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