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
John Lennon the skiffle craze as a teenager. In 1957, he formed his first band, the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. Lennon began to record as a solo artist before the band's break-up in April 1970; two of those songs were "Give Peace a Chance" and "Instant Karma!" Lennon subsequently produced albums that included "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" and "Imagine", and songs such as "Working Class Hero", "Imagine" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". After he married Yoko Ono in 1969, he added "Ono" as one of his middle names. Lennon disengaged himself from the music business in 1975