Barney Flaherty becomes America's first paperboy - September 4th, 1833

On this day in 1833, a 10-year-old boy named Barney Flaherty took a job as America’s first newsboy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that flips through the pages of history to deliver
old news in a new way. I'm Gabe Lucier and
in this episode we're talking about the rise of the
American Newsy, a child labor nightmare that later gave rise

(00:24):
to a beloved childhood institution. The day was September fourth,
eighteen thirty three. A ten year old boy named Barney
Flaherty got a job as America's first newsboy. His hiring

(00:44):
led to a new labor trend in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries in which thousands of mostly young boys
became the nation's top distributors of newspapers. Bernard Barney O.
Flerty was born on August thirty one, eighteen twenty four,
in Cork, Ireland. His family immigrated to America seven years

(01:06):
later and settled in New York City, where his father
became a policeman. Two years after that, shortly after his
tenth birthday, Barney Flerty set out to get his own job.
He had come across a want ad in the New
York Sun, which read quote a number of steady men
can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount

(01:28):
is allowed to those who buy to sell again. There
was no mention of an age requirement, so Flerty went
down to the Sun and inquired about how to get
started selling papers. He was soon directed to the Son's publisher,
Benjamin Day, who was impressed with the boy's moxie. Day
had hoped that a man would respond to his ad,

(01:50):
but after having Flerty demonstrate that he could throw a
newspaper over some bushes, he decided to hire the kid instead,
and so once Amber fourth, eighteen thirty three, Barney Flerty
became the first known paper boy in the United States.
As the job listing's wordings suggested, the boy wasn't actually

(02:11):
an employee of the newspaper. Instead, he was essentially an
authorized distributor. He was allowed to purchase papers and bulk
at a discounted rate, and then resell them to the
public at full price. The upside for the paper was
that its circulation increased without having to pay for additional
advertising or manpower, and although the Sun supplied the papers

(02:36):
at a discount a rate was still high enough for
its turn a profit. It was a win win arrangement
for the newspapers, but for flarity and for all the
future newsboys like in slinging papers was a very risky prospect.
That's because newsboys or newsies weren't allowed to return their
unsold stock. The kids would collect their papers hot off

(02:59):
the prey each morning and then spend all day hawking
headlines on street corners and trapsing through neighborhoods to deliver
papers to their subscribers. Then at the end of the day,
if they still had papers left over, they had to
eat the cost. This system often resulted in steep losses
for boys new to the job, but even the seasoned

(03:21):
pros could still take a bath on a slow news day.
In fact, the average income for a nineteenth century newsy
was just thirty cents per day. Because being a newsy
was such a tough racket, the job typically fell to
those on the margins of society. The majority of American
paper boys lived at home with their families and used

(03:42):
their earnings to help support the household, but many others
didn't have houses or families, and selling papers was their
sole means of support. Those kids wandered the streets at
night and slept in stairwells or under doorsteps. They only
sold papers when they were able to bet enough money
to buy them, and every time they did it was

(04:03):
a gamble. Money that could have been spent on a
hot meal was instead traded away for a chance to
eat all week long. Oftentimes that gamble paid off, but
not always luckily. Social reform groups took notice of the
young boy's plight, and in the late nineteenth century they
began opening lodging houses for newsboys and other kids who

(04:26):
lived and worked on the streets. Here they could eat
a free meal and sleep in a warm bed, and
with that assistance, their meager earnings stretched that much further.
That said, the newsies were still getting a raw deal
from their partners at the daily presses, so it's no
surprise that New York City's newsboys eventually mounted several strikes,

(04:49):
most notably the Newsboy's Strike of eighteen ninety nine. Several
thousand paper boys refused to handle papers for the leading
muckrakers of the day, William Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer,
but the publisher's competitors were all too happy to cover
the strikes in their own pages. Introducing the world to

(05:09):
such colorful characters as Ed Racetrack Higgins and Kid Blink,
two hard scrabble young newsies who dared to speak out
for better treatment. The eighteen ninety nine strike wasn't a
total success, but it put enough pressure on Hearst and
Pulitzer to get them to drop the no refund's policy.

(05:30):
From then on, the publishers agreed to buy back any
unsold papers, eliminating the need for newsies to pull an
all nighter to avoid taking a loss. Bizarrely enough, the
newsboy's strike also inspired a big budget Disney musical called
What Else Newsies. Both the nineteen ninety two film and

(05:51):
the Broadway show that spun out of it offer a
somewhat fictionalized take on the story, with a lot more
singing dancing in melodrama than the actually lies. Still, Disney's
take manages to deliver the basics on the strike and
does a decent job of showing the gritty lifestyle of
turn of the century New York newsies. As the twentieth

(06:12):
century marched on, newsboys became a less common sight in
American cities, not because of child labor laws, but because
of the rise of newspaper vending machines. Instead of buying
a paper from a disheveled kid shouting extra extra, people
could simply drop a nickel in a machine and help
themselves to a fresh copy. Newsies disappeared from city street

(06:35):
corners by the nineteen thirties, but their profession lived on
in the suburbs. As more and more Americans ditched big
city living for quiet life in the country, the need
for paper boys migrated with them. Boys and girls alike
began making early morning deliveries by bicycle flinging rolled up
papers onto their neighbour's lawns and porch steps as they

(06:58):
rode by. For about aout half a century, delivering newspapers
was many kids first job experience. Having a paper route
was treated as a rite of passage in some communities
and in popular culture. Kids delivering papers became visual shorthand
for wholesome small town America, which is pretty ironic given
what life was like for the original newsies. These days,

(07:22):
children still have paper routes in some small communities, but
they are now the exception, not the norm. According to
the Newspaper Association of America the NAA, more than eighty
percent of today's carriers are adults, largely due to the
greater distances that they have to travel to collect their papers.
One thing that hasn't changed, though, is that the vast

(07:44):
majority of newspaper deliverers are still independent contractors, although their
subscribers are now billed directly by the papers. A decade's
long decline in newspaper readership means that the banner days
of the Newsy's so behind them, but that doesn't mean
their historical and cultural contributions are forgotten. In nineteen sixty

(08:07):
the Newspaper Carrier Hall of Fame was established. It honors
famous former newspaper carriers, including the likes of Martin Luther King, Junior,
Walt Disney, Isaac Asimov, Wayne Gretzky, and John Wayne. There
are also two annual tribute days for Newsy's past and present,
the International Newspaper Carrier Day, which is in the second

(08:30):
week of October, and National News Carrier Day, which is
celebrated in the United States on September fourth, the day
when Barney Flaherty became the first to carry the banner.
I'm Gabe Bluesyay, and hopefully you now know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. If you'd

(08:54):
like to keep up with the show, you can follow
us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at TDI HC Show,
and if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free
to send them my way by writing to This Day
at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Casby Bias for producing
the show, and thanks to you for listening. I'll see

(09:14):
you back here again tomorrow for another day in History class.