Samuel Gompers: Address to the Annual Meeting of the National Civic Federation

About the Author

Samuel Gompers was born on January 27, 1850, in London, England. In July 1863, his family immigrated to the United States, where Gompers and his father found employment in New York City as skilled cigar rollers. Although Gompers lacked formal education, he was introduced to the ideas of the political economists Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle through the working-class self-education practiced by cigar makers, who hired a fellow worker to read aloud to those rolling cigars. This education helped convince Gompers of the necessity for trade unionism, and he became active in the Cigar Makers’ International Union. Along with his friend Adolph Strasser, who assumed the presidency of the union in 1877, Gompers fostered a more centralized union model for skilled craft workers in response to the fragility of the labor movement during such troubled economic times as the Panic of 1873—a financial depression that led to losses of jobs.

As a trade unionist, Gompers believed that political action was premature prior to workers’ forming a sense of class consciousness. Accordingly, he opposed political alignments with the Democrats and Republicans or parties of the left, such as the Socialists, in favor of direct action that would increase a sense of labor solidarity. Driven by these ideas, Gompers helped found the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1881. Although the federation was underfunded and organizationally weak, Gompers was successful in opposing the political orientation and influence of the Knights of Labor among the unions. In 1886, Gompers and supporters among organized skilled workers formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and Gompers was elected president. The AFL supported the independence of autonomous trade unions in the ordering of their internal affairs. Gompers and the AFL believed in voluntarism, rejecting an active role for the state in the regulation of industrial relations. In fact, with court decisions often overturning pro-labor legislation, Gompers was convinced that only collective action by workers, the essence of labor voluntarism, could protect the interests of labor and achieve such goals as the eight-hour workday. Gompers addressed workers across the nation to rally American workers to the forefront of an international campaign to allow labor more dignity by providing time for workers to cultivate their minds.

During the 1880s and 1890s Gompers worked tirelessly to establish the AFL’s influence over skilled workers. Although he was often accused of fostering elitism within the labor movement, Gompers was a critic of the International Association of Machinists, which opposed black membership. Rejecting the Marxism and radicalism of his youth, Gompers attempted to distance himself from the influence of the Socialist and Populist parties. In an August 1894 editorial for the American Federationist, the newspaper organ of the AFL, Gompers opposed the actions of Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union (ARU) during the 1894 strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company. Debs, who would emerge as the leader of the Socialist Party of America in the early twentieth century, and the ARU were supporting striking workers at the Pullman company factory town where railroad sleeping cars were produced. Although Gompers condemned George Pullman’s wage cuts for initiating the labor stoppage, he failed to support the call by Debs for a general strike by American labor. This stance led to Gompers’s failure to win reelection as AFL president in 1895.

Regaining the presidency of the AFL the following year, Gompers soon attempted to offset employer opposition to unionization by cooperating with the National Civic Federation, a reform group composed of the nation’s corporate leadership. Although this alliance produced few tangible benefits for the AFL, the organization’s membership continued to grow, numbering nearly two million workers by 1904. Nevertheless, Gompers was troubled by the actions of the Supreme Court in the 1908 Loewe v. Lawlor decision, also referred to as the Danbury Hatters’ Case. In a March 1908 editorial for the American Federationist, Gompers criticized the Court’s declaration of the AFL’s boycott against the hat manufacturer Dietrich Lowe, for its refusal to recognize the hatters’ union, as an unlawful restraint of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890). In his editorial, Gompers displays frustration with the legal system, but his more conservative nature is apparent in his conclusion that the AFL must bow to the Court’s ruling.

Gompers also came to rethink his organization’s avoidance of political entanglements, and in 1906 he presented labor’s Bill of Grievances to President Theodore Roosevelt and Congress. As the ruling Republican Party proved unsympathetic to Gompers, in 1912 the AFL executive abandoned nonpartisanship, supporting the presidential candidacy of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who prevailed. The Wilson administration honored labor’s support by appointing a former coal miner, William B. Wilson, to head the Department of Labor and enacting legislation beneficial to labor. The 1914 Clayton Act, further antitrust legislation, was proclaimed by Gompers as labor’s Magna Carta for exempting unions from the restraint of trade provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Gompers’s enthusiasm for both the Clayton Act and the Wilson administration is apparent in his 1915 circular letter dispatched to AFL organizers. Gompers concludes in that letter that working within the political system allowed labor to legislatively address the inequities of the Supreme Court decision in the 1908 Danbury Hatters’ Case.

As the United States struggled with maintaining Wilson’s policy of neutrality during World War I, Gompers spoke before the 1916 annual meeting of the National Civic Federation, asserting that labor would support national preparedness but needed to be a full participant in any plans for the nation to move to war footing. When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Gompers supported the nation’s effort, breaking with Eugene Debs and the Socialists, who opposed U.S. participation. Gompers also endorsed the National War Labor Board, which encouraged the cooperation of business and labor in the war effort, a relationship Gompers had advocated in his 1916 address before the National Civic Federation. Gompers also served the Wilson administration as an adviser on the labor sections of the Versailles Treaty. His influence waned with Wilson’s failing health and the election of the Republican Warren G. Harding to the presidency in 1920. In December 1924, Gompers collapsed while participating in a meeting of the Pan-American Federation of Labor; he died a week later, on December 13, in San Antonio, Texas. While labor was on the defensive in the 1920s, Gompers’s leadership of the AFL from 1886 until his death established a strong foundation for craft unionism in the United States.