 By the summer of 1915, the SPO had English-language Locals and official party contact names in 69 Oregon towns, with an additional Finnish Locals in Astoria and Svenson, as well as Finnish, Latvian, German, and Polish branches of Local Portland.The early Socialist Party of Oregon was in many ways a federation of two parallel organizations — an English-language organization centered in Portland, the state's largest city, and Finnish-language organization consisting of a cluster of radical émigrés from Finland who made their home in the old coastal town of Astoria.The migration of Finns to North America began in the early 1860s, when representatives of Michigan mining interests began to actively recruit hardy Finnish workers as a labor source.