Niilo Wälläri (1897–1967), President, Finnish Seamen’s Union)

1999

My next FinnFest lecture was in the summer of 1999 in Seattle and featured Niilo Wälläri, the legendary president of the Finnish Seaman’s Union from the early 1930s to his death in 1967. He was without question the boldest and most militant union leader in Finnish labor history. My late cousin Pertti Kuokkanen sailed on Finnish merchant ships as a young man and once told me that “the Finnish labor movement has never seen anybody like him and never will again.” My cousin Terttu (Majonen) Orava’s husband Taisto of Kello, Finland, spent his entire working life as a seaman, including international hauls to Houston, Texas, and later on the Finnish icebreakers in the Gulf of Bothnia. Taisto always sang the highest praises of Wälläri, saying he was smarter than any of the bosses in negotiations, and had the most fearless force of rank-and-file sailors to lend their muscle to the struggle, solidly backing his ingenious leadership. I picked the 1999 Seattle FinnFest to give my talk on this man as in 1946 he had been part of a delegation of Finnish trade unionists who had attended an international maritime labor conference in Seattle. I have a detailed outline of my lecture in two sections on this website, under the section “Harry’s Scans,” including a bibliography, I would encourage readers to examine. So my lecture account will be a mostly anecdotal summary in this Memoir #36. The substance of my lecture was based on Niilo’s 1967 memoir: Antoisia Vuosia (Rewarding Years) and on Erkki Savolainen’s biography: Niilo Wälläri, Legenda Jo Eläessään (Niilo Wälläri, A Legend in His Own Time) WSOY, 1978. (Savolainen, an academic, sailed with Niilo in his younger years.)
 

THE SEA CALLS YOUNG NIILO

Merchant Seaman at 17

Niilo Frans Wälläri was born on July 6, 1897 in Lieto near Turku, Finland to tanner Frans Wälläri and Elina Johanna Lindroth, the oldest of eight children. His father died of a heart attack in 1909. As an eldest son this meant huge responsibilities for young Niilo. So in 1913, he shipped out as a cook’s helper. Soon enough he landed berths as a stoker on Finnish, Danish and English ships which sailed European waters. He was as quick a study in learning other languages as was the academic Santeri Nuorteva discussed in Memoir #35. He became particularly adept in English which stood him in good stead sooner than later.
 

MEDITERRANEAN MAY DAY

Niilo’s first real revolutionary act came on a May Day while working on a ship plowing Mediterranean waters as part of a motley melange of crew members of many races, ethnicities and tongues. Hey, it was May Day and workers needed to observe International Labor Day. One of his shipmates had bought a bright red silk scarf as a gift to his girl friend from some bazaar in Tangiers. So this was tied to a pole as crew members assembled just below decks to do their show. They may not have known each other’s languages but by then the color RED signaled Workers’ Revolution to many! So their crimson emblem aloft, our ragtag seafarers streamed on deck, marched around it a few times and as quickly disappeared into the hold from which they had emerged. For a few moments the ship’s officers on the bridge thought a mutiny was aloft, but soon saw it as a few of the stokers and deck hands shedding some wild oats.
 

