Samuel Gompers was born in 1850 in Spitalfields in London’s East End to a Jewish family from Amsterdam. Three months after turning 10 he left school to roll cigars beside his father, while studying Hebrew and the Talmud at night. In 1863 the family emigrated to New York’s Lower East Side. In the quiet cigar lofts workers pooled money for newspapers and paid one man to read aloud while they rolled, and Gompers joined his first union at 14. He married at 17, and he and his wife had 12 children, six of whom died in infancy. In 1873, at David Hirsch’s shop, mentor Karl Laurrell told him to test every idea against his union card, steering him from socialism to practical trade unionism.
After the Panic of 1873 nearly destroyed his local, Gompers rebuilt it on high dues that paid sickness, unemployment and death benefits. He helped found the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and led it for almost 40 years, seeking an American standard of living through business unionism and once saying an employer’s greatest crime was to fail to run at a profit. He backed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and opposed annexing the Philippines, partly on racial grounds, while supporting Mexican workers joining U.S. unions. In World War I he allied with Woodrow Wilson, joined the Council of National Defense and helped move against anti-war IWW leaders, then chaired the Commission on International Labor Legislation in Paris in 1919.
- Business leaders came to prefer his predictable AFL to the radical Industrial Workers of the World.
- His labor recommendations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference were written into the Treaty of Versailles.
- Going blind late in life, he hid it by having aides read to him and whisper names of approaching colleagues.
- He collapsed at a Pan-American Federation of Labor meeting in Mexico City and was rushed north by train.
- He died in San Antonio in December 1924 at 74 and is buried at Sleepy Hollow near Andrew Carnegie.
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