The Norrland Crop Failures of 1902 and the Swedish Americans

H. ARNOLD BARTON

uring the fall of 1902, disturbing reports reached the Swedish- American press that Norrland—the northern two-thirds of Swe• Dden (together with parts of Dalarna and Värmland and neigh• boring areas of northern Norway and Finland)—was threatened with serious crop failures. That winter there was much need and deprivation throughout the region. Swedish Americans reacted to this crisis deter• minedly and effectively, collecting large sums of money for relief through their churches, organizations, and newspapers, as well as sending pri• vate help to relatives and friends. The crop failures of 1902 in northern Scandinavia have received surprisingly little attention from historians and are virtually forgotten today, except perhaps by some in the region itself. Thus the most acces• sible source would appear to be an article entitled "Svensk-amerikanska insamlingar för nödlidande i norra Sverige: Minnen från vintern 1902- 03" (Swedish-American fund-raising on behalf of the needy in northern Sweden: Recollections from the winter of 1902-03), by Johan A. Enander (1842-1910), the well-known and influential editor of the newspaper Hemlandet in Chicago. The article appeared in the Swedish-American yearbook Prärieblomman for 1904.1 In going through Prärieblomman in connection with research for my book A Folk Divided: Homeland Swedes and Swedish Americans, 1840-1940 (1994), I passed over this article, surely misled by its dry and uninfor¬ mative title, believing it probably to be of little relevance to my subject. As what follows will show, I was much mistaken, for the impressive efforts of the Swedish Americans to aid the victims of the Norrland crop failures during 1902-03 tells much about their complex relationship to both their old and new homelands. It was particularly significant that it should be Enander who wrote this account. Soon after emigrating to the United States and assuming the editorship of Hemlandet in 1869, he began his lifelong mission of

H. ARNOLD BARTON is professor emeritus of history at Southern Illinois Univer• sity at Carbondale and former editor of the Quarterly. instilling in his Swedish-American readers pride in their unique iden• tity as both Swedes and Americans. The Swedish Americans were "a people" in their own right, he maintained, combining the best charac• teristics of their old and new homelands.2 This viewpoint is strikingly evident in Enander's account of his Swedish-American countrymen's response to the Norrland crisis in 1902-03. Enander tells little about the actual crop failures and their conse• quences in the homeland, concentrating instead upon the Swedish- American response. This was not immediately aroused, since both the press and the government in Sweden long played down the mounting crisis, in contrast to more immediate publicity in both Norway and Fin• land. Once the full gravity of the situation became known, however, it quickly became a matter of highest priority throughout Swedish America. Enander tells in detail how its newspapers gave the crisis wide coverage, appealing for support, while the Swedish-American churches and societies organized collections. He accounts for each separate fund- raising effort, reporting the exact totals collected, by organization and by state. Some contributions came from other Scandinavian-, German-, and Anglo-American sources, and in some cases funds were raised to• gether with Norwegian and Finnish Americans, to be divided among their homelands. The state legislatures of Illinois and Nebraska voted contributions of five thousand and two thousand dollars, respectively, for relief of the needy. Enander, meanwhile, could not but observe that, in general, relatively modest amounts were contributed by wealthy do• nors, as compared with the very generous support, within their means, provided by immigrants with only modest incomes. Most of the money collected was forwarded to a Central Relief Com• mittee in Stockholm. When the final tally was made, it showed that, while 579,991 kronor were contributed from sources in Sweden itself, fully 651,090 kronor were received from America, above all from Swed• ish-American sources (159). In addition, smaller sums were sent by cer• tain Swedish-American organizations directly to sister organizations in Sweden. This, however, still did not account for the full extent of Swed• ish-American support, since many individual Swedish immigrants sent unrecorded sums home to relatives and friends in northern Sweden. This was truly an impressive accomplishment, and the Swedish Americans had every reason to feel proud of it at the time and thereaf• ter, as Enander intended they should. However, early in the relief cam• paign there were already signs of Swedish-American misgivings about the Old Country and its government. At a meeting in early November 1902 to organize a Chicago relief committee, there were those who ex-

10 pressed concern over how funds collected by the Swedish Americans would be used. During the great crop failures in Sweden between 1867 and 1869—which had set off the real mass migration to America—as well as after the disastrous fires in Sundsvall and Umeå in 1888, the Swedes in the United States had collected money for relief which had been misused, leaving bitter memories.3 In particular, it was feared that the Swedish communal authorities, instead of making use of the do• nated funds to assist the needy, would simply appropriate them into their regular budgets (127-28). The relief committee in St. Louis made its contribution conditional upon a guarantee from Sweden that the money would not, as was rumored, be given to the needy only in return for work or as repayable loans (139-40).