NIILO AS YOUNG AMERICAN IMMIGRANT

At Work Peoples College 1919

In 1916 at age 19, Niilo jumped ship in Boston and began his American adventure. After working briefly in Eastern Seaboard factories and mines, he headed westward to San Francisco where he berthed as a seaman on the Pacific coastal trade. While in San Francisco he read Jack London’s class war novel, “Iron Heel” which made him a socialist, as it did a young Welsh coal miner, Aneurin Bevan, who became a powerful leader of the British Labor Party. In 1918, Niilo moved up to Seattle, where he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) which defined his politics for life. He soon enrolled in the Finnish IWW-run Work People’s College (Työväen Opisto) in Smithville, MN and continued his Wobbly education. After completing his classwork, he moved to Hancock, MI where he became an IWW delegate in the mines and boarded with popular Finnish immigrant folk singer Hiski Salomaa and his wife, who operated a tailor shop in that city with whom he became great friends. A restless young laborer, Niilo worked as a Great Lakes seaman until he was fired as an IWW agitator. He then went on to work in the building trades and was converted to the principle of “closed shop” in the carpenters union in Ohio, where one needed a membership card in order to work. Devoted to Finnish radical hall life, Niilo moved on to New York where he reunited with the Salomaas who had set up tailoring operations in the Big Apple where Hiski’s growing fame as an immigrant pop singer led eventually to some recording contracts. Meantime Niilo’s writing talents emerged in New York where he was a correspondent for the Finnish IWW newspaper Industrialisti. He was soon awarded the editorship of the new IWW magazine, Tie Vapauteen (Road to Freedom), published in New York, which he developed into a high quality publication in a literary sense. When living in Wisconsin he met a teenage girl Lyyli Jääskeläinen at a Finn Hall dance with whom he eloped in moving to New York. This led to some big trouble in his life in America.

Scan in Finnish of an old 1919 news story by Niilo.
You may click on it to view the PDF,
then view at 200% to read (how’s your Finnish?).
 

DEPORTATION BLUES

There was considerable opposition to World War I among Finnish immigrant socialist and radical Finns, including my parents, who saw it as strictly a capitalist war among co-belligerents. Socialist leaders like Eugene V. Debs had gone to jail. So did William N. Reivo, who had been business manager of Toveri (The Comrade), the Finnish SP paper published in Astoria, Oregon. So after the war, the Red hunts and deportations of so-called subversives and undesirables escalated, beginning with anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman whose expulsions established the notoriety of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. They became epidemic in the Palmer Raids. So not only did Santeri Nuorteva become a target among the Finns but also Niilo Wälläri. The latter was questioned extensively by the FBI about his extensive union and political activities. Nowadays radicals in such circumstances are asked to keep their mouths shut and refuse such interviews lest whatever they say can be used against them in devious, unsuspecting ways. But Niilo was honest and open about his views and activities as he had done nothing wrong. Actually, the agent who questioned him in his reports said Niilo was the most straightforward and up-front person he had ever questioned. He was unequivocal in his condemnation of capitalism as harmful to civilization, which needed to be replaced by working class socialism for the best interests of the people. So the agent who was so favorably impressed by his frankness, recommended he be DEPORTED as a danger to the state and the American way of life. So it came to pass that he was ordered to be deported back to Finland. He wanted to take his young wife Lyyli with him but the government totally ruled out that option. Lyyli had been underage when Niilo brought her to New York. This was said to be in violation of the Mann or “white slavery” Act, transporting a minor across state lines for illicit sexual purposes. So the government gave Niilo a choice: Leave without her or go to jail. So Niilo was forced to leave his young bride or spend years behind bars. He chose deportation, never to see her again. Attached to this essay is a scan of an article he wrote in Finnish for the IWW’s newspaper Industrialisti from Erie County jail in Pennsylvania while awaiting deportation, closing with “Revolutionary Greetings” to his Fellow Workers.

(After my FinnFest lecture in Seattle, an elderly man from Palo Alto approached me and introduced himself as a nephew of Lyyli Jääskeläinen. He told me that his aunt had told him that “Niilo Wälläri was a first-rate union man but a lousy husband.”)

