There are some left-wing lives that seem to speak most directly to our
own moment. One such is the story of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an American
champion of revolutionary trade unionism. In her day, Flynn advocated
socialism, syndicalism, and women's liberation. Her politics defy categorisation.
A feminist who worked full-time for an anarchist trade union, which had
initially been set-up by reformist and revolutionary socialists working
in unity, it is hard to place Flynn into any of those boxes which we construct
to make sense of the history of the movement, and which recent events
have tended to break down.
Born in 1890 to
a family of Irish radicals, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's influences included
the Irish socialists James Larkin and James Connolly, both of whom stayed
at her family's flat in the Bronx. As a teenager, Flynn met the fiery
anarchist Emma Goldman, and was encouraged by her to play a role in the
movement. Most of the socialist parties then thought that their task was
to act as propaganda groups, giving public speeches in favour of socialism.
The role of the left was to "make socialists" in this way. Flynn
spent her youth with her parents at meetings, and soon learned from her
surroundings some of the tricks of public speaking. She gave talks at
her school debating club, and offered herself forward at an early age
to speak at local Socialist meetings in New York.
Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn mounted her first soapbox in 1905, aged just fifteen, to give a
talk on "Women and Socialism", and gained a reputation as a
powerful speaker. In August 1906, she was arrested alongside her father
Tom Flynn and members of the local Socialist Unity Club. The press accused
her of being an anarchist, a label which the young activist rejected:
"I am not
an anarchist but a thorough socialist. First, socialism is the study
of human development of the human race -- that is, the facts of class
struggle and economic progress. Secondly, it is the analysis of the
past so as to foretell what the next step will be in human development.
Thirdly, it is collectivism, what we will believe this next step will
be, public utilities owned and organised by the people."
In 1907 Flynn
left school, to became an organiser for the radical American trade union
movement, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or "Wobblies").
Why did Flynn choose to work for the IWW? Given her background, Flynn
might have been expected to join either the American Socialist Party or
the Socialist Labor Party, two groups with which her parents had worked.
Indeed Flynn's later biography made much of the socialist education that
she received as a teenager when she first came into the movement. Among
the books which she read at this time, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn specifically
mentioned the Communist Manifesto, Engels' Socialism: Utopian
and Scientific, On the Family, Private Property and the State,
also Marx's Value Price and Profit, and Wage, Labour and
Capital. Yet she preferred to work with the fighting trade unionists
of the Wobblies.
This is how Flynn
later described her choice:
"All of
us of the younger generation were very impatient with it [the Socialist
Party]. We felt it was rather stodgy. Its leaders were, if you will
pardon me for saying so, professors, lawyers, doctors, ministers, and
middle-aged and older people, and we felt a desire to have something
more militant, more progressive and more youthful and so we flocked
into the new organisation, the IWW."
In her view, the
people who believed simply that workers deserved justice, tended to join
the Socialist Party. The IWW was the movement for people who fought.
Flynn's organisation
was a revolutionary union, formed by an alliance between members of the
Socialist Party, Socialist Labor Party and the Western Federation of Miners
- plus many new activists inspired by the united nature of the organisation.
But such was the level of repression, that the IWW was unable to act as
a trade union. Simply to exist, the Wobblies were forced to wage a series
of free-speech fights. One took place in Spokane in autumn 1909. The Wobblies
protested at the use of employment agency to force down the average rate
of pay. One of the main such sharks was the Peerless Agency, which had
just been convicted of shipping out fourteen- to sixteen-year old girls
for the purpose of prostitution. Flynn was one of hundreds of soap-box
orators arrested as part of this fight. The city spent one thousand dollars
a night on repression. Placed in prison herself, Flynn discovered that
at least one fellow-captor was being pimped by the jail.
By 1912, the free
speech battle had been largely won, and the Wobblies were able to provide
support for mass strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 and Paterson,
New Jersey in 1913. In all these battles, Flynn played a proud role --
speaking up for the dispossessed, organising solidarity work, pushing
the struggles to their maximum height.
John Reed, an
early American Communist, described how the Wobblies organised. "The
workers are discontented; they are either unorganised, or their unions
will not support their demands. A spontaneous strike movement occurs.
The IWW is called in to take charge." Now that the strike was underway,
other workers would be called out in sympathy. The leaders of the strike
would preach the necessity of a revolutionary war against capitalism.
Even at the end of a victorious dispute, no truce would be signed with
the employers. "No contracts or agreements must be signed with the
employers; the working class must be free to strike whenever the opportunity
comes."
