East Side Joan of Arc
The early 20th century organized labor movement saw many activists rise to national prominence, including a scrappy teenaged socialist orator named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1906. This is the second article in my series Ask Her about Her Zero F*cks.
In my decade-plus of studying women’s history, I have noticed that women who gained reputations for being *scary* were often small and delicate-looking. There was an inverse relationship between a badass woman’s stature and her perceived threat level. This week’s subject is no exception.
“Elizabeth Flynn is a little woman, the best known, presumably the worst feared, of radical labor leaders.”
Small? Irish? Loud? From the experience of being all three of those myself, I can say that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890–1964) only won by refusing to lose. Wherever she went, labor unrest followed, and she gave factory owners a run for their filthy capitalist money. She was known as the “East Side Joan of Arc” and the “Rebel Girl” to supporters of the labor movement; to its enemies she was “that Flynn woman” who went around starting shit. But how did she get this reputation?
Liz Flynn was descended from Irish rebels and reared in a hyperpolitical household. This informed her class and gender consciousness during an age of horrendous socioeconomic inequality not unlike our own. Her family lived in a cramped South Bronx tenement in New York City at the turn of the century. She and her siblings grew up in seemingly inescapable poverty, surrounded by dark and crowded buildings full of sweatshops, child laborers, railroad men, and “white slaves.” They embodied what Jacob Riis termed the “other half.” From a young age, Liz was skeptical about capitalism. She took to socialist ideas like a duck to a waterfall and gleefully went over the edge.
On August 22, 1906, a rosy-cheeked schoolgirl took to the speaker’s platform on Broadway and 38th, ready to give passersby a piece of her mind. With one finger pointing indignantly at the evening sky, 16-year-old Liz articulated her arguments of socialism’s benefits for women. Her feminist instincts were already highly developed, having been raised by a liberal-minded mother who proudly belonged to Sinn Féin and who had attended speeches by leading women’s suffragists in her own youth. If anyone was surprised by Liz’s early entry into a great big cause, it certainly wasn’t Mama Flynn.
A crowd quickly gathered around the young woman, enough to snarl traffic, and the police appeared. Liz, her father Tom, and several other socialist speakers were arrested and released on bail in the early hours of the following morning. At their trial, Tom had to be restrained by his lawyer from vociferously defending his daughter’s actions. The lawyer complimented Liz by calling her the “coming Socialist woman orator of America,” but the judge was unimpressed and told Liz to stay in school. She would later drop out of high school, unable to focus on her studies while the labor struggle beckoned.
Liz earned her first nickname, East Side Joan of Arc, from the editor of Broadway Magazine, Theodore Dreiser. Other publications condescended to her, with headlines like “Mere Child Talks Bitterly of Life.” Liz would have been the first to tell you, however, that poverty robs people of their childhoods. Who would not talk bitterly of life if they had witnessed, at a tender age, another child be scalped by mill machinery? Who would not be bitter past their years living in a slum, knowing that just a subway ride away was another world where the robber barons luxuriated in their 5th Avenue mansions Edith Wharton-style? Liz did not have time for a childhood that was never hers to begin with, and high school was a snore-fest compared to joining the Industrial Workers of the World.
Let’s talk about the IWW for a second. The IWW is not a craft union; it welcomes all stripes of underpaid/underappreciated/exploited laborers (its motto is “One Big Union”). I was briefly a member myself several years ago, while working for an un-named Big Retail that did not want its workers organizing (oops, sorry not sorry). Quite progressively for 1906, the IWW allowed Black and female workers in its ranks. Mixed Local №179 gave Liz her first job as a speaker and sent her to the East Side of Manhattan, where her regular haunt became the Liberal Arts Club.
Here, she encountered the Jewish immigrant community, a much different scene from her Irish and German neighborhood with only their poverty in common. The Jewish neighborhood had socialist halls instead of saloons and these were constantly busy. Events on the international stage were these comrades’ pressing concern when Liz met them. The previous year, Russia, where many of these folks were from, saw the First Russian Revolution. Liz’s first demonstration was against the pogroms that ravaged isolated Jewish communities on Russia’s western edges. These pogroms were an awful, but predictable, outgrowth of the anti-Russian nationalism fueling the Revolution. All this upheaval deeply affected young Liz and only cemented her conviction that class division was antithetical to human flourishing.
