Samuel Gompers
27 January 1850 - 13 December 1924
First President of the American Federation of Labor, 1886 - 1924
"Father of American Labor"
Autobiography & Photos
US Department of Labor Hall of Fame entry (Off-site link)

    Samuel Gompers, after whom many things were named (USS Samuel Gompers [AD-37], Gompers Park on Chicago's Northwest Side, and several schools across the nation, to name a few), was one of the founders of the American Federation of Labor in 1886. He was elected president, a position he held, except for one year, until his death 38 years later.

    Samuel Gompers was the first president of the American Federation of Labor, and remained president for almost forty years,  between 1886 and 1924, and the nation's  leading trade unionist and labor spokesman.  A cigarmaker by trade, an intellectual by nature, and a skilled organizer and administrator by vocation, Gompers dedicated his life to the working class.  He was a passionate advocate of  shorter hours, higher wages, safe and sanitary working conditions, and workplace democracy.   And he believed that strong, well-financed trade unions would humanize industry, protect workers' interests, and in the process, create opportunities for workers to educate themselves and claim a larger role in industrial society.  Essentially, Gompers promoted the idea that economic organization was the key to a more satisfying life, in and out of the shop.

    Samuel Gompers was the paramount advocate of "pure and simple business", stressing cooperation between management and labor, rather than strike actions, as a means of obtaining labor demands. Under his leadership, the American Federation of Labor grew from a handful of struggling labor unions to become the dominant organization within the Labor Movement in the United States and Canada.

    Samuel Gompers was born in London, England on January 27, 1850. His parents were poor immigrant Jews from Holland, and he was the oldest of five sons.

    Although he had been a good student at the Jews' Free School, after only four years of elementary school education, he was already learning to make a living, apprenticing first to a shoemaker at age 10 and then apprenticing to a cigar maker in the East End of London, where he learned the trade that he followed for a quarter of a century.

     In 1863 his family emigrated to the United States in 1863 and settled into an apartment on the Lower East Side, New York City.  Gompers and his father worked as cigar makers.  There he later became active in the social clubs, fraternal orders, and labor unions of the Lower East Side, then teeming with emigrants from Europe. Unlike many of the other emigrants who were the bearers of European revolutionary traditions, Gompers's ideas were moderate, and he exerted a powerful influence in the evolution of American labor unionism from radicalism to conservatism.

    Life was difficult in the crowded slums of New York. There were a few relatively large cigar making shops, perhaps, with as many as 75 employees; but much of the work was done in a thousand or more sweatshops, often the same crowded apartments where the workers lived. Thousands of little children worked in New York sweatshops and factories, as they helped their parents eke out a living.)

    He joined the Cigar Makers' International Union in 1864.  Before too long he was earning his living in cigar shops around the city.

    He married Sophia Julian in 1867 at the age of 17.  At 18, he had become a father.  Together they had five children.  Gompers was already recognized as a skilled and valuable cigar roller by employers, and an aggressive and confident spokeman by his shopmates.

   Ten years after  Gompers became a member of the Cigar Maker's International Union, he helped found Local 144 of the international union, of which he remained a member for the rest of his life. He was elected president of Local 144 in 1874.

    In the 1870's, he was also a student of socialism.  With colleagues like P. J. McGuire, Hugh McGregor, Adolph Strasser, and J. P. McDonnell (all of whom would become longtime associates) he participated in meetings of the International Workingmen's Association, the Economic and Sociological Club, and the Workingmen's Party of the United States. The experience strengthened what came to be called his "pure and simple" approach to trade unionism: that economic class power preceded political class power, and that it would be achieved through trade organization based on practical working-class issues.

    After attending a lecture in 1879 given by Thomas Hughes the British M.P. and Christian Socialist, Gompers became an active trade unionist and helped to reorganize the Cigarmaker's Union.

