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

The unionization of women, even in occupations like the needle trades where they predominated, had scarcely yet begun. Equal opportunities, equal pay, and the right to be organized, were the crying needs of women wage-eamers then and unfortunately these demands remain with us today. Many union leaders, like Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, did not consider women workers organizable or dependable. “They only work for pin money!” was the usual complaint. An outside job was considered by the woman worker herself as a temporary necessary evil—a stop-gap between her father’s home and her husband’s home. Fathers and husbands collected women’s wages, sometimes right at the company office. Women did not have a legal right to their own earnings. There was no consideration for the special needs and problems of working mothers, though they were numerous and pressing. Even the clothes of women hampered them—the long skirts that touched the ground, the big unwieldy sleeves, the enormous hats. You were still “a girl” if your skirt was above your shoe tops.

The struggle for the right of women to vote was nationwide and growing. It had started with the first Equal Rights Convention, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was addressed by Frederick Douglass, the great Negro leader. The suffragists had been ridiculed, assaulted by mobs, refused halls, arrested for attempting to vote, disowned by their families. By 1904, groups of working women, especially Socialist women, were banding together to join in the demand for the vote. Two years later, International Women’s Day was bom on the East Side of New York, at the initiative of these women demonstrating for suffrage. It spread around the world and is universally celebrated today, while here it is deprecated as “a foreign holiday.”

The suffrage movement was growing more militant and figures like Maude Malone appeared. She organized the Harlem Equal Rights League in 1905. She interrupted Theodore Roosevelt at a meeting of 3,000 people to demand where he stood on woman suffrage. She walked up and down Broadway, at the same time we were holding our street meetings there, with signs front and back, like a sandwich man, demanding “Votes for Women,” and lost her post as a librarian in

When I was a girl, parents took the children along wherever they went, either to church, to visit or to Socialist meetings. If both parents wanted to go to a meeting, they had to take the children. There were no baby-sitters in those days. That came over 30 years later, with World War II. Working class families could not afford it. In case of an emergency, such as childbirth or death, the older children, a relative or a neighbor took the young ones over. A child might be asked “to mind the baby” in the carriage outdoors or while the mother did an errand. Ten cents could be ample reward for this chore. On many occasions our whole family of six—parents and four children—all went to a Socialist meeting or social gathering.

When the younger children got tired they were put to sleep on benches along the walls. They woke up if tea and cookies were served. Most parents did this in moderation, but my father had a tendency to overdo it. There were many times we children rebelled and my mother had to intervene. He would drag the children to street meetings where they had to stand around for hours. They would rather stay home to do their homework than to sell literature and help with collections. They lost sleep and were overtired the next day. He tried to turn everything into socialist propaganda and there were endless struggles over school compositions. We would go to school early and rewrite what he had dictated to us. It developed a dislike of my father and his methods and also a distaste for meetings, of which we had an overdose. It took years to overcome this. I shared the rebellion against Pop but was old enough to like meetings. Another habit my father had was to read aloud. “Listen to this, Annie,” he would say, regardless of what Mama was doing. He interrupted our homework with “This is part of your education, too, and more important than that stuff!” As a result, none of us to this day read aloud or can bear to listen. There are right and wrong ways with children, who have more recognized rights today than we had when we were young.


TAKING CHILDREN TO MEETINGS

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I have been in many working-class families during my long life of labor agitation and have heard complaints from both generations. I have heard many discussions on how to pass socialist ideas on to the next generation. It has been particularly hard for intelligent foreign- born workers, who speak and read papers and books in their native language, which their children all too soon rejected as “old country stuff.” I’ve had many young people say to me in surprise: “You’re an American and you believe that too?” Often the parents were overcrit- ical of all American ways and this deepened the rift. The “melting pot” concept, that to be an American one must shed and forget one’s language, traditions and culture and be molded to a common denominator has caused the second generation to be ashamed of their parents’ ways and to reject their ideas. Later, after experience and struggle, they are often amazed to realize how right their parents really were, even if they were “foreigners.”

