Industrial Revolution Primary Sources | Samuel Gompers

Excerpt from "Tenement-House Cigar Manufacture"

Published in the New Yorker Volkszeitung, October 31, 1881

"For many years the system of tenement-house cigar manufacture has formed one of the most dreadful, cancerous sores in our city."

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) is best known as the leader of the American Federation of Labor, a group of unions (organizations of workers) representing workers with special skills, such as weavers or carpenters. Before he came to national prominence as a leader of the labor movement, he was active in organizing a union of cigar makers.

In 1881, when Gompers was thirty-one years old, he wrote a series of articles in a German-language newspaper in New York City, the New Yorker Volkszeitung (New York Peoples' Newspaper), describing the living and working conditions of people who worked in cigar factories located in tenement...