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

There were many small factories, veritable sweatshops, in the neighborhood, where children went to work as early as the law allowed and even younger. They made paper boxes, pencils, shirts, handkerchiefs (at three dollars a week and bring your own thread). There were larger factories employing adult labor—piano and refrigerator factories, a drug plant, and others. Mothers worked too and many children were left alone. Sometimes babies fell out of windows; one boy was killed when a huge sewer pipe rolled over him; a widow’s only son fell from a swaying pole in a backyard, where he was putting up a clothes line, and was killed. Children lost legs on the railroad and under trucks on the streets. The wife of the comer saloonkeeper made huge kettles of soup for free lunch and sent bowls of it around to the poorest families. People helped each other as best they could. Truly, as some philosopher said, “Poverty is like a strange and terrible country. Only those who have been there can really speak of it with knowledge.”

An unforgettable tragedy of our childhood was the burning of the excursion boat, the General Slocum, in 1904. It had left the Lower East Side loaded with women and children on a Sunday school picnic of the Lutheran Church. When it reached Hellgate, a pot of fat upset and the kitchen took fire. The captain tried to reach a dock at 138th Street. By then the boat was an inferno. A thousand people died as a result of bums or drowning. The local undertakers’ establishments were full of bodies. The Alexander Avenue Police Station was a temporary morgue, where grief-stricken fathers and husbands rushed up from the East Side to claim their dead. It was heart-rending to all of us in the neighborhood, like a disaster in a mining town. Investigation showed that the boat was an old firetrap, with inadequate fire-fighting equipment and life preservers. The captain, who did his best, was sent to prison, which cleared the company of responsibility for negligence. It was considered one of the worst marine disasters up to that time. The lives of working-class mothers and children were sacrificed to greed and corruption.


LIFE IN THE SOUTH BRONX

39

Life in the South Bronx

Childhood casts a glow around some events, even in poverty. It was a great day when we moved one block, from 133rd Street to 511 East 134th Street, on the comer of Brook Avenue. We lived there for 27 years and a whole book could be written around “511,” our lives there and our famous visitors. It was a sunny comer flat facing south, but gaslit and without hot water for many years. We never had steam heat, though electricity was finally installed. In the last few years, at our own expense, we put a small fireplace in the parlor which helped to heat the house. We also installed a porcelain tub. As the old tin tub was being carried out our very near-sighted landlord stood on the stairway. Thinking it was a coffin he stood respectfully bareheaded as it passed.

Our long residence was a record in a neighborhood where for years families got one month’s rent free, paid a few months, stayed on a few more until they were dispossessed, and then moved on, to repeat the same procedure elsewhere. When we moved in there were red carpets on the floor and shiny brass door knobs and mail boxes. But it became more and more dilapidated with the passing years and each new, indifferent landlord.

Our windows looked out over the Harlem River and Manhattan’s skyline. We saw the Hellgate Bridge in construction. We liked the friendly noises of the railroad—the whistles at night, the red glow of the engines, the late night milk trains rumbling in, and sometimes the circus cars from Bridgeport. One night in the midst of a political argument, a crony of Pop’s looked out the window and said: “My God, Flynn, is that an elephant?” Pop replied: “It must be the beer!” But it really was an elephant, out for a stroll from a circus car. We loved to see the fire engines clatter down the hill from Brown Place, the horses’ hoofs striking sparks from the cobblestones. Once there was a terrible fire opposite our house, on Brook Avenue. Three tenement houses were burned out late at night in zero weather. Over 20 families rushed out in their night clothes to escape the flames. They lost everything— their poor furniture and meager clothes. Everyone around opened up their stores and houses, took the victims in, fed and clothed them. They made wash boilers of coffee and piles of sandwiches for the firemen, who were there all night. Hoses froze and had to be thawed out.

