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Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

1890–1964 · 74 years Tier II

Arrested at 16 for her first speech, and it never stopped

Portrait of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn — Unknown author — circa 1948 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Flynn's parents filled the house with stories of the Irish independence struggle and with socialist argument, and when the family moved from Concord, New Hampshire, to the Bronx in 1900, the 10-year-old brought both into New York's public schools. She won a medal for debate, argued political theory at an age when classmates were still doing arithmetic, and left Morris High School before graduating — the record does not agree on whether she was pushed out or walked out. At 16, in the summer of 1906, she gave her first street-corner speech for socialism on a New York sidewalk and was arrested before she had even finished. She never really stopped.

She organized garment workers in Pennsylvania, silk weavers in New Jersey, miners in Minnesota and Montana, and textile hands in Massachusetts, and fought two free-speech battles for the IWW at Missoula and Spokane in 1909 and 1910 — Theodore Dreiser called her the East Side Joan of Arc. She split from Big Bill Haywood and the IWW in 1916 over strategy, then spent the rest of her life building institutions instead: the Workers Defense Union in 1918, the ACLU in 1920, and a leading role defending Sacco and Vanzetti. She joined the Communist Party in the late 1930s, was arrested in 1951, convicted after a nine-month trial under the Smith Act, and served part of a three-year sentence at Alderson, West Virginia. She became the party's first woman national chair in 1961.

The organization she helped found turned on her. In 1940, alarmed by the Nazi-Soviet pact, the ACLU board barred Communists from leadership and put Flynn — the only open one among them — on trial, then expelled her by vote, 20 years after she had helped assemble that board. It did not reverse the decision until 1976, 12 years after she was dead. Her personal life absorbed similar wear. Her first son died days after birth, and her second, Fred, in 1940. Her longtime partner, the anarchist Carlo Tresca, left her after she discovered his affair with her own sister, and she lived for a decade afterward with the birth-control activist Marie Equi — a relationship biographers still argue over. The government revoked her passport in 1962, and she fought it to the Supreme Court and won in 1963.

She died in Moscow on September 5, 1964, and the Soviet state gave her a funeral in Red Square that drew a crowd estimated past 25,000 — an honor almost no American has received before or since. Her body came home for burial at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago, near Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood, and the Haymarket martyrs, and what little estate she had went to Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker house. The reputation stayed genuinely contested. Her home state tried to honor her with a historical marker in Concord in May 2023, and the governor had it removed within two weeks after objections to celebrating a Communist. The argument over what to do with her memory has not settled.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Workers Defense Union company
Legal defense for activists charged under the Espionage Act 1918
American Civil Liberties Union company
Founding board member — expelled from it in 1940 1920
Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaign case
A leading organizer of the public campaign for the two anarchists 1921
The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner book
Written about her Smith Act imprisonment 1963

Life in brief

with age at each point

August 7, 1890 aged 0 Born in Concord, New Hampshire
1900 aged ~10 Family moves to the Bronx
Summer 1906 aged ~16 Gives her first street speech and is arrested at 16
1907 aged ~17 Becomes a full-time IWW organizer
1916 aged ~26 Splits from Big Bill Haywood and the IWW
1920 aged ~30 Co-founds the American Civil Liberties Union
1940 aged ~50 Expelled from the ACLU board for being an open Communist
June 1951 aged 60 Arrested and later convicted under the Smith Act She served part of a three-year sentence at Alderson, West Virginia.
September 5, 1964 aged 74 Dies in Moscow during a visit to the Soviet Union