IWW. In the east, on the other hand, the majority remained socialist, but when the central region met in Duluth in February 1914 the division was already a fact: almost all the Minnesota chapters had resigned from the federation. Some legal battles still followed to decide the ownership of halls and other property, but the outcome was clear: the IWW controlled Minnesota so completely that the socialists were unable to hold even conventions there any more. Indeed, the following convention, in November 1914, was held in Chicago, but socialism had already run its course by then and was soon to disappear completely. More than 3,000 members had resigned, the Workers' Institute had been lost, the power to negotiate and make concessions had been lost. In 1917, when the Finns still accounted for 13% of the membership in the American Socialist Party, the world was at war, and after the war international communism rose out of the ruins of the holocaust.

When the Third International came to the United States, it caused much confusion and controversy. The Socialist Party, which had 112,000 members in 1912, was left with 25,000 members in 1919. Among the Finns, the Työmies fell into communist hands, as did the Toveri, which had been founded on the west coast in 1907 as the workers' voice there, and in addition to them, in the East the Eteenpäin newspaper fell into their hands in 1921. (After World War II, the Työmies-Eteenpäin continued to appear as a consolidated communist newspaper.) Since the developments after this socialist-communist split have not been of any significance for the Minnesota Finnish workers' movement, let it be stated here that the Finnish Socialist Federation left the American Socialist Party definitively in 1936, and that in 1940 there was founded a "Finnish American Democratic League," whose main activity has been educational and cultural work to meet the demands of a working population. The center of this movement is in the East, and its organ is the Raivaaja, whose original motto, "a newspaper fostering socialist ideals" had been changed to "a newspaper fostering democratic socialist ideals," a motto which was discarded during World War II.

In communist circles there was strong agitation in the 1930s to lure workers to move to Russia, to the Carelian Soviet Republic, and actually there were thousands who were persuaded to sell all their possessions and who left, full of idealism, to this unknown destination. Among them were several hundred starting out from Minnesota. Of course, only a few were satisfied with what they found in Carelia, and a great number returned to the United States,

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