What Manner of Man Was Gompers?
I
FOR years Samuel Gompers was American Labor. If one traces its victories, one uncovers his tactics. His virtues were the best measure of its social reform. His prejudices, bigoted under stress, became fixed by its trials and errors. Rarely have the native limitations of a leader so perfectly synchronized with the cultural limitations of a movement. Gompers was the clarion consciousness of the unconscious wishes and fears of the tribal period — the primitive craft phase — of American Labor. He was the Moses of its forty years in the wilderness, its daily struggle for manna, its defense against inner rebellion and outer attack.
It is hard to tell Moses from Israel during those forty years in the desert. Guerrilla existence demanded such high-handed leadership of such narrow idealism that the fire of the leader blinds us to the terrible trail behind him. It was only when those simple tribes were brought to the threshold of their greater social significance that his spirit cooled and clarified against the background of their stern epic. His work done, he went to the top of a mountain and died. His death revealed that he was not much of a prophet, for his vision was limited by his watchful pugnacity. He was not much of a thinker, for the same reason. He was a great personal chieftain, whose narrow righteousness was never disturbed by philosophical doubts or utopian dreams.
It is idle to fall into the rhythm of analogy. But the strength of Gompers was of just that kind. He was a personal leader — vigilant, dictatorial, canny, incorruptible, narrow in his ideals though wide in his sympathies, and for his time and place the only man for the job. The American Federation of Labor is still a community of backward and often barbarous tribes. When he joined what there was of the Labor movement in his late teens in the late sixties, it was wage-enslaved with a callousness which now seems incredible. It was practically unorganized. At first he drifted — never completely — into the reveries and dream-talk of the socialism of the period, here and there touched by that fatal anarchist decadence which comes to every movement unable to connect with its times. These Red and Black clouds had drifted over from the lightning of the ‘48 revolutions and the Communist manifestoes of the Old World. But the winds of our industrial frontier soon dispelled them. For a while he even flirted with the equally naive native syndicalism of the Knights of Labor, whom he later disrupted in one of his most brilliant campaigns. But in time his indomitable realism asserted itself. He appreciated the absurdity of dialectic nightmares and One Big Union attacks against the young giant of American capital. He went to the burning bush and listened to the voice of his Lord. His Yahweh appeared to him in the overalls of a glorified trades-union workman. To him Gompers was loyal to his dying breath. And from him he got this simple decalogue: organize by separate crafts; fight for more wages; for fewer hours; for better work-rules; strike when necessary; break no contracts; obey the oligarchy of the elder chiefs; commit no adultery with socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, communists; covet not the function of capital; and abstain from partisan politics. As years went by he grew ever more orthodox in this ritual of daily opportunism. Under the circumstances he was essentially right. This piecemeal campaign for social justice kept American Labor from dissipating its strength in the hostile environment of an industrial borderland, which only nowadays is gradually vanishing.
II
Gompers had the physical spell of the personal leader. When seated, the powerful, long-armed torso and the enormous head seemed to belong to a six-footer. But when he rose his hefty, absurd little legs kept him from soaring above five feet four and gave a touch of anthropoid strength to his chronic restlessness. The head was magnificent. It looked like an animated boulder, on which the weathers of a rich and dangerous life had carved large and rugged yet tremulously sensitive features. The granite complexion, the mossy tufts of graying hair, the Oriental cast of countenance — its whole noble freakishness fascinated. His face was perpetually acute, forever approving or disapproving with the entire gamut of strong emotion. When he felt very intensely his pellucid gray eyes, perched wide apart behind bits of thin windowglass, gave the impression of inflaming his face. The mouth was a wide slit, with the corners quivering down the hard and well-rounded jaw. The voice had the rare and exquisite gift of communicating any emotion he felt. All his vital expressions rose and fell together as though controlled by some inner mechanism. One moment the mobile mask would be cunningly furtive and quizzical, then intimately and wistfully kind; then again it would glow with a self-righteous passion that in retrospect seemed grotesque. It was a congenitally histrionic face, and its outlay in spiritual energy bespoke an enormous vitality.
Physically, and especially nervously, he was tireless. Inhumanly grueling labor and a Gargantuan intemperance seemed to make no impression on him. He had the iron man’s disregard for all common-sense in matters of diet, sleep, pleasure, drink, comfort, and work. Years on end his work-day began shortly after eight in the morning and ended deep in the night. Even his relaxations — which he often took in one of the cheap burlesque houses on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington or in a saloon frequented by the Labor crowd — were spent with some friend or foe in the everlasting game of Labor strategy. His mere animal spirits roused the elementary admiration which we all have for those who arc able to go on forever. And even brief contact with his impassioned, prudential, ceaseless alacrity left one fatigued, pleasantly if the relation was pleasant, distempered if otherwise. But even his closest associates rarely left him with a sense of indifference.
