The Great Chicago Waiters’ Strike

The tables at the First National restaurant were crowded “with hungry patrons” just past noon on May 9, 1890, when the “colored waiters put on their street clothes and deserted the establishment.” The restaurant, located at the corner of Randolph Street and Wabash Avenue in Chicago, was popular with merchants and businessmen working in the city’s commercial center. Many had been served their entire meals “barring the checks” and “figured their own accounts” after the waiters walked out. That morning, W.C. Pomeroy, the white organizer of the waiters’ union, had visited First National’s owner, Mr. Stein, demanding a $2 increase in weekly pay to $10 and eight-hour work days for the waiters. “My men have been treated more than fairly,” Stein later told a Chicago Daily Tribune reporter. “They have neither night nor Sunday work and all the breakage that has been charged up against them does not foot up more than $1.” The waiters, continuing demands that had been pressed by Chicago laborers for at least a decade, fiercely disagreed. ¹

The waiters were members of the Chicago Culinary Alliance, an organization launched eighteen months earlier by sixteen German waiters, meat and pastry cooks, and bartenders on January 3, 1889. The restaurant workers gradually expanded the organization to include local assemblies of waiters, cooks, and bartenders in several northern cities. The white leaders of the waiters’ organization were well aware of the number of black waiters in the city and concerned about the use of black workers to break strikes. White organizers had met with African American Knights of Labor and, using the Knights as a model, white and black organizers had in the months before the Chicago strike established an alliance of restaurant workers as a loosely organized union of separate assemblies of different nationalities or races. By the end of April, the Indianapolis Freeman reported that the Culinary Alliance had formed an executive committee, “equally divided between white and colored,” of men with experience in labor organizing and in the service trades across the South and Midwest. It was not an equal partnership between white and black waiters but rather a pragmatic alliance that would serve the interests of black and white waiters, at least for a time. The Alliance’s most significant organizing work, over the following decade, was in Chicago. ²

It is no coincidence that the Alliance, a rare example of biracial unionism in the nineteenth century, emerged most powerfully in a city that in the 1890s represented the rise of corporate capitalism and consumer culture. Chicago, more than any other American city of the decade, stood as a symbol and an actual example of the gradual shift in the American economy and culture from production to consumption. The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 confirmed Chicago’s place as a new cultural landscape of consumption. Urban space was dramatically transformed by structural changes in the urban economy in the late nineteenth century. The Alliance challenged employers in the city’s downtown business district, a site that took form alongside the economic changes and thus was both the symbol and material expression of the rise of corporate capitalism. By the 1890s, industrialists had moved factories out of the business center; the physical and social distance expanded between employers and managers working in the new skyscrapers and waged laborers toiling in factories. The conflict between waiters and their employers was, ironically, made possible by the spatial changes that distanced so many other workers from the symbols of capital and the capitalists who employed them. Workers no longer directly engaged with the men who owned the factories and most rarely entered the skyscrapers where the managers and corporate entrepreneurs worked. Alliance organizers, in effect, made visible the conflicts that the spatial arrangement of the industrial city tended to obscure. ³

The spatial reorganization of the northern city under the pressures of corporate capitalism reveals a powerful force in the complex interactions between race and gender relations in urban labor markets. By the 1890s, class and racial segregation of the city’s housing markets left the run-down and unhealthy living conditions in slum neighborhoods, particularly the growing African American south side, almost invisible to the middle classes. While social reformers attempted to draw public attention to urban poverty and tenement housing, most among the white middle classes could easily distance themselves from slum neighborhoods. Black and white waiters, men who might never share an urban neighborhood, worked, sometimes side by side, in the eateries and hotel restaurants in the city’s new commercial center. Until, that is, the demise of the waiters’ movement thirteen years after the 1890 strike. In the early twentieth century, black men waiters were increasingly replaced by white women; a benign and servile vision of black manhood, challenged by the labor strife of the 1890s, gave way to a restaurant service labor force that was white, working class, and increasingly female. By the 1910s, the Loop’s commercial eateries, like the new downtown theatres, were newly segregated, making whiteness a defining characteristic of consumer culture in the city’s commercial center. The waiters’ struggle and the ultimate decline of biracial unionism among service workers highlights the distinctive character of urban commercial centers as sites of commerce, consumption, work, and labor conflict.

The emergence of the Culinary Alliance provides an opportunity to consider the relation between political economy and urban space, or to address a question geographer Neil Smith asked nearly two decades ago: “What is the geography of capitalism? Or what specific spatial patterns and processes were characteristic of, and at the same time, helped determine the social relations of work?” ⁴ The spatial turn in history, so called by scholars drawing attention to the historical contingency of urban and rural space, has highlighted what Edward Soja calls “spatial consciousness,” the strategic use of urban space to challenge political and social inequalities. ⁵ Studies ranging from nineteenth-century racial segregation to twentieth-century labor battles explore the ways urban space became the “very ground” of political struggle. ⁶ The politicization of space, and the scholarly recognition that space or an actual place was a site of political contest and, at times, a tool deployed in social struggles, reminds us of the importance of the local, of the ways specific places shaped events. Similarly, environmental histories, often influenced by the work of economic and cultural geography, have long explored the ways power was inscribed on specific urban and rural spaces. ⁷ What gets less attention from historians is the ways societies produce and are produced by space, or to cite Smith again, this time referring to Henri Lefebvre: “We do not live, act, and work ‘in’ space so much as by living, acting and working we produce space.” ⁸ The history of the Culinary Alliance—its rise and demise—suggests the ways urban space structured and was structured by changes in the social relations of work.

Architectural historian Dolores Hayden years ago called on historians to treat the built environment as another piece of evidence on which we can read political and social struggles. The built environment is a particularly difficult text to decipher, in part because history is visibly layered on top and alongside of urban structures, and because the very materiality of urban space, its durability across decades, tends to obscure the complex processes of its production. Urban space, though obviously human-made and historically determined, takes on an air of inevitability; the tangible and mundane qualities of buildings, roads, bridges—any landscape—seem fixed in the present even if they evoke a bland nostalgia for some moment in the past. It’s not that we cannot unearth the history of a place in an archive with a host of documents, as historians generally do. But often, the built environment is treated as a simple backdrop, a bit of colorful description, on which the real events of history play. Yet, in neglecting place, in treating the built environment as mere context, we contribute to the process through which particular places are universalized and stripped of cultural, economic and historical specificity, or worse space is rendered natural and its development an inevitable, ahistorical event. ⁹ This essay aims to highlight the ways the spatial reorientation of Chicago, driven by the rise of corporate capitalism, consumer culture, and labor struggles, was both a product of and produced a dramatic shift in urban service labor markets.

