Cigar Makers' International Union

And Samuel... takes up working as a cigar maker in New York.

He becomes involved in the Cigar Makers Union in the United States.

And it's through that that he eventually rises through the union in America and in 1886 is one of the founders of the AFL, the American Federation of Labor.

So that's the broad brushstrokes of his story.

So the same year that Taft gives this speech at the University of Michigan, the American Federation of Labor has its convention.

And one of the American union leaders, The leader of the Cigar Makers Union, which actually ended up being a very significant union because it produced the leader of the AFL, Samuel Gompers, who himself was British, said that, is it not a fact that in England there is no constitutional provision to stymie an eight-hour law? And at that same convention, one of the delegates says – I sometimes wish I had been born in any other country than in the United States.

I am sick and tired of listening to lawyers declaring everything we ask unconstitutional.

And this is really, I think, quite an astonishing thing for someone to say in America then or now, that they are so upset with the way the Constitution has been used to limit the rights of workers that they would actually rather not be an American at all.