Samuel Gompers was born on January 27, 1850, in London, England. In July 1863, his family immigrated to the United States, where Gompers and his father found employment in New York City as skilled cigar rollers. Although Gompers lacked formal education, he was introduced to the ideas of the political economists Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle through the working-class self-education practiced by cigar makers, who hired a fellow worker to read aloud to those rolling cigars. This education helped convince Gompers of the necessity for trade unionism, and he became active in the Cigar Makers’ International Union. Along with his friend Adolph Strasser, who assumed the presidency of the union in 1877, Gompers fostered a more centralized union model for skilled craft workers in response to the fragility of the labor movement during such troubled economic times as the Panic of 1873—a financial depression that led to losses of jobs.