Interview Series with Carl Ross

Interviewed by Hyman Berman 20th Century Radicalism in Minnesota Project

Interviewed in 1986, 1987 and 1988 at the Hill House in St. Paul , Minnesota

Part IV

July 13, 1988:

HB: This is a continuation of the oral history interview with Carl Ross, after an interruption of approximately one year. Carl , we ' ve come to the point where you're in your retirement mode and a whole new phase of your life begins, which is devoted to theMinnesota study of Finnish­ American society, culture and history . I think it would be appropriate at this point to start by asking inwhat revitalized your interest in this general area of study?

CR: The answer to that question lies in several things . First of all, it occurred to me in 1973 that I should pick up the previous interest I had in American history. I had not yetSociety actually figured out where to begin or what to do, when byProject a strange coincidence, Lionel Davis invited me to a meeting of Michael G. Karni's advisory committee discussing his dissertation.Radicalism So I went to the meeting , found that the subject matter was interesting, and met Rudolph J . Veco1i and Dr . Hyman Berman on this occasion. It intrigued me. I knew something about the Finnish cooperatives from having worked in them and lived with that for someHistory time , something I described in a recent article for Scandinavian StudiesHistorical, as a matter of fact . 1 So this led me into researchCentury on the subject of Finnish-American history and the cooperatives. OralI was interested in the history of American radicalism, American communism, the American labor movement, but at that time I felt deeply that my own experiences were still too close to that . I didn't have a perspective . That could develop only with time and with a great deal of thinking.

HB : Even though thisMinnesota was fifteen years after your termination of activity?Twentieth CR: Right, those fifteen years had been in a sense scattered. I had decided to put all those things behind me for all practical purposes and not concern myself deeply with them.

HB: So for all practical purposes it could have been just one day?

CR: Well , not really, not truly. Perspective on the past was developing .

1 r

HB: Yes.

CR: But if I had picked up the question at that time, I would have started as though those events had been the day before. I could not have shifted my perspective or my point of view from the rather narrow and inward orientation of one who had gone through that period of Communist Party history. I thought that it would be useful to develop some information, knowledge, from a different perspective and felt that the Finnish-American experience which highlighted radical activities would serve that purpose. And I think experience has proven that I was right. I had more or less also made up my mind to look at things starting from about 1930, dealing with the history from that point onward. That would, of course, fit more with my own personal life experience.

The strange thing is that it didn't work that way. As I delved into research materials at the Immigration History Research Center [at the University of Minnesota], I found that all of themMinnesota led me backward rather than forward and that, as a matter of fact, the sources were not that great on the more contemporary history.in So, what this meant for me was to get some grasp of Finnish-American life, Finnish­ American culture, in terms of an immigrant experience and of American radicalism from the point of view somewhat before my personal experience. That was an interesting experience to me; that that was the direction that logic led me. That is not somethingSociety I would have been able to do, I think, if I had just begunProject where I left off in 1957 or '58. Radicalism By 1974 I was fairly familiar with of the history of Finnish-American cooperatives and I did talk a lot with Mike Karni and became acquainted with some of the secondary sources. I would say I was doing ninety or ninety-five percentHistory of the research with primary sources. I certainly learned an immediateHistorical respect for the thinking, the activities, and the intellectual achievements of the older generation of Finnish-Americans.Century One didn't have to start writing their history; they hadOral begun it. They had begun it very early and that was a great aid to finding one's way through the writings. Of course, primarily historical works, by the first generation, were essentially justifications, explanations of their own activities and not analytical in the sense that a scholar today would be approaching the same questions. Minnesota Twentieth I think the first phase of this exploration ended with an international conference on "The Finnish Immigration Experience in the Western Great Lakes Region: New Perspectives" in Duluth in the spring of 1974. That was for me an interesting and useful experience in several ways. I found there, probably for the first time, that it was feasible for me to be accepted by and regarded as a colleague of scholars -- accepted, in fact, as a person who by virtue of personal experience had insights they didn't have. I think I also began to bridge the conception that I was a useful source of historical

2 information but probably not a historian. I think the acceptance of my work as a historian basically came later.

The other rather significant event there was that I was introduced by Mike Karni to Marianne Wargelin Brown. Her father was at that conference acting in a sense as an opposition spokesman who thought that Karni, [Doug] Ollila, and [Matti] Kaups were carrying Finnish­ American history off into left field and ignoring the church, for instance. In fact, he made a quite polemical presentation there. I guess the irony of that is that Ray Wargelin and I have become fast friends and colleagues since that day. Marianne asked me to work with her on developing her research on Finnish-American women and we began then a collaboration that lasted until the present, although it was not until about 1977 that I undertook some serious extensive researches in Finnish-American women's history. That relationship created a collaboration, a close collegiality with someone with whom I could work, exchange opinions and collaborate in developing a whole number of projects that I will describe. Minnesota From that 1974 conference, I went on to articulate some of the things I had begun to sense or to understand about Finnish-Americanin experience. In 1975, I think, I wrote a series of essays for publication at that time in the New Yorkin Uutiset, the New York News, the most conservative of the Finnish-American publications. HB: You wrote this in Finnish? Society Project CR: In English. I didn't have a grasp of Finnish at all at the beginning. It didn't take very long for the truth to percolate to me that one could not do seriousRadicalism research without the language. I had studied Finnish briefly at McNeil Island. I had a grammar published in President Wilson's time (I think I referred to that before) and a dictionary, a little bit of groundingHistory in it, and some instinctive knowledge from my childhood. But nowHistorical I studied Finnish for a second time and learned to read it fluently, particularly if it was written before 1920. That'sCentury not because those Finnish immigrants wrote poor Finnish but their language,Oral although grammatically and otherwise excellent Finnish, was in a working-class vernacular and working-class vocabulary and I was familiar with the English equivalent of it. So that was really the first hurdle that had to be overcome. I guess New Yorkin Uutiset accepted the articles because they were becoming aware of the significance ofMinnesota history. Also the business agent happened to be Twentietha woman who had come from Duluth and worked as a secretary at the Work People's College or the Industrialisti, one or the other, and was very helpful. This was a series of eleven essays that essentially covered much of the ground that I did later in The Finn Factor.

HB: This wasn't the first draft of The Finn Factor, was it?

CR: In effect this was a first draft. It was a series of connected essays. I undertook to rewrite them, to integrate them more closely together and to extend them into a book, and that was by the year

3 1976. The book came out in '77, I believe.

HB: Now the articles were published in English in the Finnish newspaper?

CR : Yes, American New Yorkin Uutisit, like the other Finnish[­ American] press, was partially bilingual.

HB: Most foreign language press now is bilingual.

CR: They tried bilingual publication as early as the 1930s.

My articles were very well-received. They plowed up ground that was new to the readership, I think, at that time and yet also new to Finnish-American scholarship. I spent about three months in Texas, probably the winter of '75-6, putting these together in~o the draft of The Finn Factor in American Labor. Culture and Society. I wanted that book to be popular, readable, addressed to a general public, but to be based on primary sources particularly, and Minnesotathat would be of scholarly interest. I regard several things as significant about that book: I think it was one of the first instancesin in Finnish-American historical work, to some degree in ethnic research generally, to connect the Old Country experience to the American cultural experience, and the kind of political and social actions that immigrants engaged in. This, I found, was a phenomenon that influenced the thinking of successive waves by immigrants,Society according to when they arrived. The particular experienceProject they'd had in Finland to some degree influenced the development and the nature of Finnish­ American politics and cultureRadicalism in America. I tried to trace that relationship from the older immigration right through the period up to World War I and beyond. By the way, also historians up to that time hadHistory never done any work beyond 1914 in America. Whatever happened in the Finnish-AmericanHistorical community later was just simply beingCentury omitted as though it were largely irrelevant. HB: Even [by] those whoOral participated in the '74 conference in Duluth? None of those papers had to do with the postwar period?

CR: There was some papers at that conference that did go beyond that, but the study of the immigration statistics and the look at the relationship between MinnesotaFinland and America, that essentially ceased altogetherTwentieth with 1914. HB: Well,Reino Kero then was working on his book on immigration. 3

CR: Right, on immigration between 1865 and 1914 .

HB: Right. Auvo Kostiainen was working on his study of Finnish­ American radicalism in the 1920s. 4

CR: This is work that he was doing in '75, '76.

4 HB: He'd already begun it, hadn't he? He was in my seminar in '73 or '74.

CR: I would say that his work essentially developed after '74. As a matter of fact, I have a high respect for Kostiainen's work and we were quite close colleagues in developing some of these things. What I tried to do in The Finn Factor, and this very briefly, was to deal with World War I experience, that whole [Finnish-American] Loyalty League question, the attitude towards the radicals in the war, the drive to Americanization. This had not been treated other than a little bit in John Warge1in's book, The Americanization of the Finns,S which was an exception. As a matter of fact, I found it very helpful .

