or two copies were bought, from which the individual roles were copied out, most often in longhand.

In 1921 Lauri Lemberg began the supplying of plays and role-books on a business basis. He started by ordering a few plays from Finland, chiefly from Jalmari Finne, who was an active translator of plays from Swedish, German and French originals. Buying two typewriters, Lemberg and his wife began the task of typing out as many copies as they could manage. Later he even wrote a few plays himself, and adapted and translated others into Finnish. In 1922 he sent one play he had written (The Five o f Hearts) to Finne in Finland, suggesting that it might be produced there; it was, in fact, taken into the repertoire of the Peoples' Theater, and so Lemberg was able to become a member of the Finnish Playwrights' League and to become the League's representative for the United States and Canada.

The 1920s were, then, the most flourishing years of the FinnishAmerican theater. Every society and organization had its own dramatics group, and every such group needed plays. To meet this demand, Lemberg even had to hire a staff of typists. Somewhat later his business increased further when he became the sales representative of Finnish films in partnership with Robert Anderson.

It was during this decade, too, that Communism seemed to flourish among Finnish-Americans, and their programs became more active and their dramatics groups more numerous. In the beginning, the Communist groups rented their plays from Lemberg, too, but a few years later they opened their own play rental service in Chicago. There was, naturally, a certain amount of confusion. Lemberg was the official representative of the Finnish Playwrights' League and responsible for the collection of royalties for every performance of plays written by the League's members, no matter how the plays had been procured by any given group. Almost all the communist theater groups refused to pay the royalties required, arguing that they had already paid these to their own rental service; that service, in turn, argued that they had just as much right to rent out plays as anyone else. At that time, unfortunately, there was no copyright agreement between Finland and the United States, but when this agreement did come, in 1929, the communist play rental service stopped marketing plays by members of the Finnish Playwrights' League. Not long after, they gave up their play rental service altogether, although the Workers' Institute did maintain such a service from 1932 to 1942, when the Industrialisti newspaper took it over.

303