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. Thereafter there followed repeated waves of mass immigration down to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, peaking with the arrival of over 44,000 Swedes in 1882. By 1910, Swedish Americans of the first and second generations amounted to 1,363,554 persons (about 1lh% of the American population).10 By that time it was commonly estimated that about one out of every five Swedes was living in America. This mass migration radically altered the Swedish-American cultural scene. Heavy concentrations of Swedish immigrants in a number of locations in the upper Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and eventually in New England, as well as a steady stream of newcomers from the Old Country, meant that Swedish became a good ideal more than simply the interim language of a small and rapidly assimilating group and provided the "critical mass" necessary to create the infrastructure of a selfconscious and purposeful ethnic culture. The replacement of sail by steam in the Atlantic passenger traffic by the later 1860s meanwhile made emigration a less binding decision. It became both easier and cheaper to return to the Old Country to visit or to stay. Between 1875 and 1925, nearly one-fifth of the emigrants returned permanently to the homeland. Improved transportation encouraged increasing individual, rather than family or group migration. These transport-related circumstances all tended to promote cultural retention and organized ethnic life in the new land. The fledgling Augustana Lutheran Synod strove heroically to establish and staff a multitude of new congregations, while increasingly stressing its Swedish as well as its evangelical mission. Fewer Swedes than before left the Lutheran fold, or if they did they now went over mainly to the Mission Covenant, an

287 offshoot of Lutheranism itself in the 1880s, of Swedish rather than American origins. The rapid development of religious life led to the establishment of seminaries, colleges, and preparatory academies, several of which survive today, whose curricula reveal a growing appreciation of the language and literary culture of the old homeland as valuable in their own right. Congregations held "Swedish school" in the summers to teach children the proper form of the ancestral tongue, which was used in church services, Sunday schools, confirmation classes, and church societies. The onset of the mass migration was similarly reflected in the rapid flowering of the Swedish-language press. An astonishing number of newspapers and periodicals came out. For the entire period, 1851 to the present, an estimated 1,200 Swedish newspapers have been published in the United States, some of which admittedly did not outlast a few issues. All but a handful came into being between 1870 and 1914, when several hundred of them were in operation at any given time.11 Both newspaper presses and other publishing houses also produced large numbers of books in Swedish. While these consisted largely of devotional works, translations from English, and reprints (often pirated) from Sweden, they also included original writings in

Swedish school held by Chisago Lake Lutheran Church in the summer of 1910. (Courtesy of Emeroy Johnson.)

288 both prose and verse by Swedish Americans, dealing primarily with the Swedish immigrant experience in the new land.12 The same period saw a proliferation of Swedish-American secular societies, a development roundly condemned by the churches, which led to the characteristic cleavage of Swedish Americans into religious and secular camps, each backed by their own newspapers and societies. As Swedish-American cultural life was becoming far more self-consciously "Swedish" than it had been prior to around 1870, it also revealed a growing awareness of its own uniqueness. This could not but be, given the great disparities between Swedish and American conditions. But it may also in part be ascribed to the type of cultural leadership that emerged in Swedish immigrant society. Characteristically the pastors and journalists who took the lead were men of relatively—sometimes very—humble social origins and little education in their homeland, persons who could hardly have hoped to rise into established ecclesiastical or intellectual circles in Sweden, but for whom Swedish cultural life in America offered welcome opportunities which soon became firmly vested interests. Others only discovered an urge to "higher things" after entering the free and open American society. G. N. Swan complained in humorous fashion in 1930 that life in America infected his countrymen with the "Writer's Itch" to an astonishing degree.13 Indeed, one is impressed by a high level of self-education and self-improvement among numerous Swedish Americans. Such a cultural leadership, while proud of the Old Country and its contributions to civilization, was by no means uncritical of it, and it strongly extolled the blessings of American freedom, opportunity, and abundance. Thus there came about the concept of a culturally distinctive "Svensk-Amerika"; the term would seem to have been coined by the influential journalist, J. A. Enander, who proclaimed, "It is not Sweden's, but Swedish-America's cause I am fighting for."14 This emerging sense of a proud and unique identity led by the 1880s to the first efforts to record the history of the Swedes in North America, an activity which Enander himself greatly inspired and encouraged, culminating with the establishment of the Swedish Historical Society of America in 1905, the first such organization among the Scandinavian Americans. Characteristically for their time, Enander and his colleagues presented an unabashedly

289 Johan A. Enander.

filiopietistic epic of high virtues and great deeds, intended to justify the Swedish Americans in their own eyes, as well as in those of both their new and their old compatriots.15 As the mass migration brought increasing numbers of other Nordic immigrants to North America in the later nineteenth century, the joint Scandinavian-American enterprises of the 1850s and '60s broke down into purely national groupings. After ten years of existence, the Augustana Synod (and with it Augustana College) separated into a Swedish and a Norwegian church body. By the 1890s Swedish-speaking immigrants from Finland were beginning to organize their own groups.16 This trend toward a more national form of ethnicity was furthered by the breakdown of the Scandinavianist movement in the Old World, following Denmark's defeat in the war of 1864, and growing frictions within the Swedish-Norwegian dual monarchy, leading to the break-up of the Union in 1905. Swedish-America meanwhile reacted in other ways to cultural currents in the homeland. The National Romantic movement in literature and the arts not only created a heightened sense of

