page_title: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
section_title: IWW (Wobblies)
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn / Career / IWW (Wobblies)
caption_attribution_description: English: Strike leaders at the Paterson silk strike of 1913. From left, Patrick Quinlan, Carlo Tresca, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Adolph Lessig, and Bill Haywood
context_page_description: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a labor leader, activist, and feminist who played a leading role in the Industrial Workers of the World. Flynn was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a visible proponent of women's rights, birth control, and women's suffrage. She joined the Communist Party USA in 1936 and late in life, in 1961, became its chairwoman. She died during a visit to the Soviet Union, where she was accorded a state funeral with processions in the Red Square attended by over 25,000 people.
context_section_description: In 1907, Flynn became a full-time organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, and attended her first IWW convention in September of that year.  Over the next few years she organized campaigns among garment workers in Pennsylvania, silk weavers in New Jersey, restaurant workers in New York, miners in Minnesota, Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington; and textile workers in Massachusetts. During this period, author Theodore Dreiser described her as "an East Side Joan of Arc".
  In 1909, Flynn participated in a free speech fight in Spokane, in which she chained herself to a lamp-post in order to delay her arrest. She later accused the police of using the jail as a brothel, an accusation that prompted them to try to confiscate all copies of the Industrial Worker reporting the charge.
  Flynn was arrested ten times during this period, but was never convicted of any criminal activity. It was a plea bargain that resulted in Flynn's expulsion from the IWW in 1916, along with fellow organizer Joe Ettor. According to historian Robert M. Eleff, three Minnesota miners had been arrested on murder charges arising from an incident which arose when a group of deputised mine guards, including an alleged gunman named James C. Myron and a former bouncer named Nick Dillon, came to the residence of one of the miners, Philip Masonovitch, to investigate allegations of the presence of an illegal liquor still on the premises. A confrontation ensued in which Myron and a bystander were shot dead. According to Eleff, some witness testimony suggested that Myron was killed accidentally by one of his colleagues, who fired into the Masonovitch residence from outside, and that the bystander was killed by Dillon. Three IWW organizers were also charged, although all three were elsewhere at the time. Head of the IWW's organizing committee, Bill Haywood seemed confident that Judge Hilton, who had successfully defended George Pettibone when he and Haywood were on trial in Idaho, could win the case for the miners.
  However, the main organizers on the scene accepted an arrangement by which the other organizers were allowed to go free, but the three miners, none of whom spoke English fluently, faced time in prison. There was also a mixup in the sentencing; a prior agreement for one year in prison was somehow changed in the courtroom to a sentence of five to 20 years. Haywood held Flynn and Ettor responsible for allowing the miners to plead guilty to charges that they probably did not understand. Haywood wrote in his autobiography that Flynn and Ettor's "part in the affair terminated their connection with the IWW." Haywood's biographer, Peter Carlson, wrote that Ettor left the IWW and that Flynn "remained in the union, but took pains to avoid Haywood and his supporters."
caption: 1913 photo of Paterson silk strike leaders Patrick Quinlan, Carlo Tresca, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Adolph Lessig, and Bill Haywood
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