The Finns who migrated to America were numerous – Atchison Globe, a newspaper from Kansas, writes that in 1899 there were already 250,000 Finns in the United States and Canada. Many of them had settled in the states in the area of the Great Lakes, where the forests and the climate reminded them of Finland, as stated by the following excerpt. This view is repeated in several articles in Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers. Most of the articles do not name the author, but the Atchison Globe article mentioned previously was written by Olaf Johnson, who might have originally been a Swedish speaking Finn, given his name, the lengthy text, and his good opinion of Finland. In the descriptions of Finnish people, it is often repeated that they are hardworking people from peasant origins – the rural poor were indeed the largest group of emigrants by far, and they were eager to make a better living in the land of their dreams. Many articles commend the compulsory public schooling that meant that Finnish immigrants knew how to read and write.

Even though most of the emigrating Finns were young adult men, there were a couple of years when women outnumbered men. However, the ratio was normally about one or two female emigrants out of every five.^[1] The share of women emigrating from Europe differed from country to country, so there were more from some than others. There was variation between the years too, just like in Finland. On a larger scale, the United States saw numerous young, unmarried women from all over Europe seek new lives on her soil. The Boston Daily Advertiser praises the efforts of a New York association that worked to get young, most likely unmarried, women safely to the country so that they did not fall prey to "the wicked and mercenary of both sexes".

^[1] Kero, Reino, 1974: Table 12. “Migration from Finland to North America in the Years between the United States Civil War and the First World War”, University of Turku.

The United States’ Declaration of Independence is perhaps the earliest political manifesto on human rights. While the United States faced its own problems with systematic racial discrimination, the American news in the last decade of the nineteenth century recognised a serious flaw in Finnish society: the awful treatment of ‘paupers’ – orphans, disabled and elderly alike – as they were auctioned to the family that demanded the smallest compensation from the municipality for taking care of them.

It can be concluded that Finnish immigrants were a significant target group for the press in the United States, given the large number and variety of news and articles on Finland. Many newspapers published lengthy texts that summarise facts on Finland’s geography, demography, and economy. Daily Picayune from New Orleans even dedicated a full page to go over the contents of the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland that had been the subject of a pageant.