Samuel Gompers Quotes
Pullman, who has grown so rich from the toil of his workingmen, that he can riot in luxury, while he heartlessly turns these very workmen out of their tenements into the streets and leave to the tender mercies of corporate greed.
At the time many workers lived in housing owned by their employer. When the Pullman company had a labor dispute, they not only locked the workers out of their jobs but evicted them from their meager housing.
Samuel Gompers, 1850-1924, President, American Federation of Labor, Letter to Judge Peter Grosscup, September 1894
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Webster was taking regular bribes from large corporations and even complained when his payments were late. So he might have had a pro-large business bias. At the time taking bribes even if there was a quid pro quo was not illegal or even “unethical” by then Congressional rules.
McConnell had become very rich as a senator despite the relatively modest salary paid to members of Congress. As soon as Grimes announced her candidacy, McConnell launched a serious of negative attack ads to try and define her negatively for the voters. She then retaliated. This is one of her retaliations. The campaign was a good example of Congressional races then where candidates spend very little time and resources telling the voters what they were for. Instead they spend their resources and efforts on stating what is wrong with their opponent. Grimes lost to the incumbent who outspend her in their mutual attack campaign. McConnell never did explain how he had become so wealthy.
There were few if any consumer protection laws in those days and many wealthy aristocrats made their money by taking advantage of the poor. They were the landowners, bankers, financiers and often the industrialists. Shaw was a sarcastic social critic and this is a typical line he gave his upper class characters. Today, we have more controls on business and finance, and many wealthy business people have gotten that way by providing great value to the consumers and being honest. However, we still have large numbers of wealthy members of society who do make their money from the poor and middle class by unethical and often illegal means. In the aftermath of the Meltdown of 2008. hundreds of thousands of the homes of the working poor and middle class were foreclosed by the major banks forging the legal documentation for the foreclusures. Millions of consumer contracts are issued that even a PhD cannot understand the terms of without special legal and financial training. There is even a legal definition of a salesperson lying to make a sale which is so commonplace that our law excuses it and calls it "puffing". However, there has been over time, improvement over Shaw's era.
Sinclair had written an expose of the meat packing industry – the Jungle – which used as its setting the Armour meat packing factory. It changed the way the public thought about the industry, the role of government and regulation. President Roosevelt took up the reform role, and got Congress to Regulate the quality and cleanliness of the meat packing industry. Sinclair, however not only wanted that reform, but also wanted the labor wages and conditions reformed. He referred to the Armour plant as the fortress.
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 (AFL), 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.
