Andrew Furuseth

• Andrew Furuseth
• Born: March 12, 1854
• Died: January 22, 1938

Leader of the seamen’s union, was born Anders Andreassen, the fourth of nine children and third son of Andreas Nilsen, a farmer. and his second wife, Marthe (Jensdatter) Andreassen. His surname Furuseth derived from the name of the cottage near Romedal, Hedmark, Norway, in which he was born. Furuseth had an older half-brother from his father’s earlier marriage. Because of the family’s poverty, Andrew Furuseth was obliged to leave home when he was eight and work for a nearby farmer. He also attended school and did considerable reading on his own. He began to work in Christiania (now Oslo) at the age of sixteen, and went to sea three years later, sailing under many “flags On ship he observed labor conditions that inspired his future activities. He saw men “beaten into insensibility ... hunted down and thrown into the ship’s hold in chains.”

Furuseth arrived on the West Coast of the United States in 1880, and he shipped out intermittently from its ports until 1891, when he quit life as an active seaman. He began to organize seamen actively, becoming secretary of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific in 1887, one year after the union had held its first big strike. From that time, he devoted his life to the improvement of shipboard labor conditions, through both economic and legislative action. Furuseth perceived the sailor as a serf on the ship; because sailors could be arrested, imprisoned, and deprived of their wages for leaving the ship prior to the completion of their voyage, strike action was made difficult or impossible.

Furuseth became legislative agent in Washington, D.C., for the seamen’s unions and later for the American Federation of Labor (AFL), whose president, Samuel Gompers, became a close friend. The first fruits of his efforts to protect seamen came with the passage in 1895 of the Maguire Act, and then in 1898 of the White Act, which abolished corporal punishment and legislated other reforms. For years Furuseth, with the support of Gompers and the AFL, fought for the enactment of the La Follette Seamen’s Act, which abolished imprisonment for desertion, gave seamen on American vessels the right to demand half the wages they had earned to date in any loading or discharging port of the United States, and instituted other protective changes.

Furuseth had interested Senator Robert M. La Follette in the plight of seamen, thus beginning a long friendship with both the senator and his son and future senator, Robert M. La Follette Jr. Both American and foreign shipping interests fought La Follette’s bill vigorously. Defending the bill, Furuseth became expert in American and foreign shipping statutes and international law. The bill finally passed Congress in 1912 but was vetoed by President William Howard Taft. President Woodrow Wilson signed the measure in 1915, a landmark in legislation for Furuseth’s constituency.

President of the International Seamen’s Union from 1908 until he died, and a frequent delegate to international conferences of seamen’s unions, Furuseth was not successful until 1920 in winning European support for the protection of the sailors’ rights that the La Follette Act had incorporated; many socialists in European trade unions had argued that this approach would threaten discipline aboard ship. Furuseth opposed the entry of America into World War I, but once the country was at war he called on seamen to support the war patriotically and was instrumental in the implementation of a no-strike policy by his union.

Working with Gompers and the AFL, he became involved in general labor lobbying, helping to draft the “Bill of Grievances” as a basis for labor activity in the 1906 elections. He felt that the government might not be able to enforce the 1914 Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which Gompers called “Labor’s Magna Charta,” but he helped to draft and lobby for the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932, which struck a blow at the kind of injunction by which Furuseth and the sailors had been victimized.

Furuseth’s life-style was as idealistic as his work. He told Senator La Follette Jr. that “a Union official, to be efficient, must have nothing of his own and want nothing for himself.” Paid the salary of an able-bodied seaman as union president, he lived for a large part of his life in a thirty-dollar-a-month hotel room in Washington. He never married. In 1934 he gave most of his life savings to his sister to prevent the foreclosure of her Wisconsin farm. His initial voyage as a first-class passenger came in 1913 when President Wilson appointed him as United States representative to the London Conference on Safety at Sea. “Logical, rugged, terse, quaint and fervid with conviction,” as Senator La Follette Jr. said of him, Furuseth exemplified a kind of committed idealistic labor leader who could work with Gompers and the labor officialdom and be pragmatically effective as a lobbyist in effecting significant legislation.

Furuseth’s response in a San Francisco court to a charge of defying an injunction attests to the validity of La Follette’s estimate. “You can put me in jail,” Furuseth declared, “but you cannot give me narrower quarters than as a seaman I have always had. You cannot give me coarser food than I have always eaten. You cannot make me lonelier than I have always been.”

“He had no ties of the flesh,” Gompers said, “to interfere with the absolute dedication of his time to the seaman’s cause.” Furuseth died at eighty-three in Washington, after a year-long illness. His ashes were scattered over the Atlantic. A bust of Furuseth by the sculptor Jo Davidson is located in San Francisco.

Furuseth’s union proved to be internally weak and it crumbled readily when the National Maritime Union was organized at sea in the 1930s and 1940s.

A collection of Furuseth’s letters and other personal material is in the possession of Silas B. Axtell in New York City. There are letters by Furuseth in the Woodrow Wilson Papers in the Library of Congress and in the La Follette Family Papers at the Wisconsin State Historical Society and the Library of Congress. For biographical material see S. B. Axtell, ed., A Symposium on Andrew Furuseth (1945); P. S. Taylor, The Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (1923); S. Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, 2 vols. (1925); B. C. La Follette and F. La Follette, Robert M. LaFollette (1953): R M. La Follette, Autobiography (1960); G. W. Norris, Figuring Liberal (1945); F. H. La Guardia, Making of an Insurgent (1960); A. S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (1956): American Federationist, September 1945; The New York Times, January 23, 1938. See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1958).