The Scandinavian Element in the United States

CHAPTER I.

Introduction

The history of the United States, according to newer views which have largely supplanted, or progressed beyond, those of the New England school of great historians, is the history of the march of a civilization, chiefly English, across the vast North American continent, within the short period of three hundred years. It is the story of the transformation of a wide-stretching wilderness – of an ever-advancing frontier – into great cities, diversified industries, varying social interests, and an intensely complex life. Wave upon wave of races of mankind has flowed over the developing and enlarging West, and each has left its impress on that area. Across the trail of the Indian and the trapper, the highway of the pioneer on his westward journey, have spread the tilled fields of the farmer, or along it has run the railroad. The farm has become a town-site and then a manufacturing city; the trading post at St. Paul and the village by the Falls of St. Anthony have expanded into the Twin Cities of the Northwest; the marshy prairie by the side of Lake Michigan, where the Indians fought around old Fort Dearborn, has come to be one of the world’s mighty centers of urban population – and all this transformation within the memory of men now living.

The progress of this rapid, titanic evolution of an empire was greatly accelerated by the desires, the strength, and the energy of multitudes of immigrants from Europe; and in at least six great commonwealths of the Northwest the Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes have been among the chief contributors to State-building. During the eighty years ending in June, 1906, among the 24,000,000 immigrants who came to the United States, the Scandinavians numbered more than 1,700,000. Whether viewed as emigrations on the eastern shores of the Atlantic, or as immigrations on the western shores, these modern Völkerwanderungen constitute one of the wonders of the social world, in comparison with which most of the other migrations in history are numerically insignificant. The Israelites marching out of Egypt were but a mass of released bond-men; the invasions of the Goths, Vandals, and Huns were conquering expeditions, full of boisterous, thoughtless, unforecasting energy. Even the immigration from Europe to America in the whole of the seventeenth century scarcely equalled in number the columns which moved westward in any one year from 1880 to 1890.

In this flux of humanity, mobile almost to fluidity, various in promise of utility, shifting in proportions of the good and bad, of pauper, refugee, and fanatic, or “bird of passage”, sweatshop man, and home-builder, there has been such an interplay of subtle and vast forces that no just and final appreciation can as yet be reached. But some sort of tentative conclusions may be arrived at by intensive study of each immigrant group, following it through years and generations, searching for its ramifications in the body politic and social.

The student of this phase of American history must attempt the scientific method, and exercise the patience, of the student of physical nature. No geologist, for example, would think for a moment of generalizing as to the history and the future of a continent of complicated structure after a few examinations here and there of cross-sections of its strata. He must know from thoro-going observation the trend, thickness, and composition of each stratum; he must trace, if possible, the sources of the material which he finds metamorphosed; he must be familiar with the physical and the chemical forces at work in and on this material, – heat, pressure, movement, affinities, gases, water, wind, and sun. In like manner, the student of immigration as a whole, or of a section as large as that of the Scandinavians or Italians, must make careful discriminations as to previous conditions and influences, and also must notice carefully the differentiation of peoples, places, and times.

Too much stress, however, should never be laid on the character of any one group of immigrants, lest it warp the judgment upon the immigration movement as a factor in American progress. The ardent political reformer in New York City, seeing the political activity of the Irish, and the easy, fraudulent enfranchisement of newly-arrived aliens, cries in a loud voice for restriction or prohibition of immigration. The California labor agitator, feeling chiefly the effect of Chinese efficiency in the labor market, would close the gates of the country to all the eastern nations. The social worker, knowing mainly and best the degradation of the Hungarians in the mines, or of the Hebrews in the sweatshops, prophesies naught but evil from foreign immigration. From an opposite point of view, when a man travels in leisurely fashion up and down Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, and finds a dozen race elements – English, German, Norwegian, or Russian – he begins to understand the real benefit to the nation of the coming of this vast, varied, peaceful army.1 The scale of immigrants runs from the pauper or the diseased alien, awaiting deportation on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, to the rich Norwegian or German owning a thousand-acre farm in North Dakota, and to the millionaire Swedish lumberman or manufacturer of Wisconsin or Minnesota.

