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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday January 29, 1913
New York, New York – Waiters’ Strike Collapses Under Policemen’s Clubs
From the Honesdale Citizen (Pennsylvania) of January 28, 1913:
WAITERS’ STRIKE COLLAPSES.
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Lack of Public Sympathy and Police Clubs
Causes of Failure.
New York, Jan. 27.-The general strike of the hotel workers, which was promoted and nursed by the agitators of the big Bill Haywood organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, has collapsed. The strike leaders admitted that the fighting spirit had oozed out of their followers and that within twenty-four hours waiters and cooks and others would be scrambling for their old jobs.
The organizers sent by the Industrial Workers of the World to show the hotel workers how to fight according to the tactics of Haywood and Ettor were the first to admit defeat. Patrick Quinlan, the general organizer, and Miss Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the principal speechmaker, were hard at work trying to convince the leaders of the International Hotel Workers’ union that he who fights and runs away can live to fight another day.
Less astute perhaps than the professionals of the Industrial Workers of the World, the leaders of the Hotel Workers’ union were struggling at the executive committee meeting to prolong the strike, but they were told frankly by the Industrial Workers of the World strategists that the battle was lost and that terms had better be made as quickly as possible. There were a number of causes for the failure of the strike. Among them were an absence of public sympathy, the lukewarm attitude of 75 per cent of the union waiters satisfied with their pay and the discovery of the strikers that the police were not afraid to use their clubs.
After three days of window smashing, of assaults on nonunion waiters and of noisy demonstrations there was less work last night for the police and the private guards by whom most of the hotels and restaurants were heavily guarded.
[Newsclip added from York Daily (Pennsylvania) of January 28, 1913.]
