Wednesday, May 15, 2019


Welcome to History Is A Weapon!


       If this is your first time at the site, it can look a little daunting. To help you navigate, we'll spell out how everything is organized so you can find what you need.
       This is an online Left reader focusing largely on American resistance history. The readings are organized in sections ("Chapters"). If you are struggling with a particular question, you can go that chapter. For example, if you want to know "Why are there so many people in prison?" you can go to "Chapter 3: The Long Chain". We'll include a good starter essay here for each.
       If you aren't dealing with a particular question, feel free to work your way through all the starter essays and head back to the issues that stirred you the most. Here we go:
  1. What is this America? Three books by authors trying to redefine what America is, the horror and the potential. We're a little biased, but Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a fine beginning.
  2. Learning To Surrender The role of education: How does a system teach us about itself? Malcolm X describes his education and its effects on him in this excerpt from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X"
  3. The Long Chain These essays tackle the relationships between the economy, police, prison, and slavery. A good starting point is Christian Parenti's talk based on his book "Lockdown America"
  4. Voices From The Empire People all over the world have identified what the American system means for them and what they have to do. The next section identifies how this is a world system and how the world has responded. Walter Rodney addresses the relationship between a Black American Prisoner and the international struggle in his short essay George Jackson: Black Revolutionary.
  5. Looking Inward There comes a moment when those inside the core examine the relationship to the colonized. Here, we examine those questions, starting with Bartoleme de Las Casas in his Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies.
  6. Raising Our Voices Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and abolitionist, was asked to give a Fourth of July speech while slavery still existed. His fiery talk is what this section is about: People within America recognizing that the American promises ring hollow.
  7. Against The War Machine Americans speaking and acting out against war is the next subject. Don Mitchell got a chance to speak to the bureaucrats of the military and talked about Americans as people of the world living under the same empire.
  8. Repression James Madison outlined what was needed to keep Americans from enjoying the fruits of democracy too much. Written over two hundred years ago, his essay, Federalist 10, identifies ways to control people that were impossible then.
  9. From Resistance to Revolution If you've read through all of this, you'll probably be itching about what is to be done. There are numerous examples and one excellent one is Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women's Movement. It is long, but readable and in-depth.
  10. Appendix A: Maps Everybody loves maps!
  11. Appendix B: The Future Is All We Have Because knowing is only half the battle.

       If you haven't been in school for awhile (or are in a terrible school), some of the words might trip you up. Dictionary.com and Wikipedia.org are two good resources to help you. And because we're your friends, you can email us if you have any questions.

100 YEARS AGO THE ACLU WAS CO FOUNDED BY ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN 

(OF THE IWW AND LATER THE COMMUNIST PARTY USA) 

MEMORIES OF THE IWW BY ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN 


Web Edition, editor Eugene W. Plawiuk, web design by Donalda Cassel

PDF http://www.laborhistorylinks.org/PDF%20Files/Memories%20of%20the%20Rebel%20Girl.pdf

ALSO ON THE WEB AT WOMEN'S SPEECHES FROM AROUND THE WORLD

THIS IS THE ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WE BASED OUR WEB EDITION ON
I FOUND IT IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA LIBRARY
Transcript of a speech Elizabeth Flynn made to students at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb on Nov. 8, 1962. https://libcom.org/history/memories-industrial-workers-world-elizabeth-gurley-flynn
AttachmentSize
Memories of the Industrial Workers of the World.pdf49.99 MB

Know your rights:
➡️ When stopped by police
➡️ Protesting
➡️ As a student
➡️ To religious freedom
➡️ While incarcerated
➡️ Voting
➡️ If you're facing harassment at work
➡️ When navigating public spaces with a disability


ACLU.ORG
Everyone has basic rights under the U.S. Constitution and civil rights laws. Learn more here about what your rights are, how to exercise them, and what to do when your rights are violated.

