Samuel Gompers

In honor of Labor Day, here is an entry I wrote on Samuel Gompers for the Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice, edited by Gary Anderson and Kathryn G. Herr. Thousand Oaks, Calf: Sage Publications, 2007.

Samuel Gompers(1850-1924). American labor leader and president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), 1886 to 1895 and 1896 to 1924.

Samuel Gompers was born in London, England to a Jewish family of laborers. In 1863 after spending the first thirteen years of his life on the tough London streets, Sam immigrated to the United States with his family. They settled in the tenements of the lower east side of Manhattan and became cigar makers. In 1864 Sam joined local 144 of the United Cigar Makers Union. In 1866 Gompers married Sophia Julian, also a Jewish émigré from London. The couple had over a dozen children.

Gompers continued to roll cigars, but he increasingly devoted more time and energy in the capacity of union organizer. The cigar industry was thrown into disarray by the introduction of the cigar mold which turned the skilled cigar makers into unskilled machine operators. In 1875 Gompers became president of Local 144. The following year he called a strike in New York City against companies who utilized the cigar mold. Initially, he was successful in gaining wage increases. Part of the reason for his success rested in his use of a benefit system for striking workers financed by union dues. However, independent cigar rollers who worked out of their tenement flats also went on strike and the companies took a harder line. Unable to control the situation, the strike fizzled out in early 1878. Gompers was blacklisted and had a difficult time finding decent work. These were hard times on his growing family. Disillusioned, Gompers resigned his position in Local 144 and moved his family to Brooklyn in order to gain a fresh start. 

Two years later, he returned to the union movement and dedicated his life to the cause of improving the working and living conditions of laborers. In 1880 he was once again elected president of Local 144 and he began a battle against the unskilled tenement rollers who, he believed, were damaging the livelihood of the skilled cigar makers who worked in the factories. The wretched pay and conditions of the tenement rollers degraded the condition of all labor. His aggressive lobbying led New York State to pass a law effectively abolishing tenement cigar manufacturing. The state supreme court, however, eviscerated the law. Later the legislature passed a revised bill that met the court’s objections, but almost no municipality in the state enforced it. 

Gompers learned four key lessons during these early years of union leadership. First was the limitation of political action. Instead of obtaining laws, he focused his efforts on improving the lives of workers by gaining concrete benefits from employers through collective bargaining. As an adjunct to his belief in the near futility of political action, he believed that the labor movement needed to avoid direct political affiliation. Labor, he argued, should not mingle with politics or form a separate workingman’s party as the socialists professed. Gompers believed that political action should only occur after workers had first leveled the economic playing field. Moreover, the political crusades for causes outside of the workplace, such as the free coinage of silver, as advocated by the Knights of Labor, distracted from the central mission of improving the lives of the workers. When he did take a strong position on a political issue, such as support of Chinese exclusion, it related directly to the condition of labor. Second, his strategy required stronger unions with a benefits system to support strikers, centralized control over when a strike would be called, and a required consensus among union members approving a strike. Strikes, according to Gompers, should he planned, rational events, not a spontaneous and emotional measure. Third, he bitterly opposed dual unionism. A fractured and divided labor movement created a gap that hostile business owners could exploit. Fourthly, Gompers became convinced that trade unionism, focusing on the conditions of the skilled laborer, was the best way to lift all workers. In response to his four lessons, he proposed a federation of labor unions. The first attempt, begun in 1881, proved too weak and failed. He had better success in his second effort. In 1886 he organized the American Federation of Labor and was elected president.

His first objective as president of the AFL was the eight hour day and he called for a nationwide strike on May 1, 1886. The disaster at Haymarket square hurt the cause dearly.  The depression of 1893-1896 hit workers hard. Depression induced unemployment deprived Gompers of the dues he needed to fund his strike benefits system. Gompers received criticism for his failure to provide greater support to the Homestead and Pullman strikes and it briefly cost him the presidency of the AFL.    

After his return to the AFL presidency in 1896 he moved the union headquarters from Indianapolis, Indiana to Washington, DC to better his lobbying efforts. He became a fixture on Capitol Hill advancing the cause of labor to individual Congressman and before committees. Gompers remained president until his death in 1924. He used the force of his personality and patronage to build a reliable and effective political machine inside the AFL. To keep his fingers on the pulse of the membership, he traveled frequently, logging as much as 50,000 miles in rail travel in a year. 

After 1896 Gompers shifted attention from the eight hour day to the right of collective bargaining and increasing the membership of the AFL. He negotiated directly with business leaders and worked closely with Mark Hanna and the National Civic Federation. This course increasingly distanced him from the growing ranks of socialists and radicals. Playing on the emotions and ideals of the progressive era, Gompers presented himself to the business leaders as a sane third choice between immoral wage slavery and the radical International Workers of the World (IWW). In 1906 he supported a boycott against the Buck’s Stove Company and was charged with contempt. He refused to back down or accept a lesser charge. This act of martyrdom improved his standing among the workers and counteracted the tendency some who viewed Gompers as being too conservative. 

Despite his efforts, Gompers could not contain the growing popularity of the radical IWW or of the Socialist Party. The AFL opposed the IWW-managed strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts which lasted from 1912 to 1914.

In 1906 Gompers put fourth a Bill of Grievances. His intention was that the federal government would create something like a labor bill of rights. In 1912 Gompers welcomed the friendly overtures of Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate for president. His support of Wilson paid off when the president signed the Clayton Anti-Trust Act in 1915. Although this embodied a small part of the Bill of Grievances, he proclaimed the Clayton Act “the magna carta” of labor because it exempted unions from prosecution under the restraint of trade clause in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. 

Despite the fact that Gompers had advocated pacifism his entire life, he supported American entry into World War I in April 1917. Gompers held important positions in Wilson’s war-time government. As a member of the National Council of Defense and other committees, Gompers brokered a deal in which labor agreed to an unwritten no-strike pledge in return for an eight hour day provision, increased pay, and a minimum wage. During the war union membership skyrocketed from 2.4 million to 3.3 million workers. At the same time the radical unions who spoke out against the war became increasingly marginalized. Gompers supported prosecution of radical labor leaders under the Sedition Act. The success Gompers enjoyed and the defeat of his enemies within the labor movement seemed to vindicate his strategy and ideals. He was at the apex of his career. 

Success, however, was short lived. The end of the war also meant the end of labor’s gains. Gompers did not support the strikes of 1919 and correctly predicted that the labor movement as a whole would suffer a backlash in the court of public opinion. The election of Republican Warren G. Harding as president in 1920 marked a conservative revival and the restoration of a pro-business atmosphere in Washington. At the same time, businesses undercut unions by offering company-sponsored alternatives.  

The last four years of Gompers’s life were painful ones. The death of his wife Sophia in 1920 filled him with grief. His second marriage was an unhappy one, and, he had begun divorce proceedings before he died. He completed his autobiography, Seventy Years of Life and Labor which was published posthumously in 1925. Gompers’s one great initiative of the decade was an unsuccessful drive to create a federation of unions representing the nations of the Americas. The radicalism of the Latin American unions frustrated his attempts at moderation. He died in 1924 of Bright’s Disease while returning from a trip to Mexico.