Samuel Gompers

Samuel Gompers was born Samuel Gumpertz on January 27, 1850, in the Spitalfields area of London, England, the eldest of five sons in a Jewish family; his father was a cigar maker.⁠[1][2][3]

He was a good student at the Jews’ Free School, but by the age of ten he was learning a trade, first as a shoemaker and then making cigars, his father’s trade.⁠[4]

In 1863 the Gompers family moved to New York City, where he and his father rolled cigars in a Lower East Side tenement before he went to work in a shop. In 1864 he joined the Cigar Makers’ International Union.⁠[2][4]

He was married by 17 and a father by 18. In 1872 he became a United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry citizen.⁠[4][3]

In the 1870s Gompers studied socialism under the Swedish socialist Ferdinand Laurell, reading works including Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and worked with P. J. McGuire, Adolph Strasser and J. P. McDonnell in groups such as the International Workingmen’s Association and the Workingmen’s Party of the United States. The Samuel Gompers Papers biography judges that this experience shaped his “pure and simple” unionism, which put economic class power ahead of political power.⁠[4]

In 1875 he was elected president of Local 144 of the Cigar Makers’ International Union.⁠[4][2]

In 1881 Gompers helped found the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, which later became the American Federation of Labor.⁠[1][2]

In 1882 he campaigned for a New York bill banning cigar manufacturing in tenement buildings, and in the process met Theodore RooseveltTheodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was an American Republican politician, writer, naturalist, and soldier who served as the 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909 and received the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War.Open the full entry, then a young Republican state assemblyman. Roosevelt initially opposed the bill but became a supporter after Gompers showed him the city’s slums. The bill died in the state senate that year, passed in the next session and was signed by the governor, and was later ruled unconstitutional by the New York courts.⁠[5]

In 1886 Gompers helped lead the cigar makers and other craft unions out of the Knights of Labor. In December 1886, after the Knights rejected a proposal to keep trade-union and labor-reform functions separate, the craft unions established the American Federation of Labor, initially joining some 100 autonomous national and international unions. Gompers was elected its president in December 1886.⁠[6][3][7]

From 1886 to 1924 he was also vice president of the Cigar Makers’ International Union, and he was active in the New York State Workingmen’s Assembly; he testified before Congress and state legislatures on labor laws, addressed mass meetings and negotiated strike settlements.⁠[7]

Except for 1895, Gompers remained president of the American Federation of Labor until his death. In 1895 John McBride, president of the United Mine Workers of America, replaced him as AFL president; Gompers was elected again the following year.⁠[7][5]

Gompers co-founded the National Civic Federation with Mark Hanna and took part in it as a labor representative. He promoted “voluntarism,” the idea that unions should pursue their aims mainly through economic action such as strikes and boycotts, and he favored written trade agreements.⁠[5][3][8]

BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry’s article notes that Gompers kept the AFL politically neutral until employer tactics and federal court injunctions pushed it toward political engagement. In 1908 he backed William Jennings BryanWilliam Jennings BryanWilliam Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) was an American politician and orator who represented Nebraska in the U.S. House, won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896, 1900 and 1908 but lost each election, served as U.S. Secretary of State from 1913 to 1915, and was a prosecutor in the 1925 Scopes trial.Open the full entry’s unsuccessful presidential campaign; that year he and Theodore Roosevelt also exchanged angry letters over union power.⁠[3][5]

After Gompers nearly went to jail for contempt in Gompers v. Buck’s Stove and Range Co., he addressed the judge in an editorial in the June 1911 issue of the American Federationist. That year, defending the AFL’s approach, he said “first things must come first,” meaning immediate protections and improvements for wage workers.⁠[1][7]

In 1912 Gompers directed the AFL to oppose Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party.⁠[5]

After the AFL turned to political engagement, the Woodrow WilsonWoodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson (1856–1924) was an American scholar and politician who served as president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey and was the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921, leading the country through World War I and proposing the League of Nations.Open the full entry administration saw the creation of a cabinet post for labor in 1913, the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 and the Adamson Act of 1916, which set an eight-hour day for interstate railroad workers.⁠[3]

Gompers supported the war effort, was appointed by Woodrow Wilson to the Council of National Defense and chaired a labor committee there. He and Theodore Roosevelt both favored military preparedness and earlier American entry into the war than Wilson wanted; in July 1917, at an event welcoming Russian envoys, the two argued heatedly over the East St. Louis race riot.⁠[1][5]

After the war he attended the Paris Peace Conference as a labor adviser. The Library of Congress article describes him as essential to the founding of the International Labor Organization.⁠[1]

At the AFL convention in November 1924 Gompers was already in poor health but insisted on presiding. He then traveled to Mexico City for a Pan-American Federation of Labor meeting, became seriously ill there and was taken back to San Antonio, TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry.⁠[9][5]

Gompers died in San Antonio on December 13, 1924, aged 74, and was buried in Sleepy Hollow, New York.⁠[3][1]

One of Gompers’s daughters died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and his wife died in 1919.⁠[10]

Gompers edited the AFL journal, the American Federationist. His autobiography, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, was published posthumously in two volumes in 1925.⁠[8][10]

During his presidency, AFL membership grew from about 50,000 in 1886 to nearly 3 million in 1924. The AFL-CIO calls him the first and longest-serving president of the AFL.⁠[2][11]

Congress authorized the Samuel Gompers Memorial in 1928, and the American Federation of Labor raised the funds. Created by the sculptor Robert Ingersoll Aitken, it stands on a triangular reservation at Massachusetts Avenue, 10th Street and L Street NW in Washington, D.C., and was dedicated in October 1933 with Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin D. RooseveltFranklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) was an American politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 to 1945, the only president elected four times; he led the country through the Great Depression and World War II and greatly expanded the federal government’s role through the New Deal.Open the full entry in attendance. His former Washington home, the row house at 2122 First Street NW, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1974.⁠[12][1][10]

In 1989 Gompers was among the first people inducted into the U.S. Department of Labor’s Labor Hall of Honor. The department’s profile says he favored indigenous approaches to workers’ problems, preferring to operate within American institutions rather than in opposition to them.⁠[1][13]

Britannica’s article judges that Gompers shifted the focus of American unionism toward wages, benefits, hours and working conditions negotiated through collective bargaining. The Samuel Gompers Papers biography notes that critics on the left saw him as more interested in personal power and considered the AFL too narrow and conservative, while critics on the right viewed him as a foreign-born troublemaker.⁠[3][7]

AFL-CIO: Official website: https://aflcio.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

Samuel Gompers Papers: Official website: https://gompers.umd.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]