Jun 22, 1976 - The American Civil Liberties Union has decided 12 years, after the death of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn that it was wrong in expelling her from its board of directors in 1940 and has repealed the expulsion. ... In 1920, at a time when she was a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World ...

Since Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was recently elected chairman of the ... She was a charter member of the American Civil Liberties Union, a member of its Board, ...


Apr 13, 2019 - Uploaded by protestfolk
When They Jailed Elizabeth Gurley Flynn--Bob A. Feldman ... Gurley Flynn and the response of middle-class ...

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Archive. March 27, 2017. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Archive. A founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, she was involved in ...
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was an agitator and organizer for the Industrial Workers of ... War I Red Scare, and helped establish the American Civil Liberties Union



Flynn was a vehement speaker about women’s rights, including birth control. She was also against World War I, and like most naysayers was charged with espionage. Flynn soon became absorbed with defending immigrants who were threatened with deportation because they opposed the war.
A sense of nationalism was extremely important to the US government during war time, and Flynn had her work cut out for her. Flynn’s first hand involvement caused her to help found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and she was elected to the national board.
She had to take a break from activism, not from a hostile government or because she rethought her positions, but because of her health.  She also joined the American Communist Party in 1936, and did in fact inform the ACLU before she was elected—there wasn’t a cover up or anything like that—but because of the rise of Hitler, several known communists supporters  were expelled from various organizations, and the ACLU were no different
In 1941 she was elected to the Communist Party’s Central Committee, and then in 1942 she ran for Congress, campaigning on women’s issues instead of the usual men’s issues. She wasn’t successful, but she actually ended up working for FDR for a little bit, and then after the war she was thrown in prison for two years along with a few others for planning to overthrow the government. Once she got out, she was elected to National Chairman of the Communist Party.

Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: Vincent St. John Announces Western Tour of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn


March 19, 2010 2:36 PM CDT BY TONY PECINOVSKY


In honor of Women’s History Month, the seventh article in our series on the Communist Party’s 90th Anniversary will survey a few documents written by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, one of the most prominent women Communists in U.S. history.

Flynn was a labor leader, activists and feminist. At 16, she gave her first speech, “What Socialism Will Do for Women.” For her political activities, Flynn was expelled from high school.

By 1907, Flynn had become a full-time organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, where she helped organize union campaigns among garment workers, silk weavers, restaurant workers and textile workers. In 1920, Flynn helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU, where she helped organize the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, among other union and labor activists.

Flynn was also concerned with women’s rights. She supported access to birth control and women’s suffrage, and criticized some unions for being male-dominated. In 1936, Flynn joined the Communist Party and started to write for the Daily Worker. By 1938, she was elected to the CP’s National Committee. (It was due to her Party membership the ACLU kicked her off of their board of directors.)

T  The Truth about the Paterson Strike

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1914)

On January 31, 1914, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn analyzed the Paterson strike in a speech before the New York Civic Club Forum. The manuscript of her talk is in the Labadie Collection. Born in 1890 in New Hampshire, Gurley Flynn joined the I.W.W. in 1906 at the age of sixteen and for the next ten years was a leading organizer, soapboxer, and lecturer for the organization. She was arrested in the Missoula and Spokane free speech fights in 1908 and 1909, was a strike leader in the Lawrence and Paterson textile strikes and the 1912 strike of New York City hotel workers, and was active in the defense of Joe Hill, Ettor, and Giovannitti, and the I.W.W. prisoners arrested under the wartime Espionage Law. After leaving the I.W.W. about 1916, she helped launch the Workers' Liberty Defense League, was active in the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, and, from 1927-30, was chaiman of the International Labor Defense. In 1937, she joined the Communist Party and in 1961 became chairman of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. Her autobiography, I Speak My Own Piece (New York, 1955), contains a great deal of interesting material on the early organizing and free speech activities of the I.W.W.
MORE THAN LABOR’S ABLE ASSISTANT: 
by CARLIE D. VISSER



 Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History Acadia University April, 2016 © Copyright by Carlie D. Visser, 2016



Abstract 

This thesis focuses on the early life and activism of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a leading female orator and activist for the syndicalism movement of the early 20th century. Emerging as a popular oratorical figure in New York in 1905, Flynn became what theorist Antonio Gramsci would describe as an organic intellectual, emerging from within the working class itself to speak to its grievances and articulate a vision of social justice. This thesis seeks to foreground the hybridity of Flynn’s involvement in Progressive Era social activism by highlighting her connection to both the world of radical labor unionism and the sphere of socialist and progressive American thought. As a writer, orator, and thinker, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn worked to bridge the internal divisions of the working-class and build unions predicated on class-based solidarity that would lead to fundamental social and economic change. In addition, Flynn was a labor feminist who believed that women’s economic independence could not be separated from the movement for her political and social equality. As a representative figure and a singularly significant working-class intellectual, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn warrants the attention of those who seek to better understand how women, labor, and dissident thought intersected in the democratic challenge to industrial capitalism

Heroine of the Working Class 


There are very few Americans who remember Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Those who do will certainly note that she was a faithful Communist Party member from the 1930s until her death in the Soviet Union in 1964.
Even so, as Lara Vapnek makes quite clear in her spirited, sympathetic and enlightening biography, long before she ever signed a party membership card, Flynn was not just another communist apparatchik or commonplace left-winger. She was, instead, a genuine heroine of working men and women in their early twentieth century struggle against tone-deaf corporate power and hostile courts and governments.
Indeed, in this latest in the valuable “Lives of American Women” series, Vapnek, a St. John’s University historian, sees a complex Elizabeth Gurley Flynn who has been overlooked and forgotten, most likely because of her politics. Helen Camp’s 1995 biography “Iron in Her Soul” is a more thorough treatment of Flynn’s life but Vapnek’s slender volume doesn’t miss a beat as she skillfully revives the memory of this Irish-American radical.

Born in 1890 of impoverished immigrant Irish socialist parents in New Hampshire and reared in The Bronx, she inherited her family’s political views. For them, the answer to why so many lived lives of powerlessness and poverty had been explained by Karl Marx, whose “scientific” approach pointed to the class struggle as a way out. For her parents and herself, the culprit was unbridled, unregulated, capitalism and its political and governmental lackeys.


THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 100 YEARS AGO TODAY THE WINNIPEG GENERAL STRIKE BEGAN
MAY 15, 1919 remains the most important date in the history of Canadian workers to date. On that day, 35,000 Winnipeg workers, only one third of them unionized, went on strike in solidarity with the city's metal and construction trades workers who had been striking since May 1 for the right to bargain collectively with employers in their trade. The employers, themselves negotiating as a bloc, refused, insisting that they would only negotiate with individual trades. They wanted to keep their workers divided so as to keep them weak relative to the united employer class.
The day began with the non-unionized telephone operators, the "hello girls," declaring their support for the strike and refusing to work despite employer threats to fire anyone who joined the strike. Later, the "salesgirls" at Eaton's and other stores, all non-unionized, as well as a variety of other non-unionized workers in the public and private sectors joined the unions in withholding their labour. In a city of about 180,000, a majority of families counted someone who was on strike.

A Strike Committee was formed to liaise with Winnipeg city council and the mayor about what essential services would be offered in Winnipeg while the workers continued their strike for just treatment of all workers. At the council's request, the Strike Committee agreed that vehicles used by workers deemed essential would be marked "Authorized by the Strike Committee" so that strikers would not see them as scabs and perhaps harass them. The so-called Citizens' Committee of 1000, which formed to represent the interests of the city's bourgeoisie of owners and professionals, would later distort that label to suggest that the Strike Committee had usurped power to run the city from the city council. The employers were determined to give no concessions to the striking workers and indeed to break the back of unionism in Winnipeg. That would cause the Winnipeg strikers to call for general strikes in other cities in solidarity with the Winnipeg workers. Calgary and Edmonton responded to that call with month-long general strikes, though only unionists joined those two strikes.

