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Debate between Samuel Gompers and Henry J. Allen at Carnegie hall, New York, May 28, 1920
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About the Book
Books dealing with State and local histo...)
About the Book
Books dealing with State and local histories in the United States may examine a city, a suburb, a municipality, a region, a community, an association, a church group, or the entire State. In fact, local history, is the largest category of history publishing. Often being of the community that is the subject of the book, local or regional historians can provide a specific insight into their subject matter.
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The next decades up to World War 1 saw large migrations from Europe and massive growth in the US economy. The US had a short but decisive influence on World War 1, suffered during the Great Depression, and had an even greater decisive influence on the outcome of World War 2. The US then engaged in a Cold War with its military and ideological adversary, the USSR, which disintegrated in 1991. Over the 20th century the US was not just a dynamo of technological advancement, but also contributed greatly to world growth.
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(Originally published in 1910. This volume from the Cornel...)
Originally published in 1910. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
Meat Vs. Rice: American Manhhod Against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive?
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The double edge of labor's sword; discussion and testimony on socialism and trade-unionism before the Commission on Industrial Relations
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About the Book
A political ideology is a set of ethical...)
About the Book
A political ideology is a set of ethical ideals, principles, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or other grouping that provides a framework for how society ought to operate, and often offers a political and cultural blueprint for a desired social order. Political ideologies address many aspects of a society, including such issues as: the economy, education, health care, labor law, criminal law, the justice system, the provision of social security and social welfare, trade, the environment, minors, immigration, race, use of the military, patriotism, and established religion. Examples of major political ideologies are: Anarchism, Communism, Authoritarianism, Libertarianism, Populism, Socialism, Conservatism, Environmentalism, Feminism, Nationalism, Fascism.
About us
Leopold Classic Library has the goal of making available to readers the classic books that have been out of print for decades. While these books may have occasional imperfections, we consider that only hand checking of every page ensures readable content without poor picture quality, blurred or missing text etc. That's why we:
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Happy reading!
Samuel Gompers was a labor leader. He was a key figure in American labor history.
Background
Samuel Gompers was born on January 27, 1850, in a London tenement. One of nine children and the son of one of six, Gompers spent his early youth in a family group of which his grandfather was patriarch.
His father, Solomon Gompers, was a workingman, a cigar maker by trade, and the earliest recollections of young Samuel were of laboring people and their problems. A few years prior to the birth of Samuel his grandfather had emigrated to London from Holland, where the family had lived for many years.
Samuel’s mother, Sarah Rood, also came from Holland to England where she married his father.
Education
From the age of six to ten, Samuel attended a Jewish free school, but his parents were too poor to permit him to continue after he was old enough to work, so he was taken from school and at the age of ten apprenticed to a shoemaker.
A few months later, Samuel ended his shoe-making career and was apprenticed by his father to a cigar maker.
Although Gompers’s formal education ceased at the age of ten, his thirst for knowledge was insatiable, and soon after his arrival in New York, he began to spend much of his spare time at Cooper Union, attending lectures and engaging in debates.
Career
During the sixties, the Civil War stimulated the interest of many English people in America. The elder Gompers decided that the New World offered advantages for economic betterment and in 1863, he landed in New York with his family. They settled on the East Side and Gompers followed his trade of cigar making.
Samuel assisted his father for several months after landing and then started out on his own initiative as a journeyman cigar maker. In 1864, he joined the Cigarmakers’ Union.
Samuel early became interested in the fraternal movement and joined the Odd Fellows and the Foresters. The most significant of his experiences, however, was his life as a cigar maker in the factories in and about New York City.
The little shops of skilled cigar makers of those days were schools of economic research, and it is not surprising that out of one of them came the model for the American Federation of Labor. The room was very quiet, work was paid for by the piece, and there were no rules against talking.
Papers, magazines, and books were purchased from a fund to which all contributed, and while the others worked one would read aloud for an hour or longer, his fellows turning over to him a definite number of cigars to make up his lost time. Gompers’s voice was strong, and he always read more than his period.
Although local cigarmakers’ unions had existed in New York City as early as 1864, they had collapsed during the period of business depression after 1873.
In 1877, however, the cigar makers made a desperate recovery and carried on a prolonged strike against the tenement-house sweating system. The strike was a disastrous failure.
The unions had no funds, no discipline, no inducement to hold together as militant organizations during periods between strikes or periods of business depression. In such times they became mere debating societies, dwindling down until only the theoretical debater on cooperation, socialism, anarchism, and labor politics held the floor.
Gompers and Strasser took the lead in reorganizing the cigar makers. Strasser was given the ambitious title of international president, by which was meant traveling organizer for North America, and Gompers remained president of Local 144, continuing to work in the shop but also organizing unions out of hours. They accomplished four things: they made the international officers supreme over the local unions; they increased the membership dues to unheard-of amounts in order to build up a fund; they concentrated the control of that fund in the national officers, and they adopted or prepared to adopt, sickness, accident, and unemployment benefits. This was the beginning of militant, persistent unionism in America.
