The Scandinavian Element in the United States

Co-ordinate with the school and the church, as a social force to be estimated, is the press. Newspapers and periodicals of various sorts in foreign languages inevitably follow the settlement of any considerable number of aliens in a given community, for people of education and ambition will look in a familiar medium for their news and gossip, their instruction in commerce and politics, as well as their teaching in religion. So the Chinese and Japanese on the Pacific Coast, no less than the Germans, Italians, and Greeks on the Atlantic, have their dailies and their magazines. Since the three Norse peoples, practically without illiteracy and with active and ambitious minds, have settled in a large number of moderate-sized communities, frequently isolated from each other, and since their differences of opinion in matters religious and ecclesiastical are often positive and aggressive, the number of their publications of all kinds since the middle of the last century is curiously large, and quite as remarkable for their migratory and short-lived character.

The newspapers usually serve as the chief means of keeping informed concerning the general news of the European home-lands, as well as of the United States. Nearly all the larger papers publish regular European correspondence, summaries of events, letters, and clippings, under such headings as “Sverige,” “Fra Norge,” etc.299

The newspapers and magazines render another service by the publication, on the instalment plan, either as a part of the regular columns or as inserted sheets, of standard works of the great Scandinavian writers or of translations of the masterpieces of English and American authors. Since these novels, essays, and histories are so printed that they may be folded up and form a pamphlet for preservation, the periodical serves both as newspaper and library. “It was the Swedish-American press which caused the Swedish literature, as it is in America, to spring up.”300

The dailies of Chicago, Minneapolis, and Duluth, in particular, publish every week scores of communications from subscribers in all parts of the Northwest, in a department devoted to neighborhood news or gossip. The old settler writes his reminiscences, sometimes a brief letter called out by some event, sometimes at great length, like the Rev. J. A. Ottesen’s “Contribution to the History of our Settlements and Congregations,” which ran through eleven numbers of the weekly paper Amerika, from April to September of 1894, and gave very minute details of immigrant families unto the third and fourth generation, as they had passed under the kindly eye of the patriarchal old pastor in his service of forty years among them.301 Great numbers of these communications relate to the conditions and prospects of local settlements as viewed from the settler’s standpoint – crop conditions, market prices, wages, opportunities for labor, nature and prices of nearby land, schools, religion. As a revelation of the real mind of a community or of an element of the population, showing the inducements and motives operating upon the immigrant, and his response, they are exceedingly valuable, and in some important respects almost unique.

The editors and business agents of the larger and more enterprising Scandinavian papers very early began making journeys about the country, especially into the newer parts, in the interests of their papers; incidentally they were spying out the land for themselves, but indirectly they were furnishing first-hand observations of frontier conditions to the hundreds who were moved to reinvest themselves and their small accumulations. One of these “circuit riders” was Johan Schröder, editor of Fædrelandet og Emigranten, founded at La Crosse, in 1864, who published a little book of information for immigrants in 1867, after one of his extensive journeys among the settlements.302 Three years later he made a trip into Minnesota as far as Otter Tail County – “En Snartur i Nordvesten” – and was deeply impressed with the possibilities of that fertile section, to which many men of his nationality were already looking, as the Newtown folk in Massachusetts Bay looked in 1636 toward the Connecticut country, with a “strong bent of their spirits to move thither.” Such words as these were as seed sown in good soil: “So far as I have journeyed about in the prairie counties of Minnesota and Iowa, I have not yet met with any county which in multiplicity of natural resources can come up with Otter Tail. Immigration this year is very strong. Both newcomers direct from Norway, and older farmers from Iowa, Wisconsin and Southern Minnesota take their various ways thither.”303 The “America fever” of the Old World was now the “West fever,” and again more of the “West fever.”304 These articles were not mere generalizations, but often, as in those just quoted from, they gave the exact and practical information the reader would desire – break-up of the prairie would cost $25 or $30 for five acres on which to grow wheat and potatoes, cash to be had by working on the nearby railroad at $2.50 per day, salt to be had at five cents per pound, butter could be sold for ten cents per pound, fish and game were abundant, – also mosquitoes!305

