Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Union Organizer, American Communist Party Official. She was an American woman of the early 20th century, who received notoriety for her radical political viewpoints. Born the oldest of four children of working-class socialists, she began to express her political viewpoints while still in grammar school. At the age of fifteen, she made her first political speech, "What Socialism Will Do for Women," at the Harlem Socialist Club. Later that year, she and her father were both arrested in a labor protest. In 1907 she left high school, or expelled according to some sources, without graduating to work full-time for the Industrial Workers of the World or "Wobbies," a newly formed international labor union. Exercising her freedom of speech, she toured from city to city mainly in the Northwest, protesting injustices done to workers and was arrested ten times but never found guilty. Supporting striking for better working conditions, she helped organized workers in restaurants, garment factories, the railroads and coal miners. Many of the protests became riots with deaths. On January 7, 1908 in Minnesota, she married John Archibald Jones, a miner age 34, and although their marriage ended by 1910 , they divorced in 1920. The couple had two sons: One died shortly after birth and the other at age 29 in 1940 from complications of a surgery for lung cancer. She was arrested once while pregnant. She spoke during the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike in Massachusetts, when the state militia with fixed bayonets was called to fight against unarmed workers and their wives and children. Women with babies in their arms were arrested and a woman and two male workers were killed. In 1920 she was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU, a profit organization formed "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." She promoted women's right to vote and use of birth control. In 1936 she joined the Communist Party in the United States and served as the first national chairwoman in 1961. In 1936 she wrote a column in the Communist newspaper, "The Daily Worker." The ACLU expelled all Communist Party members from its ranks in 1940. During World War II, she promoted day care for the children of the "Rosie the Riveters." In 1942, she was a candidate for Congress at-large in New York and received 50,000 votes. In 1951 she was arrested along with over 200 other Communist Party members in violation of the 1940 Smith Act, which authorized "criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence, and required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the federal government." Of the 200 Communist members, 131 were prosecuted, of whom 98 were convicted. After her ten-month trial and representing herself as a lawyer, she was found guilty and given a three-year sentence in the Federal Prison Camp at Alderson, West Virginia. She served 29 months of her sentence before being released in May of 1957. Later she wrote about the ordeal, "The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner." During this time, radical labor organizers were deported. The speech she made at Smith Act Trials is rank as #87 in American Rhetoric's Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century. In 1915 Joe Hill wrote the song "Rebel Girl" in honor of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. In 1955 she published her autobiography "I Speak My Own Piece: Autobiography of "The Rebel Girl". Author Eugene Lyons wrote about her accomplishments in labor in his 1937 autobiography, "Assignment in Utopia," saying Flynn was "the most brilliant woman I had ever met". In 1987 feminist historian, Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, published Flynn's essay collection in a biography, "Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn." Since 1928, she had episodes with heart illness and depression, withdrawing from public life for long periods. While making one of her many trips to Russia, she became ill and died. She was honored with a state funeral procession in Red Square with thousands attending. Interred at Forest Home Cemetery, her ashes were buried, in accordance with her wishes, near the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument, where other labor activists are resting. In 1976 the ACLU restored Flynn's membership posthumously.