    In 1881 Gompers was sent as the delegate of the Cigar Makers to a conference of various unions which created a loose confederation to be called the Federation of Organized Trades and Labour Unions (FOTLU) of the United States of America and Canada, which was established solely to influence legislation in behalf of labor - an annual congress of national unions and local labor councils designed to educate the public on working-class issues, prepare labor legislation, and lobby the U.S. Congress to act on it.  This organisation was based on the structure of the Trade Union Congress in Britain. Gompers was one of the chief founders, and although without the title of President, as head of the legislative committee, Gompers became its leader, practically speaking; but the organization was structurally weak and ineffective.

    As an officer of FOTLU from 1881 to 1886, Gompers worked for compulsory school attendance laws, the regulation of child labor, the eight hour day, and the mechanics' lien law, among others. He soon learned, though, that the new federation had neither the money nor the authority to do much more than talk about these issues. So in 1886 he supported P. J. McGuire's call to organize an "American Federation or Alliance of all National and International Trades Unions to aid and assist each other . . . to secure national legislation in the interest of working people and influence public opinion . . . in favor of Organized Labor."

    And so, the need for close cooperation among like-minded labor organizations being abundantly evident; the organization was reconstituted in 1886 as the American Federation of Labor.  Gompers was elected president of the American Federation of Labor in December 1886 and held that position for the rest of his life, save for one year -- his "sabbatical" in 1895 -- when John McBride, president of the United Mine Workers of America, replaced him. His office was not much more than an 8x10 room in a shed. His son was the office boy. There was $160 in the treasury. As Gompers said, it was "much work, little pay, and very little honor."

    Four years later, the AFL represented 250,000 workers. In two more years the number had grown to over one million. Under Gompers, the guiding principle was to concentrate on collective bargaining with employers, and on legislative issues directly affecting the job. Broad social goals and political entanglements were left to others.

    Gompers also served as vice president of the CMIU (1886-1924) and played an active role in the New York State Workingmen's Assembly. Whether he was testifying before Congress or state legislatures on the importance of labor laws, rallying his troops at a mass meeting, or negotiating strike settlements, Gompers proved to be a capable, dependable, and unflappable spokesman for the trade union movement, well-known and respected for his integrity, his generosity, and his willingness to speak truth to power.

    Gompers had his opponents, of course, both within and outside the labor movement.  On his left were those who believed him to be more interested in personal power than in moving the masses forward. To them, his pure and simple strategy was no match for corporate power, and they dismissed the AFL as a narrow, conservative organization designed to serve skilled workers only. On his right were those who considered him a foreign-born trouble maker determined to destroy property rights and individual initiative.

    Gompers helped build the foundations of the modern American labor movement, with a group of sympathetic employers that worked with the National Civic Federation in 1900. They did this because they wanted to reduce discord and strikes. He also helped build the modern labor movement in the United States.

    Samuel Gompers dedicated his life to working for a new order of things: a revolution based on the evolution of trade unionism, the progressive improvement of working and living conditions, and the emergence of the working class as an equal partner in industrial life. He had no illusions about the task, though, as he made clear in a speech in 1900: "Conscious that we are right in our movement to secure better conditions for the workers; conscious that we are entitled to it, to a continual larger share of the ever-increasing production and the productivity of the laborer, we shall continue the struggle for better homes and better surroundings. We want your co-operation to attain those ends. We want the good will and the co-operation of all; but if that is withheld from us, we shall conclude to go on organizing and struggling for that goal in spite of the opposition."

    Whatever their complaints, though, Gompers made no apologies to his critics. "The ground-work principle of America's labor movement has been to recognize that first things must come first," he explained in 1911. "Our mission has been the protection of the wage-worker, now; to increase his wages; to cut hours off the long workday, which was killing him; to improve the safety and the sanitary conditions of the workshop; to free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery."

    "But while our Federation has thus been conservative," he admitted, "it has ever had its face turned toward whatever reforms, in politics or economics, could be of direct and obvious benefit to the working classes. It has never given up its birthright for a mess of pottage.  It has pursued its avowed policy with the conviction that if the lesser and immediate demands of labor could not be obtained now from society as it is, it would be mere dreaming to preach and pursue . . . a new society constructed from rainbow materials -- a system of society on which even the dreamers themselves have never agreed."

