people, politicians and, on occasion, even by corporate leaders. As
American society completed its transformation into a mature industrial
capitalist society, Gompers assumed the position of labor's leading rep-
resentative both to workers and to the larger society.

Many of the positions Gompers took engendered serious opposi-
tion within the labor movement. The very existence of that sustained
controversy ensures Gompers a prominent place in the history of the
early organized labor movement, for it underscores his central role.
In addition, however, the career of this early labor leader is of interest
to readers primarily concerned with the contemporary labor movement.
While there have been many important changes in the labor movement
since Gompers's time (not the least of which was the emergence of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations in the mass production industries
during the 1930s), the structure of the modern labor movement would
be immediately recognizable to Gompers today. Indeed it should, for,
especially since the merger in 1955 between the federation and the
Congress of Industrial Organizations, that structure reflects in both gen-
eral outline and many specific details the very orientation Gompers him-
self helped establish many decades earlier. Thus even to critics of his
legacy within labor today, Samuel Gompers remains an essential starting
point for understanding the ideas that have largely influenced the devel-
opment of organized labor in America.

This edition of Seventy Years of Life and Labor represents a little
more than a quarter of the original eleven hundred pages. Despite the
drastic cuts dictated by considerations of space, I have sought to include
each major experience or discussion from the original volumes. As Gom-
pers often repeated himself in different chapters, I was able to select the
most appropriate examples and exclude others. In certain cases, whole
chapters were omitted. Gompers's discussions of music and drama, the
presidents he met, and similar chapters are not in the current text. I
judged them of limited value given the need to present a relatively inex-
pensive edition. I have also taken the liberty of restructuring the origi-
nal chapters and of connecting without ellipses passages on either side
of excluded material. This edition is not meant to replace the full autobi-
ography but rather to make available the essence of Gompers's memoirs
to students of American labor. To aid those desirous of further study, I
have added both a glossary of names and a selected bibliography.

I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for the

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