In the days of my youth there were no organized youth activities of any sort. Later, a Socialist youth movement developed, with Socialist Sunday schools. Some of these were horribly sectarian, however. My sister Kathie went to one in the Bronx, where they sang:

My father had a working man,

My father had a mule.

To save my life I couldn’t tell Which was the biggest fool!

The point here was that the workingmen did not vote the Socialist ticket. After I left the debating society in 1906, I was plunged into an adult world, with no contact with boys or girls of my own age level. I needed a social life, youthful advice, criticism and association. As a result I had no real youth.

But with all its shortcomings, I still think the old-fashioned method of “taking children to meetings” has some real advantages, especially if the parents are selective and take them to those special occasions which they will remember all their lives. Many people have said to me: “I first remember a meeting where my parents took me to hear Debs—or Haywood—or Mother Bloor.” Or, “You are the first speaker I ever heard—at Lawrence, or Paterson.” Children of today will similarly remember in days to come: “I heard Paul Robeson—or Steve Nelson—or Ben Davis—or Eugene Dennis.” A big rally where


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CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH

there are many people and great enthusiasm gives a child a sense of belonging, a feeling of identification with others, that “we are many,” and that their parents do not have queer ideas and are not alone.

There are some modem concepts among progressive parents of “security” or “protecting children” by shielding them from problems and struggles, as if one can shut off the impact of schools, radio, television, comic books, atom bomb scares and what not. Of course plain workers—miners, steel, auto, needle and textile workers—cannot shield their children from the impact of unemployment, part-time employment, and the like. “I don’t want my children to go through what I did!” is a natural feeling, but sometimes it is used as an excuse to divorce children from all progressive ideas and to deprive them of all antidotes to the daily poison poured into them. The “wrap them up in cotton wool” method is one approach. “Let them do what they please, don’t frustrate them,” is another, which is more likely to develop egocentric reactionaries than defenders of peace and democracy. We’ve got to fight for the minds of our children lest they become warped and distorted, as were many of the German youth. We must not surrender our children’s minds to brutality, cruelty and violence or to anti-social ideas.

Our father’s methods were not entirely correct but his purpose was clear, not to allow his children to be “educated” against the interests of the working class. Our family came out of our early tribulations all progressive-minded, members of unions, voting Socialists. For all his faults our father was a fighter with strong convictions as to the rights of the people. This at least he bequeathed to his children.


TWO

Socialist and IWW Agitator 1906-1912

I Mount the Soap Box and Get Arrested

My advent as a speaker at the Harlem Socialist Club in 1906 brought me invitations to speak elsewhere. There were many progressive forums held at that time in practically every section of the city and in nearby cities. I visited Newark, Philadelphia, Providence and Boston. One such gathering was extremely popular with “radicals” of all descriptions. It was called the “Unity Congregation” and was conducted like a church, with readings, songs, and a main speech or sermon. Hugh O. Pentecost, an ex-minister then a lawyer, conducted this assemblage. (He had lost his pulpit over the Father McGlynn controversy.) It was held at Lyric Hall on 6th Avenue between 41st and 42nd Streets opposite Bryant Park, where the Automat now is. It was a famous old meeting place, originally called Apollo Hall. A life-sized statue of a Greek god adorned a niche in the side wall. It was here, in 1872, that the Equal Rights Convention had nominated Victoria C. Woodhull for President and Frederick Douglass for Vice-President of the United States.

My friend Fred Robinson and I attended this forum and we gave out circulars at the door advertising a series of printed mottoes by Fred’s older brother, Victor, who later became a professor. The only one I recall is: “Progress is written in one word—disobedience.” Mr. Pentecost spoke every Sunday and did not ordinarily invite others to share his platform. Imagine how highly honored I felt when he asked me to speak there! I chose for my subject “Education,” in which I

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SOCIALIST AND IWW AGITATOR, 1906-1912

voiced all my criticism of the school system—too much homework, not sufficient manual work, not enough subjects of practical value to students, especially those who could not go to college. This is remembered by many as my “first speech.”

