Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964) devoted her life to the cause of the working class. She organized workers, defended the civil liberties of radicals, and was a leading figure in socialist and communist circles.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was born in Concord, New Hampshire, on August 7, 1890, to Thomas and Annie Gurley Flynn. From her parents she absorbed principles of socialism and feminism that would inform the rest of her life. After several moves, in 1900 the family settled in the Bronx in New York City, where Flynn attended public schools. At the age of 16 she gave her first public address to the Harlem Socialist Club, where she spoke on "What Socialism Will Do for Women." Her striking appearance and dynamic oratory made her an enormously popular speaker. Upon her arrest for blocking traffic during one of her soapbox speeches she was expelled from high school, and in 1907 she began full-time organizing for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

In the IWW Flynn met Jack Archibold Jones, a miner and organizer, and they married in 1908. The marriage lasted little more than two years, during which their work separated them for much of the time. Their first child died shortly after its premature birth in 1909; the second, Fred, was born in 1910. Motherhood did not interrupt Flynn's career; she moved back to the Bronx, where her mother and sister cared for her son while she travelled on behalf of workers. Flynn did not remarry, but she carried on a long love affair with Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca, who lived with the Flynn family in New York.

Flynn's efforts for the IWW took her all over the United States, where she led organizing campaigns among garment workers in Minersville, Pennsylvania; silk weavers in Patterson, New Jersey; hotel and restaurant workers in New York City; miners in Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range; and textile workers in the famous Lawrence, Massachusetts, strike of 1912. She spoke in meeting halls, at factory gates, and on street corners in cities and towns across the country from Spokane, Washington, to Tampa, Florida. As she participated in the IWW campaigns against laws restricting freedom of speech she was arrested ten times or more, but was never convicted.

Many of the workers whom Flynn sought to organize were women and children, and Flynn combined her class-based politics with recognition of the particular oppression women experienced because of their sex. She criticized male chauvinism in the IWW and pressed the union to be more sensitive to the needs and interests of working class women. She was a strong supporter of birth control, and she reproached the IWW for not agitating more on that issue. While Flynn considered the women's suffrage movement largely irrelevant to working-class women and opposed mobilization of workers on its behalf as diversionary and divisive, she believed that women should have the right to vote and never opposed suffrage publicly as did some of her colleagues. Her feminist consciousness grew when she joined the Heterodoxy Club, a group of independent women who met regularly to discuss issues of concern to women.

By the later 1910s Flynn was devoting more and more of her time to defending workers' rights, which came under intensive attack during and after World War I. She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and chaired the Workers Defense Union and its successor, International Labor Defense. Besides making speeches, Flynn visited political prisoners, raised money, hired lawyers, arranged meetings, and wrote publicity on behalf of dozens of radicals, including Sacco and Vanzetti, whose defense went on for seven years.

In 1926 Flynn's health failed, and she spent the next ten years recovering in Portland, Oregon, where she lived with Dr. Marie Equi, an IWW activist and birth control agitator. In 1936 Flynn returned to New York and joined the Communist Party, on which she would focus her work for the rest of her life. Although she had announced her new affiliation to the ACLU and had been elected unanimously to a three-year term on its executive board, in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1940 the ACLU expelled her for her party membership.

During World War II Flynn organized and wrote for the party with a special emphasis on women's affairs and ran on its ticket for congressman-at-large from New York. She joined other women leaders in advocating equal economic opportunity and pay for women and the establishment of day care centers and publicized women's contributions to the war effort. Fully supporting the war effort, she favored the draft of women and urged Americans to buy savings stamps and to re-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944. Flynn rose in party circles and was elected to its national board.

With other Communist leaders, Flynn fell victim to the anti-Communist hysteria that suffused the United States after the war. After a nine-month trial in 1952, she was convicted under the Smith Act of conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the United States government. During her prison term from January 1955 to May 1957 at the women's federal penitentiary at Alderson, West Virginia, she wrote, took notes on prison life, and participated in the integration of a cottage composed of African-American women. Upon her release Flynn resumed party work and became national chairman in 1961. She made several trips to the Soviet Union. Falling ill on her last visit, she died there on September 5, 1964, and was given a state funeral in Red Square.

