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In death, Flynn is stirring more controversy. Her home state of New Hampshire removed a marker placed close to her birthplace in Concord on Monday, two weeks after it was put up.
The marker was removed after two Republican members of Concord’s executive council, Joseph Kenney and David Wheeler, denounced it. Kenney said in an emailed statement Tuesday that “a devout communist” doesn’t deserve a marker: “If our citizens want to read about her, go to the state library or online.”
The office of Gov. Chris Sununu (R) said the “controversial marker” was removed because it was placed on state property, not city property, as had been previously believed, and the city had not advocated for it to stay up.
Wheeler did not reply to a request for comment, but he has said that he had been “totally offended” by the marker, according to New Hampshire Public Radio.
The marker was erected after state officials approved a petition by residents, who say all rules were followed. Petitioners must provide documentation backing up the facts noted on the marker, and the subject must have had historical significance, state guidelines say. Petitioners must also receive signatures from 20 New Hampshire citizens.
The markers are not aimed at honoring or commemorating a person or event but to educate the public, according to state guidelines.
To some, Flynn was a leftist extremist whose Cold War-era communist leanings posed risks to U.S. security and whose aggressive activism worsened labor strife. To others, she was a pioneering feminist and labor activist ahead of her time.
Born into a family of activists in 1890 in Concord, Flynn was exposed to anti-establishment ideas from her earliest years, according to Rosalyn Baxandall, a historian of feminism. Her mother preached equal rights for women. Her parents took her to socialist meetings and gave her left-wing publications to read, including the works of Karl Marx.
In 1906, Flynn gave her first formal speech to an adult audience that included her parents at a Harlem socialist club in New York about “the status of women, who were then considered inferior and treated as such in every walk of life,” according to her autobiography.
During her life’s work for the feminist cause, Flynn backed women’s voting rights, equal pay for equal work — a radical idea at the time — and expanded college education for women. She advocated birth control, working with Margaret Sanger. (Sanger was a feminist who coined the term “birth control” and opened the nation’s first birth control clinic.)
Flynn also became a champion for unskilled immigrant laborers, joining the more-militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union. It differed from the American Federation of Labor, whose members were mostly skilled White men. She organized miners in the west, and agitated workers in Massachusetts during the 1912 Lawrence textile strike as well as silk workers in New Jersey a year later.
“Her feminist side is just as important as her labor side. Both of them got her into immense amounts of trouble. But she was the kind of person who didn’t care about getting into trouble,” said Ileen A. Devault, a professor of labor history at Cornell University.
Flynn’s activism and association with the IWW consistently drew attention from law enforcement, resulting in multiple arrests starting in 1906. In 1917, as the United States entered World War I, she was arrested for allegedly defying “at least 24 laws,” including the Espionage Act, due in part to her IWW activism, according to a biography.
Those experiences led her to help create the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. The union, however, ousted her from its board in 1940, a few years after she had joined the U.S. Communist Party in the wake of the Great Depression, which had contributed to communism’s then-growing popularity among lower-income earners.
(The ACLU repudiated its move in 1976, saying that decision was inconsistent with its basic principles.)
Flynn’s affiliation with the Communist Party attracted continued interest from authorities. In 1953, she was convicted of violating the Smith Act — a law that prohibits the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, or abetting such activities.
During her trial, in which she acted as her own counsel, Flynn denied involvement in acts of violence or seeking to overthrow the U.S. government. She said that the Communist Party of the United States denounced those that seek “to subvert, undermine, weaken or overthrow any or all institutions of American democracy.”
“Our ideas may be new and strange to you,” she told the jury. “Probably you have never seen or met a Communist before. We don’t ask you to agree with us but to listen with an open mind,” she said.
Her plea impressed the presiding judge, who offered to send her to Soviet Russia in lieu of jail time, which Flynn turned down.
But her defense failed to persuade the jury or the Cold War-era American public.
After serving a 28-month jail sentence, Flynn spent her last years traveling to socialist events in Europe and Soviet Russia. Her reports from those events, though, were so glowing that even readers of left-wing publications “objected to her unadulterated praise,” Baxandall wrote. Flynn was named the chair of the Communist Party of the United States upon her return home.
In 1964, when visiting the Soviet Union, she suffered a stomach and intestinal inflammation, which claimed her life. More than 25,000 people attended her Soviet-sponsored funeral there, according to Baxandall.
Bettina Aptheker, a former professor of feminist studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz who is now retired, was a longtime family friend of Flynn’s and recalled seeing her in San Francisco in 1963, a few months before she died.“She was lively and curious and funny and apparently robust as ever,” Aptheker wrote in an email.
If she were alive today, Aptheker wrote, Flynn “would have twinkled her bright blue eyes at me, and smiled and laughed to imagine that 60 years after her death, some politicians were still fussing over her!”
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