The cigarmakers’ union became the model for all others, and when twenty years afterward, in the last decade of the century, another depression like that of 1873-79 took place, Gompers could report to the Federation of Labor that, for the first time in history, the unions had weathered the storm.
In 1881, after other unions had copied the cigarmakers’ union of 1877, came the next step, the “Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States of America and Canada. ”
Gompers was chairman of the Committee on Constitution, and it was in his committee that the final plan of organization was worked out. This federation was reorganized in 1886 as the American Federation of Labor.
The principles of organization adopted were entirely different from those of any other labor movement in the United States or any other country. There were to be no “dual unions”—only one union could be accepted for each trade in all North America; no local unions were to be admitted - such unions must enter their own International Union and get what representation they could through their national unions; the delegates from each international union were to cast as many votes as were proportionate to the number of its members; local or city trades assemblies and federations were to have each only one vote; each national union was to be completely self-governing over its own locals and free from domination by the Federation.
Gompers was elected president of the new labor organization, and until his death in 1924, with the exception of one year, he was the official head of the American labor movement.
In 1896, the convention of the Federation Gompers was again a candidate for the presidency and succeeded in defeating McBride. With the expansion of the American Federation of Labor Gompers became, as its head, an important public figure.
Crises in labor matters and his innumerable public speeches kept him constantly before the public. Just prior to the outbreak of the war he was appointed by President Wilson to serve on the Council of National Defense.
After the war, he was plunged into the struggle of American labor to maintain its wartime gains. Despite his advanced age, he continued his manifold activities without a check until 1924.
At the convention of the Federation in that year, it was apparent that he had only a short time to live and within a few days after the close of the convention, he died.
Achievements
Gompers had seen what things were like for the workers back in England when they weren't paid enough and had to work under terrible conditions and knew that as much as some of his co-workers might complain, they still weren't as bad off as the workers he had known as a boy. However, he knew things could still stand to be a lot better, and with this in mind, and inspired by the ideas of Socialism, he decided to do something to better their lot.
In 1877, he instituted some radical changes in his union, such as organizing it with a hierarchy, charging higher membership dues, and creating programs for pension and strike funds. Gompers didn't want to achieve things such as better wages, job security, and benefits such as disability pay through politics, but rather through strikes, boycotts, and negotiations.
His ideas led to the development of collective bargaining and the management having contracts with the laborers. His union was so successful that many other unions began to adopt their ways and means.
In 1881, he co-founded the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, which was restructured as the American Federation of Labor in 1886. Apart from the year 1894, Gompers served as the organization's president for the rest of his life.
With Gompers at the helm, the organization soared to new heights and became the most powerful and successful labor organization and union in America. However, his extreme opposition to radicalism and getting involved in politics, coupled with his preference for skilled laborers over unskilled laborers, indirectly led to a splinter group, the Industrial Workers of the World, splitting off from the AFL in 1905.
Gompers is the subject of statuary in several major American cities.
A bronze monument honoring Gompers by the sculptor Robert Aitken is in Gompers Square on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D. C. .
On September 3, 2007, a life-size statue of Gompers was unveiled at Gompers Park, named after the labor leader in 1929, on the northwest side of Chicago. This is the first statue of a labor leader in Chicago. Local unions throughout Chicago donated their time and money to build the monument.
A U. S. Navy support ship and an entire class of U. S. Navy destroyer tenders were named for Gompers.
The Samuel Gompers Houses, a public housing development on the Lower East Side of New York, is named in his honor.
There are schools named for Gompers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Madison, Wisconsin, and Phoenix, Arizona.
The power that Samuel exerted as the official head of the American labor movement may be expressed as “moral, ” a term which, in his interpretation, signified the organized consent of collective action on which the American Federation of Labor was founded.
Moral influence meant the belief that drastic methods would not bring education and solidarity; that it was persuasion, not domineering, that unionized. One of the national unions had disciplined a radical agitator, whose rebellious following broke up the union’s meetings.
The national officers, in despair, called in Gompers. He announced his intention of talking with the revolutionist. The officers protested. Discipline was at stake. Why recognize rebellion? But after Gompers’s conference with the rebel, the union was again united. Gompers’s “moral influence” with the executives of each national union was founded on their knowledge that no “dual union” would be allowed to displace them. No “dual union” can be admitted to the Federation.
There must be but one union for all North America for each trade or industry. A thousand independent unions are eligible to the British Trade Union Congress. The American Federation of Labor admits less than 150.
In England, as Dr. Perlman has pointed out, there is a class psychology which unites all the unions against all the employers. In America, however, dual unionism means that either one or the other union furnishes strikebreakers for the employer.
