 Give us the time that the AFL was being formed and tell us a little bit about Mr. Gompers. So Gompers was an immigrant who arrived in the U.S. during the Civil War of the 1860s. He arrived in 1863. He came from London. His family were Dutch immigrants to London, however. They were of Dutch-Jewish origin. They settled in London, worked there for a time. Sam came over when he was a teenager.