Samuel Gompers-The Daily Ledger

Samuel Gompers (; January 27, 1850December 13, 1924) was a British-born American cigar maker, labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and served as the organization's president from 1886 to 1894, and from 1895 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize jurisdictional battles. He promoted thorough organization and collective bargaining in order to secure shorter hours and higher wages, which he considered the essential first steps to emancipating labor.

He encouraged AFL member unions to take political action to "elect their friends" and "defeat their enemies". In politics he mostly supported Democrats, and occasionally local Republicans. He led the opposition to immigration from China. During World War I, Gompers and the AFL energetically supported the war effort, attempting to avert strikes and boost morale while raising wage rates and expanding membership. He strongly opposed the antiwar labor groups, especially the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Samuel Gompers

Early life

Gompers was born Samuel Gumpertz on January 27, 1850, in Spitalfields, a working-class area in the East End of London into a Jewish family that originally hailed from Amsterdam. He was the son of Sarah (Root) and Solomon Gumpertz, a cigar maker. At age six, Samuel was sent to the Jewish Free School to receive a basic education. His education there was brief, however, and a mere three months after his tenth birthday Gompers was sent to work as an apprentice cigar maker and earn money for his impoverished family.

Samuel Gompers

Gompers continued his studies in night school, learning Hebrew and studying the Talmud—a process that he later likened to studying law. While he appreciated Hebrew in his youth, he held Yiddish in low regard.

Samuel Gompers

Young worker at the bench

Owing to dire financial straits, the Gompers family immigrated to the United States in 1863, settling in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Gompers's father manufactured cigars at home, assisted for the first year and half by Samuel. In his free time, the young teenager formed a debate club with his friends, gaining practical experience in public speaking and parliamentary procedure. The club drew Gompers into contact with other upwardly mobile young men of the city, including young Irish-American Peter J. McGuire, who would later play a large role in the AFL.

In 1864, at age 14, Gompers joined the Cigar Makers Local Union No. 15, the English-speaking union of cigar makers in New York City. Gompers later recounted his days as a cigar maker at the bench in detail, emphasizing the place of craftsmanship in the production process:

The day after his seventeenth birthday he married his co-worker, sixteen-year-old Sophia Julian. Together they had many children, but only six survived infancy.

In 1873, Gompers moved to the cigar maker David Hirsch & Company, a "high-class shop where only the most skilled workmen were employed". Gompers later called this change of employers "one of the most important changes in my life", for at Hirsch's—a union shop operated by an émigré German socialist—Gompers came into contact with an array of German-speaking cigar makers—"men of keener mentality and wider thought than any I had met before", he recalled. Gompers learned German and absorbed many of the ideas of his shop mates, developing a particular admiration for the ideas of the former secretary of the International Workingmen's Association, Karl Laurrell. Laurrell took Gompers under his wing, challenging his more simplistic ideas and urging Gompers to put his faith in the organized economic movement of trade unionism rather than the socialist political movement.

Gompers later recalled:

Gompers complained that the socialist movement had been captured by Lassallean advocates of "political party action" rather than the "militant economic program of Marx". He warned delegates to the 1900 annual convention that when men became enthusiastic about socialism, "they usually lost interest in their union".