John Brown Lennon 400 local unions. Lennon was elected treasurer of the American Federation of Labor in 1890. He soon became a close associate, and friend, to AFL president Samuel Gompers. In 1894, when Gompers lost the AFL presidency for a year to socialist labor leader John McBride, he worked out of Lennon's New York City office. Both Lennon and Gompers held the conservative AFL labor philosophy of "pure and simple unionism" against socialist and anarchist viewpoints that put forward a larger political project of working-class emancipation through the overthrow of capitalism. In 1894, the Journeyman Tailors Union under Lennon's leadership faced a
Imagine (John Lennon song) to him by Gregory, Lennon wrote what author John Blaney described as "a humanistic paean for the people". Blaney wrote, "Lennon contends that global harmony is within our reach, but only if we reject the mechanisms of social control that restrict human potential." "Rolling Stone"s David Fricke commented: "[Lennon] calls for a unity and equality built upon the complete elimination of modern social order: geopolitical borders, organised religion, [and] economic class." Lennon stated: "'Imagine', which says: 'Imagine that there was no more religion, no more country, no more politics,' is virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I'm not particularly a