Samuel Gompers

English-born American labor leader

• Born: January 27, 1850
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: December 13, 1924
• Place of death: San Antonio, Texas

Gompers helped create the first successful national organization of trade unions in the United States, the American Federation of Labor, and led it almost continuously through four decades.

Early Life

Samuel Gompers was the son of Dutch parents who had emigrated to London in 1844. His father was a cigar-maker whose family lived in poverty. Gompers’s total formal education consisted of attendance, from the ages of six to ten, at a free school provided by the Jewish community, plus some free evening classes. Samuel left school because of the family’s poor financial condition, and, after a brief try at shoemaking, his father arranged for an apprenticeship as a cigar-maker. Gompers worked in this trade until he became a full-time union leader.

In 1863, the Gompers family followed relatives to the United States and settled in were chosen. Gompers married Sophia Julian in 1867. Although they had many children, only five lived to reach adulthood. Sophia died in 1920, and Gompers remarried the next year. His second wife, Gertrude Neuschler, was thirty years younger than he, and the marriage was an unhappy one.

Gompers was Jewish by birth; however, he neither practiced his religion nor exhibited any strong identification with other Jews. He had an attraction to fraternal orders, including the Foresters, the Odd Fellows, and the Masons. Gompers’s father had been a union member in London, and father and son joined the Cigar-makers’ Union in 1864. Gompers, however, was more involved with fraternal than with union activities until the early 1870’s.

Hard times for skilled cigar-makers ultimately impelled Gompers into active involvement with the union. The introduction of a new tool, the mold, into the trade in 1869 simplified cigar-making and threatened the position of the skilled workers. The long depression of 1873-1877 made the situation worse. By 1872, Gompers had joined Adolph Strasser and Ferdinand Laurrell in trying to remake the faltering Cigar-makers’ Union. In 1875, Gompers became president of a reorganized cigar-makers’ local union in New York City. Gompers then helped elect Strasser as president of the national union in 1877. Together, they reconstructed the Cigar-makers’ Union on the model of British trade unions. This meant high dues; financial benefits, such as a death allowance, sick pay, and out-of-work payments; and centralized control of strikes. From 1880 onward, Gompers held office in his local union, and, after 1886 and for the remainder of his life, in the national union.

In these early years, Gompers demonstrated the personal qualities that were to mark his later activities. He was pragmatic, indefatigable, honest, and totally devoted to the union cause, passing up many more lucrative job opportunities. Although short in stature and initially hampered by a stammer, Gompers became an accomplished speaker. Despite his meager formal education, he wrote extensively, including many articles as editor of the journal of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). He gave his life to the labor movement, and he expected others to accept his leadership. Gompers rarely admitted a mistake or forgave an enemy.

Life’s Work

As early as the 1870’s, Gompers believed in the importance of a national organization to represent the trade unions of the country. Earlier efforts during the 1860’s to create such an organization had failed. Gompers helped to form a weak federation of trade unions in 1881, and he was the leader, in 1886, in establishing a more powerful body, the AFL. He became its first president, and with the exception of 1894, he was reelected annually until his death. As president, Gompers developed his mature views on how the American labor movement should function, and he worked tirelessly to put them into practice.

Gompers believed that the labor movement must win acceptance by employers and the public as the representative of the workers’ legitimate interests within the existing capitalist system. Any resort to violence or support of radicalism would lead to repression by the state. Thus, the labor movement must work within the law for goals understandable to most Americans: an improved standard of living, better opportunities for one’s children, and security in one’s old age.

Gompers was familiar with socialist doctrine from his exposure to the movement during the 1870’s. Although he retained certain elements of Marxism, particularly an intense belief in class as the determinant of political behavior, by 1880, he opposed the socialists as being dangerous to the labor movement. He believed that the socialists did not represent the views of most Americans on matters such as private property. Moreover, their demand for radical change threatened to stimulate repression. Because many workers were supporters of the two major political parties, the attempts of the socialists to create an alliance between the trade unions and a radical third party were divisive. Gompers’s struggles with the socialists increased in intensity after 1890, and they were the major opposition to his leadership within the AFL.

For Gompers, legislation was not a major means for workers to win gains. Ultimately, this position flowed from his belief that politics was controlled by class interests. For Gompers, because the demands of workers would eventually conflict with the interests of other classes and because workers did not control the government and were unlikely to do so, political action would be dangerous for the labor movement. Gompers carried this idea to the point of opposing most labor legislation, because once the government intervened in the lives of workers, it would be more likely to do harm than good.

Rather than risk the danger of governmental intervention in labor matters, Gompers called upon workers to organize trade unions and to win their gains by this means. The trade union was the only institution in society fully under the control of the working class and responsive to its interests. This doctrine of voluntarism brought him into frequent conflict with social reformers, who pointed out that most workers were not members of trade unions. Strong opposition to Gompers’s views also came from important elements within the labor movement—principally the weaker unions that saw little prospect of substantial immediate gains through their own efforts and who were therefore attracted to an alliance with middle-class reformers to secure labor legislation. This trend was most apparent during the two decades prior to World War I, known as the Progressive period.

