The Nationalistic Generation
The oldest generation was born before World War II. It was not hard to give a name to this generation. First and foremost, the generation is characterised by a strong nationalist sentiment.
Independent of their current country of residence, their lives have been entangled with the history of Finland as an independent country and/or the history of World War II. The usual social background of this group was that their parents’ occupational status was small farmer or farm labourer, regardless of the residential area at the time of the interview. These people grew up in circumstances typical for the agrarian poor. The circumstances of their early life have affected their whole life-course, which must be kept in mind when interpreting the life experiences and insights of this generation. At the time of the interviews, the informants were at least sixty-four years old. The following ideals of the good life can be seen as an accumulation of the experiences of a long life. The following dialogue was conducted in 2004 between a female researcher and an eighty-two-year-old female Finnish informant whose family history was coloured by bitter experiences in the Finnish Civil War of 1918.
| Interviewer: | What about the values and lessons you got in your own childhood home? Have you been able to transmit them to your children? |
| Informant: | I don’t exactly know what they have learned. But, oh yes, I have tried. |
| Interviewer: | What is the most valuable thing in life? |
| Informant: | That they would be decent and conscientious people. I really don’t know. They haven’t succumbed to any evil so far, to drugs or tobacco. (F1922, Fi) |
This type of conversation was repeated frequently when the members of the research group interviewed informants who were members of the nationalistic generation.
It reflects the overall aim to teach the next generation, to transmit experiences of life and immaterial values to one’s descendants, but it contains a tinge of doubt about the results of the instruction. The content of the teaching is also an important aspect. Living a decent and good life means living in harmony with other people and carefully fulfilling one’s duties as a member of society. Illegal acts are excluded from the concept of the good life, as are unhealthy risk behaviours.In maintaining culture, the discreet guiding role of the parents also comes out in the way a Finnish-Canadian immigrant aged nearly ninety talked about the vocational education she and her husband had been able to offer to their seven children. In 1957, the large family migrated to Canada despite having no language skills, no friends, and no money. The early years in Thunder Bay had meant hard work, few amusements, and small incomes:
I do remember when we first came to Thunder Bay. The year was 1957. It was called Port Arthur then. There were nine of us: two parents and seven children. We had no money. We had no work, no residence, and no friends here. Someone saw us standing there lost and told us the way to the ‘Hoito’ restaurant. There we met other Finns who helped us to start out. Since then, we have been here and all has gone well. […] The children got their education here. It would have happened in Finland, too, but anyway.
(F1920, Fi)
The informant’s argumentation also emphasises the importance of family values. For this age cohort, family was a remarkable part of a good life. Family history was well known; grandparents, grandchildren, aunts and uncles, cousins, and other relatives were valued highly. Familialism was an important internal feature of the production of the good life.
The oldest generation lived its childhood in a society where people’s life-courses were often dictated by all kind of health problems. In the period before antibiotics, even a minor disease or accident could lead to a long-term disability or premature death (Vuorinen 2002, 62–67).
This deeply rooted risk manifested itself as an excessive emphasis on good health and its implications. Of course, this ageing generation had met all kinds of age-related health problems, but this social understanding of health had become an immanent part of the good life for both men and women. Two informants in Finland discussed the meaning of health:
| Interviewer: | I have to ask: when you have had such an exceptionally hard life with all kinds of adversities and afflictions … are you not bitter at all? |
| Informant: | I don’t know, maybe it is those children, and especially the girl, when she was [seriously] ill, that I still always think about her, every day I worry myself about her, if she only could stay healthy. (F1927, Fi). |
| Interviewer: | What is your opinion; does health matter in your life? |
| Informant: | Yes it does! […] It is the basic thing in life! If one is sick … one can’t live at all. (M1925, Fi) |
The ethos of work is also part of the identity of this age cohort. Nearly every informant in Finland and Canada evaluated his or her life in terms of diligence and persistence. Employment started at a very early age and continued throughout the whole life-course. Work history was one of the topics about which the informants remembered even the small details and about which they were willing to talk. This dialogue emphasised their ability to manage on their own without help from others. It may be surprising that hard work was considered a symbol of the good life. A man who was born in Finland at the beginning of the 1940s but migrated to Canada in his childhood highlighted this:
It was hard work that made all this stuff possible. I started work immediately after school at the age of fourteen, which meant only six years of schooling for me.
First it was bush work, the same activity that I used to do already in Finland, then business in the same trade. It demanded long days and economy in all activities. But now I have all this, the house and cars, and my descendants are educated and work in good occupations.(M1940, Fi)
When talking with the informants, one could not avoid the impression of a hidden sense of guilt that seems to have been a driving force behind the endless slog and the life of great industry. In sum, members of this generation were forced to work all day long and tended to avoid leisure time. The lifestyle of long days on the farm or in small enterprises affected the whole life-course of these people, and it could be seen in their daily activities, even in their old age. Religious issues were not so often discussed by the informants. However, the worldview of the oldest generation was so laden with religious values and attitudes that this aspect could not be ignored. For this generation, the church was not only a place for religious rituals and traditions but also a community with a living belief in a god with answers to the problems of everyday life. Finns often keep their personal beliefs private (Häkkinen 2014), but in Thunder Bay, Canada, the state of affairs was different. The Hilldale Lutheran Church was an important place for meetings and also a central spiritual centre.
| Interviewer: | Isn’t it written in the Bible, ‘ask, and you will receive’? |
| Informant: | Oh yes, so it is. And you have to believe that. One can’t live the life without this [belief]. This is my life experience. (F1917, Fi) |
School was actually the first institution through which a citizen of this generation concretely met society, and education was one of the processes that connected the individual to the continuous influence of the state (Häkkinen 2014). Consequently, experiences of schooling were deeply ingrained in the individual and collective memory of the nationalistic generation.
Nearly every informant professed the importance of education as a route to a better life, and the fact that schooling careers had been interrupted too early for economic reasons was a common reason for sorrow and anger. A Finnish man related this sentiment:
| Informant: | … and schooling then, I would have been talented enough to go on in schooling, if we had only had the money, but we didn’t… |
| Interviewer: | So … how long did you go to school for? |
| Informant: | So I went through two years of basic school and then four years of primary school. |
| Interviewer: | Your teacher would have been happy for you to continue? |
| Informant: | Oh yes, she tried hard but with no success. It just was not possible, and my life then went as it did. (M1925, Fi) |
For the oldest generation, the concept of the good life consisted of such issues as a decent life, family values, work, health, environment, community, religion, and learning. There were individual exceptions, but these fundamental aspects could be found in most of the dialogues: they were the pillars of the good life. The ideal of the good life is constituted of several pieces, the significance of which varies depending on life experiences, time, and place. In short, the nationalistic generation carries many values and norms inherited directly from the old agrarian world; however, education and school represented something new, which strongly reflects the growth in state power.
When comparing the ideals of the good life of this generation in two different countries, it is not easy to find remarkable differences. Nevertheless, because of migrants’ position as an ethnic minority, the marks and symbols of all kinds of managing for oneself seem to be of stronger importance to the older immigrant generations in Canada. This refers to the open or hidden competition between the different ethnic groups, which is typical for communities with several minorities of roughly equal strength. Another possible target of comparison is the Finnish branch of the family. It is a permanent source of challenge: was the decision to migrate right or wrong? This will be discussed in more detail later.