It was the American workers’ loss and the Finnish workers’ gain that Niilo was deported. He was the same maverick union militant in his native country as he was in the United States. He had strong Communist leanings when he first returned home, although temperamentally he was more anarcho-syndicalist. Arvo (Poika) Tuominen was the head of Finland’s outlawed Communist Party which remained underground until the end of the Continuations War with the Soviet Union in 1944, when Russia insisted in the peace terms that concluded it that Finland accede to a legal, above-ground Communist Party. But in 1920 the Finnish CP’s above-ground politics were expressed through the fellow-traveling Socialist Workers’ Party (Sosialistinen Työväen Puolue), made up of communists and left-wing socialists. Tuominen saw Wälläri as a bright young revolutionary and used his powerful clout to make him national secretary of the SWP. But in 1925, the rightist bourgeois government majority of Finland deemed the SWP a front organization of the CP and outlawed it. Both Tuominen and Wälläri went to jail through much of the 20s. The orders for the Finnish CP came from the exiled Finnish Communist leadership of Otto Kuusinen in Moscow through its “democratic centralist” clout. While in prison in 1945, Niilo established a new direction in Finnish labor politics. He though that why should Finnish left-wing workers take orders from some exiled bureaucrats in Moscow, and that Finnish workers should make their own decisions and not something ordained from abroad. So Wälläri and his allies developed a third force in the Finnish labor movement, to the left of the traditionalist Social Democrats and apart from CP Finns in Moscow. For this the CPers denounced the new tendency as the Hoipertelijat or “The Totterers.” The reformist SDP saw them as “just a another bunch of commies.” Niilo’s approach again was more akin to the democratic rank and file industrial unionism of his IWW days in the USA.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

Freed from prison, 1926

After his release from Tammisaari Prison in Helsinki in 1928, Wälläri became editor of a radical left newspaper Tiedonantaja (The Informer) in which he was critical of both SDP and CP politics. (In 2016 this newspaper was the official newspaper of the Finnish Communist Party (SKP), now reduced to a small remnant of its former size and influence as a political party.) In 1928 he married Toini Antikainen with whom he had a daughter, Vappu. In 1929 he became secretary of the Transport Workers Association.

Wälläri finally joined the Finnish Seaman’s Union (Suomen Merimies Unioni) in 1930 which defined his career for the rest of his life, promoted to its Executive Committee in 1931, its Secretary in 1932 and finally in 1938 its powerful President. The SMU was in a moribund state when he began to put his militant and effective organizing talents in building it to become the most powerful single union in the Finnish labor movement. He was not afraid to employ direct action or quickie wildcat strikes into rebuilding it as a fighting force, which frightened the social democratic and Moscow communist bureaucrats who were hesitant to employ militant tactics in a period influenced by Finnish fascism dominated by Victor Kosola (a professional strikebreaker) and leader of the extreme right Lapua Movement in the North along the Gulf of Bothnia. But spurred by his IWW Direct Action background in the States, Wälläri steeled the Finnish seamen to act boldly and defiantly. He did not tolerate drunkenness in SMU crew members and would not allow them to sail unless they remained sober, as he was a teetotaler himself. In 1933 he led the Finnish seamen in a fierce strike across the board in European seafaring to improve both wages and conditions in the middle 1930s world-wide economic Depression which totally freaked out the leftist politicians and conventional labor bureaucracy. After four months of gutsy battle, the strike was lost due to the non-cooperation of the English waterfront unions to honor it. Even in such bloody losses, the fighting spirit of SMU sailors was only further honed.
 

ANTI-FASCISM

In 1936, Finnish seamen demonstrated their spirit of international labor solidarity by smuggling arms on their ships to the fighters of the Spanish Republic in combating Franco’s Fascist juggernaut in the civil war. During WWII, when the Finnish government was allied with Nazi Germany, Wälläri instructed SMU members when their ships were in German ports and waters to keep track of German troop movements and report these to him, and through his various courier connections conveyed the information to his trusted friend the head of the Swedish trade union movement. They would convey the message to Ernest Bevin’s Transport Workers Union in wartime Britain., which in turn would get the word to the British military which would direct the Royal Air force to bomb the new locations of the Wermacht armies.

Both the Finnish secret police Valpo and German Gestapo were suspicious of Wälläri assisting the Allies in their efforts and the Gestapo demanded that Finland arrest him for treason. After the war, Eero Wuori, who had been Finnish labor’s liaison in the wartime government told Wälläri that the only reason he wasn’t arrested was because of the fear that if it happened the crews of every Finnish merchant ship in the world would strike their ships in support of their revered leader!

The other great achievement of Wälläri’s during these war years was the secret underground rescue of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany by having his ships docked in German harbors smuggle them to Finland in their holds and then having them driven secretly to neutral Sweden through another network of couriers, For these perilous acts, he was awarded a special medal by the Israeli labor organization Histadrut in a ceremony in Israel after the war.
 

