Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Duluth, Minnesota 1908 4- ir + £ jL 5K«a p&ftt'Ss ILL sw*UH»

After I had been home a few months, Jack came to New York to see if I would change my mind. He talked to my father who called me into the living room to discuss it. I was just 20 then, but I was determined in my refusal to live with him. Finally my father, in some embarrassment, said: “But surely you can give the man some reason!” All I could say, and it seemed enough to me, was: “I don’t love him any more. Besides, he bores me!” It was the cruelty of youth, yet the best I could do to explain. My father tried not to smile but I felt he understood.

Jones was a good man, but erratic. His father had been a drunkard, and Jack was so set against drink that when a dentist in Missoula told me to take some whiskey after a tooth was pulled he was highly indignant. When Fred was a baby and ill, a local doctor prescribed a few drops of whiskey. Jones cried and threatened to put the baby in a Masonic home if it happened again. True, I was high-spirited and headstrong and not ready to attempt to adjust myself to another person. But it was especially difficult with him. His hobby was “system.” He nearly drove me crazy in Chicago with his wheels and charts on the IWW and a complicated plan he worked out to revise the calendar. Foster, who was a personal friend of his, told me years later: “I always felt sorry for Jones and blamed you for leaving him until I lived with him myself. Then I understood.” I felt better, though I also felt the fault was mine to have agreed to marry so young. My parents felt guilty for allowing me to go on the trip in 1907. But I was now back home again and happy to be there, with my two sisters and brother. We were a close-knit family.

My son, Fred, boasted as he grew up that he had been in jail twice for free speech before he was bom—in Missoula and in Spokane.

The summer of 1910 was extremely hot and my friends were concerned about me and my baby after the ordeal of Spokane. Dr. Strunsky had taken care of me during childbirth. His sister was Anna Strunsky Walling, whose husband was reputed to be a “millionaire Socialist.” So was J. G. Phelps Stokes, recently married to Rose Pastor, a beautiful and talented working woman from the East Side of New York. There had been much publicity about this romantic marriage of a well-to-do Christian settlement worker and a Jewish cigarmaker, and quite a furor in orthodox Jewish circles. It antedated a similar fuss made by the upstart Irish capitalist, Mackay, when his lovely daughter married the Jewish songwriter, Irving Berlin. Religious mixed marriages are accepted sufficiently today that such bitterness would be hard to understand if it did not still exist in relation to interracial marriages. But that will pass, in time.

The Stokes family lived on an island in Long Island Sound, off Stamford, Connecticut, called Caritas Island. Another family, the writer Miriam Finn and Leroy Scott, lived there too. Mrs. Stokes invited me to spend the summer. I had a large downstairs room and bath all to myself, next to the spacious library. I sat outdoors in the sun reading a great deal with the baby asleep in a basket. Many interesting people came there. I recall Horace Traubel and Shaemus O’Sheel, then a budding young poet. There I first met Ella Reeve Bloor, who was the Socialist Party organizer for Connecticut.

Ella Reeve Bloor was in her forties when I met her in 1910. She was strong and vigorous and moved as if she were flying rather than walking. She had dark hair, done up very simply in a little knot on top of her head, and very bright, snapping black eyes. I remembered she wore a lace collar pinned with a brooch. All here life Ella was a dressy little lady and loved jewelry. She was animated and vivacious. I thought she resembled a busy little brown bird. Her voice was clear and resonant and could be heard in the largest hall or on the noisiest street corner.

She was then the mother of six living children; two more had died in childhood. She was divorced from her first husband, Lucian Ware,


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who remained her friend and took care of their four children at Arden, Delaware, and sometimes the other two as well. She had the two youngest children of her second marriage, Dick and Carl, with her in Connecticut. She described to me the battle she had with the “conservatives” of the Socialist Party there in 1905, when she was first proposed as organizer. Two Catholic Socialists objected on the ground she was “a divorced woman.” Some objected simply because she was a woman. But with the tremendous persistence for which Ella was noted, she moved into the state anyhow and worked unofficially, until she wore down the opposition. They finally decided she was “a good woman” (women were either “good” or “bad” in those days) and in 1908 they elected her their organizer.

She helped support her family by writing for the Waterbury American until an article against child labor caused her to lose her job. She told me how Emmeline Pankhurst, the militant British suffragette, had come to Connecticut to speak and had criticized her for lending her energies to “a man’s party.” Ella retorted she was working hard through that party to help get suffrage in that state, cooperating with Mrs. Hepburn who headed the movement—the mother of Katherine Hepburn, the actress. I liked and admired this spirited and peppery little Socialist agitator, who in later years became one of my dearest friends and closest co-workers, although I had only a short visit with her at that time. It took courage in those days to bamstom for socialism in front of factories, out among the farmers, in every nook and cranny of a New England state, as she did.