    Gompers was the chief exponent of the policies that gave the AFL its character as a conservative federation of autonomous craft unions. He resisted efforts of socialist infiltration and control of the federation and fought the openly antagonistic and more militant Industrial Workers of the World. Gompers used the growing influence of the AFL to secure the passage of federal and state legislation favorable to labor. He formulated the federation's policy of urging its members to support candidates for public office, regardless of political affiliation, who were considered friendly to labor.

    Gompers supported United States involvement in the First World War and during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Gompers a member of the Advisory Committee to the Council of National Defense.

    Samuel Gompers is known for one of his greatest achievements. It was regarding the passage of the Clayton Acts labor section in 1914.

    After the war, on a tour of Europe in 1918, when that continent was experiencing revolutionary upheavals, Gompers was hailed as a statesmanlike labor leader by the heads of various governments, but encountered great hostility from masses of workers.

    In 1919 Woodrow Wilson appointed Gompers as a member of the Commission on International Labour Legislation at the Versailles Peace Conference.  At the Peace Conference of 1919, Gompers served as chairman of the Commission on International Labor Legislation, where he was instrumental in the creation of the International Labor Organization (ILO) under the League of Nations..

    Returning to the U.S., he later played a leading role in establishing the influence of the federation in various Latin American countries.

    Gompers held conservative political views and believed that trade unionists should accept the economic system. As a result, a rival, more radical organisation, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was formed. However, numbers of members remained small compared to American Federation of Labour.

    When Sophia Julian died in 1920 he became so lonely that within the year he remarried Grace Neuschler in 1921. They did not have any children together but supported his five other kids.

    He was a supporter of trade unionism in Mexico and, though elderly and in failing health, he went to Mexico City to attend the inauguration of Mexico's reform President Calles; and, also, the Congress of the Pan-American Federation of Labor. It was at the Congress that his final collapse occurred. He was rushed to a hospital in San Antonio, Texas where he died on December 13, 1924.

    His farewell message, which he gave to a colleague two days before his death, summed up his life's work: "Say to them that as I kept the faith I expect they will keep the faith...  Say to them that a union man carrying a card is not a good citizen unless he upholds the institutions of our great country, and a poor citizen... if he upholds the institutions of our country and forgets the obligations of his trade association."

    His autobiography, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (1925), was published after his death.

The first home that I remember was in a three-story brick house in London. Like all the other houses in the neighborhood, ours had worn grey with the passing years. My mother and father lived on the ground floor. My paternal grandparents lived in the second story with their four girls and one boy just ten months older than I. On the top floor lived Mr. Lellyveld, who had two sons, Ascher and Barnett.

Just across the street from our house was a silk factory. That section of London is known as Spitalfields, then about a mile from the London Ghetto. Our apartment consisted of one large front room and a little back room which we used in the winter for storage and for things which had to be kept cool. In the summertime father constructed bunks in the little room and we children slept there. In the wintertime we all slept in the big room - father and mother in the big bed that had a curtain around it, and we children on the floor in a trundle bed that was rolled under the big bed in the daytime. I was the oldest. Beside me there were Henry, Alexander, Lewis and Jack. The front room was sitting-room, bedroom, dining-room, and kitchen the centre of our busy little lives as we learned the ways of childhood in East Side, London.

My parents were both Hollanders born in Amsterdam. On the paternal side the family name Gompers, came originally and many years before, from Austrian origin where it was spelled Gompertz and, in some instances, Gomperz. On the maternal side the family name was Rood. During the Napoleonic rule in Holland, a French soldier fell in love with a Dutch girl. They were married, lived and died in Holland, surrounded by a large family. That was the beginning of our Dutch branch of Roods.
 

(2) Samuel Gompers left school when he was ten years old.

