ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN : THE REBEL GIRL, DEMOCRACY AND REVOLUTION
By
Mary Anne Trasciatti
Rutgers University Press. 372 pages. £27.99. ISBN 978-1-9788-1757-9
Reviewed by Jim Burns
In
my copy of Songs of the Workers (The Little Red Songbook), published
by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in July 1956 “In Commemoration
of the 50th Anniversary of the I.W.W.”, there’s a song called
“The Rebel Girl”, written by Joe Hill and, according to Mary Anne
Trasciatti, possibly dedicated to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She had visited
Hill in his cell in Salt Lake City while he was awaiting execution for the
alleged murder of a shopkeeper. It has been suggested that Hill may have had
someone else in mind besides Flynn, but the fact is that the song became
associated with her when she rose to prominence as a leading IWW organiser,
agitator and orator.
Flynn was born in 1890 in Concord, New Hampshire, though her family moved to
New York where she was educated in public schools. Her father was
American born from Irish stock and her mother was born in Galway.
Both were socialists, and Flynn grew up conversant with stories of the
struggles to free Ireland from English rule, and with ideas of social and
economic justice. One of the
books she read was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, with its
utopian vision of a future world without wars and with an emphasis on the
common good. She became a street-corner speaker in 1906 and was arrested for
“speaking without a permit and blocking traffic”. It was to be the first of
many encounters with the forces of law and order.
She
joined the IWW in 1906, which was more or less around the time it was
founded. It was a syndicalist union (some people preferred to refer to its
policies as industrial unionism), and its aim was to organise among workers
who the existing craft unions often looked on as unorganisable: Immigrant
mill employees who were mostly female, transient workers following the
harvests in the western states, and others. But the Wobblies, as they were
nicknamed, went wherever there were strikes. Their attitude might best be
summed up by quoting from the IWW Preamble: “The working class and the
employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as
hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few who
make up the employing class have all the good things of life. Between these
two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as
a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and
abolish the wage system”. Those were heady words, and no doubt inspired the
actions of dedicated IWW members, but in practice, and certainly for the
majority of the people they attempted to unionise, the hard facts of life
meant that energies were largely devoted to organising immediate demands for
better pay and conditions.
Flynn was married in 1908 to John Archibald ‘Jack’ Jones, an IWW activist.
The marriage didn’t last too long, but she had a son, Fred. In the meantime,
she became involved in the free speech fights that erupted in towns along
the West Coast. These came about when local authorities attempted to impose
restrictions on IWW street speakers. I should point out that Trasciatti, in
her introduction, makes a point of saying, “I foreground Flynn’s commitment
to civil liberties as a characteristic and enduring element of her activism
and a force that shaped her life”. She doesn’t overlook the various strikes,
and other events, that Flynn was involved in, but she certainly gives more
attention to the civil liberties aspect than earlier biographies have done.
The
free speech fights in towns like Missoula and Spokane attracted attention
outside their immediate locales due to the tactics employed by the IWW. When
speakers were arrested calls went out for Wobblies to descend on the
relevant town and replace their imprisoned fellow-workers. The prisons were
soon filled as Wobbly after Wobbly was pulled from his or her soapbox and
taken away by the police. As
can be imagined, the strain on the town’s budget began to take its toll.
Prisoners had to be fed, and few of them could be discharged after being
fined. They were single men with no fixed addresses who wandered from place
to place, worked wherever and whenever there was work available, and rarely
had more than a few coins in their pockets.
It's debatable if the free speech fights achieved much beyond perhaps
forcing the authorities to compromise by giving permission for speakers to
function, subject to certain limits. Within the IWW itself there were
suggestions that the time and effort spent on them could be better used for
organising. It was pointed out that, while it might be easy for single
rootless men to take a chance on spending a few nights, or even a few weeks,
in jail, it was less so in the East where the IWW was organising among mill
workers in places like Lawrence,
Massachusetts and Paterson, New Jersey. There were many married men and
women, not to mention children, working in the mills. To be arrested, fined,
possibly imprisoned, and then probably blacklisted, were risks they had to
avoid.
