Sakari Siltala: Richesse oblige – At the origins of Ahlström’s social responsibility

Sakari Siltala

Richesse oblige – At the origins of Ahlström’s social responsibility

Richesse oblige, wealth obliges. Before the emergence of the Finnish welfare society in the 1960s, if there were any considerations of societal responsibility in the country, they were borne by affluent individuals, families, clans, and companies. The most far-sighted owners saw societal responsibility as a worthwhile and necessary investment, ensuring social peace and a healthy, productive workforce. Short-sighted ones would extract what they could and then switch workers, industries, or locations. For some firms and owner families, it was about humanity, for others, about profits and gains, for most, some mixture of the two.

The Ahlström company is rightly counted among those who carried their social responsibility, even though its story wasn’t all smooth sailing alongside their workers and the less privileged. And the Ahlström brothers and sisters didn’t always see eye to eye on matters. Ahlström’s golden age of social and societal responsibility shone from the 1930s onwards, but even before that, the firm and the family had a strong influence in this area.

In my book “High Stakes – The Life of Industrial Titan Walter Ahlström” (2023), one thread traces Ahlström’s company and family’s social responsibility, donations, and patronage from the late 1800s to the early 1930s. The book tells a different story as well, but here is one important perspective.

The Fennoman Beginnings

Ahlström’s company is said to have been founded in 1851. Antti Ahlström (1827–1896) had married a wealthy widow and started his business in Satakunta on the west coast of Finland. The business grew, and the family prospered. At the same time, within the Grand Duchy of Finland, a part of the Russian Empire, the nationalistic movement was rising. Literary and artistic pursuits merged with pan-European philosophical leanings and were shaped into political and nation-state ideals. For Fennoman sympathisers, the issue of the Finnish language and culture was paramount. Finnish had to be elevated alongside Swedish, and preferably rise above it. It all came down to a simple wish: Finns wanted to handle their affairs in their own language. From this ideology, the thoughts on Ahlström’s societal responsibility also emerged.

Antti Ahlström married a second time after his first wife passed away. Antti and his new wife Eva Ahlström defended the promotion of the Finnish language and the universal right to education with every means available to them, which in his case meant money and verve. In the 1870s, the couple started donating money to various Fennoman campaigns and projects. Indeed, the movement’s pockets were pretty much empty before Ahlström’s “spring flood of donations” hit in 1873. “The summer wind of national enthusiasm, combined with reawakened patriotic pursuits, has melted the snowy and frosty forests. The resulting deluge has poured out and moistened the soil for our cultivation,” wrote Antti’s biographer, the renowned Finnish author Juhani Aho.

At this time, Antti deposited one thousand Finnish markka into the bank, the interest of which was distributed the needy during the years marked by crop failure. “Patron A. Ahlström’s donation account book, opened in 1874” was written on the form. Viimeistään tästä voidaan kai laskea Ahlströmin yhteiskuntavastuun ajanlaskun alkaneen.

Already in 1866, a decree was passed in the Grand Duchy of Finland to establish a nationwide network of public schools. Implementation had been slow, as it was difficult to compete with church- and fac¬tory-affiliated schools. Antti donated generously to efforts to found Finnish-language schools and was successful in establishing a dozen or so. Even so, for a long time, his words and actions were dispar-aged. “What do tenant farmers need to go to school for?” many were prone to ask.

One village even decided it was smarter to use the school building Antti had paid to build as a distillery instead. When people even¬tually started to gain interest in his schools, he was then accused of discriminating against farm owners. It was true that the primary goal of his endeavour was to educate the poor. There was no gender favouritism, however; both girls and boys were welcome in schools that Antti backed.
Antti also put up the money for a new church organ in their home village Norrmark and donated generously to the poor, orphaned, widowed – and even mistreated animals. Two hundred Finnish markka were also donated to the fledgling Norrmark brass band so they could order new instru¬ments from Germany.