A little thought about The Finn Factor. While the thrust of the book is a discussion of the radical Finns, it was very clear to me that we were dealing with two cultural groupings essentially, or two differentiated groups within the same culture, to put it a little differently. Their interaction was a central questionMinnesota to any historical look at the period. But I found it disconcerting to have all of the younger scholars so abruptly and sharplyin dividing the Finns into two categories, "Church Finns" and "Red Finns."

HB: Yes. CR: I don't think that that thesis is sound or supportableSociety for a number of reasons, one of which is that theProject pure mathematics of it don't work. Perhaps twenty-five to thirty percent of the Finns were radicals. At the outset maybe twenty percent were in the church, which probably grew to thirty,Radicalism thirty-five percent [by the 1920s], which kind of leaves about a third of the Finns unrepresented at all, out there in limbo. That's one aspect of it. The other most signficant aspect is that whenHistory you begin to look at the actual workings of Finnish-American familiesHistorical and communities, you'll find that the divergences were not that sharp. You'll find radicals who read the Bible afterCentury supper. You'll find the generally religious family who would invite Orala radica~ uncle to bury some member of the family when you read Leaf House. I tried to present that problem in a little different perspective: more as a conflict over directions to take in American society rather than as an irreconcilable ideological conflict. Of course, people approached that problem of how to enter American society from Minnesotathe point of view of their ideological outlook. But in a sense I think that played a secondary role. The actual issuesTwentieth around which differentiations developed and quarrels and schisms took place were the practical questions of attitude towards particular labor struggles, particular questions like those that arose with the red flags parade [1908] in Hancock, Michigan. And in that respect, by the way, the response of the radicals makes more sense than the position of the conservatives. They asserted their right to parade with the red flag was embedded in the American constitution, the Bill of Rights; they asserted the right from that point of view.

S HB: They were articulating the doctrine of symbolic speech long before the legal scholars had even thought of it.

CR: That's a remarkable document that they wrote in 1909 [at the Finnish Socialist Federation national convention] on that subject, and I think you're right. Both sides, of course, were inflexible in their relationships to each other and in the extent to which they carried forward their quarrel. But there were many moments in Finnish­ American history, most particularly I think the copper mine strike in 1913-14, where a mass of church-going Finns were in the strike led by Socialists. Clergy of the church were defending the rights of the workers to strike and developed what one calls the "social gospel." Generally speaking, I found out that Arthur E. Puotinen, who comes from the church, was the historian most sympathetic to the kind of interpretation that I was making of these things. So I was very pleased with [The Finn Factor] at that time, and I remain well satisfied with it. I think it's endured the decade and for me was a landmark in my own development as a scholar. Having published and begun to distribute that book in '77, I found outMinnesota how difficult it was to publish and circulate a book. I also felt that it was time to move on to some other aspects of the research. in

HB: It was at that point also, then, that you came into contact with Russell Fridley and the Minnesota Historical Society staff, who were interested in the collection of material on [Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union] Local #665. Society Project CR: Well, several things happened somewhat coincidentally. Let's see if I can put them into some perspective.Radicalism First, the second of the international conferences was about to take place in 1979 in Toronto. 7 Marianne and I felt that we should intensify our scholarship in the area of Finnish-American women's studies and prepared to present two papers there. We had made a jointHistory presentationHistorical on Finnish-American women's history prior to this, at a conference of the Women Historians of the Midwest [inCentury 1975]. I had also published an article in Finnish Americana in 1978 ca1~edOral "The Feminist Dilemma in the Finnish Immigrant Community." Marianne had done some research in Rudy Veco1i's seminar. I undertook then to do a study of the economic basis of Finnish-American women's life and employment as household workers, as maids, and presented that paper in Toronto; Marianne did a different paper there. We were laying the groundwork for later scholarship in the area,Minnesota too. I guess to some extent these papers cameTwentieth as a bit of a shock and possibly as a milestone. There had been no presentations in this area at the first conference nor was any publishing taking place. It kind of became essential at that point that there be some women's participation and some discussion of women's history in Finnish-American scholarship.

It was on the way to the Toronto conference that I was thinking of the research on Local 665's history and I was talking to Rudy Veco1i on the plane to Toronto about that. This was a divergence from purely Finnish-American history into general labor history.

6 HB: Wasn't it somewhat before that that you first broached the 665 project in a seminar that was offered by the urban historian from Boston University?

CR: Bass?

HB: Yes, Sam Bass, Sam Bass Warner, junior.

CR: Yes, I don't remember that. I recall the event.

HB: I chaired the seminar, and Sam Bass Warner made a presentation and then you made a presentation in general about 665. 9

CR: Okay, I recall that, yes.

HB: And I think that preceded the Toronto meeting. CR: The actual interviews on that project were Minnesotadone in '81 and '82. HB: Right, I'm not talking now about the interviewsin themselves, but the initial impetus for launching the project.

CR: Yes, I think you're right about the occasion. There are actually two things germinating simultaneously here that had to do with the Historical Society. I was intrigued by the possibilitiesSociety of family history as social history and earlier thanProject '79 I had broached that subject to you and to Russell Fridley. We were in the process at that time of developing the ideas Radicalismfor the project. Somewhere along in that period the Minnesota Historical Society gave us a grant of $16,000 to conduct such a project on family history, through the Minnesota Finnish American Historical Society. As a matter of fact, were far enough along on that to bring Historyinformation about it to Toronto with us in November of 1979. That began a projectHistorical that lasted eighteen months and I think more or less simultaneous with that, the Local 665 project was germinating butCentury in practice didn't get off the ground until the Family History Project Oralwas out of the way -- that is, in '81 and '82. For that I applied for a grant to the Minnesota Historical Society and they gave a sum of $10,000 to conduct that project, which became the progenitor of this project on Minnesota radicalism. So we'll talk a little bit about the Family History Project, and then we'll talk about the Local 665 thing. Minnesota Twentieth In some ways I found the development of the project kind of an uphill struggle involving some interesting questions. First, I thought that family history could be done as social history, and that a collection of individual family histories really represented a body of social history. I recall one of your colleagues, whom we asked to help formulate policies, felt that it was not proper to designate such a project as an ethnic project. [Instead,] one had to do the history and find out if occasionally you found a Finnish-American in a body instead of going selectively about seeking out Finnish-Americans.

7 There's a little logic to that, but there is greater logic to undertaking the family history program as a specific look at the culture and experience of a particular group. The problem is, of course, to design it in such a way that it is adequately representative. Velma Doby did excellent work on that project; she did the interviewing. The interviewing was to be part of the development of written histories. We did something on the order of two hundred hours of interviewing; rather I should say she did. We collected something like a hundred family histories altogether which had written texts along with them. Probably the most interesting thing we produced was th~ guide, the Handbook for Doing Finnish American Family History,lO which has become a kind of a guide for doing ethnic history in general.

The project presented other problems. The Finnish American Historical Society, while it approved of it, did not know beans about developing history. We had even some difficulty getting their fifteen hundred dollars contribution toward the cost of the project. But on the whole the project was in the tradition of historical workMinnesota that that society had begun. We were correct in collecting a body of information that would supplement the work that the Finnish Americanin Historical Society had done in 1949 and '50-51 in writing and preparing for the book HistohY of Finns in Minnesota. ll They collected individual and community histories. We did a somewhat comparable collection almost thirty years later. (I should say in passing that the historian Salomon Ilmonen had done oral history work betweenSociety 1900 and 1911, a substantial piece of it in Minnesota, so Projectthat between his work in the first decade of the century and the 1950s activity and our work in the later seventies, you have threeRadicalism parallel projects [during this century] to gather similar information.) One of the upshots of this for me was that it threw me into the area of looking at folklore as history, and of deliberately gathering Finnish-American folklore as part of this history collectionHistory and as part of the approach to Finnish-American history. Historical

Finnish-American folkloristsCentury up to that time had, in fact, been largely looking at folkloreOral among Finnish-Americans as a search for the remnants of Old Country beliefs and Old Country superstitions and practices and so on, rather than as an indigenous phenomena developed among Finnish-American immigrants . That, by the way, led Marianne and me to the presentation of papers at a session of the American Folklore Society when they metMinnesota in Minneapolis [in 1982]. I did a paper based on Twentiethconclusions that might be drawn from family history concerning the meaning of folklore and Marianne made a presentation from her own research as a folklorist.

