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directors in 1955-56 there were John J. Kolu, Gust Aakula, Wesley Kniivilä, Urho Sandelin, Aino Järvi, Lempi Kovero, Tauno Mulari, Hilda Stonewall and Emil Takala.
"With the housing shortage prevailing during World War II, the government in 1944 took a 7-year lease on the existing school building, remodelling it into apartments for workers in war industries. With the end of the war the housing was no longer required, and since holding the building meant a financial drain it was returned to the owners a year before the lease expired. Even before this lease had been made, the directors had been instructed to sell off the Institute's holdings and had been ready to sell this building for $6,000, but since the government had put $15,000 into it in alterations, the directors, even while collecting rents on the apartments, now offered it for sale for a higher figure and sold it for $14,000 in 1953.
"Subsequent to that time the directors had been busy settling the indebtedness of the Institute, buying back shares from those anxious to have their money returned, and in handing over to the Workers Publishing Company, which puts out the Industrialisti, any funds which may be left remaining, in preparation for the official
liquidation of the Institute."
Assessing, finally, what the Institute has meant, Aakula claims that "perhaps never will the great, broad and manifold significance of this Institute in its forty years of existence as an elevating force among Finnish immigrants be fully comprehended, not only in its significance as a disseminator of the ideas of what was the labor movement, but above all as a fountain of knowledge in general and as a teacher particularly of the American form of government and its economic system."
The Party Split: To understand some of the statements made by Aakula, it is necessary to go back in time, to the years on the eve of World War I, when a new line of thought began to gain ground within the workers' movement and which soon spread like wildfire, Actually, it was not really a question of an absolutely new idea, since back in 1904 dissidents within the American Federation of Labor, including Thomas Haggerty, George Estes, W. L. Hall, Isaac Cowan, Clarence Smith and William E. Trautmann, had held a meeting in Chicago in November 1904 and had there prepared an invitation to several organizations acknowledged as radical to come to a meeting to be held in Chicago during the January following. Thirty organizations accepted the invitation and were represented at this preliminary meeting, which led to an agreement to meet again in Chicago in June to establish a new organization. At that latter meeting 186 delegates met to give birth to a new group, named the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. Critics soon labelled them the "Wobblies" or claimed the initials stood for "I Won't Work."
Once a week the Finnish language newspaper Industrialisti published the aims of the IWW, beginning with the statement that "the working class and their employers have nothing in common; there can be no peace as long as there is starvation and privation among millions of workers and while those few who form the class
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