Biography
Carl Paivio, born Karl Einar Päiviö on November 23, 1893 at Töysä in Finland, was a Finnish-American editor, lecturer and labor organizer and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. He edited the Finnish-language Bronx paper Luokkataistelu — Class Struggle. After the Lusk Committee raided the New York IWW headquarters on June 21, 1919 and seized copies of the paper, investigators fixed on an article advocating mass action, sabotage and revolutionary violence. His co-editor Gust Alonen was arrested in New York on August 7; letters found with Alonen placed Paivio in Detroit, where New York and Michigan officers arrested him on August 13, 1919. He was returned to New York and held in The Tombs on bail of $25,000, later reduced to $10,000 and still reported as beyond his means. Both men were prosecuted under New York’s 1902 criminal-anarchy law. Neither was accused of a bombing, an assault or any other violent act; the case rested almost entirely on their alleged responsibility for printed matter advocating future revolutionary violence, tried before a specially selected jury of businessmen and professionals that defence counsel Walter Nelles argued would be prejudiced against radicals. Convicted on October 25 and sentenced on October 28, 1919, they were the first men convicted under the statute and each received four to eight years at hard labour, with the judge recommending deportation afterwards. Paivio served at Sing Sing and Auburn and may later have been moved to Clinton, and was released during 1923 after roughly four years. The deportation order was never carried out. Afterwards he moved from the anarchist wing of the IWW toward the Communist movement and became a prominent Finnish-American organizer, lecturer and educator, later national secretary of the Finnish America Mutual Aid Society and active in the International Workers Order. During the postwar anti-communist campaign immigration authorities repeatedly detained him at Ellis Island while seeking to deport him; his health broke down in detention and he died in New York on April 14, 1952, before the deportation could be completed.
