On a sunny summer day in 1931, an eighth-grader-to-be called Helmi became aware of her best friend’s bond with the communists—those other Finnish Americans who did not share the same values as Helmi’s family.
A red mark—the hammer and sickle that had been stamped on her friend’s toe—proved that she had attended a Young Pioneers’ summer camp. When school started three weeks later, Helmi decided that from now on her best friend would be Carol, a new Swedish–American student with a middle-class background (Hiltunen Biesanz 1989, 178–179).
Meanwhile in the Midwest, the eight-year-old Mayme, another Finnish-American girl, thought it perfectly natural to recite poems about Lenin during her father’s lecture trips to communist rallies. She and her family belonged to the so-called Red Finns, who had a working-class background and a socialist worldview (Sevander and Hertzel [1992] 2004, 21–22). While both girls had a Finnish heritage, lived in Finnish-American communities, and were students of the American school system, they held very different views regarding society.By looking at the children’s experiences, I examine how Finnish Americans’ understandings of citizenship were constructed and how they developed socially and ideologically. I consider why the dichotomy of civic education was so strong in Finnish-American communities. To answer these questions, I trace how the girls’ families and the other members of the communities passed on their values and knowledge of modern society and citizenship to the younger generation from the mid-1910s to the early 1930s; how the first-generation Finnish Americans applied their Finnish experiences of the national awakening and civic activity in the USA; what new things they learned about citizenship, the nation state, and democracy in the USA; and what kind of civic values they transferred to their children, the next generation. My hypothesis is that Finnish Americans built citizenship according to their ethnic, political, and social values in the riptide of national and transnational ideas.
One of these ideas was Americanisation, which aimed to make immigrants patriotic and loyal to their new country, the United States of America.
It was a cultural and political movement accepted by both Democrats and Republicans, and it blossomed in the 1910s and 1920s. The proponents of Americanisation aimed to make immigrants forget their old cultures and ways of life and to adapt to the American one. The idea arose from Americans’ suspicions and prejudices towards immigrants during World War I. The eligibility and loyalty of immigrants were increasingly challenged in American societal and political debates. The question was now asked: ‘who was good enough to be an American?’ Nationalism and nation-building were put into practice through the immigration and nationalisation policies of the US, and they were crystallised in the policy of Americanisation. Cultural diversity was seen as harmful—even dangerous—to the USA and demands increased for immigrants to integrate and show total loyalty to American society—in other words, to become Americanised. Historian John F. McClymer (1982, 110) states that Americanisation meant that ‘to become a good American one had to adopt in toto habits, practices, and idealized virtues of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class’. Politically, the American authorities used many direct and indirect strategies and customs in educational interactions, especially when socialising children but also with adult immigrants (Mirel 2010, 58–60). As it turns out, Americanisation also very strongly defined Finnish Americans’ civic education at home and in their communities.The history of Finnish migration to America has been much studied academically since the 1960s. We already know the push and pull factors of Finnish migration; the Finnish Americans’ way of life; and their cultural, social, and political activities in their new homeland (Toivonen 1963; Holmio 1967; Hummasti 1979; Karni 1990; Kivisto 1984; Karni, Koivukangas, and Laine 1988; Kero 1996, 1997; Kostiainen 1978, 2014). However, we do not know how the formal expectations of American society were embraced by Finnish-American families or how the children experienced and reacted to living between American society and Finnish-American communities.
This is an interesting matter to consider, as when immigrants became the targets of nationalistic education, it was a holistic process; they were moulded into decent American citizens through the adoption of American values, attitudes, and lifestyles. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to find out how Finnish families with different political leanings reacted to the Americanisation process—that is, how they responded to the efforts to impose American values and culture upon them.Civic education in this chapter is understood as the formal and informal ways of educating children to become citizens. Historically, the modern idea of civic education imparting beneficial values, such as equality and patriotism, arose in France at the end of the eighteenth century. As modernisation proceeded at all levels of society, qualifications for citizenship expanded; the rise of nationalism intertwined tightly with patriotic values in the process of building the nation state, industrialisation required an efficient workforce, and the development of parliamentary democracy demanded that citizens possessed skills in reading and writing and knowledge of political decision-making (Heater 2004, 67). According to the sociologist T.H. Marshall, liberal citizenship became political citizenship, which involved the individual’s right ‘to participate in the exercise of political power’.1 The younger generations were given deliberate education and guidance on civil rights and duties, national values, culture, and history at public schools.