POSTWAR VICTORIES

But it wasn’t until after WWII when Finland began its recovery from the ravages of war from 1939 through 1944, that the SMU made its greatest gains. In 1945 in the first major contract negotiated by Wälläri won the right for a CLOSED shop in seafaring. Only union seamen would work on the ships. He recalled working under closed shop conditions in the building trades in the United States and replicated the practice for the SMU. The agitational tool to win this agreement came about when Finnish SMU seaman refused to work if a non-union seaman was hired and came aboard ship. It didnät take long for the employers to capitulate. Niilo combined the IWW principle of “direct action” and the AFL building trades “closed shop” as a bargaining strategy. Soon dormitory-style sleeping quarters were eliminated aboard ship and each seaman got his own clean sleeping compartment, and bad food on board vanished into history. In 1946, an eight-hour work day and paid vacations went into effect for ocean shipping, extended to the inland and coastal trade the following year. These and other reforms that bettered the daily lives of the crews and work stoppages were key tools in achieving them.

Heat was also applied for Parliament to enact beneficial pro-worker laws. Both SDP and CP politicians approached Wälläri complaining that his militant agitational tactics were making their jobs more difficult if not impossible. His answer to the legislators was: “I wasn’t elected to my job to serve you guys; I was elected by the merchant seamen of Finland to serve them.”

MILITARIZING THE FINNISH ICEBREAKERS

For years Finnish icebreakers were under civilian control and operated by SMU seamen under labor contracts to keep the sea lanes open in the Baltic, and Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia during the winter season.. Wälläri was in a good strategic position to negotiate good terms for their crews, for he had seen to it that expiration dates were just before the winter season, so if a strike was in effect then, they would be locked into their harbors except in the ice-free port of Petsamo on the Arctic Ocean. So Parliament decided to militarize the icebreakers operated by the Army rather than SMU sailors. Wälläri fought to keep them under civilian control and SMU contract with the right to strike if necessary. The beleaguered union president met alone with a roomful of key Finnish politicians and top army and navy brass to argue against the military takeover of the country’s icebreaker with the threat of a mass maritime general strike as the only ace up his sleeve. One frustrated admiral railed at the fearless lone union man: “Even in the Soviet Union the icebreakers are under the command of the military!” To which Wälläri responded: “If any of you distinguished gentlemen would prefer to live in such a country as the Soviet Union, be my guest. But such an arrangement is unacceptable to the members of the Finnish Seaman’s Union.” Even Wälläri and the SMU could not prevent the militarization of the icebreakers, but in his lifetime was able to salvage something of an unavoidable compromise on the issue.

But then the old warrior’s lifetime was cut suddenly short. On Aug. 25, 1967 while having lunch in a restaurant with his now adult daughter Vappu, Niilo Wälläri dropped dead suddenly of a heart attack at age 70. A titan of Finnish labor was gone. As my cousin Pertti said: “The Finnish labor movement has never seen anybody like him before, and will never see again.”

My thanks to Finnish-Canadian labor historian Saku Pinta of Thunder Bay, Ontario for the photos and scan that appear with the above essay on Niilo Wälläri. The scan is of an article Onko Järjestyyminen Anarkismia? (Is Organizing Anarchism?) by NW that appeared on Industrialisti, the Finnish language IWW newspaper in 1919.) FinnLabor readers literate in Finnish should enjoy it. —HS

OTHER PERSONAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN 1999

In January, 1999, I began serving my first of two terms as President of the Tenants Association of my senior residence of Strawberry Creek Lodge in Berkeley, in elections held the previous month after serving as Recording Secretary the previous year. Fairly routine stuff with one of our major functions being to lobby for the preservation of Section Eight Federally subsidized senior housing for lower income residents. Helen Lima, an earlier TA Chair, commissioned a film to be made featuring Section 8, much of which was shot at SCL. I also appeared on behalf of the TA before the Berkeley City Council to speak on problems concerning seniors’ issues.

