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V

AMERICAN LABOR

SAMUEL GOMPERS LEADING

As the traveler in lands of the older world looks upon the ancient masonry of temples, pyramids, aqueducts, city walls, castles, and cathedrals, and turns his thought to former civilizations, he must see in the masses of stone piled upon stone the token of infinite human toil, the work of slaves, feudal servants, and armies. The emperor, bishop, or general, under whom these products of human energy, enduring through the centuries, were built, live on as an historic name and deservedly, for without his vision and directing power the work would never have been done. The workman is forgotten, inevitably forgotten, as merely one in a nameless multitude; yet, whatever his zeal for the cause in which even a monument of religion has reared its walls, he was still a human being, subject to hunger, thirst, and weariness, subject also to complete exploitation, usually we may be sure - at hands none too sensitive. With nobody to speak for him, and incapable of speaking for himself, he could do merely as he was told, to the

enrichment of architecture and the utter submergence of his own identity.

The individual worker in modern industry is still a member of an army, and even in this age of selfexpression, without the power to imprint much, if any, of his personal identity upon his daily work. Since labor-saving power and machinery have in many instances supplanted the manual skill of individuals, this has become increasingly true. But the worker is no longer a silent pawn, to be played at the whim of his employer. In his town, his state, his country, the world at large, he is banded with other workers of his own and other trades, under leaders through whose voices his own, blending with those of thousands upon thousands, makes itself heard to effective purpose. The cathedrals of to-day could not be built at all were organized labor to say No.

In the single century now ending — and most notably in the second half of that century there has come to pass a change in the condition of the working class as a whole which would have seemed unbelievable a hundred years ago. In this period of universal change economic and industrial forces never dreamed of when the century began have altered the whole relation between employer and employed. But for the constantly recurring appear

ance of powerful leaders for the forces of labor, the workers would have remained inarticulate, and the history of the "labor movement," with all its contribution to the general cause of human betterment, would still have to be made. It is, to be sure, still in the making — not through the fulfillment of any single tendency, but through the operation of many forces, highly complicated and diverse.

In the United States it is not too much to say that the history of the labor movement for the past forty years and more has been inseparable from the personal history of Samuel Gompers, the lifelong foe of socialism, of whom Mr. John Spargo, for many years, though not finally, an authoritative spokesman for that way of thinking, has recently written: "Mr. Gompers held his unique position by virtue of extraordinary gifts of intellect and character, amounting to something closely akin to genius. Taken all in all, he was incomparably the greatest leader that the trade-union movement of any country has yet produced." Still another writer, Mr. Benjamin Stolberg, has described Gompers as the Moses of American Labor, "through the forty years of its daily struggle for manna, its defense against inner rebellion and outer attack"; and he adds, "It is hard to tell Moses from Israel during those forty years in the desert." Because the

leader and his people were so fused into a single force, they may best be regarded here as such, and so be treated. Let us then look upon them as one.

I

Samuel Gompers was an American by adoption, not by birth. Just opposite the home of his boyhood in London, where he was born January 27, 1850, there stood a silk factory, which the topographical biographer may identify, if he will and can, with the scene of Matthew Arnold's lines,

And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited.

It was a sordid, dispiriting neighborhood, and the young Gompers, surrounded by silk-weavers often out of work, had ample occasion for gaining an early knowledge of the hardships endured by the class into which he was born. His parents, Solomon and Sara (Rood) Gompers, were Dutch Jews who had moved from Amsterdam to London before their marriage. His grandfather Gompers, a man of no little personal dignity, was a dealer in antiques and, in pursuance of his calling, a considerable traveler. He and his family, including a son only ten months older than Sam, occupied the second floor of the house of which his father, mother, he,

his four younger brothers, and a sister occupied the lower. After his parents moved from London to New York three more children were born to them. In outward circumstance their lives differed widely from those of earlier generations of the family, members of which- spelling their name Gomperz and otherwise - had distinguished themselves as rabbis, scholars, and generous men of wealth both in Holland and in Prussia.

To supplement the education imparted by a large and lively family circle, Sam Gompers was sent to a Jewish free school at six. At ten his earnings were needed for the family sustenance, and he went to work, still so eager for knowledge that he attended a night free school in which his mind received further training through study of the Talmud. But the formalities of the Jewish religion meant even less to him than to his imperfectly orthodox family. "By nature," he wrote many years later, "I am a nonconformist. I believe that restrictions dwarf personality and that largest usefulness comes through greatest personal freedom. Somehow I have never been able to separate an act of worship or service, as I prefer to call it, from some concrete human need.”

Sam Gompers, so to call him again (he said that everybody who cared a cent about him called him