Työmies

[1] The original Amerikan Suomalainen Työmies began publication with the purpose of spreading socialism and held an inclusive stance towards religion despite historical conflict between the labor movement and Finnish Lutheranism.

[1] Both of these radical weeklies had broader organizational goals than merely bringing the news to a Finnish-American readership profitably, instead seeking to help construct a potent network of Finnish Americans to advance the cause of socialism through political and economic means.

[4] Local Finnish socialist groups began to centralize around the same period that Työmies (and Raivaaja) were launched, holding a convention at Duluth in 1904 as the "Finnish-American Labor League.

[1] The paper advertised for a meeting of co-operative store organizers which was eventually held in Superior in July 1916 and led to the creation of the Central Cooperative Exchange (CCE) on August 30, 1917.

[11] During the early 1910s, the Finnish socialist movement had become deeply divided between a center-left majority faction (so-called "opportunists"), who sought to use electoral methods to attain state power and to initiate transformative reforms, and a left wing (so-called "impossibilists"), who considered all reformist gradualism to be useless and counterproductive and who instead favored the use of strikes and sabotage by the radical labor movement to bring about a revolutionary change.

[16] However, internal divisions and perhaps a desire to relocate closer to Minnesota's booming iron ranges, which offered a greater chance to expand their organization, led to the Työmies’ departure from Hancock; the search for a new location preceded the unrest caused by the Copper Miners’ strike.

[16] During its Communist Party phase, which began in about 1920, the circulation of the daily fluctuated in the range of 13,000 to 15,000 copies, declining to around 5,000 in 1950, at which time it was merged with the CPUSA's East Coast Finnish-language newspaper, Eteenpäin, to form Työmies-Eteenpäin.

[17] Työmies-Eteenpäin originally had strong communist leanings, but later mellowed over the decades to become more of a link between Finns in different parts of the United States rather than addressing a political agenda.

[1] Työmies-Eteenpäin ran from 1950 to 1998, however in 1986 the English-language Finnish American Reporter was established and continues to circulate out of Finlandia University in Hancock, MI, as a politically unaffiliated paper with readership across the United States and Canada.