Creating the American Newspaper Boy: Middle-Class Route Service and Juvenile Salesmanship in the Great Depression

Abstract

Speaking before a gathering of circulation managers in 1935, Rex Fisher of the East St. Louis (Illinois) Journal, lauded the revolutionary changes that were transforming his industry. Years ago a boy applying for a newspaper route would come in and ask, 'Can I get a job peddling papers?' he recalled. Today on most newspapers the carrier is known as a carrier-salesman? He is taught the fundamentals of salesmanship and that there are definite steps he must take to accomplish desired ends. From the moment a boy entered into work for the Journal, he was guided and instructed by competent men who measure his ability to accept responsibility and conduct the affairs pertaining to his work in a business-like manner. Fisher believed that the lessons learned through daily route service complemented more conventional types of academic instruction, affording the boy opportunity to apply the theories he learns to real life situations.1 Though individual newspapers had experimented with carrier training schemes as early as World War I, it took the jolt of the Great Depression to spur circulation managers to collective action. In the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, advertising revenues for daily newspapers in the United States swiftly declined. Managers responded to deteriorating conditions with one of the few resources at their command?juvenile workers. Beginning in 1930, the industry launched a national campaign to increase home newspaper readership by instructing route carriers in the principles of door-to-door subscrip? tion marketing. This movement, which I term juvenile salesmanship, led to the creation ofthe familiar middle-class newspaper boy and permanently altered the relationship between childhood and work in modern America.2 Sociologist Viviana Zelizer, in her study of the changing social value of child? hood, has shown how evolving conceptions of legitimate economic roles for chil? dren shaped the nature of work performed by boys during the twentieth century. Throughout the Victorian era, most Americans accepted unregulated newspaper selling for minors because they believed such activity taught working-class boys the value of economic self-reliance. Following World War I, the standards for determining suitable work for children were dramatically reversed, converting the previously admired independent role of a newsboy into a liability. Route service now became appealing to middle-class parents precisely because it was under strictly regulated adult supervision. According to Zelizer, the search for new boundaries between childhood and labor was instrumental in creating new kinds of work to replace discredited forms of child labor. Viewed within this con? text, juvenile salesmanship should properly be seen as an attempt to expand the borders of acceptable children's work in the United States.3 In one sense the imperative to increase subscriptions had always been a part of delivering papers: the more customers a boy could acquire, the more money