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines, Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late-Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1991), xviii-xix, 4-5, 86, 99, 117, 119, 125-26.

(11.) "End of the Poor," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (July 1,1865). Peter J. Eckel Collection. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.

(12.) Jacob Riis, The Children of the Poor (1892), in Francesco Cordasco, ed., Jacob Riis Revisited: Poverty and the Slum in Another Era (Garden City, NY, 1968), 163-64.

(13.) See Richard E. Meyer, ed., Ethnicity and the American Cemetery (Bowling Green, 1993); Richard A. Kalish, Death and Ethnicity: A Psychocultural Study (Los Angeles, 1976); and two interesting case studies, Joan Moore, "The Death Culture of Mexico and Mexican Americans" and Maurice Jackson, "The Black Experience with Death: A Brief Analysis through Black Writing," in Kalish, Death and Dying: Views from Many Cultures (Farmingdale, NY, 1980), 72-91, 92-98.

(14.) Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (Orig. pub. 1890) (New York, 1989), 142. On this phenomenon in an earlier period, see Paul A. Gilje, "Infant Abandonment in Early Nineteenth-Century New York: Three Cases," in Hiner and Hawes, Growing Up in America, 109-117.

(15.) In Pittsburgh between 1870 and 1900, for example, male workers between 15 and 24 died at a rate of 12 per 1,000, or about twice the rate of females in the same age group. Nearly a third died as a result of industrial accidents. The mortality rate of younger boys, between 5 and 14 years old, was 8 per 1,000. See S.J. Kleinberg, "Death and the Working Class," Journal of Popular Culture Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer 1977), 194/56-196/58.

(16.) New York newsboy Johnny Morrow recalled that when his cat died back in his native England, "I made a little grave for it, and put a tombstone at its head with this inscription, which I had persuaded some one to write upon it:--'Here lies poor puss, who died in the year A.D. 1847; may she test in peace!'" Johnny Morrow, A Voice From the Newsboys (New York, 1860), 21. On doll funerals see Miriam Formanek Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (Baltimore, 1998), 20-23.

(17.) Gayle Goodman, interview with Henry Dockter, 1989, in author's possession. On death as news, see Robert V. Wells, Facing the "King of Terrors": Death and Society in an American Community, 1750-1990 (New York, 2000), 245-53.

(18.) Madeline Leslie, Never Give Up; or, The News-Boys (1863) (Chicago, 1881), 46. Cornelius Mathews also observed that newsboys had a "profound passion for the Theatre," and would carve their names into the benches of the Chatham or the Bowery, securing a right to the spot no less sacred than that guaranteed by the pew rents at Grace Cathedral or St. Patrick's. Newsboys preferred dramas with "thunder and lightening long-swords, casques, and black-whiskered villains," he said, and were devoted to actors who demonstrated a "convulsive, awful manner of yielding up the ghost on the stage." See Mathews, A Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New-York City (New York, 1853), 187-88.

(19.) Sol Eytinge, "The Streets of New York--A Tragic Story," Harper's Weekly (Oct. 11, 1879), 801.

(20.) Oliver Dyer, "The New York Sun; Its Rise, Progress, Character, and Condition," American Agriculturalist (Dec. 1869), 463-67. Eckel Collection.

(21.) Charles Loring Brace, Short Sermons to Newsboys (New York, 1866), 234-36.

(22.) On the evolution of the funeral and the dimunition of the religious aura surrounding death, see James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920 (Philadelphia, 1980); Charles O. Jackson, "American Attitudes to Death," Journal of American Studies Vol. 11 (Dec. 1977), 297-312; Lewis O. Saum, "Death in the Popular Mind of Pre-Civil War America," in Charles O. Jackson, ed., Passing: The Vision of Death in America (Westport, Conn., 1977), 65-90; Lewis O. Saum, The Popular Mood of America, 1860-1890 (Lincoln, 1990), 104-33; and Mans A. Vinovskis, "Death," in Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams, eds., Encyclopedia of American Social History, Vol. III., (New York, 1993), 2063-70.

(23.) F. Ratchford Starr, Didley Dumps or John Ellard The Newsboy (Philadelphia, 1884), 148.

(24.) Ibid., 160.

(25.) Charles Dawson Shanly, "The Small Arabs of New York," Atlantic Monthly Vol. 23, No. 137 (March 1869), 281.

(26.) Charles Loring Brace, "Reminiscences" and "The Little Newsboy's Funeral," N.Y Evangelist & S.S. Times (June 1861), in Morrow, A Voice From the Newsboys, 137-39. Both articles appear in later editions of Morrow's memoir which still bear the 1860 publication date. For other versions see "A Newsboy's Funeral," New York Independent (June 6,1861); Ninth Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society (Feb. 1862), 34-37; and Short Sermons to Newsboys (New York, 1866), 238-44.

(27.) Peter J. Eckel located and photographed Morrow's grave in 1977.

(28.) Brooks McNamara, Day of Jubilee: The Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788-1909 (New Brunswick, 1997), 110-117, 130-36. On the gender politics of public ceremonies see Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore, 1990).

(29.) See, for example, Horatio Alger, Rough and Ready; or, Life Among the New York Newsboys (Boston, 1869); James Otis, Left Behind, or Ten Days a Newsboy (New York, 1884); and Oliver Optic [William Taylor Adams], Watch and Wait; or, The young fugitives (Boston, 1866). Among the leading juvenile publications that featured newsboy stories were Harpe's Young People, St. Nicholas for Young Folks, and Oliver Optic's Magazine. Cheap serials such as Ornum's & Co.'s Fifteen Cent Romances, Beadle's Half Dime Library, and Fame and Fortune Weekly also made newsboy protagonists a stock in trade.

