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

When I was just past my 15th birthday, searching for a solution to poverty, my mother suggested I read Looking Backward by a Massachusetts journalist, Edward Bellamy. It was about the year 2000 in a socialist America. The author, who is portrayed as a sufferer from insomnia, had taken a sleeping potion in 1887 and had gone to rest in an underground soundproof chamber of his house in Boston. The house was burned down, the one servant had died in the fire and it was assumed the young man had also perished. He lay there in a trancelike sleep for 113 years, to awaken in a new world when his resting place was unearthed by builders. The book portrayed an ideal society, due to the abolition of banks, landlords and capitalists. It was an imaginative description of what a socialist America could be like, with collective ownership of all natural resources and industries and full utilization of machinery, technical knowledge and the capacities of her people. It appealed to me as practical and feasible. It still does in its basic principles—though the year 2000 is now only 46 years away and socialism should be that much nearer at least, in fact “just around the comer.”

This book of Bellamy’s pictured an American society built on the principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Some of it seemed quite fantastic then, such as pushing buttons in the wall and hearing plays and operas right in the room, but children can do it today with TV sets. This socialist romance of the 19th century was read and discussed by millions of people throughout the world. It was translated into German, French, Russian, Italian, Arabic and Bulgarian. Bellamy Clubs were formed around the country. My mother had belonged to one, in Concord, New Hampshire. The book first popularized the idea of socialism in this country. It was a biting criticism of capitalism, which hit home to many Americans and with which they agreed in the days of rising monopolies.

Naturally, it created much debate. One of my anarchist friends labeled it as “too mechanical a world” and tried to counteract it by giving me another Utopian story, News from Nowhere by William Mor

After graduation from grammar school, our debating society continued outside as the Hamilton Literary Society. We met weekly during 1905 at the home of a Dr. Cantor on East 143rd Street and were supervised by Joseph Weinstein, a college student, later a school teacher. Many newcomers from other schools joined, most of whom were Jewish. This was my first intimate contact with Jewish people, and I liked them very much. I found them idealistic and progressive. Their mental curiosity and intellectual acuteness were stimulating. Our discussions encompassed every possible social problem. I began to realize that the Irish were not the only national group that had suffered persecution because of their religion, language and culture. I was influenced greatly in my thinking at the time by a youth in high school I met at this club. He was Fred Robinson, the son of Dr. William J. Robinson who edited an unorthodox trail blazer on medicine called The Critic and Guide. Dr. Robinson was one of several doctors who were pioneer advocates of birth control, long before Mrs. Margaret Sanger became its chief spokesman.

Fred used to walk me home the nine blocks after our meetings. He was my first boy friend, though he never as much as held my hand. He talked about Walt Whitman, Jack London, Emma Goldman, and other people of whom I had never heard. He wrote me letters full of ideas of “social significance,” enclosing clippings and poems. Fred was more of an anarchist than a socialist, I believe, though the words were loose


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ly interchanged in those days. Albert Parsons, for instance, the martyred leader of the eight-hour movement in thel880s, had called himself a socialist and an anarchist and had run for office on a union labor ticket.

Fred Robinson wanted me to see and meet Emma Goldman. She had been persecuted considerably after the death of President McKinley, and was living quietly then as E. G. Smith, running a hairdressing establishment. But her reputation was as a fiery agitator, who had served a sentence on Blackwell’s Island, and as the companion of Alexander Berkman who was still in prison in Pennsylvania for the attempted shooting of Henry Frick during the Homestead strike. What type of woman I expected to meet would be hard to say—an Amazon, undoubtedly. I afterward thought of my own surprise on this occasion, when later people would say on first meeting me: “Oh! We expected a different sort of woman—large and redheaded!”