His intensity simplified his nature. His tactics, no matter how oblique or vicarious, were intuitional and not. intellectual. In his likes and dislikes he was childishly stubborn. And in the women who played a part in his life he called forth mainly the maternal affection. The first Mrs. Gompers, whom he married when he was seventeen and she a bit younger, and with whom he lived in homely comradeship for fiftyfour years, mothered his gifts and adjusted herself to his shortcomings by overlooking them. She slipped into the rôle of making a home for his cause and it was charming to see the fine friendship which existed between this plain little Jewish housewife and the ScotchIrish Labor oligarchy which moved around her husband.
For a long generation his personal secretary was Miss Guard. And when toward the end of his life the Bright s disease from which he had suffered for many years affected his heart, Miss Guard nursed him with infinite patience. She would interrupt important conferences to force on him a pill or a spoonful of medicine, much to his peevish disgust, which occasionally precipitated a scene. She knew his every reaction and softened their effects on himself with the shrewdness of friendship, fooling him when he needed or wanted to be fooled and giving him a piece of her mind whenever he needed a censor.
His research secretary was Miss Thorne, who knows as few others the pawns and forces in American Labor. In time she selflessly trained her mind into the shadow of his to such perfection that students of Labor and writers who went to Gompers for his opinions almost always came to her afterward for the real facts and psychology back of them. And she explained and extended his views with rare faith and diplomacy. The devotion with which these two splendid old maids admired, understood, interpreted, and forgave him is remarkable, for there was much in his life and language and ways of doing things which they would have deeply resented in others. The secret probably lay in the fact that to them he was both a great leader and a bad boy.
Unconsciously Gompers surrounded himself with far lesser men. Mr. Matthew Woll, who was derisively called his ‘crown prince’ or ‘office boy,’ was and still is the only man of marked ability on the executive council of the Federation. The others drifted to the important positions either through a combination of seniority and conformity or, as Labor people express it, because they are ‘good poker-players’ and play any game accordingly. Gompers invariably held the best hand. They were his creatures, not at all in any invidious, but in the purely malleable, sense. He instinctively picked them because their minds were certain to fade into his. They shared his ideas, which were mediocre, while they lacked his élan, which was his strength. Constitutionally the office of President of the American Federation of Labor is very weak. He can call no strikes; he can settle none. When he issues a call for a boycott it has none but moral force. The Federation is often called a rope of sand. Its treasury is far weaker than the treasuries of most well-sized unions. The office is entirely one of moral authority, of suasion, of tactics and countertactics, of maintaining nice balances through the juggling of forces. Gompers could play this game — sympathetically, ruthlessly, understandingly, cunningly — with the perfection of a creative artist. Often the leaders were mistrustful of one another, but they could always finally trust him. He had given himself to the movement completely — and they felt it. He understood them better than they did themselves — and they knew it. He was the moral centre of their cause. They often strayed to its periphery; but they never dared to leave the circle of his influence, for beyond its reach was the camp of the enemy.
He held them together with all the devices of the superb politician. But fundamentally he kept his machine through the force of morale.
III
Gompers had the mental characteristics of the personal leader. He was vastly experienced. The social politics of this country for the last half-century were his personal reminiscences. One morning he sketched for me the socalled concerted movement in allied crafts, on which I had spent a good half-year in research and travel. He told me all I already knew about it in a brief half-hour, and then he told me some things about it which no amount of study could have unearthed. He had gone through the vortex of every political campaign since Garfield — in most states of the Union. He had been in the thick of the fight for or against every bit of social legislation since the late seventies. He carried in his retentive mind the motion picture of the last half-century of our social history, which alone would have made him one of the best historians of that period, were it not for the fatal censorship of his frequently bigoted retrospections and prejudices.