For more than half a century, the United States has been almost a nation of immigrants, a mixture of races in the process of combination; upon the exact nature of this combination, whether it take the form of absorption, amalgamation, fusion, or assimilation, depends future political and social progress.

The writer has for years felt a profound conviction of the vital importance of this whole problem of the alien, and a corresponding belief in the value of the investigation of each cohort in the national forces. Hence this attempt at a sympathetic study of the Scandinavian element in American life and of its contributions to the evolution of the Northern Mississippi Valley during the last sixty years.

In such a study, the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes, like all other citizens of foreign birth, must be judged by the character and preparation which best fit men to contribute to the permanent progress of a self-governing people. What are the signs of readiness for full Americanization? The fundamentals are manliness – Roman virility – , intelligence, and the capacity for co-operation, ennobled by “dignified self-respect, self-control, and that self-assertion and jealousy of encroachment which marks those who know their rights and dare maintain them”;2 devotion to law, order, and justice; and a ready acquiescence in the will of the majority duly expressed.3

Such qualities in America have been the especial possession of that sub-race of the Caucasian stock which the later ethnologists call the Baltic, in contradistinction to the co-ordinate sub-races, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean or Ligurian. This Baltic race has for centuries occupied the British Isles, the northern plains of Germany, and the North European peninsulas, being found in its purest state in Norway, Sweden, and Scotland. The people of this sub-race, asserts the writer of an admirable article on racial characteristics, are mentally “enterprising and persevering, and cheerfully dedicate most of their time and thought to work… They are liberally gifted with those moral instincts which are highly favorable to the creation and growth of communities, altho not always so favorable to the individual who possesses them; they are altruistic, fearless, honest, sincere. They love order and cleanliness, and attach considerable importance to the dress and personal appearance of individuals.”4 While the other Caucasian sub-races do not lack these qualities, their most dominating characteristics are different; for example, one may exemplify the artistic or the idealistic side of human nature.

As related to the progress of civilization in America, all immigrants fall into three classes: those who powerfully re-enforce the strength and virtue of the nation, those who supplement its defects with desirable elements, and those who lower its standards and retard its advancement. Hence, those immigrants will be presumably the most desirable to America who come from the regions where the purest Baltic stock now exists, that is, north of a line running east and west through Brussels, and especially in north-central Germany and the Scandinavian peninsula.

Measured by character and training, the Baltic race in America stands up well to the test, not only in the foreign-born alone, but in the second and third generation born on American soil. If generations of ignorance, mental inertia, social depression, political passivity, shiftlessness, and improvidence stretch behind the immigrant, if his religion be chiefly a superstition or strongly antagonistic to the principles of the Republic, and if he be physically inferior and long inured to the hardships of a low standard of living, just so far is he an undesirable addition to American population. But, on the other hand, if his homeland show a very low percentage of illiteracy; if his life has been saturated with the ideas of thrift and small economies; if he hold himself free from domination by priest, landlord, or king; and if his history be the story of a sturdy struggle for independence, he should be rated high and welcomed accordingly, for it is of such stuff that mighty nations are made.

The student of Scandinavian immigration in the nineteenth century is not left to conjecture in his endeavor to estimate the probable result of the injection into American society of this foreign-born element. Before the second generation of English and Dutch settlers in America in the seventeenth century had grown to manhood, the Swedes began a colony upon the Delaware River; and their descendants are still a distinguishable part of the population of the lower Delaware valley. This beginning of Swedish immigration to America is particularly instructive because the settlements undertaken in the period of the Thirty Years War drew their recruits from the same classes of Swedish society as the movements of the nineteenth century, and developed under substantially similar conditions and along much the same lines.

