Samuel Gompers and Jane Addams

Do these names sound famil­iar? They didn’t to me. So when I came across them in my his­tory read­ing, I wanted to know a lit­tle bit more about these peo­ple. The one thing that con­nects them is that they both fought for work­ers rights.

Samuel Gom­pers was born on Jan­u­ary 27, 1850, in Lon­don. He had to drop out of school at the age of ten to become an appren­tice, first as a shoe­maker, then to his father as a cigar-maker. His fam­ily immi­grated to New York in 1863, when Samuel was 13. He found work as a cigar-maker, but the poor work­ing con­di­tions made him and his fel­low work­ers start a union, and go on strike. How­ever, due to lack of funds, the union didn’t work out. How­ever, after rais­ing funds, the union went on strike again, this time with enough money to care for the employ­ees not working.

In 1866, Samuel mar­ried Sophia Julian. Six years later, in 1872, he became a cit­i­zen of the United States. In 1875, Gom­pers was elected as the pres­i­dent of the AFL-CIO (Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Labor and Con­gress of Indus­trial Orga­ni­za­tions), a posi­tion he held every year (except 1895) from 1886–1924. On a trip in Mex­ico in 1924, Gom­pers col­lapsed. He knew he was dying, but wanted to die in the United States. He was rushed to San Anto­nio, TX, where he died on Decem­ber 13, 1924.

Today, the work of Samuel Gom­pers has been rec­og­nized by means of schools (sev­eral all over the U.S.),parks (Gom­pers Park in Chicago, Ill.), and a statue of him that was put there in 2007. Also, his grave in Sleepy Hol­low Cemen­tary in Sleepy Hol­low, NY, has got­ten many visitors.

Jane Addams, one of the few rich peo­ple who ded­i­cated their lives to help­ing the poor, also fought for work­ers, mostly women work­ers. Born on Sep­tem­ber 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Ill., Jane was the eighth of nine chil­dren. Her father was a banker, a mill owner, a law­maker, and a friend of Pres­i­dent Lin­coln. (Lin­coln, in his let­ters to Addams’ father, often referred to him as “My dear double-D’d Addams”) Jane’s mother died when Jane was two. Her father did a good job of rais­ing the nine chil­dren (whether or not he remar­ried, I don’t know).

In 1881, Jane was vale­dic­to­rian in a class of 31 women at the Rock­ford Female Sem­i­nary, but was only accred­ited the bachelor’s degree after the school became Rock­ford Col­lege for Women the next year. Over the next six years, Jane stud­ied med­i­cine, but left because of poor health (a con­gen­i­tal spinal defect that was reme­died later), was hos­pi­tal­ized  inter­mit­tently, trav­eled  and stud­ied in Europe for 21 months, and spent almost two years in read­ing and writing.

In 1889, with friend Ellen G. Starr, Addams leased a build­ing in Chicago built by Charles Hull. Thus began Hull-House, an orga­ni­za­tion designed to help unem­ployed female work­ers get through their tough times. Addams became a pub­lic fig­ure of women’s rights, writ­ing many books and giv­ing speeches at cer­e­monies. Her work earned her a Nobel Peace Prize on Dec. 10, 1931, but she was hos­pi­tal­ized that same day. Addams never fully recov­ered, and died on May 21, 1935, three days after an unsus­pected can­cer was revealed after an operation.