The chairman of the meeting was a man named Brown,
the president of the city’s labor council.
He was certainly respectable enough, prosy and solemn.
But he was deeply moved on this question of clubbing
strikers’ heads; and you could see that the crowd
was only waiting for a chance to shout its indignation.
The chairman introduced the president of the Restaurant
Workers, a solid citizen whom you would have taken
for a successful grocer. He told about what had
happened last night at Prince’s; and then he
told about the causes of the strike, and the things
that go on behind the scenes in big restaurants.
I had been to Prince’s many times in my life,
but I had never been behind the scenes, nor had I
ever before been to a labor-meeting. I must admit
that I was startled. The things they put into
the hashes! And the distressing habit of unorganized
waiters, when robbed of their tips or otherwise ill-treated,
to take it out by spitting into the soup!
A couple of other labor men spoke, and then came James,
the carpenter with a religious streak. He had
a harsh, rasping voice, and a way of poking a long
bony finger at the people he was impressing.
He was desperately in earnest, and it caused him to
swallow a great deal, and each time his Adam’s
apple would jump up. “I’m going to
read you a newspaper clipping,” he began; and
I thought it was Judge Wollcott’s injunction
again, but it was a story about one of our social
leaders, Mrs. Alinson Pakenham, who has four famous
Pekinese spaniels, worth six thousand dollars each,
and weighing only eight ounces—or is it
eighty ounces?—I’m not sure, for
I never was trusted to lift one of the wretched little
brutes. Anyhow, their names are Fe, Fi, Fo, and
Fum, and they have each their own attendant, and the
four have a private limousine in which to travel,
and they dine off a service of gold plate. And
here were hundreds of starving strikers, with their
wives, also starving; and a couple of thousand other
workers in factories and on ranches who were in process
of having their wages “deflated.”
The orator quoted a speech of Algernon de Wiggs before
the Chamber of Commerce, declaring that the restoration
of prosperity, especially in agriculture, depended
upon “deflation,” and this alone; and suddenly
James, the carpenter with a religious streak, launched
forth:
“Go to now, you rich men, weep and howl for
your miseries that are coming upon you! Your
riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten!
Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust on it
shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your
flesh as if it were fire. You have heaped treasure
together for the last days. Behold the hire of
the laborers, who have reaped your fields; you have
kept it back by fraud, and the cries of the reapers
have entered into the ears of the Lord! You have
lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; you
have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.
You have condemned and killed the just—”
