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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 19, 1913
New York, New York – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Leads Waiters’ Strike
From The Rock Island Argus of January 18, 1913:
New York.-Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is just a woman, but she has demonstrated her ability to lead a big strike in New York City. When the hotel and restaurant waiters decided that they wanted more pay, they asked Miss Flynn to help them. She played a prominent and successful part in the Lawrence, Mass., textile strike a year ago.
She came to New York City about the time the strike started and has been on the job ever since. She’s a good organizer and a fiery speaker. She says the best way to hit the hotel-keepers is to prove that the food they serve is unclean. Addressing a big crowd of strikers the other night she said:
I want you all to come and tell about the adulteration of food. I want you to tell how dishes which are refused by one guest because of their inferiority are sent back again to another guest; and how sauces are poured upon bad food to make it taste like good food. I want you to make affidavit to it, so we may give our information to the board of health and to the newspapers.
If the guest knew half much as you do about the food they eat and the places it comes from, they wouldn’t dare go into some of our best known hotels and restaurants.
Miss Flynn declared that of course the board of health wouldn’t do anything in the matter. All public officials, naturally, had their palms crossed with filthy capitalistic lucre when they went on “inspection.”
[She resumed:]
We want Mr. Capitalist, when he sits down to his dainty dinner, to know that its daintiness rose out of a vile spot like a lily out of a mud pool. We want to let the evil smell of your waiters’ quarters spread throughout New York.
He doesn’t care where you work, of course. But if you can impress him with the fact that you work in a vile place, and that his food comes from a vile place, you may be helped. For you will hit him square in the stomach, and that’s where all the senses of the American capitalist are located.
Miss Flynn has been trying to induce the waiters to adopt an anti-tipping resolution. In this she has been unsuccessful.
[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote EGF, Heaven n Hell, ISR p617 (42 of 98), Jan 1910
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v10n07-jan-1910-ISR-gog-LB-cov.pdf
The Rock Island Argus
(Rock Island, Illinois)
-Jan 18, 1913
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92053934/1913-01-18/ed-1/seq-11/
See also:
I Speak My Own Piece
Autobiography of “The Rebel Girl”
-by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Masses & Mainstream, 1955
(see pages 152-3, 148 of 348)
“New York Cook and Waiters Strike”
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