The shop was quiet. A roomful of men sat at their benches, hands never still: pick up a leaf, shave off the unusable edge to a hairbreadth with the blade, then roll with both hands until the cigar came out perfectly shaped. The work made almost no sound, and that left the ears free.

Then someone stood up to read.

This was a New York cigar shop in the 1870s. As Samuel Gompers remembered it in old age, the custom was for the men to chip in for papers, magazines and books and choose one of their number to read aloud, perhaps for an hour at a time, sometimes longer. So that the reader would not lose by stopping work, each of the others gave him a set number of cigars. After the reading came argument, and before long everyone in the room knew who could marshal his thoughts, who passed off sophistry as reasoning, and who could take a joke.

Gompers, then in his early twenties, had his turns too. He clipped any article that struck him and saved it for his shopmates. His voice was strong and the men could hear him easily, so the men always asked him to read past his time.

Many years later he called these shops little forums, workingmen's debating societies. The man who came out of rooms like this one became the first president of the American Federation of Labor and held the office for more than thirty years.

The Cry in Spitalfields

The first home he remembered was No. 2 Fort Street in Spitalfields, East London, a three-story brick house gone gray with age. His parents were Dutch Jews from Amsterdam. The family lived in one large room on the ground floor that was sitting-room, bedroom, dining-room and kitchen at once. He was the eldest, followed by a line of younger brothers.

Across the street stood a silk factory. Many of the local weavers descended from Huguenots who had fled France two centuries earlier, and their skill had made Spitalfields famous. Then machines came, and the skill was worth nothing. As a child he watched groups of men with no work pace the narrow street, wringing their hands, striking their heads, crying over and over: God, I've no work to do, Lord strike me dead, my wife, my kids want bread and I've no work to do. The cry rang down the street day after day, and every time it drew him to the window.

At six he entered the Jewish Free School in Bell Lane and learned fast. At ten years and three months he had to leave and earn money, standing third in his classes. His teacher told his father it was wrong to take such a boy out of school. His father had no choice.

He was put to shoemaking first. After eight weeks the boss paid him threepence a week. He hated the noise of the shop. One Sunday morning his father let him choose: stay with shoes, or learn cigarmaking. He chose cigars, he said, because the cigarmakers had a society and the shoemakers had none. He was indentured to David Schwab, a cigarmaker in Bishopsgate Street, for a shilling a week the first year.

One thing in the London shops he never forgave. Every night the men were lined up at the door and the foreman ran his hands over each body to make sure no cigars were being carried out. It was treatment, he wrote, that no one could endure with dignity.

To the West

America was at war with itself. In the shop he heard the men argue about it, and he learned the two songs English workers loved most: "The Slave Ship," about an African mother and her boy seized by a slaver, and "To the West," about a land where a man is a man if he is willing to toil and the humblest may gather the fruits of the soil. He threw back his head and sang until he shook. Years later Andrew Carnegie told him that the same song had made his own father want to go to America.

The family's struggle kept getting harder. The English cigarmakers' union had a practical answer: instead of paying unemployment benefits, it granted out-of-work members five to ten pounds toward passage to the United States. Those who left got their fare, and those who stayed had fewer rivals for work. After long discussion his father decided to go.

On June 10, 1863, they boarded an old sailing ship, the City of London. It spent nine days crawling down the Channel. When someone asked the captain how long it would take to reach New York, he said that at this rate they would be back in London in three days. They lived on the salt beef and red pickled cabbage they had brought and cooked for themselves in the galley. Everyone was seasick except his father, who had to cook and nurse at once. He knew little about cooking. Once he put three quarts of split peas in the kettle; as they swelled he kept adding water, until there were peas in every container on board and the family ate peas and pea soup for days. A Black crewman helped him in many ways.

On July 4 they were still in mid-ocean. The captain ordered everyone on deck for the American holiday, with music, dancing and fireworks. His father, who played no instrument, joined the band by snapping his fingers. After seven weeks and one day, on July 29, the ship reached Castle Garden at the tip of Manhattan.

The Handshake on the Pier

Relatives and friends were waiting. As the family stood talking, the crewman who had helped his father came off the ship. His father went over, shook his hand, thanked him and gave him his blessing.

The onlookers erupted. Gompers wrote that New York was in the grip of the draft riots, and that on that very day Black men had been chased and hanged by mobs. A crowd closed in, threatening to hang his father and the sailor together from the lamp-post. His father did not back down. He turned to the crowd, explained why he had shaken the man's hand and thanked him, and finished: any one of you would have done the same.

