Flynn was a gifted orator who was at the heart of U.S. left-wing movements for the first two-thirds of the 20th century
[This article is specially published on labor day to commemorate a great figure in American labor history.—Editors]
In 1915, legendary folk singer Joe Hill wrote a tribute to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW-also known as the Wobblies), a left-wing organization that supported worker-controlled industry.
Hill’s song was titled “The Rebel Girl.” It described Flynn as “a precious pearl” to the working class who brought “courage, pride and joy” to their struggles.
Hill wrote that, while “her hands may be hardened from labor, and her dress may not be very fine,…a heart in her bosom is beating that is true to her class and her kind.”
The song finished with the following stanza: “the grafters in terror are trembling” when “her spite and defiance she’ll hurl, for the only and thoroughbred lady is the Rebel Girl.”
Iconic Figure of the American Left
Born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1890 to Irish parents who introduced her to socialism as a teenager, Flynn was an iconic figure in the American left from the early 1900s until her death in 1964.
As a socialist, then a Wobbly, then a Communist, Flynn gave fiery speeches, helped organize strikes in a variety of industries, supported anti-imperialist movements in the U.S. and around the globe, galvanized resistance to fascism, protested unjust deportation of immigrants, advocated for prison reform, and fought for civil rights and civil liberties.
Mary Anne Trasciatti, director of labor studies at Hofstra University, has written a timely biography of Flynn that helps to remind 21st century readers of Flynn’s magnetism and significance to left-wing social movements in U.S. history.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution has a particular emphasis on Flynn’s support for free speech and civil liberties and the travails that she endured during the Second Red Scare when she was imprisoned under repressive anticommunist legislation.
Trasciatti writes that Flynn was a “trailblazer in the American civil liberties movement, an ardent and active defender of the right to hold and express one’s own political views and to associate with like-minded people in peaceful pursuit of economic, social and political change.”[1]
Trasciatti concluded further that Flynn was “one of the most exciting and innovative labor leaders the United States has ever had. Her fighting spirit, fearlessness, creativity and absolute dedication of working-class people and their struggles for a better life offer a well-spring of inspiration for labor leaders today.”[2]
Formative Years with the Wobblies
Flynn grew up in the Bronx and became radicalized by the poverty that she experienced and her encounters with books like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), which envisioned a utopian socialist future.
Because her parents were Irish, Flynn identified with the Irish struggle for independence from British colonialism, and became friendly with James Connolly, a revolutionary leader of the Irish movement for independence who would come to her house.
In the summer of 1906 at the tender age of 15, Flynn launched her career as a soapbox speaker.[3] With her talent for oratory, she came to draw crowds and was arrested for the first time for speaking without a permit and blocking traffic in Times Square.[4]
Shortly after the beginning of her soapbox-speaking career, Flynn joined the IWW, which was founded the year before in Chicago with the goal of emancipating the working class from “wage slavery,” as it was then called.[5]
The IWW appealed to segments of the working classes that the conservative and exclusive American Federation of Labor (AFL), which organized only skilled tradesmen along craft lines, chose to ignore: migratory and unskilled workers, immigrants, Blacks and women.
A fierce fighting spirit animated the IWW that solidified its role as a nemesis of corporate interests. Flynn was highly valued by the organization because street-speaking was pivotal to its organizing efforts.[6]
Soon she began crisscrossing the country on behalf of the IWW, giving speeches and supporting striking workers and campaigns for free speech. The Butte Miner recognized her as an “arch disturber, organizer and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, a woman of considerable power as a speaker of unquestioned courage.”[7]
In one fiery speech in Spokane, Flynn called the local police “hired thugs” of the “parasite class” “acting like gorillas.” The Police Chief was a “monster,” she said, and the local jail where IWW activists were sent was a “torture chamber.”[8]
In 1912, Flynn went to Lawrence, Massachusetts, with IWW leader “Big Bill” Haywood to help lead a strike of textile workers who had walked off the job in protest against a pay cut.
There she met Carlo Tresca, an anarchist from Italy who would become her lover.[9]
The governor of Massachusetts ordered out the state militia and, during one demonstration, a 15-year-old boy was killed by a militiaman’s bayonet, and a woman striker, Anna LoPizzo, was also killed.
The strike ended, however, in success and brought national renown to the IWW. Afterwards, Flynn went to Paterson, New Jersey, to support a silk-workers’ strike that was brutally suppressed.[10]
Flynn emerged as a key leader of the strike, which resulted in a reduction of the workday from ten to nine hours.[11] John Reed, Mabel Dodge and John Sloan organized a Paterson Strike Pageant in Madison Square Garden to raise funds for the strikers while it was going on.
Flynn, subsequently, was charged with conspiracy to incite a riot. After her arrest, the police chief told her: “You may be right, but we have the power.”[12]
Efforts to Save Joe Hill
Flynn was the first person to see Joe Hill, the IWW songwriter who wrote “The Rebel Girl,” after he was sentenced to death following his conviction for the murder of a Utah grocery store owner in 1914. Flynn and others who followed the case recognized that Hill was framed for the crime.
Flynn gave numerous speeches to call attention to the injustice of Hill’s trial and even arranged a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson’s press secretary, Joseph Tumulty, who offered to forward an appeal to Wilson. Unfortunately, it was to no avail and Hill was executed by firing squad in November 1915.[13]
World War I and the Red Scare
When World War I broke out, Flynn and the IWW spoke out against it as a war for profit driven by the plutocratic elite.
Soon IWW members were accused of being agents of the German Kaiser. The climate of repression directed against them intensified following the November 1917 Russian Revolution.