Chicago was in the final decades of the nineteenth century a city of expanding industries and labor organizations. The thousands of European immigrants who flowed into the city in the wake of the Great Fire found work in the lumber mills and stone cutting plants that lined the western banks of the Chicago River, in the meat slaughtering and packing plants in the Union Stockyards, and scores of workshops and factories. Just as the city’s residential areas were defined by particular immigrant groups, so too employers often linked jobs with workers’ nationality. Higher-skilled and higher-paying work often went to northern and eastern Europeans: the skilled butchers in the packing houses, for example, were often of German descent. The lower the skill, the lower the pay and the more likely the worker was Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, or at the very lowest wage levels, African American. ¹⁰

Black laborers were largely excluded from industrial jobs and labor unions. There were ten thousand African Americans living in Chicago in 1885, and close to fifteen thousand five years later, less than 2 percent of the city’s 1890 population. The 1890 U.S. census listed nearly five thousand black Chicagoans working in domestic and personal service, another 1,376 working in “manufacturing or mechanical,” and 474 in commercial venues. There were 115 physicians, lawyers, dentists, ministers, and musicians, all grouped under the census category of “professional services.” Forty-eight black Chicagoans worked in “public services,” most likely the post office or the city clerk’s office. Seven men worked in agriculture and another 560 African Americans were defined as unclassified workers. The majority of black men worked as railroad porters, waiters, janitors, elevator operators, saloon porters, dock laborers, foundry men, house servants, and coachmen. By 1905, there were a couple black-owned manufacturers, one making chewing gum, and two cigar making firms. Black women were clustered in low-wage and physically demanding jobs like household service, seamstress, and laundress. In 1890, no black women worked in the city’s restaurants or waited tables in hotel dining rooms. ¹¹ For black laborers, a job in industry, especially with the protection of a labor union, was rare.

Sociologist Monroe Nathan Work estimated in the mid-1890s, at the depths of a national economic depression, “a large class of unemployed negroes,” numbering from several hundred to several thousand. He noted the poverty among the city’s growing black population; many were living in run-down frame dwellings just south of Dearborn Station. “Of all the people dwelling in Chicago’s slums, the negroes are the most neglected,” Work wrote. Hard times, combined with a steady migration of unskilled rural black workers into the city, left many struggling to feed their families and a growing problem of urban crime, Work noted. By 1920, an investigation into African American workers found that black workers had for decades earned significantly less than whites and were regularly denied chances for “advancement and promotion.” ¹²

The final decades of the nineteenth century were tough on black workers and hard on all of the city’s workers. Chicago was shaken regularly by violent battles between workers and their employers. Hostilities simmered through the economic depression of the 1870s, erupting in violence in July 1877 when the strike against the railroads reached Chicago. Hundreds of people filled West Side streets, clashing with Chicago police and state militia. At least thirteen people were killed, scores injured, and a precedent was set of neighbors taking to the streets to support the demands of striking workers. ¹³ Chicago’s most notorious late nineteenth-century street riot came nearly a decade later in Haymarket Square on the city’s west side. A bomb exploded during a demonstration called to rally against attacks on protesters for the eight-hour work day. Hundreds were arrested and eight suspected anarchists were put on trial. ¹⁴ While the violence left many middle-class Chicagoans terrified of a labor uprising, the movement for the eight-hour day continued, as did regular labor violence.

The Culinary Alliance was a biracial movement of multiple nationalities, an unwieldy confederation within Chicago’s carefully divided social geography. Most blocks of working-class neighborhoods contained a mix of nationalities. The city’s laborers tended to live in “ethnic colonies,” sharing buildings and communities with fellow countrymen. The German waiters who joined the Alliance likely lived in the neat two- and three-story frame buildings on the city’s North and West Sides; Irish waiters tended to live west of the Chicago River and on the southwest side. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, African Americans lived on several West Side blocks, in an enclave near Federal Street, and in a small but expanding strip stretching south along State Street. It was their jobs as waiters in the city’s downtown eateries and hotel restaurants that brought together men who, otherwise, would likely never have walked the same city streets. ¹⁵

The waiters’ strike of 1890 came in the wake of a citywide work stoppage on May 1. In “one of the largest and most orderly demonstrations ever held in Chicago,” thirty thousand “toilers” representing nearly every labor organization in the city had joined the movement for eight-hours work at the usual ten-hours pay, “and extra pay for overtime.” White waiters had been expected to join the protest, but when their employers recognized the newly formed waiters’ union, “a general strike was averted.” White waiters demanded that employers, largely the biggest restaurants and oyster houses in the city, hire “nothing but union men.” ¹⁶ Employers quickly rejected that demand.

By May 1890, more than fifteen hundred of Chicago’s three to four thousand waiters had paid initiation fees and signed membership cards. Strike leaders had moved to prevent the hotels and restaurant managers from bringing strikebreakers to the city. They telegraphed “all large cities . . . not to send any waiters,” while railroad porters and dining car workers announced they would “discourage all they can from coming to Chicago.” “From the appearance of things,” the Freeman noted, “a new man may fare hard for he will have no friends, and you can’t live on wind in Chicago.” ¹⁷

The Alliance committee leaders included William C. Pomeroy, a twenty-eight-year-old white labor organizer from Kentucky who had successfully organized St. Louis waiters; New York-born, African American Knights of Labor activist R.S. Bryan; and Berry A. Lewis, a black waiter who had been raised on a farm in Macon County Georgia. Lewis, who left the farm shortly after his father died in 1871, had, like many of the city’s other waiters, lived in several southern and midwestern cities. He told a reporter for the Freeman that he had “successively held positions as coachman, barber, breakman, newsboy and waiter” in Albany, GA, New Orleans, St. Louis, St. Paul, MN, Milwaukee, and finally Chicago. Another member of the committee and Knights of Labor member was E.B. Warwick, who was African American, born in Richmond, VA, moved to Baltimore and then Chicago where he got a job waiting tables in July 1876. Pomeroy was the most flamboyant and controversial. He was, as historian Richard Schneirov writes, “a strange blend of the idealist and the cynical manipulator” with all the qualities of “a successful ward boss.” He was a brilliant orator with a deep knowledge of classical literature and the author of a utopian novel, The Lords of Misrule. The novel, published in 1894, suggests Pomeroy’s racial egalitarian views, though indirectly. (He wrote, “mark you all mortal mothers are but the particles of a common stock.”) Warwick and Pomeroy drew up the first scale of wages “ever written up for waiters,” which was successfully adopted by Chicago’s restaurant proprietors. “Seeing the necessity of having the colored waiters combined with us,” Pomeroy noted, they organized black and white waiters together and “fought the only successful fight of its kind ever known.” The white waiters, having tried to organize a union without black waiters, apparently realized that black waiters could too easily be used to break the union; the few extant public statements from Pomeroy and Warwick suggest the biracialism was a pragmatic move, not necessarily a search for racial egalitarian workplaces. ¹⁸

