When Finns first migrated to Western Pennsylvania en masse, they brought with them a strong socialist culture — a culture that competed with the Christian church and made them a key constituency for the American left for decades.
There aren’t many Finns left in the Mon Valley, where most of the early arrivals settled. There are even fewer physical remnants of their socialist and Communist movements, although for a time they controlled several imposing “red” halls and a network of cooperative businesses. But, for a time, the Finns of Glassport, Monessen, McKeesport and Beaver County were among the region’s most active radicals.
Arriving in America
The first Finns arrived around Pittsburgh in the 1890s, according to a report on immigrant cultures dating to 1944. Many headed to Monessen and Glassport, where the men sought work in steel and tin-plate mills. Of the Finns who traveled on the ill-fated Titanic in 1912, nearly one in four was headed to Western Pennsylvania, according to a 2003 article by Mike Roinila.
Many of the Finns were well-read and politically active even before their arrival. Their Scandinavian homeland, controlled as an appendage of tsarist Russia, was home to a growing social democratic movement.
The Finns took their socialism with them. They established a renowned network of meeting halls that competed with Lutheran churches as community hubs. There were Finnish socialist halls in Glassport and Monessen, and clubs in several other towns. In Monessen, the “red” hall (as opposed to a conservative “white” hall) was “said to be the best and most striking example of Finnish architecture in the city,” as Roinila relates.
A nationwide movement
In 1904, when the nation’s disparate Finnish socialist groups held a conference to decide whether to affiliate with the Socialist Party of America, one of the 14 delegates was Axel Pekkol of Glassport.
Glassport’s socialist hall sat at the corner of 9th Street and Ohio Avenue (most likely at a now-empty corner lot). During the 1910s, the hall was abuzz with socialist activity, including by Jewish and “English” socialist groups. A social held there in 1915 was representative, featuring “an Italian string trio; a vocal singing trio; a piano solo . . . violin solo . . . short talk on socialism by a 6-year-old orator, G. Piper” as well as antiwar talks, “a vaudeville act” and music from a socialist youth orchestra.
Finns, sometimes dismissed as clannish and isolated by others on the left, managed to set up a nationwide network of cooperative stores and restaurants. Sampo, the Monessen cooperative, lasted for years despite competition from a “white” non-socialist cooperative.
War and Red Scare
World War I and the first Red Scare brought crackdowns on the radical press and pressure on the socialist movement — especially its immigrants. In 1918, agents of the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor to the FBI) spied on Pittsburgh-area Finns, particularly those they associated with the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World. Finns “are invariably socialists with strong I.W.W. tendencies,” one New Castle informer told a federal agent. The outbreak of civil war in Finland between socialists and right-wing forces raised distrust and divided the community.
In 1919, during the Great Steel Strike that nearly crippled steel production and provoked brutal state violence, a group of Finnish I.W.W. “red guards” was apprehended in Weirton, W. Va., just over the state line. According to (possibly exaggerated) press reports, West Virginia sheriff’s deputies and war veterans arrested the Finns, many of whom had allegedly traveled from modern-day Aliquippa to provoke revolutionary violence. The press hailed a policeman who forced the Finns to kneel and kiss the American flag; a steel company official blamed the “reds” for driving innocent men from working through the strike.
From socialism to communism
The 1919 Red Scare came amid a split in the U.S. socialist movement, with radical factions and entire immigrant federations bolting the party to form the first American communist parties. In the wake of the split, the Finnish federation bolted the party and eventually joined the newly formed Workers Party (the aboveground wing of the semi-legal movement). The arrival of the Finns was an enormous boost to the small party: By 1925, of 16,000 members, 6,500 were Finnish, according to Jacob A. Zumoff in “The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929.
The party maintained a network of branches throughout the region. In 1925, when the party moved to reorganize its Finnish units, it listed ethnic locals in Canonsburg, Glassport, Pittsburgh, Monessen and New Castle, among others. The Daily Worker included regular mentions of Mon Valley Finnish clubs amid fundraising reports and speaking tours.
By the 1930s and ’40s, many of the region’s Finns had assimilated or moved on to other parts of the country. Locals were among the Finnish Communists who traveled to the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, a Soviet region that aimed to build a socialist Finnish culture at Finland’s border. Elis Ranta, a Finn from Monessen, sailed for Europe in 1932, arrived in the Soviet Union in 1933 and was jailed during Stalin’s purges, according to a dissertation by Samira Saramo.
Fading away
While the area’s Finnish population trickled away by World War II, many remained active on the left. At least three Finns with local ties served in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War: Henry Oliver Sutiinen, George Albert Pulkinin and Henry Einar Heinanen.
By the mid-1940s, the region’s Finnish community was being discussed largely in the past tense. “Red” halls closed, and the Communist Party had long since reined in its language federations before shifting them into the International Workers Order, a fraternal benefit society. Roinila reports that a cooperative farm run by local Finnish leftists remained active outside Pittsburgh until the 1960s (we’d love to learn more about it!). The radical community ended much like that of the local Lithuanians — politically divided, culturally assimilated and no longer tied to a single, powerful socialist movement.
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