Surviving Repression

Abstract

Several thousand Wobblies and anarchists assembled at the Manhattan Lyceum Theater at 66 East 4th Street on Christmas Eve, 1916, to give Tresca a hero’s welcome upon his return from Minnesota.¹ Before resuming his activities, Tresca spent several days just resting and eating at the Flynn household to regain the strength he had lost during his incarceration. The happiest member of the family was Flynn’s son Buster, now a sickly child going on seven, who adored Tresca as a father and rejoiced that he was back home. This rare moment of domestic communion ended abruptly around the New Year. Like Tresca, Flynn always put career before family, and despite promises to him and Buster that she would stay home for a lengthy period, she left for Seattle to aid the seventy-four Wobblies unlawfully jailed on murder charges after the Everett Massacre, the ambush of a boat-load of Wobblies by a drunken sheriff and deputies on November 5, 1916. “Carlo was shocked and amazed;” Flynn recalled, “that I would even consider leaving him after he had been in jail since July…. [He] was so angry that he did not write to me for six weeks after I arrived in Seattle”²