Hellraisers Journal: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Leaves Seattle, on Speaking Tour Back to New York City

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You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal, Friday May 18, 1917
From the Industrial Worker: Elizabeth Flynn Heading Back East

According to tour dates published in Seattle Industrial Worker, organ of the Industrial Workers of the World, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, has left Seattle and is heading back east, with speaking engagements scheduled along the way. She has a small son in the care of her mother in New York City, and she must surely be eager to be with him again.

From the Industrial Worker of April 21, 1917:

Everett Massacre, EGF Tour Dates, IW p2c4, Apr 21, 1917

From the Industrial Worker of May 8, 1917:

Everett Massacre, EGF Tour Dates, IW, May 8, 1917, p3

From The Rockford Republic (Illinois) of May 12, 1917:

ELIZABETH FLYNN SPEAKS.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, noted agitator, speaks tonight at the Olympic theater on Seventh street. She will tell about the trials at Everett, Wash., in which seventy-nine I. W. W. men are being tried for murder.

The Northwest Worker of January 18, 1917
-announced the arrival in Seattle of Miss Flynn:

EGF, Everett Northwest Worker, Jan 18, 1917

The best woman labor speaker in America is in Seattle. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “the Joan of Arc of the Labor Movement,” will devote the next few weeks of her time to the defense of the 74 men in jail in Everett charged with murder.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn has been an agitator since her fifteenth year. She has been brought up in the atmosphere of the working class movement and it has entered right into her soul. Her vivid and appealing oratory can sway thousands of workers because it proceeds out of an intense sincerity.

She has been in nearly every great fight the Industrial Workers of the World have engaged in for the last seven years. In Spokane, Wash., during the Free Speech Fight in 1909, she was arrested. Since then her arrests have been many; Philadelphia, Paterson, New York, Missoula and other towns have known her in the clutches of the law for her upholding of the rights of Free Speech and labor organization.

The great strike of 20,000 iron ore miners in the Mesaba Range in Minnesota was the last scene of Miss Flynn’s activities. There she was a power in the building up of the miners’ solidarity. She is known from coast to coast and every place that she visits there is a revival of enthusiasm among the workers for the cause of labor.

Miss Flynn will be the principal speaker at a great demonstration to be held at the Dreamland Rink on Sunday, Jan. 21st, at 2 p. m. This meeting is called in the interests of the Defense of the 74 men in jail in Everett for their active advocacy of free speech for labor.

Other well known speakers will address the meeting, among them H. Scott Bennett, former member of parliament in Australia and a lecturer and writer of national repute.

In the evening of the 21st there will be a Mammoth Dance, also in the Dreamland Rink. The tickets sell for 50¢ each and the profits all go towards the defense of the Everett prisoners. Every worker should make a point of attending the meeting and the dance. Miss Flynn will speak in Everett at a date that will be announced later.

———-

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SOURCES

Industrial Worker
(Seattle, Washington)
-April 21, 1917, p2c4
https://libcom.org/files/Industrial%20Worker%20(April%2021,%201917).pdf
-May 8, 1917, p3
https://libcom.org/files/Industrial%20Worker%20(May%208,%201917).pdf

The Rockford Republic
(Rockford, Illinois)
-May 12, 1917, p1c7-bottom
http://www.genealogybank.com/

The Northwest Worker
(Everett, Washington)
-Jan 18, 1917
(Also source for image.)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/64453745

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