As I learned from the very interesting book Orphan Trains, Newsies were mostly orphans and they were the ones who had gumption. Although they were young to be working by today’s standards, at the time it was considered sort of a noble way of helping support downtrodden youth to provide them with these jobs and to purchase papers from them.The kids had moxie and could hustle. Some of them were quite entrepreneurial and did manage to get out of their terrible situations by earning a living hawking newspapers. That’s why in the Horatio Alger books it’s always a Newsie who is the young upstart who goes from rags to riches.
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