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 dur- ing 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 his- tory 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 organiza- tion to the small Rock Island campus in 1948. (The college archives contain several letters from prominent historians remarking espe- cially 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. It should here be noted that Ander was not the first to deal with that story with a degree of irony and even harshness. George M. Stephenson’s The Religious Aspect of Swedish Immigration, published in 1932, had, according to the author himself, been banned from the Augustana Synod’s Rock Island book- store. Indeed, it had even produced nausea in one of the seminary professors who opened it.10 But Stephenson taught up in Minneapo- lis, Ander right in Rock Island, which, for young man Bergendoff, had been the very heart of Swedish America. And, as the Augustana Church was about to pass from the ecclesiastic scene, to treat one of its founders (indeed, the first president of its first school) as a “malad- justed” person, as Ander did, must have been, in Bergendoff’s eyes, at best inappropriate. Further, it was one thing to label Lars P. Esbjörn maladjusted. It was quite another for Ander to treat both the Swed- ish emigration to America and the great nineteenth-century Swedish revivals that so deeply influenced many of the Augustana Synod’s founders as examples of a “mass psychosis.” That must have troubled Bergendoff even more. These differences between Ander and Bergendoff were not just recent. Professor Ander, in any case, believed they had been clear three decades earlier when, in 1931, several of the college’s adminis- trators had met with him as he prepared to publish his dissertation on T. N. Hasselquist. The leaders of the college hoped to convince him to mitigate what they regarded as his unduly severe treatment of Lars Paul Esbjörn and the process by which the Augustana Synod had been formed in the mid-nineteenth century. Ander believed that in those 1931 discussions Bergendoff, then Dean of the Theological Seminary, had sided with Augustana President Gustav Andreen in the latter’s efforts to prevail upon the young historian to temper his 240 (1808-1870). Courtesy of Esbjörn Lars Paul Augustana College Special Collections. T. N. Hasselquist (1816-1891). Courtesy of T. Augustana College Special Collections. 241 criticism. About that meeting, Ander wrote to George M. Stephenson, “I simply had to tell them what I thaught [sic] of L.P.E., the formation of the Synod, and a lot of dirty church politics.”11 Now, thirty years later, Ander’s views about Esbjörn and the early days of the Synod reemerged, this time in the lecture and article he prepared for Uppsala University. Fortified with the tools of “depth psychology,” Ander went at it again. Some of the reasons for their disparate interpretations of Augustana history certainly lay in the differing tempers and characters of these two men, Bergendoff and Ander. The former had, as already noted, grown up dreaming of Swedish-American Rock Island. He spent his life serving the Augustana Church and seeking to interpret its heri- tage and life to “mainline” America. For Bergendoff, as he wrote in his Olavus Petri and the Ecclesiastical Transformation in Sweden, the tru- est genius lay in preserving, interpreting, and developing the heritage one received from the past: “No genius can be more worthy than that which fits measures conducive to a noble goal.” In the case of Petri this genius lay in the Swede’s successful effort to give the Ger- man Lutheran Reformation a firm footing in Sweden: “The genius of the Swedish Reformer ... manifests itself not in creation of new forms and doctrines, but in selection of material produced by the German Reformation.”12 The Augustana Synod’s history represented the bringing of the best elements of the Church of Sweden to North America, a process that manifested the kind of “worthy genius” which Bergendoff most respected. And in the case of a liberal arts college, such genius meant basing its program of study in an understanding and respect for the past, especially that of Christian civilization, rather than in chasing after every new intellectual fad that elbowed its way into academe. Bergendoff felt himself at times to be deeply at odds with contemporary culture, and his homilies to Augustana undergraduates were sometimes jeremiads, as when he warned 1947 chapel goers, many of whom were war veterans, about the “unnecessary evil of drinking that creeps into the lives of too many college students because they are too weak and spineless to face the reality of their own situation in life.”13 Fifteen years later, as he got ready to retire as Augustana’s president, he wrote that mid-twentieth-century univer- sity life was often characterized by a lack of values that had “no 242 