Challenge Accepted: A Finnish Immigrant Response to Industrial America in Michigan's Copper Country by Gary Kaunonen (review)

Book Reviews 111 Gary Kaunonen. Challenge Accepted: A Finnish Immigrant Response to Industrial America in Michigan’s Copper Country. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010. Pp. 255. Appendices. Bibliography. Drawing. Index. Maps. Notes. Paper, $35.95. Gary Kaunonen, the grandson of Finnish immigrant miners from Minnesota’s Iron Range, has not turned his back on his family’s moral traditions, even while he pursues a PhD at Michigan Technological University. He has written an important social history of the leftist subculture of the Finnish immigrant community during the early 1900s, which amounted to approximately one-third of the Finnish immigrant population. Kaunonen has concentrated on several workers’ rights advocates and organizations associated with the Finnish Socialist Federation (FSF), the first foreign-language affiliate of the American Socialist Party. He uses and builds on the scholarly enterprise launched by the late Michael G. Karni and Douglas Ollila in their book, For the Common Good (Superior, Wis.: Työmies Society, 1977). Kaunonen focuses on the 1913-1914 Copper Country Strike, an episode famous in American labor history and an event still seared into the consciousness of residents of Michigan’s Copper Country. Copper miners wanted an eight-hour day for three dollars pay; termination of the “widow-maker,” the dangerous one-man drill; and recognition of their union, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). The odds were stacked against the strikers. The WFM had just exhausted its funds in brutal, hard-fought strikes in Colorado. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) shunned and refused to support the WFM. The strike occurred when labor law was best described as the “law of the jungle.” Kaunonen centers his narrative on a “Finnish Transitional Neighborhood” in Hancock, Michigan, and its driving force the Työmies Society, a radical organization that published Työmies (The Worker), two women’s newspapers named Työlaisnainen (Working Woman) and Naisten Viiri (Women’s Banner), pamphlets, songs, plays, books, political cartoons, children’s periodicals, and more. Through its publications, a drama club, and a choir it sponsored, the Työmies Soceity became the cultural center of the Finnish immigrant workers’ community. The author shifts between descriptions of the key Finnish immigrant organizations—temperance societies, the FSF, and the WFM—the Calumet & Hecla (C&H) mining company, and the “Detective Agency” goon squads hired by C&H. The author moves back and forth between descriptions of organizational activities and 112 The Michigan Historical Review the concrete and specific narratives of individual working families, which he extracted from numerous archived letters. The brutal strike culminated in the well-known Italian Hall tragedy in Calumet, Michigan, where about seventy-five miners and a great many of their wives and children were stampeded and smothered in a panic during a Christmas Eve celebration in 1913. Someone yelled “fire,” and to this day, generations afterwards, the relatives of the miners believe that company thugs deliberately precipitated this tragic incident that broke the spirit of both the union and the community. Gary Kaunonen brings to life the struggles of a Finnish immigrant working-class neighborhood in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. This book is very important to labor, ethnic, and American social history. His grandparents would be proud; they would say what I once heard Martin Kaurala, a second-generation Socialist from Mass City, Michigan, say, “He is a Son of the People.” Michael M. Loukinen, Professor of Sociology Northern Michigan University, Marquette Michael Largey. Haitians in Michigan. “Discovering the Peoples of Michigan” series. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010. Pp. 126. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. Maps. Notes. Photographs. Paper, $12.95. Since January 2010 there has been a renewed global interest in Haiti, sparked by an earthquake, an outbreak of cholera, a controversial presidential election, and the unexpected return of the ousted former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Michael Largey’s Haitians in Michigan is therefore a timely publication. The book’s major objective is to illustrate that although Haitian communities in Michigan are small compared to Haitian groups in other areas of the United States or even to other immigrant groups in Michigan, they constitute a lively American ethnic enclave worth studying. For its cultural vibrancy the Haitian population of Michigan is deemed “pi piti, pi rèd...