The first of a long line of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish periodicals in the west, was a little paper called Nordlyset (Northern Light), which began publication in the Norwegian colony in Racine county, Wisconsin, in 1847, with James D. Reymert as editor. It was a small four-page sheet which at the start espoused the cause of the Free Soil party. In 1850 it changed hands, and was re-christened Demokraten; tho its subscription list increased to three hundred, the venture proved a failure.306

After 1850 the number of Scandinavian newspapers and religious periodicals multiplied rapidly. Langeland, himself an editor and publisher of the time, mentions five of these publications on the Norwegian side alone in the decade following 1850.307 Skandinaven, whose foundation marks an era in the Scandinavian press, dates back to this period. From its small beginnings has grown a great metropolitan daily, with a circulation of 20,000, besides its semi-weekly and weekly editions which have a circulation all over the Northwest of nearly 50,000.308 In the ten years after 1870, a second expansion in the number of publications took place, tho the fifteen Scandinavian papers given in the list published in the standard newspaper directory for 1870, make an almost insignificant showing by the side of the two hundred and fifty or more printed in America in German.309

The Swedish press in the United States began somewhat later than the Norwegian, but it manifested a stability and steadiness of progress which the latter too often lacked. Hemlandet was founded in 1855 as an organ of Swedish Lutheranism, but in 1870 it was a political as well as a religious journal, with 4,000 subscribers to the weekly edition, and 2,000 to the monthly, – “the largest circulation of any Swedish political newspaper in this country.”310

The high-water mark in the number of these publications in the Northern tongues seems to have been in 1892 or 1893, when Rowell mentions 146, of which Minnesota is credited with 33, Illinois with 30, Iowa with 13, and Wisconsin with 10, a total for these four States of 86, with a reported total of 140,000 subscribers, out of 550,000 subscribers for all the Scandinavian papers in the country. By 1901, the number of papers had fallen off – many suspended in the hard times after 1893311 – but the number of subscribers increased for the whole country to more than 800,000, and for the four States just enumerated, to more than 650,000.312

The politics and religion of the papers reflected the variegated opinions of different parties and sects, and of men who would found new parties and denominations, but Lutheranism and Republicanism have been from the start the dominating influences. A historian of Lutheranism named 16 Swedish Evangelical Lutheran periodicals in existence in the United States in 1896.313 About the same time a Democratic paper remarks grudgingly and sourly: “It is worthy of note that of the fifty or sixty Norwegian papers in the United States, including two dailies, all are Republican tho at rare intervals some may bolt individual nominations. Generally, however, they are amazingly steadfast to party – moss-backed and hide-bound, in fact.”314

The strong hold which this press exercises upon its subscribers is excellently illustrated in the large sums of money raised from time to time through its agency in behalf of sufferers from fire and famine in the North European peninsulas. By editorials and special correspondence, by subscriptions and the publications of lists of contributors, by stimulating concerts for raising relief moneys, these journals have pursued the shrewd, enterprising, and, at the same time, benevolent schemes of advertising, followed by their American contemporaries. In 1893 Skandinaven received and remitted to Norway for the relief of sufferers from a landslide in Thelemark more than $2,700.315 When a great fire nearly destroyed the city of Aalesund, that journal in the winter and spring of 1904 gathered and sent to Norway $19,000, mostly in sums ranging from $.25 to $2.00; at the same time Decorah Posten remitted more than $12,000 for the same purpose.316 The great famine in northern Sweden and Finland in 1902-3 gave rise to a similar collection of money; the editor of the Svenska Amerikanska Posten, the powerful Swedish newspaper of Minneapolis, headed the list for his paper, and at the end of several months the contributions through this one journal reached the total of approximately $18,000.317 Of course not all the money so liberally poured out to aid the unfortunate by the Baltic or the North Sea, was transmitted through the agents of the newspapers, but it is true that almost the sole inspiration for the gifts came more or less directly from the Scandinavian press. Probably out of $175,000 sent from the United States to the famine sufferers in 1903, – and America’s quota was about one-half of the total handled by the Swedish central committee in Stockholm – the newspapers were instrumental in raising fifty per-cent.318

CHAPTER X.

