SAHQ April 10

Interpreting One Hundred Years of Augustana History: Fritiof Ander, Conrad Bergendoff, and the 1960 Centennial THOMAS TREDWAY AND DAG BLANCK s the year 1960 approached, two Swedish-American Augustanas—the Synod and the College—prepared to cel- Aebrate their mutual centennial. For the Augustana Synod that anniversary anticipated by two years the end of its life as an independent Church: the Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Church (commonly known to its members simply as “the Synod”) was to join three other American Lutheran Churches in 1962 to form the Lutheran Church in America. At Augustana College preparations for the Cen- tennial Year included, as one would expect from a place of higher learning, a scholarly look back at the century during which the American landscape, ecclesiastical and academic, had been graced by the two Swedish-American institutions, Church and school. Two Augustana historians, one the president of the college, the other an THOMAS TREDWAY was president (1975-2003) and professor of history (1964- 2003) at Augustana College. He is the recent author of Coming of Age (2010), a history of the college during the years 1935-75, when Conrad Bergendoff and C. W. Sorensen served as its presidents. A graduate of North Park and Augustana Colleges and Illinois and Northwestern Universities, Tredway is currently working on the rela- tionship between ethnic and religious factors among Scandinavian immigrants and their descendants in the United States. DAG BLANCK is the director of the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and an associate professor of history at Uppsala University, Sweden. Educated at Augustana College and at Stockholm and Uppsala Universities, his research has focused on different aspects of Swedish-American history and on the cultural and social relations between Sweden and the United States. 234 O. Fritiof Ander (1903-1978). Courtesy of Augustana College Special Collections. 235 Conrad Bergendoff (1895-1997). Courtesy of Augustana College Special Collections. 236 eminent student of immigration, were invited by Uppsala University to interpret in scholarly essays for the Swedish university world the nature and meaning of one hundred years of Swedish-American Lutheranism. Each of these men did so, but their takes on that history were rather different. And in these differences, as well as in the content of each of their articles themselves, lies the significance of their work now, fifty years later. Some of these differences were rooted in the individual life expe- riences of the two men, Conrad John Immanuel Bergendoff and Oscar Fritiof Ander. Bergendoff had grown up in a Lutheran parson- age. His father, Carl August Bergendoff, had emigrated from south- ern Sweden in the 1880s, enrolled at Augustana (College and Semi- nary), and then served churches in Nebraska and Connecticut. Conrad, born in 1895, was the second of the Bergendoff family’s five children. He recalled later that as a young man in Middletown, Connecticut, he had visions of the Swedish-American school halfway across the continent in Rock Island, Illinois—he had never wanted to study anywhere else.1 The institution was, for him anyway, the spiritual and intellectual capital of Swedish America, and Conrad Bergendoff gradu- ated, as had his father, from both its liberal arts and theological faculties. After ordination he finished a doctorate in history at the University of Chicago while simultaneously serving successfully as pastor of Salem Lutheran Church on the city’s south side. Bergendoff’s dissertation on the Swedish Reformation was written after a year devoted to research in Sweden, on leave from his pastoral duties. There he also spent considerable time with Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, one of the leading ecumenists in inter-war world Protes- tantism. The dissertation was published in 1928 and immediately assumed the status of the authoritative treatment in English on the life and work of Olavus Petri, the principal architect of the Lutheran reform of Sweden. Bergendoff was called to become the dean of Augustana Theo- logical Seminary in 1931 as a key figure in a sort of academic remake of that school, which theretofore had been staffed in the main by faculty with long pastoral experience but little advanced graduate training. In the early thirties a number of other clergy holding earned doctorates also joined the seminary staff.2 Though his own Ph.D. was 237 in history, Bergendoff assumed the professorship in theology, not Church history. Four years later he was chosen to succeed Gustav Andreen as president of the entire institution: seminary, college, and music school. He held that position for twenty-seven years, retiring in the same year, 1962, that the Augustana Synod passed out of existence in the merger creating the Lutheran Church in America. Bergendoff’s busy years as a college administrator did not preclude his continued