Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl Who Got a State Funeral in Moscow

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn arrived in Lawrence, Massachusetts in January 1912, twenty-one years old and already five years into full-time organizing for the Industrial Workers of the World, to help lead the strike that put bread and roses into the vocabulary of the American left. She was already one of the union’s best-known speakers. Over the next fifty-two years she would have a song written for her, co-found a civil liberties organization that later expelled her, serve federal time for her politics, chair the Communist Party USA, and die in Moscow with a state funeral in Red Square. To see how a New Hampshire teenager got to that platform in Lawrence, start with the soapbox.

The soapbox at sixteen

Flynn was born August 7, 1890, in Concord, New Hampshire, to Irish immigrant parents who raised her on stories of Ireland’s independence fight; the family moved to the Bronx in 1900. At fifteen she gave her first public speech, “What Socialism Will Do for Women,” to the Harlem Socialist Club. The next year she was speaking from a soapbox on New York street corners, got arrested for it, and left high school before graduating over the same activism. By 1907, still a teenager, she was a full-time IWW organizer, touring the country to speak to restaurant workers, garment workers, and miners the AFL’s craft unions had no interest in signing up.

Missoula and Spokane

Before Lawrence, the IWW sent Flynn into the free speech fights of 1909 and 1910, where the union’s tactic was to fill a city with soapbox speakers until the jails ran out of room. She helped win Missoula, Montana that way in October 1909, then moved on to Spokane, Washington, where hundreds of Wobblies filled the jail that winter. In a December 1909 dispatch for the International Socialist Review, Flynn documented what she found inside: men “herded twenty-eight to thirty at a time in a 6 x 8 cell known as the sweat box,” steam turned on until they were ready to collapse, then locked into an ice-cold cell afterward. Spokane granted the IWW the right to hold street meetings that March.

Lawrence, 1912

The full story of the Bread and Roses strike, and the slogan it left behind, lives at causes/bread-and-roses. Flynn’s part in it was to arrive with Big Bill Haywood and fellow organizer Carlo Tresca and help run the relief effort that kept thousands of immigrant strikers fed through a Massachusetts winter, a strike committee that had to work in more languages than any single organizer spoke. Writing decades later, in a 1939 essay recalling three decades of May Days, Flynn remembered the Lawrence and Lowell mills that year mainly by one image: “Big Bill Haywood in the Syrian Hall,” one of the immigrant meeting halls the strike used to reach workers no English-only leaflet could.

Paterson, and the truth about it

The following year Flynn organized in Paterson, New Jersey, where roughly 25,000 silk workers walked out from February to July 1913 over the mills’ push to a four-loom system that would have cut jobs and sped up the survivors. The strike ended without its demands met, and a year later, on January 31, 1914, Flynn stood before the New York Civic Club Forum to defend the IWW’s record and admitted up front that she was not a neutral witness:

It is rather difficult for me to separate myself from my feelings about the Paterson strike, to speak dispassionately.

She was blunt about what the union actually offered strikers, and what it did not:

We have certain general principles; their application differs as the people, the industry, the time and the place indicate.

And she measured the strike’s failure against a different scale than a signed contract:

What is a labor victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society is to have achieved a temporary gain and not a lasting victory.

Joe Hill’s song

In 1915, IWW songwriter Joe Hill, awaiting execution in a Salt Lake City jail on a murder conviction, wrote The Rebel Girl and dedicated it to Flynn. She confirmed the dedication in her own later writing; her 1955 autobiography carried the nickname as its subtitle, and her full 1973 autobiography took the title outright. That fall she went to Washington and got as far as Woodrow Wilson’s private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, pressing for clemency. Hill was executed by firing squad on November 19, 1915. The rest of his story, and the telegram he sent from his cell, is at figures/joe-hill.

The ACLU cofounds her, then expels her

In 1920 Flynn was among the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1937 she joined the Communist Party USA. By 1940 the ACLU’s board had adopted what it called the 1940 Resolution, barring from its governing committees or staff anyone “who is a member of any political organization which supports totalitarian dictatorship in any country,” language written with Communists specifically in mind. That May the board applied it to Flynn and voted, by a single vote, to expel her, a decision the ACLU’s own history now names as one of the times the organization violated the free-association principle it exists to defend. The reversal took 36 years. In 1976, the national board voted to rescind the expulsion.

The Smith Act

In June 1951, federal agents arrested Flynn in a second wave of Communist Party prosecutions under the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of the government. She was convicted after a nine-month trial and sentenced to three years, entering the federal prison at Alderson, West Virginia in January 1955 and walking out in May 1957. Of the sentence, TIME magazine later reported, she said:

I had no reason to reform, repent or recant, so I just reduced.

A passport, then Moscow

In 1961, four years out of Alderson, Flynn became the first woman elected national chair of the Communist Party USA. The federal government had been refusing her a passport under a Cold War statute barring Communists from foreign travel. She sued, and on June 22, 1964, the Supreme Court ruled in her favor in Aptheker v. Secretary of State, holding the travel ban unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment. Two months later, seventy-four years old and free to travel again, she went to the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet government. She died in Moscow on September 5, 1964, of what TIME’s contemporary report described as a clot in the lung artery.

A funeral on two continents

The Soviet state gave her the send-off of a head of state. Her body lay in Moscow’s Hall of Columns before a procession through Red Square reported at more than 25,000 people, with Nikita Khrushchev among the mourners. Her ashes were then split: part interred at the foot of the Kremlin Wall, near where a portion of Big Bill Haywood’s ashes had gone when he died in Moscow in 1928, and the rest flown home to Forest Home Cemetery outside Chicago, the same ground that holds the Haymarket martyrs’ monument and the remainder of Haywood’s own ashes. The teenager who once got herself arrested for talking on a street corner ended up with a grave in two capitals.