Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution, by Mary Anne Trasciatti, Rutgers University Press, 2025.
Mary Anne Trasciatti will speak about her new book on Thursday, July 24, at 6:30 pm at Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main Street, Concord NH.
Above, Arnie Alpert and Mary Lee are pictured with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s historical marker in Concord before it was taken down.
By Arnie Alpert, Active with the Activists
A frequent contributor to InDepthNH, Arnie Alpert was a prime sponsor of the effort to get a historical marker for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn placed near her Concord birthplace. Read more here.
To qualify for a State of New Hampshire historical highway marker, says the Division of Historical Resources, nomination forms must demonstrate that “The person, place, event, organization, or innovation to be marked had a significant impact and has demonstrated historical significance.” In addition, “The significance of the subject, particularly for continuing events and organizations, must be historically established rather than of contemporary interest alone.”
A new biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, born in Concord in 1890, provides evidence that Flynn, a celebrated and maligned labor and political leader for much of the 20th century, fits the bill. A marker for Flynn was installed in 2023 only to be taken down two weeks later.
Mary Anne Trasciatti makes the case for Flynn’s historical significance in the opening paragraph of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution, just published by Rutgers University Press. Flynn, she writes, “is one of the most important figures in the history of the U.S. Left. Her participation in ‘the working-class movement,’ as she called it, spanned nearly six decades, from 1906 to 1964. As a Socialist, then a Wobbly syndicalist, then a Communist, she organized workers into unions, led strikes in a variety of industries, supported anti-imperialist movements around the globe, galvanized resistance to fascism, protested deportation of immigrants, advocated for prison reform, championed labor and political rights for women, fought for civil rights for Black Americans, and defended civil liberties for labor activists of all ideological stripes. It is no exaggeration to claim that Flynn was involved in just about every major campaign of the Left in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.”
Flynn’s story has been well told in earlier books, including two scholarly biographies, a lengthy introduction to a collection of her writings, and Flynn’s own memoirs. Trasciatti places her emphasis on Flynn’s commitment to and unflagging practice of the right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, rights that are now under assault.
After her first few years in New Hampshire, Flynn moved with her family to Ohio and Massachusetts before settling in New York City, where her Irish-American parents joined a growing socialist movement. Flynn’s first public speech, at age fifteen, on “What Socialism Will Do for Women,” was soon followed by her first arrest. With her father beside her, Flynn was seized while speaking from a soapbox in Manhattan’s theatre district as a red flag waved nearby. Charges of disorderly conduct were later dropped. She would go on to be arrested and jailed repeatedly for actions that should have been protected under the First Amendment.
It was with the Industrial Workers of the World, known as “The Wobblies,” that the young rabble rouser found her first political home. The IWW, made up largely of immigrants, was dedicated to organizing across industrial rather than craft lines and believed in organizing all workers regardless of race, sex, or national origin. While some members were socialists, the union was syndicalist in its orientation, believing that workers needed to claim power through direct action in their workplaces rather than through laws, contracts, or political alliances. Their outreach to potential members included songs, newspapers, and street speaking.
It would be an understatement to say the Wobblies were unpopular with the employing class and its political allies, who in several cities passed ordinances banning IWW soapbox oratory. “The Wobblies fought back by calling free speech fights, essentially coordinated and sustained campaigns of nonviolent resistance to the law,” writes Trasciatti. When street speaking was outlawed in Missoula, Montana, Flynn put out the word for Wobblies to converge there. “IWW members flocked to the city in freight cars and formed a kind of oratorical assembly line. As soon as one speaker was arrested, another took his, or her, place.” With the jails full and more Wobblies on the way, the city surrendered. Trasciatti writes that Flynn, pregnant and not quite 20 years old, was the recognized leader.
A similar campaign soon followed in Spokane, Washington with similar results. “The format and tactics that Flynn devised in Missoula and brought to Spokane became the model for the campaigns that followed in Fresno, San Diego, Seattle, and elsewhere in the West. Moreover, she helped launch a conversation about working people’s First Amendment right to use public places for purposes of organizing and demonstrating.”
While we may think of the First Amendment as central to protection of individuals’ rights to free expression, Trasciatti says Flynn’s approach focused on collective action, “the only way to remedy the imbalance of power between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’”
“In other words,” writes Trasciatti, “without guarantees of free speech, press, assembly, and a fair trial, workers could not possibly hold union drives, conduct strikes, organize against exploitation, resist oppression, advocate for worker-friendly politics, or do any of the things required to secure basic needs and a share of the good life.”
