Why Karelian ”fever”?

Abstrakti

”The fever.” ”It was the fever.” ”The fever got them.” ”They went because of the fever.”

I have heard such phrases numerous times since 1993 when I began to study North American Finns who went to the Karelian region of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. ”Karelian fever,” the term applied to their immigration, it would seem, is an apt one.

But the question arises, why a ”fever”? Here my interviewees have been more ambiguous in their answers: ”It was the time.” ”It was the recruiters.” ”That Oscar Corgan [prominent recruiter to Karelia], I could listen to him all day.”

Unfortunately, few of the survivors of Karelian fever either heard the actual recruitment speeches or if they did were often too young to understand them. Those whom I have interviewed were most often the children of those who made the decision to leave for Karelia, taking their families with them. Yet it would seem that something in the message of the recruiters who traveled to Finnish communities in the U.S. and Canada beginning in 1931 contained ideas capable of triggering a social movement.