Samuel Gompers

Samuel Gompers was born in London to a Dutch Jewish family and emigrated with them to New York at thirteen, going straight to work rolling cigars in the crowded tenement workshops of the Lower East Side, where cigar makers often worked, ate and slept in the same room. The trade's custom of paying a reader to read aloud to workers as they rolled tobacco exposed Gompers to newspapers and radical literature, and he joined the Cigar Makers' International Union in his teens.

He rose through the union arguing against the era's more revolutionary socialist and anarchist currents, insisting that unions should focus on concrete gains, higher wages, shorter hours and better conditions, won through collective bargaining rather than political upheaval. In 1886 he helped found the American Federation of Labor, a coalition of craft unions, and served as its president for all but one year until his death in 1924, building it into the largest and most durable labour organisation in the United States.

His approach left the AFL open to accusations that it protected skilled white male workers while showing little interest in organising women, Black workers or the unskilled immigrants filling America's factories, criticisms that shaped decades of rivalry with more inclusive unions that followed.

He also supported American entry into the First World War and worked with the government on wartime labour policy, a stance that alienated some of the movement's more radical members.