When six years of age I was sent to the Jewish Free School in Bell Lane and learned rapidly all that was taught there - reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. Mr. Moses Angel was head teacher. My immediate teacher was Mr. Speyer. When I was ten years and three months I had to go to work. When I left school I stood third to the highest in my classes. As I made rapid progress in my studies, the teacher told father that it was wrong to rob me of an education, particularly as I showed ability. But father could not do otherwise. My father found it extremely difficult to support a family of six children on the scanty wages earned at the cigarmaking trade.
 

(3) Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labour (1925)

It became harder and harder to get along as our family increased and expenses grew. London seemed to offer no response to our efforts towards betterment. About this time we began to hear more and more about the United States. The great struggle against human slavery which was convulsing America was of vital interest to wage-earners who were everywhere struggling for industrial opportunity and freedom. My work in the cigar factory gave me a chance to hear the men discuss this issue. Youngster that I was, I was absorbed in listening to this talk and made my little contribution by singing with all the feeling in my little heart the popular songs, "The Slave Ship" and "To the West, To the West, To the Land of the Free".

The sympathy of English wage-earners was with the cause of the Union which was bound up with the anti-slavery struggle. We heard the story from the Abolitionists. This was true of all the workers of Great Britain even though their own industrial welfare was menaced as was that of the textile workers who were dependent upon cotton shipped from our southern ports. Even against their own economic interests the British textile workers were opposed to the Palmerston diplomatic policy of recognition for the Confederacy and the plan of the British and French governments to raise the blockage of the cotton ports.
 

(4) Samuel Gompers and his family emigrated to the United States in the summer of 1863.

The Cigarmakers' Society Union of England, whose members were frequently unemployed and suffering, established an emigration fund - that is, instead of paying the members unemployment benefits, a sum of money was granted to help passage from England to the United States. The sum was not large, between five and ten pounds. This was a very practical method which benefited both the emigrants and those who remained by decreasing the number seeking work in their trade. After much discussion and consultation father decided to go to the New World. He had friends in New York City and a brother-in-law who proceeded us by six months to whom father wrote we were coming.

There came busy days in which my mother gathered together and packed our household belongings. Father secured passage on the City of London, a sailing vessel which left Chadwick Basin, June 10, 1863, and reached Castle Garden, July 29, 1863, after seven weeks and one day.

Our ship was the old type of sailing vessel. We had none of the modern comforts of travel. The sleeping quarters were cramped and we had to had to do our own cooking in the gallery of the boat. Mother had provided salt beef and other preserved meats and fish, dried vegetables, and red pickled cabbage which I remember most vividly. We were all seasick except father, mother the longest of all. Father had to do all the cooking in the meanwhile and take care of the sick. There was a Negro man employed on the boat who was very kind in many ways to help father. Father did not know much about cooking.

When we reached New York we landed at the old Castle Garden of lower Manhattan, now the Aquarium, where we were met by relatives and friends. As we were standing in a little group, the Negro who had befriended father on the trip, came off the boat. Father was grateful and as a matter of courtesy, shook hands with him and gave him his blessing. Now it happened that the draft and negro rights were convulsing New York City. Only that very day Negroes had been chased and hanged by mobs. The onlookers, not understanding, grew very much excited over father's shaking hands with this Negro. A crowd gathered round and threatened to hang both father and the Negro to the lamp-post.
 

(5) Samuel Gompers and his family settled in New York after arriving in 1863.

New York in those days had no skyscrapers. Horse tram cars ran across town. The buildings were generally small and unpretentious. Then, as now, the East Side was the home of the latest immigrants who settled in colonies making the Irish, the German, the English, and the Dutch, and the Ghetto districts. Father began making cigars at home and I helped him. Our house was just opposite a slaughter house. All day long we could see the animals being driven into the slaughter-pens and could hear the turmoil and the cries of the animals. The neighborhood was filled with the penetrating, sickening odor.
 