That is his memory sixty years on. The New York draft riots broke out on July 13, 1863, and went on for several days, more than two weeks before the ship came in. The anger on the pier was real, with the riots barely over and the city still raw; "that very day" is probably an old man's memory folding time together.

That first day they rented four rooms at Houston and Attorney Streets, far more space than the single London room. He was thirteen years, six months and two days old. Across the street was a slaughterhouse. All day animals were driven into the pens, and the noise and stench filled the block; for months he could not eat meat. His father took in work and made cigars at home, and Sam sat beside him.

A Mere Boy Speaks for the Men

After a year and a half at home he decided to find work outside. In 1864 he had joined Cigarmakers' Local Union No. 15, the English-speaking union, which was not strong. With an older cigarmaker he went from shop to shop until one boss agreed to try him. A little nervous but quick and sure, he rolled two cigars, the boss accepted them, and he was a journeyman. The shop was M. Stachelberg's on Pearl Street, and he was between sixteen and seventeen.

The men were discontented and asked him to present their grievances. Stachelberg told him that he, a mere boy, ought to be ashamed to speak for men old enough to be his father, and should be at home where his mother could "dry me one behind the ear." Gompers answered that the men were entitled to choose whoever they liked. When the boss saw he could not be frightened, he tried friendliness, beer and long talks to pull him away from the men. Gompers held on and won the case. He dated it "about 1866."

He was bursting with energy in those years. Every Saturday night he went to the free lectures at Cooper Union, where two or three thousand people heard scientists talk about light and distance or listened to readings from great authors. The aged founder, Peter Cooper, walked onto the platform beside the lecturer with an air cushion under his arm, and the whole hall stood until he sat down. Gompers took classes there, on and off, for twenty years. Mental hunger, he said, is just as painful as physical hunger.

Laurrell, the "Horse Head"

In 1873 he moved to David Hirsch & Company at 122 Chambers Street. By his account it was then the only union shop in the city, employing only the most skilled workmen, fifty or sixty of them. Hirsch had learned the trade in Hamburg and been ordered out of the city for his socialism; in New York he opened a shop and hired many fellow exiles. Almost everyone there was German. They talked and read in German, and the union meant to them something vastly bigger than anything he had imagined.

At first the young Englishman talked of lodge brotherhood and grand schemes for remaking society. The dominant mind in the shop belonged to Karl Laurrell, Swedish-born, trained as a cigarmaker in Copenhagen, once secretary of the Scandinavian section of the International Workingmen's Association, who had hidden from soldiers after a demonstration before the royal palace and made his way to New York. The men called him "Horse Head." He thought Gompers "fresh" at first, and only slowly began to explain things to him.

One day Gompers came to him full of enthusiasm and laid out his plans for human betterment. When he finished, he sat back, pleased with himself. Laurrell had kept working in silence without missing a point, and now he answered point by point. Gompers felt himself growing physically smaller. By the end he had vowed: never again will I talk that stuff, but I will find principles that will stand the test.

He asked Laurrell for something to build on. Laurrell handed him a German copy of the Communist Manifesto, and since Gompers's German was not yet good enough, translated and explained it paragraph by paragraph. It put words to feelings he had never been able to say. He set himself to master German, read not a word of English for months, and went on to Marx, Engels and Lassalle.

But the most important thing Laurrell gave him did not come from a book. Whenever Gompers arrived with a new idea, Laurrell would say gently: "Study your union card, Sam, and if the idea doesn't square with that, it ain't true." When Gompers asked whether to join the Socialists, Laurrell said: go to their meetings by all means, listen and understand them, but do not join the Party. He never did.

From then on the card was his measure for every new problem. Not revolutionary slogans, not a party first, but workers of one trade organized, paying dues, building funds, and bargaining with employers over wages and hours, clause by clause. He later gave the approach its name himself: "pure and simple trade unionism."

The Office Nobody Wanted

He learned some lessons the hard way. Around 1869 employers began using molds to shape the filler, and immigrant workers with little training could soon turn out cheap cigars. At Turner Hall on Orchard Street the union voted on striking against the molds, and he voted yes with his young friends. The strike was lost and the members drifted away. From that time, he wrote, he understood the futility of opposing progress.

Over the next decade and more he helped rebuild the cigarmakers' union and worked to federate unions across trades. On December 8, 1886, union delegates met at Druid Hall in Columbus, Ohio, and founded the American Federation of Labor. The new constitution gave the president a salary of $1,000 a year and required him to devote his entire time to the Federation.

He was nominated first and declined, unwilling to take money from working people. John McBride of the Miners was nominated next and said frankly that he could not afford a full-time post on so meager a salary. The office went begging until Gompers was nominated again and persuaded to accept. It was the first salaried office he ever held in the labor movement.