The 1890 walk-out, the first of the nascent union, was organized to hit all the downtown restaurants and hotels that May morning, a strategy made possible by the enormous changes in technology, transportation and, most significantly, the organization of business and housing in the industrializing city. Until the fire of 1871, Chicago was a walking city with twenty-five thousand of its citizens living in or near the commercial center. In the rebuilding after the fire, retailers and financiers expanded the business district, pushing wealthy Chicagoans south along Michigan and Prairie Avenues and forcing the poor into the increasingly jammed west side. By the mid-1880s, manufacturers, seeking cheaper land and labor, had moved mills and factories west, across the Chicago River. The physically demanding work of the factory floor was geographically, as well as ideologically, removed from the office towers where managers, accountants, and lawyers oversaw commerce. Manufacturing suburbs, like Pullman and Hegweisch to the south, were hubs for working-class housing and industry. Suburban manufacturing was “a major contributor to the metropolitan industrial base from as early as the mid-nineteenth century,” writes Robert Lewis. ¹⁹

Chicago’s largest and most congested manufacturing district was the Near West Side, just west of the Chicago River. Separated from the city’s rising commercial center by the river and rail tracks, the neighborhood was home to thousands of immigrant laborers who walked to work in the planning mills, sash and door factories and lumber yards along the river front. “The heavy hardware firms were moving from Lake Street to the West Side,” noted Homer Hoyt, the city’s most meticulous student of land values, about the shifts in land uses in the late 1880s. Furniture makers and printing plants could be found just south and west of the river; along Milwaukee Avenue on the West Side in 1881, there were at least seventeen furniture manufacturers, twenty-one leather goods firms, along with twenty-nine lumber dealers and twenty-seven metal workers, according to Lewis’s calculations. Further south was Packingtown, the sprawling working-class community surrounding the Union Stock Yards. Though some manufacturing remained in the business district well into the twentieth century, decentralization of manufacturing and working-class housing had begun in the 1870s. ²⁰

The central business district, the nine square blocks just west of the lakefront rail lines, was fast becoming a center for consumption and commerce. The city’s new department stories featured the new technologies of plate-glass windows and, eventually, electricity to display household goods and fashionable clothing. By the late 1880s, Marshall Field & Co., for example, employed nearly three thousand people at its retail store on State and Washington Streets and seven-story wholesale building at Quincy and Adams. The stores offered a host of services designed to entice women shoppers, including beauty salons and a day nursery. “The different banks, churches, and municipal buildings which had been destroyed by the great fire-fiend are all re-erected in a substantial style,” wrote Lady Dufus Hardy, the British novelist during an 1880 visit to the city, “though with varying degrees of eccentric architecture.” In her exuberant description of the “bright, bustling city,” Lady Hardy extolled the city’s luxurious hotels and the “tasteful” displays in the windows of the “handsome drygoods, millinery, and other stores of all possible descriptions.” ²¹

Skyscrapers, the ten- and twenty-story buildings that would mark Chicago’s downtown for decades to come, were fast replacing the rows of frame buildings and low-slung brick workshops in the city’s center. The ten-story Home Insurance Building with steel frame and interior elevators was completed in 1885, setting off a burst of construction using the new technologies. These new buildings were hives for hundreds of office workers, young men with aspirations in business and by the early 1890s, growing numbers of young, native-born white women taking jobs filing, typing, and moving papers for the expanding corporate enterprises that dominated the city’s—and the nation’s—economy. ²²

Workers, the salaried young men dressed in business suits, the neatly tailored department store clerks, and the hourly paid laborers who maintained the elevators, cleaned the offices, and constructed the new buildings, traveled to work by streetcar from their homes in neighborhoods west, south, and north. Chicago’s cable cars, brought to the city by a group of investors led by department store magnate Marshal Field in 1882, circled the commercial center. Cable cars largely replaced horse-drawn streetcars in the 1880s—though a few of the horse-drawn lines remained into the early twentieth century. The steam-powered cars sped travel to over ten miles per hour, transforming the ways Chicagoans shopped, worked, and experienced their city. “Long before the elevated Loop became an accomplished fact, downtown business men were taught the value of a traffic loop which deposited the passengers gathered from a wide residential area into a limited business district,” wrote Hoyt. By 1893, Chicago had the largest cable-car system in the world, with eighty-six miles of track, eleven power plants, and more than fifteen hundred cars linking far-flung neighborhoods and suburban villages to the city center. Around the turn of the century, the cable cars were superseded by the elevated railway system that established the more visible and enduring overhead loop around the business district. The Loop was, by day, the most congested area of the city, a neighborhood of office workers and shoppers, almost no residences, little industry, and the city’s uncontested commercial center. ²³

For Chicagoans in the 1880s, the Loop was a distinctive urban space, a place where working classes could daily see the wealth and status of employers and, as in the case of the waiters’ strike, place direct and in some cases personal pressure on the city’s growing middle classes. It was, in addition, a site where men and women, immigrants and native-born, black and white Chicagoans might come in close contact. Though each was expected to remain within carefully circumscribed spaces—middle-class women shoppers in department stores, white women workers behind store counters, and black janitors in the basements of skyscrapers, for example—the commercial crowds of the Loop made possible a face-to-face contact that could, as in the waiters’ strike, generate new social tensions. ²⁴

In the center of the industrializing city, commercial eateries were a modern necessity. Tea rooms opened in department stores to provide comfortable spaces for lady shoppers. Restaurants and low-priced lunch counters sprung up along Wabash and Dearborn Avenues, behind the plate glass windows in street-level spaces of skyscrapers, to feed the hordes of clerks, lawyers, and other white-collar workers. The new eating places meant scores of jobs for cooks, dishwashers, janitors, and waiters. In southern towns and cities, these were jobs typically held by black men. In Chicago, white and black men were hired in restaurants, saloons, and lunch counters. German waiters were found in some of the more exclusive hotels and oyster houses, though some elite hotels and restaurants, following east coast fashions, sought black waiters, who, as one scholar of restaurant history writes, “evoked images of slavery . . . and became a physical reminder of servitude.” African Americans typically worked the counters and small tables of Loop lunchrooms, a sign of the early migration of black southerners to northern cities. But the service workforce was hardly segregated; black and white waiters worked side by side in downtown eateries. ²⁵ The waiters’ strike, then, was made possible by changes in the social relations of work and the social geography of the industrializing city.

