Gompers and Boyce went together like warm beer and vinegar. A stumpy Jewish immigrant from the London ghetto, Sam Gompers was shaped by the world of his father, who rolled rich cheroots and aromatic panatelas in cigar-making lofts on New York's Lower East Side... the rollers young Gompers joined were educated men, their craft an ancient skill, their union like that of the medieval guilds, designed as much to protect their hard-won turf from less-skilled workers as to wrest concessions from their employers. Not surprisingly, then, the AFL, which Gompers founded in 1886, was sometimes regarded as a league of petit-bourgeois tradesmen seeking to protect their status from challenges by the industrialized masses... Gompers and his lieutenants, with their silk hats and waistcoats, their lifelong habit of philosophical disputation over glasses of steaming tea, often looked like a band of privileged elitists.