I learned that my Typo Sector of the Media Workers Union 39521 was now without delegate representation on the Alameda County Central Labor Council so I called Charlie Tobias, then President of the Typographical Sector volunteering to fill the gap. So he appointed me and Larry Rau, another East Bay union member, to fill the vacancies. I served as delegate for the next ten years, although Larry dropped out when he went to work the night shift at the SF Chronicle in a new technology skill. At first, meetings were weekly but then switched to every other week as business at most delegate meetings was rather routine. I commuted to Oakland to them on the BART train, transferring at Coliseum Station to an AC Transit bus that got me out Hegenburger Road to the meeting place. Most evenings a brother or sister delegate would drive me to the Bart station at the end of the meeting. I rarely missed a meeting which weren’t all that exciting but I did want to serve my old union in some capacity in retirement.

Since I continued to work as a background performer in films shot in the Bay Area, I also attended regular monthly evening meetings of the Screen Actors Guild which I had joined in 1990. SAG, now called SAG-AFTRA which merged a few years ago with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, also had a subcommittee of the Background Performers of which I was vice president for awhile which would meet on weekday afternoons as needed to discuss problems on movie sets where management might be in violation of the SAG contracts and rules. Since blacklisting was possible of performers who might raise issues on the set, SAG advised us instead of getting in arguments with an assistant director, to call the union by phone and a business agent would visit the set to solve the problem. And I must say generally our reps did a decent job of it. In case a director tried to screw us on overtime, we would call the union after being released for the day and SAG would investigate. I did pretty well with my OT paychecks in several disputed shoots. Even at age 90 as I remain a SAG-AFTRA member I could theoretically still work the flicks were I not too disabled and elderly to do so. I don’t need to pay dues any more as I’m over 70 and have been a SAG member for over twenty years but can still vote on contracts and in union elections.

1999 WORKING VACATION IN PARIS

Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in gay Paree.

A great highlight of my year was a two week, expenses paid, including flight on Air France, work vacation in Paris! The previous year a Finnish-speaking French scholar Dr. Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest and her husband Finnish-Sami writer and translator Jouni-Antti Vest, and their young son visited Berkeley. They contacted our Finnish Kaleva Hall for interviews about Finnish-American immigrant and social history, besides vacationing. Jocelyne, a multi-linguist who taught at the Sorbonne, found me the most knowledgeable person on her subject of exploration. But there was much more to be researched before they had to return home. So she secured me a stipend for expenses and round-trip air flight for me to spend in Paris to continue her interviews with me, fully paid by the French Board of Education. Talk about clout! So at the beginning of the Fall Semester I arrived in Paris and camped out in a small apartment they used as a study near their flat in the Latin Quarter. She was busy during the day preparing for the studies of the semester with her colleagues, and evenings were spent at their home where she recorded our interviews on tape. Daytimes I was free to explore Paris to my heart’s content!

I gloried in visiting every museum of note and all Parisian points of interest on both sides of the Seine River which was within easy walking distance. I would start off my mornings having breakfast in some corner proletarian café in my neighborhood and then walk over to one of the large coffee houses on the West Bank on Rue San Michel and peruse the Paris edition of the NY Herald-Tribune and an English paper like the Guardian or London Independent over tea and toast before beginning my daily explorations around this magnificent city. I covered vast expanses of Paris from the Arch of Triumph to the working class east end and the Pierre La Chaise Cemetery. I wandered about the Luxembourg Gardens, the Sorbonne, Eiffel Tower, Pantheon, Shakespeare’s Books. the famous Harry’s Bar, Café Deux Maggots where Sartre and Camus reportedly hung out, Edith Pia’s tomb and home museum, Oscar Wilde’s tomb, and the Communard Wall at Pierre La Chaise where the last of the martyrs of the Great French Revolution of 1871 were shot be firing squads. I bought some red roses which I laid out at Oscar Wilde’s monument, Edith Piaf’s family tomb and at the Communard Wall. My two weeks in Paris that year turned out to be about the most exciting short vacation of a lifetime.

End of Installment 36