sword with which to fight the pen of a putrid age.”14 At times President Bergendoff despaired of finding social science faculty who would combine work in their academic fields with deep Christian values; it was in these fields that pretended to maintain “objectivity” toward fundamental human questions where “the Chris- tian college is most severely tested,” he wrote in 1962.15 He must, therefore, have been nonplussed by Fritiof Ander’s seeming espousal, in his Uppsala University speech and the printed essay that resulted from it, of a sort of “psychological approach” to the history of the Augustana Synod, one that examined Esbjörn and others through the lens of modern psychology. (More of that momentarily.) For his part, Ander was not particularly troubled by the effort to apply the “objective standards” of the social sciences to the study of history. That was clear in his classes in European and American history, especially his popular course in “American Ideals.” In that senior level offering many of the methods and thought structures of psy- chology, sociology, and the other behavioral disciplines which were emerging to academic prominence in Europe and America in the 1950s were used by Ander in his effort to place American life and thought in the larger context of the history of civilization. It was not merely the early record of the Augustana Church that got the professor’s often humorous and sometimes bitter assessment; certain aspects of American civilization itself were targets as well.16 This was not how Bergendoff, whose teaching had once been described by one of his students as “dry as dust,”17 went at the past. His lectures were neither so irreverent nor quite so entertaining to undergraduates as were Ander’s. The two essays that are presented here, as well as the history they consider, could be viewed through pairs of spectacles provided by one or another of the sub-fields or specialties that were developing in American university history departments after the Second World War. Church history, the history of ideas, or social history are ex- amples. Bergendoff conceded this in his 1960 essay which follows, when he suggested that the history of the Augustana Synod might be a fitting matter for consideration by anthropologists or sociologists. Bergendoff’s own approach was, of course, that of a Church historian. For his part, Ander was inclined toward the use of depth psychology 243 in understanding that history. And we have already noted that the differing life histories, personalities, and styles of Ander and Bergendoff must be taken into account. But perhaps the most useful way to understand the two men’s articles today is to see them in the context of American immigration historiography. First, however, we would like to introduce some additional back- ground on the history of these essays themselves. Both were solicited by the leading Swedish Church history publication, the annual Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift, and should be seen as a Swedish recognition of the centennial of the Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Church. Ander and Bergendoff were each approached by Gunnar Westin, professor emeritus of church history at Uppsala University and former editor of Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift. Westin had longstanding ties with the two Augustanas, having done significant scholarly work on the religious dimensions of Swedish emigration and on American religious life in general.18 He had been a Rockefeller Fellow in the United States in 1929-30, when he did archival research in Rock Island, and he had visited the United States (including Rock Island) an additional four times over the next three decades.19 Westin developed close ties with Ander, Bergendoff, and Stephenson—ties that were maintained through these years.20 It is also worth noting here that Westin was the first Baptist to hold the church history chair at Uppsala—although, technically and of necessity, he was a member of the Church of Sweden—a status that was required in order to be a member of the Uppsala theological faculty. As a Baptist, he may have found the historic differences between the Augustana Synod and the Church of Sweden just as significant as were the roots of the American Church in the Swedish. Professor Westin asked the two Augustana scholars to write the articles in the fall of 1959 for the next edition of the church history annual, which would appear during the spring of 1960. Bergendoff answered in the middle of October that he was doubtful if he would have the time to finish an article before Christmas. But as he knew of “no one else who is willing to take on the assignment,” he neverthe- less agreed to “give an overview of how the Augustana Synod came into being and developed during the coming century before it now enters into a larger entity.”21 He delivered his article on