Samuel Gompers Papers Samuel Gompers was the nation’s leading trade unionist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and president of the American Federation of Labor from 1886 until his death in 1924. “Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people,” he said. “There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire . . . . there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.”