Living on in the Archives
History is awfully fragile. I spent yesterday at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library system (my new girlfriend, “Sybil,” as I like to say, with whom I have been spending all my Saturdays) reading through the 70-year-old archives of the “Free Voice of the Amalgamated Food Workers.” The Amalgamated Food Workers was an independent union, focused mainly in the hotels, restaurants and bakeries of New York City. They were born in the IWW-led strikes of 1912 and 1913. Those strikes are today most infamous for Wobbly organizer Joseph Ettor’s inflammatory battle cry, “If you are compelled to go back under unsatisfactory conditions…go back with your mind made up that it is the unsafest thing in the world for the capitalist to eat food prepared by members of your union.” The press, of course, seized on these words of more evidence of the IWW’s un-American […]