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Upon men of Strasser's practical mental grasp these petty tempests in the melting pot could only produce an impression of sheer futility, and he turned to trade unionism as the only activity worth his while. Strasser had been elected president of the Cigar Makers' International Union in 1877, in the midst of a great strike in New York against the tenement-house system.
When it was finished, the conductor said: "Gentlemen, I ask your pardon for having allowed this piece to be played to the end; but I wanted to know what manner of man it is that dares to write such things about the master, Brahms." Wolf got a little respite from his miseries by going to stay a few weeks in his own country with his brother-in-law, Strasser, an inspector of taxes.
The dismal failure of the strike against the tenement house system in cigar making brought home to both Strasser and Gompers the weakness of the plan of organization of their union as well as that of American trade unions in general.
There is certainly something of this idea in the plan outlined by President Strasser of the International Cigar-makers, and he represented the advance guard of his generation, in his annual report in the year 1879. "We cannot drive the females out of the trade but we can restrict this daily quota of labor through factory laws.
His early contact in the union of his trade with men like Strasser, upon whom the ideas of Marx and the International Workingmen's Association had left an indelible stamp, and his thorough study of Marx gave him that grounding both in idealism and class consciousness which has produced many strong leaders of American unions and saved them from defection to other interests.
There were at the time two factions among the cigar makers, one upholding the International Cigar Makers' Union with Adolph Strasser and Samuel Gompers as leaders, the other calling itself the Progressive Union, which was more socialistic in nature and composed of more recent immigrants and less skilled workers.
Then it took the form of a demand by such conservative leaders as Gompers, McGuire, and Strasser, that plank 10, with its pledge in favor of "the collective ownership by the people of all means of production and distribution," be stricken out. Notwithstanding this, the majority of national trade unions endorsed the program. During 1894 the trade unions were active participants in politics.
The socialist movement, after it had unwittingly assisted in the birth of the opportunistic trade unionism of Strasser and Gompers, did not disappear, but remained throughout the eighties a handful of "intellectuals" and "intellectualized" wage earners, mainly Germans. These never abandoned the hope of better things for socialism in the labor movement.
Adolph Strasser of the cigar makers raised the point of protection for union funds and gave as a second reason that it "will give our organization more stability, and in that manner we shall be able to avoid strikes by perhaps settling with our employers, when otherwise we should be unable to do so, because when our employers know that we are to be legally recognized that will exercise such moral force upon them that they cannot avoid recognizing us themselves."
These "sections," with a maximum membership which probably never exceeded a thousand, nearly all foreigners, became a preparatory school in trade union leadership for many of the later organizers and leaders of the American Federation of Labor: for example, Adolph Strasser, the German cigar maker, whose organization became the new model in trade unionism, and P.J. McGuire, the American-born carpenter, who founded the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and who was for many years the secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor.
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