Toward a Red Melting Pot

This dissertation examines the racial thinking of Finnish radicals in the early twentieth century United States. It studies how and why Finnish radical immigrants used racial ideas to describe and explain human difference. It also examines how and why Finnish thinking on race changed during this time. The study focuses on the time period between 1900 and the late 1930s. During these years, Finns formed one of the largest immigrant groups in the Socialist Party, the IWW and the Communist Party. Yet, the extensive research on the U.S. Left’s troubled relationship with race has largely ignored these immigrant radicals.

Studies on European immigrants’ racial thought, on the other hand, have often not paid due attention to radical immigrants’ ideas on race. The main sources for this study are six Finnish-language labor newspapers that were published in the early 1900s in the United States. The present work also makes use of non-fiction books, memoirs, pamphlets and other printed material that was written by both Finnish and American radicals in the United States.