page_title: Samuel Gompers
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Samuel Gompers / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: TIME Magazine Cover Featuring Samuel Gompers (1 Oct 1923)
context_page_description: Samuel Gompers was a British-born American cigar maker, labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor, and served as the organization's president from 1886 to 1894, and from 1895 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize jurisdictional battles. He promoted through organization and collective bargaining, to secure shorter hours and higher wages, the first essential steps, he believed, to emancipating labor. He also encouraged the AFL to take political action to "elect their friends" and "defeat their enemies". He mostly supported Democrats, but sometimes Republicans. He strongly opposed Socialists. During World War I, Gompers and the AFL openly supported the war effort, attempting to avert strikes and boost morale while raising wage rates and expanding membership.
context_section_description: Gompers' health went into serious decline starting in February 1923, when a serious bout of influenza sent him to the hospital, sidelining him from work for six weeks. No sooner had he recovered from the influenza, than he was stricken by a case of bronchitis that laid him low again. By June 1924 Gompers, who suffered from diabetes, could no longer walk without assistance, and he was hospitalized again, this time suffering from congestive heart failure and uremia.
  He collapsed in Mexico City on Saturday, December 6, 1924, while attending a meeting of the Pan-American Federation of Labor. It was recognized that his condition was critical and that he might not survive for long. Gompers expressed the desire to die on American soil and he was placed aboard a special train that sped toward the border. He died in San Antonio, Texas. Gompers was buried at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Gompers is buried only a few yards away from industrialist Andrew Carnegie, another important figure of industry in the Gilded Age.
  Gompers inspired later generations of labor leaders, such as George Meany, who paid tribute to Gompers as a European immigrant who pioneered a distinctly American brand of unionism. Reuben Soderstrom, President of the Illinois State Federation of Labor and the Illinois AFL-CIO from 1930 to 1970, cited his 1923 encounter with Gompers as particularly formative. Gompers chided Soderstrom after the latter expressed frustration with the slow pace of progress being made in a local strike, telling him "Young man, you know you can climb the highest mountain if you've got the patience to do it one step at a time." Reuben never forgot those words, stating  decades later "that philosophy had a lot to do with guiding the activities I've been engaged in."   
  His belief led to the development of procedures for collective bargaining and contracts between labor and management that remain in use today. In practice, AFL unions were important in industrial cities, where they formed a central labor office to coordinate the actions of different AFL unions. Issues of wages and hours were the usual causes of strikes, but many strikes were assertions of jurisdiction, so that the plumbers, for example, used strikes to ensure that all major construction projects in the city used union plumbers. In this goal they were ideally supported by all the other construction unions in the AFL fold.
  Gompers is the subject of statuary in several major American cities. A bronze monument honoring Gompers by the sculptor Robert Aitken is in Gompers Square on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C.. On September 3, 2007, a life-size statue of Gompers was unveiled at Gompers Park, named after the labor leader in 1929, on the northwest side of Chicago. This is the first statue of a labor leader in Chicago. Local unions throughout Chicago donated their time and money to build the monument. A U.S. Navy destroyer tender was named for Gompers. The Samuel Gompers Houses, a public housing development on the Lower East Side of New York, is named in his honor. There are schools named for Gompers in Philadelphia, Madison, Wisconsin, San Diego, Phoenix, Arizona and The Bronx, New York, and a closed school in Detroit.
caption: Time cover, 1 Oct 1923
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