A cigar maker’s son in Spitalfields
Samuel Gompers was born on 27 January 1850 in a tenement in Spitalfields, in the East End of London, the eldest of five sons. His parents, Solomon and Sarah Gompers, née Rood, were Jews whose families had come from Amsterdam, part of the stream of Dutch Jews who had settled in London’s East End. Solomon was a cigar maker, and money was always short.
From about the age of six Samuel attended the Jews’ Free School, one of the largest elementary schools in London, where he was remembered as a good student. At ten he was taken out of school to work. He was apprenticed first to a shoemaker and then to his father’s trade, rolling cigars, while continuing to study Hebrew and the Talmud at night school. The habits of the Jewish classroom, argument, memory and the patient weighing of texts, stayed with him all his life.
New York and the Cigar Makers
In 1863, in the middle of the American Civil War, the family emigrated to New York and settled on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where father and son made cigars at home and then in shops across the city. In 1864, at fourteen, Samuel joined the cigar makers’ union. The day after his seventeenth birthday he married Sophia Julian, a fellow worker; he was a father by eighteen. Of their many children, six survived infancy.
In 1873 he went to work at the shop of David Hirsch & Company, where many of the workers were German-speaking socialists. There he found a mentor in Ferdinand Laurell, a Swedish former socialist who urged him to put his faith in trade unions rather than in political parties. Gompers read Marx’s Communist Manifesto and joined the debating clubs and workingmen’s associations of the radical immigrant world, but he drew from them a practical conclusion: workers would gain power first through organisation on the shop floor, and only later, if at all, through politics.
Building a union that lasts
By 1875 Gompers was president of Cigar Makers’ International Union Local 144. With Adolph Strasser, the union’s international president, he rebuilt it after the depression of 1873–77 had shattered labour organisation across the country. Their model was borrowed from the strong craft unions of Britain: centralised authority, high dues, a strike fund, and benefits for sickness, accidents, death and unemployment. The aim was a union that could survive bad times and hold its members through long struggles, rather than flaring up and collapsing with each strike.
In 1881 he helped found the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada and chaired its constitutional committee. In 1886 the federation was reorganised as the American Federation of Labor, a loose alliance of autonomous national craft unions, and Gompers was elected its first president. He held the office for the rest of his life, except for a single year, 1894–95, when he was defeated by a socialist-backed challenger. From 1894 he also edited the federation’s journal, the American Federationist.
Pure and simple unionism
Gompers’s philosophy came to be called pure and simple trade unionism. The labour movement, he argued, should concentrate on wages, hours and working conditions, won through collective bargaining, strikes and boycotts, and should avoid tying itself to any political party or to plans for overturning capitalism. Economic power, in the Gompers Papers’ summary of his view, had to come before political power. He did not believe that workers could take over the management of business from employers; he believed they could force employers to share more of what their labour produced.
That approach made the AFL the dominant labour organisation in the United States. Membership grew from a few hundred thousand in its early years to several million by the end of the First World War. The demand that summed up his outlook was a single word, more, and in his famous 1893 address “What Does Labor Want?” he defined it as more schools, more books, more leisure and more justice, the chance for working people to cultivate their better natures. Gompers also served as vice-president of the National Civic Federation, which brought union leaders together with industrialists and bankers to promote stable labour relations; radicals attacked him bitterly for it.
Courts, Congress and the Clayton Act
For decades American courts were labour’s most formidable opponents, issuing injunctions against strikes and boycotts. When the AFL placed the Buck’s Stove and Range Company of St Louis on its “We Don’t Patronize” list, a federal judge ordered the boycott stopped and then found Gompers and two colleagues in contempt; Gompers was sentenced to a year in prison. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction in 1911, a second conviction followed, and that too was set aside by the Supreme Court in 1914. He never served the sentence, but for six years the threat of prison had hung over the head of the most prominent labour leader in the country, a vivid lesson in how far American law still stood from the workers’ side.
The episode pushed Gompers, despite his principles, deeper into politics. The AFL began rewarding friends and punishing enemies at the ballot box and drew closer to the Democratic Party. The reward came with the Clayton Antitrust Act, signed by President Woodrow Wilson on 15 October 1914, which declared that the labour of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce and sought to limit the use of antitrust law and injunctions against unions. Gompers hailed it as labour’s Magna Carta. In practice the courts interpreted it narrowly, and many of its protections were only secured by later legislation.
War and the world stage
When the United States entered the First World War, Gompers committed the AFL firmly to the war effort. He served on the advisory commission of the Council of National Defense, organised a committee on labour that brought union and business representatives together, and led the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy to rally workers against anti-war socialists. In return, organised labour won recognition and wage gains in war industries.
In 1919 he went to the Paris Peace Conference as a labour adviser and chaired the Commission on International Labour Legislation, whose recommendations were written into the Treaty of Versailles and created the International Labour Organization. A cigar maker from the East End had helped design the first permanent international body devoted to the rights of workers. He also founded and led the Pan-American Federation of Labor, linking unions in the United States and Latin America.
The limits of his vision
Gompers’s record has a dark side that historians have long emphasised. He was a fierce opponent of Asian immigration, supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its extensions, and published under his name, with Herman Gutstadt, the AFL pamphlet Meat vs. Rice (1902), which argued for continued Chinese exclusion in crude racial stereotypes. He backed broader restrictions on immigration, even though he was himself an immigrant and many of his members were Jewish and Catholic newcomers from Europe. The craft-union structure he defended also left most unskilled workers, and many Black workers, outside the federation, while some of its affiliates barred Black members outright.
He also feuded with rivals on the left, opposing the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905, and resisting the organisation of whole industries regardless of craft. His defenders argued that his caution kept American unions alive in a hostile age; his critics argued that it narrowed the labour movement for generations.
A secular Jew in the labour movement
Gompers was never a religious leader of the Jewish community, and in adult life he was largely secular; he was also a committed Freemason, reaching the 32nd degree of the Scottish Rite in 1906. But his formation was Jewish, from the Jews’ Free School and the night-school Talmud of his London boyhood to the immigrant workshops of the Lower East Side, and his career unfolded alongside the great Jewish labour movement of New York’s garment trades, whose unions joined the AFL.
His wife Sophia died in 1920, and in 1921 he married Gertrude Gleaves Neuscheler. By then his health was failing: he was losing his sight, which he largely concealed, and he suffered from diabetes and heart disease. In 1924, at the AFL convention, he was elected president for the last time.
Death and legacy
In December 1924 Gompers travelled to Mexico City for a meeting of the Pan-American Federation of Labor. He collapsed there on 6 December and asked to be taken home. He died in San Antonio, Texas, on 13 December 1924, soon after crossing back into the United States, and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York. His autobiography, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, appeared in two volumes in 1925.
The institutions he built outlasted him. The AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 to form the AFL-CIO, still the largest federation of unions in the United States, and the ideas he championed, the union contract, the eight-hour day, collective bargaining as a normal part of economic life, became part of American law and custom. He is commemorated by a bronze memorial in Washington, D.C., a 1950 postage stamp, a statue in Chicago unveiled in 2007, a U.S. Navy ship and the Samuel Gompers Houses in Manhattan.
Sources & further reading
Samuel Gompers, Wikipedia · Samuel Gompers, Jewish Virtual Library · Samuel Gompers Papers, University of Maryland, Biography · Gompers v. Buck’s Stove & Range Co., Free Speech Center, MTSU · Meat vs. Rice (1902), Who Built America? · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.