AFL Office of the President, political correspondence
Collection
0032-LBR-RG1-012
This collection of miscellaneous political correspondence consists of letters from American presidents, secretaries and under-secretaries of executive departments and agencies and from state governors. These letters were sent to American Federation of Labor (AFL) Presidents Samuel Gompers and William Green between 1908 and 1944.
This collection is open to the public and must be used in the Special Collections reading room. Researchers must register and agree to copyright and privacy laws before using this collection.
Photocopies or digital surrogates may be provided in accordance with Special Collections and University Archives duplication policy.
Copyright resides with the creators of the documents or their heirs unless otherwise specified. It is the researcher's responsibility to secure permission to publish materials from the appropriate copyright holder.
Archival materials may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal and/or state right to privacy laws or other regulations. While we make a good faith effort to identify and remove such materials, some may be missed during our processing. If a researcher finds sensitive personal information in a collection, please bring it to the attention of the reading room staff.
20 Folders
This collection of miscellaneous political correspondence consists of letters from American presidents, secretaries and under-secretaries of executive departments and agencies, and from state governors. These letters were sent to American Federation of Labor Presidents Samuel Gompers and William Green. Inclusive dates are March 14, 1908 to April 7, 1924 for letters to Samuel Gompers and February 27, 1925 to February 28, 1944 for letters to William Green. Many letters are nothing more that acknowledgements of correspondence received from Gompers and Green, often on the occasion of the AFL Presidents sending copies of resolutions from annual conventions. Some letters contain information of more substance, such as one from Secretary of State Cordell Hull to William Green on August 25, 1938 about British policy towards prospective Jewish immigrants to Palestine (folder 12). Another significant letter was sent by Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, to William Green on July 2, 1942. It concerned the relevance of the Walsh-Healy Act to production of goods in federal prisons (folder 16).
This collection is organized into two series. Within each subseries, letters are arranged alphabetically by correspondent, then chronologically.
The contents of this collection were rescued from scheduled destruction by Edwin M. Schmidt during an American Federation of Labor (AFL) microfilming project in the 1950s. Mr. Schmidt, who served as Director of the AFL-CIO Division of Reproduction, Mailings, Shipping and Subscription in the 1980s, donated the collection to the George Meany Memorial Archives in 1986. The George Meany Memorial Archives transferred these records as part of a major transfer of their archive and library holdings to the University of Maryland Libraries in 2013.
Catherine A. Christen and Sue Ann McMaster at the George Meany Memorial Archives initially processed these records in 1991. The University of Maryland Libraries received the records and the finding aid in 2013. In 2017, Bria Parker exported and cleaned the finding aid contents from the Eloquent Systems database using OpenRefine, and finally transformed the finding aids into Encoded Archival Description (EAD) using a series of programmatic scripts. The finding aid was ingested into ArchivesSpace in 2017, at which point Jennifer Eidson updated the descriptive content for accuracy. Revisions include changes to biographical/historical notes, scope and content notes, and the creation of new collection numbers. Jennifer Eidson also enhanced custodial histories and re-wrote collection titles to better conform to archival standards.
Part of the Special Collections and University Archives