Elizabeth Gurley Flynn by Lara Vapnek

Author:Lara Vapnek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 2014-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Fred “Buster” Flynn as an adult, in a photo taken by his Aunt Kathie.

NP18-67, EGF Photographs, Tamiment Library, NYU

Grief struck Flynn at a particularly difficult time politically: in August 1939, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact had ended the CP’s easy camaraderie with liberals and intellectuals.54 Many people who had sympathized with the Popular Front and supported the fight against fascism felt betrayed by the Soviet Union when it cut a deal with Germany to avoid invasion. When Flynn ran into an Italian friend from her days defending Sacco and Vanzetti, he greeted her with a “Heil Hitler” salute. American communists painted World War II, like World War I, as an imperialist conflict and called for peace. But their stance seemed hypocritical when the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland in the fall of 1939.55 At a CP rally in Baltimore in December, war veterans, many of them Jewish, “hissed, booed, cat-called and shouted” at Flynn when she tried to defend Soviet actions.56 The American Legion disrupted meetings that Flynn held in Davenport and Des Moines, Iowa.57

The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact sparked a mini Red Scare, but anticommunism had already intensified during the New Deal. Business and religious leaders viewed communism with hostility. The national leaders of the AFL continued their long animosity toward socialism and criticized their rivals in the CIO for their communist connections.58 President Roosevelt’s consolidation of executive power and his administration’s sympathy for workers and African Americans antagonized both northern Republicans and southern Democrats, who sought to paint the New Deal as a communist plot. In May 1938, Representative Martin Dies, a Democrat from Texas, formed a Special Committee on Un-American Activities to investigate “subversive activities.”59 The Dies Committee assumed a broad mandate to question suspects about communist ties and find them guilty by association. Anxious to avoid censure and disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, many liberal organizations that had been part of the Popular Front resolved to rid themselves of communists.60

Flynn became a victim of this new upsurge of anticommunism. In January 1940, the ACLU adopted a resolution declaring it “inappropriate for supporters of so-called totalitarian dictatorships to serve on the governing committees and staff of the union.” They expected Flynn, the sole member of the CP who remained on the board of the ACLU, to resign quietly. She refused. Instead, she wrote articles for the Sunday Worker and the New Masses defending herself. Flynn expressed disbelief that she would be asked to resign from the ACLU due to her membership in an organization: a practice the ACLU had “continuously protested against” since its founding twenty-three years earlier. Once composed of “heretics” and “non-conformists,” she complained, the board of the ACLU now consisted of wealthy “lawyers, business men, [and] ministers” and included “not a single representative of organized labor.” Damning liberals’ conceptions of themselves as neutral mediators between opposing interests, Flynn accused the board of having become “class conscious.” The board was intimidated, Flynn argued, by a strong, powerful labor movement that made demands rather than asking for favors.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.