[Republican lawmakers in New Hampshire had a marker at Elizabeth
Gurley Flynns childhood home removed just two weeks after it was
unveiled, arguing that Flynn did not deserve such recognition because
she was “un-American.”]
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CANCELLING ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN  
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Mary Anne Trasciatti
May 24, 2023
Labor and Working Class History Association
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_ Republican lawmakers in New Hampshire had a marker at Elizabeth
Gurley Flynn's childhood home removed just two weeks after it was
unveiled, arguing that Flynn did not deserve such recognition because
she was “un-American.” _

,

 

If you blinked, you might have missed the historical marker dedicated
to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at the site of her childhood home in
Concord, New Hampshire, on May 1, 2023. That’s because Republican
lawmakers had it removed just two weeks after it was unveiled, arguing
that Flynn did not deserve such recognition because she was
“un-American.”

They based their charge on her membership in the Communist Party of
the United States (CPUSA). Flynn joined the Party during the Popular
Front period and remained a member until her death in 1964.

The marker does not shy away from this history. It explicitly states
that Flynn was a Party member and that she was sent to prison under
“the notorious Smith Act,” a reference to the 1940 law that made
it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of the federal
government. Although it was supposed to protect the nation from Nazis
as well as Communists, the law –like most anti-subversive
legislation — was used almost exclusively as a weapon to bludgeon
the Left.

Early in the Cold War, in 1948, at the urging of J. Edgar Hoover,
federal agents arrested CPUSA leaders around the country and brought
them to trial, presenting dubious evidence, much of it provided by
paid informers, to secure convictions. In 1951, the Supreme Court
upheld the convictions in _Dennis v. United States_. Almost
immediately after that decision was announced, Flynn and several other
Communists were arrested and indicted under the Smith Act. In 1953,
all of them were found guilty.

After the appeals were exhausted, Flynn served twenty-eight months in
prison. She was nearly sixty-seven years old when she was released in
May 1957. Two months later, the Supreme Court decided in _Yates v.
United States _that the First Amendment protects radical speech,
which effectively ended Smith Act prosecutions. Now, nearly seventy
years after her Smith Act conviction, when the Cold War is supposedly
over, Flynn is once again being penalized for her political ideas.

Gurley Flynn, who started as a soapbox speaker in high school,
inspired the Song by Joe Hill. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

If Flynn were around today, she would undoubtedly unleash her quick
wit and sharp tongue to roast her critics. And she would be justified.
To label her un-American is preposterous. Most of her life was spent
fighting with and for working people in the U.S. During her years with
the Industrial Workers of the World, she led organizing drives,
strikes, and free speech fights. She had toyed with the idea of
becoming a Constitutional lawyer, but instead, she studied the
Constitution on her own, becoming an expert of sorts on civil
liberties. In 1918, she founded the Workers Defense Union to aid labor
activists whose First Amendment rights were endangered by the wartime
Espionage Act and to advocate for recognition of political prisoners
by the federal government.

Flynn used this experience as a founding member of the ACLU and she
acted as a bridge between the liberals in that organization and the
radical labor activists they had pledged to defend, including Sacco
and Vanzetti. Long before most Americans understood the danger posed
by Mussolini, she recognized his fascist regime as a threat to
democracy around the world and spoke against it. She also opposed the
Ku Klux Klan, which she saw as a uniquely American fascist
organization.

Flynn’s commitment to the struggle for Black liberation was
unsurpassed among white activists of her era. She campaigned alongside
Black comrades against lynching, suppression of voting rights, housing
discrimination, job discrimination, education discrimination, and
police brutality. In the final years of her life, when she was
appealing the denial of her passport under Section 6 of the McCarran
Act, she wrote numerous articles in which she argued that freedom of
movement was necessary for the exercise of one’s First Amendment
rights. All Americans should be this un-American.

The marker to Flynn in Concord, N.H. was one of 278 across the state.
It lasted less than two weeks. Credit: Joseph Alsip.

While I bristle at the claim that Flynn (or, as New Hampshire
Executive Councilmember Joseph Kenney called her, “someone like
that”) does not deserve to be commemorated in public space, I also
regret the way that New Hampshire activists chose to remember her. The
plaque in Concord identified Flynn as a “nationally renowned labor
leader” whose “fiery speeches” earned her the nickname “the
Rebel Girl.” Yet it also claimed that Flynn worked through the ACLU
to advocate for women’s rights, particularly suffrage and birth
control. That claim is simply not accurate. Flynn was not a proponent
of voting until she joined the CUPSA and cast a ballot for Roosevelt
in 1937. Although she fought for the right of Margaret Sanger to speak
about birth control, the issue was not a priority for her. The idea
that Flynn was primarily a women’s rights activist has also seeped
into media coverage of the controversy over the plaque.
The _Washington Post_, for example, bears a headline that refers to
Flynn as “feminist, with Communist past.” She would be surprised
to see herself described this way, even if she espoused many ideas
that we think of as feminist.

Moreover, Flynn would recoil at the subordination of “Communist”
to “feminist.” From the moment she joined the CPUSA until the day
she died, Flynn saw herself as a Communist – no qualifier. The
movement to which she dedicated her life was, in her own words, “the
working-class movement” and the organization that she believed best
advanced the interests of the working class was the Communist Party of
the United States. In fact, when she was faced with a choice between
the ACLU and the CPUSA, she chose the latter. Her refusal to let the
ACLU dictate her politics resulted in her expulsion from the
organization in 1940.

We can debate her decision to join the Party or to stay with the Party
as long as she did. Nevertheless, if we are going to commemorate
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn or any other controversial figures whom we
believe have made important and valuable contributions to U.S.
society, we should commemorate them as they really were, not as we
want to see them. In the case of Flynn, the epitaph from her tombstone
in Forest Home Cemetery, where her ashes lie near the graves of the
Haymarket Martyrs, may offer the best guidance:

“The Rebel Girl”
Fighter for Working Class Emancipation

Credit:
Credit: Einar E Kvaran aka carptrash courtesy
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_Mary Anne Trasciatti [[link removed]],
Professor of Rhetoric and Director of Labor Studies at Hofstra
University, is President of Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition. She
is co-editor (with Edvige Giunta) of Talking to the Girls: Intimate
and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (2022)
and (with Robert Forrant) of the forthcoming Where are the Workers?
Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites (2022). She is
finishing a book on the civil liberties activism of Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn, to be published by Rutgers University Press._

_The Labor and Working Class History Association
[[link removed]] is an organization of
historians, labor educators, and working-class activists who seek to
promote public and scholarly awareness of labor and working-class
history through research, writing, and organizing._

* Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
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* Communist Party
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* Feminism
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* Labor History
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