Emancipation was another of Antti´s concerns. Antti’s friend, the municipal councillor and Fennoman Agathon Meurman, once argued at the Diet of Finland against women’s emancipation and right to study. “How could a laurel wreath even fit over their blonde curls?” he callously asked. Antti was annoyed. “Much better than it would on the head of young man seeking to cover up a budding bald patch!” he thought. He was fond of repeating the axiom: “Men are not worthy to loosen women’s sandal straps”.

Antti Ahlström supported the Diet’s new law in 1878 that sanctioned women’s equal right to marry and inherit estates. Twelve years later, women were also granted control over their own property, salaries and wages, although legally they were still under their husband’s guardianship. This didn’t change until 1929.

The Widow Donatrix

Antti Ahlström died in 1896. His widow Eva Ahlström and her children kept up Antti’s practice of generous patronages and donations to charity. One of Eva’s initiatives was to send gardeners to speak in the public schools, where they taught the children about horticulture and gave them seeds and seedlings to plant. The Norrmark Youth Club also received Ahlström support. When the Grand Duchy of Finland’s crops failed in 1902, Eva donated a large sum of money for emergency famine assistance and mobilised company employees to pitch in with charitable activities. Among other things, they banded together to drain a boggy meadow area in Leineperi, a village to the south of Norrmark, so it could be rented out to tenant farmers for livestock grazing. The company gave its employees free glass and wood for updating the windows on their cottages and barns, and adjusted their tenant farming measurements and charges so they would be more just and fair. She also donated money to establish a women’s shelter in Norrmark.

The family members that steered the Ahlström company wrote a romanticised definition of the relationship between the landowners and their tenant farmers in one of their meeting minutes. The ideal bond, they said, should be mutually beneficial and enable “fully good” living conditions for the crofter. In return for their kindness, of course, they expected hard work, good behaviour and obedience.

In Norrmark, the standard working day lasted 11 hours, from 6 in the morning until 7 in the evening. Breakfast was eaten at 8–9 am and lunch 2–3 pm. One day Antti´s and Eva´s son Walter Ahlström decided it was warranted to shorten the workday by one hour: “The reduced labour has had no effect on work morale, as longer days make slaves of us all, while shorter working hours foster enthusiasm and diligence.”

This kind of patriarchal indulgence was the rule in many other com¬panies, but by no means all of them. The goal of a “fully good” sta¬tus for crofters was no guarantee. The strictest industrial barons and business leaders required total submission from their subordinates.

Of course, the benefactors, by extending their alms from above, created and maintained social hierarchies. They knew that the generous charity of one party knowingly places the other party under their power. An unwritten agreement grants the benefactor control, in addition to social and political influence. At the same time, it also boosts their good standing and social status. This was very much the case with the Ahlström family. News of their charitable work spread and was widely reported in the press.

To celebrate her 60th birthday in 1908, Eva Ahlström donated a mammoth 550,000 Finnish markka to various causes. It was much more than she gave away on her 50th birthday ten years earlier, and almost as much as Antti and she had previously jointly donated (700,000 Finnish markka). For comparison’s sake, a mayor of a medium-sized city at that time was making 5,000 Finnish markka a year, a public prosecutor made 1,800 annually, and a local bailiff made 1,200. Eva’s donation would have paid these top salaries for almost seventy years.

The largest donation, 300,000 Finnish markka, went to help build a hospital in their village of Norrmark. The money was deposited in the Ahlström company account with a five per cent annual rate of interest to wait for the necessary permits and arrangements to be completed. The hospital was built in 1911 on the western bank of the Noormarkunjoki river, next a shelter for the “sick and weak downtrodden” that the Ahlströms had previously built. The Ahlström company donated the plots for both institutions. The hospital was designed by the renowned Finnish architect Lars Sonck.

Eva also donated a small but locally appreciated sum of 2,000 Finnish markka to paint Norrmark’s church. The horticultural and home economics school planned for the neighbouring village of Leineperi received 200,000. Eva donated 2,000 to the Women’s Society of Pori and the same amount to the Pori Orchestra’s pension fund. A gift of 20,000 Finnish markka went to the Imperial Alexander University, where prizes were distributed every three years for innovative chemistry inventions.

