Showing posts sorted by relevance for query ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, May 15, 2019


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

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➡️ When stopped by police
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➡️ Voting
➡️ If you're facing harassment at work
➡️ When navigating public spaces with a disability


ACLU.ORG
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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the death of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn that it was wrong in expelling her from its board of directors in 1940 and has repealed the expulsion.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.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Cancelling Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

BY MARY ANNE TRASCIATTI
MAY 24, 2023
LAWCHA | 

If you blinked, you might have missed the historical marker dedicated to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at the site of her childhood home in Concord, New Hampshire, on May 1, 2023. That’s because Republican lawmakers had it removed just two weeks after it was unveiled, arguing that Flynn did not deserve such recognition because she was “un-American.”

They based their charge on her membership in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Flynn joined the Party during the Popular Front period and remained a member until her death in 1964.

The marker does not shy away from this history. It explicitly states that Flynn was a Party member and that she was sent to prison under “the notorious Smith Act,” a reference to the 1940 law that made it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of the federal government. Although it was supposed to protect the nation from Nazis as well as Communists, the law –like most anti-subversive legislation — was used almost exclusively as a weapon to bludgeon the Left.

Early in the Cold War, in 1948, at the urging of J. Edgar Hoover, federal agents arrested CPUSA leaders around the country and brought them to trial, presenting dubious evidence, much of it provided by paid informers, to secure convictions. In 1951, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions in Dennis v. United States. Almost immediately after that decision was announced, Flynn and several other Communists were arrested and indicted under the Smith Act. In 1953, all of them were found guilty.

After the appeals were exhausted, Flynn served twenty-eight months in prison. She was nearly sixty-seven years old when she was released in May 1957. Two months later, the Supreme Court decided in Yates v. United States that the First Amendment protects radical speech, which effectively ended Smith Act prosecutions. Now, nearly seventy years after her Smith Act conviction, when the Cold War is supposedly over, Flynn is once again being penalized for her political ideas.

Gurley Flynn, who started as a soapbox speaker in high school, inspired the Song by Joe Hill. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

If Flynn were around today, she would undoubtedly unleash her quick wit and sharp tongue to roast her critics. And she would be justified. To label her un-American is preposterous. Most of her life was spent fighting with and for working people in the U.S. During her years with the Industrial Workers of the World, she led organizing drives, strikes, and free speech fights. She had toyed with the idea of becoming a Constitutional lawyer, but instead, she studied the Constitution on her own, becoming an expert of sorts on civil liberties. In 1918, she founded the Workers Defense Union to aid labor activists whose First Amendment rights were endangered by the wartime Espionage Act and to advocate for recognition of political prisoners by the federal government.

Flynn used this experience as a founding member of the ACLU and she acted as a bridge between the liberals in that organization and the radical labor activists they had pledged to defend, including Sacco and Vanzetti. Long before most Americans understood the danger posed by Mussolini, she recognized his fascist regime as a threat to democracy around the world and spoke against it. She also opposed the Ku Klux Klan, which she saw as a uniquely American fascist organization.

Flynn’s commitment to the struggle for Black liberation was unsurpassed among white activists of her era. She campaigned alongside Black comrades against lynching, suppression of voting rights, housing discrimination, job discrimination, education discrimination, and police brutality. In the final years of her life, when she was appealing the denial of her passport under Section 6 of the McCarran Act, she wrote numerous articles in which she argued that freedom of movement was necessary for the exercise of one’s First Amendment rights. All Americans should be this un-American.
The marker to Flynn in Concord, N.H. was one of 278 across the state. It lasted less than two weeks. Credit: Joseph Alsip.

While I bristle at the claim that Flynn (or, as New Hampshire Executive Councilmember Joseph Kenney called her, “someone like that”) does not deserve to be commemorated in public space, I also regret the way that New Hampshire activists chose to remember her. The plaque in Concord identified Flynn as a “nationally renowned labor leader” whose “fiery speeches” earned her the nickname “the Rebel Girl.” Yet it also claimed that Flynn worked through the ACLU to advocate for women’s rights, particularly suffrage and birth control. That claim is simply not accurate. Flynn was not a proponent of voting until she joined the CUPSA and cast a ballot for Roosevelt in 1937. Although she fought for the right of Margaret Sanger to speak about birth control, the issue was not a priority for her. The idea that Flynn was primarily a women’s rights activist has also seeped into media coverage of the controversy over the plaque. The Washington Post, for example, bears a headline that refers to Flynn as “feminist, with Communist past.” She would be surprised to see herself described this way, even if she espoused many ideas that we think of as feminist.

Moreover, 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. The movement to which she dedicated her life was, in her own words, “the working-class movement” and the organization that she believed best advanced the interests of the working class was the Communist Party of the United States. In fact, when she was faced with a choice between the ACLU and the CPUSA, she chose the latter. Her refusal to let the ACLU dictate her politics resulted in her expulsion from the organization in 1940.

We can debate her decision to join the Party or to stay with the Party as long as she did. Nevertheless, if we are going to commemorate Elizabeth Gurley Flynn or any other controversial figures whom we believe have made important and valuable contributions to U.S. society, we should commemorate them as they really were, not as we want to see them. In the case of Flynn, the epitaph from her tombstone in Forest Home Cemetery, where her ashes lie near the graves of the Haymarket Martyrs, may offer the best guidance:

“The Rebel Girl”
Fighter for Working Class Emancipation


Credit:
Credit: Einar E Kvaran aka carptrash courtesy https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Elizabeth_Gurley_Flynn#Media/File:Elizabeth_Gurley_Flynn_gravestone,_Chicago,_IL,_USA.jpeg



Mary Anne Trasciatti



History.acadiau.ca

https://history.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/history/Documents/Carlie%20Visser.pdf

This thesis focuses on the early life and activism of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a ... pdf. 46 Foner, Women and the ... 100 Flynn, Sabotage, 4. 101 Elizabeth Gurley ...


Archive.org

https://archive.org/details/MemoriesOfTheIndustrialWorkersOfTheWorldiww

Jun 28, 2010 ... p5^e. MEMORIES OF THE INDUSTRIAL. WORKERS OF THE WORLD CIWW). by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Occasional Paper No. 2k (1977).


Historyireland.com

https://www.historyireland.com/the-girl-orator-of-the-bowery-elizabeth-gurley-flynn-ireland-and-the-industrial-workers-of-the-world

He organised for the IWW and soon moved to a Bronx flat near Flynn's family. Connolly's ability to inspire multilingual audiences impressed Flynn. Her memoirs ...

Concordmonitor.com

https://www.concordmonitor.com/Concord-Historical-Society-Gurley-Flynn-presentation-51628087

Jul 14, 2023 ... Alpert offered a backstory for a woman who had begun to fade from memory. Inspired by the dangerous and unsafe conditions she saw in the mill ...

Dp.la

https://dp.la/exhibitions/breadandroses/strikers/elizabeth-gurley-flynn

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a labor leader, activist, and feminist who played a leading role in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She is just one of ...

Historyisaweapon.com

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/gurleyflynnpaterson.html

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 ...