The Lawrence Strike
began on 11 January 1912, following a 32 cents a week pay cut. Having
started as a mass walk-out, the strike lacked organisation, and the IWW
was invited in to support the movement. The strikers were an extraordinary
mix -- seven thousand Italians, six thousand Germans, five thousand French-Canadians,
two thousand five hundred Poles, and two thousand from Lithuania. Many
were female mill-hands. Others took part as wives and mothers. These women
evolved their own radical tactics -- organising human chains, creating
noise and commotion, cutting the uniforms of state troopers, and jeering
the police. Eventually the workers won a 7.5 percent pay rise.
The Wobblies were
committed to gender equality. Yet there was little tradition of open struggle
by women workers. The Wobblies found it much easier to recruit male full-time
workers. In order to compensate, the IWW deliberately went out of its
way to encourage Flynn and other prominent female activists. The Wobblies'
minstrel Joe Hill dedicated
one of his songs to Flynn's campaigning work.
That's the Rebel
Girl, That's the Rebel Girl
To the working-class she's a precious pearl
She brings courage, pride and joy
To the fighting Rebel Boy
We've had girls before
But we need some more
In the Industrial Workers of the World
For it's great to fight for freedom with a Rebel Girl.
Flynn developed
a socialist explanation of women's oppression. She blamed the capitalist
family for the diminished lives that people led.
"Multitudes
of wives and mothers are virtually sex slaves through the direct and
debasing dependence upon individual men for their existence …
How can one have depth or mental scope when one's life is spent exclusively
within the four walls of one's individual composite home, and workshop,
performing personal service continually for the same small group?"
Like other Wobblies,
she saw that organising working women was a task that required special
thought.
In 1916 the Wobblies'
paper, Solidarity, ran a special women's issue. Flynn wrote on
"Problems Organizing Women". She acknowledged that women could
sometimes be cautious supporters of trade union rights. Where did this
conservatism come from? Flynn maintained that the fault was not in women,
but in men. Women had been denied rights, forced into domestic service,
and kept from education,
"Religion,
home, and childbearing were their prescribed spheres. Marriage was their
career and to be old a lifelong disgrace. Their right to life depended
on their sex attraction and the hideous inroads on the moral integrity
of women, produced by economic dependence, are deep and subtle."
The burden of
house work still fell overwhelmingly on women. It was for these reasons
that militancy was considered a virtue in men, but not as often in women.
What processes
could open up a brighter future? In this article, Flynn mentioned three.
One hope was that technology could liberate women from the chores of sweated
labour in the home, "The home of the future will eliminate the old
jobs that reduce it to a cluttered workshop today and electricity free
the woman's hand from methods entirely antiquated in an era of machinery."
A second task was to advise people on how they could stop unwanted pregnancies,
"Certainly there would be more rebellion in our people if this crushing
burden were lifted from women." The third hope was that men would
understand the need for unity -- and allow women the space to play a full
role in the organisation.
As well as opposing
sexism in all its forms. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also fought consistently
against the attempts of the American state to criminalise protest. In
1914, she helped to found the Workers' Defence Union (WDU) to defend Wobblies,
anarchists and socialists against state repression. A decade later, one
of the WDU's proudest moments was to publicise the case of Sacco and Vanzetti,
two anarchists who were framed and murdered by the American government.
As America prepared
to enter the first world war, the level of repression rose. A number of
IWW activists were killed, often by private thugs hired by the employers.
Joe Hill was accused of killing a Salt Lake City grocer in the course
of a robbery. On the flimsiest of evidence, he was convicted and executed.
There were many such defeats. In this context, Flynn grew increasingly
frustrated with the leadership of her movement. She had now spent tent
years in the IWW, long enough to meet most of the prominent activists.
Run down, frustrated, she could see all the faults of her friends' too
close. Flynn finally decided to leave the Wobblies in autumn 1917 following
disagreements among the leadership of the IWW, as to how they should resist
state persecution.
For the rest of
her life, Flynn remained in the movement. Yet the story of her later years
lacks the elan of the first decade of her activity. In 1926, Flynn helped
to lead Passaic New Jersey textile strike. Afterwards, she joined the
American Communist Party. For many years Flynn was a leading figure in
the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the US Communist Party.
She was expelled from ACLU during an early red-hunt in 1940. Later Flynn
was jailed under McCarthyism. Arrested a dozen times, Flynn remained a
prominent Communist until her death in 1964. We know that she had many
private complaints about Stalinism, but these were shielded from public
view.
Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn's socialism was all about action - the self-activity of the working-class.
She was part of a generation of women radicals who allied themselves with
the left and socialism, at the time that socialism spoke most clearly
to them. Flynn's accounts of her own life tended to end at around the
time that she left the IWW. It was in these early years that she had the
most opportunities to lead others in struggle. Indeed it was in such moments
that her own generosity and courage were most evident. We can easily imagine
the warmth with which she would have welcomed the new movement that we
have seen in the protests at Seattle,
Washington, Genoa
and elsewhere.