In New England we had bought wood by the cord and coal by the ton. But here, in the South Bronx, we bought coal in bushel bags and wood in little bundles which were three for five cents at first. This was sold by Joe, the only Italian in the neighborhood. In the summertime he sold ice, and wine all year round, if he trusted you. There was only one Jewish family for many years, that of Mr. Isaacs, who kept a poolroom. My mother insisted we treat him courteously, though others did not. She approved of his place, which she said he ran like a social hall for the boys of the neighborhood, and it kept them out of trouble. She was firm in teaching us respect for other people’s nationality, language and religion. Most of our neighbors were German and Irish. The Germans owned the stores. The saloons were owned by the Irish. Italian women, with colored handkerchiefs over their heads, shawls over their shoulders, and great circular earrings, would come up from Harlem to the open fields in the Bronx to pick dandelion greens, which they carried back in great bundles on their heads. In the evenings Italian laborers would walk back over the bridge, on the way home from work. The children threw stones at them and shouted “Dago.” As little children in Manchester and Adams we had lived near Poles and French- Canadians, who were called “Polacks” and “Canucks.” My mother would tolerate none of this and would say firmly, “How would you like to be called Micks?”—as the Irish were for so many years.

In the early days of our life in the South Bronx, at the turn of the century, there were no amusements for children, or for adults either. There were no movies—the nickelodeon started later—no radios, no television, not even the old-fashioned phonograph, which also came later and by now is a museum piece. Reading was our sole indoor pastime, especially in the long winter nights. We walked over the Willis Avenue bridge to the East 125th Street library for books. We read everything we could understand and some we did not, including all the traditional books for young people at that time—Louisa Alcott, Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe and Janies Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, George Eliot and the New England poets.

My mother was a kind but reserved woman. She did not allow us to go into other people’s houses; she frowned on over familiarity and gossip. But she was a good neighbor in time of need. She helped the sick,

I attended the grammar school, P.S. No. 9 on 138th Street. It was a decrepit old building then, with toilets in the yard. I do not know what improvements have been made since, if any, but the school is still in use. My teacher in an upper grade was James A. Hamilton who was studying law and later became a New York State official. He fired me with ambition to be a constitutional lawyer and drilled us so thoroughly in the U. S. Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights that I have been defending it ever since. (I have been arrested at least ten times in my lifetime and in every instance the denial of the Bill of Rights has been involved.) I joined a debating society which Mr. Hamilton had organized and took to it like a duck to water. I won a gold metal for proficiency in debating and one in English at graduation in 1904. I also won a silver medal from the New York Times in 1903 for “Merit in an Essay on the City’s History.” I believe that originals of these essays are in the cornerstone of the New York Times building, for posterity to unearth. Typical subjects for debate then were: capital punishment; should women get the vote; and government ownership of the trusts. I remember arguing that women should vote—and strongly believing what I advocated.

Once when I was in a Catholic hospital for a few days in Portland, Oregon, a sister asked me: “Are you a Catholic?” When I replied, “No, I’m not,” she said, “With that name, I’m surprised. Are you an Orangeman?” I answered quickly, “Good heavens! No!” She laughed and said, “You see—you ought to be a Catholic!” I was baptized in the Catholic Church, as were my two sisters and brother, but we were not taken to church for this ceremony by either of our parents. We were belatedly brought there by aunts. Neither of my parents went to church nor did they send us to church. My mother’s grandparents, who brought her up, were not Catholic. My father had been a Catholic

The oft-repeated question, “Why are the Irish more attached to their religion than other Catholics?” received a political answer from him, as follows: In Ireland, Catholicism was closely identified with the national independence struggles of the people. Unlike other Catholic countries, the church in Ireland was not identified with the ruling state and was persecuted by it. Laws were passed at one time under British rule forbidding Catholic schools or places of worship; nor were Catholics allowed to own property or to be elected to office. Priests were forced to say mass secretly out in the hills. No priest was allowed to enter the country. “Adherence to the Catholic Church came to be a point of honor with the common people of Ireland,” as T. H. Jackson remarks in his excellent history, Ireland Her Own. And as the Irish had defended their religion against the attacks of the British government, so they defended it with equal vigor against bigoted attacks here, especially prevalent in New England, such as were made by the APA (American Protective Association).

