Aging & Wisdom Quote by John T. Flynn

Flynn writes like a man sketching a burglary, not a political shift: Communists "entered" through a "crack in the wall", then "grew and prospered" as if they were mold. The point isn’t merely to claim Communist influence in unions; it’s to frame that influence as clandestine, parasitic, and almost mechanical. He’s doing narrative engineering: turning messy coalition politics into a clean morality play with a breached perimeter and an invading force.

The diction matters. "Positions of great power" and "close to the center" conjure a map of a besieged institution, implying that legitimacy lives at the center and danger arrives from the margins. Flynn’s "new union movement" isn’t described in terms of wages, strikes, or internal democracy; it’s presented as infrastructure vulnerable to infiltration. That choice quietly delegitimizes union leadership by suggesting workers didn’t elevate these figures so much as fail to notice them slipping in.

Context sharpens the edge. Flynn, an anti-New Deal critic writing in an era when labor was rapidly organizing and the Communist Party had visible, if often overstated, presence in certain labor and cultural circles, is also feeding a broader American anxiety: that radical politics spreads not by persuasion but by exploiting loopholes in liberal institutions. The subtext is a warning about naivete - yours, the public’s, the movement’s. If they got in once, the sentence implies, they’ll do it again, and next time the wall won’t be there at all.