Social Relations and Characteristics

While the normal unit in Scandinavian immigration is the family, a considerable proportion of the immigrants has consisted of young, unmarried men and women. Not infrequently the young man left behind him a sweetheart who followed a little later when a solid foundation was laid for the prospective family; or perchance, if sufficiently prosperous, he went back at some Christmastide to marry her and bring her to America. In any case, the farm meant a home, and the marriage back of it was generally between two of the same nationality. Still, intermarriages between Scandinavians and persons of American or of other alien stock, are not infrequent, tho the number and significance of such marriages is more a matter of personal opinion and estimate than of exact statistics, since the latter are lacking. The opinions expressed in this chapter are based upon the inconclusive figures of the census reports, upon a study of a large number of brief biographies, and upon a considerable acquaintance with conditions in the Northwest. The biographies, it should be noted, are almost exclusively of men of Scandinavian birth, whose intermarriage with American women is less common than that of American men with Scandinavian women.319

Before the flood tide of immigration in the period beginning about 1880 brought to America so many young, unmarried women, intermarriages were more infrequent than in the later time. Hence the discussion of the matter in the Census Report of 1880 would not necessarily hold true for the subsequent period: “There is but one important element (other than the Irish) which manifests an equally strong indisposition to intermarriage, viz., the Scandinavian. This element appears in an important degree in but few of the States and Territories embraced in the following tables, but in these the effects of intermarriage are slight. Thus in Wisconsin, while there are 42,728 persons born on our soil having both Scandinavian father and Scandinavian mother, there are but 2,083 persons having a Scandinavian father and an American mother. In Dakota, the respective numbers are 10,071 and 418; in Minnesota 69,492 and 1,906… It will be noted that in some of the States and Territories where the Scandinavians are few and where it is notorious that they are thoroly mingled with the general population, the proportion of intermarriages is not a low one.”320 The figures for the children of such mixed marriages given in the reports of the Twelfth Census certainly reveal a decided increase in the number, especially when the necessary allowance is made for the decreasing birthrate naturally incident to the development of urban communities and to filling up of States, which took place between 1880 and 1900.321

In these two decades, large numbers of young unmarried women, moved by the same economic motives as the young men, came to the United States and took service among the Americans as domestic servants. The demand for capable and well-trained servants far exceeded, and still exceeds, the visible supply, and the wages which seemed high to the American housewife seemed trebly high to the girl who received in cash wages in the old home only $20 or $30 per year.322 In the new service the girls must perforce learn English rapidly or fail, so they learned the language and also the ways of the American household. In return they gave an honest, good-tempered, and trustworthy if sometimes clumsy service. If they were not always evidently grateful for the instruction and patience of the mistress of the household, if frequently they married soon after they were trained into efficient and satisfactory servants, they should not be condemned wholesale! While the marriages of these strong, healthy, intelligent, domestically capable young women with non-Scandinavian young men of the middle and lower classes constitute the larger proportion of intermarriages, the intermarriage of the American-born Scandinavian girls, trained in the public schools and colleges, with American men is also frequent, and no reservation as to the mixture of social classes needs to be made.

