American Federation of Labor.

Fate had decreed that these sections of a handful of immigrants should
play for a time high-sounding parts in the world labor movement. When,
at the World Congress of the International Workingmen's Association at
the Hague in 1872, the anarchist faction led by Bakunin had shown such
strength that Marx and his socialist faction deemed it wise to move the
General Council out of mischief's way, they removed it to New York and
entrusted its powers into the hands of the faithful German Marxians on
this side of the Atlantic. This spelled the end of the _Internationale_
as a world organization, but enormously increased the stakes of the
factional fights within the handful of American Internationalists. The
organization of the workers into trade unions, the _Internationale's_
first principle, was forgotten in the heat of intemperate struggles for
empty honors and powerless offices. On top of that, with the panic of
1873 and the ensuing prolonged depression, the political drift asserted
itself in socialism as it had in the labor movement in general and the
movement, erstwhile devoted primarily to organization of trade unions,
entered, urged on by the Lassalleans, into a series of political
campaigns somewhat successful at first but soon succumbing to the
inevitable fate of all amateurish attempts. Upon men of Strasser's
practical mental grasp these petty tempests in the melting pot could
only produce an impression of sheer futility, and he turned to trade
unionism as the only activity worth his while. Strasser had been elected
president of the Cigar Makers' International Union in 1877, in the midst
of a great strike in New York against the tenement-house system.

The president of the local New York union of cigar makers was at the
time Samuel Gompers, a young man of twenty-seven, who was born in
England and came to America in 1862. In his endeavor to build up a model
for the "new" unionism and in his almost uninterrupted headship of that
movement for forty years is indicated Gompers' truly representative
character. Born of Dutch-Jewish parents in England in 1850, he typifies
the cosmopolitan origins of American unionism. His early contact in the
union of his trade with men like Strasser, upon whom the ideas of Marx
and the International Workingmen's Association had left an indelible
stamp, and his thorough study of Marx gave him that grounding both in
idealism and class consciousness which has pro