ABSTRACT

The Statue of Liberty looked cold and lonely to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in January 1949. From the Staten Island Ferry, the "lady with a lamp" seemed frozen in place on her small island. As the United States and the Soviet Union battled to shape the world order during the Cold War, peace and internationalism seemed suspect, and American communists became internal enemies. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's international framing of the local problems made the strikers feel that they were "not alone" and belonged to "something big". Foster's firm rejection of a civil liberties strategy, however, coupled with the vehemence of anticommunism, made it impossible for Flynn to assemble a united front that could even come close to the defense movement she had built in the 1920s. Like the socialists of her parents' generation, Flynn explained, communists hoped to win socialism through the ballot box rather than through a violent revolution.