There was a free speech fight in Paterson when Flynn and the anarchist Carlo
Tresca (said by Trasciatti to be Flynn’s “love of her life”) arrived to
address a meeting of striking silk workers. There was a ban on IWW meetings,
and, though Tresca managed to avoid being arrested, Flynn was taken into
custody, escorted to the railway station, and put on a train to New York.
When she raised the question of civil liberties and the right to speak, the
Chief of Police replied, “You may have the right, but we have the power”.
It’s the kind of response that makes
you realise that rights are really only concessions that can easily be taken
away when the authorities feel threatened in any way. As Trasciatti puts it
: “The Paterson police showed little concern for the rights of silk workers.
Their loyalty was to the silk manufacturers”.
The
outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 gave a boost to the American economy. The
country was neutral but orders for military and non-military supplies poured
in from Britain and France. As a consequence the number of strikes boomed as
workers, faced with increases in the cost of living, reacted to the profits
that businesses were making. Flynn was on record as saying, “Our
self-appointed task was to organise the unorganised workers and lead them in
struggle for better wages, shorter hours, and decent working conditions”.
One strike occurred on the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota. Flynn, Tresca,
and the IWW organisers James Gilday and Frank Little, were sent to help
organise the strike, and during a confrontation with police a deputy was
killed. Little and Tresca were among those arrested, though the latter was
not present at the time.
The
strike eventually collapsed, and Flynn and Joseph Ettor then campaigned to
get Tresca out of prison. Her actions were to lead to a rift in her
relations with William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood, head of the IWW.
Trasciatti says that Flynn, Ettor
and Tresca “brokered an out-of-court settlement in which three
strikers…..pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter in exchange for the
release of Tresca and the other prisoners”. Haywood opposed the deal, saying
it was contrary to IWW principles, and “sold out the strikers”. He
“officially reprimanded” Flynn, who was already in dispute with him
regarding his plans for centralising control of the IWW in order to make it
more efficient. Wobblies were good at turning up for strikes but, once they
were won, or lost, they tended to move on and leave little in the way of an
organised union branch behind them. From that point on, says Trasciatti,
Flynn “never organised another IWW strike”. She did, however, continue to
campaign on behalf of Wobblies who were in court for one reason or another.
In 1917 she went to Seattle “where a group of Wobblies had been arrested and
jailed on murder charges”. These were in connection with events at Everett
in late-1916 when members of the IWW, who were aiming to provide support for
striking shingle weavers, clashed with armed deputies. Five Wobblies (some
accounts suggest a higher figure) and two deputies were killed.
The
IWW had always attracted hostile attention in the period since its inception
in 1905, and American entry into the First World War in 1917 meant that more
restrictions were imposed on its activities. Trasciatti notes that “Between
1917 and 1920, twenty-one states and two territories passed….criminal
syndicalism laws”, with the definition of criminal syndicalism being a
“doctrine which advocates crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of
terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform”. With
those laws, and others such as the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act,
brought in by the Federal government, the time was ripe for an all-out
attack on the IWW.
There were raids on offices and homes, and in Chicago 166 alleged IWW
members were indicted by the federal grand jury. Flynn was the only woman
among them. Throughout the country individual Wobblies were hounded, beaten,
imprisoned, and even killed in a frenzy of “patriotism” as IWW was said to
mean “Imperial Wilhelm’s Warriors”. One such action was the savage lynching
of Frank Little by a group of vigilantes. A popular novel of the period,
Zane Grey’s The Desert of Wheat, published in 1919, the year
of the mass IWW trial in Chicago, has a gloating description, clearly
based on Little’s death, of “a man hanging from a rope fastened to the
centre of a high bridge span…..the placard on the hanged man’s breast bore
in glaring red a strange message : Last Warning -
3-7-77. The figures were the ones used in frontier days by
vigilantes”.
