You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday February 13, 1908
New York, New York – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Stands with Strikers
Since her marriage in Minnesota, in early January, to I. W. W. organizer Jack Jones, his arrest and her subsequent return to her parent’s home in New York, we have not heard much from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But we did find this item in the New York Sun of February 7th:
GIRL SOCIALIST TO STRIKERS
—–ELIZABETH FLYNN ENLIVENS A MEETING OF MILLINERS
—–
Commends the Workers to the Socialist Trades Unions
and Describes Hearst as a Middle Class Reformer
-As for Roosevelt, What’s He to Labor?
The mantle which Thomas W. Lawson discarded when he announced that so far as he was concerned the “System” might work out its own destruction has fallen upon the shoulders of Miss Elizabeth Flynn. She wore it last night most becomingly and effectively at a mass meeting of milliners in Teutonia Hall, 66 Essex street.
Miss Flynn is 17 and slim, with big Irish blue eyes, nut brown hair and the milk white skin that betokens a Killarney ancestry. Her voice is clear, soft and coaxing, with a carrying power and a staying quality that the average Madison Square Garden orator would be glad to attain at almost any cost.
The crusader against capital spoke for one hour and a quarter and at the end of that period seemed fresher and more enthusiastic than when she began. As for what she didn’t say about the robbers who stole from the poor working man his country, the tools and materials and the finished product of his labor, and even annexed his inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it would be difficult for the most ingenious opponent of the “System” to conceive.
The mercury in Teutonia Hall didn’t rise above 34 degrees while the oratory was going on, so that the 150 little milliners who came there to find out how they might have their wages increased and their hours of toil decreased shivered and shook and rubbed their benumbed fingers and shuffled their feet and tried to look wise every time the girl orator shot off such phrases as “potential organization” or “unearned increment ” or “economic crisis.”
They thought it was all perfectly lovely though, and ever so many of them said that they thought so too when the speaker announced without any apparent effort that it “was an outrage that the average proletarian didn’t own even a square inch of ground.”
Some of the little milliners admitted that they had not known before that they were proletarians, but they displayed a proper pride in the discovery.
Miss Flynn told them that they didn’t understand the value of their services in the industrial organization, because if they did the capitalist would make no money.
It was the business, she said, of all workers to organize in such a manner that they could control the industries which had been wrested from them and enjoy the fruits of the surplus product, which now went to swell the coffers of their oppressors.
She then explained how vastly superior the Industrial Workers of the World were to the American Federation of Labor. The latter, she asserted, was an organization of handicrafts, in which there was little real union among the different branches. She gave several instances of strikes which did not receive support from other labor unions. Men, she added, had shown themselves extremely unsympathetic regarding the wrongs of women workers. She spoke about “scabs” in a tone that made the smallest of the milliners shudder with horror.
There were some men present, and to these the evangel of the “new Socialism” gave the message that their ballot really wasn’t the least bit of use to them.
[She asked scornfully:]
Do you think that the capitalist is going to stand by the ballot box unless it puts money in his pocket?
Why then didn’t they stand by it when William Randolph Hearst was elected Mayor of this city? Why did the Supreme court say that a recount was “unconstitutional”? If they wouldn’t count in a middle class reformer like Mr. Hearst do you think they will ever count in the Socialist party? Well, if they do I’ve another guess coming.
What did President Roosevelt do-he who came out so strongly in his last message on behalf of “labor”? Didn’t he send the troops out to Goldfield to force scrip money down the throats of the miners who had been taking out $2,000,000 worth of gold every week for the benefit of capitalists?
[She concluded:]
The political influence of the laboring man counts for nothing. What we want is an industrial organization so strong that it will force the other class-the class who would grind us forever under their heels-to give us what we have earned. It is not for a fair wage for a fair day’s work that we are fighting, it is for the full product of our labor, and some day we will get it, but not if we falter.
The little milliners made as much of a demonstration at the end of this address as their stiffened joints and muscles would permit, and then through the medium of Miss Mary Papelsky had something to say about their own particular affairs.
About thirty new names were added to the roll, swelling the membership of M. W. I. U. to about two hundred and twenty-five.
———-
SOURCE
The Sun
(New York, New York)
-Feb 7, 1908
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1908-02-07/ed-1/seq-5/
IMAGE
EGF, DEN p21, Sept 21, 1907
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045555/1907-09-21/ed-1/seq-21/
Note: M. W. I. U. is most likely Millinery Workers Industrial Union No. 53 of New York.
See IUB of Feb 22, 1908, page 2, column 2, above “From the Seattle District.”
https://archive.org/stream/v1n52-feb-22-1908-iub#page/n1/mode/1up/search/millinery
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iub/v1n52-feb-22-1908-iub.pdf
See also:
Category: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
https://weneverforget.org/category/elizabeth-gurley-flynn/
Tag: Goldfield Miners Strike of 1907-1908
https://weneverforget.org/tag/goldfield-miners-strike-of-1907-1908/