Propaganda and the Dinner Table: Strike-Breaking and Graphical Display of Data, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 987

This graphic display of the effects of a  transport workers’ strike is a pretty, well-designed piece of propaganda designed to draw in the general, middle-class (such as it was) and working population into league against the strikers.  At least that’s what it looks like to me: the strangulating effects of food not coming into the port of Liverpool and its attack on the family dining table. Literally, and figuratively: a table, by the way, that appears at the direct center of attention, the bull’s-eye of what is a target, made to look like the transport workers were taking direct aim at the symbol of the family. 

All of what was going on of course was that some hard working people were trying to get a little more money to put food on their own  tables—the facilitators of food distribution for the nation’s people wanting nothing more than a little more food for themselves and their families.  And these were the people, by the way, who did not set a five-utensil place settings with linen table covers and a large fresh bouquet as is oddly the case in the illustration.

By the time this illustration appeared in the Illustrated London News in August 1911 the movement had already been active for a year—there had also been a call to action the month before involving over 100,000 workers.  The National Sailors and Firemen's Union, and the National Union of Ships' Stewards, Cooks, Butchers and Bakers, dockhands, lorry rivers,  general laborers, and on and on, were involved in the strike, which was a bitter and confrontational battle between them, scabs, police, the army, and of course the owners of the means of production and shipping means.

After the battle of greed and need, need won.