While I had been away in the West, several large strike struggles had taken place in the East. One, in 1909, was centered in New York’s East Side, involved 20,000 waistmakers and was called “the girls’ strike.” Sixty per cent in the trade were women and 70 per cent between 16 and 25 years old. They worked 56 hours a week in seasonal work, speeded up in dirty firetraps known as “sweat shops.” “Learners” wages were $3 to $6 per week. The highest paid to operators was $18. The strike started in two shops, one the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Company. A meeting was held at Cooper Union with union officials and prominent sympathizers as speakers, cautiously discussing if a general strike was possible. The overflow filled all the halls in the vi

The strike lasted two months. The picket lines were broken up again and again by the police. Over 1,000 strikers were arrested. Twenty-two young girls were sent to Blackwell’s Island Workhouse, a horrible, filthy place. The Women’s Trade Union League and the suffrage organizations came to the aid of the strikers. Five hundred school teachers, led by Henrietta Rodman, president of The Teachers’ Association (there was no union then), met at the New Amsterdam Theatre to pledge aid to the strikers. Mary Dreier, then President of the Women’s Trade Union League, was arrested on the picket line. A meeting to protest against police brutality was held at the Hippodrome; Dr. John Howard Melish was chairman. A similar meeting at Carnegie Hall was addressed by Rabbi Stephen Wise.

Young girls told at these meetings of violence and insults by the police and of how the prostitutes in jail jeered at their low wages and told them they could do much better at their trade. When the strike started, there were two union shops. When it ended, there were over 300 union shops, with shorter hours and more pay. This heroic struggle of women laid a firm base for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In 1910 over 45,000 men and women were out in a general strike. Yet it took years for one woman to be elected to their executive board. It has always been a male-run organization, with the biggest local unions of women in existence.

Another hard-fought IWW strike struggle in the East took place while I was in the West. It started in July 1909, and involved 8,000 workers in the Pressed Steel Car Company plant at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. There were 16 nationalities employed mostly as unskilled workers at the customary long hours and low wages. It was hard and dangerous work and there were many accidents. This strike lasted eleven weeks.

Picket lines were brutally charged by the state constabulary known as the Coal and Iron Police, whom the strikers called “Cossacks.” When one striker was killed, the strikers drove the constabulary into the plants. Several were killed on both sides in the battle that ensued and 50 were wounded. But the fight-back mood of the strikers brought


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an end to further violence against them. At the end of the strike all strikebreakers were fired. All employees became members of the IWW.

I do not know the exact economic gains won at that time. But Bill Haywood wrote: “It was the only strike of the lower paid workers that had ever been won against the Steel Trust.” Vincent St. John, then secretary-treasurer of the IWW, jubilantly wired all over the country that it was a complete victory. A Spokane paper headlined “Industrial Workers Rule at McKees Rocks.” It was the first big step toward the IWW spreading eastward. It helped break ground for the great steel strike led by Foster just ten years later, in 1919.

That fall James Connolly came to say goodbye to our family. He had been called back to Ireland and was glad to go. He said he was not sorry he had come to America and not sorry to leave. Movements were on foot to organize industrial unions in Ireland. We sat and talked quite a while. The baby was very fretful that day. Connolly, who was well experienced with babies, having had seven, took the baby from me, laid him face down across his knees and patted his back until he burped soundly and then went to sleep. We all felt very sorry to see Connolly go. His family left shortly afterward—the older children not too willingly. This was the last time I saw this good friend.

In the winter of 1910-11, after my baby had been weaned, I began to do occasional speaking again. My father was out of work and we were very hard up. I had refused to take any money from my husband, if I could possibly help it. I became involved in a strike in Brooklyn, and the IWW paid me a part-time wage for that, which helped a great deal. This was an IWW shoeworkers’ strike of highly skilled craftsmen, who did custom work on made-to-order shoes for the rich, which sold for as high as $75 a pair. They were dissatisfied with the terms the Boot and Shoe Workers Union of the AFL had made with their employers. Some of them received as little as $10 a week, they were speeded up, and the work was seasonal. Many were Italians. They sent for Joseph J. Ettor, who was fast emerging on the labor scene as an excellent organizer. The strike lasted four months and ended with


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some concessions by the employers and the AFL union. I spoke at their mass meetings two and three times a week.

One striker, Vincent Buccafori, was sentenced to ten years in prison as a result of defending his life against the murderous attack of a foreman in the Dodd factory. I spoke around the city for his defense, taking his wife and two children to some gatherings. On his behalf I appealed to the May Day Conference at the Labor Temple on East 84th Street on April 7, 1911. I went with his wife to visit him in Sing Sing, which was the first of my many visits to grim prisons where labor and political prisoners were incarcerated. He was released a few years later. The Buccafori case was my first direct experience in labor defense work, which later became my specialty.

