The wealthy are obsessed with castigating our diets, forever advising the working classes on how we might be able to pay rent if we just forgoed $5 coffees and avocado toast. Georgia Kotsch, left wing California Socialist and chair of that State’s Women’s Socialist Committee, is having none of it as she hears the newest advice, that we eat dog meat.

‘Dog-Cheap Living for the Under Dog’ by Georgia Kotsch from Solidarity. Vol. 3 No. 48. November 23, 1912.

Cometh now a female person with the fifty-eighth variety for reducing the high cost of living. I am not acquainted with the lady, but judge her to be a society person because she landed from the Mauretania. Ladies’ maids, stewardesses and steerage femininity also land sometimes, I dare say, but the fact is never chronicled in the papers. They are not persons or they are not capable of saying things silly enough to be sensational.

This lady has been to Geneva as delegate to the International Peace Conference and incidentally stumbled over her discovery in Germany.

No, it is not a new style in vegetarianism, saving your empty pay envelopes, killing the baby nor making croquettes of the potato peelings.

It is dog-dog steaks, hound chops, cur-tail bouillon, blanc mangy jelly, poodle pate a la poulette, pickled pups’ feet, terriers on toast.

Hot dogs are to have become more than a name so in fact.

Exclaims the lady enthusiastically: “When I was in Munich I saw one hundred dogs sold for food in one day to poor people. Of course the dogs had been inspected before the sale, and they were perfectly fit to eat.”

I gather from the statement that the poor, the under dogs, so to speak, are to have a monopoly on dog meat, which would seem to be a case of dog eat dog.

We welcome any new acquisition. Hitherto about the only monopolies we have been able to accumulate have been poverty and hard work. A shadow, however, blurs my ecstasy. It is that the American beef trust knows a good thing when it sees it as well as does this fair tourist, and while she may be generously willing that the poor shall monopolize the juicy flea-fed roasts, Rover ragout and curried Carlo, a beef magnate is usually dogmatic in the opinion that the carnal solids and soups au gras in which the extravagant six-fifty-a-weekers riot should be well paid for and upon his thrifty mind I fear the advent of this new era of dog days will have no effect.

I could yelp with pain that this discovery should have been made in Germany–the home of the big socialist vote. Is there, alas, no tie that binds between the ballot and the dinner pail? Must we un-hitch our cart from that brightest star in the firmament of managing other people, the dog star of politics?

We know it is of the greatest importance to persons of the clawses who “arrive” on ocean liners that the “poor” may live cheaply. That is why the largest cotton mill in the world has been located in Mexico and the largest steel plant in China. Beans, rice and dog meat. Philanthropic trinity. Cheap, nutritious and profitable unto dividends.

No, thank you, dear lady, there is no possible objection upon our part to dog meat being served on the Mauretania to the clawses who consider it “perfectly fit,” but as for us we live a dog’s life as it is, and it is quite unnecessary to incorporate the friendly curs in our system. We are getting tired of a dog’s life anyhow. It is becoming so uninteresting, don’t you know, devoid as it is of travel, the means of culture and other things which go to make life worth living, that we find it more exhilarating to lay it down in starvation, in jail, on the gallows, than to sustain it upon dog just to continue a dog’s life. If you don’t know it go on another voyage of discovery to the miners and dockers of England, to Lawrence, to Lake Charles, to San Diego. And when the poor get into this dogged frame of mind it means more than an election, though an election may election may take its cue from it.

The worst thing about this new notion of ours is that it is not a blind mob spirit, but it is intelligent, disciplined and wholly determined to get along without any advice from well-fed parasites as to what we shall eat or wear or do. Watch it grow. Incidentally it will obviate the necessity for journeying to peace conferences. We poor folks are just going to quit killing each other for the benefit of the upper clawses. It’s doggone simple, isn’t it?

GEORGIA KOTSCH.

The most widely read of I.W.W. newspapers, Solidarity was published by the Industrial Workers of the World from 1909 until 1917. First produced in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and born during the McKees Rocks strike, Solidarity later moved to Cleveland, Ohio until 1917 then spent its last months in Chicago. With a circulation of around 12,000 and a readership many times that, Solidarity was instrumental in defining the Wobbly world-view at the height of their influence in the working class. It was edited over its life by A.M. Stirton, H.A. Goff, Ben H. Williams, Ralph Chaplin who also provided much of the paper’s color, and others. Like nearly all the left press it fell victim to federal repression in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/solidarity-iww/1912/v03n48-w152-nov-23-1912-Solidarity.pdf