Just Culture #3: The Biggest Titan in Finnish history
Reviewing the bibliography of the Industrial Titan - Walter Ahlström, who owned the Finnish born company that ones the biggest in the Nation.
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In Just Thoughts #22, I mentioned that I bought Walter Ahlström's bibliography after visiting the Ahlström family estate for a wedding. He was an industrial titan, like you’ve never heard about before in Finnish history. The Ahlström family legacy overshadows and predates Nokia.
The storytelling is not dull, and the language is exquisite. The editor does not spare any descriptive adjectives for Walter Ahlström's persona. His legacy is entwined with that of Finnish independence, its cultural identity, and, most important, its language.
More than anything, it makes you realize the impact and significance of language in creating a shared identity. Finland, having belonged to Sweden, the Ahlström family’s spoken language was firstly Swedish, but identifying as Finnish, Walter made strides to use the Finnish language at home. Additionally, his father had been an avid believer that education is good for society at large, and the family invested in schools and endeavors that would solidify the existence of the Finnish language.
What followed was donating fortunes to schools and art. The bibliography covered how the family made friends with Jean Sibelius and other notable figures who created art pieces that define the cultural heritage of Finns. Not covered much in the Bibliography is that his daughter and her husband later made friends with Alvar Aalto, who designed the family’s home, Villa Mairea, one of the famous architects' most revered works.
To give you an understanding of the vastness of the family company during Walter Hayday’s;
“In 1927, more than 12,000 people worked at the Ahlström company’s 38 industrial facilities, most of them wage earners. The increase since the beginning of the century had been sixfold. Close to 160 million Finnish Markka in wages and salaries were paid out by the company each year. Over 600 buildings had been built for the workers, containing over 3500 rooms. More than 200 houses containing 1700 rooms were built for the firm’s office workers and foremen…. during the 1920’s. The land holdings of the companystood at over 170,00 hectares….”
Fortunes are amassed by moves like buying the most significant competitor, with the family’s entire fortune as collateral for the needed loan, thus not allowing Norwegian ownership. After successfully pulling such a move, the Ahlström company decided to invest in its acquisitions by taking out more loans and amassing hundreds of millions in debt financing to expand its factories without using a single markka of its cash reserves. This was made when the world was at war, which created thousands of desperately needed jobs.
When you take a small loan, paying it back is your problem; when you take a big enough loan, it ultimately becomes the bank’s problem. However, securing the funds seems to be a lot easier when they’re given to create wealth by someone with a proven track record of doing it. Walter was willing to play with the highest stakes when the country needed bold moves.
A few learnings from the book, in general, were that if you have a lot of wealth, it’s considered a duty to donate to causes that are important to you. Additionally, without donations towards education, culture, and art, there would’ve likely never been such a strong shared identity among Finns. I’d like to believe that made a more considerable difference than supporting politicians in driving your agenda across society. Nonetheless, before any solid political parties and associations to drive the causes of the “common man,” business was done by wealthy males sitting in armchairs, behind closed doors, smoking their cigars.
All this being said, the book is one I’d hoped I had read as part of history class back when I still had it as a subject. Additionally, I warmly recommend visiting the Norrmarkku estate. There are few places like it in Finland, and several lifetimes of Finnish historical culture are woven into it.
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