There is something curious in the way that Flynn managed to avoid being
tried with the other IWW activists. She wrote direct to President Wilson
and, as Trasciatti puts it, “she challenged the reputation she had acquired
as a labour agitator by claiming that her activism was necessitated by
maternal obligations. Nationalist rhetoric of the era linked motherhood to
patriotism and support for the war and Flynn exploited the connection to
argue that she could not possibly be an antiwar radical because she was
devoted to her child and siblings…….In addition to rejecting the moniker of
labour agitator, Flynn disavowed membership in the IWW ‘due to violent
disagreements that arose in the organisation last December’ “. There was
more, with Flynn alluding to her agreement with Wilson’s war aims. As
Trasciatti says, “Militancy and audacity had given way to humility and
obsequiousness”. And she adds, “However problematic they might seem in
retrospect, lying, humility and obsequiousness proved successful tactics”.
Flynn was never brought to trial. It was, perhaps, as well that she
wasn’t. Haywood, for example, was convicted, sentenced to twenty years in
prison, and fined $10,000. He jumped bail, fled to Russia, and lived there
until his death in 1928.
The
IWW was never the same after 1920 or so, and by that time the American
Communist Party was on the scene, albeit initially in the form of two
feuding parties each claiming to be the authentic voice of communism in
America. Flynn was no longer active on the streets, though she continued to
participate in efforts to defend civil rights and support workers who were
on trial for alleged offences committed while striking. She also got
involved in the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists
accused of murder during a payroll robbery. And she was in at the birth of
the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
On
a personal level, not everything went smoothly for Flynn. She discovered
that Carlo Tresca had been having an affair with her sister, Sabina, and
that Sabina was pregnant with Tresca’s child. The child, a boy named Peter,
was eventually placed in foster care. He grew up to be Peter Martin who,
along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, started the City Lights bookshop in San
Francisco.
In
1926 Flynn was in Passaic. New Jersey, where what Trasciatti describes as
the “first massive industrial strike in the United States led by Communists”
was taking place. It involved sixteen thousand immigrant wool workers – half
of them women – (and) was instigated by a 10 percent pay cut in the fall of
1925”. Flynn, with journalist and novelist Mary Heaton Vorse and communist
Ella Reeve ‘Mother’ Bloor, dealt with publicity, raising money for the
strike fund, and distributing food to the strikers’ children. There’s a
photo in the book of Flynn demonstrating how to use a gas mask, the police
in Passaic using tear gas to break up picket lines and meetings. She had
been having an affair with Albert Weisbord, “a Harvard Law School graduate
turned communist silk weaver” who was leading the strike. But, as with her
affair with Carlo Tresca, it didn’t turn out well, and she found that he was
also involved with Vera Buch, “an old flame and recent graduate from Hunter
College, whom he would eventually marry”.
There is a brief reference to Flynn’s presence in Passaic in Vera
Buch Weisbord’s A Radical Life (Indiana University Press, 1977),
where she’s described as “a warm, vibrant person and a powerful speaker”.
Between 1929 and 1936 Flynn lived with Marie Equi in a relationship that
caused some concern among her family and friends. Equi was “an out lesbian,
pacifist, free speech fighter, labour activist. anti-imperialist, and doctor
who dedicated her practice to serving the working-class community in
Portland, including providing safe and affordable abortions for women who
needed them”. She had served ten months in prison for making a speech
against American involvement in the First World War. Flynn, in her capacity
as chair of the Workers’ Defence Union (WDU), had campaigned on Equi’s
behalf, and when she arrived in Portland, “physically ill and emotionally
exhausted”, Equi took care of her. Was there a lesbian relationship involved
in their friendship? Trasciatti seems to think so.