The waiters’ strike too marked a shift from the mass strikes of the previous decade, the labor stoppages rooted in neighborhoods and supported by communities of immigrants of shared nationalities. Though typically sparked by labor grievances, mass strikes like that of the 1877 railroad workers, often were sustained by neighborhood residents. Lacking strong labor organizations, workers engaged in mass strikes relied on support from neighborhood grocers, saloon keepers, and shop owners, making the labor struggle into a communal event that linked the interests of neighborhood residents. But by the late 1880s, the experience of organizing in local assemblies within the Knights of Labor had laid the groundwork for more formal and structured labor unions. More significantly, as places of paid work were separated from residential neighborhoods—as waiters, black and white, traveled to jobs in the city’s commercial center—workers turned to labor organizers, rather than neighborhood leaders, for support. They formed an alliance of laborers living in a variety of neighborhoods, of varied nationalities and races, with the common experience of restaurant and hotel work. ²⁶

The strike was carefully planned, designed to use the new commercial geography to the workers’ advantage. Pomeroy, Bryan, and Lewis had been visiting eating places along with the elegant downtown hotels, the Tremont and Palmer Houses, talking with waiters, black and white, for several weeks. Some restaurants avoided the strike when the owners “gave in” to the demands for higher wages, shorter hours, and recognition of the union’s right to negotiate for the restaurant workers. Nearly a dozen proprietors formed their own organization to fight the striking workers, a move that would become a model for the city’s leading industrialists in the strike-torn years of the following decade. ²⁷ The concentration of restaurants and hotels within the Loop combined with a growing demand for commercial eateries in the urban center strengthened the waiters’ organization. ²⁸

Waiters’ labor was demanding and exhausting. Most, especially those employed in the large oyster houses and restaurants, worked thirteen- or fourteen-hour days. Their work included polishing silver, washing windows, as well as serving food. The waiter, remembered Jere Sullivan, a leader in Chicago’s white waiters assembly and a Knight, served “as an all-around handyman who occupied the position of cook, waiter, bartender and oysterman at one and the same time.” In some restaurants, he was also forced “to do a singing stint” to entertain diners. As Sullivan later complained, there were no clearly defined jobs in a restaurant, no craft or trade rules. ²⁹

But in the more exclusive restaurants and hotels, there was a hierarchy, with headwaiters supervising captains, waiters, and water boys. The headwaiter, somewhat like a factory foreman, carried significant authority in the dining room. Headwaiters were listed among the professionals, government workers, and skilled laborers in city directories. Pay rates suggest large and meaningful status differences among restaurant staff: headwaiters could earn as much as $75 per month while waiters’ wages ran as low as $28 per month, or $7 to $10 per week. The Lexington Hotel on Michigan Avenue established one of the most elaborate systems. The hotel’s fifty waiters were divided into ten ranks. The headwaiter in the 1880s was a college-educated African American, who reportedly earned $100 per month. Perry Duis notes that the ranks included a “Second Lieutenant,” a “Third Man,” a waiter who handed out bread and butter pats, and a “lowly water boy,” who was paid just $10 per month. Crucially, headwaiters were known to stand by proprietors when their subordinates walked off the job during Alliance-led strikes. The so-called “vampire alliance” between proprietors and head-waiters angered African American waiters and was seen, among Alliance members, as one way the head-waiters profited from the “floor-workers’” hard work. ³⁰

The arrangement of work in a hotel dining room or commercial downtown eatery might, in the 1890s, contrast sharply with the expanding racial segregation of the city’s residential neighborhoods. There were at least eighteen African American “head waiters” listed in the 1905 Colored People’s Blue Book and Business Directory, a register of black businesses and community leaders. Black head waiters were listed at such upscale spots as the Auditorium, Briggs House, Windemere Hotel, Vendome Hotel, and several other Loop eateries. Most of the men worked in the Loop while living in segregated South Side blocks. William Nixon, for example, worked at the elegant Palmer House and lived on South Cottage Grove Avenue; London Smith who supervised waiters at the Thompson Hotel on Dearborn in the Loop listed his address at 24th and State Streets. Theirs were positions of authority within the restaurant, overseeing the work of dozens of waiters and water boys. Like the black lawyers, public school instructors, and entrepreneurs whose names and addresses appeared in the directory, the head waiters’ appearance in the Blue Book suggests they also were important figures in the segregated South Side, emblems of the achievements of black men in the northern city. But unlike so many other black professionals and entrepreneurs, the head waiters worked among a biracial staff in a commercial center that brought together workers of varied nationalities and races. ³¹

But if the head waiter carried the marks of masculine authority in the industrial city, the waiters and other subordinates who worked beneath him did not. Waiters’ names were not listed in the city’s business directories; they were instead rendered part of the unskilled and low-wage labor force. Many complained that waiting tables simply reinforced white Americans vision of black men as servile. “The place assigned to him (a black man) is in the lowest walks of life,” commented an angry writer for The World. “His place according to assignment is that of menial, a servant, a boot-black, waiter, a monkey.” White proprietors affirmed this image. “Colored men are the best waiters by nature, and are peculiarly adapted to servitude,” one restaurant owner told a Tribune reporter. The Christian Recorder, an African American newspaper, published sporadic complaints and “exchanges of views” over the status of the black man waiting tables in urban restaurants. ³² While black civic leaders proudly advertised the number of black head waiters, they were, at best, ambivalent about the growing numbers of African American men working at lower pay levels in the city’s hotels and restaurants.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, black men could fairly easily find a waiter job, especially if the prospective worker was willing to take lower pay than a European immigrant. A Missouri migrant, the son of slaves, remembered finding jobs easily when he arrived in Chicago in 1887. “I was a young man and soon got a job waiting table in various restaurants and hotels,” he commented. “I made eighteen dollars a month.” Paul Lawrence Dunbar traveled from his hometown, Dayton, OH, to Chicago in spring 1893 in search of work at the World’s Fair. He found a job “cleaning one of the big domes,” and another “uncrating exhibit specimens” in a damp basement, which left him with a hacking cough. Dunbar quickly gave up on the fairgrounds and found a job waiting tables in a hotel. The white leaders of the Alliance, recognizing that black men were increasingly taking waiters’ jobs in the 1890s, and often for lower wages than white waiters, sought to use the Alliance to protect white jobs, as much as it sought higher wages and shorter hours for all waiters. ³³

The waiters’ struggle, like that of an array of craft unions in the late nineteenth century, was to set maximum hours, raise wages, negotiate trade rules, and especially for black men, to assert the “dignity” of their work. Among their biggest complaint was the requirement that each waiter pay to replace any plates or glassware he broke during service. In 1885 when a union of white waiters began negotiating with restaurant and oyster house owners, waiters demanded that employers permit them to replace the broken wares. “You will know what that means,” a Boston House employee told an Inter-Ocean reporter, “when I tell you I was compelled to pay 50 cents for plates accidently broken which at wholesale cost the proprietor 4 cents each.” The waiter noted that the restaurant owners paid “8 to 9 dollars per week” but if “we broke a saucer, or goblet, or plate, we were required to pay from three to ten times its value.” The waiters had “decided to fight this robbery.” They also demanded “steady wages” of $10 per week and ten-hour days. The 1885 movement won the wage increase but little else. Five years later, the waiters had reorganized, using the Culinary Alliance to once again press their case. This time, among the most prominent demands, was recognition of the union. Proprietors should hire “nothing but union men.” This time, black waiters were included in the organization. It is not clear why a white union of waiters determined, five years later, to include black men, except that the number of black waiters had increased substantially in the late 1880s, making black waiters viable competitors for jobs and a growing portion of the commercial wait staff in the city center. ³⁴