My sister Kathie and I had one brief experience in Cleveland with a Catholic school and church when our parents decided to send us to a day convent around the comer from where we lived. The public school was far away, across two car tracks. Kathie was five and I was seven. The academy was run by German sisters, strict disciplinarians, and we did not like them. On the occasion of the Bishop’s visit, Kathie declined to make a proper bow, much to my embarrassment! We took a silver dollar each to school every month for tuition. We were relieved to return to a New England public school with neither prayers nor hymn books.

We did not resume going to church in Adams and nothing was said about it. The reason again was a political one, as we later learned, related to a struggle in the late 1880s and early 90s, which affected not only my parents but many practicing Catholics of their generation. It caused a large number to leave the church. This struggle developed around a progressive pro-labor priest in New York City, Dr. Edward McGlynn, called in Gaelic the “Soggarth Aroon,” the good priest.

Father McGlynn first evoked the ire of the hierarchy by championing the public school system and opposing the establishment of pa


NOT A CATHOLIC

43

rochial schools, contending that the church should confine itself to religious teaching only. He championed Irish freedom and espoused the Single Tax theories of Henry George, whose United Labor Party candidacy for Mayor in 1886 he endorsed. He was ordered to cease these political activities and was suspended when he refused. He was finally removed from his parish in 1877 and excommunicated, because he refused to go to Boston. He insisted that the Pope had no jurisdiction over his political rights. He fought valiantly as an American citizen for the right of the Catholic clergy and laity to espouse any political views or party they saw fit. A storm broke of unexpected proportions, involving both Catholics and Protestants who supported Father McGlynn around the country. He organized the Anti-Poverty League to express his social views.

After five years of militant struggle in which the Catholic Church lost tremendously, not only in terms of Peter’s Pence but in prestige, Father McGlynn was declared free of censure by a Papal Legate and restored to his priestly post. He served in Newburgh, New York, for many years. However, large numbers of Catholics, like my father, did not return to the fold. So it was partly on account of what happened to Father McGlynn that we were not brought up Catholic. Father McGlynn remained active in public affairs until his death in 1900. At one time, citizens of Newburgh petitioned him to rim for Mayor. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery in Brooklyn, “consecrated ground,” and there is a statue to him in non-sectarian Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where LaGuardia and Marcantonio are buried. The principle he fought for is so important that the famous struggle of Father McGlynn for civil and political rights free from ecclesiastical domination is part of American history and should not be forgotten.

This question, “Why are you not Catholic?” comes up at regular intervals, undoubtedly because of my Irish name. Of course not all Irish are Catholic. Charles Stuart Parnell, the great Irish leader, was not. Yet people do not find it easy to understand that one can be simply nonreligious. When my mother was 78 years old she was in the Lebanon Hospital in the Bronx, which is a Jewish hospital. The young woman checking her in asked me: “What is your mother’s religion?” When I replied, “She has none,” she answered impatiently: “That’s impossible—an old lady like that,” as if I were libeling my mother. “Why don’t you ask her?” I suggested, which she did. She asked, as my mother lay on the examining table: “What’s your religion, Mrs.


44

CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH

Flynn?” Mama opened her eyes and smiled. “I haven’t any, my dear,” she said gently. Later, when her sister insisted she should read some religious material, Mama asked us to bring her a book she had been reading at home, The Story of Buddha and Buddhism. She had just finished The Story of Conf ucius.

Sometimes, however, one finds discernment in unexpected places. An Irish woman officer in the Women’s House of Detention made this observation to me on the subject of religion: “I guess Socialism has always been your religion.” And, in a certain sense, this is true. I found the Socialist movement at a very young and impressionable age. To me it was the creed of the brotherhood of man or “to do on earth as it is in Heaven,” and I was an intense believer in socialism during my whole life.