Then he was uncannily shrewd. One by one he outwitted his opponents and rivals, driving them off the confines of the mass movement of American Labor, away to the left and into the desert with nothing to face but their own embittered Atlantis. He had the fighter’s cold-hot fury, merciless, savagely invective and personal yet superbly controlled during the struggle; but instantly ready to compromise when compromise amounted to victory, and completely forgiving the moment he won. He was above personal grudges, though he was never so weak as to believe that in politics one can fight ideas without hitting their carriers. These two qualities, his monumental experience and his sharp skill, welded by his impassioned self-righteousness, gave the impression of wisdom. He gave such good precedents for his consummate strategies that one had the feeling of a synthetic understanding behind them. Great character often gives this illusion. Thus Gandhi’s mystical genius so obscures the naïve nonsense of his beliefs in a world without laws, medicine, and machinery that his observations seem profound. Gompers had the same necromantic influence, not merely on himself and his followers, but also on his dissenters. Everybody praised or indicted his social philosophy.
But as a matter of fact that’s just what he lacked. He had no long view either of life or of Labor. And the strength as well as the weakness of American Labor under his leadership lay in its hourly realism. When he ventured into philosophical speculations about the State or industrial society he was invariably sophomoric. He had the Jewish admiration for learning, but it was superficial. He read a good deal in the social sciences, but always to prove his own prejudices. And even in his serenest intellectual moments he thought not in search of truth but in terms of debate.
Thus for over forty years he fought the different socialist schools, from the blackest anarchism to the reddest Bolshevism. Yet he admitted to me that he had never studied Marx or Bakunin or Kautsky or Lenin, let alone the historical or theoretical implications of their thought. Of Bolshevism he had this to say: ‘Bolshevism in Russia began in prohibition. For prohibition uproots the habits of a people’ — thus linking his two pet abominations. Of the wars of the pamphlets in which these Red leaders had engaged he knew absolutely nothing. And since the history of European Labor consists so largely of its reactions to the splits in the Social Democracy, he was so woefully ignorant about it as to be a source of perpetual wonder to his European comrades.
Tactically he beat the radicals, man by man, movement by movement, in convention after convention. He always knew their ways and means and masterfully frustrated them, but he never understood their various aims. He always defeated their intentions, but he never knew their motives, except that he could tell the faker from the fanatic. His first antiradical drives were against the primitive socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist sectlets, whose constant segmentation speckled the Labor movement in the seventies and eighties of the last century. Then he fought the shrewd but weak Powderly and the Knights of Labor; then the saintly but simple Debs in the syndicalist nineties, and the socialists of this century; then the fanatical and ascetic De Leon and his Socialist Labor Party; then the vitriolically embittered and irresolute Haywood and the I. W. W.; finally our contemporary Bolshevist Don Quixote, William Z. Foster, and his communist phrase-movement. And all along he fought those who believed in a Labor party, from the days when such belief was mere folly to the days when it seemed at least feasible, standing firmly for the nonpartisan policy of ‘rewarding the friends’ and ‘punishing the enemies’ of Labor in the two old parties.
But he fought not merely the radicals. He fought all ‘ intellectuals’ — a term he constantly rolled on his tongue with the fascination of deep hatred. Since the war there has been a growing tendency in our Labor movement toward what has been so happily called Trade-Union Capitalism. These New Unionists are accepting the basic economic structure of American industry and are trying to work within it. During the last few years they have gone into banking, insurance, and business to the extent of hundreds of millions of dollars. They are developing the technical training and the vocational placement of their rank and file. They are organizing for greater political power. But, most significantly, they are beginning to collaborate successfully with Capital, in the only way in which collaboration is possible, by assuming Labor’s responsibility toward production. They guarantee efficient production in exchange for intelligent and humane management. Here and there, especially in the needle and railroad industries, they are establishing boards of mutual control and impartial arbitration. And they share contractually in the resulting benefits. In the words of one of their leaders, ‘organized Labor is passing the stage of mere economic haggling. It is still bargaining. But it is bargaining for a way of life.’ Now the illuminating thing about Gompers is that he fought this essentially conservative way of life just as hard, though far more covertly, as he fought the radical way of life. And for the same instinctive reason. The New Unionists threatened to lift his bushwhacking opportunism into an industrial programme. They threatened to weaken his jealous craftseparatism, with its absurd ‘jurisdictional disputes’ in the face of the amalgamation of capital. In short, they wanted more peace, while Gompers lived on fighting. He was born to infight at close range: for a little more money — penny by penny; for a little more leisure — minute by minute; for a little more leeway — rule by rule; through the weapon of the strike and the armistice of its ‘settlement.’ And he hoped to orchestrate the discordant trades in each industry so slowly that no leader might lose his job or his power.
