Capitalism as Death: Loss of Life and the Finnish Migrant Left in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Abstract In early twentieth-century Canada and the United States, Finnish migrants faced dangerous working conditions and regularly lost lives on the job. To counter government and company inaction, migrant workers supported each other through grassroots community systems of reciprocity and participation in unionism and socialism. This article pairs migrant labor history with the history of death and mourning to explore how the relationship between the two may mutually develop our understandings of everyday life. Three case studies are at the center of analysis: the Italian Hall Tragedy of 1913 (Calumet, Michigan), the Hollinger Gold Mine Disaster of 1928 (Timmins, Ontario), and the deaths of lumber union organizers Viljo Rosvall and Janne Voutilainen in 1929 (Thunder Bay District, Ontario). By focusing on the death, grief, and mourning at the core of these events and on the days immediately following the tragedies, I demonstrate that death and loss were central to Finnish migrant workers’ everyday encounters with community and class-consciousness. I analyze newspaper coverage of these deaths in order to investigate the strategies of the Finnish language socialist press and leadership to emphasize the deadly power of the capitalist socioeconomic structure, but also seek the everyday spaces, feelings, and relationships caught among labor tensions. In analyzing the cases, I aim to highlight opportunities for new types of dialogue on migrant social history that come from bringing together death, the everyday, and the political.