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University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences
Vol. 111. No. 3 September, 1914
THE SCANDINAVIAN ELEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES
by
KENDRIC CHARLES BABCOCK, Ph. D.
Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the University of
Illinois
Sometime Fellow in the University of Minnesota and in Harvard
University
PRICE $1.00
Published by the University of Illinois
Urbana
Copyright, 1914
By the University of Illinois
TO
HARRY PRATT JUDSON, KNUTE NELSON,
NICOLAY A. GREVSTAD, AND ALBERT BUSHNELL HART
IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF
UNFAILING ASSISTANCE, ENCOURAGEMENT,
AND FAITHFUL CRITICISM
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Introduction--General discussion 7-14
CHAPTER II
Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes 15-21
CHAPTER III
Early Norwegian Immigration 22-34
CHAPTER IV
The Rising Stream of Norwegian Immigration 35-49
CHAPTER V
Swedish Immigration before 1850 50-61
CHAPTER VI
The Danish Immigration 62-65
CHAPTER VII
A Half Century of Expansion and Distribution, 1850-1900 66-78
CHAPTER VIII
Economic Forces at Work 79-105
CHAPTER IX
The Religious and Intellectual Standpoint 106-129
CHAPTER X
Social Relations and Characteristics 130-139
CHAPTER XI
The Scandinavian in Local and State Politics 140-156
CHAPTER XII
Party Preferences and Political Leadership 157-178
CHAPTER XIII
Conclusion 179-182
CHAPTER XIV
Critical Essay on Materials and Authorities 183-204
APPENDIX I
Statistical Tables of Population 206-216
APPENDIX II
Statistics of Three Minnesota Counties 217
INDEX 219-223
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.
[1] Whelpley, _The Problem of the Immigrant_, I.
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]
[2] J. R. Commons, "Racial Composition of the American People,"
_Chautauquan_, XXXVIII, 35.
[3] R. Mayo-Smith, _Emigration and Immigration_.
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.
[4] G. Michaud, "What shall we be?", _Century_, LXV, 685.
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]
[5] _Argonautica Gustaviana_, 3, 16.
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]
[6] Mattson, _Souvenir of the 250th Anniversary of the First Swedish
Settlement in America_ (1888), 44.
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]
[7] This letter, printed as a broadside in England about 1683, was
furnished me by Mr. George Parker Winship of the Carter Brown
Library of Providence, Rhode Island.
[8] Janney, _Life of William Penn_, 246-247.