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n 45 CHAPTER 3 Immigrants A great struggle of the miners in Colorado and at Calumet, Michigan, is still going on. . . . Comrades, workers, brothers! Nobody should leave for these states! Inform your friends and comrades to look for work in other places so as to not become traitors of those martyrs who are our brothers and whose struggle is also ours. —Radnicka Straza, Croatian immigrant working-class newspaper In the years leading up to the 1913–14 Copper Country Strike, immigrant laborers took on an increasingly important role in the Copper Country’s labor force, as well as in its radical and workers’ movements. The presence of European-born workers and their children was visible in union memberships, in the foreign-language labor and left-wing publications they wrote, and in the community spaces they owned and operated. Additionally, immigrant radicals—especially the “Red” Finns—carried out a number of public demonstrations in which their politics and ethnicity were on display. The best known of these parades came on July 28, 1907, during the so-called Red Flag Parade when nearly 4,000 people lined the streets to watch as a parade of hundreds marched through the streets of Hancock in violation of a municipal ordinance forbidding the “carrying or exhibiting the red flag of anarchy or any flag 46 n Chapter 3 or symbol representing anarchy, or teaching against or toward the destruction of the organized government of the United States.”1 During the parade, Hancock police “rushed forward like wild beasts with foam coming from their mouths,” according to one of the thirteen socialists arrested during the incident.2 Leo Laukki, a socialist and advocate of industrial unionism, a future prominent member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and a recent arrival from Finland where he “was sought by the secret police of Russia” for organizing soldiers into revolutionary organizations, was one of the “Reds” arrested during the parade. Combining his radical politics with his internationalism, Laukki expressed his views that “the economical system of the United States should be overthrown in one way or another,” and that insurrection would be carried out “in Finland, Russia, and all over.”3 Laukki’s participation in the parade was characteristic of the strongly Finnish composition of the Copper Country Left during the early twentieth century. Of the twelve men and one woman arrested during the July 28 parade, nearly all had Finnish surnames.4 Much the same could be said of other parades held under radical auspices, including the May 4, 1913, parade through Hancock and Houghton, held in honor of May Day, the international workers’ day. According to the Miners’ Magazine, “It is not too much to say that there was in parade about 3,000 men, because the parade was over one mile long.”5 The Finnish character of the parade was apparent from the fact that the notice of the parade that appeared in the Miners’ Magazine was written by two Finns, John Välimäki and Charles E. Hietala. Following the parade, the demonstrators attended a meeting at Kansankoti Hall, the Finnish socialist hall and headquarters of the Työmies Publishing Company.6 Older, established groups in the region nonetheless treated Finns, the largest immigrant group in the Copper Country, as a distinct “other.” This was due only partly to their status as new immigrants; it was also a product of the extraordinarily radical nature of Finnish politics in America. Still, the Copper Country’s radical Left was not composed solely of Finns, but also drew in radicals from a number of the Keweenaw’s largest groups of ethnic laborers, including radicals who spoke English, Finnish, Croatian, Slovenian, Hungarian, and Italian.7 A June 1913 meeting exhibited this diversity; “a red letter day in the history of Calumet Miners’ Union” was celebrated when 2,000 people paid twenty-five cents each to attend a meeting where “addresses on unionism were delivered in English, Italian, Finnish, Croatian, and Hungarian.”8 As these events suggest, the Copper Country Left during the early twentieth century was shaped by its largely immigrant composition. The diverse groups of Copper Country workers, which included labor militants and socialists, had equally diverse methods for responding to—and in some cases reshaping—their working and living conditions in the heavily industrialized Copper Country of Michigan. Immigrants n 47 Immigrants and “Race,” the Racialization Process As occurred throughout industrial America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnic hostilities and conflicts...

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