Further Reading

Flynn published two books about her life: The Rebel Girl, An Autobiography: My First Life (1906-1926; revised edition, 1973) and The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner (1955). A summary of Flynn's IWW and labor defense activities can be found in Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, "Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Early Years," in Radical America (January-February 1975). The following books provide discussions of Flynn in the context of women activists and labor radicals: Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (1969); Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917 (1980); and June Sochen, Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists, 1900-1970 (1973).

Additional Sources

Camp, Helen C., Iron in her soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left, Pullman, Wash.: WSU Press, 1995.

(1890-1964), agitator and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World and Communist party activist. In an era when street life and mass strikes were important in people's lives, Flynn's notoriety was like that given to media stars today. In major strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson and Passaic, New Jersey, "the Rebel Girl," as she was called, agitated among and led immigrant workers. A great orator, Flynn saw labor court trials as important aspects of organizing, and so participated in fights for free speech in Missoula, Montana (1908), and Spokane, Washington (1909-1910). She brought to the attention of the general public the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, which was already at issue in the Italian community. The case involved her for seven years (1919-1926). She organized the Workers' Defense League to fight for the victims of the post-World War I red scare and was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu). (The aclu ousted her in 1940 because she was a member of the Communist party, but reinstated her posthumously in 1976.)

Flynn's life was both illustrious and stormy. Born to radical Irish immigrants, she grew up in the poverty of the South Bronx. After a brief marriage she left her husband and lived most of her life with her mother and sister, who raised her son.

Reacting to fatiguing labor battles, left-wing faction fights, and an unhappy love affair with the anarchist organizer Carlo Tresca, Flynn retreated from the labor struggle during the years 1928-1937. But in 1937, she joined the Communist party and rose quickly in the organization, joining the national board in 1938. Actually she was only a figurehead and rarely dissented from the party line. Having come in at the top, instead of rising through the ranks, Flynn always felt uncomfortable in the party. Nevertheless, she was one of its most popular speakers and publicists; two to four times a week for twenty-six years she wrote a column for the Daily Worker. But her constituency consisted of rough-and-tumble miners and immigrant workers, and she preferred militant organizing to bureaucratic and reform work.

Flynn was indicted and convicted with other party leaders under the Smith Act, which made it illegal to advocate the overthrow of the government by force. With flair and eloquence she defended herself in a nine-month trial. While awaiting jail in 1955 she wrote Rebel Girl, an account of her early life. She was sentenced to three years in the Alderson Federal Penitentiary and served from January 1955 through May 1957. After her release she published a memoir, Alderson Story.

In 1961, Flynn became the first female national chair of the Communist party. She ran for the New York State Assembly, headed the Women's Commission, and traveled abroad. She died in the Soviet Union where she had gone to write and rest and was given an elaborate state funeral.

Bibliography:

Rosalyn Baxandall, Words on Fire: The Life and Writings of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1987); Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl, an Autobiography: My First Life (1906-1926) (1955).

Author:

Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall

See also American Civil Liberties Union; Anticommunism; Communist Party; Industrial Workers of the World; Labor.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964) was born in Concord, New Hampshire on 7 August, 1890. The family moved to New York in 1900 and Flynn was educated at the local public schools. Her parents introduced her to socialism. When she was only 16 she gave her first speech, "What Socialism Will Do for Women", at the Harlem Socialist Club. As a result of her political activities, Flynn was expelled from high school.

In 1907 Flynn became a full-time organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Over the next few years she organised campaigns among:

• garment workers in Pennsylvania
• silk weavers in New Jersey
• restaurant workers in New York
• miners in Minnesota, Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington
• textile workers in Massachusetts.

During this period, author Theodore Dreiser described her as "an East Side Joan of Arc."

