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

99 Chapter Five Equal Opportunity Remade I Samuel Gompers and the Pursuit of Leisure and Consumption In his autobiography Samuel Gompers related fondly that his political and economic education began when as a teenager he worked alongside fellow cigar makers in New York’s Lower East Side and listened to coworkers read aloud from newspapers, magazines, and books. A cofounder and president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) from 1886 until 1924 (he lost the presidency for one year in 1894), Gompers had emigrated from London to the United States in 1863 as an adolescent and followed his father into the cigar trade. Ferdinand Laurrell, a Swedish-born socialist active in the International Workingmen ’s Association, introduced Gompers to The Communist Manifesto and played a formative role in shaping Gompers’s political views. Laurrell argued that trade organizations offered laborers the best chance to improve their circumstances. Eventually, Gompers learned German to immerse himself further in Karl Marx’s writings, along with those of Frederick Engels and Ferdinand Lassalle.1 Melding aspects of Marx and Laurrell, Gompers became convinced that labor’s advance depended on its economic strength, which necessitated not political party action but a class-based trade movement. In the 1870s, Gompers became an active member of the Cigar Makers’ International Union and a close ally of Adolph Strasser, the union’s president. Gompers’s and Strasser’s efforts to restructure the Cigar Makers’ Union into a financially secure, centralized trade union that would guide the work of locals served as a model for the later Samuel Gompers and the Pursuit of Leisure and Consumption 100 development of the American Federation of Labor. Over time the AFL surpassed the Knights of Labor as the preeminent national labor union and enjoyed sustained growth through its first two decades, including in its ranks, by 1904, approximately 1.7 million members.2 A crafts-based union that initially borrowed producerist ideas about the sanctity of labor, the AFL organized skilled workers and promoted an entrepreneurial vision of opportunity based on controlling one’s labor and the expectation of becoming a master craftsman. Like producerist advocates affiliated with the Knights of Labor, the AFL adopted rhetoric that celebrated individual craft and its associated economic and civic independence as distinct from the dependence of wage labor. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, Gompers had helped lead trade unionists toward a revised view of opportunity that focused on greater leisure and consumption realized through shorter hours and higher wages. This transition evolved from both the logic of the trade-unionist understanding of labor’s place in society and as a response to the economic and working conditions of Gilded Age industrialization. Large-scale factory manufacturing, the permanence of wage labor, and the introduction of technological advances to increase production effectively deskilled labor, which, in turn, diminished worker autonomy along with the opportunity for a craft-based future. Trade-union exclusivity in regard to membership and concern with worker and entrepreneurial independence could not easily adapt to both corporate consolidation and changes in the labor force caused by the large waves of immigrants landing on American shores. Thus, Gompers came to define opportunity as greater leisure and consumption , a shift that redirected the gaze of trade unionism from questions of production toward those of distribution. Gompers acted as a transitional figure as the nation abandoned producerist ideas and embraced consumption as part of the accommodation to a corporate economy. In the producerist realm, economic independence corresponded to an understanding of opportunity as residing in one’s labor that depended on entrepreneurship. However, this view could not survive amid the consolidated capital of the emergent corporation. Instead, the more capacious idea of equal opportunity would subsume older notions of economic independence through a vigorous focus on increased leisure and consumption as a means to redefine opportunity Samuel Gompers and the Pursuit of Leisure and Consumption 101 in a manner that fit these new corporate conditions but that also retained the essential core of opportunity—financial and social recompense for hard work. While this determination to achieve higher wages and shorter hours led to improved working and living conditions in the short term, it left intact the fundamental division of labor that defined industrial productive relations. The redefinition of opportunity as greater leisure and consumption also did not challenge the inequalities of equal opportunity . However, Gompers did insist on a reassessment of the conditions necessary to ensure fair economic competition. This included the right...

Share