In addition to her role as an organizer, Flynn became the nation’s leading practitioner of “labor defense,” mustering social, political, and legal support for labor activists threatened or arrested for their beliefs and actions. Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Joe Hill may be the most famous cases, but as Trasciatti shows, Flynn was at the center of similar solidarity efforts at the time of World War I and also during the first “Red Scare,” which followed on its heels.
When the U.S. joined the war in Europe, the federal government and many states enacted laws aimed at criminalizing dissent in order to stifle anti-war activism. Although it took care to avoid an explicit anti-war stance, the IWW was all but destroyed. Flynn, who had split from the radical union shortly before its leaders were indicted, managed to stay out of prison. She would be less successful in the second Red Scare.
During this period, New York, where Flynn lived, was a hotbed of civil liberties activism, which Trasciatti traces from its origin in support for draft resisters and conscientious objectors and which involved feminists, pacifists, socialists, and labor activists. Out of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, Flynn formed the Workers’ Defense Union (WDU) “to advocate specifically for the hundreds of labor activists who had been prosecuted under wartime laws for activities that were deemed as interfering with the war effort.”
“Flynn steered the WDU into an activist program that included mass meetings and demonstrations, visits to unions, and leafleting as well as fundraising for legal defense and bail,” Trasciatti writes. “The WDU’s activist agenda also included organizing letter writers to correspond with jailed labor and antiwar activists; sending inmates money, books, games, musical instruments, clothing, and other items; obtaining special diets; and protesting solitary confinement and unsuitable work assignments.”
The Russian Revolution unleashed another round of repression, including in New Hampshire, against those deemed suspect by government authorities. On Friday evening, January 2, 1920, federal agents and local police swept through eight New Hampshire cities and towns, searching for people they claimed were dangerous radicals. When the raids were done, nearly 300 New Hampshire residents, mostly immigrants from eastern Europe, were in custody, seized from private homes and meeting halls in Nashua, Manchester, Derry, Portsmouth, Claremont, Newmarket, Berlin, and Lincoln. It was the local manifestation of what became known as the “Palmer Raids,” named for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who was assisted by a young J. Edgar Hoover. Thousands of suspects in dozens of cities were arrested nationwide. Non-citizens deemed to be radicals were subject to deportation.
“Flynn understood deportation as an instrument of repression designed to divide American- born and immigrant workers and keep the latter fearful,” writes Trasciatti. Flynn’s WDU and the related Deportees Defense and Relief Committee sprang into action, raising funds for lawyers and material aid. “Flynn would continue to oppose deportation as a tool of political repression for the rest of her political career.”
She was also among the signers of the first charter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which grew out of the National Civil Liberties Bureau in 1920.
Rather than emphasize Flynn’s personal travails – the break-up of her youthful marriage, her love affair with Carlo Tresca, the death of her son, and what we might now call a period of intense burnout – Trasciatti stays focused on Flynn’s public life, which from 1937 until her death in 1964 was centered in the Communist Party.
Flynn joined the Party in 1937 at a time when the group was emphasizing opposition to European fascism and support for President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, “a moment when Communists enjoyed a measure of acceptance—even popularity.”
“An opponent of violence as a political tactic, Flynn would have felt comfortable with the party’s retreat from armed revolution as a stated goal,” says Trasciatti. But that would not save her from persecution when the second Red Scare arose at the conclusion of World War II.
As a frequent contributor to Communist Party publications and a popular speaker, Flynn continued to back the cause of labor with particular focus on issues affecting African American and female workers. With regard to international affairs, American Communists followed Moscow’s lead and Flynn went right along, believing that the Soviet Union provided a valuable example of socialism. In response to reports of Stalinist repression, “Flynn was among those who saw what they wanted to see.” When Stalin made a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939, Flynn shifted from attacking fascism to attacking capitalist imperialism. When the Germany-USSR pact dissolved, Flynn became a fervent supporter of the anti-fascist Allied cause, even discouraging wartime strikes in strategic industries.
Her own support for the war effort and reverence for the Constitution, dating back to her schooldays, would not save her from a new tide of anti-radicalism at mid-century. First, her own allies at the ACLU turned on her, voting to expel her from the organization’s board in 1940 because of her Communist Party membership. In 1948, the federal government began prosecuting Communist Party leaders under the Alien Registration Act, commonly known as the Smith Act. The 1940 law made it a crime to produce or circulate literature intended to impair the loyalty or morale of members of the military; to “advocate, abet, advise, or teach” the overthrow of the government by force; or to be a member of any group which advocated overthrowing the government.
