Work People’s College (Duluth, Minnesota) records

Perhaps the most important part of the papers of Work People's College consists of the minutes of meetings of the School’s Board of Directors. The collection contains such minutes (including the microfilm) for the years 1904 to 1911, parts of 1917 and 1918, and 1935 to 1962. Although the minutes are hot available for the entire existence of the college, these minutes do give a very good picture of life in the school. The curriculum, the selection of teachers, the financial problems and ideological quarrels are all described within them. The correspondence, too, which is far from complete, illustrates life in the school, but it is much more heavily concentrated on financial problems.

The bulk of the collection is made up of the financial papers. They are almost complete for the entire existence of Work People's College. Included in them are financial accounts, checks, bills, annual statements, auditors' reports, tax records, insurance papers, building rent records, inventories of books and supplies, and papers dealing with the sale of the building. These financial papers could well serve as a source for the study of the various persons and societies which supported the school.

Work People's College gathered and maintained a large lending library of scripts of "proletarian" plays. The borrowers were usually Finnish American workers' clubs, which performed the plays in their halls. The collection contains lists of the borrowers of various plays between 1933 and 1940. In addition, there is a photocopy of a complete list of plays available and also photocopies of the scripts of six such plays. These six samples give a good indication of the nature of this historic collection of plays.

There was an active Students' Association at Work People's College. The papers of the Students' Association are valuable for the vivid picture they give us of the students' life in the school. In fact, for the period 1913-1914, when the Finnish Socialist Federation was split over tactical questions, the minutes of the meetings of the Board of Directors are missing, but the minutes of the Students' Association are here and give a good account of that critical time. The minutes of the Students' Association shed light on many ideological questions which were discussed in the school, and give clear examples of the manner in which the students were trained to handle problems in democratic ways through meetings.

The collection contains copies of the Work People's College Bulletin for the years 1923 and 1924. This was published by the Students' Association in English and is quite rare and valuable. Among the other miscellaneous materials are the following: a history of the school, written by a former student, Gust Aakula, various newspaper clippings, chiefly from the newspaper, Industrialisti, reports from the annual meetings of the college, several posters, and a printed school bulletin for the year 1917-1918.

In addition to the main body of the collection, there are four ledgers containing financial accounts and an inventory of supplies, and also one reel of microfilm (removed and added to the IHRC microfilm collection, number N 680) which contains the minutes of the Board of Directors of the Workers' Socialist Publishing Company from 1916 to 1920. This publishing company was located in Duluth and published the newspaper Industrialisti and many Finnish American socialist books.