Keeping the Workers' Faith
BROOKS, THOMAS R.
Keeping the Workers' Faith Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America By Harold Live say Little, Brown. 195 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Toil and Trouble: A History of...
...I do not doubt that the Federation failed to organize women workers as such, but this was not a matter of male chauvinism...
...Livesay rightly acknowledges that Gompers could not lead where his followers would not go...
...At the core of Gompers beliefs, though, there remained an unshaken conviction in workers' self-reliance...
...Perhaps...
...This trendy formulation is the cause, I suspect, of a serious omission...
...In his time he built as best he could on the territory he could hold...
...Born of Dutch-Jewish parents, Gompers attended a Jewish free school in London for four years and had little more formal education...
...Gompers' dying words were, "Say to the workers of America that I have kept the faith...
...But at the time an attempt at organization might have been suicide...
...How it was tested in difficult times is the subject for a major biography...
...Faulted for not being a Eugene Victor Debs or an industrial unionist, he is more often than not portrayed as a conservative, and sometimes as an outright reactionary...
...The AFL experience in steel, and the failure of the Wobblies to secure their precarious industrial beachheads, suggest the possiblity...
...Livesay does not mention that women workers were organized, mostly in the garment trades, by AFL affiliates, or that the Federation, early on, favored equal pay for equal work...
...Harold livesav's all-too-briel book is a paruallv successful altempt at redressing the balance...
...Gompers, Livesay writes, "saw as few others did that in America labor must shape itself to the contours of its society rather than try to remake society...
...We no longer think that women ought to stay at home, yet that does not mean unionists who felt that way 50-75 years ago were in their day entirely wrong...
...As Livesay shows, that faith was increasingly constricted by a craft-bias...
...He made his share of mistakes, but fewer than his predecessors or his rivals...
...surely there is something more to be said...
...For his inability to overcome this limitation," Livesay writes, "Gompers suffered much criticism, both during his life and after...
...Regrettably, Harold Livesay did not undertake the task...
...We too easily dismiss today the craft unions' feeling that the unskilled were not ready for unionization...
...In his youth, he was something of a Marxist...
...During World War I, the membership doubled, but it dropped back to 2.9 million by the time of Gompers' death...
...Livesay asserts, without sufficient qualification, that racism, sexism, an anti-immigrant mentality, and craft prejudice "stood in the way" of organizing the industrial labor force...
...At the same time, he shared an "adherence to the prevailing system of values" that prevented expansion of unionization into the modern industrial sector...
...He does not, however, have the space to delve into the complexities of leadership or of Gompers' character...
...he died with his hand clasped in a Masonic grip by James Duncan of the Granite Cutters, an old and trusted aid...
...The craft unionists viewed female labor much as they did child labor, cheap and exploitive, and probably believed a worker should earn enough to make it unnecessary for his wife and daughters to take jobs...
...That labor survived at all is due in no small part to Sam Gompers...
...The courts—indeed, government at every level—actively intervened against organized labor...
...He writes well, has a sure grip on the facts, and shows understanding of Gompers and the forces that made him a leader of organized labor in the America of his day...
...His successors have done no more...
...Unfortunately, Livesay's book is an extended essay, not a full-scale biography...
...Over that 38-year period the Federation, often in the person of Gompers, boxed and feinted just to stay in the ring...
...Despite some reservations, I agree with Livesay's judgment...
...That there was no Wagner Act in Gompers day is another consideration which cannot be lightly dismissed...
...Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886, backed by Peter J. McGuire of the Carpenters and Adolph Strasser of the Cigarmakers, and continuously served as its president—except for 1894, when Socialist-backed Mineworkers chief John Mc-Bride won a term—until he died in 1924...
...After praising Gompers' ability to weld a coalition of "white, male, skilled workers across a spectrum of trades, national origins, and religions, many of them antagonistic," Livesay condemns his "failure to extend the movement to minority groups, women and the unskilled...
...At first the Federation grew slowly, barely topping the half-million mark at the turn of the century, and rising to slightly over 2 million in 1914...
...He realized that to succeed, the labor movement "would have to take the workers as they came, accept their principles, and weave them into a whole fabric...
...Goiupers' life, placed in an hisiorical perspective, shows "how Americans tried to preserve their traditional ideals in the shifting maelstrom of the industrial workplace...
...If it or an affiliate stepped out of its craft-bound arena, it was severely trounced, as the Iron and Steel Workers was in the 1892 Homestead strike and in 1919...
...as not only a craftsman but also a craflv fellow who subverted the revolutionary will of the American working class...
...But foreshortening leads the author to read into the past today's conventional wisdom...
...Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor" Samuel Gumpi-rs has been ill-served by most labor historians...
...Livesay, an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, sees Gompers as a "survivor" who pulled workers together in the small shop and craft industries, leaving them better paid, working shorter hours and more strongly organized...
...Livesay does not go much beyond reporting these simple facts...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 7