The waiters won support from at least one of their employers, Herman Henry Kohlsaat, who made his fortune with a bakery and a chain of low-budget lunch counters in Chicago. Kohlsaat already employed unionized black waiters in his downtown eateries. He also provided his patrons, who often included the staff of the African American–owned newspaper, the Conservator, with a comfortable reading room that featured five hundred books. He encouraged several employers to negotiate with union leaders. “Mr. Kohlsaat,” the Tribune noted, “made the desired increase in wages without waiting to be asked.” A year later, Kohlsaat would purchase part-ownership of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, one of the few nationally distributed newspapers sympathetic to both organized labor and African American civil rights. (He also contributed to land for Provident Hospital. The anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett named her second child for him.) ³⁵

Yet conflicts between white and black workers, between skilled and unskilled, and among types of labor nearly scuttled the movement. The Inter-Ocean reported the proprietors of the Boston and Chicago Oyster Houses, after learning of the planned strike, “were trying to organize forces of colored men” to take the striking waiters’ places, a move that had clearly worried white waiters when they joined with black waiters to form the Alliance. That effort failed. When the waiters walked out of the First National, the restaurant’s cooks, clerks, bartenders, “and the employer himself turned out” and waited on the customers. At Kinsley’s, a pricey lunch spot further south on Wabash (known for serving “swell meals to swell people, or people who wanted to be known as swells”), “white-capped cooks” waited tables when the waiters walked out. The willingness of other restaurant workers to wait tables proved short-lived.

Nevertheless, tensions between black and white and English- and German-speaking workers required constant mediation. Pomeroy, Bryan, Lewis, and the other strike leaders quickly moved to resolve these differences. Waiters and kitchen staff were organized in separate but coordinated unions according to race and nationality: the German Bartenders’ and Waiters’ Association, Chicago Waiters’ Union No. 1, Chicago Waiters’ League, 5170 AF of L, the Meat and Pastry Cooks’ Union, Chicago Waiters’ Association No. 7475, Knights of Labor, the Chicago Association of Oystermen, and for African American waiters, the Charles Sumner Independent Colored Waiters’ Union. Those whose allegiance lay with the Knights of Labor remained separate from those who joined the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor. Ultimately, Pomeroy and Lewis brought together many kitchen, cleaning, and wait staff into the Alliance. Separate unions reinforced social divisions along lines of race, nationality, and skill while at the same time establishing a collective interest and experience in challenging local employers. ³⁶

On Monday, May 18, strike leaders “opened hostility against the hotels,” reported the sympathetic Western Appeal. The Alliance called on the crews of waiters at the Commercial Hotel, the Tremont, the Palmer House, the Brunswick, the Grand Pacific, and the Brigges House to walk off the job. Most struck immediately but waiters at the Tremont “for some reason or other did not pay any attention to the order.” The Tremont waiters were members of the Alliance; their refusal to strike was “looked upon as rank mutiny.” Pomeroy and Lewis ordered the uncooperative waiters to report to Quinn Chapel, the city’s leading African American church, that evening. Newspapers later reported “a good many of the men . . . promised to join the ranks of the strikers Tuesday morning.” Proprietors’ responses varied. Managers at the Commercial and the Palmer house fired “union men,” while the proprietors of the Grand Pacific “took an entirely different view of the situation,” signing a labor agreement Monday night. When the waiters at the Tremont House walked out, the hotel manager “pressed every employee into service, but he had “hard work of it.” Chambermaids, cooks, and other servants waited tables “and grumbled not a little.” By mid-May, an estimated nine hundred restaurant and hotel workers, nearly 30 percent of the workforce, were on strike. ³⁷

The waiters were not the city’s only workers to strike that spring; they were part of a larger movement of laboring people to pressure employers for shorter hours and higher wages, and recognition of labor’s right to organize. Journeymen carpenters had just settled with the builders, as had employees in the sash, door, and blind factories in the lumber district. The Stairbuilders’ Union, which was associated with the Carpenters’ Council, sent word to the planing mill owners and other contractors that their “craft was bound by the settlement of the carpenters’ strike” between the journeymen and the “new bosses’ association.” The stairbuilders would not work for any contractor who “cannot produce a copy of the contract with his signature attached.” Mill owners were preparing for “another trouble,” the Tribune reported on May 10. ³⁸

If there were black workers among the striking journeymen carpenters, Packingtown coopers, and other industrial laborers walking off the job that May, the newspapers did not mention them. Black men appeared in news accounts more often as strike breakers, brought by train from southern towns to replace striking white workers. Black workers were “easily lured to the north at wages disgustingly inadequate for white workingmen,” commented a reporter for John Swinton’s Paper in 1885. “It is hard to find fault with the poor colored men but for the capitalists who have brought them to the North there would be nothing short of positive popular condemnation. . . . The imposition on the negroes is systematically carried on.” ³⁹ The Chicago papers regularly reported on the trainloads of black workers brought from southern towns to replace striking miners in southern Illinois. The press had covered in lurid detail the tense weeks in July 1886 when black strikebreakers were employed in the stockyards to crush a union in the meat-packing industry. “We have about 300 of those fellows (black men) at work now,” Philip D. Armour, owner of the city’s largest packing house, told a reporter. “When they proposed to go to work in one house we told them they would be slugged. They replied . . . all we want is work; we don’t ask for protection.” ⁴⁰ Strike-breaking gave black workers access to jobs from which they had been previously excluded, industrial jobs that paid higher and steadier wages than agriculture and personal service.

The Alliance’s simple and efficient tactics attracted support. Assistance and approbation came from many sources, from the chambermaids at the Tremont, from white labor activists like Kohlsaat, and from some of the middle-class congregants of Quinn Chapel. Hotel proprietors found their staff, even those who did not strike, fully supporting the striking waiters. “We’re with the waiters every time,” said the head bell-boy at the Tremont House, “and we don’t intend taking their places.” Ferdinand Barnett, the prominent black lawyer and editor of the Conservator, published a letter in the Inter-Ocean offering his support for the waiters. The Western Appeal’s coverage of the strike ran under the headline: “We are With you!” Even the Inter-Ocean, which questioned the carpenters’ demands for higher wages, supported the waiters. The affirmation of workers’ rights coming from Quinn Chapel’s charismatic minister proved crucial. The church provided space for meetings and negotiations, and the critical backing of many of the city’s black elite. Many middle-class and well-to-do black Chicagoans were willing to ally with workers in an effort led by labor leaders. ⁴¹

Victory came May 21, just three days after the strike had spread to the downtown hotels. There was a celebration, a “Jubilee,” at Quinn chapel where Lewis announced that five restaurant-keepers had signed the union pay scale in the previous twenty-four hours. The Tremont House, after what the Tribune called “a gallant fight,” was forced to close its dining room and agree to the Alliance demands to end the strike. As waiters in one downtown hotel after another had walked off the jobs, proprietors had been forced to negotiate with Alliance leaders. The waiters won an increase in base pay from $7.50 to $10.00 per week, though no limit on hours. They had forced restaurant and hotel managers to negotiate with the union. ⁴²

