She Was Sure Irish: The Anti-imperialist, Antiracist, and Antifascist Politics of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

In an interview he gave in 2010, Bob Lewis, President of the Young Communist League at Cornell University in 1940 and 1941, recalled when the YCL invited Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to speak on campus about fascism and the war in Europe. A crowd, including students and members of the local community, many of whom had heard her speak before and wanted to hear her again, packed the auditorium. Flynn’s ability to connect with an audience was not the only thing that stood out in Lewis’s memory. He also noted her interpersonal warmth, openness, and ability to socialize into the wee hours of the morning, usually outlasting her student hosts, as well her irrepressible Irishness. “She taught us a lot of Irish liberation songs. She was sure Irish.” Lewis’s comment illustrates the indissoluble connection between Flynn’s Irish American ethnicity and her radical politics. Throughout her activist career, first, as a Wobbly agitator, then, as a founding member of the ACLU, and, ultimately, as a leader of the Communist Party of the United States, Flynn identified with and drew inspiration from the Irish freedom struggle. My presentation will consider how Flynn’s working-class Irish American identity, forged from the material conditions of her childhood, her parents’ socialism, and her friendship with Irish republicans such as James Connolly and James Larkin, shaped and informed her politics, specifically her enduring commitments to anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and anti-fascism.