Flynn had been on the fringes of the communist movement for some years, but
it was only in 1937 that she decided to join the American Communist Party
(CPUSA). Her friends – Mary Heaton Vorse, Arturo Giovannitti, Carlo Tresca,
Joseph Ettor, – tried to
persuade her against joining, but by 1937 the party seemed to be a force to
be reckoned with. And the Popular Front, designed to unite communists,
socialists, liberals in a united front, though one dominated by the
Communist Party, against fascism, was at its height. But Flynn’s decision
was to lead to difficulties, in particular her membership of the ACLU. With
news of the Moscow Trials, in which “members of the Bolshevik Old Guard”
were accused of, among other things, “conspiring to kill Joseph Stalin”,
reaching the West, it may have seemed an odd time for Flynn, with her
reputation for campaigning in favour of free speech and freedom of assembly,
to be joining a party which had quickly developed a totalitarian nature.
Trasciatti observes that “The party defended the trials as legitimate. Those
who doubted kept their reservations to themselves and stood loyal to the
Soviet Union, the most antifascist country in the world. Flynn was among
those who saw what they wanted to see; she spoke in defence of the party
line on the Moscow trials”.
Within the ACLU Flynn argued that the organisation’s original commitment to
free speech saw it as “a necessary tool for working-class organising and
activism in the struggle for economic justice in a hostile environment”. But
others were concerned to develop a “new direction towards free speech as a
value neutral right that could be invoked by capital as well as labour”.
They, under the leadership of the anti-communist Roger Baldwin, finally came
out on top, and Flynn was expelled from the ACLU. I’m giving an edited
version of the arguments for and against Flynn’s expulsion, and Trasciatti
provides a much-more detailed account and sets it in the political framework
of the late-1930s.
There had been yet another switch in Communist Party policies in 1939 when,
to the consternation of many members, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed and it
became necessary for the anti-fascism of the Popular Front to be played down
and reasons for the Pact to be thought up. Flynn “explained it as a
necessary tactic to protect Russia, the only home to socialism in the world,
a justification that wore thin after the partition of Poland by Germany and
the Soviet Union followed by the Soviet invasion of Finland”.
Flynn worked hard for the Party, making speeches, writing a regular column
for the Daily Worker and, with the rest of her colleagues, adjusting
her thinking to fit the new circumstances when Germany invaded Russia in
June 1941. She talked to miners in an attempt to get them to call off a
threatened strike, and called on Irish-Americans to forget the old enmities
and stand with the English against fascism. She travelled around the
country, speaking to ordinary people and taking note of what they said. Some
of the leaders of the American Communist Party considered her an
intellectual lightweight, but “For Flynn ‘the working class’ was not an
abstract concept from Marxist theory but a community of human beings, each
possessed of dignity and individuality and deserving of respect”.
In
late-1944 Earl Browder, head of the CPUSA, decided to dissolve the party and
reconstitute it as the Communist Political Association(CPA), with a policy
of co-operation with “enlightened capitalist, liberals, and mainstream
labour organisations……it would work within the two-party system (rather than
run its own candidates) to support New Deal policies and ensure peace and
prosperity”. Flynn initially supported Browder in his aims, but it wasn’t
long before Jacques Duclos wrote an article for the French communist
theoretical journal, Cahiers du Communisme “in which he denounced the
liquidation of the CPUSA”. It was quickly understood that Duclos was
speaking for Moscow, and plans were made to overthrow Browder and revert to
the CPUSA title. They succeeded and Browder was deposed and expelled from
the party.
Despite her earlier support for him Flynn joined in the vote to “revoke
Browder’s executive power and transfer it to a group headed by William Z.
Foster”, a man usually referred to as a Stalinist. She attacked Browder in a
speech which was later reprinted in the magazine, Political Affairs,
and which was, in effect, an apology for her misguided behaviour in not
understanding “how to work as a Communist and how to work under this
conception of leadership”, meaning the kind of authoritarian rule
exemplified by Foster. It was a sad example of someone eating humble pie in
order to stay in the Party, and was a far cry from her days with the
Wobblies and their irreverent attitude towards leaders and authority.