In the summer of 1906 I began to speak on the street. I took to it like a duck to water. So many of our street meetings were held at 125 th Street and 7th Avenue that an enthusiast tacked a metal marker on one of the trees, “Liberty Tree.” Needless to say, there were no amplifiers or loudspeakers in those days. Tom Lewis, pioneer soapboxer, who could be heard for blocks, taught me to speak, especially how to project my voice outdoors. “Breathe deep, use your diaphragm as a bellows; don’t talk on your vocal chords or you’ll get hoarse in no time. Throw your voice out.” His advice was effective.

I often wonder how modem audiences would receive the fervid oratory popular then. Styles of speech have changed with the radio and public speaking systems, which have compelled modulation of the voice, eliminated action, and calmed down the approach. Then we gesticulated, we paced the platform, we appealed to the emotions. We provoked arguments and questions. We spoke loudly, passionately, swiftly. We used invectives and vituperation, we were certainly not “objective” in our attacks on capitalism and all its works. Even when newly-arrived immigrants did not understand our words they shared our spirit. At all our indoor mass meetings there were speakers in many languages—Jewish, Russian, Polish, Italian, German and others. Our foreign-born comrades, like Pedro Estove in Spanish, Arturo Giovannitti in Italian, and Bill Shatoff in Russian, were magnificent orators. They inspired us to more beautiful and moving language in English.

In August 1906, I was arrested with my father and several others for “speaking without a permit” and “blocking traffic” at 38th Street and Broadway, then the heart of the theatrical district. The chairman was a little old man with a derby hat—Michael Cody, who sold the Weekly People for years at all Socialist meetings. The auspices of our meeting was the Unity Club, an attempt to unite Socialist Party and Socialist Labor Party speakers on one platform. One of our number had a flair for showmanship and had devised a striking unity banner, topped by a whirling contraption with the flags of all nations, flanked by red flares for illumination. Someone in the audience objected to the flags and insisted that only the American flag should be displayed.

We were released on bail at 2 a.m. and appeared before Magistrate Walsh in Jefferson Market Court the next day. Our trial was something of a disappointment to Pop, who wanted to tell the judge off, but Mr. Pentecost, who appeared as our lawyer, hushed him up. He spoke of my extreme youth to my great embarrassment, although I did feel a little better when he said I was “the coming Socialist woman orator of America.”

We were all discharged, with the judge advising me to go back to school that Fall and be a student a while longer before I become a teacher. He said to the prosecutor: “Better some socialism than a suspicion of oppression!” He said I was wasting my time trying to convert “the tenderloin riffraff” and the idle curiosity seekers of Broadway. Seldom is judicial advice of this sort taken, and we returned forthwith to bigger and better meetings, although the working class districts would have been more appropriate for our purposes. The newspapers featured my arrest as “Mere Child Talks Bitterly of Life.” The New York Times editorialized in a humorous, patronizing style about “the ferocious Socialist haranguer, Miss Flynn, who will graduate at school in two years and whose shoe tops at present show below her skirts, [who] tells us what to think, which is just what she thinks.” Pop never forgave Mr. Pentecost. “That damned lawyer wouldn’t let me talk!” he’d rave.

Strangely enough, when I returned to Morris High School in the Fall, no comment was made on the arrest. But attending school by day and meetings by night was a heavy toll, not conducive to proper rest or study. I had an excellent scholastic record in grammar school with all A marks, but it had now declined alarmingly. Mr. Denbigh, the principal, tried to convince me that I should concentrate on my studies and give up the outside activities, of which he expressed no criticism. He said if I finished my education I would be better equipped for work in the labor movement a few years later. My mother agreed with Mr. Denbigh. But I was impatient. It did not seem to me that anything I was learning there had relationship to life or would be helpful to me. With the Revolution on my mind I found it difficult to concentrate on Latin or geometry. And I smarted under the “too young” attitude of