In 1909 Flynn participated in a free speech fight in Spokane, in which she chained herself to a lamppost in order to delay her arrest. She later accused the police of using the jail as a brothel, an accusation that prompted them to try to confiscate all copies of the Industrial Worker reporting the charge.

Flynn was arrested ten times during this period, but was never convicted of any criminal activity. It was a plea bargain, on the other hand, that resulted in Flynn's expulsion from the IWW in 1916, along with fellow organizer Joe Ettor. Three Minnesota miners had been arrested on murder charges when a gunman by the name of Myron came to the residence of one of the miners and was killed. Three IWW organizers were also charged with the murder. Head of the IWW's organizing committee, Bill Haywood seemed confident that Judge Hilton, who had successfully defended George Pettibone when he and Haywood were on trial in Idaho, could win the case for the miners. Unfortunately, it didn't happen that way — the main organizers on the scene accepted an arrangement by which the other organizers were allowed to go free, but the three miners, none of whom spoke English fluently, faced time in prison. There was also a mixup in the sentencing; a prior agreement for one year in prison was somehow changed in the courtroom to a sentence of five to twenty years. Haywood held Flynn and Ettor responsible for allowing the miners to plead guilty to charges they probably didn't understand.^[1]

A founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Flynn was active in the campaign against the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti. Flynn was particularly concerned with women's rights, supporting birth control and women's suffrage. Flynn also criticised the leadership of trade unions for being male dominated and not reflecting the needs of women.

In 1936, Flynn joined the U.S. Communist Party and wrote a feminist column for its journal, the Daily Worker. Two years later, she was elected to the national committee. Her membership in the Party led to her ouster from the board of the ACLU in 1940 [1].

During the the Second World War she played an important role in the campaign for equal economic opportunity and pay for women and the establishment of day care centres for working mothers. In 1942, Flynn ran for U.S. Congress at large in New York and received 50,000 votes, not winning.

In July 1948, 12 leaders of the Communist Party were arrested and accused of violating the Smith Act by advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence. Flynn launched a campaign for their release, but in June 1951, was herself arrested in the second wave of arrests and prosecuted under the Smith Act.

1913 photo of Paterson silk strike leaders Patrick Quinlan, Carlo Tresca, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Adolph Lessig, and Bill Haywood

After a nine-month trial, she was found guilty and served two years in the women's penitentiary at Alderson, West Virginia. She later wrote an account of her prison experiences in The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner.

After her release from prison, Flynn resumed her activities for leftist and Communist causes. She became national chairperson of the Communist Party of the United States in 1961. She made several visits to the Soviet Union and died while there on September 5, 1964. The Soviet government gave her a state funeral in Red Square with over twenty-five thousand people attending. In accordance with her wishes, Flynn's remains were flown to the U.S. for burial in Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery, near the graves of Eugene Dennis, Bill Haywood and the Haymarket Riot Martyrs.

The song "Rebel Girl" was written by Joe Hill in honor of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

Quotes:
"History has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered, were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political oppression and economic slavery."

"We believe that the class struggle existing in society is expressed in the economic power of the master on the one side and the growing economic power of the workers on the other side meeting in open battle now and again, but meeting in continual daily conflict over which shall have the larger share of labor's product and the ultimate ownership of the means of life."

Notes

1. ^ The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, 1929, pp. 291 ppbk.

References

• Fraad Baxandall, Rosalyn (1987). Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Rutgers Univ Pr. ISBN 0-8135-1241-7. 
• Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley (1963). The Alderson Story: My Life As a Political Prisoner. International Publishers. ISBN 0-7178-0002-4. 

Further reading

• Camp, Helen C. Iron In Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left. Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 1995. ISBN 978-0-87422-105-3 (hardbound) ISBN 978-0-87422-106-0 (paperback)

External links

• SABOTAGE, THE CONSCIOUS WITHDRAWAL OF THE WORKERS' INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY
• Memories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

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