Finally Fred brought me to a little, rather stout woman, with mild blue eyes, lovely blonde hair, dressed very plainly, with a funny little flat hat and a flower cocked on one side of it. She greeted me kindly but with the absent-minded manner of a public speaker who meets countless people. Later I heard her speak at the Harlem Liberal Alliance and was surprised at the force, eloquence and fire that poured from this mild-mannered, motherly sort of woman. Her views on subjects like birth control, prison reform, marriage and love, and the social significance of modern drama would seem quite mild today. Then they were considered dangerously radical, her meetings were broken up and she was arrested in many cities, particularly after the Berkman arrest in Pittsburgh and again after the assassination of President McKinley by a Polish anarchist. She spoke of Berkman, soon to be released from prison, and said dramatically: “We will take up his work right where he left off!” I thought that boded no good for old Frick! As long as Emma Goldman spoke to-poor people in the small halls with sawdust on the floor there was an agitational vibrance in her speeches. Later, with an insufferable buffoon, Dr. Ben Reitman, as her manager, she blossomed into a lecturer, the idol of middle-class liberals, and the crowds grew. He used to boast of the “number of cars” outside the hall, when cars were scarce and expensive. But she lost her dynamic quality as an agitator on these occasions and became quite prosaic.

I went to a meeting of welcome to Berkman and you can judge

After all, Berkman had just been released from the Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary in 1905, after serving 13 years. During the Homestead steel strike in 1892, outraged by the brutal murder of strikers, he had made an attempt on the life of Henry Frick, manager of the Carnegie Steel Works. Berkman was a youth who had come, from Russia only five years before and was under the influence of the Nihilists who believed in assassination of all tyrants, from the tsar down. He tells in his book, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, how he met a steel striker in the jail who thought Berkman had “some business trouble” with Frick, because he had gained access to him with an employment agency card. On this basis, he was sympathetic with him. But when Berkman eagerly tried to explain that he had committed the act from sympathy with the strikers, that it was an act of protest for them, the worker indignantly rejected the idea and said it would only hurt them. “The steel workers defended their homes and their families against invaders. But they will have nothing to do with anarchists,” he said. “It’s none of your business, you didn’t belong to the Homestead

My parents did not object to the debating society or to my friendship with Fred Robinson. But they were alarmed at my fraternizing with the anarchists and the number of pamphlets from that source I was reading. They certainly did not approve of the free love theories of Emma Goldman, upon which she gave lectures which drew large audiences of young people. They probably discussed the problem with some Socialists at the meetings we attended. Someone who took a special interest in my questions at the forums suggested that I read the publications of the Charles H. Kerr Company of Chicago and gave me for a starter the Communist Manifesto. I had not yet read anything by Marx or Engels. They did not have a wide circulation in English. It was part of a “Standard Socialist Series,” which this company started in 1900.

The Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was written in 1848. I read it first in 1906. It was introduced as “evidence” of a criminal conspiracy against me and my co-defendants at the Foley Square trial in New York under the Smith Act in 1952. I also read in that long ago day, nearly a half century ago, Socialism—Utopian and Scientific and the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, both by Engels, and the pamphlets Value, Price and Profit and Wage- Labor and Capital by Marx. The Kerr company issued the first volume of Capital in 1906, the remaining two volumes in 1909. All of these books and pamphlets are today not only labeled “subversive” but are introduced by stool pigeons in trial after trial as Smith Act evidence, to show that we are “foreign agents” and advocate the violent overthrow of government. In 1906 they were considered part of an education by all progressive-minded Americans, as Wendell Willkie remarked to the U. S. Supreme Court.

When I began to accumulate scientific socialist literature my father seized upon it. He read everything by Marx and Engels he could lay his hands on. His knowledge of mathematics helped him to master them easily. He read them aloud to his family. He talked and argued about them with anyone who would listen—in the saloon, in the park, on the job. Scientific socialism came as a balm to my father’s spirit. It exposed the capitalist system in all its ugly naked greed, and its indifference to human welfare. It showed how it enriched the few and impoverished the masses of people. It explained what caused depressions, “bad times,” economic crises.