290 patriotism but led to the discovery and idealization of what still remained of the ancient Swedish folk culture by the turn of the century. Beginning first among the educated classes, the National Romantic spirit spread downward through society. Its effects upon Swedish-America were somewhat ambivalent. Its patriotic ethos was basically hostile to emigration from the fatherland and it provided much of the emotional appeal of the National Society Against Emigration founded in 1907. The anti-emigration movement in Sweden in turn stimulated "Swedish-Americanism" among the emigrants and their descendants in America. The emigrants of this era were meanwhile better educated than earlier generations and thus more fully a part of their national culture at the time of their departure from Sweden. Through the great "folk movements" of the later nineteenth century they had become accustomed to an active organizational life with strong emphases upon culture and self-improvement. With them there arrived in America a new generation of culture-bearers. By the later 1890s national Swedish-American

North Park College, Chicago, around 1898. (Courtesy of North Park College.)

291 lodges began to appear, led by the Vasa Order of America in 1896, which, inspired by Swedish National Romanticism, were dedicated to the preservation of the Swedish cultural heritage in the New World. Through the combined efforts of churches, societies, the press, and ethnically oriented businesses in Swedish neighborhoods, a variety of Swedish customs and traditions, of both genteel and peasant origins, were for the first time introduced and became established rituals of Swedish-American life. The early decades of this century were the heyday of Midsummer and Lucia festivals, choral societies, and folk dance teams. Not surprisingly, such activity was most intense in the areas of most recent Swedish settlement, generally urban, notably in New England.17 But as cultural Swedish-America at last entered its Golden Age, it was already apparent that its days were numbered. By the turn of the century political and labor radicalism gained ground among a part of the Swedish-American working class, which under socialist inspiration rejected "bourgeois" nationalism in favor of proletarian internationalism. More serious in the long run, however, was the generational problem as growing numbers of the children of immigrants showed a marked apathy toward an

The Skansen folk dance team before departing Stockholm for a tour of Swedish-America in 1906. (From Hvar 8 dagar, courtesy of Nordiska museet, Stockholm.)

292 Old World culture which might set them apart as "different" from other Americans. World War I not only drastically reduced immigration but dealt a hard blow to all forms of "hyphenated" ethnic culture in the United States; as the Swedish Americans showed little enthusiasm for America's entry into the conflict and had indeed revealed a certain sympathy toward the Germans, the "100% Americanism" of 1917-18 bore heavily upon them.18 While the war was followed by a final wave of immigration in the early 1920s, reaching nearly 25,000 in 1923, this was reduced to modest proportions by the American quota laws of 1924 and 1929. In the latter year the Swedish quota was set at around 3,300 per year. In actuality, the Swedish quotas were seldom filled after 1924, thanks above all to far-reaching reforms and rising prosperity in the homeland, while during the Depression of the 1930s remigration to Sweden greatly exceeded emigration from that country.19 The onset of the Depression in 1930 thus began a decade and a half of relative isolation and the loosening of ties between Sweden and America, which was to continue through to the end of World War II in 1945. Deprived of fresh blood from the homeland, Swedish-American cultural institutions aged, became set in their ways, and adapted to American practices. Older, Swedish-born members died off. Many publications and societies failed to weather the economic hard times. Swedish-America fell increasingly out of touch with a rapidly modernizing Sweden, which at that very time was attracting the interest of influential liberal intellectuals in the United States, thanks largely to Marquis Childs' Sweden: The Middle Way, first published in 1936.20 The end of World War II led to the resumption of closer contacts and of a small but significant immigration from Sweden. The new, postwar immigrants have for the most part been educated, qualified persons in business and the professions. The great majority have settled in the larger cities, including places like Los Angeles, Houston, or Washington, where few Swedes had lived before. Many are "Swedes in America" or "Overseas Swedes," ever prepared to return to Sweden when the right opportunities arise, rather than firmly established "Swedish Americans." As a group they tend to remain quite distinct from the older immigrants and their descendants. They have their

293 own social and cultural life, at once more cosmopolitan and more "Sweden-centered"—centered, that is, upon the modern, industrial, urbanized, and affluent Sweden of today, rather than upon the image of an idyllic and unspoiled rural Sweden still lovingly cultivated by what remains of institutional Swedish-America.

The American-Swedish Institute, Minneapolis. (Courtesy of the Institute.)