time, and it 244 was published in the 1959 edition of the annual. Ander, on the other hand, had suffered a small stroke in the fall of 1959. Concerned about the article that her husband had prom- ised, Ruth Ander wrote in September to Westin from Moline Lutheran Hospital, where Ander was recovering. She feared that her husband “had completed much of the research ... but will not be able to complete [the article]. If he is to continue teaching, he will not be permitted to do anything else.” Mrs. Ander added that her husband believed that Westin should write the article in his place.22 Westin, however, did not take Ander’s place; the American his- torian finished his contribution, which was published a year later, in the 1960 edition of the annual. The article seems to have been connected with the honorary degree in theology that Ander received from Uppsala University in 1960. The university cited him as “the premier researcher” of the history of the Augustana Synod, and gave particular attention to his Hasselquist study and his extensive biblio- graphic and archival work.23 It also noted the fact that the Augustana Synod was about to merge into the “Lutheran Evangelical Church in America” [sic] and that the Faculty of Theology at Uppsala was the place where L. P. Esbjörn, the founder of the Augustana Synod, had been educated.24 Ander was, of course, very pleased with this honor, claiming that he was unworthy and that “naturally a doctoral degree in theology is the greatest honor I could receive.”25 In spite of his poor health,26 Ander and his wife traveled to Sweden in the spring of 1960 and attended the commencement exercises on May 31. As is the custom for honorary doctors, Ander lectured while he was in Uppsala. Initially he was reluctant to do so, due to his health, but as he “badly needed the speaker’s fee,” he suggested three topics: “Lincoln and the Founders of Augustana Col- lege,” “The Augustana Synod on the Eve of the Merger: Historical Footnotes,” or “The Significance of the Study of American Immigra- tion.” Eventually, Ander settled on the second subject, for which he had gathered materials for the unpublished 1959 article in Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift.27 He was encouraged to publish the lecture in Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift, and as he submitted it in the summer of 1960, he asked for Westin’s comments. He was particularly interested in Westin’s reac- tions to his attempt to “make use of depth psychology in an effort to 245 understand Lars P. Esbjörn.”28 It is worth noting that both Bergendoff and Ander addressed the Swedish academic world, with which they had each had significant lifelong contact. Bergendoff also had an honorary degree from Uppsala, awarded in connection with another Swedish-American jubilee year, the tercentenary celebration of the New Sweden colony in 1938 (when, among others, George M. Stephenson also was honored). In the respective pieces that follow, the two authors work from different perspectives in their approach to the Synod’s history, though both operate within a prevailing historiographical paradigm that em- phasized the immigrants’ capacity to integrate into American society. In Bergendoff’s judgment the Synod “had not been Swedish for al- most half of the hundred years,” and he considers it “difficult to justify the continuation of a cultural tradition in the name of reli- gion.” He does write about factors that retarded the Americanization of the Synod, but nevertheless underscores “the impossibility of the survival of a Swedish Synod in American Lutheranism and Christian- ity.” Ander notes somewhat paradoxically that the Americanization of the Synod had begun already with the decision to emigrate, and that, once in the U.S., “the Americanization proceeded continu- ously,” suggesting that when the immigration ceased, the church had fulfilled its “mission as an emigrant church.” This attention to the integrative forces of American society on the Swedish immigrants is visible elsewhere as well. Similar argu- ments can be found in Bergendoff’s 1969 history of Augustana Col- lege. They are in fact evident as early as 1924, when he felt com- pelled to speak up when the Augustana Synod was accused of aban- doning its Swedish cultural heritage by switching over from Swedish to English as the language of ordination of its ministerial candidates. “The preservation of the Swedish language has never been, is not, and can never be this synod’s objective. Those who criticize a church’s use of one language or another should not forget that the Church exists for the sake of religion and not of culture,” Bergendoff argued in that year.29 Ander’s 1931 study of T. N. Hasselquist was also clearly marked by an emphasis on Americanization. To Ander, Hasselquist’s success was in no small measure a result of his willingness to adjust to life in 246

