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The Coming Nation, Sept. 9, 1911. Mr. Gompers's articles in the Federationist have recently appeared in book form. Victor Grayson and G. R. S. Taylor, "The Problem of Parliament," p. 56. Edmond Kelly, "Individualism and Collectivism," p. 398.
The union boasted that this sale would prove only an incubus to the purchasers, for no one would dare occupy the houses sold under such circumstances. In the meantime the American Federation, which had financed the litigation, undertook to raise the needed sum by voluntary collection and made Gompers's birthday the occasion for a gift to the Danbury local.
It was not necessary in a Socialist periodical to say anything against Gompers's preaching of the common interests of capital and labor, since there is practically no Socialist who would not agree that such a belief amounts to a total blindness to industrial and political conditions.
The relation between the American Federation of Labor and the socialistic and political labor movements, as well as the monopolistic eagerness of the socialists to absorb these activities, is clearly indicated in Gompers's narrative of his experiences as an American labor representative at the London Conference of 1918.
Gompers's program, as I have shown, to claim that "a partial expropriation of capital" is taking place through the unions, and that by this means, without any government action, and without any revolutionary general strike the workers will gradually "get all they produce."
But Kautsky feared that the German workingmen might give some credit to Gompers's claim that the non-Socialist policy of the American unions was responsible for the relatively greater prosperity of the working people in America. "The workingmen," he explained, referring to this country, "have not won their higher wages in the last decade, but have inherited them from their forefathers.
This last clause, though a clear statement of the common law, would, of course, render hopeless Mr. Gompers's crusade in favor of the boycott, the object of a boycott invariably being to control the acts of somebody else.
Gompers's representative in New York was the first man put up. He was furnished with quotations from alleged Socialist writers on the question of religion. Then a woman from Boston who had once been a Socialist, sent a note to me I was presiding asking for extended time. I was the only Socialist in the place who knew what was going on.
President Gompers has claimed that 80 per cent of the voting members of the American Federation of Labor followed his advice in the election of 1908, which was, in nearly every case, to vote the Democratic ticket. About 60 per cent of this number have always voted Democratic, so that if Mr. Gompers's claim were conceded it would mean a change of no more than 300,000 votes.
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.
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