What we learned from the project was very extensive. I wrote an article with Velma for Siirtolaisuus, the journal of the 1r~titute of Migration in Turku, summarizing some of these experiences. I think the central fact here is that the family history project, and the look at the genealogy of Finnish-American families, developed a new perspective from which to look at Minnesota history. We started the

8 project kind of sneering at genealogy because we wanted to broaden the approach to family history from the strictly genealogical approach and we wound up finding that including genealogical research in family history was indeed a valuable consideration. We learned with substantial precision how Finnish-American cultural attributes were preserved through the family and within the community, the kind of role the families played in developing community structures and institutions. We learned a great deal about the transmigration of culture from rural to urban areas and back from urban areas to rural communities. We identified several communities in the state as the abiding and continuing centers for the flourishing regeneration, so to speak, of Finnish-American culture. Ely on the Vermillion Range was such a place. The New York Mills-Sebeka area was and is that kind of a community, and Cokato in Wright County was and remains that kind of a center. And strangely enough, Finnish-Americans by the thousands even in the third and fourth generation and in urban settings, return to those places like migrating birds at least once a year, maintain family connections and cultural connections. This practice extends from, say, Cokato up to the Copper Country. OnceMinnesota a year there's a migration of Finns from Cokato to Calumet, Michigan, to attend annual church celebrations because that was their originalin root community. This is partially confirmed from these family histories and mostly from the work of Salomon Ilmonen that we're also able to look at the phenomena of the industrial urban roots of the rural Finnish-American communities. This, of course, is very apparent around the Iron Range when you know they were blacklisted miners, but isSociety less apparent in Cokato unless you know that between the l870sProject and early 1900 most of those families came from the Copper Country; or if you know that the New York Mills-Sebeka area was settled by a core of some ninety families who came from Upper MichiganRadicalism and settled around New York Mills. Incidentally, this also explains why there are workers' societies in farm communities, and explains how come the bakery in Cokato to this day has once a Historyweek sales of "pasties" which comes from the UP [Upper Penninsula]. Historical

HB: So the Local Century665 project in essence was conceived simultaneously with that, but really followedOral the Family History Project in terms of chronology?

CR: Yes, that's true. The Family History Project wound up in 1980 and the interviews on the Local 665 project were done in 1981-82, at which time some otherMinnesota things were developing. Twentieth HB: Yes.

CR: The decision I made to go into the history of Local 665 probably grew out of that seminar [with Sam Bass Warner] but also it was a first step away from the Finnish-American experience using research abilities that I had begun to acquire. Local 665 was a very logical subject for a research project. It illustrated the fact that the energizing of the movement for organizing labor in the 1930s actually developed substantially in the American Federation of Labor unions,

9 and also that the left-wing had built a number of substantial bases within the A F of L prior to the emergence of the CIa [Congress of Industrial Organizations]. The workers that became organized in Local 665 were representative of that section of the working-class untouched by unionism previously. Outside of the cooks, waiters and bartenders who were organized essentially in craft unions of the International Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, the bulk of the employees in the restaurant and hotel industry were unskilled and unorganized, low­ paid, often in fact at that time, not paid any wages in cash but ...

HB: Just tips.

CR: ... their pay was in tips -- and sometimes they even bought their jobs out of their tips. The impetus for the organization of Local 665, by the way, had come from an itinerant Swedish organizer by the name of Swan Assarson who came here from Chicago with the intention of organizing a Swedish radicals' workers club, which he never did organize. Assarson apparently took the initiative to organize this union at a picnic for the Daily Worker in Como ParkMinnesota in St. Paul, and they were chartered in August of 1935. I was invited to join the local very early on by Swan Assarson and I didin join and belonged to it in '35 -6 and -7.

HB: What kind of work did you do that you were qualified to join that local? Society CR: I was an experienced organizer. Project HB: Oh. Radicalism CR: ... and a radical. HB: ... How 'bout a dishwasher?History Historical CR: I had not worked as a dishwasher. My work experience was largely warehousing. ThisCentury illustrates the point that Swan built the union by bringing into it young peopleOral devoted to labor idealism and radical ideas. He nurtured their interest, developed close relationships with them, and created the leadership for a very effective and progressive union. Some four thousand workers were organized into the union, largely between '35 and 1938 when they won their first general contract with the MinneapolisMinnesota Hotel Association. They introduced into the Minneapolis A F of L industrial union principles of organization, moreTwentieth or less simultaneously with the introduction of such organizational principles by the Building Laborers' Union and, of course, by the teamsters, who were in the A F of L. [Together, they] drove the Minneapolis Central Labor Union very abruptly in the direction of giving attention to the needs of the unorganized and the unskilled rather than simply to the craft unions.

HB: Which essentially returned the Central Labor Union to the position that it held in the early twenties, when it was much more

10 radical than any other central labor body in the country.

CR: Probably more industrial-union oriented.

HB: That's right.

CR: I should mention, as a matter of fact, that in 1935 the machinists undertook industrial organization primarily in the [Minneapolis Moline Power Implements Company] plant. They organized a major mass production industry regardless of craft, so 665 was a part of this trend.

Now, I don't think Swan Assarson could have [built 665] by the recruitment of younger people without previous labor experience had he not also had the support of older, more experienced radicals -- most importantly among them, the Bu1garian-Macedonian Workers' Club people. I think there were ... HB: Oh, many of those people were working in thatMinnesota trade? CR: They were employed in the trade. in

HB: Yes.

CR: The industry was undergoing some change also. The predominance of the Scandinavians in the restaurants and hotelsSociety had disappeared. The Bulgarians, Macedonians, Poles, very Projectfew blacks yet except for black women, were moving into the industry and it was changing character. The Bu1garian-MacedoniansRadicalism were fairly entrenched in the Minneapolis Athletic Club. Most of them worked in relatively unskilled jobs, though some in the department stores, places like that, that 665 tried to organize. The core of leadership which developed around Swan AssarsonHistory included Nellie Stone from the Athletic Club, (a black woman who operated theHistorical passenger elevators, Albert Allen, (a black from north Minneapolis at the Athletic Club); George Naumoff, (a freightCentury elevator operator at the Athletic Club); and one or two others. Oral

HB: [Naumoff] was from the Bu1garian-Macedonian Workers' Club?

CR: Right. He was a Macedonian who had worked mainly in the railway industry since [comingMinnesota to America with his family] at the age of about eleven.Twentieth Now he was in his forties, had a long experience similar to that of Greek immigrants in the railway industry, in railway construction gangs and some of the shops. The younger people drawn in were indivduals like Ole Fagerhaugh, whose father had been a leader of the streetcar workers and bus drivers in Minneapolis for many, many years, a Norwegian radical; Ray Wright, who came into the union in 1938, and who had started work as a miner in Hancock, Michigan, (a mine that my uncle used to work in.) He worked on the railroads, the lumber camps, organized farmers in Wisconsin in the United Farmers League, was also an experienced organizer. Bob Kelley, who was

11 indigenous to the industry, was a desk clerk at the Curtis Hotel , but had started as a bellman and knew the industry thoroughly. Bob's older brother Ed was a civil service worker at that time who initiated the organization of the public employees in Minneapolis. But Bob was probably, along with George and Swan, the key man in building the organization. They recruited a number of young women , most important of whom were Rozzie [Rosalind] Matusow who came from the University, and started working with the maids; and a remarkable young woman from the country by the name of Gunhild Bjorklund, of Swedish background, who became a very effective organizer. Douglas Hanson, son of a radical mother, came into the union. He worked in the Nicollet Hotel .

The emphasis was on rank and file unions and on educating the membership, on involving the membership, good basic left-wing principles of union organization. They paid full per capita to the Central Labor Union, full per capita to the Farmer-Labor Association, so they were well-represented in the CLU and in the Farmer-Labor politics. In fact, I was a delegate to the Hennepin County Central Committee of the Farmer-Labor Party from the union;Minnesota I was not an active participant though I went to meetings. In some respects Local 665 gave the Communist Party a platform in thein A F of L, in the Central Labor Union ...

HB: At a time when ... CR: . . . [the CLUJ opened an arena through which itSociety could work with independent radicals like Walter Frank andProject some of the left-of-center social democrats. Without this I think the CP would have been isolated from the A F of L. Radicalism HB: Isolated not only because of the absence of any kind of organizational platform within the CLU but isolated because the radical presence would have beenHistory exclusivelyHistorical Trotskyist in the CLU. CR: Probably so. Century HB: If 665 hadn't existed.Oral

CR: Yes, I think that's true. It became a counterweight to the Trotskyists and I think provided a possibility of left-wing initiatives in the State Federation of Labor as well. The State Culinary Workers, whichMinnesota 665 actually initiated, played a very substantialTwentieth role in the industry, resulted in a very vital state hotel and restaurant workers' union.' I think Ray Wright chaired this state board for a while, and went on to the state board of the A F of L from there.

The gathering of the history was for me rather an interesting experience. If anything we undertook it a little bit too late, but the taped interviews that I did with George Naumoff and Nellie Stone, with Ray Wright at some length, with Ole Fagerhaugh , with Roz Matusow, with several others, provided in fact the core of oral history that we

12 transcribed in this project on Minnesota radicalism. This co~ld not have been done today. It was also an interesting experience in recording the ethnic diversity of the labor movement, of the trade union movement in general. One could not but be impressed with the fact that this union not only represented diversity of ethnic origins, but functioned on that basis in terms of the kind of leadership that it created. There is very little doubt that Local 665 also pioneered the first steps in the [Minneapolis] civil rights moy~ment. That emerges in John Haynes' book, the Dubious Alliance, but I think it is probably also, perhaps reluctantly, admitted by other historians of the labor movement. This was the largest organized block of black workers among other things, and the union effectively and actively pursued a policy of integration.

