The Armies of Labor: A Chronicle of the Organized Wage-Earners

by Samuel Peter Orth

There remain the local unions, into personal touch with which each member comes. There were in 1916 as many as 647 “city centrals,” the term used to designate the affiliation of the unions of a city. The city centrals are smaller replicas of the state federations and are made up of delegates elected by the individual unions. They meet at stated intervals and freely discuss questions relating to the welfare of organized labor in general as well as to local labor conditions in every trade. Indeed, vigilance seems to be the watchword of the Central. Organization, wages, trade agreements, and the attitude of public officials and city councils which even remotely might affect labor rarely escape their scrutiny. This oldest of all the groups of labor organizations remains the most vital part of the Federation.

The success of the American Federation of Labor is due in large measure to the crafty generalship of its President, Samuel Gompers, one of the most astute labor leaders developed by American economic conditions. He helped organize the Federation, carefully nursed it through its tender years, and boldly and unhesitatingly used its great power in the days of its maturity. In fact, in a very real sense the Federation is Gompers, and Gompers is the Federation. Born in London of Dutch-Jewish lineage, on January 27, 1850, the son of a cigar-maker, Samuel Gompers was early apprenticed to that craft. At the age of thirteen he went to New York City, where in the following year he joined the first cigar-makers’ union organized in that city. He enlisted all his boyish ardor in the cause of the trade union and, after he arrived at maturity, was elected successively secretary and president of his union. The local unions were, at that time, gingerly feeling their way towards state and national organization, and in these early attempts young Gompers was active. In 1887, he was one of the delegates to a national meeting which constituted the nucleus of what is now the Cigar-makers’ International Union.

The local cigar-makers’ union in which Gompers received his necessary preliminary training was one of the most enlightened and compactly organized groups of American labor. It was one of the first American Unions to adopt in an efficient manner the British system of benefits in the case of sickness, death, or unemployment. It is one of the few American unions that persistently encourages skill in its craft and intelligence in its membership. It has been a pioneer in collective bargaining and in arbitration. It has been conservatively and yet enthusiastically led and has generally succeeded in enlisting the respect and coöperation of employers. This union has been the kindergarten and preparatory school of Samuel Gompers, who, during all the years of his wide activities as the head of the Federation of Labor, has retained his membership in his old local and has acted as first vice-president of the Cigar-makers’ International. These early experiences, precedents, and enthusiasms Gompers carried with him into the Federation of Labor. He was one of the original group of trade union representatives who organized the Federation in 1881. In the following year he was its President. Since 1885 he has, with the exception of a single year, been annually chosen as President. During the first years the Federation was very weak, and it was even doubtful if the organization could survive the bitter hostility of the powerful Knights of Labor. It could pay its President no salary and could barely meet his expense account. ¹ Gompers played a large part in the complete reorganization of the Federation in 1886. He subsequently received a yearly salary of $1000 so that he could devote all of his time to the cause. From this year forward the growth of the Federation was steady and healthy. In the last decade it has been phenomenal. The earlier policy of caution has, however, not been discarded—for caution is the word that most aptly describes the methods of Gompers. From the first, he tested every step carefully, like a wary mountaineer, before he urged his organization to follow. From the beginning Gompers has followed three general lines of policy. First, he has built the imposing structure of his Federation upon the autonomy of the constituent unions. This is the secret of the united enthusiasm of the Federation. It is the Anglo-Saxon instinct for home rule applied to trade union politics. In the tentative years of its early struggles, the Federation could hope for survival only upon the suffrance of the trade union, and today, when the Federation has become powerful, its potencies rest upon the same foundation.

¹ In one of the early years this was $13.

Secondly, Gompers has always advocated frugality in money matters. His Federation is powerful but not rich. Its demands upon the resources of the trade unions have always been moderate, and the salaries paid have been modest. ² When the Federation erected a new building for its headquarters in Washington a few years ago, it symbolized in its architecture and equipment this modest yet adequate and substantial financial policy. American labor unions have not yet achieved the opulence, ambitions, and splendors of the guilds of the Middle Ages and do not yet direct their activities from splendid guild halls.

² Before 1899 the annual income of the Federation was less than $25,000; in 1901 it reached the $100,000 mark; and since 1903 it has exceeded $200,000.

In the third place, Gompers has always insisted upon the democratic methods of debate and referendum in reaching important decisions. However arbitrary and intolerant his impulses may have been, and however dogmatic and narrow his conclusions in regard to the relation of labor to society and towards the employer (and his Dutch inheritance gives him great obstinacy), he has astutely refrained from too obviously bossing his own organization.

With this sagacity of leadership Gompers has combined a fearlessness that sometimes verges on brazenness. He has never hesitated to enter a contest when it seemed prudent to him to do so. He crossed swords with Theodore Roosevelt on more than one occasion and with President Eliot of Harvard in a historic newspaper controversy over trade union exclusiveness. He has not been daunted by conventions, commissions, courts, congresses, or public opinion. During the long term of his Federation presidency, which is unparalleled in labor history and alone is conclusive evidence of his executive skill, scarcely a year has passed without some dramatic incident to cast the searchlight of publicity upon him—a court decision, a congressional inquiry, a grand jury inquisition, a great strike, a nation-wide boycott, a debate with noted public men, a political maneuver, or a foreign pilgrimage. Whenever a constituent union in the Federation has been the object of attack, he has jumped into the fray and has rarely emerged humiliated from the encounter. This is the more surprising when one recalls that he possesses the limitations of the zealot and the dogmatism of the partisan.

One of the most important functions of Gompers has been that of national lobbyist for the Federation. He was one of the earliest champions of the eight-hour day and the Saturday half-holiday. He has energetically espoused Federal child labor legislation, the restriction of immigration, alien contract labor laws, and employers’ liability laws. He advocated the creation of a Federal Department of Labor which has recently developed into a cabinet secretariat. His legal bête noire, however, was the Sherman Anti-Trust Law as applied to labor unions. For many years he fought vehemently for an amending act exempting the laboring class from the rigors of that famous statute. President Roosevelt with characteristic candor told a delegation of Federation officials who called on him to enlist his sympathy in their attempt, that he would enforce the law impartially against lawbreakers, rich and poor alike. Roosevelt recommended to Congress the passage of an amendment exempting “combinations existing for and engaged in the promotion of innocent and proper purposes.” An exempting bill was passed by Congress but was vetoed by President Taft on the ground that it was class legislation. Finally, during President Wilson’s administration, the Federation accomplished its purpose, first indirectly by a rider on an appropriation bill, then directly by the Clayton Act, which specifically declared labor combinations, instituted for the “purpose of mutual help and… not conducted for profit,” not to be in restraint of trade. Both measures were signed by the President. Encouraged by their success, the Federation leaders have moved with a renewed energy against the other legal citadel of their antagonists, the use of the injunction in strike cases.

Gompers has thus been the political watchman of the labor interests. Nothing pertaining, even remotely, to labor conditions escapes the vigilance of his Washington office. During President Wilson’s administration, Gompers’s influence achieved a power second to none in the political field, owing partly to the political power of the labor vote which he ingeniously marshalled, partly to the natural inclination of the dominant political party, and partly to the strategic position of labor in the war industries.