“What does labor want,” asked Samuel Gomers, who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday. “We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful and childhood more happy and bright….These are the demands made by labor upon modern society and in their consideration is involved the fate of civilization.”
Except, perhaps, for the stereotypical sex roles, these goals are wonderfully contemporary. But Gompers – who is pictured on a 3-cent stamp issued in 1950 – said them in 1893, seven years after he founded the American Federation of Labor, which he headed from 1886 to 1894 and again from 1895 until his death on December 13, 1924.
Born in 1850 into a Jewish family in London, Gompers began making cigars alongside his father at the age of 10. In 1863, the entire family immigrated to New York City. Settling into a tenement apartment on Houston Street, Gompers continued rolling cigars at home with his father until he found work in one of the local shops. In 1864, Gompers joined Local 15 of the United Cigar Makers.
In 1881, Gompers helped found the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, which reorganized into the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886, which united the various trade unions under one roof. Gompers himself served as president of the AFL every year but one until his death. (In 1955., the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), its longtime rival, to form the AFL-CIO.)
Unlike some of the more radical union activists of the day, Gompers did not try and reshape the fundamental institutions of American life. Instead, he insisted that the AFL focus on securing higher wages, better working conditions, and a shorter work week. “You are mistaken in asserting that I am embittered against everybody or anything that savors of socialism,” he wrote a friend in 1915. “What I resent and what I have persistently opposed is any effort that will mislead the wage-earners and delude them with vain hope….Because I am firmly convinced that socialism is founded upon principles that will not lead out into broader liberty, independence and opportunity, I have done what I could to show men the fallacies of the doctrine of socialism.”
Gompers also focused on creating a strong national organization. He required that each trade be represented by only one union, and that within each union the national organization should prevail over local chapters. He also encouraged the AFL to take political action to “elect their friends” and “defeat their enemies”. He mostly supported Democrats, but sometimes Republicans.
During World War I, Gompers and the AFL openly supported the war effort, attempting to avert strikes and boost morale while raising wage rates and expanding membership. Aft Like most labor leaders, he also opposed unrestricted immigration from Europe because it lowered wages. In addition, he strongly opposed all immigration from Asia because it lowered wages and, in his judgement, represented an alien culture that could not be assimilated easily into that of the U.S.
Gompers’s trade union philosophy and his devotion to collective bargaining with business proved to be too conservative for more radical leaders, such as Bill Haywood, a leader of the creation, in 1905, of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which aimed to organize all workers and supplant capitalism with a workers’ commonwealth. But while Gompers was often at odds with the IWW, when government abuses against its leaders seemed too egregious, he offered assistance.
And while he focused on working within the system, he also recognized that the current economic system had important flaws. In an 1895 speech, for example, he contended, “if ever men have demonstrated their incapacity, their impotence to conduct commerce and industry, the men in command of our economic and social conditions have certainly given plain proof of it.”
Unions, he believed, were needed to offset the growing power of large corporations. As he explained in Congressional testimony given in 1916: “I believe in people. I believe in the working people. I believe in their growing intelligence. I believe in their growing and persistent demand for better conditions, for a more rightful situation in the industrial, political, and social affairs of this country and of the world. I have faith that the working people will better their condition far beyond what it is today. The position of the organized labor movement is not based upon misery and poverty, but upon the right of workers to a larger and constantly growing share of the production, and they will work out these problems for themselves.”
From our perspective more than a century later, some of his positions and views seem naïve and, at times, wrong. But that judgement shouldn’t blind us to the powerful vision that animated his life’s work.
As he told a newspaper in 1911, “if, in all this civilization, and if, in all the wealth produced, if in all this great fertile country of ours . . . we assert first, that wherever and whenever there be one human soul in our country walking the streets unable to find the opportunity to perform work and service to society, to demand in return for it the decent livelihood with opportunities for the cultivation of the best that is in us, if there is that opportunity denied to any one single man or woman in all this country, to him or to her all our boasted civilization is a sham.”
It was true then, and it’s still true today.
Be well, stay safe, believe in people, fight for justice, and work for peace.