On occasion, Gompers believed that political action might be necessary for limited objectives that were unachievable by trade union action alone, or to protect the labor movement against assault. An example of the latter was the campaign by the AFL, from 1906 to 1914, to win relief from the use of the Sherman Antitrust Act against the labor movement. In such a case, however, labor had to follow a policy of rewarding friends and punishing enemies, without reference to party. Gompers argued that this practice would counteract the allegiance of workers to the two major parties and avoid the permanent commitment to any political party that Gompers wanted to avoid.

Despite his foreign birth, Gompers led the AFL in its demand for a restriction of immigration. He undoubtedly expressed the views of most trade unionists, who feared that the newcomers would accept lower wages and that the arrival of vast numbers of both skilled and unskilled workers would create an additional pool of labor that employers could use to crush strikes or to operate new machinery. The AFL consistently supported immigration restriction, beginning in 1897.

Gompers initially favored the organization of all workers. He opposed the tendency in some trade unions to bar immigrants, black people, women, or the less skilled, because by doing so a nonunion work force that could weaken the labor movement would be created. However, Gompers eventually yielded on this point and left the issue to individual unions.

Gompers also increasingly favored the organization of workers by craft, rather than through unions representing all the workers in an industry. Gompers believed that the creation of industrial unions would produce conflict with the existing craft unions, thus weakening the labor movement. Moreover, he argued that the craft unions could effectively organize the less skilled workers. In the event, however, this did not occur—and as a consequence, the scope of the American labor movement was severely limited. It took a split in the AFL during the 1930’s and the subsequent formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to make industrial unionism a significant force in the United States.

Gompers consistently supported the peaceful settlement of international disputes until 1916, when he embraced the concept of preparedness. Gompers strongly supported the war effort once the United States entered World War I in 1917. This shift in attitude reflects several of his basic beliefs. First, he contended that the nation overwhelmingly supported preparedness and then the war, and it weakened the labor movement to oppose popular opinion. Second, Gompers viewed the issue with his usual pragmatism: He correctly believed that the administration of Woodrow Wilson would cooperate with the AFL to maximize production during the war. However, the gains for the labor movement could not be sustained after the war, in the face of the severe Red scare of 1919 and the political and economic conservatism of the 1920’s. By the time of Gompers’s death in 1924, the AFL was only slightly larger than it had been prior to the war.

Significance

Samuel Gompers’s views strongly influenced the character of the American labor movement until the appearance of the CIO during the 1930’s. Gompers’s leadership was a combination of experience, tenacity, hard work, and the web of personal contacts that he had built in the labor movement. He could only persuade and implore; he could not command. Because Gompers was elected annually by the votes of the larger craft unions in the AFL, he had to represent their interests. However, Gompers was too strong a personality to stay with a labor movement that he could not support. The AFL was not exactly what Gompers might have wanted, but it did reflect many of his basic views. Thus, he was able to develop, defend, and lead the organization for more than four decades.

Bibliography

Buhle, Paul. Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999. A radical attack on Gompers and other American labor leaders. Buhle charges that labor leaders allied with corporate executives and government officials instead of representing the best interests of workers.

Dick, William M. Labor and Socialism in America: The Gompers Era. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972. Traces Gompers’s relations with the Socialists over the course of his career.

Gompers, Samuel. The Samuel Gompers Papers. Vol. 1, The Making of a Union Leader: 1850-86. Edited by Stuart B. Kaufman, et al. 9 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986-2003. Excellent documentary history that covers Gompers’s early life and career up to the AFL’s activities from 1913-1917. Other volumes to follow.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography. 2 vols. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925. Gompers’s version of his life and times. Contains valuable information, but it must be used with care. Includes photographs.

Greene, Julie. Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A study of the AFL under Gompers’s leadership, examining the organization’s political participation during the Progressive Era.

Grob, Gerald. Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865-1900. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1960. Examines Gompers’s efforts to establish the AFL in competition with the Knights of Labor.

Livesay, Harold. Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Brief, interpretive, and readable study of Gompers.

Mandel, Bernard. Samuel Gompers: A Biography. Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1963. Full-length biography that is rich in detail. Includes photographs.

Reed, Louis. The Labor Philosophy of Samuel Gompers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930. Descriptive and analytical presentation of Gompers’s views. The author sees a need for the AFL’s type of unionism in the nineteenth century, but he believes that it became outdated in the twentieth century.

Taft, Philip. The A.F. of L. in the Time of Gompers. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. Detailed account of the AFL; necessarily stresses Gompers’s role. Generally supports the policies of the AFL and its leader.