The biracial labor organization had proved that black workers could come together, perhaps reluctantly, with European immigrants, at least for a brief and intense struggle, to improve working conditions in Chicago’s downtown. That November, most proprietors claimed they maintained “wages proposed by the Culinary Alliance.” In January 1891 at a mass meeting, the German Waiters and Bartenders’ Columbia Association, the Chicago Waiters Union Germanis, and the Charles Sumner Association of Colored Waiters Union debated forming a four-thousand-member union, ultimately deciding to retain the alliance of member unions. (This was likely the result of white waiters refusing to join an integrated union, but wanting to retain their alliance with black waiters. The black waiters did not push hard for the integrated union either, perhaps hoping their collective strength would give them greater leverage within the Alliance). The Alliance of German, Irish, Scandinavian, and African American waiters continued to represent the spatial organization of the city: residential segregation combined with labor cooperation across the color line in the commercial center. It would last more than a decade. ⁴³

The Alliance quickly became part of a national union, one of the few in the late nineteenth century to welcome African American laborers. By the time of the Chicago walkout, there were already several unions of white waiters in cities across the north. Waiters organized in local assemblies in New York and a German waiters union in St. Louis had pushed Samuel Gompers, leader of the American Federation of Labor, to include them within the new craft union in the 1880s. It was only after the successful Chicago waiters strike that a national waiters union was formed. That December, at the American Federation of Labor convention in Detroit, a delegate announced plans for a “Waiters National Union” and called on the AF of L for assistance. In April 1891, during a convention in New York, the waiters wrote a provisional constitution for the new union and applied for a national charter with the AF of L. None of the Chicago leaders were listed on the charter, which was approved by Gompers on April 24, 1891. But two African American waiters were present: Richard Ellis of New York and S.K. Govern of Philadelphia. The convention ruled that local unions of any race or nationality could join the national union. Even more significant, under the new charter, white workers were barred for one year from applying for jobs in a restaurant or hotel where black waiters had gone on strike. ⁴⁴ The Chicago alliance could then turn to the national organization for financial support, and advice in its next major struggle with the city’s employers.

The Alliance, the leading biracial labor organization in the city, faced its next formidable challenge when the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in May 1893. That spring, as thousands of people arrived in Chicago to visit the fair grounds, the waiters challenged not just local entrepreneurs but, in effect, the symbol of federal power and national achievement in the World’s Columbian Exposition. In many ways, the Fair signaled a dramatic shift in representations of the city, Chicago and other northern cities, which were guided by the reorientation of urban space, industry, and consumption. The fair aimed to present a new image of the nation, Chicago, and more generally, urban space. The Exposition, as art historian T.J. Clark writes of Haussman’s Paris, crafted a vision of the city that was unified and, most importantly, guided by consumption. Labor conflict—the 1877 rail strike, the Haymarket riot in 1886, and recent local battles in Chicago’s industries—worried local and national investors, and threatened the image of the city. Older representations of the city as a site of production, of workers valiantly building the nation’s industrial base, were increasingly accompanied by images of consumption in department stores, office towers, and restaurants. The spectacle, Clark writes, was “not a neutral form in which capitalism incidentally happened; it was a form of capital itself and one of the most effective.” The spectacular beauty of the White City, the unrivaled entertainments of the Midway, and the new consumer goods marketed at the Fair were not mere distractions from social problems. The Fair grounds, instead, sought to bring the nation together, to paper over growing tensions and social differences. ⁴⁵

The varied waiters’ organizations within the Alliance, taking advantage of the nation’s attention on the Exposition, issued a call for a wage increase to $20 per day during the six months of the fair. Members of the “Colored Waiters’ Alliance”—an estimated nine hundred black waiters—attended a meeting on April 28 in Olivet Baptist Church to “understand the scale that had been prepared by the Executive committee and adopted by the alliance.” Along with pay raises, the alliance demanded ten and a half hours “to constitute a days work,” six and a half days a week, and “none other than union men to be employed.” ⁴⁶ Two days later, on May 1, the Fair’s opening day, the largely white wait staff of many of the city’s largest restaurants and oyster houses, walked off the job. On May 2, five hundred striking waiters met at the Alliance headquarters, Fisher’s Hall on Lake Street, where they appointed a five-member committee to “induce” others to “quit work.” Several “colored waiters entered the hall and promised the support of their organization if needed.” Though organized in separate locales, those in the alliance recognized their common interests; they had for the previous three years successfully deployed a strategy of organizing across racial lines, across differences of nationality and within workplaces of the commercial downtown. ⁴⁷

“Eating places badly crippled for want of help,” the Tribune announced on May 2. Two days later, six hundred cooks held “a secret meeting.” The Tribune, somehow privy to the meeting, noted, “it is said that they intend to follow the example of the waiters and strike for more wages and shorter hours.” For the waiters, the strategy of mutual support, with a bit of pressure from fellow restaurant laborers, proved effective. Some waiters continued working, but at least two of the city’s largest oyster houses, the Lakeside Oyster House and Charles Rector’s Oyster House, closed down, while several restaurant managers quickly agreed to the Alliance’s wage demands. The Chicago Oyster House opened “with a green crew” earning $15, the Inter-Ocean reported. The Saratoga, the American, Boston, Kinsley’s, Baker & Jackson’s, Chapin & Gore’s, and several others were open, “running with short help.” ⁴⁸

A week later, most of the leading restaurants in the city and on the fair grounds had signed labor agreements with the Alliance. “The colored waiters in Chicago are better organized and are doing better to benefit themselves,” announced the Indianapolis Freeman, “and are getting higher wages than they ever have done before in the history of Chicago.” This was a moment of great achievement and high hopes for Chicago’s waiters. The agreement with proprietors had been negotiated by a committee from the Trades and Labor Assembly, fully incorporating the Alliance into the city’s leading labor assembly. ⁴⁹

The summer after the fair closed, as the city slipped into the economic depression that already had pummeled the rest of the nation, the Pullman strike just added to the long-standing racism among white rail workers. Black workers, who had been refused jobs in the plant manufacturing the luxurious Pullman cars, were, when whites walked out, willing to take the lucrative work. The strike, which in Chicago revived neighborhood-based organizing and sparked much street violence, once again drew attention to black strikebreakers. That summer too when butchers, who were Knights of Labor, walked out of the Chicago stockyards in sympathy with Eugene V. Debs’s railway workers, black men were hired to replace the strikers. “An offer was received by one of the larger packing firms,” the Tribune recounted, “to supply several hundred negroes to fill the places of strikers.” In mid-July an effigy of a black worker labeled “nigger-scab” was seen hanging from a telephone pole near the entrance to the yards, the Chicago Record-Herald reported. ⁵⁰ By mid-decade, the carefully crafted pay scale that was designed to standardize waiters’ wages was cracking; some of the city’s proprietors were paying black waiters lower wages than those offered white men. In July 1896, black waiters, angry about “starvation wages,” threatened to strike during the Democratic convention in Chicago. They were persuaded by Alliance leaders to hold off. There were growing divisions between black and white waiters in the Alliance. ⁵¹

The comity of the Culinary Alliance could barely be sustained against the onslaught of employers determined to use race to divide workers, European-born laborers deploying racist tactics to hold on to their jobs and homes, and black workers desperate for industrial jobs. By the turn of the twentieth century, many Chicago labor leaders would affirm the racial hierarchies imposed by industrial foremen and their employers, making it almost impossible for black workers to align with white. Racial barriers in the workplace, reinforced by the hardening of racial segregation in the city’s neighborhoods, stamped out workers’ belief in mutual, interracial support.