(6) Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labour (1925)

I remember very vividly the morning that brought the news of President Lincoln's death. It was Saturday. Like some cataclysm came the report that an assassin had struck down the great Emancipator. It seemed to me that some great power for good had gone out of the world. A master mind had been taken at a time when most needed. I cried and cried all that day and for days I was so depressed that I could scarcely force myself to work. I had heard Lincoln talked about in London. In the minds of the working people of the world Lincoln symbolized the spirit of humanity - the great leader of the struggle for human freedom.
 

(7) Samuel Gompers began involved in the National Union of Cigarmakers soon after arriving in the United States in 1863.

There was a vast difference between those early unions, and the unions of today. Then there was no law or order. A union was a more or less definite group of people employed in the same trade who might help each other out in special difficulties with the employer. There was no sustained effort to secure fair wages through collective bargaining. The employer fixed wages until he shoved them down to the point where human endurance revolted. It was late in the fall of 1879 my attention was called to a Cooper Union meeting at which two Englishmen, A.J. Mundella and Thomas Hughes, M.P., were to speak on the scope and influence of trade unions. Mundella was a manufacturer of Nottingham who established the first voluntary board of conciliation and arbitration for the hosiery and glove trades of that locality. My sense of injustice was stirring and I began going to more labour meetings, seeking the way out.
 

(8) Samuel Gompers was a staunch opponent of socialism. He explained his views in his book, Seventy Years of Life and Labour (1925)

The Socialists in our organization formed an inner clique for the purpose of controlling elections and voters upon legislation. Socialist publications, Socialist organizers and propagandists spread the poison of hatred and discontent, thus weakening confidence in the integrity of the officers of the union. According to my experience professional Socialism accompanies instability of judgment or intellectual undependability caused by an inability to recognize facts. The conspicuous Socialists have uniformly been men whose minds have been warped by a great failure or who found it absolutely impossible to understand fundamentals necessary to developing practical plans for industrial betterment.

(9) Samuel Gompers, letter to Judge Peter Grossup concerning the imprisonment of Eugene Debs during the Pullman Strike (14th August, 1894)

You know, or ought to know, that the introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands faster than the new industries are founded, and yet, machinery certainly should not be either destroyed or hampered in its full development. The labourer is a man, he is made warm by the same sun and made cold - yes, colder - by the same winter as you are. He has a heart and brain, and feels and knows the human and paternal instinct for those depending upon him as keenly as do you.

What shall the workers do? Sit idly by and see the vast resources of nature and the human mind be utilized and monopolized for the benefit of the comparative few? No. The labourers must learn to think and act, and soon, too, that only by the power of organization and common concert of action can either their manhood be maintained, their rights to life be recognized, and liberty and rights secured.
 

(10) In 1903 Samuel Gompers was involved in helping William Walling and Mary Kenny O'Sullivan in establishing the Women's Trade Union League.

William English Walling - a longtime friend - came to the Boston convention full of enthusiasm for a league of women workers. Mary Kenny O'Sullivan's quick mind caught the possibilities of the suggestion. When they submitted to me a proposal, I gave it most hearty approval and participated in the necessary conferences. Under the leadership of Jane Addams and Mary McDowell, the movement became of national importance. In more recent years, Mrs. Raymond Robins, as president of the league, exercised good influence in promoting the organization of women workers into trade unions.
 

(11) Samuel Gompers, Schemes to Distribute Immigrants (1912)

More than 2,00,000 Italians have come to the United States in the last ten years: 1901-1905, 974,236; 1906-1910, 1,129,975. Here from a single nationality has been the revenue of $70,000,000 to the steamships. If a million Italians have gone back, they have paid for transportation thirty to forty million dollars more. The advertisements in the New York daily Italian newspapers, of which there are no less than six, are a revelation of the financial interests which are maintained by the Italians in the metropolis who are not yet sufficiently Americanized to depend on American newspapers for their daily reading. The revenues of any one of these newspapers would be reduced by a good percentage, perhaps below the sustaining point, if the steamship advertisements were withdrawn. The bankers, the doctors, the transportation agents, the dealers in Italian food supplies are all enterprising advertisers.
 

