Elizabeth Gurley Flynn may have died in 1961, but her life is ever vivid and
current.
As early as age 5, Flynn already had
the "indelible impression" of working class life and poverty where they lived in
Manchester, N.H., "where the great mills stretched like prisons along the bank of the
Merrimac River."
Her family was an active socialist
family. She vividly remembered the Sunday night gatherings at the Harlem Socialist Club at
250 W. 125th Street. It was here that Flynn, aged 15, made her first public speech. The
topic was "Women Under Socialism."
She frequently went to Union Square
with her father, an organizer for the newly-formed Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
She would speak there, attracting the attention of the press. The author Theodore Dreiser,
then working as a journalist, wrote of her as "an East Side Joan of Arc."
She joined the IWW in 1906 at 16. Of
the IWW Flynn wrote, "It blazed a trail like a great comet across the American labor
scene from 1905 to 1920." She was assigned to IWW Local 179. Her first experience as
an IWW speaker took place in Brandywine Park in Schenectady, N.Y. at a meeting protesting
the arrest of "Wobblies" Bill Haywood and George Pettibone.
She attended her first IWW Convention
as a delegate from Local 177 in Chicago in 1907 while still in high school and met Lucy
Parson, widow of Albert Parson, who had been executed 20 years before, a martyr of the
struggle for the eight-hour day.
At the convention she also met J. A.
Jones, organizer of the Minnesota IWW, who invited her to come on a speaking tour to the
Mesabi Iron Range north of Duluth where he was an organizer for the Western Federation of
Miners. She went on to Butte, and later to Kalispell, Montana where the IWW was leading a
lumber strike.
Gurley's first real participation in
the IWW free speech fight and second arrest occurred in Missoula, Mont. in the fall of
1908. The city council had passed an ordinance making street speech unlawful. The IWW
decided to defy this ordinance as unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment.
Speaker after speaker was arrested, including Flynn. She participated in 26 such battles
between 1909 and 1916 and emerged as an eloquent speaker.
1912 brought the Lawrence, Mass. mill
strike: 14,000 people went out and the mills remained empty for three months. The strikers
spoke in 25 different languages and 45 different dialects. With the arrest of the original
leaders, Gurley and Haywood were brought into the strike. They addressed 10 meetings a
day.
Police brutality and hunger forced
the strike committee to send their children out of town to sympathizers who volunteered to
take them for the duration of the strike. Gurley was in charge of the evacuation of the
children. On Feb. 22 the police arrested the children at the train station. The local
authorities, infuriated by the favorable publicity of the strikers, decided no more
children would leave town.
On Feb. 24 Flynn tried to put another
40 children on a train for Philadelphia. The police, with clubs drawn, attacked the group,
arresting 15 parents and children, and sent 10 terrified children to the Lawrence Poor
Farm. The newspapers headlined the situation and the publicity forced Congress to
investigate the conditions in the shops. The strike was won by mid-March with wage
increases from 5 to 25 percent, with the largest increases going to the lowest paid
workers.
On March 3, 1913, 25,000 silk workers
in Paterson, N.J. struck. Over 1,000 strikers were arrested. It became a bloody
confrontation between the strikers and the hired thugs, police and judges.
Picketing and outdoor meetings were
forbidden. Picketers arrested were automatically sentenced to three months in jail. The
nearest meeting place was Haledon, a neighboring suburb whose mayor was a socialist. There
Flynn spoke to the mass meetings.
On June 7, the strikers gave a
propaganda pageant for the Paterson strike, in Madison Square Garden in New York City,
orchestrated by John Reed. It was a theatrical success, but financially a failure because
of the expense of the Garden, transportation and publicity. The treasury was zero and the
strikers - starved into submission - slowly drifted back into the shops. By Aug. 1 the
strike was officially ended. The IWW suffered a setback in Paterson and never completely
recovered.
