‘The Face of Gompers’ by Michael Gold and Boardman Robinson from The Liberator. Vol. 5 No. 1. January, 1922.

THE face of Gompers is the face of reality. We give you Boardman Robinson’s portrait of it for the New Year, fellow-humanitarians, and bid you paste it on the wall paper of your furnished room, to be stared at every morning before breakfast. It will do you good. Absorbing the iron facts written on that face will make you hard and strong. It will teach you that you are living in America, in the year 1922, and that national progress is impossible until we have solved the problems symbolized by that strange, hard-bitten, practical, sardonic fiery countenance.

The hope of America is in the labor movement, and the main part of the labor movement of America is in the A.F. of L. It is hateful to admit this fact, as hateful as it was to the Victorian divines to admit that an Asiatic monkey was the father of the human race and not Adam. But it is so. Admit it and gird your loins and become stronger for the fray.

Until the A.F. of L. is lifted out of its rut nothing great can happen here. There will be strike after strike, wagecuts and wage-gains, open shop versus closed shop, the endless struggle on the part of labor to make wage-slavery bearable, “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.” Gompers is not an individual despot ruling by whim; he and his corrupt machine hold power because they express the puzzled, halting mind of the American worker. The everyday struggle, bloody and endless, to maintain merely the unions, collective bargaining and a living wage, has absorbed all of the vitality of the American working-class. The administration of this great corporation in its ordinary business has swamped the leadership, and made it a bureaucracy of tired and disillusioned job-holders and wretched, disillusioned grafters. Strong and revolutionary-minded men get jobs in the A.F. of L. and in three. or four years are as “practical” as Brindell and Gompers and James Duncan. The nose of the A.F. of L. has been held too close to the grindstone, and its leaders have become as incapable of thinking new thoughts as the average business man is incapable of thinking them. That is their real crime. And it is our task, it seems to me, to remain a part of the A.F. of L. (where it is possible) and to propagate the new thoughts and the new tactics of labor-industrial unionism, labor solidarity and unity, strikes for increasing control of the industry by the workers, not strikes for mere wages.

We must prove to the workers that these are not mere modes of idealism, but are the scientific tools that supersede the old labor tactics as the harvesting machine has superseded the sickle of the peasant. We must put our brains into the technique of labor organization and tactics; we must solve specific problems and situations. The left wing must stop dreaming of what is happening in Russia and Italy and Germany; we are living in America.

Paste the face of Gompers on your wall, fellow-citizens of the world, and remember every morning that our brains must match the brains of this ruthless old lion, and that workers are realists and follow Gompers only because they think he guarantees them a job and a living wage. We must prove to them that he is inefficient and old-fashioned, and that despite all his militancy and vigor, he is fighting for them with weapons of bronze when there are weapons of fine steel at hand.

The face of Gompers is the face of reality in America, as the face of the Czar was the face of reality in Russia. America, although the richest, is the most socially backward nation in the world because the labor movement is backward. In America it is Gompers that must first be met and overthrown-as in Russia it was the Czar-before the great change can begin.

So look at the Great Stone Face every morning, dear fellow-worker, and remember how long the Czar and his forefathers reigned, and how their jobs seemed cinched for eternity, and what finally happened to the regal line.

Happy New Year!

The Liberator was published monthly from 1918, first established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman continuing The Masses, was shut down by the US Government during World War One. Like The Masses, The Liberator contained some of the best radical journalism of its, or any, day. It combined political coverage with the arts, culture, and a commitment to revolutionary politics. Increasingly, The Liberator oriented to the Communist movement and by late 1922 was a de facto publication of the Party. In 1924, The Liberator merged with Labor Herald and Soviet Russia Pictorial into Workers Monthly. An essential magazine of the US left.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1922/01/v5n01-w46-jan-1922-liberator-hr.pdf