In 1906, speaking from a homemade soapbox near Times Square, 16-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn stopped traffic on a Saturday night. Impressed, Broadway producer David Belasco wanted to put her on stage, but she told him, "I'm in the labor movement and I speak my own piece."
For more than fifty years, the fiery American radical did just that, crisscrossing the United States while crusading for her brand of humane socialism. The only woman leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, she organized immigrant factory workers in the East and lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest.
When the World War I era Red Scare emasculated the Wobblies, she became a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union. By the late thirties, afraid that the "revolution" would pass her by, she joined the American Communist Party and was instantly thrust into its top ranks. In 1961 she became their first female chair. A victim of McCarthyism, authorities arrested her more than a dozen times for exercising free speech. She served a three-year prison sentence in the 1950s.
As a lifelong professional revolutionary, Flynn encountered an extraordinary range of American and international personalities, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Mabel Dodge, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Roger Baldwin, Felix Frankfurter and Mary Heaton Vorse, Nikita Khruschev, and Ché Guevarra. A passionate woman who believed in "free love," she had a long affair with Carlo Tresca, the colorful Italian anarchist murdered in New York City in 1943.
Based on Flynn's personal papers and writings, memoirs of her friends and colleagues, personal interviews, Flynn's FBI file and trial transcripts, and other important unpublished materials in a wide range of historical repositories, Iron in Her Soul is the first full-length biography of the most notable twentieth century American radical—an exhaustively researched, yet dramatic and readable account of a remarkable life.