In the spring of 1915,
Hill was visited in his cell by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Flynn came away from the meeting
as Hill's new champion: "He is tall, good looking, but naturally thin after sixteen
months in a dark and narrow cell with another row of cells between him and daylight. Joe
Hill had nothing to say about his case or himself. He only said, 'I'm not afraid of death,
but I'd like to be in the fight a little longer.' Can we afford to give up our Joe Hill
without a struggle?"
Hill immediately composed a song in
honor of Flynn, a sentimental tune that championed the women of the I.W.W. He titled it
"The Rebel Girl."
At the end of World War I the
government organized an all-out attack against workers, a reaction to the Russian
Revolution and a near uprising of workers in the United States. Nearly a million workers
were on strike, including the Seattle General Strike, an industry-wide strike of 365,000
steel workers led by William Z. Foster, 400,000 miners out, 200,000 railroad workers and
the Boston Police Strike. During this time the Communist Party was formed.
To halt this upsurge the government
launched an all-out attack on labor. The agents of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer and his assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, invaded homes and meetings, arresting over
10,000 men and women in a single night. Hundreds were deported, thousands imprisoned for
opposition to the war.
The International Labor Defense was
organized in June of 1925 and Flynn became chairperson in 1926. It existed for over 15
years and was succeeded by the Civil Rights Congress, in which Flynn was also active.
Flynn joined the Communist Party in
1936. In 1937 she made her first speech as a Communist at Madison Square Garden. She wrote
a biweekly column for the Daily Worker and served as chair of the women's commission for
10 years.
In 1942 Flynn ran for Congress at
large in New York and received 50,000 votes. Her program was geared especially toward
women, millions of whom had been drawn into factories and offices during the war. She
believed that African American women were the most discriminated against, super- exploited
workers in spite of the Fair Employment Protection Act. The Ford Motor Co. would not even
accept applications from African American women until militant demonstrations forced an
end to this discrimination.
In July 1948 12 leaders of the CPUSA
were arrested under the infamous anti-Communist witchhunt, falsely accused of advocating
the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence. Flynn launched a mass defense
campaign for the release of the 11. In June 1951 at the height of the McCarthy period,
Flynn was arrested in the second wave of arrests. Between the time of her sentencing and
her actual imprisonment, Flynn ran for Congress from the Bronx on the Communist Party
ticket under the slogan of "Vote No! to McCarthyism." For Peace and Jobs!
Amnesty for all." She received 4,000 votes. On Jan. 24, 1951, Flynn, Claudia Jones
and Betty Gannett were incarcerated in Alderson Women's Federal Prison in West Virginia.
On her return from prison Flynn ran
for city council with the slogan of "Clean Jim Crow out of New York" and for
full equality for women. In 1961 Flynn was elected CPUSA national chairperson, a post she
held until her death.
In January 1962 the State Department
revoked the passports of five well-known Communists, including Flynn who had just returned
from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's 22nd Congress. She protested that "to
set up classes of citizens who can't leave the country due to political beliefs is
unconstitutional and a violation of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights adopted
in 1948. When the test case reached the court in 1964 the justices agreed with her. They
ruled Section 6 of the McCarran Act unconstitutional.
In August 1964, after the McCarran
Act was struck down, Flynn went to the USSR representing the CPUSA at an international
Party Congress. She hoped to write her autobiography there. Instead she was hospitalized
for a stomach disorder and died on Sept. 5.
She was honored with a state funeral
in Red Square. Her body lay in state in the Hall of Columns of the Soviet Trade Unions.
For eight hours a column of mourners, six abreast, filed past. Wreaths from workers'
organizations and trade unions from the vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and
Communist parties around the globe adorned the casket.
The New York Times gave this story
front page coverage, quoting a May Day speech in which Flynn said "I believe in a
socialist America. What a May Day that will be to celebrate. Hail to it."
In accordance with her wishes,
Flynn's remains were flown to the U.S. for burial in Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery, near the
grave of Eugene Dennis, Big Bill Haywood and the Haymarket martyrs.
- People's Weekly World |
revolutions.