and heavy involvement in the life of his Church, particularly in its ecumenical relations with other Christian bodies. Nor did it mean a letup in his own scholarly work; he published three theological works and scores of articles and book reviews during his time as a college president.3 O. F. Ander was one of the major figures on the Augustana faculty during the years of Bergendoff’s presidency. Born in Sweden in1903, he had immigrated to the United States as a young man, enrolled at Augustana, and after graduating earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Illinois. Ander joined the Department of History at his alma mater in 1930. His dissertation on the Augustana patri- arch T. N. Hasselquist, published in 1931, set Fritiof Ander on a career as a historian of the Swedish immigrant community in America. He became one of the first to take up the academic consideration of immigration to America. Scholars such as Marcus Lee Hansen, George M. Stephenson (a fellow alumnus of Augustana), Theodore Blegen, and Carl Wittke, as well as Ander himself, constituted a generation which, in the words of Rudolph Vecoli (who was the immigration history specialist in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota in the later twentieth century), “rescued immigration history from the filiopietists and established it as a legitimate field of historical study.”4 Fritiof Ander’s subsequent books and articles on Sweden and on Swedish-American life firmly solidified his reputation in these ranks, as did his work in the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (which became the Organization of American Historians in 1965). Ander actually lured the annual meeting of the organization to the small Rock Island campus in 1948. (The college archives contain several letters from prominent historians remarking especially on the splendid smörgåsbord they were served during their convention.)5 When Bergendoff was asked in 1940 by Who’s Who in 238 America to nominate members of his faculty for inclusion in the volume, Ander was one of two names he submitted (the second was another Fritiof, Professor of Geology Fritiof Fryxell).6 Bergendoff, not surprisingly, was already listed. Ander’s very aggressive efforts at raising the scholarly profile of the college he served made President Bergendoff at times hesitant to accede to the professor’s ambitions. The president certainly shared the professor’s academic ambitions for the school, but he had to worry about finances as well. For example, in the early 1950s Ander proposed that the college accept the Swedish government’s offer of a large collection of documentary material covering almost every as- pect of Swedish life since the time of Napoleon, a collection that established Augustana as a major American location for the study of the conditions that led to the great exodus of Swedes to America.7 Bergendoff was hesitant. Ander had come up with “about a ton of material,” the college’s president told the board of directors, and it was not clear just where it might be housed.8 He wrote to Ander: “A college is like a family with a dozen children, each one of whom has special interests and requests.”9 But Ander knew how to press his demands, and the school did finally accept the offer. It became the core of a collection that still draws researchers to what is now the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center. Today the “ton of material” rests on solid ground—in the basement of the Swenson Center’s quarters on the campus. Though they shared life on the Rock Island campus, respected each other greatly, and found themselves often working in adjacent scholarly precincts, Ander and Bergendoff had rather different ap- proaches to the history of the soon-to-pass Synod that for a century had sustained the college they served. The articles presented in this issue of the Quarterly make that plain. As they both neared their own retirements (Bergendoff in 1962, Ander in 1965), they looked back with quite disparate feelings and thoughts. For Bergendoff the Church in which he had been ordained was the most important of any of the institutions begun by Swedes in North America. Its founders had performed a noble service in the preservation of the best values that the immigrants brought from Sweden to the new land. These founders had also created, especially in Augustana College and Theological 239 Seminary (and perhaps the other synodical colleges too; Bergendoff always considered Augustana to be primus inter pares among the Church’s schools), the means by which generations of Swedes and Swedish- Americans were brought into the mainstream of American life as well as into the leadership of their own Church. Bergendoff treats the fathers of the Synod and its schools with respect, perhaps even rever- ence. One wonders, therefore, how he responded to Fritiof Ander’s read on the early history of the Synod.

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