there were 12 million or 13 million out of -- >> the second half of the nan19 century, and gompers in 1886 starts it and then you had the wobblys, you had anarchists that were involved in labor agitation. i think there are lots of reasons why it didn't succeed in this country. one of them is the individual initiative that i talked about. that's just hardwired in the american psyche. there's a dislike for collective action, that we all hang together and do this thing. it seems un-american. the other thing is america had an incredible flood of immigrants starting in the 1880s and the immigrants and took the jobs from the factory and pushed up people who were born in america into white-collar jobs or to formanship, to organize the basic labor you had to organize people who were just trying to get assimilated in this country, just trying to learn the language. extremely hard. someone like gompers was successful because he specialized -- not initially, but then he specialized in skilled labor and he discriminated, he discriminated on blacks and they looked at women as strike breakers and h

the gompers memorial exudes both his dignity and his force. a champion of the working man is seated. behind him half a dozen allegorical figures represent justice. unity. and the spirit of self-improvement.