The Swede of the seventeenth century and the Swede of the nineteenth century are essentially one in character, for two hundred years have wrought less change in him than in his cousins of Germany and England. The accounts of Stockholm, its people and its surroundings, written in the early seventeenth century, might serve, with very little modification, to describe the large features of the Sweden and the Swedes of today. Great progress has of course been made in two centuries, but in political wisdom, high moral courage, and benevolent purpose, Gustavus Adolphus and his advisers were distinctly in advance of the first two English Stuarts and their courts.

Perhaps no better illustration of this difference could be found than in the plans for the beginnings of the colonies on the James River and on the Delaware River. The scheme for a colony on the Delaware was originally outlined by the great Gustavus himself in 1624, but sterner duties took his energies; and after the fatal blow on the field of Lützen, it devolved on his daughter, Queen Christina, and her faithful minister, Oxenstjerna, to carry out his plan for establishing a colony which was to be “a blessing to the common man,” a place for “a free people with wives,” and not a mere commercial speculation or a haven for aristocratic adventurers and spendthrifts.5

The first company of immigrants arrived in 1638, and year by year additions were received. So early as the middle of the seventeenth century, Sweden had a touch of the “America fever,” and when an expedition left Gothenburg in 1654 with 350 souls on board, about a hundred families were left behind for want of room. Perhaps only the transfer of the colony, first to the Dutch and then to the English, prevented the Swedish immigration from attaining large proportions two and a half centuries ago. The Swedish flag floated over New Sweden notwithstanding the protests of both the Dutch and the English, until the conquest of the colony by Governor Stuyvesant in 1655, and then it disappeared from the map of America.

In spite of threats, subjugation, and isolation, the prosperity of the early colony continued, and by the end of the seventeenth century it numbered nearly a thousand. No injustice in dealing with the Indians provoked a massacre, for these protégés of the Swedish crown, before William Penn was born, carefully and systematically extinguished by purchase the Indian titles to all the land on which they settled. Their piety and loyalty built the church and fort side by side, and long after they became subjects of the king of Great Britain they continued to receive their ministers from the mother church in Sweden. In fact, pastors commissioned from Stockholm did not cease their ministrations until they came speaking in a tongue no longer known to the children of New Sweden.

This Swedish colony, planted thus in the midst of larger English settlements, continued for many generations to add its portion of good blood and good brains to a body of colonists in the New World, which too often needed sorely just these qualities. The Honorable Thomas F. Bayard, who lived long among their descendants, wrote in 1888: “I make bold to say that no better stock has been contributed (in proportion to its numbers) towards giving a solid basis to society under our republican forms, than these hardy, honest, industrious, law-abiding, God-fearing Swedish settlers on the banks of the Christiana in Delaware. While I have never heard of a very rich man among them, yet I have never heard of a pauper. I cannot recall the name of a statesman or a distinguished law-giver among them, nor of a rogue or a felon. As good citizens they helped to form what Mr. Lincoln called the plain people of the country, – and I have lived among their descendants and know that their civic virtues have been transmitted.”6

Their thrift and comfort and sobriety attracted the attention of Thomas Pascall, one of the Englishmen of Penn’s first colony, who wrote in January, 1683: “They are generally very ingenious people, live well, they have lived here 40 years, and have lived much at ease having great plenty of all sorts of provisions, but they were but ordinarily cloathed; but since the English came they have gotten fine cloathes, and are going proud.”7 Penn himself declared: “They have fine children and almost every house full; rare to find one of them without three or four boys and as many girls; some six, seven and eight sons. And I must do them right – I see few young men more sober and industrious.”8

CHAPTER II.

Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes

The common use of the term Scandinavian to describe Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes in a broad and general way, is one of the products of the commingling of these three peoples on the American side of the Atlantic. The word really fits even more loosely than does the word British to indicate the English, Welsh and Scotch. It was applied early in the history of the settlements in Wisconsin and Illinois, to groups which comprised both Norwegians and Danes on the one hand, or Norwegians and Swedes on the other hand, when no one of the three nationalities was strong enough to maintain itself separately, and when the members of one were inclined, in an outburst of latent pride of nationality, not to say conceit of assumed superiority, to resent being called by one of the other names; for example, when a Norwegian objected to being taken for a Swede. Thus the Scandinavian Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, organized in 1860, included both Norwegians and Danes; ten years later the name was changed to the Norwegian-Danish Conference; and in 1884 the differentiation was carried further, and the Danes formed a new Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church Association, supplementing the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which dated back to 1871.

Vigorous protests were made from time to time against the use of “Skandinavian” or “Skandinav.” “Shall we Norwegians let the Danes persist in calling us Scandinavians?” wrote “Anti-Skandinavian” to the leading American Norwegian weekly of 1870.9 He also quoted the sarcastic words of Ole Bull: “Scandinavia, gentlemen, – may I ask where that land lies? It is not found in my geography; does it lie perhaps in the moon?”10 But the use and acceptability of the word steadily grew; the great daily paper in Chicago took the name Skandinaven; in 1889, the editor of The North declared: “The term has become a household word … universally understood in the sense in which we here use it (to designate the three nationalities).”11

Ole Bull was, of course, right in saying that there is no Scandinavian language, no Scandinavian nation; but the ordinary reader or student does not recognize clearly that Sweden, Norway and Denmark have different spoken languages (though the Danish and Norwegian printed language is one), different traditions, as well as different governments. Almost while these words are being written, the coronation ceremony in the ancient cathedral at Throndhjem completes the process by which Norway is severed entirely from Sweden and again assumes among the powers of earth that “separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

The physique and characteristics of the three Scandinavian peoples have been profoundly affected by the physical features of the northern peninsulas; the mountains, fjords, and extensive coast lines of Norway, the level stretches, lakes, and regular coast of Sweden, and the low, sandy islands of Denmark find a counterpart in the varying types of men and women of those countries. The occupations which necessarily grew out of these differences of surface and soil tended to give to all a strong, sturdy, hardy body; farming naturally claims by far the largest percentage, though great numbers of the men yield to the call of the sea. Both Norway and Sweden have large lumbering interests, while Norway leads in fishing industries, Sweden in mining, and Denmark in dairying.

Nature is no spendthrift in any part of the Scandinavian peninsulas; small economies are the alphabet of her teaching, and her lessons once learned are rarely forgotten. Her children of the North, therefore, down to the stolidest laborer, mountaineer, and fisherman, are generally industrious and frugal, and when they migrate to the American West, to enter upon the work of pioneering, with its stern requirements of endurance, patience, persistent endeavor, and thrift, they start out in the new life with decided temperamental advantages over most other immigrants, and even over most native-born Americans.

Other characteristics common to these three peoples distinguish them strikingly from the South European. From their Viking ancestors they have inherited a love for adventure, a courage in facing the possibilities of the future. Their hatred of slavery, and their clear, high ideas of personal and political freedom, are strongly marked, and their peasantry is ranked highest on the continent.12 Their adaptability to changes of clime, of conditions, of circumstance, has been remarkably demonstrated over and over again, in Normandy in the 11th century, in Sicily in the 12th, and in America in the 19th; yet it has not degenerated into a facile yielding to moods and whims even under the rapid changes of New World society.

The typical Swede is aristocratic, fond of dignities, assertive: he is polite, vivacious, and bound to have a jolly time without troubling too much about the far future. Yet he is not afraid of hard work; he is persistent, ofttimes brilliant, and capable of great energy and endurance. He is notably fond of music, especially the singing of choruses and the opera, and the poetry of Bellman and the epics of Tegner belong to the great literature of the world.