Large families have been a prominent characteristic of the home life of the Northmen in America’s Northwest. Race suicide should not be charged against the Scandinavians either in their new homes or in their old, for in spite of the steady drain which emigration has made upon the population of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark for fifty years, each country in each decade has shown an increase of population, due solely to natural increase.323 In America this natural fecundity was re-enforced by the conditions under which settlement was made, for large families are characteristic of the early years of a developing agricultural frontier. So when the Scandinavians entered the newly-opened regions of the Great West and found land and food abundant, both immediately and prospectively, they felt no necessity for enforcing prudential or other checks upon the increase of population. Putting the case more positively, circumstances put a premium upon families with numerous children; the farmer welcomed additions to his circle of boys and girls who would grow up into helpers upon the expanding cultivated acreage of the farm, and later take up land near the original homestead, buttressing it with prosperous allied homes. Families of ten and twelve were common, while others reached sixteen, eighteen, and even twenty-four.324 In his remarkably detailed reminiscences of Norwegian settlers in Wisconsin and the further Northwest, the Rev. J. A. Ottesen refers to families of his friends and acquaintances, sometimes in exact figures, as seven, ten, or fourteen children, and sometimes in such general phrases as “many children,” or “several children,” making use of these phrases no less than seventeen times in three columns of a single article.325

An examination of several thousand biographical sketches of Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes who have attained some degree of success in the American West, the very class which would first begin to limit the size of the family, leads to the conclusion that the average number of children per family among them is between four and five. In other words the average is nearly double that of the United States taken as a whole.326

Closely connected with this immigration of so many young, unmarried girls of the servant class, is the question of sex morality and illegitimacy. The statistics relating to this question are particularly unsatisfactory so far as the United States is concerned, even for a land where the scientific statistician is a recent product, and where the collection of social statistics, left mainly to the States and to local authorities, is very loosely carried on. The motives for concealment and for prevarication are obvious, and the records of municipal courts, even if closely inspected, would not give much more than a scant minimum of information applicable to an estimate of the Scandinavian element in the population.

To judge from the figures given for certain cities in Norway and Sweden, it would be natural to expect a much higher percentage of illegitimate births among the immigrants from those countries than among persons of American ancestry. The United States Consul at Stockholm reported for 1884 for the whole of Sweden that 10.2 % of all births were illegitimate; for the city of Stockholm alone, 29.3 %.327 Twelve years later the figure for the whole kingdom was 11 %.328 For Norway, the figure for the kingdom was 7.2 % for 1896; in the city of Christiania, 15.4 % of the 5,349 births in 1895 were illegitimate.329

Such statistics are certainly ominous, whatever the allowance which should be made for peculiar social conditions in Europe, which make the begetting of children after betrothal and before actual wedlock a less heinous offence against good order and morality than in America. But over against these startling figures stands the fact that it does not seem to be harder to maintain order and decency in cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul, or in the Scandinavian wards of Chicago, than it is in Detroit or Boston, or in the other alien quarters of Chicago itself. Nor does an inspection of the court and police records of cities of the Northwest for crimes and offences against decency, or against women, give cause for any special alarm for the future morality of the Scandinavians of that section.

For a safe and conclusive estimate of the contributions made by the Scandinavian element to the delinquent and defective classes of society, no very complete or satisfactory data are at present to be had. A detailed study of the statistics of these classes in Wisconsin and Minnesota warrants the judgment that the immigrants from Northern Europe, and their immediate descendants, have a much smaller percentage of paupers and criminals and a much larger percentage of insane, than do either the Germans or the Irish, the two other alien elements which approach the Scandinavians in importance in those States.330 But these statistics are at best unconvincing, because they are acknowledgedly incomplete, and because in them little attempt is made to distinguish between the children of American descent and those born of immigrant parents in America.

