Carl Ross papers

Carl Ross was born on July 22, 1913, in Hancock, Michigan, and grew up in Superior, Wisconsin, where he graduated from high school in 1931. His father was a Finnish immigrant and his mother was born of Finnish immigrant parents. Ross was active in youth, labor and radical movements. Among other organizations, he was involved in the Labor Sports Union and the Finnish American newspaper "Tyomies." From the 1930s into the 1950s he served in a variety of leadership positions at the national level in the Young Communist League and the Communist Party.

After leaving the Party in 1957, Ross developed a successful electrolyting business. Upon his retirement in 1972 he became an independent scholar, devoting his time to research and writing about Finnish American, radical, and labor history. In 1977, Ross published "The Finn Factor in American Labor, Culture, and Society" which Rudy Vecoli, then the Director of the Immigration History Research Center, deemed "a very important work which really launched Finnish American Studies. He (Ross) played a critical role in bridging the chasm between the ‘Red Finns’ and the ‘Church Finns." The Minnesota Finnish American Family History Project (1979-1981) led to the publication of "Handbook for Doing Finnish American Family History," co-authored by Ross. All of the family histories gathered for this project are available to researchers at the IHRC.

Ross was active in the United Fund for Finnish-American Archives in the 1980s. This organization launched the project "1983: Year of the Finnish-American Archives," an awareness and fund-raising venture. Ross was vital in the assembling of the photo exhibit "Courageous Enough" which would eventually develop into the publication Ross co-edited and contributed to, "Women Who Dared: The History of Finnish American Women" (1986). He also co-authored a book, published in 2006, two years after his death, "By the Ore Docks: A Working People’s History of Duluth." Carl Ross died on March 1, 2004, in Minneapolis.