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Updated: June 12, 2025
It was called for the purpose of discussing a general strike of shirt-waist workers in New York City. The hall was packed. Overflow meetings were held at Beethoven Hall, Manhattan Lyceum, and Astoria Hall. In the Cooper Union addresses were delivered by Samuel Gompers, by Miss Dreier, and by many others. Finally, a girl of eighteen asked the chairman for the privilege of the floor.
I do not know how he squares that with his distaste of democracy. There was Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, high in Administration confidence. It was a long wait before Abby Scott Baker and I were allowed into his sanctum.
Contrast with the position of Gompers and Mitchell the chief official of the German unions, Karl Legien, a relatively conservative representative of Continental unionism. "The unions," he says, "are based on the conviction that there is an unbridgeable gulf between capital and labor.
A mass meeting had been called in Cooper Union to consider the situation. Mr. Gompers was one of the speakers. At the far end of the hall rose a little Jewish girl, and asked to be heard. Once on the platform, she began speaking in Yiddish, fast and earnestly. She concluded by saying she was tired of talking, and so would put the motion for a general strike of the whole trade.
Such expressions naturally aroused the European Socialist and Labor press, and Kautsky even devoted a special article to Gompers in the Neue Zeit.
President Gompers recognized that this was equivalent to an endorsement of Bryan, but pleaded that "in performing a solemn duty at this time in support of a political party, labor does not become partisan to a political party, but partisan to a principle." Substantially, all prominent non-Socialist trade-union officials followed Gompers' lead.
Enthusiastic meetings were held in the great manufacturing centers, stimulated to enthusiasm by the incisive eloquence of Gompers. At the annual convention of the Federation held in Buffalo in November, 1917, full endorsement was given to the Alliance by a vote of 21,602 to 401.
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 cigarmaker, Samuel Gompers was early apprenticed to that craft.
President Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, who had every facility of meeting European Socialists and unionists on a recent tour, made some observations which are by no means without a certain foundation.
Gompers defends the Federation as worthy of labor's respect on the ground that many of its most active capitalist members have shown a sustained sincerity, "always having in mind the rights and interests of labor," which is the very antithesis to the Socialist claim that nobody will always have in mind the rights and the interests of labor, except the laborers and least of all those who buy labor themselves, or are intimately associated with those who buy labor.
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