PDF Scan to USB Stick

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SWEDISH-AMERICA H. ARNOLD BARTON So much of our picture of immigrant life in the past is based on tacit assumptions, rather than upon objective research, and these in turn derive not only from traditional lore but from what simply seems to make sense under given circumstances. It thus seems altogether natural to assume that the ethnic culture of an immigrant group was strongest at the beginning of its migration from the old land to the new, and thereafter became progressively weakened. That this was not necessary so, however, and that an ethnic culture on new soil could have a life cycle of its own, is demonstrated by the Swedish element in North America and the underlying dynamics of its cultural evolution. The culture of the seventeenth-century Swedish (and Finnish) colonists in the Delaware Valley and their descendants down through the end of the eighteenth century is a story in itself that was over by the time the nineteenth-century immigration properly began. There was, however, a long period in the earlier nineteenth century which may be termed the Swedish "Pre-Immigration." While departure from Sweden was not officially permitted without the king's permission before 1840, Axel Friman has recently estimated that some 5,000 Swedes came to America between 1820 and 1850. Nils William Olsson in particular has gathered much valuable information on many of these early forerunners.1 It is apparent that many of them were seamen who stayed—legally or illegally—in the New World. Such men had frequently served for years on foreign, including British and American, vessels. Their lives were often footloose and adventuresome as they drifted from place to place, on land and sea, following such opportunities as arose. Since there were as yet few Swedish women in the New World, there was little chance to found Swedish homes. Such men turn up on the crew lists of American merchantmen and whalers, in the enlistment records of the army and navy, among the gold miners in California, frequently disguised by typically Anglo-Saxon names 282 like Smith or Brown.2 It is related that Jacob Falström, known as the first Swede in Minnesota, who lived to see the beginnings of Swedish settlement in that territory around 1850, could speak English, Canadian French, and one or two Indian dialects—but had long since almost forgotten his native tongue.3 His case was surely not unique at the time. Persons of birth and breeding were meanwhile more prominently represented among these forerunners than they would ever be during the following periods of heavier Swedish immigration. People of such backgrounds were unlikely to abandon a normally comfortable and secure existence at home to go to the New World without strong motives. Usually this meant an escape from some failures or disgrace at home. A few, like Gustaf Unonius and his companions who settled at Pine Lake, Wisconsin, in 1841, were driven by a genuine admiration for American liberty and an idealized vision of life in the unspoiled wilderness. In either case, such persons were seeking not only new opportunities but in large part a new identity beyond the sea. While educated and cultivated immigrants were the heirs of their homeland's higher culture, that culture was at the time highly cosmopolitan. They knew French, German, and frequently English, and upon arrival were familiar—often enthusiastic—over American conditions as described by Morris Birkbeck or Alexis de Tocqueville, Axel Klinckowström, CD. Arfvedson, or Fredrika Bremer. While Rosalie Roos, serving as a schoolteacher and governess in South Carolina in the early 1850s was happy to visit Swedish friends of her own social background in the area, her letters describe little that appears specifically Swedish in their homes or genteel way of life.4 Thus the small numbers, wide dispersal, and social characteristics of the Swedish forerunners in North America did not encourage the establishment of an ethnic culture. A new phase began with the arrival in 1845 of Peter Cassel and the first small group of Swedish peasant farmers to establish a lasting settlement in the Midwest—at New Sweden, Iowa—followed the next year by Eric Jansson and his sizable sectarian following, who founded their colony at Bishop Hill, Illinois. Swedish immigration increased significantly over the next decade and a half, down to the outbreak of the Civil War. Between 1845 and 1861, some 20,000 Swedes arrived in the 283 United States.5 From 1851, Sweden began to keep statistics on emigration (and from 1875 on remigration), which makes the process easier to follow. The immigrants from the mid-1840s were, moreover, predominantly land-seeking farmers. Although they generally brought their families, traveled with groups of relatives and friends, and founded fairly compact settlements, mainly in the upper Mississippi Valley, they transplanted on American soil remarkably