This chapter is going to be an uncomfortable one. We will come face to face with discrimination, persecution, violence and general bad human behavior. I have read extensively and will try to document as well as I can some of the adversity immigrants faced when they moved to this country in the early 20th century.
When I was in high school and studying Minnesota history, my dad told me a story of when a cross was burned in the yard of Finn Hall in Balsam, Minnesota, the community I grew up in. He was too young to remember it directly and recounted it from his parents telling him. I had to look into it at the time and revisit the social implications of it every once in a while.
There was a large influx of immigrants to America from the 1890s until the 1920s. I’ve been primarily concerned about the Finns but others from Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland and Macedonia faced the same issues of discrimination. There were many reasons for this, some ethnic, some social and some political. I’ll try to address each area.