America, and to lead the Augustana Synod in the direction of ad- justing to life in America. Hasselquist “became a ‘good’ American in nearly every respect,” and “characterized opposition to ‘Americaniza- tion’ as sinful.” Even though Ander’s subject had some objections to the rather American inclination toward congregational autonomy in the early days of the Synod (which stood in contrast to the episcopal government of the Church of Sweden), he concludes that Hasselquist “rather furthered than retarded the process of ‘Americanization.’ ”30 Both authors write of Americanization rather than assimilation, suggesting a possibility for maintaining a sense of Swedish distinctive- ness among the immigrants and their children. Even though Bergendoff seems to view the process of Americanization as inevitable and per- haps even positive, he does maintain that all aspects of Augustana’s Swedish background had not—and should not have been—aban- doned. In the 1924 discussion he argued that although the language was disappearing, “Augustana’s heart is still Swedish, regardless of which tongue it may speak.”31 Furthermore, as a scholar of Swedish- American history, Bergendoff also emphasized the duality of Augustana’s background. In his view, the immigrants had rightly become Americans, while at the same time retaining certain aspects of their heritage. To Bergendoff in 1960, on the eve of the disappear- ance of the Augustana Synod, those elements were clearly spiritual: in the new merged church the descendants of the immigrants would “maintain the rich gifts brought over from the Swedish Church.” Ever since 1924, therefore, Bergendoff was erecting an interpretive structure that clearly and appropriately was rooted in American con- ditions. Still, there was also some room for a Swedish spiritual tradi- tion, which then became the main contribution of the Augustana Synod to its adopted homeland.32 A tension between religion and ethnicity had been characteristic of the entire history of the two Augustanas, but as one of the writers of this introduction has recently observed, when Bergendoff was about to retire from Augustana Col- lege in 1962 it “was certainly still a Lutheran institution, but it was not so clearly a Swedish-Lutheran one.”33 Ander, too, recognized the fact that although the forces of Ameri- canization were strong and ultimately decisive, ethnic heritage could still play a role. In his Hasselquist study, which so strongly under- 247 scores the integrative powers of American society, he also writes about the development of a “peculiar Swedish-Americanism,” which he seems to see as a combination of the two cultural traditions.34 Moreover, Ander’s tireless efforts to collect Swedish language materi- als for the Augustana library—in particular the Swedish-language newspapers published in the U.S.—and his highly useful bibliography of Swedish-language imprints in this country suggest a continued interest in the Swedish cultural traditions in America.35 There are other notable and important differences between the two authors. Ander had read, considered, and to some degree been influenced by Oscar Handlin’s Pultitzer Prize winning The Uprooted (1952), with its emphasis on the disintegrative and alienating forces that European immigrants met in America. Jon Gjerde has observed that one of Handlin’s main contributions in The Uprooted was his interest in “the subjective experience of the immigrants.”36 The year after he published his article on the Augustana Synod, Ander main- tained that Handlin had captured in an “exemplary way”37 the feel- ings of “anguish, sorrow, and disappointment” that characterized the immigrants. These two emphases, the immigrants’ subjective experi- ence and their feelings of disappointment and anger, are clearly vis- ible in Ander’s treatment of the history of the Augustana Synod. Ander also goes further and interprets some of the main actors in the Synod in psychological terms. Examples of this include his cat- egorization of all immigrants in the three broad categories of malad- justed, well adjusted, and adjusted, and his use of what he calls “depth psychology” in the discussion of Esbjörn’s personality. In a footnote Ander makes explicit reference to the 1957 presidential address by Harvard historian William L. Langer to the American Historical Association, where the speaker, a leading diplomatic histo- rian, quite unexpectedly charged his fellow historians with their “next assignment”: “the urgently needed deepening of our historical under- standing through exploitation of the concepts of modern psychol- ogy.”38 Langer used Martin Luther as his example for further study, whereas Ander answered his call by focusing on Esbjörn and Hasselquist. In his analysis, Esbjörn emerges as a psychological misfit, alienated and misunderstood, whereas Hasselquist is depicted as a strong and successful immigrant. The publication of Erik