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 Brown Lennon John Brown Lennon John Brown Lennon (October 12, 1850 - January 18, 1923) was an American labor union leader and general-secretary of the Journeyman Tailors Union of America (JTU). In 1890, he was elected treasurer of the American Federation of Labor and served in that capacity until he was defeated by Teamsters president Daniel J. Tobin in 1917. During World War I, he was appointed by Woodrow Wilson to the U.S. Department of Labor's board of mediators and Commission of Conciliation, and also served on the U.S. Commission of Industrial Relations. In 1919, he supported the formation of the Illinois