HB: It was different from the Pullman porters in that there were no white Pullman porters.

CR: Yes, the dining car waiters and Pullman porters were strictly black organizations. Minnesota

HB: Right, exactly. in

CR: And in fact the black waiters [Local #614 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union] in the Curtis Hotel which had about forty members, (because only blacks served as waiters in the Curtis,) was built on that prototype. It was a credit to 665, Societyspecifically to Bob Kelley and also to Anthony Brutus Cassius,Project leader of the Curtis workers, that they were amalgamated into 665. Radicalism At that point, by the way, the there were three major centers of Left influence in the hotel and restaurant workers' union' -- New York, Minneapolis and San Francisco. It's something of a toss-up as to whether the first hotel contractsHistory were signed in San Francisco or Minneapolis; this was on the nationalHistorical scene a very pioneering effort. Century I think one of the interestingOral things is that in this particular local union the Communist Left did not isolate itself from the rank and file. They maintained and retained a position of respect on the part of the Central Labor Union. The reason for that I think was the quality of leadership and the fact that the leadership in many ways was quite independent. There was little disposition on their part to operate simply on the Minnesotabasis of instruction from the CP about current politicalTwentieth issues. They exercised initiative and independence. That was partially, from 1946 on, a matter of Communist Party policy. Martin Mackie and I told these people who were following the leaders of the Party, "You're on your own. You may share our socialist visions, but you're making your own policies from now on." And this was consistent with the situation in which they found themselves after the Taft-Hartley Act [with its requirement that union officers sign a non-Communist affidavit.]

HB: That didn't rub off on Gus Hall, did it?

13 I recall that at the time when you were thinking about doing these interviews with the surviving participants in Local 665, you and I met up in Mesaba Park at some kind of a celebration in honor of former Congressman [John T.] Bernard. That was in the summer of 1978. I recall that throughout that celebration Mr. Hall was sitting up there on the platform, and after ...

CR: That's Gus Hall you're referring to?

HB: I'm talking about Gus Hall, of course . After a break in the proceedings, or it may have been at the end of the proceedings, Gus Hall and I were talking when you were standing next to me. I turned to him and said, "Gus, you know Carl, of course," and he looked at you icily and he said to me, "Yes!" and turned away. You recall that particular incident?

CR: Yes, I recall meeting him in the doorway coming in and holding out my hand and saying, "Hi, Gus," and he jus t walkedMinnesota by. in HB: I didn't know about that 'cause it was before I arrived. But I did recall the icy greeting, or icy non-greeting, he gave you at the time I tried unsuccessfully to reintroduce you to him.

CR: I think you were going to say something there about the fact that the policy I was describing 1n relation to the PartySociety leadership and the union leadership was not the kind thatProject Gus Hall advocated.

HB: Not only that, but I thinkRadicalism it was probably, from my reading at least, unique in the United States at any time. If anything, the Party direction was too ubiquitous in other parts of the country where the Party did in fact have someHistory influence in the trade union movement. This is not only my observation, basedHistorical on of reading the secondary/primary evidence, but also the observation of such an activist as MichaelCentury Quill of the Transport Workers Union of New York. Oral CR: There's no question you're right on that score.

Minnesota Twentieth

14 July 19, 1988:

HB: Carl, among the other activities that you were engaged in that flowed directly from your research and scholarly activities, was, of course, the United Fund for Finnish-American Archives, and the Reunion of Sisters that was associated with the Finnish-American and Finnish women's history. I think that we should perhaps devote this session to a discussion of these other activities that you are engaged in in a scholarly way. Now, how did it emerge that you went from the Finnish­ American Family History Project to these other activities?

CR: Well, the [Minnesota] Finnish-American Family History Project was already intended to create additional resources for research in this field. We had become aware of the deficiencies in materials, for instance, at the Immigration History Research Center [IHRC] and we had become quite aware that the Suomi College Finnish-American Historical Archives in Upper Michigan were another research resource far more extensive in fact than the IHRC collections in respectsMinnesota other than the socialist and cooperative movement. We had also learned that there were important collections of information and inmaterial in Finland which were not directly accessible to American scholars.

As a result of this, back in about 1980, Marianne Warge1in and I had begun to postulate the possibilities of cooperation between the several archives -- most particularly between SuomiSociety College and the Immigration History Research Center. ThereProject never had been cooperation, and in fact a good deal of mutual suspicion and mistrust prevailed. Suomi College particularly was sensitive to the fact that the IHRC, with its Finnish collection,Radicalism was encroaching on their territory. It was fairly obvious that no concerted effort to extend the collecting and preservation of historical materials could be accomplished without the cooperationHistory of the two institutions. This was a fairly recognized kind of a problem.Historical

The end result is Centurythat sometime in the summer of 1980, during a conference of Finnish linguistsOral in Minneapolis, I broached the subject to John Ko1ehmainen, the senior Finnish-American historian, and he was very agreeable to the notion of working for a larger measure of cooperation and to overcome these barriers. He himself had researched quite a bit at Suomi College. In September of 1980 I had the opportunity to broach Minnesotathe same question to A. William Hoglund, the second of the senior historians. We had not yet formulated anything I Twentieth I except a kind of a general program of cooperation, but in talking to Kolehmainen, Hoglund and others, it became apparent that probably the I most useful purpose for such cooperation would be the microfilming of Finnish-American newspapers. The very large collection of such papers at Suomi College was, we knew, in quite a serious state of deterioration. Access to papers stored in Finland was also very limited. Marianne and I brought this proposition to Suomi College and talked with Ralph J. Ja1kanen, the president of the college. We brought the question to Rudy Vecoli of the IHRC and achieved some

15 reluctant promises of cooperation on the part of both. The reception in the college was positive. Over the next three or four years we had a number of meetings with both Jalkanen and his staff; they began to treat us as serious people Wh9 appeared not to be contesting for leadership with them, but that some kind of genuine cooperation was possible.

It was not until probably the summer of 1982 that we finally crystalized the idea of what we called the United Fund for Finnish American Archives. United was the motif. We decided that money was the immediate current objective and the archives was the way to go.

HB: United with whom?

CR: Essentially it was intended to be a three-way collaboration hinged on Suomi College and IHRC, working together with the Migration Institute in Turku, but also and probably most importantly, with the University of Helsinki. We created a list of sponsors, quite representative of the Finnish-American community,Minnesota notable people from the church segment and from among the scholars. We published a flyer which advertised the creation of the organization,in set forth its purposes, and listed the names of the board which we had created by virtue of appointment. Russell Parta of New York Mills was the chair. Parta was an old family friend of mine, but also was a member of the Suomi College board and a long time friend of Ralph Jalkanen. Raymond Wargelin, Marianne's father, who had been the headSociety of the Finnish Lutheran Church, became the vice-chair. ProjectProfessor Hoglund became a member of the executive, as did Kolehmainen and we were in business. Radicalism We then declared 1983, "The Year of the Finnish-American Archives" and set a goal of $50,000 to raise. The interesting thing is that the notion of a year dedicated to Finnish-American archives was very widely accepted. Largely with Historythe assistance of Ray Wargelin we organized supporting committees in probablyHistorical a dozen states and raised during that year theCentury sum of about $35,000. HB: You didn't reach yourOral $50,000 goal.

CR: We didn't reach the $50,000 goal. I thought $35,000 was an extraordinary success. It came in in five and ten dollar increments, very largely. For instance, a collection list was passed around Warren, Ohio, which broughtMinnesota in nine hundred dollars in five and ten dollarTwentieth contributions, a couple of fifties and a couple of a hundred dollars. That kind of experience was repeated around the country. A substantial number of Finnish-American organizations, including such conservatives as the Finlandia Foundation groups, a large number of church congregations, etc., made contributions. The upshot of the printed appeal, which emphasized the question of preserving Finnish­ American heritage, was actually to make that idea a by-word in the Finnish-American community.