Dual unions did arise, and some of them became powerful. Gompers was not always able to bring them together, but he did not yield to them. In another direction “moral power” was Gompers’s substitute for the weakness of labor in competition with businessmen.
He had seen in New York scores of cooperative stores, cooperative workshops, and other cooperative business enterprises undertaken by the unions, especially the Knights of Labor. These “substitutes for capitalism” broke down under the incapacity of organized labor to enforce discipline when it became the employer of labor.
No one understood better than Gompers the limits beyond which the organization of labor could not go. It could not lift itself as a body out of manual labor and become a body of businessmen or professional men.
For this reason, Gompers was always against “theorizers” and “intellectuals” in the organization of labor. They were “industrially impossible. ” Amid all the differences in America of religion, of race, of language, of politics, there was only one direction toward which labor could unite - more wages, more leisure, more liberty.
To go further than this was to be misled by theorists, idealists, and well-meaning but “fool” friends of labor. Labor could have “moral power” only when it struggled for better homes, better living, better citizenship, by its collective action. In the exposition of this point of view, Gompers was the best of theorizers and the greatest “intellectual” of them all.
It was this firm conviction that labor never could displace the capitalist in the management of business that made it possible for Gompers to enter into negotiations with capitalists, and even to disregard the outcries from his own ranks against his membership in the National Civic Federation along with the most noted, and even alleged anti-unionistic, of capitalists.
He held that labor was always right. Up to the very last ditch he defended and appealed for help, even for those who afterward were convicted of dynamiting and murder.
This may seem like a paradox to many, but this policy of his was merely the result of an experience with the courts gained in boyhood and during the collective struggles of organized labor and his belief that misrepresentations, false accusation, and misuse of the courts all too frequently occur.
He knew full well the weakness of labor in business, and he knew equally well its weakness in politics. He penetrated the underlying fact of American political parties, that they are great, cooperative institutions of professional politicians and bosses competing for control of government and political jobs, and not organizations of citizens based on principles of public welfare.
Organized labor never could compete with these unions of political experts, and a labor party was, at least in this country, as politically impossible as producers’ cooperation and socialism were industrially impossible. What, then, should organized labor do in politics?
Simply bargain for immunity from interference by legislatures, courts, and executives, so that it could use its own collective moral and economic power to bargain collectively with the capitalists. Only for one year, 1895, did the American Federation of Labor fail to choose Samuel Gompers as its president.
Dissatisfaction of union members as a result of the prevailing business depression coupled with an unusual showing of strength by the Socialistic membership resulted in the election of John McBride.
During the war, in order to demonstrate that American labor stood solidly behind the government, he organized a War Committee on Labor composed of representatives of organized labor and of employers. He became an implacable foe of pacificism and combated it publicly on every occasion.
Gompers himself was conscious that his two strong qualities were his dramatic instinct and what he called his “intuition. ” The former he connected with his keen love of music and the opera and declared that he nearly became a musician. What he meant by “intuition” was a highly intellectual method of experimental research in testing out all the theories he came upon and measuring just how far they would work or not work.
His “intuitions” were not the mere internal “hunches” of a Bergson’s philosophy, but the slow thinking and intense concentration of mind upon experiments and theories which characterize great scientists and inventors. In this way, he evolved his economic philosophy.
In his personal life, he followed a philosophy of freedom. Even in his last years, “his doctors vainly endeavored to make him see the need of diet and physical discipline”.
Quotations:
“All my life, I had been accustomed to the labor movement and accepted as a matter of course that every wage-earner should belong to the union of his trade. I did not yet have a conscious appreciation of the labor movement. My awakening was to come later. ”
“At no time in my life have I worked out definitely articulated economic theory. ” He reached his conclusions gradually, “after discarding proposals to which I temporarily subscribed. ”
“I never got tired and never gave any thought to my body for it never demanded my attention. The Gompers are built of oak”.
“No inhibitions, no restrictions, but to allow natural inclination to take its course. ”
Membership
At the Peace Conference, Samuel was appointed by President Wilson as a member of the Commission on International Labor Legislation.
Personality
Gompers became an American citizen in 1872.
He was primarily a man of action, but in the course of his long career as the official spokesman of American labor he frequently wrote in defense of labor’s policies or to explain their significance to the members of the Federation. These writings will be found principally in the files of the American Federationist, the official publication of the American Federation of Labor.
He prided himself upon his physical stamina.
All his life he was surrounded by kinsmen among whom a strong loyalty prevailed. His wife bravely bore the hardships occasioned by his refusal to abjure his union principles, even during the cigarmakers’ strike of 1877-78, when at one time, save for the help of his mother and brothers, his family would have been without food. Five of Gompers’s children, three sons and two daughters, lived to maturity.
Connections
Samuel was married, at the age of seventeen, to Sophia Julian, a young working girl. His wife died in 1920 and in 1921, he married GraceGleaves Neuscheler, who survived him.
