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]
[319] Bremer, _Homes of the New World_, II, 222, 227, 236; Nelson,
_History of the Scandinavians_, I, 372, 380, 384, 404, 423, 429,
438, 504, 530.
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]
[320] _U. S. Tenth Census, 1880_, I, 676.
[321] _U. S. Twelfth Census Reports, 1900_, I, _Population_, Pt. 1,
CXCIII, and Tables 43, 46, 56.
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.
[322] _U. S. Consular Reports_ (1887) No. 76, 148; Young, _Labor in
Europe and America_, 681.
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]
[323] _Special Reports, Bureau of the Census_, "Supplementary Analysis
and Derivative Tables" (1906), 32-33.
[324] Sparks, _History of Winneshiek County, Iowa_, 110; _History of
Fillmore County_ (Minnesota), 377 ff., 434 ff.
[325] J. O. Ottesen, "Bidrag til vore Settlementers og Menigheders
Historie," _Amerika_, April-September, 1894, especially
July 4.
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]
[326] These biographies are numerous in the many county histories
which appeared between 1880 and 1890 as the work of a syndicate
of publishers; they are also the staple of the latter half of
such works as Johnson and Peterson, _Svenskarne i Illinois_, and
Nelson, _History of the Scandinavians_, I, and II. All the
Scandinavian newspapers print many similar sketches,
biographical, autobiographical, and obituary.
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]
[327] _U. S. Consular Reports_ (_1887_), No. 76, 151; Young, _Labor in
Europe_, 689. C. C. Andrews, U. S. Minister to Sweden, 1873,
states: "The proportion of illegitimate births, including the
whole kingdom was 5.85%, but including only cities, the
proportion of illegitimates was 14.32%."
[328] _Statesman's Year Book, 1900_, 1048.
[329] _Ibid._, 1062; _Folkebladet_, Feb. 5, 1896.
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.
[330] A discussion of these statistics for 1885-1890 is given in _The
Forum_, XIV, 103. The reports of the superintendents of some of
the institutions give more or less of the history of each case.
See Nelson, _History of the Scandinavians_, II, 1-23.
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]
[331] _Special Reports, Bureau of the Census_, 1904, "Insane and
Feebleminded in Hospitals and Institutions," 20.
[332] Hall, _Immigration_, 166.
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]
[333] _Special Reports, Bureau of the Census_, "Insane and
Feebleminded," 21.
[334] _Minnesota Executive Documents, 1900_--statistics for the insane
for 1890, 1896, and 1900; The North, Dec. 18, 1889; _Wisconsin
State Board of Control_ [biennial], 1890 to 1902.
[335] _Special Reports, Bureau of the Census, 1904_, "Insane, etc., in
Hospitals," 21. Nelson, _History of the Scandinavians_, II, ch.
i, makes a conscientious, but rather lame, attempt at analyzing
available statistics of insanity, and gives his conclusions for
two periods, 1881-2 and 1890-4: ratio of insane in total
population, 1:2718 and 1:1719; in American-born, 1:4120 and
1:3009; in foreign-born, 1:1480 and 1:1144; in Irish, 1:1061 and
1:769; in German, 1:1461 and 1:1439; in Scandinavian, 1:1588 and
1:819.
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]
[336] Gronvald, "The Effects of the Immigration on the Norwegian
Immigrants," _Sixth Annual Report of the State Board of Health
of Minnesota_, 520.
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]
[337] For an interesting background for this discussion, see Grellet,
_Memoirs_, I, 324. He wrote in 1818 of a parish named Stavanger,
having a population of some 7,000: "We visited their prison and
their schools; the former kept by an old woman. She had but one
prisoner in it, and had so much confidence in him that the door
of his cell was kept open."
[338] _Minnesota Executive Documents_, biennial reports of State
Prisons for the years mentioned.
In Wisconsin, where the increase of population in the last ten years of
the nineteenth century was in the native-born of Scandinavian parentage,
rather than in the number of immigrants, the reports of the Waupun State
Prison may be supplemented by those of the State Industrial School, the
reformatory for first offenders between the ages of fifteen and thirty.
In 1900, the foreign-born Scandinavian population of Wisconsin was 5% of
the total, and the Scandinavian population of foreign-born parentage was
10% of the total.[339] Of the prisoners received at Waupun, the
Scandinavians were: 1891, 4.1%; 1898, 4.4%; 1900, 3.7%. Of boys and
young men received at the Industrial School, those of Scandinavian
parentage were: 1890-1892, 7%; 1896-1898, 6.5%; 1900-1902, 6.6%.[340]
[339] _U. S. Twelfth Census_, I, _Population_, Pt. I, Tables 25,
38, 40.
[340] _Reports of the Wisconsin State Board of Control_ for the years
mentioned.
In the matter of petty offences which are usually tried in the police
courts, particularly cases arising out of intemperance, the records of
convictions in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Chicago, together with the
statistics of city prisons and workhouses, indicate that the Northmen
are clearly the chief offenders.[341]
[341] _Minnesota Executive Documents_, Reports of the State Board of
Charities and Corrections, especially for 1884, 1890, 1896; _The
North_, Dec. 18, 1889. Nelson, _History of the Scandinavians_,
II, ch. i, tabulates his estimates of criminality as he does
those of insanity; for the years 1880-1822 and 1892-1894:
Ratio of criminals in the whole population 1:2302 1:1999
American-born population 1:2413 1:2013
Foreign-born population 1:2035 1:1887
Irish population 1:1600 1:860
German population 1:2713 1:2715
Scandinavian population 1:3706 1:5933