The notion we had about how to proceed with this campaign derived from

16 our sense of what Finnish-American identity consisted of and how it was expressed. We felt the main ingredients here were first, that Finns were attached to a community, and that the interests of each individual community and its participation in this heritage preservation heritage concept had to be addressed. Second, that the Finnish-Americans' notion of identity hinged on occupation and that interest should be addressed. And we of course developed a theme of unity, as against the fragmentation of Finnish-American life and Finnish-American organizations. The degree of cooperation achieved was quite phenomenal. Sometime, I think late in 1983, we decided to publish a tabloid-sized brochure that would be inserted into each of the four Finnish-American newspapers in the country. That was successfully done. The communist Tyomies, the social-democratic Raivaaja, the conservative New Yorkin Uuntiset and the kind of liberal Amerikan Uutiset, published by Parta, all carried the supplement -- a circulation of something broader than six or seven thousand copies around the country. That was no mean achievement. The problem of microfilming newspapers was in itself,Minnesota of course, an enormous task. The Finns had published something on the order of one hundred twenty-five Finnish-language newspapersin in the United States. We asked Professor Hoglund to develop a listing of these papers. The end result was a "Union List of Finnish-American Newspapers Published in America," some one hundred eighty-five pages organized according to where each title was preserved, listing the issues held, and the number of issues missing. It covered not only the Societyarchives of IRHC and Suomi College but also the Migration Institute,Project the Library of the University of Helsinki, the Center for Research Libraries Consortia in Chicago, Concordia Seminary, the New York Public Library, and some other places. It also recordsRadicalism what newspapers had been microfilmed. 14

Eventually we, of course, had to address the question of doing the filming. The virtue of the campaignHistory for money lay in two things. First of all, it made it possible to Historicalcontribute a nest egg of some $13,000 each toward microfilming purposes to Suomi College and the IHRC, to eliminateCentury the excuses that there was no funding available. Second, it also created Oralan atmosphere in the Finnish community that literally compelled these institutions to produce results . During the first year of actual microfilming (which was done in the Twin Cities,) about twenty-five short-run titles printed largely before 1914 were microfilmed, mainly fromMinnesota the Suomi College and IHRC collections. In 1984,Twentieth Marianne and I were in Finland where we talked to Esko H&kli, the director of the University of Helsinki Library, and secured their cooperation. They probably had the largest single holding of newspapers and agreed to join in the project. H&kli said they had laid aside work of this kind for a number of years because there was no one in America to whom they could talk. We filled that vacuum and created a very good relationship with the University of Helsinki. I think it was on that trip (or it might have been a second trip that we made to Finland,) we were searching for newspapers and sure enough in the basement of the Tyovaen Arkisto, the archives of the Social 17 Democrat Party and the trade union movement, we found copies of the first four to five years of the Tyomies, a number of years of the Toveri Finnish-language radical paper published in Astoria, Oregon, and some miscellaneous items. These first issues [of 'the Tyomies] from 1904 to 1909 had been destroyed in the flood in the Tyomies basement in Wisconsin, and were believed to be totally non-existent.

HB: That means these were not available in the United States.

CR: These had been destroyed, [what we all thought were the only copies anywhere.]

HB: [So these were] the only existent copies, okay.

CR: Yes. That includes the earlier Amerikan Tyomies Suomalainen of 1903-1904. And they were non-existent in Finland as far as anyone knew. There they were about three-quarters of a mile from the University of Helsinki in the basement! Subsequently the University of Helsinki has microfilmed those papers. So we Minnesotamade some important discoveries as well as achieving the beginning of microfilming the known collections. This project has continuedin up to the present, and will continue for some time.

HB: Now, initially you said that there was reluctance on the part of the Suomi College and the IHRC administration to go along. What was the basis of that reluctance? Well, you did mentionSociety Suomi College's reluctance: they didn't want anybody intrudingProject on their turf. What was the basis of the IHRC reluctance? Radicalism CR: I think we have partially here a clash of egos and personalities. Vecoli clearly looked very dubiously on Ralph Jalkanen and the Suomi College leadership as ultra conservatives. I think there also was some rationale that perhaps theHistory collection in Suomi was second-rate and not significant; quite the contraryHistorical was the case. I must say that this kind of atmosphere disintegrated quite rapidly. We brought Jalkanen and VecoliCentury face-to-face with us in a meeting in Minneapolis during the first Finn FestOral in 1983, (which we'll talk about a little bit) and actually cemented a working relationship which has persisted. [Look at it this way: this project had to overcome the historical division of two major tendencies in Finnish-American life -- and even progressive historians could have a problem in learning to deal with "Church Finns."] ThisMinnesota became, of course, the basic model for the projectTwentieth to microfilm the Italian-American press, which is also still in progress.

I feel that this was not only worthwhile but was a rather interesting, unique kind of experience. It really created a question of the degree to which historians should link their work to the ethnic community they study, and to what degree they have responsibilities for the preservation of the documentation of that community. I think that there was a tendency on the part of some of our historian colleagues to feel that perhaps we were becoming Finn-ophiles of some kind and

18 losing objectivity in historical research, rather than seeing the intrinsic interest of the scholar in the preservation of the culture as well as of its documentation. To illustrate this let me tell you about a similar experience. Marianne and I put together a panel discussion at the first Finn Fest, which I'll talk about a little later. The topic was "Are Historians Tradition-Bearers?" We invited several historians: Peter Kivisto, Rudy Vecoli, and Melvin Holli from Chicago, and me to be on the panel. I must say that they were reluctant to address the question, I think suspicious of what it meant. I was the only one that actually talked to the issue that ethnic communities expect historians to be "bearers of the tradition." They delegate that responsibility to them, wanted or unwanted, and it's up to the historian to respond to that responsiblity in some form. Naturally a historian ideally ought to respond to the responsibility by doing his work as an objective historian to the best of his capability, so that the ethnic community might benefit from good scholarship , rather than to be embarrassed by the fact that he's expected to be na tradition bearer" -- the tradition bearer being of course a figure of folklore rather than of scholarship.Minnesota

HB: Well, would a critic of the tradition bein a tradition bearer?

CR: A critic of aspects of the ideology or tradition might be rejected by the community, but in effect would be preserving the tradition. Society HB: In a different variant. Project CR : In a different fashion. RadicalismTraditions are always subjects of polemics within the group and there are among the Finns two or three major concepts of what that tradition consists of. My approach as a scholar would be that there's room for all of those interpretations. And historians should try to graspHistory what [the traditions] are, not to reconcile them, but to record their Historicalexistence and to understand them better. Century HB : The microfilming projectOral continues you say .. . ?

CR: It continues to the present.

HB: Right . Now obviously the $35 , 000 that you raised would not be enough to continue thisMinnesota project on ad infinitum, so where do the funds comeTwentieth from for continuing? CR: Well, that has, of course, been a problem. University of Helsinki has funded its own activities. Suomi College has not spent the initial amount of money in total, and still has some moni es . Immigration History Research Center spent its money rather rapidly, particularly by devising the organization for the actual filming , setting up the standards, and preparing publications for filming . They have subsequently received some rather generous contributions for Finnish-American activities and continue to use some of that new 19 money. We have tried to involve other institutions and archives in funding some aspects of the project, with indifferent results.

For several years we've been grappling with the question of filming approximately sixty years of the Finnish [Evangelical Lutheran] National Church newspapers down at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. They plead poverty but they have the papers, although there are some issues elsewhere. The University of Michigan is willing to put up some money; Suomi College is willing to put some up and IHRC is willing to put up some money mainly to buy positive prints. Concordia is willing to lend their equipment and have their newspapers filmed. At this point, the United Fund for Finnish-American Archives still has a few bucks in the treasury, and offers to put a thousand into the kitty provided the other institutions come up with their shares. [We're] farily optimistic about winning this one.

HB: Will that exhaust the funding that the project has? CR: The United Fund still has some four or five Minnesotathousand dollars and we've agreed to use these monies for precisely this kind of purposes, to provide a nest egg for work or to stimulatein work on some particular newspaper. The nitty-gritty of the problem has been to decide on priorities, to find practical, workable objectives and to get them executed. At this point, we also move on to the question of acquisition of these titles through the exchange of film or through the sale and purchase of the film. Society Project HB: In other words the institutions, Helsinki, IHRC, Suomi, don't automatically exchange what theyRadicalism are microfilming with each other? CR: Right, right. There is still some provincialism in that respect. The University of Helsinki is open to exchanges, and they have exchanged a lot of reels with Historythe IHRC.Historical HB: Functionally, what the IHRC microfilms stays at the IHRC; what Suomi does stays withCentury the Suomi collections; what Helsinki does stays with the Helsinki collections;Oral except that Helsinki is willing to exchange, and IHRC perhaps is also willing, but Suomi is more reluctant.

CR: The practice still has to be tested. It's typical of the microfilming businessMinnesota among institutions that the institution owning the newspaper keeps the negative and sells the positives . What we're incorporatingTwentieth into the deal with Concordia, if we can swing that, is the principle of pre-funding, that is, through the advance agreement to purchase a positive print and through the cooperation of four or five institutions to make each job of this kind practical. I think that's a familiar routine for people who work in that area.

HB: Now in addition to this microfilm project and collecting funds for archives, you mentioned in passing the Finn Fest. What was that all about? When did that get started and how successful has that

20 been? Is it continuing?

CR: In 1983 the first of a series of national Finn Fests was organized in Minneapolis. This was an initiative that was taken by the Suomi-Seura or Finland Society, in Finland, bringing together leaders of Finnish-American societies to talk about having one big festival each year. This is modelled on the similar experience with Canada, which has a much more recent immmigration. So the initial meeting of this group, held in Minneapolis, delegated the responsibility of organizing the first Finn Fest to the Finnish­ American organizations of the Twin Cities. Marianne had been at the initial meeting, and she and I became members of the committee.