We were conditioned in our family to accept socialist thinking long before we came in contact with socialism as an organized movement. My father had voted for Eugene V. Debs as the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1900. We knew our father was opposed to the “two old parties,” as he called them over 50 years ago. He talked about the Populist and Greenback parties and boasted how in his youth, in the state of Maine, they had elected a labor Congressman, Tom Murch. The granite workers were employed at that time on government contracts, quarrying out paving slabs and the ugly gray stone blocks which went into all the federal buildings of that day—post offices, courthouses, jails and public offices. Fortunately, many were torn down and replaced under the Public Works Administration of the New Deal days.

The islands off the coast of Maine—Hurricane, Fox and Dix— were rich in granite and were privately owned. The government paid 15 per cent to the owners on all the stone taken out and gave them the right to run the stores on the islands and to collect rents on all the houses. The pay was $2.50 a day for the skilled men and $1 for others. They worked ten hours a day, although an Act of Congress in 1868 had declared an eight-hour day for all laboring men on government contracts. Murch was elected to press the claims of the men for the extra pay due for the two hours.

One of my first subjects in the public school debating society was “Should the Government Own the Coal Mines?” I enthusiastically

This debate was my first approach to the subject of public ownership of natural resources and industries. It appealed to me. I had begun to feel very strongly that in a rich and fertile country like ours there was no excuse for poverty, unemployment, child labor and long strikes. My mother used to recite a poem, by Whittier I believe, which expressed our hatred of poverty. It ran something like this:

When Earth produces free and fair the golden waving corn,

And golden fruits perfume the air and fleecy flocks are shorn,

Yet thousands cry with aching head the never-ending song,

“We starve! We die! Oh give us bread!”

There must be something wrong!

It was this “something wrong” I was bound to search out.

Needless to say, I was a terribly serious child for my years, the oldest of a poor family, sharing the miseries of the parents. When a family suffers poverty, when children hear their mother and even their father weep sometimes from despair over how to feed their children, when all around are other suffering families—children cannot be light-hearted and happy. We saw “some way out” in the struggles of the labor movement and rejoiced in them.

The subject of labor struggles was not new in our household. We had heard in our very early childhood of the so-called Molly Maguires, 17 young Irish-American miners who had been executed in the 1870s in the anthracite area, fpr trying to organize a union, and of how they were framed up by a Pinkerton detective, James McParlan. An

In our household the children listened in on everything. We knew Papa had met a Socialist, a draftsman, who worked with him and who ran for alderman on a Socialist ticket in Massachusetts. Pop had written a joking poem about how “We’ll get free soup and plenty beer, when Fronck is alderman!” We heard heated debates over many a “growler” of beer (ten cents in those days) on politics, labor, religion and sports. Prize fights were also a daily subject with my cousins and my father—John L. Sullivan, Sharkey, Fitzsimmons, Corbett were favorites. Ideas were our meat and drink, sometimes a substitute for both. It is not strange, therefore, that in such a household our minds were fertile fields for socialism, when the seeds finally came.

The seeds did come in a very simple way. Throwaway cards were distributed from door to door in our neighborhood, announcing a Socialist Sunday night forum, not too far away, at the old Metropolis Theatre building at 142nd Street and Third Avenue. My father and I attended regularly. When he was away my mother and I went. They were arranged by the local Socialists, who were predominantly German, in an effort to attract English-speaking people. They put forth the best American Socialist speakers they could procure. I recall hearing Elsa Barker, a noted poet—who died while I was writing this— Leonard Abbott, Ben Hanford, John Chase, who had been Socialist mayor of Haverhill, Massachusetts, Algernon Lee and others. We brought home the Socialist weekly paper of that day, The Worker, and as many pamphlets as we could afford, and read them avidly. We were surprised to leam how many Socialists had been elected to city offices around the country and how strong the movement was internationally. Our horizons broadened, beyond the South Bronx and the