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 (Royal Navy officer) John Lennon (Royal Navy officer) John Lennon (1768–1846), was a naval captain, born at Downpatrick, Northern Ireland in 1768. He is stated to have served as a midshipman in the British Royal Navy during the American Revolution. In 1796, when in command of the letter of marque schooner "Favorite", of Martinique, he was very severely wounded and his ship was taken by a French privateer of very superior force after a fierce engagement of one hour and twenty minutes' duration. In 1798 he was in command of the "General Keppel", also of Martinique, which was capsized in a white squall