Gompers, Samuel

Gompers, Samuel (1850–1924), labor leader, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).Born into a poor family of Dutch Jewish cigarmakers in London's East End, Gompers emigrated to New York City in 1863. The oldest of six children, he learned his father's trade and became a union member in his early teens. Working in the cigar shops of New York City, Gompers absorbed the culture of reform and self‐improvement in the German‐dominated cigar trade. By the early 1880s, he had reshaped the conservative Cigarmakers International Union into a dynamic workers’ organization modeled after both British craft unions and German political labor organizations. As the representative of the cigarmakers, he was a founding member of the Federation of Trade and Labor Unions in 1881, and it was largely his energetic pursuit of a unified labor movement that led to the founding of the American Federation of Labor in 1886, with Gompers the first president. By then he had become well known not only as a union leader and organizer of the eight‐hour‐day movement in 1886, but also as a proponent of “pure and simple” trade unionism, which concentrated on higher wages and better working conditions and denigrated ethnic or party politics.

Gompers's hostility to the Marxist‐led Socialist Labor party cost him the AFL presidency for one year in 1895. Once reinstated in the office, which he held until his death, he presided over a growing AFL, continuing his aggressive defense of workers’ rights to organize, strike, and boycott. Working skillfully within the federal structure of the organization, Gompers at first tried to broaden the membership of its affiliated unions beyond skilled white workers but later largely abandoned this quest in favor of a dominant craft unionism. In 1901, he joined the National Civic Federation, a group of employers, union representatives, and public figures who sought to mediate industrial disputes. Gompers refrained from supporting political parties and party programs but did selectively endorse candidates and legislative initiatives in the name of the labor movement. A supporter of President Woodrow Wilson, Gompers served on the Advisory Committee of the Council on National Defense in World War I, traveled to the European battlefronts, and participated in the Versailles peace negotiations. After the war, however, he could do little to prevent the erosion of organized labor. At his death, Gompers had come to symbolize the tremendous potential power of American labor, which seemed forever thwarted by its own internal divisions, the hostility of employers, and a mostly unsympathetic state.
See also Communism; Gilded Age; Industrialization; Industrial Workers of the World; Knights of Labor; Labor Movements; Socialism; Socialist Party of America; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Stuart B. Kaufman , Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor, 1973.
J.H.M. Laslett , Samuel Gompers, in Labor Leaders in America, ed. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren van Tine, 1987, pp. 62–88.

Dorothee Schneider