EIGHT-HOUR THEORY IN THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR 231 
to the last hour of the El Paso convention of the American Fed- 
eration in 1924, the animating spirit and the directing mind of the 
movement were those of Samuel Gompers. The intellectual his- 
tory of the American Federation is for the most part the intel- 
lectual history of Samuel Gompers. A man of action rather 
than an original and speculative thinker, though a man by no 
means unacquainted with speculative writings, Mr. Gompers had 
a profound distrust of the thinker as such, a distrust that later 
ripened into a bitter contempt for the “intellectuals”—except the 
particular ones who served his particular ends. Yet he utilized 
ideas wherever they came to his hand, and the Federation for a 
generation practically lived on three important ideas: first, that 
labor must help itself; second, that the way for labor to help 
itself is through its economic power (a fair question may per- 
haps be raised whether Mr. Gompers’ idea of the economic power 
of labor ever extended much beyond the use and the threat of 
the strike); and third, that the standard of living determines 
wages and the whole position of labor in the social order. It is 
this third idea that underlay the early eight-hour movement 
and gave it driving power. Nobody can understand the Ameri- 
can Federation who does not understand this as well as the other 
two ideas. 
It was his confident faith in labor as its own only possible 
savior, and in the organization of its economic power as the only 
agency for effecting that salvation, that gave to Mr. Gompers at 
once his distrust of all interfering “outsiders” and his fanatical 
zeal for the unions and for the Federation, binding those unions 
together. Over and over again he claims for the unions the whole 
credit for better labor conditions. Thus he writes in the Ameri- 
can Federationist of January, 1903 (pp. 20, 21): “It may be 
assumed that by comparison with conditions of a century or 
more ago, the scale of wages has risen, the hours of labor have 
lessened, and the general conditions of toil have improved. This 
can be ascribed to no other cause than to the constant, concrete, 
intelligent effort of trade unionism”—though the economists 
flatter themselves that they have succeeded in ascribing it to 
several other causes also. If Mr. Gompers had appreciated in 
more balanced fashion the multitude of causes which to the 
economist seem to determine the well-being of labor, he would 
probably not have been so great a labor leader as he was + for