Date: Sat, 27 Apr 1996 17:40:15 -0400
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
From: Charlotte Kates <ckates-AT-mosquito.com>
Subject: Rebel Girl


Rebel Girl: The revolutionary life and work of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn



by Mary Licht



This article was reprinted from the March 30, 1996 issue of the People's

Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved -

may be used with PWW credits.



Elizabeth Gurley Flynn may have died in 1961, but her life is ever vivid

and current. A biography, "Iron in Her Soul" by Helen C. Camp was recently

published and requests for permission to quote her in books and essays

still come in weekly to the Communist Party.



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 moved to the Bronx, N.Y. at the turn of the century. She loved

the city and the school, especially the upper grades where she studied the

Constitution and the Bill of Rights which, she said, "I have been defending

ever since."



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.



Meanwhile in the west, Joe Hill, a friend of Flynn's was working with the

copper miners in Utah and was framed on charges of killing a Salt Lake

grocer. Many felt his arrest was due to his radicalism, especially for his

"red songbook," sold in the millions of copies, with songs like "Solidarity

Forever," "Hold The Fort," "Casey Jones" and others sung by strikers and

workers.



Flynn visited him in jail and the next day he sent her a copy of "The Rebel

Girl" which he dedicated to her. Flynn led the movement to save Hill. She

met personally with President Woodrow Wilson, who appealed to the governor

of Utah. However, the governor rejected the message from Wilson as

"unwarranted interference." Before his execution Hill wrote Haywood, "Don't

mourn, organize."



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.



Two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti, were arrested

and accused of murder. Flynn was one of the first to investigate the case,

which became the most famous labor defense fight in history. For the next

seven years, Communists helped lead the fightback against the case, which

sparked protests worldwide. Despite the outcry, however, the two men were

executed.



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.



-Mary Licht is chair of the History Commission of the Communist Party USA.



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