Debating Visibility: Race and Visibility in the Finnish-American Press in 1908

Abstract

This article examines Finnish-American press debates on “Finnishness” in the United States in the aftermath of a 1907 miners’ strike on the Mesabi Range of northern Minnesota. Finnish workers had an extremely visible presence in the picket lines. The strike helped in dividing Finnish migrants into two hostile groups, conservatives and radicals, which disagreed vehemently on the question of how Finns should be seen by “Americans”, an often vaguely defined group of people. As the article concludes, Finnish migrants’ understandings of how “Finnishness” should be seen in the United States in the early 1900s were not uniform but a complex mix of different cultural and ideological strains. The paper has broader implications on studies of migrants’ contestations over their visibility in media.