Työmies

Työmies (The Worker) was a politically radical American newspaper written in the Finnish language. Launched as a weekly in July 1903, the paper later went to daily frequency and was issued under its own name until its merger with the communist newspaper Eteenpäin (Forward) in 1950 to form Työmies-Eteenpäin.

Työmies was affiliated with the Finnish Socialist Federation of the Socialist Party of America before later becoming a publication of the Communist Party, USA.

Työmies was established in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1903 as Amerikan Suomalainen Työmies (The Finnish-American Worker). In June 1904 the publication was moved to the small town of Hancock, located in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The paper remained in that location for a decade before moving to the comparative metropolis of Superior, Wisconsin, a virtual twin city of Duluth, Minnesota. Työmies' first Michigan-produced issue appeared on August 16, 1904, and included the election platform of Socialist Party Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. Circulation of the paper grew to about 4,000 in that year.

From its earliest days, Työmies was a Marxist publication, significantly more radical than its East Coast counterpart established in January 1905, Raivaaja (The Pioneer). Both of these radical weeklies had broader organizational goals than merely bringing the news to a Finnish-American readership profitably, instead seeking to help construct a potent network of local Finnish-speaking groups to advance the cause of socialism through political and economic means.

Local Finnish socialist groups began to centralize around the same period that Työmies (and Raivaaja) were launched, holding a convention at Duluth in 1904 as the "Finnish-American Labor League." In 1906 the 73 affiliated Finnish locals were admitted to the Socialist Party of America (SPA) as the Finnish Socialist Federation, thereby adding between 2,000 and 3,000 members to the party's ranks. The Finnish-Americans thereby became the first of the SPA's language federations, which would come to dominate the party's membership rolls by the end of the 1910s.

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