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Mary C. Pruitt, W A M M
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Toini Suojanen Mackie’s proudest moment was singing at the Finnish Opera House in Virginia, Minnesota. This was Toini’s joy in life: to express her passion for justice in poetry and song. The opera was titled “In the Bowels of the Earth” and Toini sang a lament to her lover who was trapped underground in an unsafe mine. The setting was the 1920s, when steelworkers, railroad porters, and iron miners risked their lives to organize unions.
Toini died in September at age 93, after a brief illness. She lived with her daughter, Karen Schneider, in Excelsior and is survived by grandchildren, great grandchildren, and her brother, Ty. Toini’s niece, Lois Neimi, and I enjoyed going to WAMM demonstrations and other meetings for peace and justice with Toini. We will miss her.
Toini’s parents, Nestor and Aina Soderling, brought her to the Mesabi Iron Range in 1912 when she was two years old. Nestor changed their name to Suojanen because it sounded more Finnish and he was determined to trumpet his socialist heritage in the Finnish Workers culture. After Nestor suffered a crippling accident in a mine, he could only do odd jobs.
Toini grew up in desperate times. She credited her mother and the socialist women’s clubs as “the rock of the 1916 strike” by iron miners on the Range. Conditions were brutal and pay often elusive in the company mining towns. Mine bosses played divide and conquer with the immigrant miners from Finland, Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia, Albania and Italy. Miners fought back against feudal indignities, such as the mine bosses’ claim for the “right of the first night”—which meant that the boss raped a miner’s daughter on her wedding night.
In the early 1930s, Toini married a handsome young man named Martin Mackie who worked for the Steelworkers Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO). Meridel Le Sueur, a contemporary and friend, recalled Martin as: “really one of the great organizers. Their lives were in danger. They called meetings by having a stencil on the bottom of a suitcase and setting it down on sidewalks in town.”
Toini joined the Progressive Women’s Club of the Farmer-Labor Association, a remarkable and courageous movement for justice that showed the nation how to pass progressive legislation.
Martin, Toini, and daughter Karen moved to North Minneapolis in the 1950s. There Toini joined a vital group of women, including Madge Utreus Hawkins, Viena Pasenen Johnson Hendrickson, Nellie Stone Johnson, Alma Foley, and Marian Le Sueur, Meridel’s mother. When the anti-Vietnam War movement broke out in the late 1960s, Nellie Stone Johnson recalled that Toini and others like herself “came out of the woodwork, even if we were on canes.”
Toini helped to publish “Minnesota Sings for Peace” with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She wrote songs for peace throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s Toini edited and published newsletters for two groups of women who fought for peace. She composed protest poems and elegies for friends. She took painting classes; her favorite painting was her “Water Lilies at Yalta.”
Using sarcasm, rhyme and humor, Toini’s particular gift was to turn her passion for social and economic justice into poetry. |
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© 2003 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete October 2003 Index - click here
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