Erikson’s much dis- 248 cussed Young Man Luther in 1958, with its combination of history and psychoanalysis (Erikson had worked on the topic independently of Langer), certainly must have strengthened Ander’s interest in this approach. Bergendoff’s analysis of the Augustana Synod shows none of these influences. His article—like his 1969 history of the college he served for twenty-seven years as president—instead emphasized the gradual and steady growth of the denomination, from modest and difficult beginnings to an established and successful church in 1960. There is very little of anguish, anger, or alienation here; rather, the history of the Synod is a success story. Through it Swedish immigrants quickly Americanized and became a part of American society. The historical publications Bergendoff authored after his retirement, such as his histories of Augustana College, its Old Main building, and its Handel Oratorio Society, as well as his directory of the Synod’s ministerium, were part of his effort to preserve rather than to criticize the record of the college and the church. In his essay for the Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift, the first sign that he found strife or anguish in Swedish-American church history is his reference to Erik Jansson, the leader of the Bishop Hill Colony in Western Illinois, as a “religious fanatic.” His discussion of the events leading to the rupture between the Augustana Synod on the one hand and the pietists and Mission Friends on the other also touches upon what for Bergendoff were, of course, un- pleasant episodes in the history of Swedish-American religious life. But he does not dwell on these. The differences between Ander and Bergendoff as authors can also be attributed to their respective foci of study. Even though Ander had written his doctoral dissertation on T. N. Hasselquist— Esbjörn’s rival and the dominant figure during the first three decades in the history of the two Augustanas—his interests were not solely fixed on the religious aspects of Swedish immigration, to borrow George Stephenson’s title. He certainly recognized the importance of the religious institutions established by the Swedish immigrants, but he also focused on the patterns of larger interactions with American society. In particular, Ander was interested in the political sphere and published several studies of the political preferences of the Swedish- American group. His own admiration for the political system and 249 ideals of his adopted country is clear—though he was also willing in his undergraduate classes to remark on its foibles as well. He showed particular preference for the ideas associated with Jefferson and Lin- coln, and emphasized the role of the frontier. “It is a known fact that America in a most peculiar sense became the heir to the enlighten- ment in Europe,” Ander claimed in a talk in Sweden in 1952, argu- ing that America did indeed have a special “mission” in the world, which would be for the “best of mankind everywhere.”39 Bergendoff, on the other hand, in the end saw religious life among Swedish Americans as the defining characteristic of the community’s nature. The body of his scholarly work up until the time of the centennial of the two Augustanas and the imminent disappearance of one was devoted to theology and church history. His interest in the history of the Augustana Synod and of Swedish America was no doubt something Bergendoff carried with him his whole life. He had even considered it as the topic of his doctoral dissertation.40 Still, it was not until the early 1960s that he began publishing in the field. These publications focused heavily on the history of Augustana Col- lege and of the Synod. His articles from 1963 and 1968 that dealt with Augustana and Swedish America strongly emphasized the sig- nificance of religion and Augustana’s role in shaping and maintaining the Swedish-American community, and foreshadowed his 1969 his- tory of Augustana College from 1860 to 1935. As noted above, that book emphasized the Americanization of the college but, as the subtitle “A Profession of Faith” suggests, assigned the spiritual or religious dimensions of the institution—some of which Bergendoff traced back to Sweden—a central interpretive role. Further publica- tions, such as The Augustana Ministerium (1980) and translations of selected parts of Erik Norelius’s 1890 history of Swedish-American Lutheranism, point in the same direction. To Bergendoff the history of the Augustana Synod eventually became a history of its growing and strengthening ties to American society in general and the wider American religious scene in particular. In his article for the Swedish church history annual in 1959, for example, he noted that ties with Sweden would now be maintained through the Lutheran World Federa- tion and the World Council of Churches; and he happily concluded that the Augustana