World: End of the Rebel Girl

Yes, her hands may he hardened from labor

And her dress not he very fine

But a heart in her bosom is beating

That is true to her class and her kind.

Joe Hill—The Rebel Girl

The words of this old Wobbly song were recited last week in Moscow’s Hall of Columns, where the body of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn lay in state. Chairman of the feeble U.S. Communist Party, she is the third foreign Red leader to die in the Soviet Union in the last two months, being preceded by France’s Maurice Thorez and Italy’s Palmiro Togliatti.

Diaphragm Power. Elizabeth Flynn came young to radicalism. The daughter of an Irish nationalist from Galway. she was born in Concord, N.H., in 1890, educated in Bronx schools, and became a Socialist at 15 under her mother’s maiden name of Gurley. A slim, blue-eyed girl with soft brown hair who wore a flaming red tie around her shirtwaist collar, she demanded among other things that all children be supported by the Government, thus freeing women of dependence on men.

She was soon famous as the “girl orator” of the Wobblies, the militant, native-grown Industrial Workers of the World, and considered herself as able a spellbinder as William Jennings Bryan. “I agitate a listener.” she said. “I know how to get the power out of my diaphragm instead of my vocal cords, and I’m happy to be free to give Capitalism hell.” Producer David Belasco tried to convince her that she should become an actress, Novelist Theodore Dreiser called her the “East Side Joan of Arc,” and the famed Wobbly poet, Joe Hill, dedicated The Rebel Girl to her during the years when she raced from coast to coast battling beside strikers in the mines of the West and the textile mills of the East.

Reducing Term. Elizabeth was married briefly to a Wobbly organizer, and carried on a long and tempestuous affair with the colorful Italian anarchist.

Carlo Tresca, of whom it was said that the first word he learned in English was “guilty.” In 1937 she dismayed her Socialist friends by joining the Communist Party, and her activity in strikes from coast to coast landed her in jail a dozen times. She began her longest prison term in 1955 when she was convicted with other U.S. Communist leaders un der the Smith Act on the charge of conspiring to overthrow the government and spent 28 months at the Women’s Federal Reformatory at Alderson, W. Va. By then, Elizabeth was no longer a slim and fiery girl but a plump and matronly woman. Freed in 1957, she said, “I had no reason to reform, repent or recant, so I just reduced.”

Despite her high party posts, it is doubtful that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had much influence on policy, for she was an agitator and orator rather than a Marxist dialectician or thinker. She wrote a chattily reminiscent column in the Daily Worker called “The Life of the Party,” and always proved able to follow obediently every twist and turn of the party line. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the act denying passports to Communists, 74-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was free to travel to the Soviet Union as a guest of the Kremlin, and there to die of a clot in the lung artery.

Such Red veterans as Spain’s exiled Dolores Ibarruri—the Civil War’s La Pasionaria—rose to eulogize the fallen comrade, and Nina Khrushchev stoutly joined the pallbearers in the full state funeral in Red Square. Nikita himself stood solemnly in the honor guard just before the body was cremated, and a band played the Internationale as the urn of ashes was placed briefly at the foot of the Kremlin wall, near the spot where a portion of I.W.W. Founder Big Bill Haywood’s ashes are buried. In due course, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s ashes will be flown to the U.S. and buried in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery beside the remains of many old comrades (including the other part of Big Bill) from the Wobblies and the Communist Party.