The Waiter’s Alliance shattered in 1903 when white union leaders, after a summer-long strike of restaurants, hotels, and oyster houses, refused to support black members. The Alliance held together in the early weeks, blocking an attempt by the restaurant managers to “get men from outside the city to assume the places of the union employees.” Restaurants reported losses of between $300 and $800 per day. The Tribune, in a page-one story, said the strike was “held by both employers and employees to be the beginning of a bitter struggle that may result in the closing down of all but a few of the large downtown establishments and the crippling of every hotel of importance in the city.” ⁵² At stake was the union’s demand that proprietors hire “none but union men” and that each employer negotiate and sign an individual contract with the union. The employers, forming an association of restaurant and hotel management, called for negotiations between representatives of the union and of the association. Both sides agreed to arbitration before a committee of workers and proprietors. Many waiters went back to work and restaurants reopened until the arbitration broke down amid fights among committee members in late August, when the strike was revived. ⁵³

The restaurant and hotel strike coincided with a five-week-long strike by the city’s laundry workers, “the most important labor war ever waged in the west by women and children.” As the Tribune noted on June 6, when the five-week strike ended and commercial laundries announced they would reopen the following Monday, more than 80 percent of the seven thousand striking workers were girls under twenty years of age. The young women workers demonstrated their commitment to work and to collective action. The Chicago Federation of Labor led negotiations for the laundry workers, forcing employers to “deal with the union through its proper accredited committee,” though allowing the hiring of non-union workers. The strike ended with most other issues—wages and hours regulations—headed for a board of arbitration. The Tribune, displaying its usual support for the city’s proprietors, listed estimated losses to laundry businesses and commented, “The Chinese have taken the greater part of the trade.” But the paper’s reporter could not help being impressed by the determination of the young laundresses. “These (the young women) stood by the union throughout the long struggle,” the Tribune commented, “and last night held a dance to celebrate the settlement.” ⁵⁴

The city’s waiters did not see such a happy conclusion to their strike. Moreover, while young white women laundresses were portrayed as “plucky” and even fun-loving, black male waiters garnered little respect from white journalists. Indeed, black waiters had, by participating in the labor action, demonstrated they were not as servile as white employers hoped. The long-standing trope of the obsequious black servant was, under pressure from black labor organizers, giving way to a more militant image of the urban black working man. The new image might empower some black activists, but it also undermined black men’s ability to hold on to their jobs in urban restaurants, among the highest-paying and most stable work available to black laborers in the industrial city. If labor activism was for black men an assertion of manhood and citizenship rights, it was to the white press a disturbing shift in a long-standing discourse of black labor. Black men would continue to hold service positions, most prominently as porters in Pullman cars. But, the city’s restaurant owners, in the wake of the 1903 strike, sought staff considered even more servile than black men: white women. ⁵⁵

Proprietors’ moves to replace black waiters with white women were among the strikers’ complaints. Waiters at H. H. Kohlsaat’s lunch rooms had been among the first to walk out, angered by the firing of black waiters “on charges of inefficiency and dishonesty and the substitution in their places of white girls,” Ray Stannard Baker wrote in McClure’s Magazine. Baker contended that the waitresses were union members and that the “colored men” simply “insisted that no white girls be employed.” ⁵⁶

Two days after the walkout, when the union agreed to hold a series of meetings with proprietors, most waiters and cooks returned to work. Strikes remained on several restaurants, including the Chicago Athletic and Union League Clubs, while eighty-six restaurants and lunch counters had signed agreements with the union. H. H. Kohlsaat, long a supporter of organized labor and of African American civic organizations, did not settle with the union, but rather announced that he would permanently replace his “colored men” with “girls” at 43 Dearborn Street. On June 11, a rumor spread claiming that “an offer had been made to settle the cooks’ and waiters’ strike in a way strongly suggestive of bribery.” Five days later, a conservative black leader, J. T. Brewington, resigned from his position as vice president of the “colored waiters’ local.” Brewington, urging the union to negotiate with an association of restaurant employers, said, “I realize the radicals will attempt to crucify me because of the position I have taken, but I realize someone must suffer that the truth be heard and justice be done.” That day, amid growing fear that the strike was collapsing, the union’s joint board authorized lawyer Clarence Darrow “to approach some of the hotel men and open a way for peace negotiations.” Though a Tribune headline ran “Waiters nearing a Rout,” the strike was hardly over. ⁵⁷

Violence erupted on streets and sidewalks outside restaurants and hotels as public space in the city’s commercial center became a site of conflict between laborers and employers. At least one waiter leaving work was attacked by striking waiters while pickets attacked “scrubwomen” employed by the Grand Pacific Hotel. “The women fought bravely and were able to hold their own until greatly outnumbered,” the Tribune reported. Waiters and cooks picketing Vogelsang’s restaurant were supported by a raucous crowd, which dispersed only when police appeared. At strike headquarters, the “business agents,” who led the strike, “displayed bruised heads.” No longer confined to the factory gates or the streets abutting the stockyards, striking workers and labor violence could be seen along the commercial streets of the city center. ⁵⁸ The walkout was over within a week.

That August, waiters struck half a dozen Loop restaurants, and the Alliance once again threatened a “general walk-out.” Street violence escalated. At the Kensington on State Street, union men were met with by the owners carrying revolvers. “When I put my head in that door to speak to the cooks they shoved two revolvers, with barrels a foot long at me,” the union business agent Edward Hagers said. “Did I run? Well, you see I’m still on earth.” Another revolver was drawn at a restaurant on Monroe Street when the union man tried to urge the cooks to walk out, though the police forced the owner to put away his “six-shooter” and “no harm was done.” ⁵⁹

This time, the leading issue was wages, especially the expanding use of a separate pay scale for black and white waiters. As one restaurant owner told the Daily News, “I want to go on record on this question. I believe now and have always believed that the white man is a better worker than the colored man and is entitled to more money,” adding, “the colored men employed in the lunch rooms are an inferior class of waiters.” The Chicago Restaurant Keepers Association, formed in 1877 and revived during the June walkout, refused to negotiate the wage “distinction.” ⁶⁰ The strike’s conclusion, coming just a couple of days later, proved a bitter disappointment to black waiters.

