Samuel
Gompers
was born in London, England,
on 27th January, 1850. His emigrated to the United States in 1863
and the family settled in New York City.
Gompers and his father worked as cigar makers. 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 the Federation of Trades and Labour Unions (ATLU) was founded.
This organisation was based on the structure of the Trade
Union Congress in Britain. Gompers was the chairman of this new
organisation and when it changed its name to the American
Federation of Labour in 1886, he was elected its first president.
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.
Gompers supported United States involvement
in the First World War and became a member of
the Council of National Defense. In 1919 Woodrow
Wilson appointed Gompers as a member of the Commission on International
Labour Legislation at the Versailles Peace
Conference.
Samuel Gompers, who was president
of the American Federation
of Labour from 1886-1894 and 1896-1924, died in San Antonio,
Texas on 13th December, 1924. His autobiography,
Seventy Years of Life and Labor (1925), was published
after his death.
(1)
Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labour (1925)
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, evidence given before a Senate Committee (1913)
With the power of wealth
and concentration of industry, the tremendous development in machinery,
and power to drive machinery; with the improvement of the tools of
labor, so that they are wonderfully tremendous machines, and with
these all on the one hand; with labor, the workers, performing a given
part of the whole product, probably an infinitesimal part, doing the
thing a thousand or thousands of times over and over again in a day
- labor divided and subdivided and specialized, so that a working
man is but a mere cog in the great industrial modern plant; his individuality
lost, alienated from the tools of labor; with concentration of wealth,
concentration of industry, I wonder whether any of us can imagine
what would be the actual condition of the working people of our country
today without their organizations to protect them.
What would be the condition
of the working men in our country in our day by acting as individuals
with as great a concentrated wealth and industry on every hand? It
is horrifying even to permit the imagination full swing to think what
would be possible. Slavery!Slavery! Demoralized, degraded slavery.
Nothing better.
To say that the men and
women of labor may not do jointly what they may do in the exercise
of their individual lawful right is an anomaly.
Gentlemen, the individual
working men accept conditions as they are, until driven to desperation.
Then they throw down their tools and strike, without experience, without
the knowledge of how best to conduct themselves, and to secure the
relief which they need and demand. But the working men know where
to go. It may be true that there are some workers who are opposed
to organizations of labor, but they are very, very few. Those that
do not come to us are either too helpless or too ignorant. But let
no man fool himself. When in sheer desperation, driven to the last,
where they can no longer submit to the lording of the master, they
strike, they quit, and all the pent up anger gives vent in fury -
they then come to us and ask us for our advice and our assistance,
and we give it to them, whether they were indifferent to us or whether
they were antagonistic to us. They are never questioned. We come to
their assistance as best we can.
I do not pretend to say
that with organizations of labor that strikes are entirely eliminated.
I do not fool myself with any such beliefs, and I would not insult
the intelligence of any other man by pretending to believe, much less
to make, such a statement. But this one fact is sure: That in all
the world there is now an unrest among the people, and primarily among
the working people, with the present position they occupy in society
- their unrequited toil; the attitude of irresponsibility of the employer
toward the workers; the bitter antagonism to any effective attempt
on the part of workers to protect themselves against aggression and
greed, and the failure of employers to realize their responsibilities.
The demand of the workers
is to be larger sharers in the product of their labor. In different
countries they have unrest and this dissatisfaction takes on different
forms. In our own country it takes on the form of the trade-union
movement, as exemplified by the American Federation of Labor - a movement
and a federation founded as a replica of the American governments,
both the Federal Government and the State and city governments. It
is formed to conform as nearly as it is possible to the American idea,
and to have the crystallized unrest and discontent manifested under
the Anglo-Saxon or American fashion; to press it home to the employers;
to press it home to the lawmakers; to press it home to the law administrators,
and possibly to impregnate and influence the minds of judges who may
accord to us the rights which are essential to our well-being rather
than guaranteeing to us the academic rights which are fruitless
and which we do not want.
(13)
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.
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