little of their Old World culture, which doubtless causes some surprise and disappointment to present-day visitors from Sweden seeking to follow in the footsteps of the novelist Vilhelm Moberg's Karl-Oscar and Kristina. The mid-century immigrants showed indeed a notable readiness to assimilate to the prevailing American culture. Many abandoned the Lutheranism of their homeland to become Methodists, Baptists, or Mormons. Gustaf Unonius took ordination in the Episcopal church and sought vigorously to win Swedes and Norwegians over to the denomination he considered best suited for them in the new land. Early letters from Peter Cassel and from the Bishop Hill colony reveal pride at how quickly the settlers and their children were learning English—even though the Janssonists discovered upon arrival that the Lord had failed to endow them with the "gift of tongues." After only half a year in Illinois, Eric Jansson is said to have been able to preach in English, while Lars Paul Esbjörn, the first Swedish Lutheran pastor to establish himself in the Midwest, was keeping his diary in that language already two years after he arrived in 1849.6 The founding fathers of Swedish-American Lutheranism—Esbjörn, Tufve Nilsson Hasselquist, Erland Carlsson, and Eric Norelius—all hoped for the rapid and easy Americanization of their immigrant countrymen. By 1863, Carlsson in Chicago was instructing confirmation classes in English. Hasselquist warned against the ethnic exclusiveness of the German Americans. "We are not, and will never be, shut up in our own nationality," Norelius wrote—in English—in The Missionary in 1860; "We will be more and more Americanized every day."7 From the beginning, Augustana College, founded in Chicago that same year, strongly stressed instruction in the English language. By the same token, some early efforts were made to establish English-language newspapers for Swedish-American 284 Swedish immigrants passing through Boston on their way west in 1853. (Courtesy of the Emigrant Institute, Växjö.) Pastor Tufve Nilsson Hasselquist. 285 readers, such as the Illinois Swede of Galva, edited by Eric Johnson, a son of the late prophet of Bishop Hill, in 1869-70. This eagerness to assimilate to American life would seem to derive from several causes in both the Old and New Countries. Ethnologists have noted a rapid decline of the rich old folk culture in Sweden by the middle of the nineteenth century, when peasant emigration began in earnest.8 It had been a primarily local, rather than national culture, in which, moreover, many of the poorer emigrants had shared only modestly. Spurred by new economic and social ambitions, the Swedish peasantry now tended as a whole to abandon what increasingly appeared to be a culture of social inferiority in favor of the genteel usages of the town middle classes. This reaction was fortified by the religious "Awakening" of the mid-nineteenth century, one of the most powerful expressions of growing peasant self-assertion, which condemned as ungodly and sinful many of the old folk traditions and which encouraged many of the emigrants of the period to leave Sweden at least partly for religious reasons. In the America of the 1840s and '50s the nativist "Know-Nothing" movement meanwhile discouraged too prideful a display of alien ways. Even for those immigrants who might have wished to hold more closely to their native traditions, there was as yet little upon which to build a viable Swedish-American culture life. The Swedes still amounted to only a relatively small and scattered immigrant group. A few congregations of varying denominations and a handful of modest newspapers provided only a rudimentary institutional base, and these were at this time at least partly Scandinavian, encouraged by the small numbers of all the Nordic groups in America, as well as by the Pan-Scandinavian movement among educated elements in the home countries. Skandinaven, for instance, the first Nordic newspaper in North America, was published in New York by the Swede Gustaf Öbom in 1851—53 in both Dano-Norwegian and Swedish, while the Augustana Lutheran Synod, established in 1860, brought together both Norwegian and Swedish congregations.9 The "Swedish" qualities in which the immigrants of this period continued to pride themselves were primarily religious and ethical, rather than cultural in an outward sense, while the 286 continued use of the mother-tongue was considered largely as a practical necessity for the time being. If numbers largely account for the assimilationism of the earlier arrivals from Sweden, they also explain much about changing cultural patterns during the half century of heavy immigration which followed. This phase began in striking fashion with severe crop failures in northern Europe in 1867-69. During these three years, annual emigration from Sweden jumped from under 6,000 to over 32,000, at least doubling the size of the Swedish element in the United States.

Load more