Flynn escaped the first round of prosecutions of Communist leaders and turned her attention to raising support for their defense, a campaign for which she was uniquely skilled. “We are Americans. We have inalienable rights. Let us never forget this,” Flynn insisted. Nevertheless, the CP leaders were convicted, based not on their actions, but instead on interpretations of Marxist-Leninist tracts which they had circulated. With the Cold War heating up, defense of the civil liberties of communists had virtually no traction.
Flynn’s turn would come. Like her comrades, she would be indicted, tried, and convicted based on her alleged beliefs despite the absence of evidence that she had ever done anything intended to overthrow the U.S. government. After 26 months at Alderson Prison in West Virginia, a span which coincided with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Nikita Khruschev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes, Flynn returned to public life as a champion for the rights of communists to speak and travel freely. Her final battle was for her own right to travel internationally, which had been taken away by the 1950 McCarran Act.
Under the law, known also as the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, Communist organizations were required to register with the federal government, communist immigrants were barred from naturalization, and under the Act’s Section 6, members of the Communist Party had their passports revoked. Flynn’s lawsuit was ultimately successful in overturning Section 6, which she claimed infringed on her First Amendment rights. Her right to travel restored, Flynn traveled to Moscow, where she fell ill and died.
“Her unapologetic anticapitalist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist politics combined with her refusal to tamp down her activities and submit to the normal constraints of marriage and motherhood made Flynn an aberration to some and a hero to others,” says Trasciatti. The story of New Hampshire’s historical marker certainly bears that out.
Trasciatti’s biography provides a detailed and accessible account of a remarkable woman whose story began in Concord, New Hampshire. Trasciatti paints a detailed picture of the IWW’s historic battles expanding the concept of free speech, Flynn’s leadership in civil rights battles during the first Red Scare, her troubled relationship with the ACLU, and the post-WW II battles for the rights outlined in the Constitution to be applied to communists. At a time when the right to speak freely is again under attack, Flynn’s example and Trasciatti’s scholarship are worthy of attention.
That brings us back to the historical roadside marker for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, which was approved by the state’s professional historians but taken away at the order of Governor Sununu two weeks after it was installed near her birthplace in Concord. Making note of the marker in her book’s final pages, Trasciatti writes, “the specter of anti-Communism continues to haunt efforts to commemorate her and the important contributions she has made to labor and civil liberties history.”
Trasciatti praises the marker’s intent, but takes issue with its wording, which she claims was factually incorrect in calling Flynn a “feminist” and describing her as an advocate for women’s rights, including supporting the right to vote and to access birth control. In regard to suffrage, I have to acknowledge that Trasciatti is correct. Flynn had close social ties with New York-based suffragists, but her own commitment during the time the 19th Amendment was adopted was to IWW syndicalism, which prioritized direct action and scorned political parties, legislation, and voting. While support for birth control was common in leftist circles of her time, it was not among the issues Flynn prioritized in her writings, speeches, and campaigns.
Trasciatti cites a Washington Post article which called Flynn a “feminist, with Communist past” as an example of media coverage of the marker controversy which distorted the historical record. “Flynn would recoil at the subordination of ‘communist’ to ‘feminist,’” Trasciatti writes. “From the moment she joined the CPUSA until the say she died, Flynn saw herself as a Communist—no qualifier.”
And yet, I am not willing to abandon the “feminist” label entirely with in connection with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. As my associate in the marker project, Mary Lee Sargent, points out, the term wasn’t even in common use in the early twentieth century. Trasciatti herself makes repeated reference to Flynn’s advocacy for the needs of working women, her participation in international women’s organizations, and the times in which she was the only woman leader in male-dominated movements. “Flynn refused to let traditional gender roles define her or limit her sphere of activities,” says Trasciatti. Whatever she called herself, Flynn was a role model for twentieth century women who wanted to take their own places in movements for justice, equality, and the right to speak their minds.
“She lived life on her own terms,” Trasciatti says in the book’s final paragraph, “at least as much as it was possible for a woman of her era to do so, and having done so, she complicates our idea of what makes a ‘good’ feminist.” Mary Lee and I have no trouble agreeing.
According to the Division of Historical Resources, the Flynn marker has been “retired” and is in the custody of the Department of Transportation. “It is a shame that the marker has not been replaced,” Trasciatti writes. “Flynn deserves a greater presence in US. Historical memory.” Mary Lee and I agree with that, too.