She channeled her horror at the bloodshed in czarist Russia into full-time speaking and organizing for the Wobblies, as the IWW are called. This took her all over the country. Wherever workers needed to organize, Liz and company appeared like clockwork. She was arrested routinely, most notably in a giant free speech demonstration in Spokane, Washington in 1910. At the time, Liz was pregnant with her son Fred. She wanted to speak in public per usual but was forbidden by her comrades due to her “indecent” state. She still managed to be arrested and tried for conspiracy to incite law-breaking.
Liz was present for most of the major labor uprisings of the period, including the Lawrence textile mill strike of 1912, the New York Cooks and Waiters strike and Paterson silk strikes in 1913, and the New York unemployment demonstrations in 1914. In 1915, the famed labor martyr Joe Hill was executed by firing squad in Utah, the victim of a frame-up, but not before he had written a song dedicated to Liz called “The Rebel Girl.”
Liz remained in the IWW until 1916, when she and fellow Wobbly Joseph Ettor were expelled for allegedly allowing three miners, none of whom spoke fluent English, to incriminate themselves on manslaughter charges in the deaths of two deputized mine guards in Minnesota. Though the separation was painful, Liz remained active in the labor movement and went on to help found the American Civil Liberties Union.
Her commitment to socialism doubled down during World War I as she and her comrades battled the vicious jingoism of the Wilson Administration, which threw anyone with suspicion of treason or pacifism into a cell. Liz took a hiatus from her activism during the 1920s, but came back with a vengeance in 1936, when she joined the American Communist Party. In 1951, she was arrested and imprisoned under the Smith Act. She became the Chair of CPUSA in 1961, and died at age 74 in the Soviet Union. Her headstone is in Forest Home Cemetery in Chicago near the Haymarket Memorial, as she directed.
Talk about someone who paid dearly for her “free” speech. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was one of the most controversial women in American history, but like so many other important women, she does not get her due airtime and it doesn’t help that most history curricula, until recently, omitted organized labor. Ask her about her zero f*cks next time you don’t get arrested for saying or doing things that put her, and hundreds of others, behind bars (bonus points for being pregnant while doing so).
Who:
- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Women’s History Month Profiles, AFL-CIO (LMAO How Times Have Changed!)
- Mary Heaton Vorse, a novelist and labor activist who worked extensively with Liz
- Carlo Tresca, a fellow IWW leader and orator with whom Liz had a fling or two
- Lucy Parsons, widow of Haymarket Martyr Albert Parsons, who greatly inspired Liz throughout her career (Chicago PD once called her “more dangerous than 1000 rioters”)
- Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, the OG Lady Organizer for the United Mine Workers (Liz fainted the first time she heard Mother Jones speak, which should tell you something about MJ)
What/Where:
- An audio clip of Liz giving a speech about the song “The Rebel Girl;” you can hear why she was considered such a powerful orator. Listen to the song performed by Bucky Halker and Cathy Richardson on Anywhere but Utah: Songs of Joe Hill
- Liz’s Statement at her Smith Act Trial, which was named #87 in American Rhetoric’s Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century
- Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument and Radical Row in Forest Home Cemetery (Forest Park, IL)
- American Labor Museum (Haledon, NJ)
Read:
- The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Masses & Mainstream 1955
- My Life as a Political Prisoner: The Rebel Girl Becomes “№ 11710”. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, International Publishers 1963
- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary (Lives of American Women series). Lara Vapnek, Taylor & Francis, 2015
- Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream. Bruce Watson, Penguin Books 2005
- Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman, Verso 2005
- The Jungle. Upton Sinclair, Doubleday Page & Company, 1906. I included this book because Liz read it and became a lifelong vegetarian afterwards. This powerful exposé of the deplorable conditions of meatpacking plants in Chicago made many a vegetarian and labor activist