The real question was what was this Finn Fest going to be. Was it going to be simply an old-fashioned festival or picnic, or could it conceivably attract some of the third generation? Would it be significant in terms of the preservation of Finnish ethnic identity and heritage in this country, or would it simply be celebratory in its character? We felt that it needed to have a contentMinnesota that would enlarge the comprehension of ethnic history and ethnic tradition or heritage. For that purpose, the United Fund launchedin a subsidiary aspect of the first festival, which we called a program of the Living Heritage of Finnish America. We created a series of nine symposia that would take place during the festival at the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis. The idea was accepted. In fact, people were welcome to do their thing. We brought the idea to the MinnesotaSociety Humanities Commission and asked them for a grant to Projectarrange this program. They granted us $7,500 for this purpose and the symposia became realizable. We brought together a substantial group of Finnish-American scholars to participate in the symposium.Radicalism HB: From Finland as well as fromHistory the United States? CR: From the United States, not fromHistorical Finland. [Looking at the program for the event.] The first forum was "Family History as Finnish-American History."Century Second was on "Finnish-American Folk Life: from Immigrant Customs toOral the Invention of St. Urho." Juha PentikAinen of the University of Helsinki participated in that one.

HB: So there was some European

CR: There was this outstandingMinnesota folklorist from Finland participating. We hadTwentieth then a symposium on "Archives as Preservers of Heritage," with Bill Hoglund participating and Arnold Alanen presenting papers on subjects that relate to archives and historical collecting. We had a very interesting series of symposia that dealt with the word, written and spoken -- in other words, literature as a vehicle of Finnish­ American heritage preservation. This was a symposium of Finnish­ American writers and poets. This was a beginning of something like a serious literary movement among individuals who had been writing poetry or prose or involved one way or another ...

21 HB: In Finnish? Was this limited to ... ?

CR: In the English language ...

HB: Oh, that's what I wanted to ask.

CR: In the English language primarily, other than for the translators who were translating Finnish works into the English language.

HB: But the novelists and the poets, were those American Finns who wrote in English?

CR: Right, right.

HB: So we're dealing with second, third generation essentially?

CR: Essentially third generation writers. Then there was also a symposium of Finnish-American storytellers, people who preserved the oral history tradition. We had the symposium on Minnesota"The Historian as Tradition Bearer," a symposium on the problems of rendering Finnish into English, (a discussion among translators,)in and a discussion of "Finnish-American Prose and Poetry Writing: Experiences of Poets and Writers. We had a symposium on Finnish-American newspapers, "Do Ethnic Publications have a Future in America?" We brought the editors of the four Finnish-language newspapers to the symposium, (chaired by Russell Fridley, by the way,) and they discussed whetherSociety or not they do have a future. Then there was a discussionProject of educators and teachers on "Ethnic Heritage, Culture, and History in School Curriculum." Quite a vast substantialRadicalism array of subjects, all together probably about thirty-five, forty scholars, and a whole group of writers, poets, educators, teachers. In this Finn Fest we had very substantial participation from third generation Finnish-Americans, a lot of people from academic lifeHistory forming a sort of coalition with the second generation traditional leadersHistorical of the Finnish-American community. Century HB: Now this Finn Fest Oraltook place in Minneapolis in the summer of '83. In addition to those who were part of the symposia, seminars, how many participants? CR: There were about Minnesotafour thousand people at the Finn Fest. HB: TwentiethNow the symposia, the intellectual side, was only one part of it, I assume.

CR: Yes, we estimated some seven to eight hundred people participated as listeners, discussants in the symposia, many of which were concurrent with each other.

HB: The rest of the Finn Fest was then a folk festival essentially -­ music, arts, folk festival kind of thing?

22 GR: Right, plus a very large dinner. There were about eight hundred fifty people at a dinner at which Russell Fridley became the featured speaker. We were very intent on making this festival an expression of Finnish-American participation in the American community with people like Russell Fridley. Of course, we had Don Fraser, Mayor of Minneapolis, present a proclamation declaring this Finnish-American Day. He was scheduled to come, but unfortunately there was the death of a well-known black figure ... what is his name ... ?

HB: You mean the publisher?

GR: No, Anthony Brutus Cassius. Don Fraser went to the funeral of Anthony Brutus Cassius.

HB: Of course.

GR: I told him I would have gone there, too, if I had had my choice . HB: Sure, of course. You didn't have a choice. Minnesota CR: He sent his deputy mayor down to the festival.in

HB: Now this was the first of the Finn Fests. How many Finn Fests have there been since then? CR: I think the one just held in Delaware was theSociety sixth: '83, '84, '85, '86, '87, '88. Project HB: It was held annually everRadicalism since. CR: Yes. HB: And now of course it has spreadHistory throughout the United States wherever there is a large Finnish communityHistorical. Century CR: It has been held inOral one city each year. HB: Yes, a different city each year.

CR: Yes, the second one was in Massachusetts, which was more of an old-time, second generation festival. The organizers said they couldn't deal with thisMinnesota kind of intellectual material we had had here . The Twentiethnext one was at Suomi College, which rather overdid the number of discussions. The next one was in Berkeley, California, at the University of California campus, then there was one last year in Detroit. This year, the 3S0th anniversary of Finnish settlement in America, [the festival was held] in Delaware.

HB: That already took place.

CR: That has already taken place. Marianne has attended all of these. I've attended them all except Massachusetts and Delaware. In

23 fact, she has made it a project to study the progress of this movement. There's no question that the symposia organized for the first festival were adopted as a desirable feature of all festivals, but the ability of the organizers of the festivals to do this kind of thing has been limited. The participation of Finnish-American scholars is limited and there's been some deteroriation of it. I think Marianne and I have presented some kind of papers at all of them. [At] the Detroit one, I made a presentation on the role of Finnish-Americans in the labor movement in this country. In Berkeley I presented a paper on the collection of Finnish-American heritage and documentation in the West.

HB: There is another thing regarding the United Fund activities, and that is the guide to collecting of Finnish-American materials.

CR: Yes. At the 1979 international conference in Toronto, Bill Hoglund agreed to develop a bibliography of sources on Finnish­ American culture and history, which he appears to have pretty well in hand at this point. It contains information on Minnesotathe archives and libraries of Canada, Finland, and the Uni.ted States. The discussion [which gave rise to the bibliography] and ourin own experience with archives led us to believe that a great deal more should be done to create stronger archival sources and to better inform scholars about where they are and to win greater support and cooperation from the Finnish-American community for them. Society A couple of things happened. First, the ProjectSuomi College archives were without an archivist. They had not [had a full-time] archivist for a long period of time, and the collections were deteriorating. We actually were largely instrumentalRadicalism in finding a solution to that problem. In a meeting with Ralph Jalkanen and his staff, we were stressing the need for resolving their archival problem, so Ralph asked us, "Who would you suggest?"History We came up with the name of Marsha Penti who was a graduate in folkloreHistorical from Indiana University, and well-qualified. Suomi College hired her and actually improved very much the work of Centurythe archives, and for that matter the microfilming project and other things.Oral

The other thing that occurred (and I don't recall exactly what the genesis of this was,) but the [Midwest Archives Conference], in planning their spring conference, I think in 1983, in Chicago set up a panel discussion on Finnish-AmericanMinnesota archives. [The session addressed]Twentieth their experience and specifically the experience of the United Fund in the expectation that it might serve as some kind of a model for archivists and their supporters to follow in developing ethnic collecting. The session at the conference was chaired by Francis X. Blouin from the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan. John Grabowski, curator of manuscripts at the Western Reserve Historical Library in Cleveland was a commentator, as was the archivist for the Immigration History Research Center at that time, [Susan L. Grigg]. She, by the way, was the person who initiated the organization of the panel and the session. Marianne and

24 I presented a joint paper on the experience of the United Fund for Finnish-American Archives, the status of archives and collecting in the Finnish-American community, the work toward the newspaper project, and so on.

The paper was never published, but one of the upshots of it was that we wrote A Guide to Collecting and Preserving Finnish-American History. It actually has three authors -- Dr . Raymond Wargelin, Marianne Wargelin and myself -- and is a fairly comprehensive but brief dii§ussion of the problems of collecting materials for an archive. The Suomi-Seura in Finland gave a grant of five hundred dollars toward the printing of it. It was mailed to every Finnish­ American organization that we had on our mailing list, perhaps about five hundred of them. It didn't result in any great upsurge of collecting but it did obviously enhance the prestige and position of several archives interested in collecting. At this point, that included the IHRC; the Finnish-American Historical Archives at Suomi College; the Western Reserve Historical Society; Finnish-American Cultural Center in Fitchburg, Massachusetts; andMinnesota the Iron Range Research Center -- in other words , five cooperating archives in different regions of the country . I guess forin us the interesting aspect of this was that we had to become something on the order of experts or at least informed persons about problems of archives, the problems of collecting, the problems of preservation, the problems of microfilming, which in itself is kind of a rewarding experience . Society That just about exhausts the bird's eye viewProject of the United Fund, which still exists. It will meet about ten days from now in Hancock, Michigan, and is going to considerRadicalism where it can go from here, because neither Marianne nor I are devoting time to it. There is a place for the continuation of its work. Possibly that might be with the Center for Finnish Studies of the University of Minnesota, which to some extent is an offshoot of theseHistory various activities. By the way, [it] got a quarter million dollars fundingHistorical from the Finnish government which the Universi ty is going to match, so there is some realistic prospect of this FinnishCentury center functioning and becoming a national study center . Oral

HB: That is, if the University doesn' t collapse beforehand. CR : Well, we trust itMinnesota will endure. HB: TwentiethNow, there's one other aspect of your work that we haven't touched upon and that has to do with the Reunion of Sisters. How did that emerge and what did that all mean? What were its accomplishments?