Ten thousand Finnish markka went to the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, 5,000 to the Suomen Laulu (“Finland’s Song”) mixed choir association, 1,000 to the League of Finnish Feminists and 1,000 to the Finnish Women’s Association. An organisation that called themselves “Friends of the Animals” received 2,000, alongside the Finnish Seamans’ Mission and the Christian Evangelical Association.

Walter Ahlström and social hierarchies

Walter Ahlström took the helm in the family company in 1907. Walter was building a vast business empire. The center of operations in the 1910´s and 1920´s was Varkaus in the northeast of the country, where a whole new community was being built.

In addition to the Varkaus´ mill’s machines and buildings, Walter was also interested in the factory environments, which included the yards, gardens and worker housing. He hired the country’s best architects to design these places and participated in the process himself. The appearance, equipment and location of main offices, owners’ residences, clubhouses, mill managers’ villas, and the houses of engineers, office staff, supervisors and foremen had to be arranged just so. The hierarchy of the factory area was made eminently visible, just as Walter felt it should be.

Similar factory communities were built in other parts of the Grand Duchy of Finland. In 1917, the Kotitaide (“Home Art”) magazine wrote:

The majority of these community plans are all-encompassing arrangements of large factory areas, complete with city plans and electrified building designs for housing the workers, foremen and office staff. An encouraging phenomenon in recent years is the decision by most of our industrial titans to use their windfall war profits to improve their employees’ housing conditions. Some have already made great strides in this area. Ahlström Oy has had a plan that meets every modern requirement drawn up for the factory area it owns in Varkaus. Ahlström has also designed a series of single-family homes for the same area. The proposals were created by the architect’s office of Valter and Ivar Thomé, the same duo that designed the Mänttä factory area, the areas owned by Rauma Wood Oy and the Kajaani timber company in the Karhula factory area.

The improvement of workers’ conditions was often pushed to the bottom of the list, however. While it is true that barracks were built for the workers in Varkaus, it was a slow process, as the construction of the production facilities was always given priority. In the 1910s, housing conditions actually worsened. Still, unlike in the surrounding municipalities, the workers did have their own flats in Varkaus, albeit rented from the Ahlström company.

In 1900, some one thousand people lived in the village of Varkaus. By 1917, this number had already grown to 4,500. In 1909, the year Ahlström took ownership of the mill, there were less than 300 people working for the business, but by the summer of 1917, there were 1,500. The workers’ old decrepit shacks were razed, and the local roads were straightened and paved. A large part of the workforce now lived in housing built by the Ahlström company. Twenty-nine structures with more than 400 rooms had been built for the mill’s workers, five buildings with 56 rooms had been erected for the fore¬men, and nine villas with ten rooms each had been constructed for the office staff.

In May of 1915, Walter Ahlström turned forty. In line with family tradition, Walter marked his birthday by donat¬ing money to a good cause. This year, he earmarked 50,000 Finn¬ish markka for the creation of a charitable fund to promote Norr¬mark’s handicraft industry. As a result, the Norrmark Association of Handicraft Industries was established, with its first products being cross-country skis and hunting gear. Eva Ahlström likewise donated 5,000 Finnish markka for renovation of the kitchen at the Norrmark pub¬lic school.

Three years later, in honour of Eva Ahlström´s 70th birthday in January 1918, the Ahlström company made a donation of 100,000 Finnish markka to charity, the interest of which would be used to support the pauvres honteux, or poor people who, due to modesty, previous status, or other reasons, did not want to ask help for themselves.

The bloody Finnish Civil War that broke out the same month and lasted until May had no effect on the Ahlström family’s tradi¬tion of patronage and charity donations. In fact, the most important donation by far took place at this time, in accordance with Walter Ahlström´s brother Rafael Ahlström’s will.