All his life Gompers fought these ‘intellectuals’ — the radicals in the Labor movement, the outside liberals and reformers who were ‘butting in,’ the New Unionists. Since the war his anti-intellectualist attitude developed into unreasonable hatred of anybody with a formal training or a liberal education who took an interest in Labor otherwise than as a hired ‘expert.’ This obsession grew on him because he instinctively felt that the Labor movement was outgrowing its primitive craft-phase; that it was becoming a way of life; that the forty years in the wilderness were closing; and that his leadership was bound to wane in time. His own era was really from the early eighties of the last century until our entry into the war. Since then he felt in himself the struggle between the old and the new. He was too self-righteous ever to admit even to himself that he might be wrong. But, like all perfect tacticians, he had an inner censor that warned him when his opponents expressed genuine unrest in the rank and file. And in the last few years he inspired several counter-reformations against his own orthodoxy. When the tradesunions became too fratricidally ‘autonomous,’ he manœuvred the progressives in the American Federation of Labor into pressing successfully for the different industrial ‘Departments’ in the Federation. These Departments are mere clearing-houses for all the trades in one industry. But they appeased the rank-and-file wish for closer coöperation, and the leaders could be trusted not to lose their jobs by amalgamating their unions. When in the last presidential campaign it seemed that the advocates of independent political action were gaining in strength, Gompers ‘nonpartisanly ‘ endorsed La Follette, to whom he was bound by ties of genuine friendship. Had La Follette won a strong congressional bloc, Gompers would have won with the winner. As it was, Gompers was able to smash completely his Socialist and other third-party opponents at the last national convention of the American Federation of Labor, where he fought his last fight. But, whether in retreat or attack, he always fought with the same headsI-win-tails-you-lose keenness. The detail of his playing both ends against the middle was a joy to observe. And, paradoxically, his sincerity was deepest in his very conviction that, as long as he was loading the dice, Labor was safe.
His struggle against capital and the judiciary required much less acumen. It needed mainly two qualities, morale and industry. And he had no end of both.
In 1908 he was sentenced to one year in prison for contempt of an injunction against Labor’s boycott of Buck’s Stove and Range Company. He never served the sentence. But no one who knew him could doubt his contemptuous sincerity: ‘That’s all right. Prison holds no terrors for me. My fare cannot be simpler. My bed cannot be plainer. And the rest might do me good.’ His answer to the ‘injunction judges’ was equally fearless:—
‘Only bigoted, power-lusting judges refuse to admit that the abuses of government by injunction cry to Heaven. They are pure judicial usurpations without any warrant in law.’
The central task of the American Federation of Labor is to organize the unorganized workers, which means chronic warfare against the most conservative section of capital. Under the Gompers régime, since 1882 its membership grew from a scant 50,000 to about 3,000,000. The executive routine of this growth under continuous lire was enormous, and Gompers carried most of its administrative as well as tactical responsibilities. In fact, his intra-Labor quarrels centred largely about this same problem of speed and method in organizing the unskilled workers. We have seen how he resisted the radical demand in the Federation for the spread of classconsciousness. He showed the same stubbornness toward capital. ‘There is not one word,’ so he once indirectly addressed a group of employers, ‘which I have said upon the question of Labor that I would unsay except to say it more emphatically. There is not one step that I have taken which I would retrace except to take it more firmly.’
It would be difficult to pass a more critical judgment on his orthodoxy, resilient only in its safeguards.
IV
But Gompers’s immediate strength as a leader was his intense humanness. Nothing human ever escaped his sensitive spirit. He was not merely abidingly kind to those who did not cross him. He understood the arts of warmth and affection. His histrionic temper enjoyed being delicately decent, befitting the person and the moment. His pity was instant and unquestioning. His democracy was not ulterior but natural. He recognized sincerity even in his bitterest foes. ‘Is n’t it a pity that such an intelligent fellow as Foster should make such an ass of himself?’ he once remarked to me. His zest of life was richly spontaneous and communicative, and his humor, both subtle and spiced, was infectious in his own enjoyment of it.
His friends simply could do no wrong. When they felt like it they could ‘tell Sam where to get off ‘ with a personal frankness which was amazing. Toward them he dropped all his shrewdness and was absolutely guileless. When he was shown the confession of the McNamara brothers of having dynamited the Los Angeles Times Building, he was dazed by their treachery: ‘That’s terrible. . . . If John McNamara had told me in confidence that he was guilty, I don’t believe I would have betrayed him. I am willing to stand by it — I don’t believe I would have betrayed him. But I certainly would not have declared my confidence in him. I certainly would not have raised money for his defense.’ Gompers had fought violence in Labor all his life. Still, McNamara was a Labor man: ‘I don’t believe I would have betrayed him.’ Clearly Gompers was class-conscious; not in the technical revolutionary sense, but class-conscious none the less.
