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PDF Scan to USB Stick Carl H. Chrislock. ETHNICITY CHALLENGED: THE UPPER MIDWEST NORWEGIAN-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN WORLD WAR I. Northfield, Minnesota: The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1981. 167 pages. This little volume, modestly designated a topical study, is a worthy historical monograph giving evidence of patient research and wise interpretation. The author, a professor of history at Augsburg College, has previously published The Progressive Era in Minnesota, 1899-1918 (1971). In the present work he states as his purpose "to interpret the clash between ethnic preservationism and anti-hyphenism within the Norwegian-American community in the Upper Midwest between 1915 and 1922." Chrislock is familiar with the sources and has made excellent use of the immigrant newspapers and other materials. There are over twenty pages of end notes and a useful index, not to mention a number of photographs of spokesmen for Norwegiandom in America. The war of 1914-1918 caught the peoples, if not the governments, of Europe and America unprepared. No major struggle had occurred in western Europe since the Franco-German War of 1870-1871. Pre-war crises had somehow been overcome. Few envisioned the day when nationalism, militarism, economic imperialism, and a great-power alliance system would lead to an international conflagration of unprecedented magnitude. While the Scandinavian states succeeded in remaining neutral, their fate was of deep concern to their emigrated countrymen in America. But the main attention of Norwegian-Americans was directed toward the implications of the European war for the United States. There is much in this book that suggests a common Scandinavian experience and position. As neutral states, the Scandinavian countries were known to be trading, as in peace time, with Germany. They were therefore suspected of compromising the cause of the Allies. The historic cultural ties of the European North with Germany and the common religious bond in the faith of Martin Luther did nothing to alleviate that suspicion. It soon became evident also that the harassment of German-Americans did not meet with much approval from the Scandinavian elements of the Midwest. From the immigrant newspapers as a whole, whether secular or religious, no strong anti-German feeling was expressed until after American intervention in 1917. From that point on, government censorship and controls, applied indiscriminately to all foreign-language journals, seemed hardly necessary in the case of most Norwegian publications. Germany's announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915, affecting neutrals as well as belligerents, heightened suspicions of the Hohenzollern empire among Americans of Scandinavian descent. Yet some "Norwegians" in Congress, though not Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota, were labelled as Kaiserists. It is true that the Norwegian-American representatives in Washington were less than enthusiastic about the war resolution, which passed easily in both houses. Only four of the ten Norwegians supported it. Others were identified with the Non-Partisan League, strong in previously isolationist North Dakota, or with the pacifist movement of Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin. In the loyalty crusade Senator Nelson found a welcome associate in Nicolay Grevstad, once editor of Chicago's Skandinaven and United States minister to Paraguay and Uruguay in the Taft administration. President Wilson named Grevstad to head a Commission of Public Safety, to oversee the Scandinavian-American press in the Upper Midwest. In his mind Grevstad 222 formulated a list of loyal and doubtful weeklies and personally contributed pro-Allied articles to them. Not all were published. Both Nelson and Grevstad were pleased when a Swedish American, Congressman Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin, a former supporter of La Follette, won a special election for a Senate seat in 1918. Lenroot had parted with La Follette on the issue of intervention. But, says Chrislock, he owed his election not to the Norwegian-American voters, with whom La Follette had always ranked high. Political changes worked in favor of Scandinavian progressives rather than regular Republicans. In 1922, Minnesota voters elected Henrik Shipstead, a Farmer-Labor candidate, to the United States Senate. The following year, after Knute Nelson's death, the Swedish-American Magnus Johnson was elected to fill Nelson's vacant seat. Johnson, too, ran as a Farmer-Labor candidate. In his "aftermath," the concluding chapter, the author assesses the consequences of the war upon a challenged ethnic group. The earlier wartime ban on the use of foreign languages eased considerably, yet the Norwegian tongue declined in church services, in social organizations, and in ordinary conversation. How soon this change might have come about without the war it is difficult to ascertain. An attractive insurance program may have saved the Sons of Norway lodges, but it could not stay the inevitable trend toward English. The leading newspapers deferred more and more to the English, and eventually they printed their last issues—Minneapolis Tidende in 1935, Skandinaven in 1940, Eau Claire's Reform in 1941, and Iowa's Decorah-Posten, a mere shell of its former self, in 1972. Wistfully, the book concludes with the observation that the demise of the Norwegian language in post-war America stands in contrast with the current search for ancestral roots. "Immense linguistic and cultural gaps," the result of indifference and neglect, are impeding that search. This already comprehensive treatise is limited not only in space but in subject matter. It deals with the challenge to ethnicity. The prohibition and woman suffrage movements, the seamen's act of 1915, and the League of Nations fight in the Senate are hardly mentioned, probably because Norwegian ethnicity was not challenged in these areas. It is of interest to Norwegian Americans, however, that La Follette in drawing up the seamen's act depended greatly upon the intelligence and technical expertise of Andrew Furuseth, head of the International Seamen's Union and longtime lobbyist in the nation's capital. Also of interest was Nelson's alignment with the pro-League senators in the debate of 1919. All in all, Chrislock has made a valuable contribution to a field of study that should encourage scholars to examine the responses of other ethnic groups in wartime. ARLOW W. ANDERSEN University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh George N. Nielsen. THE DANISH AMERICANS. Boston: Twayne (G. K. Hall and Co.), 1981. 202 pp. This book may not have much in it that is new to the scholar in the field, but for the average reader it will be a delightful experience. Professor Nielsen is well informed, has evidently carried on extensive research, and best of all, writes in a 223 .
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