During the Palmer raids, thousands of radicals were arrested and deported. Wobbly organizer Frank Little, with whom Flynn had worked closely, was lynched by a mob in Butte, Montana.[14]
One of the Wobblies’ last major campaigns was a fight for free speech in Everett, Washington, where citizen deputies shot at a steamship carrying Wobbly activists were trying to enter the city. At least five Wobblies were killed and 50 injured in the massacre. Trasciatti writes that the “Everett massacre was a swan song for the Wobbly soapbox orator.”[15]
Post-Wobbly Activism
After the break-up of the Wobblies, Flynn continued her political activism on behalf of labor rights, speech and other causes working for different organizations.
Described by Theodore Dreiser as an “East Side Joan of Arc,” she was valued not only for her oratory but also her pamphlet writing and fundraising skills.
One campaign Flynn was involved with was a “hands off Russia campaign,” which opposed giving aid or sending troops to bolster anti-Soviet forces during the civil war that engulfed Russia from the end of the October Revolution until the Bolsheviks defeated the white [counter-revolutionary] armies in 1922.[16]
Around this time, Flynn facilitated meetings of Irish and Indian revolutionaries unified in their opposition to British colonialism, and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which exemplified her commitment to free speech and the freeing of political prisoners.[17]
In the mid-1920s, Flynn worked to support the legal defense of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists who were framed on murder charges.[18]
With the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in Italy in 1922, Flynn began warning about the looming danger of fascism, and worked with Carlos Tresca to create an organized anti-fascist movement in the U.S.[19]
Communist Party
In 1937, after continuing her activism through the Depression years, Flynn joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). She was inspired by a speech by Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian who was General Secretary of the Comintern (Communist International), supporting a popular front of communist and progressive groups dedicated to advancing the interests of working-class people and fighting back against warmongers and fascists.[20]
Flynn’s CPUSA membership led to her being purged from the ACLU’s Board of Directors in 1940.[21]
Some of Flynn’s positions adopted during her time in the CPUSA were dubious, such as her adoption of the party line on the Moscow show trials, which wiped out 70% of the Communist Party of the USSR’s Central Committee, and the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (Nazi-Soviet Pact).[22]
But Flynn saw the CPUSA as a vehicle for advancing working-class interests that had historic ties to the American labor movement and drew off American revolutionary and democratic traditions.
Red Scare Repression and Incarceration
As the Second Red Scare (the McCarthy Era) unfolded, Flynn denounced attacks against Communists as anti-democratic and anti-labor.[23]
When CPUSA leaders were arrested under the Smith Act and put on trial, she highlighted the one-sided trials in the U.S., stating “I’ve seen pickets and strike leaders arrested by the hundreds and innocent workers framed up, like Tom Mooney and Sacco and Vanzetti, like Eugene Debs and Joe Hill. But I have yet to see a mine owner, mob leader, trigger happy copper, strike-breaking thug, vigilante or gunman, punished for crimes against the people.”[24]
The government’s basis for the Smith trial arrests was that the CPUSA advocated for the violent overthrow of the American government.
However, the CPUSA functioned as a regular American political party that ran candidates in elections and put out a newspaper. It supported an evolution into a socialist/communist political system after the majority of the population recognized its superiority to capitalism.
The latter was a point that Flynn emphasized after she was put on trial for sedition in March 1952.
Flynn told the jury that Americans had a right under the Constitution to “speak their minds on any subject” and that communists had a right to “defend socialism or the evolution of the capitalist system and economy and of the private ownership of the means of life of all the people.”
Flynn further noted that the CPUSA was “not under control of a foreign power. Communists did not advocate force or violence. The transition to socialism would come if, and only if, the people wanted it.”[25]
Unfortunately, that argument did not work in the hysterical anti-communist climate of the McCarthy era. Flynn was convicted and sent to the Alderson Prison for women in West Virginia.
After serving her two-year sentence, Flynn became an advocate for prison reform and wrote a memoir of her prison experience, which she said had made her feel like “a trapped animal in a cage.”[26]
Until her death in 1964, Flynn maintained a busy schedule of writing and political activism, some of which was directed against the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), the McCarran Act and other fascist-type legislation that took root during the McCarthy Era.[27]
During these twilight years, Flynn continued to be banned from speaking on many college campuses and had her passport revoked.
Attempt to Erase Her Memory
Decades after Flynn’s death, she continues to be targeted by political reactionaries.
In May 2023, Republican lawmakers in Flynn’s hometown of Concord, New Hampshire, had a historical marker taken down that had been put up by activists at the site of her childhood home.
The lawmakers claimed that Flynn did not deserve such a marker because she was “un-American.”[28]
Trasciatti’s study shows that, in reality, Flynn was a great American who fought for the country’s working people and stood up to ruling class elites who used patriotic rhetoric for self-serving purposes.
Today, the legacy of the “rebel girl” lives on as a symbol of resistance to illegitimate authority and oppression.
Leftists ought to follow her example in developing a class-based analysis of injustice in U.S. society and in trying to build inter-racial coalitions of the working class to fight back against corporate power and to advance a socialist-oriented economy that places a primacy on human welfare.
Mary Anne Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2025), 1. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 291. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 7. In junior high-school, Flynn had won a silver prize in a debate on the resolution “should the government own the mines.” ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 8. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 8, 9. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 11. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 21. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 32. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 43. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 53. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 65. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 66. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 70. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, ch. 3. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 77. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 114. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 116. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 127. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 131. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 144. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 161. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 147. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 196. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 209. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 233. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 245. The memoir was titled The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner (New York: International Publishers, 1963). ↑
Before her imprisonment, Flynn had written articles in The Daily Worker criticizing U.S. involvement in Korea. See, e.g., “Where is Korea? Soldiers Mother Asks (1950),” in Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 210-12. ↑
Trasciatti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 292. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