Citizenship meant a full membership of society but not for all groups: women, working-class people, and immigrants lacked political rights in most countries at the turn of the twentieth century. The elite were suspicious of them because of their values and sheer numbers; as members of the electorate, they could overturn the status quo. Consequently, the authorities tried to control and regulate political power and civic education. This was possible for a while in hierarchical and centralised societies that favoured passive citizenship, but the attempt failed in states like the US, where the active and radical tradition of citizenship was based on a revolutionary history.
As well as advancing a positive attitude towards active citizenship, the US counted on social trust. In the nationalist age from the 1880s onwards, however, both active citizenship and social trust were put to the test when dealing with immigrants that did not share same cultural, ethnic, religious, or political values. The US authorities controlled citizenship and civic education through legislation, but it was not possible to suppress popular movements and grassroots activity that implemented and advanced citizenship in various informal ways.2 Popular movements were also familiar to the first generation of Finnish Americans because such movements were important in Finland under the Russian regime.3Popular movements generated educational activity. Associations based on religious, political, or ethnic values organised schools, study groups, and recreational activities to strengthen the values and identity of their membership. According to Wenger (1998, 4, 45–49), groups with common domains, shared practices, and interaction and learning goals form communities of practice. They create informal learning communities that—besides intentionally teaching and transferring knowledge and values—strengthen the identity and fellowship of the members. I perceive Finnish-American children’s families and ethnic and social communities as such communities of practice; they moulded the children’s values prior to the formal American educational system.
This chapter consists of three sections. In the first section, I present a general overview of the Finnish-American families and communities as well as their ideological and political heritage. I also examine the policy of Americanisation in the United States in terms of how immigrants were integrated into American society and what was required from a migrant in order that he/she be a good American. The second section highlights Finnish Americans’ reactions to formal and informal methods of Americanisation, such as the educational system, the media, and the immigrants’ own educational organisations.
They all had clear—albeit partly different—views on bringing children up to become decent citizens. I will outline the immigrant families’ civic education by focusing on two Finnish-American families, the Hiltunens and the Corgans. I look at how the parents argued for and justified some topics, such as patriotism, religion, socialism, and the homeland. I examine the path they followed and how the children understood, learned, and applied their parents’ values. In the third section, my aim is to elucidate how citizenship was defined and expressed in everyday life. I study how Finnish-American families consciously or unconsciously socialised the younger generation with their ethnic heritage and the prevailing policy of Americanisation. Finally, I analyse the results of the civic education in terms of its effects on integration in the local communities and American society more generally.The study is based on data produced by first- and second-generation Finnish Americans and their organisations; I utilise the memoirs of second-generation Finnish Americans, interviews, archival material, newspapers, and local histories to create a bigger picture. I approach the issue through the children’s experiences and memories, and my chief sources are the autobiographies of Helmi Mavis Hiltunen Biesanz (published 1989) and Mayme Sevander (published [1992] 2004).4 They give precious information on Helmi’s and Mayme’s experiences on childhood, families, and communities. They can be read to examine the relationship between Helmi’s and Mayme’s personal experiences and the American and Finnish- American cultures from the perspective of civic education as well as how the families transferred cultural, social, and political values to their children and the kind of civic education they received in the US from their families, community, and other actors in society, such as schools and organisations. They are undoubtedly parts of the greater history of Finnish Americans, but, at the same time, a close reading of the memoirs reveals those events, thoughts, and items that created important memories for Helmi and Mayme: these memories were significant enough to remember and tell about. As Lynn Abrams (2010, 79) notes, ‘Memory is not just about the individual; it is also about the community, the collective, and the nation’. Memories are socially shared experiences, and they often intertwine with the public memory of the time. In this sense, they reflect the present as well as the past. Helmi and Mayme published their autobiographies at the same time as hundreds of other Finnish Americans. It was time to make themselves visible, time to understand their own pasts and those of their families as immigrants, and time to pass on their stories to the next generation.5