Workers Defense Union

[2] Flynn had been arrested for her IWW organizing activities as part of the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, facing a seven-year prison term in a trial which was held in June 1913, gaining her freedom when the jury deadlocked over the question of conviction.

[3] Later Flynn had spent the better part of a year raising public awareness and funds on behalf of condemned IWW activist Joe Hill, who was ultimately executed by firing squad in the state of Utah in November 1915.

[4] Flynn had been held in New York City's Tombs prison until $10,000 had been raised for her bail; her case was severed from the main group of defendants in February 1918 and finally dismissed only in March 1919.

[4] Flynn was unable to persuade a sufficient number of high-profile public intellectuals and attorneys to join her effort, however, and the plan was soon abandoned, with its remaining assets distributed to a subcommittee of National Civil Liberties Bureau headed by Charles Ervin, editor of the Socialist daily The New York Call, and economics professor without portfolio Scott Nearing.

[6] The spartan room had bars over the windows and faced an enclosed air shaft, an ambiance which Flynn later recalled made her feel like she was herself in jail, fighting for her own liberty as well as the prisoners which her organization sought to liberate.

[4] Although Flynn and Biedenkapp was the individuals maintaining day-to-day operations of the WDU, the group was nominally controlled by a National Committee, which included a number of prominent civil libertarians of various political allegiances, including Chicago poverty worker Jane Addams, Nation magazine editor Oswald Garrison Villard, activist clergyman such as Frank A. Ryan, Harry F. Ward, and Judah L. Magnes, prominent labor lawyer Frank P. Walsh, muckraking writer Frederic C. Howe, and trade unionist Rose Schneiderman, among others.

[9] The WDU was an explicitly radical organization and sought to aid so-called "victims of capitalist class tyranny" who had run afoul of the legal system in various contexts.

A representative of the WDU briefly detailed his organization's legal strategy in a presentation to the biennial convention of the Cloth Hat and Cap Makers of North America in May 1919:[7]

[9] Elizabeth Gurley Flynn became a founding member of the National Committee of the ACLU, remaining in that post until pressured to resign in 1940 in the anti-communist climate which surrounded the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.