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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MCCARTHYISM AND ITS VICTIMS: HERE WE GO AGAIN?  
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Paul Buhle
July 24, 2025
Portside

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_ Repression is certainly in the air, its effects likely to be as
chilling as intended: people are afraid and have good reasons to be
afraid. Reviews of two recent books on Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the
Long War Against American Communism. _

Communist Party Leaders: Claudia Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,
Pettis Perry & Betty Gannet, ca. 1951, Smith Act victims., Photo
credit: Black Past, photo in the public domain

 

 It is tempting to return to themes of the Chicago anarchists in the
Haymarket “riot” and the subsequent hanging of five labor
activists  “because of their ideas”—no decisive evidence of a
bomb conspiracy could be found. But closer in time to think of 1919-20
and the “Long 1950s,” long because the effects of the FBI and
other efforts destroyed so many lives of fairly ordinary Americans.
Many survivors were, until recently, still around to be interviewed by
scholars, including myself.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: the Rebel Girl, Democracy and Revolution
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By Mary Anne Trasciatti
Rutgers University Press; 384 pages
June 17, 2025
Hardcover:  $34.95
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1978817576
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1978817579
 

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We turn, then, to one of the more famous sufferers. The new biography
of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the famed “Rebel Girl” who way back in
the 1910s defied the wave of young J. Edgar Hoover and the then-new
Bureau of Investigation (“Federal” was added to the title later)
but could not, at a much-advanced age, successfully fight off her old
adversary thirty to forty years later. Of course, this is only a small
part of Flynn’s life story, but the police and federal authorities
set upon repression play a significant role almost throughout. She was
great for raising public attention and funds for victims, and
dramatizing their case through her oratory, travels and
mobilization. 

How did she become a giant figure in the US Left? She was already a
street orator, for the Socialist Labor Party, at age 16 and by her own
testimony, took to it like a duck to water. In an age before radio
could be widely heard, when vaudeville served as mass entertainment
and street events of all kinds drew amazing crowds, she sensed what
her audience was able and eager to hear.

The IWW could have been created for her. Never able to seriously
challenge the conservative and craft-oriented AFL, the Wobblies
rallied to the most oppressed and gave them hope, from East Coast
recent immigrants to hard-rock miners of the West. The “Free Speech
Fights” against local repression in various cities cost the little
organization mightily in legal costs and defense, straining resources
to the limit.

A clash with IWW leaders in 1911-12 over strategy set Flynn onto a
course of a break, one of the most decisive in her life. Her departure
from the Wobblies coincided with ongoing crises in her personal life,
including a short-lived marriage and the birth of a son, not to
mention romances with comrades and a possibly romantic but certainly
close relationship with Mari Acqui, a Portland birth control activist
and lesbian. 

Flynn intermittently re-emerged, perhaps grown suspicious of
organizational entanglements of the usual kind. The American Civil
Liberties Union, founded in 1920 by allies, offered something new in
socialistic activities. The ACLU was naturally non-partisan, but it
formed against the background of the most sweeping repression yet
seen, significantly commanded by White House Democrats. (Woodrow
Wilson threw Eugene Debs into prison, Warren Harding set him free).
Wartime repression separated Flynn from what had become Establishment
liberalism, although she continued the rest of her life to maneuver
for liberal support.

Author Mary Anne Trasciatti is at her strongest in the political
realm, putting Flynn’s personal life largely aside. Among the many
involvements that Trasciatti details, her description of Flynn’s
support for the early Black struggles in Harlem stands out. American
Communists, who took years to emerge from internecine struggles and
take on Black struggles, among the most important of all their
efforts, might better have looked to Flynn. They did, but as
Trasciatti says, always with a bit of ambivalence. Political,
organizational operatives held the real prestige and power at the top
of the Party.

By no surprise, Flynn reached her apex as a public leader, following
the 1910s and early 1920s, during the Popular Front, the decade from
1935 or so onward. A natural leader of International Labor Defense,
she had been repelled at the renewed battles among Communist factions,
even as she dealt with some personal illness and romantic
disappointment. To the joy of some and to the dismay of others, she
joined the CP in 1937. We learn less about her activity in the CP
before the War because Trasciatti offers us so much on her struggles
within the ACLU, whose leaders became notably cautious in criticizing
the FBI and expelled her from their Board in 1940. (Later the ACLU
would recover its courage.)

Continuing her lecture tours to unions and other audiences in the face
of the repressive Smith Act, she charged into wartime controversies,
especially the arrest of CP leader Earl Browder. She seemed, for
perhaps the first time in her life, to actually doubt herself when the
CP emerged from the happy period of wartime unity into the Cold War
era. As she grasped but could not articulate, sectarianism badly
weakened its response to the coming repression. She tried hard to
rebuild a Communist movement shaken by repression and internal
controversy, made worse by a fractured and frustrated leadership.

Much] of the last hundred pages of _Elizabeth Gurley Flynn_ reads as
tragedy. Trasciatti nails the cause. In earlier struggles, Flynn
successfully rallied liberals and a wide section of the labor movement
behind her. By 1948, Communists stood exposed and nearly alone.

Flynn wrote and spoke, her _Daily Worker_ columns read almost
secretly (by legend, hidden by riders within other newspapers, on the
subway) as she gamely took on one new legal obstacle after another.
The “Flynn Case,” aimed at her very presence, found even smaller
courtroom audiences, less press attention and also a less creative
very response from her than in previous decades. She had obviously
grown weary and defending Party positions on the Soviet Union must
have made her yet more weary.

