Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers was a British-born American cigar maker and labor union leader. A key figure in American labor history, Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor and served as the organization's president from 1886 to 1894, and from 1895 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize jurisdictional battles. He promoted thorough organization and collective bargaining in order to secure shorter hours and higher wages, which he considered the essential first steps to emancipating labor.
He was against the AFL member unions taking political action to "elect their friends" and "defeat their enemies". In politics he mostly supported Democrats, and occasionally local Republicans. He led the opposition to immigration from China. During World War I, Gompers and the AFL energetically supported the war effort, attempting to avert strikes and boost morale while raising wage rates and expanding membership. He strongly opposed the antiwar labor groups, especially the Industrial Workers of the World.
Early life
Gompers was born Samuel Gumpertz on January 27, 1850, in Spitalfields, a working-class area in the East End of London into a Jewish family that originally hailed from Amsterdam. He was the son of Sarah and Solomon Gumpertz, a cigar maker. At age six, Samuel was sent to the Jewish Free School to receive a basic education. His education there was brief, however, and a mere three months after his tenth birthday Gompers was sent to work as an apprentice cigar maker and earn money for his impoverished family.Gompers continued his studies in night school, learning Hebrew and studying the Talmud—a process that he later likened to studying law. While he appreciated Hebrew in his youth, he held Yiddish in low regard.
Young worker at the bench
Owing to dire financial straits, the Gompers family immigrated to the United States in 1863, settling on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Gompers's father manufactured cigars at home, assisted for the first year and half by Samuel. In his free time, the young teenager formed a debate club with his friends, gaining practical experience in public speaking and parliamentary procedure. The club drew Gompers into contact with other upwardly mobile young men of the city, including young Irish-American Peter J. McGuire, who would later play a large role in the AFL.In 1864, at age 14, Gompers joined the Cigar Makers Local Union No. 15, the English-speaking union of cigar makers in New York City. Gompers later recounted his days as a cigar maker at the bench in detail, emphasizing the place of craftsmanship in the production process:
The day after his seventeenth birthday he married his co-worker, sixteen-year-old Sophia Julian. Together they had many children, but only six survived infancy.
In 1873, Gompers moved to the cigar maker David Hirsch & Company, a "high-class shop where only the most skilled workmen were employed". Gompers later called this change of employers "one of the most important changes in my life", for at Hirsch's—a union shop operated by an émigré German socialist—Gompers came into contact with an array of German-speaking cigar makers—"men of keener mentality and wider thought than any I had met before", he recalled. Gompers learned German and absorbed many of the ideas of his shopmates, developing a particular admiration for the ideas of the former secretary of the International Workingmen's Association, Karl Laurrell. Laurrell took Gompers under his wing, challenging his more simplistic ideas and urging Gompers to put his faith in the organized economic movement of trade unionism rather than the socialist political movement.
Gompers later recalled:
Gompers complained that the socialist movement had been captured by Lassallean advocates of "political party action" rather than the "militant economic program of Marx". He warned delegates to the 1900 annual convention that when men became enthusiastic about socialism, "they usually lost interest in their union".
Cigar Makers' International Union career
Gompers was elected president of Cigar Makers' International Union Local 144 in 1875. As was the case with other unions of the day, the Cigar Maker's Union nearly collapsed in the financial crisis of 1873–77, in which unemployment skyrocketed and ready availability of desperate workers willing to labor for subsistence wages put pressure upon the gains in wages and the shortening of hours achieved in union shops. Gompers and his friend Adolph Strasser used Local 144 as a base to rebuild the Cigar Makers' Union, introducing a high dues structure and implementing programs to pay out-of-work benefits, sick benefits, and death benefits for union members in good standing.Gompers told the workers they needed to organize because wage reductions were almost a daily occurrence. He believed that 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."
He was elected second vice president of the Cigar Makers' International Union in 1886 when he was 36 and first vice president in 1896. Despite the commitment of time and energy entailed by his place as head of the American Federation of Labor, Gompers remained first vice president of the Cigar Makers until his death in December 1924.
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 reorganized into the American Federation of Labor, with Gompers as president. With the exception of the year 1895, he would remain president of the organization until his death. In 1894 he became editor of the Federation's publication, The American Federationist.Under Gompers's tutelage, the AFL coalition gradually gained strength, undermining the position previously held by the Knights of Labor, which as a result, had almost vanished by 1900. He was nearly jailed in 1911 for publishing, with John Mitchell, a boycott list, but in 1914 the Supreme Court overturned the sentence in Gompers v. Buck's Stove and Range Co..
He was the main spokesman for labor unions at the National Civic Federation after 1900.
Immigration and foreign affairs
Gompers, who had ties with the Cuban cigar workers in the U.S., called for American intervention in Cuba; he supported the resulting war with Spain in 1898. After the war, however, he joined the Anti-Imperialist League to oppose President William McKinley's plan to annex the Philippines. Mandel argues that his anti-imperialism was based on opportunistic fears of threats to labor's status from low-paid offshore workers and was founded on a sense of racial superiority to the peoples of the Philippines.By the 1890s, Gompers was planning an international federation of labor, starting with the expansion of AFL affiliates in Canada, especially Ontario. He helped the Canadian Trades and Labour Congress with money and organizers, and by 1902, the AFL dominated the Canadian union movement.
Gompers, like most labor leaders, opposed unrestricted immigration from Europe because of the fear that it might lower wages of domestic union workers. He strongly opposed all immigration from Asia because it lowered wages and, in his judgement, represented an alien culture that could not be assimilated easily into that of the U.S. Gompers bragged that the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, later renamed the American Federation of Labor, "was the first national organization which demanded the exclusion of coolies from the United States". He and the AFL strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned the immigration of Chinese, and published a pamphlet entitled "Some reasons for Chinese exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism. Which shall survive?" in 1901. The AFL was instrumental in passing immigration restriction laws from the 1890s to the 1920s, such as the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge; however, he supported Mexican membership in unions.
Major Republican leaders, such as President William McKinley and Senator Mark Hanna, made pro-labor statements. According to Gwendolyn Mink:
The escalation in labor disruptions and the expansion in union membership encouraged business leaders to promote union-employer cooperation in order to rationalize production and maximize efficiency. The AFL was the linchpin of such cooperation. Where AFL unions existed, the AFL could be called upon to manage labor conflict; equally important, the AFL was unlikely to sacrifice its organization to the volatility of industrial unionism.
During World War I Gompers was a strong supporter of the war effort. He was appointed by President Wilson to the Council of National Defense, where he chaired the Labor Advisory Board. He was also elected president of the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, which was organized to suppress anti-war propaganda among workers. He attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as an official advisor on labor issues. He was appointed chairman of the Commission on International Labour Legislation, whose recommendations for a workers' rights charter were incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles.
Post-war leadership
In addition to his work with the Commission on International Labour Legislation, Gompers was chairman of the US labor delegates at the International Federation of Trade Unions initial conference in Amsterdam, in July, 1919.Despite his support for the war, he later supported amnesty for political prisoners who were convicted under Wartime Emergency Acts. He worked with Lucy Robins Lang, who became the executive secretary of the amnesty committee. Lang and Gompers also became friends.