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He was very superior - he felt terrifically superior to the workingmen that he represented. That was one of my first thoughts about it. I was quite shocked. He was a labor leader and I respected his name, but when I met him he spoke of one union as “what swine in that outfit.” They were working men, after all. He didn't think much of the girls like the shirtwaistmakers who organized. There was no place for them, and so forth. He was horrid about things like that and very superior and very sneering about them.

I remember saying this to somebody in the trade union field. I said I had been so disappointed in Gompers. He said, “You must remember that Gompers came out of the aristocracy of the labor movement, out of the aristocracy of the working class.”

I said, “What was that”

He said, “He was a cigar maker and an English cigar maker at that. And he was a Jew. The Jewish people,” said this man who was Irish, “are always very well educated and the English Jewish people particularly. He got some kind of an elaborate education at home and went to work as a cigar maker, which was the aristocracy of all working people. They absolutely controlled their own jobs. They employed their own readers and they read the most high-minded kinds of stuff.” Indeed, I saw that in the New York tobacco