The following is a Catholic Action League of Massachusetts news release…
An attempt to resurrect a historic marker commemorating an infamous Communist Party figure has been defeated in New Hampshire.
Merrimack County Superior Court Judge John C. Kissinger Jr. has dismissed a lawsuit brought by radical left-wing activists against the New Hampshire Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, after the department took down a public marker honoring a Stalinist who went to prison for advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.
The judge ruled that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing.
In 2021, after sponsors met the legal threshold of twenty signatures from New Hampshire citizens, the state Division of Historical Resources approved the erection of a Historical Highway Marker in Concord, honoring the so-called “Rebel Girl,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
The petition drive was led by a former Director of the American Friends Service Committee, Arnie Alpert, and a retired college professor—and partnered lesbian—Mary Lee Sargent.
A native of Concord, Flynn was a labor agitator who went on to become a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Chairwoman of the Communist Party, USA.
Flynn joined the party in 1936, just three years after the Holodomor—the Soviet engineered famine which killed five to seven million Ukrainians. That very year, 1936, in which she became a Communist, the Great Terror, Joseph Stalin’s purge of his opposition, was beginning. It would result in another million fatalities.
In 1952, Flynn was convicted and imprisoned under the Alien Registration Act of 1940—the Smith Act—which made it a federal crime “to knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government.”
She served two years in a federal penitentiary. In 1961, during one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War, Flynn was selected as the Chairwoman of the Russian funded American Communist Party.
Flynn died during a 1964 visit to Moscow. She was given the rare honor of a Soviet State funeral in Red Square.
The New Hampshire marker whitewashed Flynn as “a labor leader, civil libertarian and feminist organizer,” who “advocated for women’s rights,” including the “right to vote and access to birth control.”
It made a perfunctory mention of her party membership, but not her leadership role or the honor conferred upon her by the Soviet Union. It then portrayed her as a victim of “the notorious Smith Act.”
The marker was unveiled on May 1, 2023. It was removed only two weeks later, following a public uproar.
The state erected tribute, on public property, to an enemy of the United States, who engaged in treason while belonging to a terrorist organization directed by a hostile foreign power, was condemned by Executive Councilors Joseph Kenney and David Wheeler at a council meeting on May 3rd.
Granite State Governor Chris Sununu agreed with them, telling reporters “An avowed communist who benefited from a state funeral in Moscow’s Red Square should not be celebrated in New Hampshire.”
Sununu ordered the Commissioner of Natural and Cultural Resources, who oversees the Division of Historical Resources, to remove the marker. It came down on May 15, 2023.
The Catholic Action League hailed the court decision, calling it a “victory for truth, moral sanity, and American nationhood.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comment: “According to the Black Book of Communism, Communist parties and governments were responsible for the killing of up to 100 million human beings in the twentieth century.
A 1959 report by the U.S. House of Representatives suggested that ten million Catholics were murdered by Communists in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and East Asia.
The Elizabeth Gurley Flynn marker was a public obscenity. It glorified treason, tyranny and mass murder. It was a whitewash of Communist crimes, an insult to the victims of those crimes and an affront to our country. New Hampshire was right to remove it.”
Historical marker commemorating Flynn’s birthplace, which, in May 2023, was unveiled in Concord and subsequently removed. Photo by Cooljeanius. Copyright: CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