Synod now returned to a fellowship with the 250 heirs of the General Synod, a body it broke away from in 1860 for practical and theological reasons. The General Synod was, of course, the nineteenth-century pan-Lutheran body (composed of a number of regional or ethnic Lutheran synods) that tended, in the view of Lars Paul Esbjörn, toward confessional or doctrinal vagueness and a willingness to compromise the Lutheran theology of the Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana). Perhaps Bergendoff, a committed ecumenist, had some reservations about the rigid Lutheran confessionalism that became quite pronounced in Esbjörn’s later years in America, but that was balanced by Bergendoff’s noting with a sense of satisfaction that the Lutheran doctrinal principle for which Esbjörn fought in 1860 was to be the standard of the new church body. In any case, Bergendoff’s interpretive framework, which is some- what more theologically nuanced than that of O. F. Ander, also an Uppsala Doctor of Theology, honoris causa, further explains the differ- ences between the two authors. From its very beginning it was clear that the Augustana Evan- gelical Lutheran Church had embraced a range of personalities, theo- logical perspectives, and ideas about how Swedes, especially those who were Lutherans, ought to organize, pray, worship, and live their everyday lives in the New World. Today, at the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of that Church and its first col- lege, we rediscover the fact that, two-thirds of the way to the present sesquicentennial, the Synod, and indeed the hundred-acre campus of its oldest college, harbored two men, both quite literate in the his- tory of their Church, who held rather variant interpretations of that history. One wonders what the theological faculty of Uppsala Uni- versity made of this pair of centennial essays. The differing emphases of Ander and Bergendoff would not have surprised the university’s professor of church history, Gunnar Westin, of course. He knew both men and their work quite well. He also knew the history of the institutions and persons that the two Augustana historians were as- sessing. One hopes, too, that Westin, himself a member of one of Sweden’s Free Churches, took it to be a sign of the vitality of Church and religious life in America as well as of the wider culture itself that such differing interpretations could coexist in a relatively small church and at a relatively small college, even as the two institutions pre- 251 pared for their mutual centennial. That hundredth anniversary was, in any event, also to be marked at an ancient university in the country from which the founders of Church and college had come, a northern land that remained a spiritual and intellectual compass point for the two Swedish-American scholars from Rock Island, Illi- nois. One of them was himself an immigrant, the other the child of one. By 1960, as it turned out, matters had come full circle. The immigrant founders of the two Augustanas had brought varying views about Church and society to America with them from Sweden in the nineteenth century. Now, in the twentieth, a new and scholarly gen- eration of Swedish-Americans carried variant interpretations of the founders’ life and work back to the Homeland. Anyone reading the following articles in the twenty-first century will at least be clear on that matter.

ENDNOTES

1. Conrad Bergendoff, “Augustana–A People in Transition,” in The Swedish Immigrant Community in Transition, edited by J. Iverne Dowie and Ernest M. Espelie (Rock Island, 1963), 199-202; “On the Occasion of the Centennial of Augustana College,” Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 51 (April 1960): 35. 2. The appointment of Bergendoff to the seminary deanship and the rede- velopment of the school’s faculty are covered in Maria Erling and Mark Granquist, The Augustana Story: Shaping Lutheran Identity in North America, (Minneapolis, 2008), chapter 14; and in G. Everett Arden, The School of the Prophets: The Background and History of the Augustana Theological Seminary (Rock Island, 1960), chapter 6. 3. Biographical sketches of Bergendoff are available in J. Iverne Dowie and Ernest Espelie, editors, The Swedish Immigrant Community in Transition; Byron Ralph Swanson, Conrad Bergendoff: The Making of an Ecuminist, Th.D. disserta- tion, Princeton Theological Seminary (1970); and Raymond Jarvi, editor, As- pects of Augustana and Swedish America (Rock Island, 1995). 4. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “ ‘Over the years I have encountered the hazards and the rewards that await the historian of immigration’: George Malcom Stephenson and the Swedish-American Community,” Swedish-American Historical Quarterly 51 (April 2000): 130. 5. Bergendoff papers, Carton 32, Folder 5, Augustana College Library. 6. Conrad Bergendoff to Marquis Who’s Who, 3 December 1940, Bergendoff papers, Carton 6, Folder 7, Augustana College Library. 252