(12) Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labour (1925)

The next big issue between the Socialists and the trade unionists grew out of the World War. Socialists were doctrinaire internationalists who declared that the ties which bound together the working class of the world were stronger than the ties of country. They were everywhere on record against war. They were always against their own government. Germany was the home of Socialism, and Socialists were adverse to making war on Germany. They refused to believe the stories of German atrocities and started pro-German propaganda.

Photos

Samuel Gompers - 1880's	Samuel Gompers - WWI Poster (ca 1917) UCLA	Samuel Gompers & Miss Philadelphia (1923)
Samuel Gompers -1924	Samuel Gompers (Pre 1900's)	Samuel Gompers with Sophia & Sadie Gompers  (ca. 1917) UCLA
	Time Magazine - 1923 October 01
Samuel Gompers Memorial Massachusetts Avenue at 11th Street, NW, Washington DC

Gompers -- rated the greatest labor leader in American history by the presidents of the nation's leading unions -- believed that government activism was harmful to the working man. In 1915 he wrote, "Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment. In the last analysis the welfare of the workers depends upon their own private initiative." He applied that belief consistently to issue after issue.

Gompers opposed the creation of state health and unemployment insurance programs, welfare initiatives and minimum wage and eight-hour-day legislation. That is a far cry from the sentiments of Sweeney, who wishes to see government's role increased in virtually every area.

During the budget debate last year he boasted that the AFL-CIO had "generated over 500,000 telephone calls to members of Congress carrying our core message," which included a call for "no cuts in Medicare." He might have believed that was the right thing to do, but it is unlikely that Gompers would have. In 1916 Gompers stated that "compulsory sickness insurance for workers is based upon the theory that they are unable to look after their own interests and the state must interpose its authority and wisdom and assume the relation of parent or guardian. There is something in the very suggestion of this relationship and this policy that is repugnant to free-born citizens."

As for unemployment insurance, Gompers argued that "when the government undertakes the payment of money to those who are unemployed, it places in the power of the government the lives and the work and the freedom of the workers." State unemployment insurance programs, Gompers concluded, "are not advocated for the good of the workers. They are advocated by persons who know nothing of the hopes and aspirations of labor which desires opportunities for work, not for compulsory unemployment insurance."

Gompers similarly opposed the creation of welfare programs -- programs that, in a 1995 statement entitled "The Attack on Working Americans," the AFL-CIO Executive Council argued "have proved their worth in protecting the most vulnerable Americans against hunger and starvation." Gompers believed that "social insurance cannot remove or prevent poverty." Moreover, he argued that welfare is "undemocratic" because it tends "to fix the citizens of the country into two classes, and a long established system would tend to make these classes rigid."

In addition to lobbying for increased funding for social programs, the AFL-CIO is currently pushing for greater economic and social regulation. On Sweeney's wish list are stricter health and safety laws, air quality standards and waste disposal regulations. Gompers undoubtedly would have questioned the wisdom of those desires.

To him, most state regulation was not only futile but also counterproductive. In a 1923 address he stated, "The continuing clamor for extension of state regulatory powers under the guise of reform and deliverance from evil can but lead into greater confusion and more hopeless entanglements." He struck a similar note in an article for the American Federationist, where he argued that "regulation of industrial relations is not a policy to be entered upon lightly -- establishment of regulation for one type of relation necessitates regulating of another and then another, until finally all industrial life grows rigid with regulations."

And when asked in 1916 if he favored an eight-hour-day law he remarked, "Do you know where the eight-hour law in California originated? It was started by the Socialist Party of California." For Gompers, a lifelong critic of the American Socialist and Communist Parties, that seemed to be a more than sufficient response.

Sweeney and other AFL-CIO leaders may believe that big government is the solution to all of America's ills. But Samuel Gompers, whose tireless efforts established labor as a permanent force in this country, certainly did not.

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