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Updated: June 12, 2025
The older skilled workers, largely American born, have long been organized in the American Federation of Labor under Mr. Gompers. These represent an aristocracy of labor. They tend to work with the employers against the great mass of unskilled immigrants, and they cannot be regarded as forming part of anything that could be truly called a labor movement. ``There are, says Mr.
From the galleries they watch the proceedings. They are mighty in committee rooms. They reason with the recalcitrant. They fight opponents in their Congress districts. There are no abler or more potent politicians than the labor leaders out of Congress. Why should rulers like Mr. Gompers and Mr. Furuseth * go to Congress? They are a Super-Congress."
The actual labor of coördination, however, was to be exercised by an advisory commission of seven, which included Howard E. Coffin, in charge of munitions, Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, in charge of transportation, Julius Rosenwald, president of the Sears-Roebuck Company, in charge of supplies including clothing, Bernard M. Baruch, a versatile financial trader, in charge of metals, minerals, and raw materials, Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, in charge of labor and the welfare of workers, Hollis Godfrey in charge of engineering and education, and Franklin H. Martin in charge of medicine.
Gompers and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all have to be made over in a week.
Law Rep. 436 . Gompers was finally sentenced to imprisonment for thirty days and the other two defendants were fined $500 each. These penalties were later lifted by the Supreme Court on a technicality, 233 U.S. 604 .
This oldest of all the groups of labor organizations remains the most vital part of the Federation. The success of the American Federation of Labor is due in large measure to the crafty generalship of its President, Samuel Gompers, one of the most astute labor leaders developed by American economic conditions.
The president of the local New York union of cigar makers was at the time Samuel Gompers, a young man of twenty-seven, who was born in England and came to America in 1862. In his endeavor to build up a model for the "new" unionism and in his almost uninterrupted headship of that movement for forty years is indicated Gompers' truly representative character.
Nor could an employer discipline an employe for joining a union or inducing others to join. In 1916, when the President established the National Council of Defense, he appointed Samuel Gompers one of the seven members composing the Advisory Commission in charge of all policies dealing with labor and chairman of a committee on labor of his own appointment.
Reinstein replied, telling how at an American labour congress some years back the Americans shut the door in the face of a representative of a union of foreign workmen. "Such," he said, "was the feeling in America at the time when Gompers was supreme, but that time has passed."
But it is easy to overestimate the drift in the direction of radicalism. The Plumb Plan has not yet been made the sine qua non of the American labor program. Although the American Federation of Labor endorsed the principle of government ownership of the railways at its conventions of 1920 and 1921, President Gompers, who spoke against the Plan, was reelected and again reelected.
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