'Työmies?': Finnish Canadians in the Economy: A Historiographic Overview

Finnish immigrants are often seen as labor activists, even “radicals,” and key players in the “left-right” political divide, thus indicating a real presence on the “other” side of the economy. How did successive historians build these now-standard views? This paper takes a sweeping tour of writing on Finnish Canadian workers, tracing the evolution of these assessments. Archives and histories provided basic notions of “the” Finnish Canadian and were key sources as professional scholars – many Finns themselves – began their work. In Canada, new academics – Varpu Lindstrom most prominently – wrote about women, arts and culture, intellectual activity, and the impact of Finns as “exceptional” historical actors in socioeconomic terms. But, have historians of Finnish Canadian workers built a convincing case? Examination of Finnish Canadian “economic” historiography offers insights into the Finnish Canadian “story,” and the nature of generalization in immigrant and ethnic history.

Company Houses Along the Picket Line

Michigan copper mining companies owned and rented more than 3,000 houses along the Keweenaw Peninsula at the time of the 1913-14 copper strike. The provision of company-constructed housing in mining districts has drawn a wide range of inquiry. Mining historians, community planners, architectural historians, and academics interested in the immigrant experience have identified miners' housing as intriguing examples of corporate paternalism, social planning, vernacular adaptation and ethnic segregation. Michigan's Copper Country retains many examples of such housing and recent research has shown that the Michigan copper mining companies championed the use of housing as a non-wage employment benefit. This paper will investigate the increasingly important role of occupancy and control of company housing during the strike. Illustrated with images collected during the strike by the fledgling U.S. Department of Labor, the presentation explores the history of company housing in the Copper Country, its part in a larger system of corporate welfare, and how the threat of evictions may have turned the tide of strike.

THE FANNED FLAMES OF DISCONTENT: A SOLIDARITY-INSPIRED HISTORY OF THE IDENTITY/IDEOLOGY, CULTURAL HISTORY, AND RHETORICAL STRATEGIES OF THE WOBBLIES DURING THE 1916 MINNESOTA IRON ORE STRIKE

Rooted in critical scholarship this dissertation is an interdisciplinary study, which contends that having a history is a basic human right. Advocating a newly conceived and termed, Solidarity-inspired History framework/practice perspective, the dissertation argues for and then delivers a restorative voice to working-class historical actors during the 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike. Utilizing an interdisciplinary methodological framework the dissertation combines research methods from the Humanities and the Social Sciences to form a working-class history that is a corrective to standardized studies of labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Oftentimes class interests and power relationships determine the dominant perspectives or voices established in history and disregard people and organizations that run counter to, or in the face of, customary or traditional American themes of patriotism, the Protestant work ethic, adherence to capitalist dogma, or United States exceptionalism. This dissertation counteracts these traditional narratives with a unique, perhaps even revolutionary, examination of the 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike. The intention of this dissertation's critical perspective is to poke, prod, and prompt academics, historians, and the general public to rethink, and then think again, about the place of those who have been dislocated from or altogether forgotten, misplaced, or underrepresented in the historical record. Thus, the purpose of the dissertation is to give voice to historical actors in the dismembered past. Historical actors who have run counter to traditional American narratives often have their body of "evidence" disjointed or completely dislocated from the story of our nation. This type of disremembering creates an artificial recollection of our collective past, which de-articulates past struggles from contemporary groups seeking solidarity and social justice in the present. Class-conscious actors, immigrants, women, the GLBTQ community, and people of color have the right to be remembered on their own terms using primary sources and resources they produced. Therefore, similar to the Wobblies industrial union and its rank-and-file, this dissertation seeks to fan the flames of discontented historical memory by offering a working-class perspective of the 1916 Strike that seeks to interpret the actions, events, people, and places of the strike anew, thus restoring the voices of these marginalized historical actors.