In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 “Labor Wants More!” The AFL and the Idea of Economic Liberty Simon Nelson Patten never fully worked out his insistence that the “right to share in the social surplus” was the “new basis of civilization.” Given more to broad pronouncements and rhetorical flourishes than proscriptive tracts, he left the details hazy and vague. By the 1890s, however, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had already begun to work out those details through a relentlessly practical politics of more. “More” became the AFL’s official answer to the general social crises of the late nineteenth century and to the labor question in particular. The fledgling AFL’s president, Samuel Gompers, griped that labor was tired of “Sympathy without relief, Mustard without beef.”1 America’s workers, he insisted, wanted “more”—“more leisure , more rest, more opportunity . . . for going to the parks, of having better homes, of reading books, of creating more desires.”2 The AFL and its leaders did not call for an end to wage labor. Instead, they demanded higher wages and shorter hours for workers, demands that were, in the AFL lexicon, self-consciously “practical.”3 The AFL has been criticized since its inception for its program of “pure and simple” unionism, with its emphasis on the bread-and-butter issues of wages and hours to the exclusion of any sustained interest in sweeping political or social change. The issues of daily life, these critics have implied, were less revolutionary and less radical than were political action or social protest. Gompers and other members of the AFL leadership, however, held the inverse to be true.4 If in the antebellum period, democracy had been linked to political participation, now it was linked just as firmly to economic participation. Without the ability to enjoy the abundance of industrial production, wage workers would remain eco- nomically marginalized. And in a social order defined by mass production, mass consumption, publicly held companies, and wage work, such economic marginalization was equivalent to political disenfranchisement. As Gompers explained to the North American Review’s readers in 1892, “We tacitly declare that political liberty with[out] economic independence is illusory and deceptive , and that only in so far as we gain economic independence can our political liberty become tangible and important.”5 More, then, represented a new understanding of citizenship that included economic as well as political opportunities.6 For the labor movement, economic citizenship provided a powerful base from which to make “pure and simple” demands for higher wages and shorter hours. For Americans more broadly, it suggested a new conception of democratic citizenship that stressed economic as much as political participation. The origins of the Politics of More Although the AFL’s politics of more came to forefront in the 1890s, it had its roots in the particular historical circumstances of depression, unemployment, and increasing proletarianization in the 1870s and 1880s as well as in the personal experiences of its founding members.7 For men such as Gompers, president of the AFL for every year but one from its founding in 1886 until his death in 1924, the broad argument of more—that material and cultural life was as central to social power as political rights were—had been tacitly apparent since his early childhood.8 Gompers was born in London in 1850, the son of Dutch Jews. His father, Solomon, and numerous uncles and cousins were cigar makers, active in the city’s Cigarmakers’ Society. The family placed considerable value on craft and guild solidarity but also emphasized the importance of education and the arts. As a child, Gompers attended a free Jewish school until the age of ten, when he began to work alongside his father. With his family’s encouragement, he continued to take classes at night, and his education was supplemented by his grandfather, who took him to concerts and plays. By the time he was thirteen, Gompers could speak and read some French, Dutch, and Hebrew in addition to English and had a fairly wide-ranging knowledge of European literature and music. Later in life, he remembered his early years fondly and saw them as instrumental to shaping both his belief in trade unionism and his love of music and literature.9 As the Gompers family grew, its members had more and more difficulty making ends meet. “London,” Gompers remembered later, “seemed to offer no response to our efforts toward betterment,” and Solomon Gompers moved “labor wants more!” · 87 [3.136.154.103] Project MUSE (2024-04...

Share