Rafael Ahlström was murdered as a prisoner of war in March 1918. Before he was killed, Walter’s brother wrote that he wished that the majority of his assets be turned into a fund for the benefit of Swedish and Finnish-language arts and culture. The incomplete and vague will was not signed or witnessed, and so his widow and extended relatives could have contested the validity of the document, but they chose not to do so. Rafael’s widow benevolently carried out the will to the letter, according to her deceased husband’s wishes. The other siblings and shareholders redeemed Rafael’s shares in the company for more than six million gold markka, five million of which went into the established fund, which was to be managed by the City of Helsinki. Walter Ahlström´s daughter Maire Gullichsen, a great patron of arts by her own right, later said that her patron¬age was nothing compared to her uncle Rafael’s gift. Rafael’s fund nourished Finland’s art, sculpture, music, and literature scene in a princely manner.

In October 1918, Walter’s youngest sister Hjördis continued her mother Dona¬trix’s legacy by donating the deed to the tuberculosis sanatorium in Kauttua that she had already supported for years to the Finnish TB (tuberculosis) Foundation. The twelve-person facility was situated on a pretty slope of pine trees that was perfect for its purpose. The dona¬tion was made on the condition that the association would continue to operate and care for patients who may also be unable to pay.

The Ahlström family matriarch and donatrix Eva Ahl¬ström died on 19 December 1920 at the age of 73 from lung disease. Her death was widely noted in the press. The Finnish tabloid Iltalehti praised her profusely:

Eva Ahlström had a long-lasting influence and her good heart and generosity reached far and wide. She helped the poor and the needy, set up and subsidised schools and educational institu¬tions, and backed artists and would-be students. She supported all kinds of Finnish art, championed animal welfare campaigns, was a founding member of the Martta association and a spon¬sor of Emäntälehti (“Homemaker magazine”). She advocated for the women’s cause, and generously helped the sick, suffering and silently distressed. The amount of aid that she donated to public utility institutions is in the millions. Closest to her heart was the municipality of Norrmark. There she gifted money to found the Norrmark infirmary, the Norrmark family shelter, and other facilities in the municipality. Her funds were also responsible for the establishment of Leineperi’s home economics school in Kullaa. Anywhere help has been needed, people have grown accustomed to asking and receiving her assistance. Due to her wide-ranging contributions to charity, she was invited to be an honorary member of many associations and clubs. Eva Ahlström’s life’s work was noble. Not all of her works are even recognised. Innumerable were the helpful endeavours she per¬formed without reward. Her deeds in life exuded warm-hearted neighbourly love.

Three years later, in 1925, as Walter Ahlström turned 50 years, he made a donation of 2 million Finnish markka to promote technological development at Finland’s universities, especially in the area of mechanical, electrical and ther¬mal engineering. To commemorate his wedding anniversary, which happened to be around the same time, Walter and his wife Lilli also donated a million Finnish markka to the Norrmark branch of the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare. Another 100,000 was used to commission new painted windows from the distinguished Finnish artist Magnus Enck-ell for the church in Pori.

When Walter’s youngest sister Hjördis died in 1929, she was particularly remembered for her extensive philanthropy, especially to the pneumonia sanatorium in Kauttua, a summer camp for older people in Finnby, as well as silent support for writers, artists and countless others “who dabble in the dark side of life”.

The close family chose the words for Hjördis´ obituary, perhaps captivating the idealized Christian self-image of the whole family dynasty and their tradition of social responsibilities in the sentence:

“She who lightens the burden of others, does not live without purpose
in this world.”

Translation from Finnish Pamela Kaskinen

January 2023

Sustainability and equality at WEF 2023

“An investment in children yields the highest possible return- a stable and equal society. #finland ranks #1 on reaching the Sustainable Development Goals 👫🌎👫The measurements include Finland’s longstanding work towards zero hunger, clean affordable energy and gender equality. This of-course is payed for with our high taxes on personal income and on businesses.” Maria Bondestam – Ahlström. Salis res doles milit laborit aut audae quame volecepta pore sunt earum rem velesed quati culpa quis quias esequi accusanihit ex esti optatenia volupti de offic te est, sectect iissum fugitios et ut odi sectatur, tor sunt……