CR: Let me put this more in the form of a narrative than attempt to describe all the details . In many respects this became the most exciting and most interesting of all of the projects that [Marianne and I] have undertaken in this period. The rather oblique origin of the project was in the fact that in doing research on Finnish history

25 and culture for The Finn Factor, I had encountered the main eminent Finnish writer of the nineteenth century, Minna Canth, and had learned something about her. Marianne, in doing her feminist research, had also encountered Canth, and since she had been a drama major in school, had some particular interest in her. I knew from personal experience that many of Canth's plays had been major features of the Finnish-American theater. So this was a person of some interest to us.

She was a native of the town of Kuopio in Finland which was a sister­ city of Minneapolis, and the University of Kuopio was a sister of the University of Minnesota. Sometime I think in the fall or winter of 1983 there was a celebration downtown of the sister cities program with Kuopio. Diane Skomars Magrath, the wife of C. Peter Magrath, the president of the University, was active in this program and present at th~s function. So knowing that she was headed for Finland, we suggested to her that she might, while she's in Kuopio, see what she can learn about Minna Canth. Well, she returned from that trip some time in the spring or early summer of '84 and, somewhatMinnesota to our surprise, said that she had spent an interesting time in Kuopio and had gotten acquainted with a woman named Sirkkain Sinkkonen who was on the faculty of the University. Diane and Sirkka, both staunch feminists, had talked together and dreamed up an idea of a festival or a meeting between women from Kuopio and the United States. And so Diane and Peter Magrath met with Marianne andSociety myself about the possibilities of realizing something basedProject on this idea. We said it sounded workable, we were willing to work on it, but there had to be some funding and some administrative support for it; under those conditions we'd undertake it. RadicalismSo Peter Magrath says, "Draw up a budget, we'll see about getting some money." So that night I knocked out a budget for $20,000 of activities which included a filmstrip, an exhibit, a book, all kinds of Historythings. Apparently Magrath was very serious about this. He called a meetingHistorical with the representative of the Northwest Area Foundation, with Marianne and myself present, and we presented the $20,000Century budget. It sounded good and they awarded us $20,000. In fact, it wasOral tacked on to a grant of $60,000 to IHRC because otherwise it was somewhat too late to consider an independent grant. So we had a nest egg of $20,000, a general plan, and somebody asks, "What do we call this thing?" "Well, let's call it a reunion of sisters," (I think I said this off the cuff) and so the Reunion of Sisters was born. Minnesota

Of Twentiethcourse it was very vague, nothing very tangible about it and so it was agreed that Marianne and I should make a trip to Finland to make this thing concrete. This was our first trip. It coincided with the international conference on immigration history at Turku University, the Migration Institute. So we took off about ten days early, rented a car, and drove up to Kuopio. We suddenly found that we had a very good project indeed. We met with the mayor of Kuopio, who endorsed the idea very strongly. We met with the president of the University of Kuopio, a number of other people there, and we went to Helsinki for

26 about a week. (We talked on this occasion with Hakli of the University Library about the microfilm project.) We went to the American embassy and met Keith and Raija Nyborg, the ambassador and his wife, and found them willing and able to render full support. We met with the secretary of the Council for Equality of Men and Women, the official cabinet level department in charge of researching and drafting an equal rights law for the country. We went to the national headquarters of the Finnish Central Federation of Trade Unions [SAK] and met with their international secretary and a couple of the young women who were doing research on women's issues for the Central Federation. By this time we began to feel that we had pretty fair support.

We had a preliminary meeting convened for us by Suomi-Seura in Helsinki which was attended by a number of people from Helsinki including the secretary of the United Nations Committee of Finland, the Finnish Literature Society, and some of the feminists at the University. We went and paid a calIon the leading sociologist and writer on women's issues in Finland, Elina Haavio-Mannila,Minnesota went to the conference in Turku and spread the word a little bit around there. By this time we felt we had created the beginningsin of a supportive movement in Finland, not only based in Kuopio but also in Helsinki, where the real action is, and where the headquarters of the feminist movement are, and the principle academic workers in this field are.

Out of all this came a proposal for holding a first preliminary conference in Finland rather than start with a full-fledgedSociety conference program. So we brought back to the UnitedProject States a proposal to gather the following June in Kuopio at a preliminary seminar where there would be some discussion, someRadicalism papers, and further planning of an international, cross-cultural, women's-issues-oriented, not strictly feminist, exchange of ideas between women in Finland and the United States. We convened a meeting Historythen in the Twin Cities to set up an American committee for the Reunion ofHistorical Sisters.

About this stage weCentury began to explore the idea of creating an exhibit. We had, I think, fifteenOral hundred dollars in the budget for an exhibit. We conceived it as an exhibit of the Finnish-American women's experience. By the time we had drafted proposals and consulted with experts like the exhibits people at the Minnesota Historical Society, we knew we needed a lot of money. We asked the Minnesota Humanities Commission for a grantMinnesota and received from them, I think, $10,900. We asked the Minnesota Historical Society for a grant and received $4,500.Twentieth We asked the Finnish-American Cultural Activities group in St. Paul and received fifteen hundred dollars and felt that there was enough money to create the exhibit.

Before I left for my winter vacation in Texas we had set up a working committee. Marianne was in effect the co-director with me. We had a scholar of Scandinavian women's history to write the text. We had people designated to find photographs, primarily Velma Doby. We approached this quite professionally. We had a designer recommended

27 I

by the Historical Society to create the exhibit. We had lined up in r advance exhibit dates at the St. Louis County Historical Society at the [restored Duluth Union Depot], at Moorhead State University, at Mankato State University, at the Iron Range Research Center, and at the Cokato Museum, as well as a preliminary agreements to show it at Suomi College during the following Finn Fest and at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. We had been turned down by the Wayne State University at that point. But there was a exhibit space and an agreement to organize a symposium in each one of these places to discuss the exhibit.

It was finally unveiled a little bit late in Duluth in August of '85, was there for a period of six weeks, and then went on a one-year tour of Minnesota. I must say it scored very successfully in communities like Moorhead and Mankato, as well as in Finnish communities. That in a sense epitomized the fact that women's history portraying the immigrant generation and second generation women simply has not been done among ethnics. To jump the gun, I guess I should say that in preparation for the final conference in 1987 of Finnish and American women, in Finland [the Athenaeum,] the national museum of Finland created a duplicate of the exhibit with Finnish-languageMinnesota text, and, insofar as I know, it is still touring Finland.in So the end result was that a small group of us, Marianne and I, Diane Magrath, Carol Pazandak, Stephanie Cain Van D'E1den, Inkeri Vaananen Jensen and some others, travelled to Kuopio the following June. A number of papers were presented which were subsequently published in Finland. Marianne did a very nice paper on theSociety history of the Finnish-American women's movement. IProject did a paper on the significance of Minna Canth in Finland. It sounds kind of ridiculous that an American, male to boot, shouldRadicalism go to Finland to deliver that paper, but I felt that, and I think this is confirmed by all our experience, that the Finns had lost track of the social and political significance of Canth in relation to the nationalist movement as well as in relation to women's rights Historyin Finland.Historical At that conferenceCentury we then planned the organization of a conference for the following year,Oral in 1986, in the Twin Cities. That took place at the St. Paul campus of the University. There were slightly over fifty Finnish women from the academic community, from government, from the labor movement at that conference, a very distinguished group indeed. The program was organized somewhat along the lines of the first Finn Fest symposium. We had for this purpose a grant, again from the MinnesotaMinnesota Humanities Commission, to bring in American Twentiethscholars. We got a grant from the United States Information Agency of, I think, $10,000 to help bring the Finns here and that was entirely due to the good graces and effective support of the American embassy in Finland. Nearly three hundred Finnish-American and American women attended the conference, a very fine cross-section of academic and political women. This included an address by Marlene Johnson, lieutenant governor of Minnesota, participation by state representatives, Margaret Preska, President of Mankato State

28 University, a scattering of scholars from across the country, from New England and New York, West Coast, and Midwest. This was a much more high-level participation than at that first Finn Fest and directed their attention, of course, to women's issues.

I think there was a failing in all this our ability to get a stronger base among the women's studies people. They were interested but [with some exceptions] not active. I think [they did not understand] the potential of this kind of international relationship . A pure academic conference might have gotten more attention, but this had the flavor of an academic and cultural exchange, going beyond the feminist and going beyond the academic people. In fact, that was its strength.

