Elizabeth Gurley Flynn ought to be a household name, given the decades she spent challenging an assortment of powerful forces, including big business, the police, politicians, and judges in her devotion to fighting for a better society. Sadly, she is not. Mary Anne Trasciatti’s new, meticulously researched book about this political radical, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution, may help change that.
Flynn’s significance, after all, is beyond question. She was a type of leftist that, sadly, no longer exists. She crisscrossed the nation and was active in numerous leftist organizations throughout her rich life, including the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Workers Defense League, the International Labor Defense, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Fascist Alliance of North America, the American Communist Party (CPUSA), and the Women’s International Democratic Federation. She marched on picket lines, championed the rights of political prisoners, hobnobbed with a host of leftist luminaries, and was featured in prominent magazines like the Nation.
For much of her life, she saw the fundamental agent for social change as the working class. But she also believed in America’s core political institutions.
In Trasciatti’s interpretation, Flynn engaged in class struggles with the US constitution — which Flynn believed protected basic civil liberties — on her mind. Foundational to Flynn’s worldview, according to Trasciatti, were the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. As Trasciatti explains, Flynn was an advocate of “the American civil liberties movement, an ardent and active defender of the right to hold and express one’s own political views and to associate with like-minded people in peaceful pursuit of economic, social, and political change.” She tested these rights throughout her long life.
Flynn, whether speaking on picket lines or defending herself or others in courtrooms,…
Auteur: Chad Pearson