On August 26, white union leaders, determined to “save their union,” renounced African American waiters and abandoned their biracial alliance. “Waiters Beaten; Negroes To Go,” ran the Tribune headline on August 27. The “white union men” had refused to support the “colored men,” the Daily News noted. White restaurant workers and their employers joined in blaming African Americans for the recent labor strife. Just one member of the arbitration committee worried that black waiters “would forever be a disturbing factor in the labor movement in Chicago.” Alliance representatives agreed to the separate wage scale, though threats of a strike continued for another week. ⁶¹ As the strikers sued for peace, the Chicago Restaurant Keepers Association moved to fire all black employees from “downtown eating houses.” Proprietors sent agents to Milwaukee, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and other cities, hiring hundreds of “white girls who are willing to come to Chicago.” As the union negotiated away nearly all of its demands, the president of the restaurant association, F. R. Barnheisel of H. H. Kohlsaat & Co., announced: “The day of the negro waiter in the downtown district is over.” ⁶² Ending too was the movement for biracial labor organizing.

The waiters’ collective action had challenged long-standing racial segmentation in the labor force even as it produced and reinforced new racial and gender hierarchies. Restaurant owners in Chicago were among the first to shift from an all-male labor force to one that included women. In most parts of the country, black men maintained a disproportionate share of restaurant and hotel service jobs until 1930. Richard R. Wright Jr., in his 1906 study “The Negro in Chicago,” reported that more black men and women were employed as “servants and waiters” than any other occupation with 4,514 men and 2,541 women listed. As Wright commented, the vast majority of women listed were likely employed as household servants. By the mid-1910s, white women increasingly replaced black men as waiters in many cities. Employers could pay women lower wages; many saw women as more “compliant” than men, writes Dorothy Sue Cobble. ⁶³

By the 1910s, the image of the servile black waiter held by northern employers and their white customers, and linked to sentimental fictions of southern plantation life, was giving way to a new version of restaurant service workers. The waitress was increasingly conceived as an extension of home life, performing the work of wives and mothers in the impersonal city. In the 1910s, a new organization, the Waitresses’ Alliance, financed by an association of restaurant owners, functioned as an employment service for Loop restaurants and lunchrooms, a place where “all types, the young and pretty, the plain and neat, the modish person, the sloven and frump,” might go to find a waitressing job. “The relationship between the waitress and patron is a distinctly personal one,” wrote Frances Donovan, a journalist who went undercover as a waitress in a series of Chicago restaurants for nine months in 1919. It was, Donovan wrote, “a good deal more intimate” that other urban occupations. ⁶⁴

By hiring women waiters, Chicago’s downtown employers gained just a few years of labor peace. The city’s long tradition of labor organizing and the aggressive actions of the Alliance spurred young waitresses to organize. By the early 1910s, there were several culinary unions organized by the Women’s Trade Union League and, in 1914 at least one highly publicized walkout by waitresses. Donovan, who had written a series of articles about young women in the city, claimed the waitress was “the advance guard of working women who are marching steadily deeper and deeper into the world of economic competition.” ⁶⁵

The white waiters’ refusal to stand by African American allies helped to position women workers as rivals to men, deepening gender and racial divisions among laborers and undermining the status of urban service workers generally. Rather than finding common cause with German and Irish men, black waiters increasingly competed with white workers, especially young white women, for the lowest-paying restaurant work. Black waiters had proved too militant for their employers and, paradoxically, were seen by white men as ineffectual partners. Increasingly, it was white women who were perceived as servile, willing to accept the authority of employers, and as a lower rung of the labor hierarchy of the expanding commercial city. ⁶⁶

Black workers, angered by the betrayal of their union, did not quickly forget. Some immediately charged the union with “bad faith.” That fall, others moved to restart the strike, while at least one group of black waiters urged their coworkers to pressure proprietors to rehire them “before white waitresses take their places.” But few black waiters regained their jobs. “In the matter of employment,” Fannie Barrier Williams wrote in 1905, “the colored people of Chicago have lost in the last ten years nearly every occupation of which they once had almost a monopoly. . . . White men and women as waiters have supplanted colored in nearly all the fist-class hotels and restaurants.” Williams’s complaint came in the context of increasing racial segregation in the city. She was angered that she and her lawyer husband faced white resentment in their neighborhood, the affluent Hyde Park, where they had lived peacefully for over a decade. As Williams wrote, even the “best” people were being forced out of white middle-class neighborhoods. Race, even more than class, defined the social geography of the twentieth-century city. ⁶⁷

The strike and its disheartening ending lingered in the memory of African American workers for decades. In 1920, when the Chicago Commission on Race Relations held a conference on “Trade Unions and the Negro Worker,” the waiters’ strike was a prominent issue. The commission was charged with investigating the causes of the bloody riot of July 1919 when twenty-three black and fifteen white people were killed. Among the issues to be discussed at the conference was a reference to “the oft-repeated statement, ‘that the negroes were double-crossed in the Waiters’ Strike of 1903.” African Americans, the conference organizers noted, were excluded from the city’s waiters’ union ever since. Many considered the local assembly of sleeping car porters “a sort of ‘Jim-Crow’ union.” The Chicago Whip also noted that black labor leaders, even those who did not “know exactly what it was,” reminded black workers that “something happened” to the members of a waiters’ organization in 1903, which was reason to warn black workers away from the American Federation of Labor. ⁶⁸

Nevertheless, the ruin of the Culinary Alliance and the closing off of a turbulent decade of biracial labor solidarity was not all loss. Black waiters continued to link their struggles in the workplace to local politics. Berry Lewis, one of the original Alliance organizers, led the Charles Sumner Independent Colored Waiters Union and was elected to the Board of Trustees for the city’s Trades and Labor Assembly, an independent labor party. In the years after the 1903 strike, the Sumner waiters union helped establish the Waiters Political Club of Chicago, which by 1907 claimed three thousand members. By then, racial segregation in the city’s housing and labor markets was near-complete. ⁶⁹

The waiters’ struggle and its early successes occurred just as Jim Crow was taking violent hold across the south. Scholars who have documented examples of biracial unionism in the 1890s and early twentieth century highlight the complex strategic alliances deployed to challenge the corporate power on the docks, in the coal fields, and in lumber fields in a handful of southern towns. In Chicago, as in the American South, African Americans would face white mobs and racial violence in the 1910s and 1920s. But in 1890s Chicago, the reorganization of the sites of industrial labor combined with the rise of consumer-oriented urban centers created the conditions for biracial labor organizing. The Alliance’s history, along with its rapid decline, highlights the distinctive histories of labor organizing—north and south, rural and urban. It reminds us too that local conditions of work and housing can sometimes produce unexpected and transformative events.