(30.) Morrow, A Voice from the Newsboys, 144, 128. One casualty of this battlefield was newsboy Giuseppe Margalto, who died Feb. 14, 1891, when a fire broke out while he was sleeping in the ventilation chute of a New York post office. Jacob Riis poignantly recalled this was the same night that General William Tecumseh Sherman died. Riis, The Children of the Poor, in Jacob Riis Revisited, 29.

(31.) Alexander Hogeland, Boys and Girls of 100 Cities (Louisville, 1886), 117-18.

(32.) Cited by David Overstreet in "Children of Poverty: The County Paupers' Cemetery and Milwaukee Children," a panel at the Children in Urban America Conference, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, May 6, 2000.

(33.) Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 142. New York had several potter's fields until 1869, when the city acquired Hart Island, a forty-five-acre site in the Long Island Sound. About a million indigents have been interred there in graves numbered but otherwise unmarked. See, Edward F. Bergman, "Potter's Field," in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven, 1998), 931.

(34.) Hogeland, Boys and Girls of 100 Cities, 60, and Ten Years Among the Newsboys (Louisville, 1884), 31-32.

(35.) C.F. Reilly, "Burial of a Newsboy," in Hogeland, Boys and Girls of 100 Cities, 60.

(36.) Hogeland, Ten Years Among the Newsboys, 118.

(37.) Thomas P. Westendorf, "Found Dead in the Street" (Nashville, 1882). Eckel Collection; Hogeland, Boys and Girls of 100 Cities, 39-40.

(38.) Benjamin C. and Gus B. Brigham, "The Little Newsboy's Death," (Chicago, 1893). Eckel Collection.

(39.) Miss H.R. Hudson, "The Newsboy's Debt," Harper's New Monthly Magazine Vol. XLVI., No. CCLXXVI. (May 1873), 876-77. Thanks to Christine Stansell. Mrs. Emily Thornton, "The Dying Newsboy," Eckel Collection; Madeline S. Bridges' "The Newsboy," Leslie's Popular Monthly, reprinted in The Book and News-Dealer Vol. 11, No. 136 (Dec. 1900), 31; and Irene Abbott, "Only a Little Newsboy," The Ministry of Love (Topeka, 1903), 103-04.

(40.) See Walter Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, 5th ed., (New York, 1994), esp. chs. 5 and 6; and Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (Chicago, 1970).

(41.) DiGirolamo, "Crying the News," 393.

(42.) Gilson Willets, Workers of the Nation, Vol.2 (New York, 1903), 1043. See also Robert Wesley Habenstein, The History of American Funeral Directing (Milwaukee, 1955), and Habenstein and William M. Lamers, "The Pattern of Late Nineteenth Century Funerals," in Jackson, Passing, 91-102.

(43.) One such vehicle may be found at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

(44.) "'Dutch Hiney's' Funeral," St. Louis Post-Dispatch (May 3, 1886), 7. Thanks to Bert Hansen.

(45.) Willets, Workers of the Nation, Vol. 2, 1043.

(46.) New York Evening World (May 6, 1897), cited in Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York, 1976), 221.

(47.) Kleinberg, "Death and the Working Class," 203/65; Rev. Quincy L. Dowd, "Burial Costs Among the Poor," Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (June 12-19, 1912), 121. I am also indebted to Eric Love's unpublished paper, "Fire or the Worm: Cremation and Burial in Fin de Siecle America," presented at the Princeton University Graduate History Conference, Oct. 7, 1995.

(48.) Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York, 1985), 116.

(49.) Benjamin Waugh, "Child Life Insurance," Contemporary Review Vol. 58 (July 1890), 41, cited in Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 124.

(50.) Articles of Association of the News Boys Association of Detroit, Feb. 20, 1892.

(51.) John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York, 1996), 203; Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 220-26

(52.) "'Waffles is Buried," Chicago Tribune (May 26, 1894), reprinted in Newsboy (HAS) Vol. 24, Nos. 9 and 10 (March-April 1986), 3. The soliciting committee included Robert McMara, William Swaufield, and Severs Johnson, who, along with Bennie Ross, George Campbell, and Epper Kenna, served as pall bearers.

(53.) New York independent (June 6, 1861).

(54.) Starr, Didley Dumps, 163-64.

(55.) "Newsboys Wept For Lost Chum," New York Journal (Feb. 7, 1898). Heig Scrapbook. Eckel Collection.

(56.) "War Among the News Boys," Brooklyn Daily Eagle (May 27, 1861).

(57.) Chicago Evening News (July 31, 1885), in Hogeland, Boys and Girls of 100 Cities, 17, 19.

(58.) Carter J. Beard, "The Newsboys of New York. A Study from Life," Demorest's Family Magazine, Vol.31 (May 1895), 381-82. Eckel Collection.

(59.) Eckel Collection.

(60.) "Brodie Will Bury Aaron 'The Slave,'" New York Evening Journal (Feb. 6, 1899). "Evening World Buries a Boy," New York Evening World (Feb. 8, 1899). Heig Scrapbook. Eckel Collection. (The World identified the deceased as Aaron Clarity.)

(61.) Milwaukee Sentinel (Jan. 28, 1880), 4; Robert W. Wells, The Milwaukee Journal: An Informal Chronicle of its First 100 Years, 1882-1982 (Milwaukee, 1981), 43-44.

(62.) Heig Scrapbook. Eckel Collection.

(63.) Rosebud Folsom, "Whistlin' Joe, 'the Best feller 'T Ever Live," Success (Jan. 1900), 15. Eckel Collection.

(64.) See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London, 1960) and Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 128-35.

(65.) Morrow, A Voice from the Newsboys, 109.