First Speech, 1906

In 1906 the Bronx Socialist Forum, which our family attended regularly, closed. We shifted our allegiance to the Harlem Socialist Club, at 250 West 125th Street. In good weather, open-air meetings were held on the comers of 7th Avenue and 125th Street—with women speaking for suffrage—and Socialist meetings arranged by this club. In winter the Socialist meetings were held in their headquarters, up two flights of stairs. We used to walk over from the South Bronx—carfares for a whole family were more than we could afford. Events took a sudden turn during my second year in Morris High School. I had lost a few months in school during that winter due to an infected jaw from an abscessed tooth. During that period I had studied two more books, which helped to catapult me into socialist activities. One was the Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft; the other was Women and Socialism by August Bebel. (Forty-six years later in 1951 this book was listed as a Government’s exhibit in Federal Judge Dimock’s court in a trial under the Smith Act. It is now out of print, practically a collector’s item.)

Someone at the Harlem Socialist Club, hearing of my debating experience and knowing of my reading and intense interest in socialism, asked me to make a speech. My father was not much impressed with the idea. He thought they should have asked him to expound Marxism, on which he now considered himself an expert. I’m afraid my father would be labelled a “male-supremacist” these days. Once I stood up at a meeting and asked the speaker a question. He frowned upon such a performance. Couldn’t I have asked him to explain on our way home? But my mother encouraged me and I accepted the offer to speak. I tried to select a subject upon which my father would not interfere too much, something he did not consider too important. It was “What Socialism Will Do For Women.”

Wednesday, January 31, 1906, is a date engraved on my memory,


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the occasion of my first public speech. It was a small place, holding not more than 75 people, but like the Mayflower, legends grew around it. That little boat would have rivalled the gigantic Queen Mary if she had carried all the ancestors now claimed as passengers. And my little hall would have been of Carnegie Hall proportions to accommodate all who have told me, “I heard your first speech!” I do recall some of those present, who included Edward F. Cassidy and his wife Alice. He was an official for many years of Typographical Union No. 5 and a Socialist candidate for mayor. There was a fussy old man, E. S. Eger- ton, who had charge of a Fall River Day Line Pier in the daytime and these lectures at night. There was also a young Chinese Socialist, who later returned to China, and a young Negro Socialist, the first I had met, Frank Crosswaithe. There was a thin elderly man named Frost, who wrote plays about workers’ lives, in which we all took part. There was a young trade unionist, A1 Abrams, who was in the Central Labor Body of the AFL. A singer with a lovely voice, Mrs. Van Name, gave cultural content to our meetings. Fred Harwood, later well known as a Communist, was there, as was Tom Lewis, who in later years was the first Communist Party district organizer in California. He was a pioneer Socialist soapbox agitator—“educated on the breakers in the coal mines,” he said, “but bring on your college professors who want to debate socialism.” It was not an empty challenge. He was a devastating opponent, his mind overflowed with facts and fast, homely illustrations. He made his living selling pest exterminators by day and “worked free to exterminate the pest of capitalism by night,” he used to say. He was an able and resourceful organizer.

I was a slender serious girl, not yet 16, with my black hair loose to my waist, tied with a ribbon. I wore a long full skirt down to my ankles, as was proper in 1906, a white shirt waist and a red tie. I had labored to write my speech and had stubbornly resisted all attempts of Egerton, my father and others to tell me what to say or to actually write it for me. Good or bad, I felt it had to be my own. I began to quake inwardly at the start, facing an adult audience for the first time. But they were sympathetic and I was soon sailing along serenely. When I concluded, I asked for questions, as I had heard other speakers do. None were forthcoming. The audience apparently sensed that I was nervous. How they laughed when I said resentfully: “Just because I’m young and a girl, is no reason you shouldn’t ask me questions!”

My speech was compounded of my limited personal experience,

“WOMAN’S PLACE”