Biography
Ailene Holmes (born 1906 in Worcester, Massachusetts) was a Finnish-American Communist organizer. The daughter of Finnish immigrants, she attended Boston University for about two years before leaving to work in Communist organizing. By 1930 she was helping run a Communist-affiliated summer camp for children near Van Etten, in Chemung County, New York, together with fellow organizer Mabel Husa. In early August 1930 American Legion members and other anti-Communists entered the camp and tried to impose an American flag ceremony; Communist accounts said the camp leaders and children were assaulted. Local authorities instead prosecuted Holmes and Husa, charging that they had insulted the American flag. Holmes denied desecrating the flag but acknowledged saying that it did not represent exploited workers. She was convicted on August 16, 1930 and sentenced to three months and a fifty-dollar fine. After her appeal failed she served the sentence at the Monroe County Penitentiary in Rochester, New York, from October 30, 1930 until her release on January 22, 1931. At trial she testified that she had earlier been arrested for picketing outside a Boston courthouse during the campaign to save Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