Several of the speakers (Enander wrote) expressed a certain mis• trust of "pedantically formal and bureaucratically slow Swed• ish relief provisions, which bore little resemblance to free, un• constrained, Swedish-American charitable activity, which was prepared to act quickly; indeed, one speaker frankly predicted that conflicts between the two "systems" would be unavoid• able. (128)

More serious yet seemed the general reaction in Sweden to the Swed• ish-American efforts to provide relief. When the Swedish Riksdag con• vened in January 1903, King Oscar II, in his speech from the throne, declared that the crisis in Sweden was now well in hand and that Nor• way and Finland were presently in greater need of help (134). Both the Norwegian and Finnish newspapers, Enander pointed out, had vividly described the suffering and need in their countries, which had made the task of collecting funds for relief a good deal easier for the Norwe• gian and Finnish Americans. Meanwhile,

The newspapers in Sweden gave, more or less in passing, infor• mation on the number of kilograms or tons of animal fodder and grain needed in the northern provinces, which details pro• vided —for the most part in the metric system with which most Swedish Americans were unfamiliar—an anything but clear picture of the extent of the need. Other newspapers in Sweden declared outright that no real need existed in Norrland. That the Swedish-American collection campaign could succeed as [well as] shown above under such circumstances gives the most positive proof of our countrymen's love for their native soil and

11 its people. (134)

Later he returned to this theme:

In all that the Swedish-American newspapers wrote about the misery in northern Sweden there was an undertone of warm sympathy for those in need. This undertone was largely or en• tirely absent in most of the Swedish newspapers and in some was replaced by a cold bureaucratic tone. (146)

There were, meanwhile, implications in the Swedish press that could not but appear downright offensive to Swedish Americans:

The newspaper press there [in Sweden] neither saw nor wished to see and understand this profound folk movement among the Swedish Americans. It was—so it seemed—not from former Swedish smallholders, tenant farmers, hired folks, and land• less laborers, "pietists," and other "plain folk" and their off• spring from whom most of the gentlemen of the Swedish press hoped for help in time of need, but rather from Anglo-Ameri• can multimillionaires, from widely famed stock-market mag• nates and "trust kings," as well as from "finer folk." When soci• ety ladies in Paris, Berlin, and London arranged benefit func• tions that brought in some pitifully small sums for those suffer• ing privation in Sweden, these were regarded as great events, deserving extensive coverage, but when sons and daughters of Sweden in America came forward by the hundreds of thousands and succeeded in collecting far greater amounts, these collec• tions were only mentioned in a few lines in small print. (146)

A wealthy "timber baron" in Norrland itself was even reported to have said that "the people of Norrland need not accept gifts from America, the land of humbug, from persons who by emigrating have betrayed their Fatherland as much as Judas Iscariot betrayed his Lord and Mas• ter." Other prominent persons in the region were said to have claimed that those presently in need were nothing but fanatical Læstadian pi• etists, idlers, drunkards, and ne'er-do-wells who would only be demor• alized by giving them handouts (147). How much truth there may have been in these allegations is diffi• cult to say. The point is that they were made and taken seriously by

12 Swedish Americans, all too many of whom harbored resentful memo• ries of upper-class callousness, snobbery, and condescension from the Old Country. Many recalled Sweden—as a country and as distinct from the old home place—as "a poor land with a class of haughty folks who despise all working people," as the Swedish-American journalist Johan Person would put it in 1912.4 As Americans by choice, they were fervent believers in equality and democracy such as did not yet exist back home. Only after electoral reforms in 1907 and 1918 would universal man• hood suffrage be entirely established there; a full parliamentary system of government would only be achieved by 1917, while old social preju• dices died hard. At the same time that the Norrland crisis and relief campaign height• ened their frustrations with the old homeland, Swedish Americans soon found themselves confronted with a new and alarming concern from another quarter. The emergency in northern Scandinavia attracted grow• ing attention from foreign newspapers, including American. The Chi• cago Daily Tribune and the Chicago Daily News sent reporters to the re• gion. Both were scooped, meanwhile, by William Randolph Hearst's Chicago American, which had not sent out a correspondent but neverthe• less came out on 24 January 1903 with a sensationalistic article under the heading "King Oscar Appeals to The American for Help for 500,000 People Suffering from Hunger." The article called for donations to be made directly to the Swedish Central Relief Committee, in care of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There followed a hair-raising ac• count of distress in Sweden and Finland, where people were said be grubbing for roots and nuts, many of them on the verge of starving in the cold. The Swedes in Chicago were deeply shocked and considered the Chicago American's alleged news dispatch a sham. Erlander sent a copy of the paper to the Swedish foreign minister, asking that his govern• ment set the record straight. When the matter was eventually raised in the Riksdag, it was reported that the minister simply declared that the government could not respond to "all the sensationalistic news dis• patches in the foreign press" (149-50). Swedish Americans were appalled by the lurid reports of English- speaking correspondents lacking, according to Enander, any knowledge of the language, ways of life, and customs of northern Sweden, their heads filled with fantasies about the horrors of famine "on the shores of the Volga or the Ganges." Even under normal conditions, he feared, they would probably have believed the region poor and deprived. Now they described it as a veritable "Niflhem," the "land of eternal cold and

