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Voice of Young America

With their distinctive dress, speech, and style, newsboys formed one the most conspicuous youth subcultures in early America. Predominately Irish, they also earned reputations as brawlers, gamblers, and consummate theatergoers. The era’s most prominent artists, writers, and performers transformed them into symbols of Young America itself and drew them into campaigns to promote temperance, nativism, westward expansion, and war with Mexico. More than any other personification of the age, newsboys represented the liberating potential of a democratic society driven by a wide-open market economy. Yet they also epitomized the bamboozlement of mass politics and the sham of self-interest masquerading as concern for the greater good. Their shrill cries and saucy ways alternately annoyed and amused their elders, but these incorrigible habits also helped them to survive the hardships of street life.