Revenge is a Dish Best Served in... Chicago?

In recent discourse about the minimum wage and working conditions in service positions, tipping often becomes a divisive topic. For food service employees, tipping is a necessity in an industry that is legally allowed to pay below minimum wage. They must engage in additional emotional labor to always appear pleasant and cheerful as a way to earn more tips, often from customers who don't understand the point of paying someone else's wages. It's a broken system, and few restaurants are moving to a tipless model that pays waiters a living wage to begin with. In the face of this frustration and hopelessness, what if you could take your revenge on customers not cooperating with the system?

The Washington Post, 23 June 1918

In June 1918, 100-150 waiters working in Chicago restaurants and hotels were taken into custody for poisoning food after police raided their union headquarters. Waiters were accused of poisoning both establishment owners to coerce them into unionizing and patrons who had either complained about service or had undertipped. All of this followed a request submitted in April for restaurants and hotels to raise wages by $10 a month, as the war was causing tips to decline.

After police raided the headquarters, the seized drugs, known colloquially as "mickey finn," were sent to a pharmacist to be analyzed, and they concluded that "one of these powders contains ten grains of poison and that three grains have been known to cause death." And at least one person was said to have died from the drug -- Joseph Mammoser, a former police operator, who passed away shortly after eating at one of the implicated restaurants.

Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 June 1918

At the trial, 13 apparent victims appeared as witnesses to condemn the waiters' plot. However, the waiters' unions vigorously denied the charges. At a conference where several food service unions appeared, and presided over by the waiters' union president who had been arrested, a collective of waiters, bartenders, and cooks asserted that the unions did not support the use of the drugs, and that they had been administered by rogue employees. They also condemned the police for having conducted the raid, saying they would have cooperated if served a search warrant.

While the newspapers did not publicize the results of the trial nearly as much as they did the investigation, the notoriety of the "mickey finn" entered into the vernacular more than ever.

Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 July 1918

How would you have reacted to this story if you read about it in the newspaper?

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