Samuel Gompers: The Cigar Makers International Union

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Born in 1850 into a Jewish family in London, Samuel Gompers began making cigars alongside his father at the age of 10. In 1863, the entire family immigrated to New York City. Then, in 1866 he married Sophia Julian, with whom he would have 12 children. About 8-9 years later in 1875, Gompers was elected president of the reorganized Local 144 of the Cigar Makers' International Union (CMIU) in New York City, a post he held from 1875 to 1878 and again from 1880 to 1886. In the 1880s, Gompers was also instrumental in establishing the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, which he served as vice president from 1881 to 1886. When the FOTLU re-organized in 1886 as the American Federation of Labor, Gompers was elected its first president, a position he held for nearly 40 years.

As a local and national labor …show more content…
Third he urged labor to follow a course of "political nonpartisanship."
With his election as president of the AFL in 1886, he sought to build a national federation of trade unions dedicated to these principles. He immediately threw himself into the organization's first big effort, a nationwide general strike on May 1, 1886, in support of an eight-hour workday.
At the end of the 1890s, the AFL's membership began to soar-faster than in any other period in the history of the U.S. union movement. But the anti-union hostility of many employers halted the AFL's rapid growth in the early 1900s and forced Gompers and the AFL to adopt a more political stance.

In 1906, after nonunion employers sued the hatters' union and each individual member for triple damages in compensation for the losses they had suffered in a union boycott, Gompers concluded that the movement had to seek legislative relief. the AFL and its affiliates launched a far-reaching and ultimately successful campaign to elect union members and other labor-friendly candidates to political
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