In the midst of this shoeworkers’ strike, Haywood returned from his European trip. He had not spoken under IWW auspices anywhere since his release from jail. But the Socialist Party official leadership was becoming increasingly cool to him because of his forthright stand on war at the Socialist International Congress, his attacks upon the AFL leadership and craft unionism and his espousal of industrial unionism. Many famous Socialists of that day had attended the 1910 gathering of the Second International, including Jean Jaures from France, Rosa Luxemburg from Germany, Keir Hardie and Ramsey McDonald of England, and Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit from the United States. It was here that Lenin led the “Lefts” in the Congress to take a strong position against war. The Congress decided that all Socialists in parliament should vote against war credits and carry on propaganda that workers must not kill one another in a capitalist war for markets, to increase profits. When war actually came in 1914, the German, French, Belgian and British Socialists betrayed this resolution and the Socialist International was split asunder.

The Socialist Party had arranged no welcome meeting for Haywood on his return. He planned to make a nation-wide tour under the auspices of the International Socialist Review, an independent left-wing magazine, published by Charles H. Kerr Company in Chicago. The price of admission was a subscription to the monthly and its circulation soared.

Haywood needed to earn more than most of us at that time. His wife was a permanently paralyzed invalid in a wheel chair and he had two young daughters. He had to hire a nurse and housekeeper in his


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home while he was away. St. John had apparently contacted Haywood While he was abroad and suggested that his first return appearance be under IWW auspices, which Haywood accepted. It was an enthusiastic overflow meeting at Yorkville Casino in New York. The rank and file of both the Socialist Party and IWW as well as many other workers were there to greet him. I felt honored indeed to be chairman of this meeting, especially when he said: “I would rather speak for the IWW with Gurley Flynn on one side of me and Joe Ettor on the other than from a place between Sam Gompers and some other Civic Federation union official.” (The National Civic Federation was an organization set up in 1900 by the employers to “bring about better relations between capital and labor.” Senator Mark Hanna was its chairman. He was the owner of big coal companies, street railways, and other industrial holdings. Samuel Gompers was its vice-chairman. John Mitchell, leader of the United Mine Workers, was forced to resign from this organization by action of a union convention, which rejected its fake brotherhood of capital and labor in the midst of antiunion drives, open shops, injunctions, violence against strikers in the very plants and mines of these cooing vultures of capitalism.)

This was my first personal contact with this heroic giant of the American working class, William D. Haywood. He was over six feet, a big man, strong and vigorous. He was then 42 years of age. He had lost the sight of one eye, as a child, which gave him a misleading sinister appearance. He was bom in Salt Lake City. At the age of nine he worked on a farm, and went into the mines in Nevada at the age of fifteen. He joined the Western Federation of Miners in 1896 at 25, when its organizer came to Silver City, Idaho, where he was then working. He became president of the local union. When he was 31, he became secretary-treasurer of the Western Federation of Miners, with its headquarters in Denver, Colorado.

In the succeeding eleven years he had shown bold leadership and courage in the epic struggles of that organization, had been framed and tried for his life and had been defended by the American working class. His speech was like a sledge-hammer blow, simple and direct— on the class struggle and the necessity for the widest possible political and industrial unity along class lines. He was the living symbol of that unity. When he walked through the streets of New York, he towered over other men. Workers would turn to look at him and say: “Why,


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that’s Bill Haywood!” After this meeting, I was associated with Bill Haywood for years—and in some of the great strikes in the East.

A few weeks later, in the Summer of 1911, I had the privilege of meeting the other great Socialist leader of that generation. I made a speaking trip to the anthracite area around Pottsville at the invitation of a local Socialist barber, Con Foley, who wanted me to speak to a group of women and girls on strike in nearby Minersville. They were employed by the Coombe Garment Company making underwear, and were resisting a wage cut of eight cents to ten cents per dozen garments. Their menfolk were miners who gave their hall for a meeting. Just as I started speaking the fire whistle on the roof of the factory let out with a long and piercing series of blasts.

One morning when I came into Foley’s barber shop a tall thin man rose out of one of the chairs and took both my hands in his. It was Eugene V. Debs. He was speaking that night in nearby Shamokin and had dropped in to see us. The word was spread in Minersville: “Debs will speak!” It was a unique experience to see this great orator of the people, who filled main auditoriums in all cities of the country, standing on an old wagon for a platform in a small town that afternoon. He was surrounded by the miners in their working clothes, begrimed as they came from work, the enthusiastic and determined women strikers, and the children just out of school, who gazed at him spellbound. I had heard Debs speak once in New York with Daniel De Leon at one of the first IWW meetings. I heard him many times after that. But that little mining town audience inspired him to eloquence such as I had never heard. His burning rage at the wrongs they suffered, his praise for their fighting spirt, his scorn for the mining companies and those “cockroach” small-shop capitalists who exploit workingmen and their families in these forlorn and isolated places, his contempt for the Coal and Iron Constabulary, patrolling the main street as he spoke—are unforgettable memories of the first time I met Debs. Later, Con Foley was arrested, charged with inciting to riot, but it caused such protest that the company gave in and the charge was dismissed, as the girls returned to work, gaining higher wages.

Bom in Indiana in 1855, Debs was then 56 years old—at the zenith of his power as a “tribune of the people.” He, too, had gone to work at the early age of 15, because of poverty. He became a railroad worker, was a brakeman at 19, and at 25 was secretary-treasurer of the