7. O. F. Ander to Conrad Bergendoff, 10 Februrary 1954, Bergendoff pa- pers, Carton 15, Folder 8, Augustana College Library. 8. Augustana College Board of Directors Minutes, 16 October 1953. 9. Conrad Bergendoff to O. F. Ander, 6 October, 4 November, 18 Novem- ber, and 1 December 1952, Bergendoff papers, Carton 15, Folder 1, Augustana College Library. 10. Vecoli, 135. 11. O. F. Ander to George M. Stephenson, 28 May 1931, Stephenson pa- pers, Box 2, University of Minnesota archives. 12. Conrad Bergendoff, Olavus Petri and the Ecclesiastical Transformation in Sweden (New York, 1928), 147. 13. Augustana Observer, 6 February 1947. 14. Conrad Bergendoff, Report of the President of Augustana College, 1962. 15. Ibid. 16. These comments are based upon Thomas Tredway’s experience in that course, “HI 351, The Growth of American Ideals,” in the late 1950s. 17. Vergilius Ferm to George M. Stephenson, 17 October 1930, Stephenson papers, Box 2, University of Minnesota archives. 18. See Westin’s Emigranterna och kyrkan. Brev från och till svenskar i Amerika 1849-1892 (Stockholm, 1932); Protestantismens historia i Amerikas Förenta Stater (Stockholm, 1931); and Kyrkosamfund och samhällsliv i U.S.A. (Stockholm, 1945). 19. Rockefeller Foundation Collection, Record Group 10.2, Fellowship Recorder Cards, Sweden, Humanities, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. Westin participated in the 1948 Swedish Pioneer Centennial cel- ebration as a member of the Swedish delegation. 20. Correspondence between Westin and both Ander and Bergendoff can be found in the Gunnar Westin Papers, Manuscript division, Uppsala University Library; and between Westin and Stephenson in Stephenson Papers, Box 2, University of Minnesota archives. 21. Bergendoff to Westin, 15 October 1959, Westin Papers, Korresp, allm, volym 11, Uppsala University Library. “Jag vet ej om någon annan som vore villig att åtaga sig detta.... Det blir ett försök att giva översikt över huru Augustana Synoden kom till och utvecklades under århundradet, före det nu ingår i en större sammanslutning.” 22. Ruth Ander to Westin, 29 September 1959, Westin Papers, Korresp, allm, volym 11, Uppsala University Library. 23. That distinction perhaps deserved to be shared with G. Everett Arden, professor of church history at Augustana Theological Seminary, who was just then working on his Augustana Heritage: A History of the Augustana Lutheran Church, which was published in 1963. 24. Inbjudningar till doktorspromotionerna i Uppsala universitets aula, tisdagen 253 den 31 maj 1960 (Uppsala, 1960), 9-10. 25. Ander to Westin, 6 April 1960, Westin Papers, Korresp, allm, volym 11, Uppsala University Library. 26. Several times he asked Westin’s advice about finding good doctors in Sweden, 6 April 1960, 20 April 1960, Westin Papers, Korresp, allm, volym 11, Uppsala University Library. 27. Ander to Westin, 6 April 1960, Westin Papers, Korresp, allm, volym 11, Uppsala University Library 28. Ander to Westin, 17 July 1960, Westin Papers, Korresp, allm, volym 11, Uppsala University Library. 29. H. Arnold Barton, “Conrad Bergendoff and the Swedish-American Church Language Controversy of the 1920s,” Swedish-American Historical Quarterly 46 (July 1995): 211. 30. O. F. Ander, T. N. Hasselquist: The Career and Influence of a Swedish- American Clergyman, Journalist and Educator (Rock Island, 1931), 229. 31. Barton, loc cit. 32. The disappearance of the Augustana Synod may have shifted Bergendoff’s balance somewhat towards the Swedish end, as can be seen in his 1984 article dealing with the history of Augustana College’s Old Main. Here he emphasizes a Swedish-American duality, arguing that the base of that building was influenced by the main building at Uppsala University, whereas the dome was inspired by American antecedents. See “A Century Old Monument: Augustana College’s Old Main,” Swedish-American Historical Quarterly 35 (July 1984). 33. Thomas Tredway, Coming of Age: A History of Augustana College, 1935- 1975 (Rock Island, 2010), 172. 34. Ander, T. N. Hasselquist, 229. 35. Ander, The Cultural Heritage of the Swedish Immigrant: Selected References (Rock Island, 1956). 36. Jon Gjerde, “Rudolph J. Vecoli and the New Social History: An Appre- ciation,” Journal of American Ethnic History 28 (Winter, 2009): 15. 37. Fritjof [sic] Ander, “Immigrationshistoriens utveckling i Amerika,” [Svensk] Historisk Tidskrift 81 (1961), 302. 38. William L. Langer, “The Next Assignment,” American Historical Review 62 (January 1958), 284. 39. O. Fritof Ander, Mores and American Presidential Elections. An address delivered before the Swedish-American Association of Borås, 27 November 1952 (Malung, 1952), 4, 16. 40. Bergendoff to Nathan Söderblom, 12 April 1926, Nathan Söderblom Collection, Letters to foreign correspondents, Uppsala University Library Manu- script Division.