Socialism as it developed in the United States is inconceivable without the participation of Finnish-speaking immigrants.

‘Working Class Active Among The Finns’ from The Montana News. Vol. 7 No. 12. January 29, 1909.

Montana Organizations Display Great Solidarity and Aggressiveness–Attempts to Organize the English Speaking Socialists

The Finnish locals of Montana are forming a solid, substantial part of the movement that is destined in time to have a most essential effect on the state party. The Socialist thought is a part of the earnest life and effort of the Finns. It is a real cause, which affords in their eyes the most desirable of purposes to strive for. They give of their time, money and daily life to effort for the Socialist cause. They have brought it into their social life, and made it a basis of their enjoyments. In the coal camps where large numbers of Finns are employed they have their own halls, their libraries, regular weekly meetings with dances, lunch and entertainment. They organize bands and have music for both diversion and education. They take to all the demands for progress and human liberty like a duck to water. It was nothing less than marvelous that in realms of the bloody czar the Finns should have wrenched the right of suffrage from the hand of the despot. And that immediately on its attainment, on their first election, they should have thrown almost a hundred Socialists into their parliament. And they did not ask this progress for the male alone. Their demand was for universal suffrage, which included women, and nineteen women were thrown into that first wonderful parliament.

Here in America the Finns have looked in surprise upon the dilletante character of American socialism; its superficiality, its sentimental, abstract theorizing, with a most monumental indifference to the practical problems of the working class that are at our door. But they have girded up their sinews and gone forward to establish a Socialist movement here in the land of their adoption, and work for the final emancipation of labor through the only possible program, the abolition of the private-owned industry. Their ignorance of a foreign tongue might have proved an insurmountable barrier to natures less determined. But they established Finnish translator in the national headquarters of the Socialist party and pay him $100 a month. They have now three weekly papers in the country and one in Canada. They have a Socialist school at Duluth, Minnesota. This school is now carrying on the inevitable fight with capitalist influences which every Socialist activity struggles under sooner or later, and which has been making such herculean efforts to ruin the News. The money which they had in the bank, about $600, has been attached for some indebtedness, and it will take an immediate assistance of $300 to save the hard work of the past few years.

The Finnish Socialists stand for all that is best, most uplifting and most practical for the working class. They are most strenuous advocates of temperance because they see the havoc that drunkenness works, its brutalizing influences and its disaster to the intelligent progress of the working class. They share this position with that of the European Socialist movement generally.

This demand for the recognition of became the temperance principle most aggressive in Minesota, and resulted in the Finns handing an ultimatum to the American Socialists at their convention that they should either insert a temperance plank in their platform or the Finns would bolt in a body and carry their own movement on independently. That is why the delegates to the national convention of the Minnesota Socialist party, characterized throughout the country for its howling impossibleism, came instructed to advocate the recognition of a temperance measure.

The Finns in Montana pay a large per cent of the state revenues of the party. They are advocates of constant organizing and supervising work done by the workers of the party. They pay their workers willingly and conscientiously for they know as a matter of course that nothing can be done without money to work on. They believe that the workers and organizers should visit all locals regularly, say once in six weeks, giving them information of the movement, encouraging them, helping and strengthening organization in every possible way. In the Northern Montana coal district the Finnish Socialists have undertaken to see what can be done toward organizing the English speaking working men into the Socialist movement. At one time we had the districts of Stockett and Sand Coulee well organized. But the old agitators have departed for other points, and though we have considerable of a vote in these sections the Socialists are taking no part in the party organization, of which there is great immediate need at the present time, no part in the trying problems that confront us, the furnishing of necessary funds, or the taking on the burden of the responsibilities that must be borne by a working class movement if it is to have any modicum of success. This floating Socialist sentiment must be organized here in America, and the Finnish comrades are lending their help in this direction. They have called for English-speaking workers. They bear the expenses and furnish money for this purpose. They held a very successful meeting at Sand Coulee with about fifty English-speaking persons present; and the Socialists among these said they thought a local could be organized with about ten or fifteen persons.

At Stockett over sixty names have been obtained of those who are ready to form a Socialist body. What is wanted is someone who will work there and mobilize this mass. We need the boomers Socialist. The Finns are alert to the need of local Socialist papers. Their practical minds see that the only class struggle that affects the working man is the one at his door, not the one in books. And they know that working class resistance without a paper is null and void. No organization in Montana stood so firmly on the ground that a paper must be supported.

The Finns have been the most aggressive advocates for the organization of labor and their right to display the ancient banner of labor, the red flag, and to wear their party emblems, that we have in this country. It was the Finns that enabled the United Mine Workers to organize Wyoming, and they didn’t hide in the bushes to organize either. They marched up to their halls and they wore their red neckties. They have made a strenuous fight in Michigan with the authorities for the right to carry the red flag.

So all tongues and nations combine to remove the ancient curse of servitude. Workingmen of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!

The Montana News first published in Lewistown, Montana, began as the Judith Basin News published by J. H. Walsh in 1904 as the paper of the Socialist Party of Montana. The Montana News moved from Lewistown to Helena, and from 1905 was edited by Ida Crouch-Hazlett. Splits within the State Party led to a number of conflicts over the paper, which ran as a weekly until 1912.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/montana-news/090128-montananews-v07n12.pdf