Industrialisti (The Industrialist)

INDUSTRIALISTI (The Industrialist). The Industrial Workers of the World’s longest-lived foreign-language newspaper, Industrialisti, published daily from 1917 into the 1950s, when it converted to weekly publication, and closed in 1975.

Launched as Socialisti in 1914 by Leftish elements in the Finnish Socialist Federation, the paper emerged out of the IWW’s 1913 copper and ore-dock strikes in Minnesota. Expelled from the Socialist Party, the direct action element renamed the paper Teollisuustyoläinen (The Industrial Worker) in 1916 and relaunched it as Industrialisti in March, 1917, after a lawsuit had forced its suspension. As the IWW’s only daily newspaper, Industrialisti was closely linked to the IWW’s Work People’s College (Työväen Opisto) in Duluth until the College closed in 1941.

Industrialisti supported the IWW’s substantial Finnish immigrant membership in the Midwestern United States and Canada and the Pacific Northwest, particularly miners and timber workers. In 1927, the Industrialisti directory listed more than seventy-five Finnish IWW groups, a number that fell to a few dozen by the early 1940s. The paper maintained a circulation of some 6,000 copies and remained a vital force through a network of Finnish halls, a traveling theater troupe and other cultural events.

Industrialisti printed IWW and other labor news, but also featured extensive coverage of the vibrant radical Finnish immigrant scene. Finnish Wobblies remained a vital force in the timber industry, in particular, through the 1940s, even as declining Finnish immigration, acculturation of the second generation, and the broader decline of the IWW after the 1930s gradually eroded the paper’s base.

During the Great Depression, Industrialisti championed organization of the unemployed and the IWW’s campaign for the six-hour work day, arguing that the IWW’s program for industrial democracy offered the only solution to the global economic crisis. A 1953 statement of principles concluded, “The working class has no other way to be freed from exploitation than getting industrially organized in One Big Union and endeavoring to control production and distribution through it.” There was less news of IWW activities in Industrialisti’s final decades, but the paper continued to advocate revolutionary industrial unionism until the end.

Etholén, Katrina. “Industrialisti and the Industrial Workers of the World.” https://talesfromthebraziersgrotto.wordpress.com/2020/06/27/industrialisti-and-the-industrial-workers-of-the-world/

Hummasti, P. George. "'The Working Man’s Daily Bread’: Finnish-American Working Class Newspapers, 1900–1921,” in Michael Karni et al., eds., For the Common Good. Finnish Immigrants and the Radical Response to Industrial America. Superior, Wis: Työmies Society, 1977.

Kostiainen, Auvo. “A Dissenting Voice of Finnish Radicals in America: The Formative Years of Sosialisti-Industrialisti in the 1910s.” American Studies in Scandinavia 23, 1991, pp. 83–94. http://www.genealogia.fi/emi/art/article256e.htm

Ollila, Douglas. “From Socialism to Industrial Unionism,” in M. Karni, ed., The Finnish Experience in the Western Great Lakes Region. St. Paul, Minn.: Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, 1975.

Pinta, Saku. “The Wobblies of the North Woods: Finnish Labor Radicalism and the IWW in Northern Ontario,” in Peter Cole et al., eds., Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW. London: Pluto Press, 2017.