And he liked to think of himself and his own as proletarians, again in the simple wage-earning sense. ‘I am a member of a family of working people,’ he boasted. ‘My father and grandfather worked at a trade. I worked at mine for twenty-six years. My children are workers. My granddaughter is a stenographer. The members of my family always have been and expect to remain wage-earners.’ In nothing was his devotion to Labor so touching as in this half-empty boast, in which he believed because he liked the idea. His children are engaged either in white-collar jobs or in small business. Our American stenographers are hardly imbued with a proletarian psychology. And Gompers himself was the scion of an impoverished branch of the aristocratic Jewish-Austrian family Gompertz, sometimes spelled Gomperz, which furnished the Hapsburg empire with merchant princes, soldiers, statesmen, and savants. The well-known actuary and astronomer, Benjamin Gompertz, a member of the British Royal Society, and the celebrated historian of Greek culture, Theodor Gomperz, were distant avuncular relations. Gompers’s grandfather was a rather shiftless fellow, one gathers, who after much wandering settled in Holland and bitterly deplored his enforced transition from the upper middle to the working class. But in his father, Solomon Gompers, the proletarian metamorphosis was complete. Sometime in the second quarter of the last century he moved from Holland into the unspeakable squalor and pauperism of Whitechapel in London. There Samuel was born on January 27, 1850, one of eight children. His schooling was meagre. His clothing and comforts and street life were those of the ghetto urchin. His family seems to have been almost destitute. At the age of ten he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but he conceived a violent dislike to cobbling. And so his father apprenticed him to his own trade of cigar-maker. In 1863 the family landed in New York City.
In America the family fared much better. The boy had all the advantages of poverty without the demoralization of squalor; of ceaseless toil but in an atmosphere of hope. As he was developing leadership — in his very adolescence — the storm and stress of American Labor gathered about his head.
Gompers never rose above those circumstances. He did far more. He literally conquered them in their very surroundings. He died not much richer, working just as hard and equally ‘loyal to loyalty.’
In 1877 he played the leading part in organizing the Cigar-makers’ Union. For a few years he was its moving spirit. In 1881 he helped to bring about the International Trades-Union Congress in Pittsburgh. In 1882 this organization changed its name to the American Federation of Labor, elected him president, and he was launched upon the longest militant career in the history of the Republic. For six more years he worked at the cigar-maker’s bench all day in order to support his job as president of the American Federation of Labor, at night. And with the exception of the year 1895, when the Socialists were able to combine with the miners and elect John McBride, he kept his office until his death last December.
Gompers could never quite rid himself of the sense of being an immigrant Jew, aggravated by his inevitable malignment as a ‘Labor agitator.’ He was far above being either proud or ashamed of his race. For the Jewish faith he had the same strong private dislike he felt for all religion — not merely in form, but in spirit as well. He had the normal man’s liking for his own people. At a recent convention he invited the delegates from one of the needle trades, all Jews, to spend an evening with him. ‘Let’s have a little party. I want to be with my own people for a change. I want to get away from these Irish roughnecks,’ he said, with a slyly affectionate wink at the ‘roughnecks’ present. But he did feel intensely, and justly, that the head of American Labor must be American.
Normally his patriotism was a very fine thing. He loved his country for the sufficient reason that it was his. But during the war, and to some degree after, his alien-Jew-agitator complex may have had something to do with his rather blatant one-hundred-percentism, as some who were close to him felt. Still, there was a good deal of shrewdness mixed with his nationalist frenzy. When the war broke out, he clearly foresaw the war-time legislation in favor of Labor. He saw in the war ‘the disenthrallment of the American worker of every vestige of wrong and injustice.’ He felt that then and there was Labor’s supreme chance to accelerate its standard of living. And the trend of his mind appears very clearly in the rhetorical question he asked the American people early in 1918 in a public address, and in his own sanguine answer to it: ‘When the war is over, do you think that . . . Labor will be thrown aside? Not on your life!’
Gompers felt about the ‘disenthrallment’ of Labor much as Lincoln felt about the preservation of the Union. Anything goes!
Such devotion touches greatness. The secret of his strength was in the paradoxically selfless egocentricity with which he harmonized his person and his crusade. He lost his life in his cause and he never troubled to find it. He died at the very end of his era and in the midst of his job.
And such a death was really all he wanted from life.