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 produced many strong leaders
of American unions and saved them from defection to other interests.
Aggressive and uncompromising in a perpetual fight for the strongest
possible position and power of trade unions, but always strong for
collective agreements with the opposing employers, he displays the
business tactics of organized labor. At the head of an organization
which denies itself power over its constituent unions, he has brought
and held together the most widely divergent and often antagonistic
unions, while permitting each to develop and even to change its
character to fit the changing industrial conditions.

The dismal failure of the strike against the tenement house system in
cigar making brought home to both Strasser and Gompers the weakness of