13 hollow-eyed hunger." As an example of their ignorance, Enander re• ferred to the report of a correspondent for an English paper who gave as proofs of the misery in Norrland that its inhabitants had to eat hard rye bread, that good beefsteak, roast beef, white bread, and decent En• glish beer were hard to find, and that even in the towns people ate rot• ten fish called surströmming!5 To take another example, a perusal of the Chicago Daily Tribune's coverage of the crisis presents a dark picture indeed. Already on 25 Janu• ary 1903, the day after the Chicago American came out with its dramatic appeal, the Tribune raised the alarm that "in this desolate region, thou• sands of human beings are face to face with actual starvation"—although it estimated those threatened at around 70,000, later revised to 100,000, rather than 500,000, as claimed by the Chicago American. From then on, hardly a day passed, at least through the end of February, when the Tribune did not carry one or more items on the crisis, mainly in Sweden, or on the relief efforts in America.6 Between 1 February and 9 March the Tribune ran a series of detailed reports by its special correspondent, Guy Cramer, then just returned from northern Sweden, where he had traveled some eight hundred miles by sleigh. His account provided, according to the editor's introduction to the first installment, "practically... the only statement that has been made by any one who actually visited the district itself. The strong Swed• ish pride has prevented even the papers of Stockholm from making too public the prevailing distress, and the meager reports that have gone forth from Sweden to the outer world have been hardly hints of the real situation." While it lost nothing in the telling, Cramer's account indeed seems credible enough. It consisted mainly of heart-rending tales of the suffer• ings of various poor, isolated settlements and individual families in the grasp of a famine terrifying to its victims, "who must watch the turns of the clock and count the kernels of grain which keep them from starva• tion and death," as he put it on 3 February. The stark and foreboding impression produced by this narrative was reinforced by numerous grainy black-and-white photographs of snowbound scenes of misery, at a time when photographic reproduction in newspapers was still rather a novelty. Cramer, however, also discussed more basic aspects of the prob• lem, in addition to the surprising neglect by the Swedish press. He ob• served how great masses of accumulated ice and snow, as well as the freezing of the whole Gulf of Bothnia, obstructed the transportation of relief supplies, even when available, into the affected region, particu-

14 larly to the isolated and widely scattered settlements and families suf• fering the greatest need. While he described admirable sacrifices by persons in a position to help, Cramer also noted cases of hard-hearted creditors who ejected tenants unable to pay their rent and seized the property of debtors unable to meet their payments. The big logging com• panies, which had acquired control over most of the forest lands and upon which much of the local population depended for employment, he described as real "tyrants." The region, he estimated, would take at least a decade to recover, since the livestock that had perished for lack of fodder or had been slaughtered and the seed grain that had to be consumed could not simply be replaced by animals and seed from south• ern Sweden, which could not thrive at such northerly latitudes. In his final report in the Tribune, on 9 March, Cramer maintained that the Swedish government's main concern over the crisis appeared to be that, once over, it would result in a great wave of emigration to America out of a region it considered of vital importance both economi• cally and strategically. It had been doing its best to encourage settle• ment in upper Norrland, in part to counteract the attractions of America, while constructing large-scale fortifications in the area due to mounting fears of future Russian aggression, aroused by the Tsarist government's Russification campaign in neighboring Finland. In the meantime, the Tribune carried numerous notices of fund-rais• ing activities in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois, stressing the grati• tude of the Chicago Swedish Relief Committee for all contributions. There were numerous concerts, bazaars, and lotteries. School children and German, Irish, Bohemian, and Polish organizations put on events to raise money; and on 19 February the renowned Jane Addams of Hull House gave a speech praising the Swedes for their "cleanliness and tem• perance" and their government for its enlightened social reforms, and calling for the world to express its appreciation by helping Sweden in its hour of need. Enander wrote dejectedly,

