ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN
(aka the Rebel Girl)

Rabble Rouser, Saboteur, Labor LeaderFlynn was born in New Hampshire in 1890 into a politically radical Irish family, active in union, anti-colonial, and socialist struggles. They thought however, that at 17 she was to young to travel to Chicago and help found the IWW(Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies). She went anyway, and so in 1907 became a labor organizer. She turned out to be an amazing public speaker, and she stirred thousands of workers in IWW free speech campaigns, defense campaigns, and above all in strikes. She, along with Joe Ettor, Big Bill Haywood, and Carlo Tresca, led two of America’s largest strikes, the textile mill strikes in Lawrence (1912) and Paterson (1913), both in Massachusetts.

Her leadership helped bring the Lawrence strike, after a long and bloody campaign, to a stunning victory. Textile workers were among the lowest paid in the country, and other unions didn’t want them because they were all “foreigners”. The fact that almost all of them were recent immigrants and spoke no English did make them a difficult force to organize. In fact the strikers spoke 22 different major languages, and were grouped into unions of their countrymen, who then elected representatives to the strike committee. Although not everyone could understand all of the words to the strike songs, the whole crowd could sing one chorus, written by a worker:

Do you like Mr. Boss? No, No, No
Do you like Miss Flynn? Yes, Yes, Yes
The IWW-Hurray, Hurray

The Lawrence Strike was largely controlled by strong women strikers, who first coined the phrase “We want bread, and roses too!” It is estimated that 438,000 textile workers received raises as a result of the strike, and achieved for the first time some control over their destiny. The Paterson strike was broken due to intense violence against and murder of the strikers, as well as mass imprisonment, and was not an immediate success. It did, though, create the framework for future victory.

In 1915 Flynn wrote the most infamous IWW pamphlet of all, “SABOTAGE”, in which she calls for and justifies using on the job work slow downs, machine breaking, and deliberate inefficiency. If practised simultaneously by all of the union workers on the job, a company can be crippled without the workers having to go out on strike and lose their pay. When the boss accedes their demands, suddenly everything works right again. This tactic was practised widely and with great success by the IWW.

IWW martyr Joe Hill was obsessed with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and wrote for her the ballad “The Rebel Girl” from his death row cell in Utah, shortly before his execution. The nickname stuck.

In 1920 Flynn helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union. She was both comrade and lover of the anarchist Carlo Tresca through much of the decade before 1925. Flynn later joined and helped to lead the Communist Party. During the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950’s she served twenty-eight months in prison because of her political beliefs. Her writings include “The Rebel Girl” (autobiography published in1973), and “My Life as a Political Prisoner”(1963). She died in 1964, and is buried in Waldheim cemetery in Chicago, next to the Haymarket Square Martyr’s Monument.