The constitution would not take effect until March 1, so for months there was no pay at all, and he had a wife and six children to support. The family, he wrote, simply put themselves in the position of a strike or lockout and somehow got through. Among the first decisions of the new executive council was one authorizing the president to hire an office boy.

No Seat at the Bench

This workingmen's school had one door that stayed shut.

In his memoir Gompers wrote that in 1878 at least ten thousand of the country's forty thousand cigarmakers were Chinese workers on the Pacific Coast. Using the slurs of his time, he said they learned quickly, lived on less, and would work for wages no white man could live on, so that unless something was done the whole trade would soon be "China-ized." West Coast white cigarmakers used a white label to mark white men's work, and Eastern employers facing strikes threatened to bring in Chinese strikebreakers. One reason the cigarmakers backed a national labor federation so early and so warmly, he wrote, was that the help of all workers was needed for Chinese exclusion. In 1881 the federation founded at Pittsburgh, forerunner of the AFL, adopted an exclusion resolution, and he made a point of recording it: the first national organization to demand the exclusion of coolies.

Later, in San Francisco, cigarmakers took him through Chinatown and into Chinese cigar shops two or three stories underground. He had read Dante's Inferno, he wrote, but Chinatown seemed a greater horror, and the picture from that night came back to him whenever Chinese immigration was debated. In 1902, with the exclusion law about to expire, the AFL issued a pamphlet with its president's name, Samuel Gompers, on the cover: Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive? Its introduction promised that the authors were not inspired by "a scintilla of prejudice of any kind." A section headed "Experience with Slave Labor" declared that "the Caucasians will not tolerate the Mongolian" and warned against letting the population "deteriorate by contact with inferior and nonassimilative races."

His father had shaken a Black man's hand on the pier and nearly been hanged for it. He himself grew up singing "The Slave Ship" and believing in a West where any man willing to toil was a man. In his hands, though, that word had a boundary. Seen this way, the Chinese workers who rolled the same leaf for the same driven-down wages were never counted as members of the same union; the fellowship of the shop, the pooled papers and the cigars paid to the reader, never reached them.

The Union Card

At Denver in 1894 he lost the presidency, and was left without office and bankrupt; a year later he was back. He held the post from then on, until December 1924, when he fell ill in Mexico City. He wanted to die on American soil. His physicians would not let him rise, so he was carried on a stretcher and passed through a window into a special coach bound for the border. In the early hours of December 13 he died in San Antonio, Texas, eleven hours after the train arrived.

The next year his two-volume autobiography, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, was published. The dedication named no family member and no president. It read: To the memory of the late Ferdinand Laurrell, a workman all his life, who was my mental guide through many of my early struggles.

The "Horse Head" who bent over his cigars on Chambers Street and took Gompers's speeches apart point by point had given him not a doctrine but a method: go back to the union card and see whether it agrees. That method carried a cigarmaker's apprentice, landed in New York at thirteen, to the bargaining table on behalf of millions of workers. It also kept the card in the hands of only those he counted as his own.

Notes on fact and narrative

1. Every scene, line and feeling here comes from Samuel Gompers's autobiography Seventy Years of Life and Labor (published in 1925, the year after his death); the exclusion section also draws on the text of the AFL's 1902 pamphlet. No dialogue is invented. The memoir was written in his seventies, many episodes rest on his word alone, and it flatters its author in places (he claims, for instance, never to have sought any office), so his own claims are marked in the text as his.

2. The reading scene. The series plan imagined thirteen-year-old Samuel reading the paper while others rolled his share. The book (chapter III, p. 45; chapter IV, pp. 80–81) says the men chose a good reader and each paid him in cigars so he would not lose, and that Gompers, having a strong voice, was asked to read past his turn. It does not say others rolled for him, and at thirteen he was working at home with his father. The two passages belong to different periods: p. 45, in chapter III ("As an Onlooker"), describes the shops of the 1860s when he first worked at the trade; pp. 80–81, in chapter IV, follow his move to Hirsch's in 1873 (p. 68) and describe the 1870s. The opening draws on pp. 80–81, so it is set in the 1870s. The book does not say in which shop the reading took place, and this story does not place it at Hirsch's.

3. The handshake. Gompers says they landed at Castle Garden on July 29, 1863, and that "only that very day" Black men had been hanged by mobs. The draft riots broke out on July 13, 1863, and went on for several days (Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People, Suffering from the Late Riots in the City of New York (New York, 1863; Internet Archive scan reportofcommitte00commi, https://archive.org/details/reportofcommitte00commi)). His landing date agrees with his stated age and his birth on January 27, 1850 (birthday "January 27," p. 36; "thirteen years, six months, and two days" on July 29, p. 24; his father's family record, p. 504, "born in London, England, on January 27, 1850"); "that very day" is likely compressed memory.

