Louis & Morris Shuman, Page One

Six-year old boy, Louis Shuman, and his 11 year old brother. Dallas Newsboys. The little fellow usually has a brother who makes him do most of the work. Dallas has too many of these little newsies. Location: Dallas, Texas, October 1913, Lewis Hine.

"When I was studying about the Great Depression in school, I asked him (Louis Shuman) if he was hurt by that. He just said that he always had money and always had a job. He was apparently the breadwinner for the whole family for a while. He told me that in the 1930s, he worked in the water mines, in the Cabazon area, near Palm Springs. They were bringing the water to Los Angeles." -Joseph Bloom, son of Louis Shuman

"Morris was called Mike. Mike was kind of an entrepreneur. His owned some auto repair shops. During the war, my father (Moses Shuman) invented a sorting machine. It sorted the nuts and bolts that fell on the floors of factories. People could pick them up and throw them into the machine, and they came out sorted and cleaned. Mike worked with my father on that. After the war, Mike retired, and then he died of a heart attack. Most of his brothers died young, all from heart attacks. Louis was a really good guy. He was sociable, he was lovable, and he cared about people." -Norman Shuman, nephew of Morris and Louis Shuman

According to David J. Wishart, author of Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (2004), more than a million Jews left Russia and other European countries between 1880 and 1914, and settled in the United States. Many came to the Great Plains states either from east to west through Canada, or north from Galveston, Texas. Most made a living as peddlers, whose customers were homesteaders and Native Americans. They made their homes in rural towns, and established dry goods stores and grocery stores, or operated scrap metal businesses along the railroad lines. They eventually migrated to cities such as Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska. Among those families were the Shumans.

Lewis Hine was a man on a mission, and probably a man in a hurry as well. In the last several months of 1913, he traveled all over the Gulf States in search of child laborers, on farms, at seafood canneries, in cotton mills, and on the streets of cities such as Dallas. His large box camera was cumbersome, certainly by today's standards. It took him a while to set it up, and he probably had only a minute or two to capture the image before the children would become restless, or he was chased away by suspicious employers.

He often knelt down in order to photograph children at eye level, knowing full well that this view would elicit more sympathy. That was certainly the case here. His focus was on young Louis, barefoot and looking very much like the proverbial street urchin. That is why Morris is leaning over; otherwise, his head would have been out of view. Hine makes a cameo appearance of sorts (note his shadow). If Hine had been afforded the opportunity to pry more information out of the Shuman brothers, he might have discovered that they had one thing in common with him - they were well traveled, but for vastly different reasons.

In 1913, Louis and Morris had been in the US seven years. Although I could not locate the family in immigration records, other records indicate that their father, Max, first came over in 1904, and then he returned to Russia and brought back his family in 1907, when Louis was only one year old. In 1910, Max, wife Rebecca (Weinstein), and four children, Morris, Rose, Sophia, and Louis, lived at 2324 N Street, in Lincoln, Nebraska, according to the census. Max worked as a junk peddler.

By 1913, they were in Dallas, as we know from the photograph; but a year later, they had moved north to 1406 Myrtle Street, Sioux City, Iowa, according to the 1915 Iowa Census. Max was a fruit peddler, and they had two more children: Moses, born in Colorado in November of 1910, and Solomon, born in Nebraska in 1913. But in 1920, the census lists them back in Dallas, where they rented an apartment at 2213 Alamo St, the present location of several large parking lots in downtown Dallas, according to Google Maps. Max was a junk peddler again, and 19-year-old Morris was working as an auto mechanic. They had two more children, Freida and Sarah, born in Colorado in 1917 and 1918.