294 Yet there is now another element to be considered in this picture: the American-born descendants of the old immigrants. While, as Marcus Lee Hansen pointed out in his celebrated essay in 1938, the second generation tended to reject the speech and ways of their foreign-born parents, the third generation, secure in its place in American society, has tended to rediscover the fascination of its ethnic heritage.21 Hence the search for "roots," the rising popularity of genealogy, the increasing demand in Swedish-American colleges and in public universities for instruction in the language and culture of the old homeland, as well as much travel to Sweden. In sum, Swedish culture has not died out in America. It has, rather, metamorphosed with changing conditions as life goes on.

NOTES

1 Axel Friman, "Forerunners of the Great Migration," Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 33 (1982), 266; Nils William Olsson, Swedish Passenger Arrivals in New York, 1820-1850 (Stockholm and Chicago, 1967) and Swedish Passenger Arrivals in U.S. Ports, 1820-1850 (Except New York) (Stockholm and St. Paul, 1979). 2 See, for instance, Nils William Olsson, "Swedish Seamen who Deserted in U.S. Ports, 1841-1858," Swedish American Genealogist, 3 (1983), 141-57, and "Swedish Enlistments in the U.S. Army before 1851," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 1 (1951), 3-13, 17-38, as well as the two books by Olsson cited in Note 1; also Axel Friman, "Two Swedes in the California Goldfields: Allvar Kullgren and Carl August Modh, 1850-1856," Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 34 (1983), 102-30, esp. 126-28. 3 Theodore A. Norelius, "The First Swede in Minnesota," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 8 (1957), 110, 111. 4 See Rosalie Roos, Travels in America, 1851—1855, trans Carl L. Anderson (Carbondale, 111., 1982). Cf. Nils William Olsson, "Rosalie Ulrika Ross in South Carolina," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 10 (1959), 127-40. 5 This figure is based on Friman, "Forerunners," 270 (Table 2) and Lars Ljungmark, Den Stora utvandringen (Stockholm, 1965), 178. It does not take into account remigration to Sweden, for which information is lacking prior to 1875. 6 Oscar N. Olson, "The Diary of L. P. Esbjörn's Soliciting Trip in the East, 1851," Augustana Quarterly, 23 (1944), 324; Olov Isaksson and Sören Hallgren, Bishop Hill, a Utopia on the Prairie (Stockholm and Chicago, 1969), 91. 7 Dag Blanck, " 'A Language Does Not Die Easily . . .': Swedish at Augustana College, 1860-1900," Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 33 (1982), 288-305. 8 See Sigfrid Svensson, Från gammalt till nytt på 1800-talets svenska landsbygd (Stockholm, 1977); also my "Old Swedish Traditions," Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 33 (1982), 237-38. 9 Regarding Skandinaven, see Nils William Olsson, "Was Napoleon Berger the First Swedish Journalist in America?" Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 3 (1952), 19-29; Erik Gamby, "Napoleon Berger alias Gustaf Öbom," Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 34 (1983), 4-31. On church life, see George M. Stephenson's classic, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration (Minneapolis, 1932).

295 10 Ljungmark, Den stora utvandringen, 178, 198. 11 J. Oscar Backlund, A Century of the Swedish American Press (Chicago, 1952), 9-10. Cf. Lilly Setterdahl, comp. Swedish-American Newspapers: A Guide to the Microfilms Held by the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center, Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois (Rock Island, 111., 1981). 12 See Dorothy Burton Skårdal, The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience through Literary Sources (Oslo and Lincoln, Nebr., 1974). 13 G. N. Swan, Swedish-American Literary Periodicals, Augustana Historical Society Publications, 4 (Rock Island, 111., 1936), 12. (First published in Svenska Amerikanaren, Chicago, 1930-31.) 14 Quoted in Albin Widén, Vår sista folkvandring (Stockholm, 1962), 151. See also my "Swedish Americans and the Old Country," in Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskaps-Samfundet i Uppsala årsbok 1981-1982 (Uppsala, 1983), 5-10. 15 My "Clio and Swedish America: Historians, Organizations, Publications," in Nils Hasselmo, ed., Perspectives on Swedish Immigration (Chicago, 1978), 3—24; Ulf Beijbom, "The Historiography of Swedish-America," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 31 (1980), 257-85. 16 Anders Myhrman, "The Finland-Swedes in America," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 31 (1980), 31-33. 17 My "Old Swedish Traditions"; also "Old Swedish Traditions: An Interim Report" Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 34 (1983), 175-77. Cf. Ingemar Liman, "The Skansen Dancers' Tour of America, 1906-1907," ibid., 224-34. 18 For the similar problems faced by fellow Scandinavian Americans, see Carl H. Chrislock, Ethnicity Challenged: The Upper Midwest Norwegian-American Experience in World War I (Northfield, Minn., 1981). 19 Ljungmark, Den stora utvandringen, 179-80. 20 Cf. my "Summer of'46," Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 35 (1984), 3-5. 21 Marcus Lee Hansen, The Problem of the Third-Generation Immigrant, Augustana Historical Society Publications, 8:1 (Rock Island, 111., 1938).

296