When the National Child Labor Committee sent photographer Lewis Hine to St. Louis at the turn of the century, he found plenty to document. On every street corner, there were packs of “newsies,” little boys as young as 4 years old, selling newspapers. Some of them had homes to go to at night; most did not. They bought their papers wholesale in the mornings, took a loss for every one they didn't sell, and spent their money on cigarettes, candy, movies, pool, and sometimes even an hour at a house of prostitution. A kid might gamble away a whole month's earnings sitting by a barrel fire in an alley, drinking whisky and playing cards with the other boys.
Hine took this photo in May of 1910. Max Case, the boy on the right (who, due to some flaws in the photograph, looks like he has an empty speech bubble over his head), told Hine he made about 20 cents a day, though he “once made $3 at Christmas-time.” His companion Jo Bruzen, 9 years old, gave his address as 2026 Market Street, but didn't say anything about how much he made on a good day or a bad day.
The Library of Congress cataloged all of Hine's Child Labor photographs, the newsies as well as the messengers, miners, mill-workers and little girls who worked 14-hour days at the Inland Type Foundry. Look through them, and you get a whiff of what it was like to be a homeless kid—or just a very poor one—in 19th- and turn-of-the-century St. Louis. You see grubby faces, ratty shoes, unraveling sweaters, 7-year-olds smoking pipes, scenes in flophouses and poolrooms and alleys...but historian Bonnie Stepenoff fills in the rest of the picture in her recently-released book, The Dead End Kids of St. Louis: Homeless Boys and the People Who Tried to Save Them.
Though Hine's photographs are stark, Stepenoff's book is even starker. St. Louis becomes a sooty 19th-century Neverland, where homeless boys sell papers (or pick pockets) during the day, then disappear at night into abandoned buildings, cellars and the labyrinth of caves under the city. There, they build fires, drink whisky, smoke cigarettes and shoot craps. Sometimes they venture out for a bit of mischief; on one snowy night night in 1891, Stepenoff notes, Fatima “the serptentine dancer,” was seen fleeing
“Doc Emerson's musee,” after the prop man mistakenly brought a box of real snakes. One escaped, and Fatima, still in her hoochie-coochie dancing clothes, ran screaming all the way down Market Street. The crowd followed her, and it is noted that it was made up of both gentlemen and boys. Someone tried to shoot the snake (it dodged the bullet, slithering away into the street, where it froze to death), and that terrible marksman could have been a child—several anecdotes in the book describe little kids packing heat, often to accomplish some violent crime. But guns were not necessarily needed:
“In the spring of 1899, six boys ranging in age from 11 to 16 robbed a printing office and saloon. Ira Adams, Jacob Lyons, Jake Schweiger, Ed Mullen, Rudolph Stuffon and Joseph Daryear all lived in the vicinity of Second Street and Clark Avenue. On March 31, they broke into a print shop on Fourth Street and Clark Avenue and carried off about 50 pounds of metal type in cloth bags. As they were lugging away the stolen goods, they forced open a rear door into a saloon at 206 South Fourth Street. Apparently, the boys stole 33 quart bottles of whiskey and stashed it in the basement of a house on Clark Avenue. After that, they returned to the saloon and consumed enough liquor to become noisily drunk. Their loud talk attracted the attention of police officers, who surrounded the saloon, pounced on the offenders, and loaded them into a police wagon. Police found the metal type in an alley and the liquor in its basement hiding place.”
Hine's photographs don't betray the fact that these kids were capable of this kind of violence (to be fair, his project was documentary and agitprop in nature, meant to help push through child labor laws). But Stepenoff definitely acknowledges this, and because she has peppered several of Hine's photos throughout her text, and they begin to look completely different. Do those blank eyes reflect hunger, intoxication, or just a deadness of soul? Was Max Case telling the truth? Was that even his name? Had he spent time in a cellar, drinking stolen whiskey and pocketing stolen typeface letters? (Maybe in order to print himself a sentence to place inside that empty thought bubble?) Stepenoff's book is not just a fascinating, rich read that conjures a vanished St. Louis, but it dispels the preciousness we project onto childhood and onto the generations that precede us—that corny old thing about good old days and more innocent times. And Dead End Kids is also entirely relevant in the here-and-now. We are still labeling certain young boys as throwaway and incorrigible, though now they steal cars instead of horse-carts, and obliterate their consciousness with one-hitters instead of cheap gin. Though Stepenoff's chapters on 20th century labor laws and social reform are genuinely hopeful, and remind us that these are solvable problems, it's sad to realize that these kids are reacting to, and trying to survive, the same kind of social stratification that was in place when Lewis Wickes Hine stood on streetcorners, taking photographs of newsies.
