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 Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership yielded eight of its fourteen tracks. With a few exceptions, one being the album title itself, Lennon had yet to bring his love of wordplay to bear on his song lyrics, saying: "We were just writing songs ... pop songs with no more thought of them than that—to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant". In a 1987 interview, McCartney said that the other Beatles idolised John: "He was like our own little Elvis ... We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the