The Winnipeg General Strike was the culmination of the frustration that most workers felt in the face of postwar unemployment accompanied by a continuation of the inflation that they experienced in wartime while their pay rates barely rose. They had managed a successful, short general strike in 1918 in the city and won concessions during a time when labour shortages and war needs weakened the position of employers. The Socialist Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Industrial Workers of the World were all strong in Winnipeg and held huge public meetings to extol the idea of the One Big Union, an organization that would unite all workers and turn every strike into a general strike in order to strike fear into the hearts of greedy employers. The sense that World War I was a war of rival imperialists, not a just war, and that only capitalists had gained anything from it, all at the expense of working people, and continuing poverty, insecurity, and poor working conditions combined with the organizing skills of radicals persuaded most working Winnipegers that they had to take a public stand for social justice for workers.

The strike would be broken by brute state force on Bloody Saturday on June 21, 1919. But on May 15, there was a feeling of exhiliration among Winnipeg workers. They were standing shoulder to shoulder in an effort to tell their employers that they wanted either serious reforms to capital-labour relations or an end to capitalism altogether. They did not want to return to work until wage slavery had been replaced by an economy in which workers had dignity, security, and a say in how their workplace was run
ALSO SEE 


CBC INTERACTIVE HAS A COMPREHENSIVE SITE CELEBRATING WINNIPEG GENERAL STRIKE

Winnipeg strikes
Workers' demands for rights and a living wage shook the nation over 42 days in 1919


By Darren Bernhardt
May 15, 2019

The lineups were agonizingly long for the few jobs available in 1919 Winnipeg, a city teeming with a ballooning population and choked by factory smokestacks.

Afraid of losing what jobs they could get, many workers suffered through dirty, dangerous conditions and long days.

Inflation was skyrocketing and so was unemployment as Winnipeg exploded into the third-largest city in Canada, drawing in thousands of immigrants who also made it the most ethnically diverse city in the country.

These were the conditions that set the stage for the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, an upheaval that brought few immediate gains but seeded the change that resulted in modern workers' rights.

"It was the most dramatic single event in Canadian labour history," author Donald D.C. Masters wrote in his book The Winnipeg General Strike.

The cost of living had gone up 75 per cent between 1913 and 1919. The average pay was $900 per year, yet it was estimated that $1,500 was needed to feed a family.

A large number of newcomers, hoping for a better life, instead found themselves salvaging scraps of wood and metal to slap together shacks in growing city slums.

"There were many impoverished people in Winnipeg. I think for many Canadians, it would be shocking to see those conditions," historian and strike expert Nolan Reilly said.



Working and living conditions were appalling for many people during the turn of the 20th century in Winnipeg.(Archives of Manitoba)


But something else also was taking root and beginning to flourish in Winnipeg —the union movement.

From 1900 to 1920, the number of unions in the city tripled and demands for a better life for workers steadily grew, said author Paul Moist, a former national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

"Life was hard for the average working-class family in Winnipeg. The general strike gave voice to the frustration felt by many," he said.

"The solidarity of the city’s workers, and their decision to elect strike leaders to a range of public offices, would forever alter and define the geopolitical map of the city."

In Winnipeg in 1917, more days of work were lost to strikes than in the previous four years combined, Moist said.

And while there were gains for workers, they were modest — a few extra cents in pay.




SEE: 
 Eugene Plawiuk's account of the Edmonton general strike of 1919 which was sparked off in solidarity with the general strike in Winnipeg,.

 Eugene Plawiuk's history of the Calgary general strike of 1919, which started off as a sympathy strike for the Winnipeg general strike and soon ...

Add caption