In addition to all its social activities, the Opera was the center for the workers' movement not only for Virginia but for also for the whole iron-mining region; even American labor groups occasionally used the Opera for their meetings. The Virginia Socialist chapter was a staunch supporter of the Työmies, as well as being one of the largest stockholders in that paper. In the split which occurred within the Socialist party in 1914, the Virginia chapter aligned itself with the industrial unionism wing and was, therefore, read out of the Socialist party. If this chapter disappeared from the Opera, the legal owners of the Opera, the Finnish Workingmen's Association, continued to be active. It did stop supporting the Työmies and joined the other Finnish labor groups of the mining region plus Duluth in starting a new newspaper: in June of the same year there began publication of the radical Sosialisti, whose name was changed a few years later to Teollisuustyöläinen (Industrial Worker) and a bit later still to the Industrialisti, which the Finnish workers of Virginia continue to read and support to this day. The Virginia club also gave support to the Workers' Institute and was, in fact, one of its biggest stockholders. And after World War I, this club purchased land in nearby Parkville, which the members transformed into a park where outdoor meetings were held in summer and where the joint summer festivals of the mining region workers' societies were held.

The Opera itself, however, continued to retain its status as a labor headquarters. During the miners' strike in 1916 it served as headquarters for the strike committee and as office of the IWW Mine Workers' Union, whose secretary at the time was Charles Jacobson. Mass meetings were held, and in addition to Finnish speakers there appeared on the Opera podium such famous IWW leaders as Sam Scarlett, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carl Tretzka, Bill Haywood and others. The two strikes, in 1907 and again in 1916, which centered on this mining region and which so closely affected the Finns of Virginia and the entire region, have already been discussed in detail in these pages.

Activity continued, then, at the Opera, from year to year. The income was large, but the expenses began to grow even larger. At the conclusion of the 1916 strike, when Finnish miners found themselves blacklisted, the Opera began to lose many of its active members. Later, when increasingly effective machinery began to replace more and more men in the mines, and when work at the sawmills came to a standstill, the number of Finns living in Virginia decreased, and so did membership in the Workingmen's

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