The
post-war period saw the beginning of the decline of the CPUSA. The
anti-communist mood gathered momentum as investigations were started into
communism in Hollywood, purges took place in the civil service and the
unions, and evidence of communist infiltration of atomic research facilities
came to light. World events – Stalinist take-overs in Eastern Europe, the
Berlin Air Lift, Korea, Russian development of the atom bomb and, a little
later, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations of
Stalin’s crimes – also had an impact on the party. Membership fell away.
Rank and file members kept their heads down and hoped to hold onto their
jobs. The leadership faced investigation, prosecution and possible
imprisonment.
Twelve members of the CPUSA national committee went on trial in January,
1949, charged under the Smith Act with conspiring to overthrow the
government by force or violence. Curiously, Flynn had not been arrested with
the others, though she had been elected to the national committee. Her turn
came in 1951 when she was taken into custody by FBI agents, along with
fifteen others, including Betty Gannett and Claudia Jones, the latter a
black party member who was later deported to England. Flynn’s trial dragged
on until 1953 when she was sentenced to three years in prison and fined six
thousand dollars. She appealed but lost, and in January 1955 she arrived at
Alderson Federal Industrial Institute for Women in West Virginia in the
company of Jones and Gannett. She was released in May 1957.
Flynn remained a member of the CPUSA. But there was little left for her to
do beyond defending fellow-members who were still being harassed and
attempting, without much success, to recruit new members. She did try
running for election to the New York City Council (24th Manhattan
District) as a representative for the People’s Rights Party, but got only
710 votes. And she travelled to Romania, Czechoslovakia, the German
Democratic Republic, Hungary and Russia, all countries where free speech was
in short supply. Did Flynn notice this or did she only see and hear what she
wanted to see and hear? In 1961, when she became the first female national
chairman of the CPUSA, her passport was withdrawn and she had to engage in a
long legal struggle to have it restored.
Flynn’s leadership of the party might be seen as purely symbolic, and
Trasciatti says that “It is true that her male comrades were dismissive of
her because of her gender and apparent lack of intellectual sophistication”.
But “all of the party’s leaders now occupied largely symbolic roles…..The
party no longer played a part in the labour movement and members were
increasingly relegated to behind the scenes in the civil rights movement.
Moreover, there was almost no one left to lead….By the end of the 1950s the
party had shrunk to about three thousand members, a twentieth of what it had
been ten years earlier”.
Flynn did eventually win her passport battle, and in 1964 she travelled to
Russia. It was while she was in Moscow that she was taken to the Central
Clinic of the Soviet Health Ministry where she was diagnosed with
inflammation of the lining of the stomach and intestines, aggravated by a
blood clot in the lung. She died on the 5th September 1964 and
was honoured with a state funeral in Red Square.
In
her Epilogue Trasciatti points out that “the reconstruction of Flynn as a
feminist rather than a class warrior” and the idea that “she was primarily a
“women’s rights activist” are both misleading descriptions. It’s true that
she did advocate “many ideas that we think of as feminist”. But Trasciatti
says “Flynn would recoil at the subordination of ‘communist’ to ‘feminist’.
From the moment she joined the CPUSA until the day she died, Flynn
saw herself as a Communist – no qualifier”.
Mary Anne Trasciatti has written a splendid biography of Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn, one which is admiring of her activities and achievements but at the
same time is alert to her limitations and occasional failings. It can be
questioned how she squared her devotion to free speech and civil liberties
with her allegiance to a political party which, in the admittedly unlikely
event of it ever coming to power, would almost certainly have placed
restrictions on both. But that’s something to be debated at a distance from
the social, economic and political pressures that Flynn had to cope with. In
the meantime I’m inclined to say, “Give flowers to the rebel failed”.
The
book does not have a bibliography, but there are extensive notes and
numerous publications are mentioned in them. I think I ought to point out
that, when writing this review, I inevitably had to leave out whole areas of
Flynn’s activities which Trasciatti explores in detail. I found her
explanations of the legal aspects of free speech and freedom of assembly
useful, and in particular valued her outlines of the various Acts – the
Smith Act, the McCarran Act and others - used to weaken the CPUSA in the
late-1940s and early-1950s.
.