Portside

 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
By Mary Anne Trasciatti
Rutgers University Press; 384 pages
June 17, 2025
Hardcover:  $34.95
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1978817576
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1978817579
 

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
By Aaron J. Leonard
Rutgers University Press;  244 pages
September 9, 2025
Hardcover:  $27.95
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1978841809
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1978841802

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.]