The Norwegian is above all democratic. He is simple, serious, intense, severe even to bluntness, often radical and visionary, and with a tendency to disputatiousness.13 There is an unmeasured quantity of passion and imagination in him, as there are unmeasured stores of power and beauty in the snows of his mountains and the waters of his coast. He has the capacity for high and strenuous endeavor, even verging on the turbulent, but he rarely has developed the qualities of a great leader. Like the Swede, the Norwegian is fond of music, but it is of a different sort. Both in his music and in his literature, the dramatic element is strong; no names in the realm of literature of the last generation stand higher than those of Ibsen and Björnson, who are first cosmopolitan and then Norwegian.

The Dane is the Southerner of the Scandinavians, but still a conservative. He is gay, but not to excess; the healthiness and jollity of a Copenhagen crowd are things to covet. He is pre-eminently a small farmer or trader, honest and persevering, ready and easy-going, and altho not given to great risks, he is quick to see a bargain and shrewd in making it. Of self-confidence and enterprise he manifests a decided lack.14 His country is small, open on all sides, and near to great Powers; his interests, therefore, have led him out from his peninsula and islands, and foreign influences have more affected him than they have his neighbors across the Sound and the Skager Rack. His best work in literature and art has been done under strong Romantic and classic impulses from the South.

Such being the qualities of the peoples of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the conditions of life and society in those countries in the first half of the nineteenth century seem on close examination quite unlikely to produce a great emigration, in comparison with conditions in other countries from which large numbers of men and women migrated to America. There were no great social, economic, or political upheavals sufficient to cause the exodus of any class; religious intolerance and persecution were, with few minor exceptions, neither active nor severe. The Napoleonic wars did not depopulate these northern lands, nor did they, like their sister nations to the south, suffer seriously from the commercial restrictions of the Emperor of the French. Militarism did not crush them with its weight of lead and steel and its terrible waste of productive energy. Political oppression and proscription, so marked in the affairs of central and western European states down to 1850, were not features of the history of Norway, Sweden or Denmark. Though Norway protested in 1814 in no uncertain terms against the union with Sweden in a dual monarchy, she was, under the constitution of that year, one of the freest nations of Europe, “a free, individual, indivisible kingdom.” In Sweden before 1840, one of the chief restrictions on the individual was potential rather than actual: a man who wished to leave the kingdom must have a passport from the king, for which he had to pay 300 kroner (about $81). He would also be under the close supervision of the state church, to which he was expected to belong.

There were, however, conditions in the home-lands as well as in America, which impelled immigration. Anyone who has travelled over the fertile prairies of the Mississippi valley and then through Norway or Sweden, will often wonder that so many people have been content to remain so long in the older Scandinavia. In Norway there were in 1910, in round numbers, 2,390,000 people on an area of 124,000 square miles.15 Of this population, about 425,000 were gathered in the larger towns, and 250,000 were in the smaller towns, making a total urban population of 29 %, over against 21 % twenty years before. The remainder were scattered over the vast mountainous country or along the coast-line of three thousand miles.16 Thousands of fishermen’s huts are grappled barnacle-like to the rocks, while behind them along a trickling thread of water stretches a precious hand-breadth of soil. The greater part of the interior is one wide furrowed plateau, in whose hollows, by lakes and streams, thrifty farmers skilfully utilize their few square yards of tillable land and pasture their cattle on the steep slopes. Save around Lake Mjösen, the Leir, Vos, and Throndhjem, there can scarcely be found in all Norway anything like a broad rich meadow. The farm products are almost literally mined from the rocks. “It is by dogged, persistent, indomitable toil and endurance, backed up in some cases by irrepressible daring, that the Norwegian peasant and fisher-folk – three-fourths of the population – carry on with any show of success their struggle against iron nature.”17 Yet in spite of such adverse conditions, these people have ever clung with passionate tenacity to their mountainous storm-beaten Norway, and by it have been made brave without bitterness, hardy without harshness, strong yet tender.