Gompers in Perspective
SELIGMAN, BEN B.
Gompers in Perspective Seventy Years of Life and Labor. Reviewed by Ben B. Seligman By Samuel Gompers. Rev. and ed. by Philip Taft & John A. Sessions. International-affairs analyst, UAW; Dutton....
...If he rejected Government involvement in economic matters, it was because he feared what busybodies might do to his union movement...
...this Gompers helped achieve perhaps more than any other labor leader...
...He nursed AFL affiliates along with patient care at a time when Pinkerton agents and company lawyers had things quite their own way...
...He rejected the notion that the "unskilled" could not be organized, arguing with force and eloquence that even the lowliest had skills and that it was simply a matter of getting them together...
...The rejection of alternative approaches to unionism was evident early in Gompers's career...
...Rejecting all forms of utopianism, he urged the workers to organize, organize, organize...
...Today, the pragmatic views of an older unionism have been fused with the sort of concepts that Gompers might once have considered futile idealism...
...334 pp...
...It was the years of bitter experience, of many lost strikes and lockouts, that convinced Gompers, Strasser and McGuire that workers could bargain only from positions of strength...
...He crisscrossed the country numerous times preaching worker solidarity...
...He fought the blacklist and labor injunction with leonine courage...
...The Western Labor Union, the American Labor Union, the IWW all came in for scorn...
...Gompers reserved some of his heaviest artillery for the Bolsheviks...
...Lenin had called the AFL a "rope of sand," but Gompers took his sneer without blinking...
...The Soviets, he insisted long before anyone else, were setting up a system of compulsory labor and this was "an unspeakable crime against civilization itself...
...But the pure and simple unionism of Gompers's day has now been tempered by a new vision of broader responsibilities...
...But, by the time he passed the scepter of leadership to his successors, Gompers had acquired for the AFL an acknowledged position of stature...
...Debs's American Railway Union was condemned as a dual organization, a heinous act of treachery in the Gompers lexicon...
...Once that task had been carried through, labor could grow to unparalleled heights...
...Gompers had been President of the AFL for forty years, from the early hesitant starts in the 1380s to his death in 1924...
...It was, however, the inability of the old Knights of Labor to meet the requirements of specific groups of workingmen that enforced an approach described as craft unionism...
...contributor, "Dissent," "Commentary'' Samuel Gompers's autobiography is a major document in the history of American labor...
...As it was, he stood committed to a policy of craft unionism, and when in the late Twenties industrial corporations had to be met with industrial unions this policy was found wanting...
...Gompers's practicality was well suited lo his times...
...They have done an excellent job of abridgement, even to the point of retaining the quaint tone of the original...
...Gompers's diction was a weighty one, and his writing and speech appear to us now redolent of Victorian candlelight...
...What disturbed Gompers in these abortive attempts at industrial unionism was the threat to safety that their more strenuous efforts implied...
...This meant economic solidarity through individual unions that were voluntarily federated for a common goal...
...Originally issued in 1925 in two substantial volumes, it has been refurbished and reissued in condensed form by Philip Taft and John A. Sessions...
...Gompers insisted that action had to be subordinate to the continued existence of trade-unionism, for if organization were maintained it would always be possible to improve the situation later on...
...His famous policy of more in the here and now was often attacked as mere opportunism, and for many years it seemed his opponents might have been right after all, for the labor movement continued to be weak and unable to resist the onslaught of intransigent employers and an indifferent, even hostile Government...
...Yet, we are indebted to Gompers for many things...
...When Daniel De Leon formed the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance to oppose the AFL, Gompers let loose with some choice vituperation which De Leon paid back with interest...
...Through most of this era, the organized unions included but a small number of American workers...
...Yet, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the new outlook implied in present-day unionism (which developed labor organizations in the very interstices of industrial society) would have been eventually welcomed by Gompers, for—as George Meany says in his introduction—Gompers sought to embrace all workers in the union movement...
...If after World War I he seemed arrogant to Europeans, it was because he felt that his insistence on bread and butter was really superior to the political ideologies of other labor movements...
...5.00...
...The labor movement needed lo sink deep roots in the pragmatic American way of life...
...It is only in our own generation that American trade-unionists have come to perceive the need for a broader perspective...
...But, once we get beyond these stylistic notes, we are brought directly to the turbulent period of the American labor movement's origins...
...That "bargaining from a position of strength" had to take other forms in the 1930s was something Gompers might have recognized more quickly than some of his colleagues had he not been blinded by the history of the Knights and the IWW...
Vol. 40 • June 1957 • No. 26