A late friend of mine, married for a few years to Eugene Dennis, Jr.,
and taking vacations with Flynn in the early 1960s, recalled her
stubborn refusal to become another “Mother Bloor,” the motherly,
sentimental senior figure honored by the Party decades earlier. She
did not wish to be sentimentalized. In prison and out, she worked on
her autobiography. Finally published not long after the internal
turmoil in the CP burst out over the Hungarian Revolution and the
revelations of Stalin’s crimes,  it emerged the worst possible
time. All this had come too early for the emerging generation of
radicals, too late for herself, even as she gamely continued to the
end of her life.

 

Menace Of our Time: The Long War Against American Communism
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By Aaron J. Leonard
Rutgers University Press;  244 pages
September 9, 2025
Hardcover:  $27.95
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1978841809
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1978841802

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Aaron Leonard’s _Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American
Communism _helps to illuminate Flynn’s dilemma. It is less a
narrative history volume, in the usual sense, than a bullet-point
series of events, organizations and movements. Mostly, it is
successful, and for that reason, can serve as a kind of Flip Book for
activists seeking a wider understanding of repression. 

When it slides into a sort of history of the Left as such, the book
loses its compass, mostly because the Left as a social movement
several times larger than “the party” had been, especially before
1950  a movement of immigrant or second-generation communities whose
lives and importance disappear in the usual studies of party
leadership and their political positions. Leonard is not to blame, but
his condensed version of the nineteenth and early twentieth century
Lefts make the schematic nature of the narrative more obvious.
Consider only the forced closure of the fraternal International
Workers Order by the state of New York in the early 1950s: something
like 160,000 members of more than a dozen ethnic groups lost their
contact with the Left, but the IWO doesn’t get a mention.

From Chapter Three (1928) onwards,  Leonard finds solid ground.
Here, an insular Communist Party struggling to come of age meets with
a newly sophisticated machine of repression. The mass movements of the
unemployed after the 1929 Wall Street crash soon fade into the great
legal causes of the day, including the Scottsboro Case and their
antithesis, the stories of local and state “Red Squads” seeking to
repress or at least limit the industrial union movement. By 1939, the
Dies Committee is in motion, and faced with the prospect of world war,
FDR rubber stamps J. Edgar Hoover’s sweeping plans of
“investigation” aka repression—and provides the funding to make
them possible.

The author does not quite note that with the burgeoning of
Congressional investigations, an anti-Semitic undertone, especially
directed toward the film industry (later, comic books), comes out into
the open. In this scenario Christian children are corrupted by
powerful influences in the media. Read: Jews, Communists,
near-Communists and social critics all face sweeping searches for
subversion and/or immorality.

I am amazed to find my mentor Archie Green, the
folklorist,  fanatical anti-red (but pro-Wobbly) leader in the
Folksong Club at the University of Illinois, highlighted (pp.71-72) as
a victim of intrusive investigations. His name had turned up in a
single FBI file as someone to be contacted by the Young Communist
League. Close enough! The  author’s use of other examples as
specific cases of repression is often hit-and-miss. 

Take film: he quotes Hollywood moguls as insisting that their films,
carefully examined in process within the studios, could not possibly
be leftwing. The same moguls had good reasons to be deceptive, because
so much Hollywood talent managed to get cinematic work past the
censors: audiences wanted social dramas, anti-authority slapstick
comedies, and even kids’ films with messages plain enough for a five
year old (me in 1949) to understand. The “little guy” (and gal)
was persecuted by the bigshots, as in many Westerns, the town banker
turned out to be the real criminal. “Casablanca” was written by
Reds and so was “High Noon,” not to mention the many other Oscar
winners, and beloved classics. 

Never mind! Leonard captures the deportation efforts against Communist
leaders (often unsuccessful), the encouragement to rightwing violence
(the Peekskill, New York, Riot against Paul Robeson in 1949), the
McCarran Act, the Smith Act and what he properly calls the “culture
of anticommunism.” Amidst an internal crisis, the Communist Party
could not survive and nearly collapsed with the end of the Soviet
Union.

Except that the ghost still lives small scale, with views and
activities that run closely to the Democratic Socialists of America
(my group), true to the Popular Front traditions of pro-labor and
anti-racism, not to mention resistance to bad US foreign policies.
Activists around the CP remained since the 1950s the exceptions who
played,  often quietly, a powerful roles in a variety of social and
cultural movements. The reality of local activity from the 1960s on to
the present has been one of aging, often Jewish veterans of assorted
movements being helpful to the younger generation. In many places and
times, we could not do without them. Sometimes, on some campuses of
the 1970s-80s, young Reds organized for Peacenik Democrats and had the
only campus links to minority movements in town.

These criticisms take us, in any case, far from the main thrust of the
book: an overview that will help activists young and old to look at
the mechanisms of repression in an era past and think about their
refurbishment today. And how the cooperation of leading liberal forces
in the repressive effort has so often, sad to say, offered yet another
obstacle to progressive struggles.##

_[PAUL BUHLE is the author or editor of 53 volumes including histories
of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of
popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is
the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James. He co-edited the outsize
oral history tome Tender Comrades, with Patrick McGilligan, and with
co-author Dave Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen, the biography of
Abraham Lincoln Polonsky. With Mari Jo Buhle and Dan Georgakas, he
co-edited the Encyclopedia of the American Left.
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* Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
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* Communist Party
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* IWW
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* Industrial Workers of the World
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* ACLU
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* repression
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* FBI
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* Red Squads
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* Red Scare
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* Smith Act
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* The Smith Act
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* McCarthyism
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* McCarthy Period
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* Racism
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* HUAC
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* Hollywood Blacklist
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* union-busting
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* Mary Anne Trasciatti
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* Aaron Leonard
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* Scottsboro
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* Scottsboro Nine
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