ABSTRACT
Samuel Gompers was one of the ten or twelve greatest Americans. It must be remembered that no great man had at any time during his life the unanimous consensus of opinion that he was truly great. Before Gompers emerged in 1877 as the principal founder of American trade unionism he had been for several years in New York City in the centre of the Marxian theories and of effort to demonstrate their practicability by experiments on a small scale. Gompers had learned from his study and rejection of socialism that labor organizations must cut loose from all political alliances whatsoever, whether socialistic or capitalistic, and must organize solely to get more wages, shorter hours and better conditions, and by the laborers’ own power of collective action. Gompers’s “moral influence” with the executives of each national union was founded on their knowledge that no dual union would be allowed to displace them.
