On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Doug Henwood wrote:
> I only just recently learned that Gompers was a Marxist of some sort
> before he left Britain for the U.S. It was in the U.S. that he discovered
> that national health insurance would emasculate the American working
> class.
He did think a lot of Marx when he was young and even young middle-aged (he even learned to read German to better educate himself) but it was always a non-political version: he felt getting involved in politics weakened the working class because it divided it (they always disagreed on candidates) and because there were few if any candidates that wouldn't be easily bribed once they got into government. He said something to the effect that workers put lots of energy into politics and get very little out of it.
But IIRC correctly his Marxism was something he largely got in the US as a cigarmaker. Before automation, cigar makers were famous for paying one of their number to read books to them when they worked, and Marx's books were always among the most popular. Since they were paid per cigar, all the other workers would chip in a certain number of cigars so the reader go paid too. (Automation, besides throwing Gompers out of work and into union work full time (and giving him the twin convictions that it was useless to oppose technical change, and that unions needed to be national), made reading impossible because of the noise.)
And even if he did pick up some Marxism in Britain in his previous trade as a shoemaker, it couldn't have been a huge lot -- his family immigrated to New York when he was 13 years old.
His position of writing off politics as a distraction wasn't that odd in 1880 when national US politics was famously corrupt. It became very odd from the 1890s on, when the state famously called out troops at owners' behests, and the factory owners called out Pinkertons (who had virtual legal immunity at their behest), to slaughter strikers. That's when a US socialist labor movement really emerged because it saw taking the state as essential to controlling the national guard -- and controlling the state force as a prerequisite to being able to strike and wield power as unions). Eugene V. Debs actually started out more conservative than Gomper's, but was radicalized by the Homestead and above all Pullman stikes. He wasn't a socialist when he was sent to jail over Pullman (he was the railroad union's head), but he read Marx in there and became one.
Gompers had been the head of the FTLU, the predecessor of the AFL, since 1886 (when it was founded, and stayed its head until his death in 1924). It was from the mid-nineties that socialists in general, and Debs in particular, became his organization's main competition, and his rhetoric became anti-socialist (and anti-immigrant), and his tactics became more collaborationist. Ironically of course the emergence of the socialists was one of the two things that made such tactics possible. It was only when there was something scary to his left, and Progressives in power, that big business and the government wanted to embrace him as part of their "third way."
Supposedly when he died in 1924, only four years after Wilson left power and 5 after the radicals had gotten bulldozered in the Palmer raid, he felt labor was going backward and had lost as much in 4 years as it had gained in 20. But I don't think he ever drew a connection, at least not publicly.
Michael