We Swedish Americans, who are accustomed to describing Norrland to our children and to the Anglo-Americans as a rich land of the future and all of Sweden as one of the most beauti• ful countries on earth, now had to hear the opposite from En• glish-speaking Americans. (150-51)

The Chicago correspondents, he complained in his account, could well have obtained reliable information from the large Swedish com-

15 munity in their own city. Yet Enander and his fellow Swedish-American newspapermen could hardly have denied that the reports by Guy Cramer and others contained a good deal of truth. Upper Norrland was an exploited region and a harsh environment, life was hard for most of its inhabitants even under the best of circumstances, and those enticed by the government to settle there had good reason to wish that they had chosen America instead.7 As it now was, Enander feared, not only would Swedes in Sweden be given "a very low opinion of the Anglo-Americans' knowledge of European geography, cultural history, and other subjects," but, worse yet, the Anglo-Americans would receive highly unfavorable impressions of Sweden and the Swedes (151). "Sweden's and the Swedish Ameri• cans' reputation was in danger of being diminished in the eyes of the Anglo-Americans and other nationalities," and the Swedish commu• nity strove as best it could to counteract such damaging publicity. "They did not want their countrymen in Sweden to seem like helpless beg• gars," Enander wrote, "at least not until the Swedish government had done all it could to relieve the need." But even here there was opposi• tion on the part of those in both Sweden and America who maintained that only such highly colored exposés might succeed in opening the purses of wealthy Anglo-Americans, pointing to the example of the Finn• ish Americans, who had willingly accepted such publicity (151-52). Sensationalism in the American and other foreign newspapers stood in remarkable contrast to the low-key coverage of the Norrland situa• tion in Sweden and to the Swedish government's foot-dragging. Surely much of the frustration Enander and his fellow Swedish-American news• papermen felt over the detailed reports in the Anglo-American papers derived from their inability to find adequate information in the Swed• ish press and their lack of means to send over correspondents of their own. The Swedish Riksdag, meanwhile, engaged in endless debate on various trivial matters, Enander editorialized in Hemlandet on 21 March 1903, while Swedish Americans found themselves increasingly embar• rassed when Anglo-Americans asked what their government was do• ing to alleviate the crisis in Norrland (154-56). Not until the end of May 1903 did the Riksdag, after much debate, finally appropriate a modest 400,000 kronor for public aid to the region (158-60). The last straw, for the Swedish Americans, came when the Chicago Swedish Relief Committee proposed to send a large shipment of pork to the needy in Norrland, to be donated, according to the Tribune, by Chicago's meat packers and transported out to the East Coast free of

16 charge by the Pennsylvania Railroad.8 This, it was naturally assumed, would be admitted toll-free into Sweden. When at last a reply regard• ing this matter was received from Stockholm in February 1903, it stated that the regular Swedish import tariff would not be waived for the ship• ment. Swedish Americans were astonished and outraged. In America, Enander was convinced, Congress would in such a case have acted quickly to allow a tariff exemption. But not in Sweden! That, in his view, took the heart out of further effective fund-raising activities in America. After Guy Cramer's final article on 9 March, for instance, one notes that the Chicago Daily Tribune's interest in the crisis evaporated as suddenly as it had begun. The value of food shipments from America would, Enander commented bitterly, have been at least ten times as great as the resultant loss of tariff revenue to the Swedish state. In fairness, he noted that the government's action was also much criticized in Sweden itself (156-58). Despite this anticlimactic ending, Enander concluded his report in Prärieblomman by holding that the Swedish Americans' generous re• sponse to the Norrland crisis "proved, in a manner that left little to be desired, what a united people working for a great and noble patriotic cause can often accomplish, even when previously unprepared and under difficult circumstances." Indeed, looking back, it was the great• est demonstration the Swedish Americans had ever given—to them• selves, to America, and to Sweden—of their capacity to overcome their many internal divisions and pull together toward a common goal. Enander's compatriots in America showed how "love of the old home• land and its people has not disappeared among Sweden's sons and daughters who have immigrated here or among their offspring born in this country." They proved that "old and ever youthful Svea can, in her day of need, like a beloved mother, put her hopes in her young, vigor• ous, and devoted children" (160). It would be difficult to determine, without a good deal of research in Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish archives, just how serious the crop failures of 1902 actually were in northern Scandinavia. They are passed over in silence in the standard histories of Sweden, in contrast to the great crop failures of 1867-69, which led to the first great peak in Swed• ish emigration and which thus have received no little attention.9 Perhaps the failures of 1902 were not quite as severe as the Swedish Americans were prepared to believe. It may be, too, that their ideas of what must have been happening were biased by lingering prejudices against Sweden's ruling classes and suspicions regarding the efficiency