The experts working out the interpretation of the results of the Twelfth Census (1900) have made distinct progress towards a fair comparative judgment in matters relating to social classes and conditions. John Koren, for example, the son of the veteran Norwegian Lutheran pastor, the Rev. V. Koren, and an investigator and writer of unusual weight, points out that the insane in hospitals are at least ten years of age, while there are few children under fifteen among the immigrants as compared with the number under that age among the native whites, and he accordingly concludes that “Of the whites at least 10 years of age in the general population of the United States in 1900, 80.5 % were native and 19.5 % were foreign-born; while of the white insane of known nativity enumerated in hospitals on December 31, 1903, 65.7 % were native and 34.3 % were foreign-born. Relatively, therefore, the insane are more numerous among the foreign born whites than among the native.”331 How much more convincing is such a cautious and careful estimate than the sweeping generalizations of another recent writer: “Roughly speaking, the foreigners furnish more than twice as many criminals, two and one-third times as many insane, and three times as many paupers as the native element.”332

The statistics for the insane in hospitals at the end of 1903 and of those admitted during 1904, as given by Mr. Koren, show a strikingly high percentage of insane persons of foreign parentage in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Iowa. No other State comes within ten per-cent of the ratio of the first three. Of those enumerated in December, 1903, 56 % in Wisconsin, 48 % in Minnesota, 52 % in North Dakota, and 34 % in Iowa, were of foreign parentage; the percentages of the admissions for 1904 were 53 % in Wisconsin, 55 % in Minnesota, and 33 % in Iowa.333 In all these States the Scandinavian element has been numerous for at least two generations. Figures gathered for this study for the period between 1885 and 1895, before the children of the Scandinavian immigrants reached in very considerable numbers what might be termed the age for acquiring insanity, gave similarly significant conclusions. Of the inmates of the state hospitals for the insane in Minnesota, the foreign-born Scandinavians were 28 % in 1886 and 30.7 % in 1890; of the admissions to the state hospital at St. Peter in 1890, 35 % were Norse. Of the total admissions for the State in 1900, 23 % were Scandinavians, while in the Fergus Falls hospital, located in the heart of a more recently settled Scandinavian area, 40 % were of that nationality; Wisconsin reports show like percentages.334 All of these statistics warrant the general conclusion that of all the foreign-born, the Scandinavians are the most prone to insanity.335

If one seeks for adequate reasons for this unusual tendency to insanity, he will not find ready satisfaction. Undoubtedly the difference of environment and the severer strain upon muscle and nerve imposed by American industrial conditions, by which the machinery of the individual must run at a higher and unwonted speed, will account for part of the phenomena, but these causes operate alike upon all classes of immigrants. The change from the mountains of Norway, or from the rugged sea-coast of the great Northern peninsula, to the rolling prairies and the vast silent plains of the interior of the United States, has also its depressing effect. The very flatness of the land, its extremes of temperature, the fierce tornadoes of wind, the bewildering, imprisoning storms of snow, with no friendly mountain or forest to offer a body of protection or a face of comfort, and the isolation of the life of the frontier farmer and his family, together with the severity of their labor – all these are causes operating with peculiar force in the case of the Norwegian and Swedish immigrants. Dr. Gronvald, writing in 1887, stated his conviction that the women of these classes, especially the Norwegians, were predisposed to nervous disorders and insanity by early and frequent child-bearing, and from early rising from child-bed.336

Since the Norse immigrants have rarely if ever been charged with illiteracy, dependency, pauperism or mendicancy, the remaining social test, usually considered co-ordinate with that for insanity, is the proportion of criminals contributed to the total of delinquents.337 Earlier computations must undergo the same severe correction as do the estimates regarding the insane. By 1885 there were in the Northwest large communities made up of the older Norwegian and Swedish settlers and their descendants, and other communities comprising great numbers of recently arrived immigrants. According to the State census of 1885 in Minnesota, the Scandinavians formed 16.5 % of the population, and the Germans, 11.5 %. The reports of the wardens of the State’s prisons for 1886 show 8.7 % of the prisoners to be Scandinavian, and 7.4 % German. The population of the State during the next five years grew rapidly; the Scandinavian element increased faster than the German and nearly twice as fast as the native American. Yet in 1890 the percentage of the prisoners who could be identified as Scandinavian was only 7.1 %.338