4. The AFL's founding. Chapter XIII gives the Columbus meeting as December 8, 1886, then a few pages later says "this was in November." This story follows December 8 (p. 265: "When the trade union conference met on December 8").

5. Hirsch's as "the only union shop in the city," and Laurrell's background, rest on Gompers's account alone.

6. Exclusion. The 1878 figures, the Chinatown visit and the descriptions of Chinese workers are Gompers's own words and views, reported as such, not as fact. The 1902 pamphlet's cover reads "Published by the American Federation of Labor … Samuel Gompers, President; Frank Morrison, Secretary," printed by the Government Printing Office. The 1902 original (Senate Doc. 137, 57th Cong., 1st Sess.) carries only "Samuel Gompers, President. Frank Morrison, Secretary" on the cover, with no author byline; the 1908 Asiatic Exclusion League reprint (San Francisco) is credited "By Samuel Gompers and Herman Gutstadt" (HathiTrust catalog record, uc1.32106007093054; the title page image itself was not seen), so the text says only that Gompers's name is on the cover. The "inferior and nonassimilative races" passage is in the section "Experience with Slave Labor" (p. 29), not the conclusion.

7. Later life. The 1894 Denver defeat and his return a year later come from chapters XVII–XVIII. His collapse in Mexico City in December 1924, the stretcher passed through a window into a special coach, and his death in San Antonio at 4:10 a.m. on December 13, eleven hours after arriving from Mexico City, come from the Associated Press dispatch in Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), December 13, 1924, p. 1, Associated Press dispatch from San Antonio, December 13, "Gompers Expires, Ending 43 Years as A. F. of L. Head" (Library of Congress, Chronicling America, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1924-12-13/ed-1/seq-1/). The dispatch says he "took ill in Mexico City"; it does not say at a meeting, so neither does this story.

8. The story covers London to the founding of the AFL, plus his exclusion stance; his campaign against tenement cigar-making in the 1880s, later strikes and his wartime work with the Wilson administration are not followed.

Sources and versions

1. Main source: Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1925), dedicated to Ferdinand Laurrell. Read in the Internet Archive scan's OCR text (seventyyearsofli0000gomp_a0u4, https://archive.org/details/seventyyearsofli0000gomp_a0u4; djvu.txt sha256 1f97037b7a6b82d584f66520f7e2fa6f7e4ba198cee3fb3898f47b8e40094e3a, downloaded October 31, 2026): volume one, chapters I–IV, XI, XIII–XIV and XVII. Published in the United States in 1925; public domain in the US.

2. American Federation of Labor, Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive? (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902). Read in the Internet Archive scan of the Harvard University Library copy (somereasonsforc00labogoog, https://archive.org/details/somereasonsforc00labogoog; djvu.txt sha256 ceec9cb47f0cb7adc37d3aaf4e1ea444355b81a71320cdd1c29dcd6ab0f03570): cover, introduction and conclusion. US government publication; public domain.

3. His death: Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), December 13, 1924, p. 1, Associated Press dispatch from San Antonio, December 13, "Gompers Expires, Ending 43 Years as A. F. of L. Head" (Library of Congress, Chronicling America, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1924-12-13/ed-1/seq-1/), read in the page's full OCR text on October 31, 2026. The outbreak of the draft riots: Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People, Suffering from the Late Riots in the City of New York (New York, 1863; Internet Archive scan reportofcommitte00commi, https://archive.org/details/reportofcommitte00commi). English Wikipedia, "Castle Clinton," "Spitalfields," "Columbus, Ohio," "Chambers Street (Manhattan)" and "San Antonio" (consulted October 31, 2026), are used only for map coordinates, not as sources of fact.

4. Chapters: Spitalfields, the weavers' cry, the free school, shoemaking and the cigar apprenticeship, the nightly search, the two songs, the emigration fund, the crossing, the peas, July 4, the handshake and the Houston Street rooms are in chapter I (pp. 1–25); Local 15, the first job, Stachelberg and Cooper Union in chapter II (pp. 28–34); craftsmanship, the reading and the mold strike in chapter III (pp. 44–47); Hirsch's, Laurrell, the Manifesto, the union card, "don't join" and the shop reading in chapter IV (pp. 68–81); the 1878 figures and the 1881 resolution in chapter XI (pp. 216–228); Columbus, the $1,000 salary, McBride and the unpaid months in chapter XIII (pp. 264–270); Chinatown in chapter XIV (pp. 304–305); Denver in chapter XVII.