Samuel Gompers

Samuel Gompers
File:SamuelGompers.jpeg Samuel Gompers
Born
January 26 1850 London, England
Died
December 13 1924 San Antonio, Texas

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Samuel Gompers (January 26 1850 - December 13 1924) was an American labor and political leader. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and held the position as president of the organization for all but one year from 1886 until his death in 1924.

Biography

Early life

Gompers was born on January 26 1850 in London, England into a Jewish family which had recently arrived from Holland. He left school at age ten to apprentice first as a shoemaker then as a cigar maker. The family emigrated to New York City in 1863, settling on the Lower East Side of the city. He married Sophia Julian in 1867 and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1872.

Involvement in labor unions

In 1864 he joined the Cigar Makers' International Union. He was self educated, aided by the non-stop discussions among the workers rolling cigars. "In fact," said Gompers, "these discussions in the shops were more like public debating societies or what we call these days 'labor forums'" (Seventy Years, I, 81). The coworkers made Gompers their reader—he devoured newspapers and German-language socialist pamphlets. In 1877 the union had collapsed and Gompers and his friend Adolph Strasser using local 144 as a base rebuilt the Cigar Makers' Union, introduced a hierarchical structure, and implemented programs for strike and pension funds, which were paid for by charging high membership dues. He told the workers they needed to organize because wage reductions were almost a daily occurrence. The capitalists were only interested in profits, "and the time has come when we must assert our rights as workingmen. Every one present has the sad experience, that we are powerless in an isolated condition, while the capitalists are united; therefore it is the duty of every Cigar Maker to join the organization. . . . One of the main objects of the organization," he concluded, "is the elevation of the lowest paid worker to the standard of the highest, and in time we may secure for every person in the trade an existence worthy of human beings." [Mandel p. 22]

His philosophy of labor unions centered on economic ends for workers, such as higher wages, benefits, and job security. His goal was to achieve these without political action or affiliation by the union, but rather through the use of strikes, boycotts, etc.

Gompers viewed unions as simply the labor component of a business, neither superior nor inferior to the management structure. This belief led to the development of procedures for collective bargaining and contracts between labor and management which are still in use today.

Gompers had the formula for militant unionism that could survive lost strikes. The workers had to believe the union would increase the bottom line. The success of this approach led to its adoption by many other unions throughout the late 1800s. The rival Knights of Labor had a grander vision but did not focus on the incomes of the members and it collapsed.

Leading the AFL

Gompers helped found the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1881 as a coalition of like-minded unions. In 1886 it was reorganized into the American Federation of Labor, with Gompers as its president. He would remain president of the organization until his death (with the exception of one year, 1895).

Under Gompers's tutelage the AFL coalition gradually gained strength, undermining that previously held by the Knights of Labor, which as a result had almost vanished by 1900.

Gompers's insistence against political affiliation and radicalism in the AFL, combined with its tendency to cater to skilled labor over unskilled, led indirectly to the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World organization in 1905, which tried with limited success to organize some unskilled workers.

Political involvement

Samuel Gompers portrait

During the First World War Gompers was a strong supporter of the war effort. He was appointed by President Wilson to the powerful Council of National Defense, where he instituted the War Committee on Labor. He was an attendee at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as a labor advisor.

Gompers contributed to the yellow peril of the era claiming, in reference to the Chinese Exclusion Act, "...[t]he superior whites had to exclude the inferior Asiatics, by law, or, if necessary, by force of arms."

Death and Legacy

Gompers died in San Antonio, Texas, aged 74, and is buried at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

The United States Navy destroyer tender USS Samuel Gompers(AD-37) was named in his honor. An impressive monument honoring Gompers resides in Gompers Square on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington D.C.

Primary Sources

• Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (1925, 1985 reprint)
• The Samuel Gompers Papers (1986- ) definitive multivolume edition of all important letters to and from Gompers. 9 volumes have been completed to 1917. The index is online. For details and more on Gompers see [1]

Scholarly Secondary Sources

• Greene, Julie . Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917 (1998)
• Livesay, Harold C. Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America (1993)
• Mandel, Bernard. Samuel Gompers: A Biography (1963)
• Taft, Philip. The A.F. of L. in the Time of Gompers (1957)

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