17 of its government. Their reactions reveal, however, not only their strong bonds of attachment to the land of their origins. They also bring to light much about their view of themselves as Swedish Americans, caught more• over in a difficult dilemma: seeking, on the one hand, to prove their loyalty to their countrymen in the Old Country, while striving, on the other, to defend its reputation—and with it their own status—in their new homeland. Swedish Americans showed in this situation that they reserved the right to private judgment, over Sweden no less than America. They loved their old homeland, as Johan Enander himself would express it in a speech he gave in Norrköping during his only visit back to Sweden in 1906, "as long as it makes itself worthy of our own and our children's love."

Swedish-American hearts—that I know—are filled with joy and pride when Lightening's brother [i.e., the telegraph] brings across the ocean reports of new Swedish deeds of greatness, such as shed new glory upon the Swedish name [Enander went on], but with sorrow and pain upon news of Mother Svea's dis• tress and need, as well as with astonishment and indignation at signs of lack of patriotism, irresolution in word and deed, of class antagonism, discord, and strife, through which the great• est strength is needlessly dissipated and hindrances are put in the way of Sweden's march toward new greatness and power.

Yet they also fulfilled the prophecy of the Swedish visitor to the United States, Ernst Beckman, who had written in 1883 that, critical as the Swedish immigrants might often be of conditions in Sweden, if any outsider should presume to make similar accusations against their old homeland, "they would rise up in fury." For, he added, "deep down they love her."10

ENDNOTES

1. Johan A. Enander, "Svensk-amerikanska insamlingar för nödlidande i norra Sverige. Minnen från vintern 1902-03," Prärieblomman 1904,118-60. Iher e follow essentially Enander's account. Because of my constant references to it, these will hereafter consist of page numbers within parentheses in the text it• self. Prärieblomman was published by the Augustana Book Concern in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1900 and 1902-13. Cf. Birgitta Svensson, Den omplanterade svenskheten: Kulturell självhävdelse och etnisk medvetenhet i den svensk-amerikanska kalendern Prärieblomman 1900-1913 (Göteborg: 1994). 18 2. No full-length biography of Enander has yet been written. See, how• ever, Johan A. Enander, Valda skrifter, 1 (Chicago: 1891; no volume 2 was pub• lished), and "Svensk-Amerikas dag i Norrköping," Prärieblomman 1907,69-90; Ernst Skarstedt, Pennfäktare: Svensk-amerikanska författare och tidningsmän (Stockholm: 1930), 54-55; Anders Schön, "Dr. Johan A. Enander: En Minnesruna," Prärieblomman 1911, 16-45; Ulf Beijbom, "The Historiography of Swedish America," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 31 (1980): 257-85, especially 262- 72, and "Svenskamerikanismen," in his Svenskamerikanskt (Växjö: 1990), 137- 60; H. Arnold Barton, A Folk Divided: Homeland Swedes and Swedish Americans, 1840-1940 (Carbondale, Ill.: 1994), especially 64-70, 115-16, 205, 216-17, and "Guest Editor's Introduction: Three Insiders' Views of Swedish America," Swed• ish-American Historical Quarterly 45 (1994): 179-82. 3. Cf. Lennart Limberg and Brita Torell, "Göteborgs-Posten och emigra• tionen," Göteborgs-Emigranten 6 (1997): 37,38. 4. Johan Person, Svenskamerikanska studier (Rock Island, Ill.: 1912), 58. 5. Surströmming, a pungent, fermented Baltic herring, is traditionally con• sidered a great delicacy in Norrland. 6. See Chicago Daily Tribune, 25,27,28,29 January, 1,2,3,5,7,8,12,16,18, 19, 20, 23 February, 9 March 1903. 7. For a graphic description of life in upper Norrland during this period, see, for example, Lisa Johansson's recollections from Vilhelmina parish in Västerbotten, in her Saltlake och blodvälling: Berättelser från nybyggartiden i Lappmarken, ed. Sune Jonsson (Stockholm: 1968). Cf. my review of this book in Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 28 (1977): 72-73. 8. Cf. Chicago Daily Tribune, 27 January, 12 February 1903. 9. Cf. Marie Nelson, Bitter Bread: The Famine in Norrbotten, 1867-1868 (Uppsala: 1988). 10. Enander, "Svensk-Amerikas dag i Norrköping," 85-86; Ernst Beckman, Amerikanska studier, 2 vols. (Stockholm: 1883) 1:152-53. Cf. Barton, A Folk Di• vided, 49, 217.

19