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Industrialisti, estimated that the IWW had had as many as 1,000,000 members during the period of its existence. Of the big names in the organization, William (Big Bill) D. Haywood went to Russia, where he died, and Eugene B. Debs was U. S. presidential candidate on the Socialist Party ticket in 1908, 1912 and 1920, while Daniel DeLeon, who had never approved that the constitution of the organization abolished all political activity, formed his own organization in the East, with the aid of some of the chapters active there, known from 1915 to its end in 1925 as the Workers International Industrial Union.
Of the publications issued in English by the IWW, it may be mentioned that the first, the Industrialist Union Bulletin, was published up to 1909, when it was succeeded by a weekly publication, The Industrial Worker, a 4-page paper, put out first in Seattle and then in Spokane. In 1909, there also began to appear another weekly, Solidarity, published originally in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, then in Cleveland and finally in 1916 in Chicago, where it was merged in 1931 with the Spokane Industrial Worker. With the exception of one paper published in Hungarian, the Finnish-language Industrialisti was the only foreign-language paper left in 1955. While Solidarity had never had paid advertising, the Industrialisti had accepted such, and for Christmas and May Day had even put out special editions to accomodate it, and had even accepted political advertisements from 1938 on, while advertisements for alcoholic beverages had never been accepted. Without these advertisements and without the sponsors who contributed funds, even the Industrialisti would have been faced with insurmountable problems. As it was, after World War II, Finnish IWW activity was limited almost exclusively to the maintenance of the economic security of its supporters.
The Role of Publishing: In addition to the innumerable Finnish-language newspapers, some of which have been mentioned in these pages, there has also been a vast literature about the workers' movement. Elis Sulkanen has made the following statement in regard to this activity: "One of the finest features of the Finnish-American labor movement has been the enthusiasm which has been devoted over the decades to newspapers and the dissemination of literature. From the very beginning, every workers' and socialist organization acknowledged this as one of its most important functions, and so every local organization had its special committee responsible for this particular work and responsible to the local group for carrying it out. In the earlier years, when enthusiasm for a faith and a desire for self-education
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