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Hellraisers Journal – Friday January 31, 1913
New York, New York – Love Poems Found Dedicated to Tresca by Miss Flynn
From the Spokane Daily Chronicle of January 30, 1913:
Tag: New York City Waiters Strike of 1913
Hellraisers Journal: New York City Waiters’ Strike Collapses; I. W. W. Organizers Urge Strikers to “Live to Fight Another Day”
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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.]
Hellraisers Journal: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Leads Big Strike of Restaurant Waiters in New York City, Describes Vile Conditions
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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.]
Hellraisers Journal: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn on Trial of Ettor and Giovannitti at Salem: “They Are Putting Justice Itself on Trial.”
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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 27, 1912
Salem, Mass. – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn:
“It is a foolish court that will try to fool an awakened people.”
From The Tacoma Times of October 26, 1912:
BY H. P. BURTON.
SALEM, Mass., Oct. 26.—There is just one spot of light in the shadowy Salem court house where sit, in their iron-meshed cage, Joseph Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Caruso, on trial for their lives and their cause. It is the grave, pale face of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Madonna of the women who slave.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is only a slip of a girl, 22. But she has been living a life for six years. She has gone from coast to coast, speaking for “the cause,” and suffering abuse, want and imprisonment, that the burden of the beaten-down may be lifted a little.
For a year now, with her baby clinging to her skirts, she has fought capitalism in the woolen trust town of Lawrence, regardless of winter cold or summer heat, picketing, helping, cheering and speaking.
And today she sees what this trial means not only to Ettor, Giovannitti and Caruso, her comrades-in-arms, but, as she thinks, all of us, and indeed to all the world.
As she let her gaze float over Gallows hill, where they hanged the witches, she said:
They will not see, I fear—these cogs in the machine of justice—in just what sort of a way they are. They will not understand that they are not trying our leaders, but they are putting Justice itself on trial.
It is a foolish court that will try to fool an awakened people. It is a foolish court that does not release quickly those wrongly indicted men. For the anger of the American working man is awaken, it cannot be held in leash much longer, even by the strongest, leaders.
I wish I did not have to say it, but I have seen how in the past few weeks we have failed to hold the workers of Massachusetts and New York in check-how they have struck “in demonstration” against our advice and pleading. If we cannot hold these few thousand, how shall we be expected to keep calm a nation of them if they are aroused, as they surely will be if they are not given back their “lost leaders”?
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s pale face was even whiter than when she began speaking. She snatched up the little baby that had sat at her feet as she talked, and pressed him close to her.
[And she said:]
It’s for his sake and the other little ones like him that I hope it will not happen, that they will not make it HAVE to happen—babies are so helpless!
[Emphasis and paragraph break added.]