There were also some other interesting things that happened in connection with that. Probably the most interesting was an exhibit on Finnish women's crafts and arts that was sponsored by the gallery at the St. Paul campus. A number of people here did excellent work for that in cooperation with the Finnish Society to Advance Folk Art and Crafts and other groups in Finland. It was a veryMinnesota fine authentic exhibit of Finnish design and folk art. In other words, this thing went off in a number of interesting directionsin including again an emphasis on women and literature and the arts as well as a day that was devoted essentially to women and politics. This was jointly sponsored with the [Hubert H.] Humphrey Institute [of Public Affairs] and included discussions on women's economic and social issues. A lot of this was an exchange in which top level academicsSociety and government people in Finland participated. Project So this conference then set the stage for the fall conference in Finland in 1987. It hardly seemsRadicalism that this was only a year ago this August. We brought something on the order of one hundred twenty Americans to Finland for this conference. They paid their own way . History HB: Of course. Historical

CR: And that's aCentury lot of money invested. There were preliminary sessions in Helsinki whichOral included a dinner for the Americans by the foreign ministry, visits to the Ministry of Social Affairs Council on the Equality of Men and Women, visits to all of the principle libraries and archives of Finland to view and hear about their collections on women's history, visits to workplaces for the women interested in labor Minnesotaissues. I don't think that the Finns took full advantage of this or quite understood what they had on their hands. I'mTwentieth not sure they anticipated what was happening in this any more than the University here ever had a vision of what might happen with this program. It was a sort of runaway affair. Or as Diane Magrath, Marianne and I visualized it, a fantasy that became reality.

The conference sessions in Kuopio were again, on the whole, good scholarly discussions. A number of preliminary sessions included, for instance, people from the labor movement and workplace coming together, historians meeting together, people in literature talking to

29 each other. By the way, we had in Helsinki a meeting called by the University of Helsinki Library, [to which were invited the] principal Finnish archives: the National Archives, the Migration Institute, the Finnish Literary Society to discuss archival and library cooperation between Finland and the United States. A very interesting subject, one which has not yet brought forth its potential but which explains partially why a good relationship with the University of Helsinki on microfilm subjects and exchange of information now exists.

HB: But does this last year's session mean the end of this Reunion of Sisters. Or does anything of a continuing character emerge from it?

CR: Everybody was ambivalent on that question. Speaking for Marianne and myself, this was it. This is what we'd set out to do and it was done. But there were also things that were in the works. There was an exhibit still touring the United States and still touring Finland. This exhibit right now is at Old World Wisconsin, in Eagle, Wisconsin. People want to see it allover the West. Minnesota No one was really anxious to let go of this, so we talked about continuation in Kuopio, but emphasized the creationin of special interest communication, with continuing cooperation among archivists and librarians, contact among labor people, contact among writers, and so on. So there was some loose understanding that continuing committees would be created in each country. That was contrary to the facts of life, in a certain sense, because everyoneSociety who had participated in this program was at this Projectpoint totally exhausted and other things had been on the back burner for all this time. So there is no organized continuity. On the other hand, there's a travelling exhibit in Finnish design in theRadicalism United States which partly owes its origins to that and there are these channels of communication that remain open. I suspect that that was the end of the movement as such. At best, people would say, "Let'sHistory get together again in five years," which is more realistic perhaps. Historical

I neglected to talkCentury about one other thing. We had budgeted five thousand dollars out of Oralthat $20,000 for creating a revolving publishing fund. We decided to publish one book on Finnish-American women'f history. That was the title we brought out called Women Who Dared. 6 The title comes from a letter of Minna Canth talking about women in Finland who dared to immigrate in quest of more independence. The Immigration HistoryMinnesota Research Center became the publisher and distributor of the book and the fifteen hundred copies are very likely to sellout.Twentieth Again this book is to some extent a pioneering venture; there really isn't that much literature on ethnic women's history. So it seems to serve a very useful purpose. The book itself essentially turned out to be a collection of writings that had been done in the past and therefore largely of papers that Marianne and I had written or presented, along with several short pieces from Hilja Karvonen that had been published by Mike Karni.

So there were very visible and continuing results in the United

30 States. The movement as a organized group may be gone but the exhibit continues. The book continues to be in use and some of the conceptual notions of this kind of international collaboration have been picked up or adopted by the feminist movement. There was a discussion about this Reunion of Sisters program at the national conference of women's studies people in the United States that took place in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. I have not had a report on that.

I think the conference served the Finns' very well . It was during the period of the Reunion of Sisters, about a year ago this spring, that the Finns adopted a national equality law and are just finishing the experience of the first year in enforcement. The people who wrote the law and who are administering the law were almost all involved in a substantial degree in this program and I think they learned something from the American experience in the course of it. And I think the Americans who went there learned something from the Finns, who in a number of respects, are ahead of the Americans. That kind of sums up what was one of the most interesting experiences of my life in any kind of activity. Minnesota HB: Which brings us, of course, to the projectin that we're now engaged in, right?

CR: Right, I think that's true. The title became the 20th Century Radicalism in Minnesota Project, after much deliberation about it. This is one of the things that was largely on the back burner during that Reunion of Sisters program. The project, whichSociety has now been in formal operation since October 1st, 1987,Project is approaching the midway point. Actually I think the genesis of this project lies in the annual meeting of the MinnesotaRadicalism Historical Society in the fall of 1985. That was just when we were moving into the Reunion of Sisters program. I presented a paper at that annual meeting on the subject "Minnesota Communism: Myth Historyand Reality," which seemed to strike a responsive chord among the people inHistorical the audience, and particularly with Russell Fridley, who was then the director of the Society. Russell suggestedCentury that I should submit a proposal about doing something with this subject.Oral And I did submit that kind of a memorandum in December of 1985. I think in principle the idea was approved by Fridley at that point. I don't think we were in a position to do anything with this until 1987.

HB: That's right. Minnesota

CR:Twentieth When we began to do these oral history interviews, you and I.

HB: Right.

CR: Even while we were getting ready to go to the last of the Reunion of Sisters conferences in August .

HB: Exactly. And of course this coincided with Russell Fridley's retirement from the directorship of the Society and therefore that

31 caused another bit of a delay.

CR: Yes, to all appearances, Fridley had not laid the basis for the project's support by the Society.

HB: No.

CR: With his resignation, it was in limbo.

HB: For about a year.

CR: Almost, yes. Well, it was largely due to the continuing support of the idea of such a project by Deborah Miller, the Research Supervisor, and by Jean Brookins, the Assistant Director for Publications and Research, that the project did survive. So, some preliminary work was then funded by the Society last June, 1987, and it was with these preliminary funds that we began the process of transcribing interviews and setting up the project. That was a phase in which I received a grant as an independent contractorMinnesota to complete transcription of interviews that were on hand, including the interviews done on the Local 665 project. I inthink that it's not necessary to try to summarize the project experiences to date.

HB: No, I think that will come around with the project results. CR: That will be put on the record. Society Project (END OF INTERVIEW SERIES.) Radicalism

HistoryHistorical Century Oral

Minnesota Twentieth

32 ENDNOTES 1nThe Utopian Vision of Finnish Immigrants: 1900-1930," vol. 60, no.4, Autumn 1988.

2New York Mills, MN: Parta Printer, 1977. 3Migration from Finland to North America in the Years Between the United States Civil War and the First World War (Turku, FInland: Turun Y1iopisto), 1974. 4The Forging of Finnish-American Communism. 1917-1924: A Study in Ethnic Radicalism, (Turku, Finland: Turun Y1iopisto), 1978.

5Hancock, Michigan: The Finnish Lutheran Book Concern, 1924.

6Leaf House: Days of Remembering: A Memoire by Ruth Engelman (New York: Harper and Row), ca. 1982. Minnesota 7Finn Forum '79, a conference on Finnish emigration/immigration, was held in November 1979, in Toronto. The proceedingsin were published as Finnish Diaspora, edited by Michael G. Karni (Toronto: Multicultural Historical Society of Ontario), 1981. Carl Ross' article was entitled "Finnish American Women in Transition, 1910-1920." 8Finnish Americana: A Journal of Finnish AmericanSociety History and Culture, vol. 1, 1978. Project 9"Labor History as Community RadicalismHistory." 10Minneapo1is: Minnesota Finnish American Family History Project, 1980. History 110riginal1y published as MinnesotanHistorical Suoma1aisten Historia, edited by Hans R. Wasastjerna,Century and translated into English by Toivo Rosvall (Duluth: Minnesota FinnishOral American Historical Society), ca 1957. 12"The Minnesota Finnish-American Family History Project" by Carl Ross and Velma M. Doby, Siirtolaisuus/Migration, 1982, no.3.

13Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota's DFL Party, by John Earl Haynes, (Minneapolis:Minnesota University of Minnesota Press), 1984 Twentieth 14This document was still in manuscript form in 1992.

15A sixteen-page pamphlet published by the United Fund for Finnish­ American Archives (Minneapolis, 198-?).

16Women Who Dared: The History of Finnish-American Women by Carl Ross and Marianne Warge1in Brown, eds., (St. Paul: Immigration History Resource Center, University of Minnesota), 1986.

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