Samuel Gompers

Why this Chapter exists

The other side of the ledger.

Many contributions are works by individuals: a commentary, a law code, a poem, a vaccine. Others were won by organized workers: shorter hours, a national holiday for workers, and the written union contract. For nearly four decades a Jewish immigrant, Samuel Gompers, led the American Federation of Labor, which campaigned for all three.

1850–1877

The reading room that made cigars.

Samuel Gompers was born on January 27, 1850, in a tenement in the East End of London (a tenement is a crowded, cheap apartment building). His parents were Dutch Jews whose families had moved from Amsterdam, and his father rolled cigars for a living. From age six Samuel attended the Jews’ Free School, a charity school for the children of poor Jewish families. At ten, the family needed his wages. He left school and was apprenticed first to a shoemaker, then in his father’s trade. In 1863, when he was thirteen, the family sailed for New York and settled on the Lower East Side.

The cigar shop became his school. Rolling cigars is quiet handwork, and cigar makers customarily chose one of their number to read aloud to the rest while they worked: newspapers, novels, economics. Gompers listened, and often read. At fourteen he joined the cigar makers’ union (a union is an organization of workers who join together to bargain over pay and conditions). An older Swedish cigar maker with a socialist past, Ferdinand Laurrell, became his mentor and urged him to learn from the socialists without joining them. Gompers became president of his New York local, Local 144, in 1875, at twenty-five.

1881–1893

A federation of the skilled.

American unions in those years were small, scattered, and easily broken. Gompers’s answer was a federation. Each craft union (a craft union organizes one skilled trade, like carpenters or cigar makers) would govern itself, pay real dues, and build a strike fund (money saved in advance so workers can hold out when they stop work). And each would stand behind the others. The craft unions had first federated loosely in 1881, as the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, with Gompers among its officers. On December 8, 1886, in Columbus, Ohio, they reorganized as the American Federation of Labor and elected Gompers, a thirty-six-year-old cigar maker, its first president. He held the job until his death, except for one year, 1895, when a socialist-backed challenge removed him.

He kept the Federation away from revolutionary programs and from forming a labor party of its own, though not away from politics. The Federation lobbied Congress and endorsed candidates. His unionism made demands a worker could measure: shorter hours, higher wages, safer shops, a contract in writing. He called it “pure and simple” unionism. He took up the question in an 1893 speech in Chicago, “What Does Labor Want?” Part of his answer reads: “We want more schoolhouses 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.”

1886–1918

Eight for work, eight for rest.

The movement’s central demand fit on a banner: eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of American workers joined a national push for the eight-hour day, which employers did not grant. In 1890 the Federation backed a strike by the carpenters’ union, led by Peter J. McGuire. About 28,000 workers struck, and many won the eight-hour day. Gains came trade by trade. On June 28, 1894, Congress made Labor Day, a holiday New York unions had first celebrated in 1882, a national holiday. A national standard for hours came only after Gompers’s death. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a maximum workweek for covered industries, beginning at 44 hours.

Major strikes in these years came in New York’s garment trade, where many of the workers were young Jewish immigrant women. On November 22, 1909, Gompers was among the speakers at a mass meeting of shirtwaist makers (a shirtwaist is a women’s blouse) at Cooper Union in New York. He described their long hours and poor wages and urged them to weigh a strike against the pay they would lose. Clara Lemlich, a young garment worker, then asked to speak and called in Yiddish for a general strike. The next day more than 15,000 shirtwaist makers walked out of about 500 shops.

On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 garment workers in New York, most of them recent Jewish and Italian immigrants and many of them young women. Gompers was named to the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, formed that year to investigate the disaster and factory conditions across the state. Its findings led to a wave of workplace-safety laws. By the end of the First World War, the Federation’s unions counted some three million members. President Woodrow Wilson appointed Gompers to the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense, which organized the country’s war preparations, and he chaired its committee on labor.

1882–1924

The lines he drew.

Gompers spoke for organizing all workers, Black workers included, but the Federation was built on the skilled crafts, and many of its member unions shut Black workers out. Gompers let each union set its own rules, and the exclusion stood. He supported the laws that barred Chinese immigrants from the country and was a named author of a Federation pamphlet, Meat vs. Rice, that argued for keeping Chinese workers out. Archivists today flag the term for Chinese workers in its subtitle as a racial slur. Late in life he also backed limits on immigration itself.

He died in San Antonio, Texas, on December 13, 1924, days after collapsing on a trip to Mexico, still president of the Federation he had led for thirty-seven of its first thirty-eight years. The organization he built, today the AFL-CIO, is still the largest federation of unions in the United States.

Object Spotlight

A parade that is still on the calendar.

The banner image of this Chapter is an engraving from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper: the first Labor Day parade, marching around Union Square in New York on September 5, 1882. Gompers was then a local cigar-union leader in that city. Read the signs the marchers carry. One says “Labor creates all wealth.” Another says “Eight hours constitute a day’s work.”

The marchers gave themselves the day off, and the holiday came later. Twelve years afterward, Congress made the first Monday of September a national holiday, and it has been on the American calendar ever since. The U.S. Department of Labor describes it as a celebration of “the social and economic achievements of American workers.” Who first proposed the day is disputed. Credit has gone to the carpenters’ leader Peter J. McGuire and to the machinist Matthew Maguire.

The analytical question

Where is his monument?

There is a literal answer. A bronze memorial to Gompers by the sculptor Robert Ingersoll Aitken stands where Massachusetts Avenue, 10th Street, and L Street meet in Washington, D.C. It was dedicated in 1933 with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in attendance. Gompers built no company and left no fortune. Most of his record is kept in other forms: his autobiography, his speeches and papers, the reports of a state commission, and an engraving of a parade. Which of these records best measures what he did, and what does each one leave out?

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• US History: industrialization, the labor movement, and the Progressive era through one organizer’s arc.
• Economics & Civics: unions, strikes, collective bargaining, and how workplace rules are actually made.
• Primary-Source Analysis: the 1893 “What Does Labor Want?” address and the 1882 parade engraving, read line by line and sign by sign.
• Ethics: the lines the movement drew, and who was left outside them.
• Jewish History: the Lower East Side immigrant arc, alongside the American Jewry Chapter and the commerce and labor field of Across the Fields.

Standards Alignment

• NYS US History & Government: 11.5 (industrialization and urbanization, 1870–1920).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.9–10.2 (central ideas from primary and secondary sources) and RH.6–8.7 (integrating visual information, here the parade engraving).

Further Teaching Resources

• The Samuel Gompers Papers, University of Maryland, the scholarly edition of his letters and speeches.
• Seventy Years of Life and Labor, his autobiography, free to read.
• Cornell University, the Triangle Factory Fire, the documentary record of the 1911 disaster and the reforms that followed.