Marcus Lee Hansen's Approach to the History of Scandinavian Immigration

The Bridge

Volume 23 Number 1 Article 8

2000

J.R. Christianson

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Recommended Citation Christianson, J.R. (2000) "Marcus Lee Hansen's Approach to the History of Scandinavian Immigration," The Bridge: Vol. 23 : No. 1 , Article 8. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/thebridge/vol23/iss1/8

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Bridge by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Marcus Lee Hansen's Approach to the History of Scandinavian Immigration

by J. R. Christianson1

Marcus Lee Hansen (1892-1938) has been called "the first serious student of the history of American immigration," and he was a very good one, but that was long ago.2 His major scholarship appeared after his death at the age of forty-five in 1938. Few authors have written about American immigration with Marcus Lee Hansen's literary grace and historical brilliance, but huge amounts of ethnic and immigration history have been written since his day. Old history often goes stale and out of print. What about Marcus Lee Hansen? Is there anything in his view of immi gration that still speaks to us in the twenty-first century, across all these immense piles of more recent and up-to-date scholarship? My answer is a resounding "yes," and the aim of this essay is to show why. Marcus Lee Hansen was born on 8 December 1892 in Neenah, Wisconsin, of a Danish father and Norwegian mother, both of them immigrants. His Danish family had deep roots in northern Langeland.3 Hansen died in Redlands, California, on 11 May 1938 and was buried in the family plot in Newell Cemetery, Newell, Iowa. Three of his books were published posthumously in 1940. The next year, one of these books was awarded the 1941 Pulitzer Prize in Letters. What was there about Marcus Lee Marcus Lee Hansen Hansen's view of American immigration that received such ac claim? First of all, Hansen included everybody: he had a unified vision of the peopling of North America. He saw the process as a continuum in time and space, beginning with Columbus and ulti mately involving all the peoples of Europe. In his day, immigration was largely a European phenomenon; today, it is global in the full sense of the word. Moses Rischin called Hansen "America's first

31 transethnic historian" because his vision of immigration history in cluded all peoples in motion.4 Hansen saw the seventeenth century colonization of North America and the eighteenth and nineteenth immigration into the continent as part of one and the same grand process. When Presi dent Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened an address to the Daughters of the American Revolution with the words, "Fellow immigrants," he might have been quoting Marcus Lee Hansen. Perhaps he was, because Hansen's writing was renowned when Roosevelt was president. Hansen's unified vision of the peopling of North American is not the normal view held by immigration and ethnic historians nowadays, and it is certainly not the usual approach taken by writ ers of Scandinavian immigration history. They usually consider each national immigrant group on its own terms. Norwegian immi gration is generally seen as a separate phenomenon beginning in 1825, and Swedish immigration as a separate phenomenon begin ning around 1840 (after a much earlier interlude in the middle years of the seventeenth century). Scholars of Danish migration like to follow Danes to all corners of the world and in the USA to focus primarily on Danish religious institutions. The multicultural ap proach pioneered by Hansen has not made much headway among the writers of Scandinavian immigration and ethnic history.

The Hansen Revival It would be wrong, however, to assume that Marcus Lee Han sen has been forgotten. His major writings are out of print, but in the last decade or so, immigration historians have begun to talk about him quite a bit. They include many scholars of Scandinavian American migration. In 1987, a conference was held at Augustana College in Rock Island to reexamine Hansen's thesis regarding immigrant genera tions. This conference resulted in a volume edited by Peter Kivisto and Dag Blanck, which examined Hansen's thesis from numerous points of view.5 In 1992, the centennial of Hansen's birth was marked by a con ference on immigration held in Aalborg, Denmark. This conference resulted in the publication of two more articles dealing with aspects of Hansen's writing.6 The Danish American Heritage Society plans to sponsor another Marcus Lee Hansen immigration conference in the year 2002.

32 Finally, on the fiftieth anniversary of Hansen's death, Jon Gjerde of the University of California-Berkeley told a group of fellow im migration historians the astonishing news that they could go back to the future by reexamining the writings of Marcus Lee Hansen. This occurred in a packed session at the annual convention of the American Historical Association in 1998. The audience sat up and listened, and Gjerde's paper was included in a forum on the future of immigration studies in the summer 1999, published in the Journal of American Ethnic History, where commentators on Gjerde's paper, Rudolph J. Vecoli, Donna Gabaccia, and Erika Lee - scholars of Ital ian and Chinese immigration - all seconded the proposal to return to the writings of Hansen.7 In short, Marcus Lee Hansen has been rediscovered - or rather, one might say that several Marcus Lee Hansens have been rediscov ered, because scholars are looking at him through various writings and finding quite different ideas to associate with his name.

The Third Generation Thesis Hansen's generational thesis, for example, was the subject of the conference that started the revival. Fifty years earlier, Hansen had expressed his thesis quite succinctly with the statement that "what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember."8 This thesis has attracted quite a bit of attention among sociologists, espe cially sociologists of religion. Some have made it into a sociological model and have even referred to it as Hansen's Law.9 Historians have paid much less attention to the thesis, but this changed with the 1987 conference, which brought historians and sociologists to gether in equal numbers. Not long after the conference, Dag Blanck pointed out what a powerful concept Hansen's thesis can be for the study of ethnic history. Hansen's thesis, Blanck noted, was the first discussion of "the dynamic nature of ethnicity," and Hansen was the first to realize that ethnic identity is not fixed and stable throughout all time but is actually in a constant state of reinvention and redefinition.1° Historians have become quite interested in that idea.11

Global Migrations At the American Historical Association meeting in 1998 and the forum that followed, Jon Gjerde looked at another side of Marcus Lee Hansen. His sources were not the 1938 essay but two of Han sen's posthumous works, The Immigrant in American History and The

33 Atlantic Migration. 12 Both of these works were published in 1940 and reappeared in paperback editions during the 1960's.13 The Im migrant in American History was a collection of historical essays based on lectures that Hansen delivered at the University of London in 1935, together with a few reprinted articles, written in clear, per suasive language that made it admirably suited for college courses.14 The Atlantic Migration was Hansen's major historical work and the one that won the Pulitzer Prize. It was a survey of the "peopling of America" by Europeans over the course of 250 years (1607-1860) and was intended to be the first of three volumes cover ing the whole history of the United States. Gjerde found much in these two books that could direct the fu ture of immigration and ethnic studies, and many prominent histo rians were quick to agree with him. Of fundamental importance to Gjerde was the fact that Hansen consistently saw migration as a global process. Gjerde said that this led him to "decenter" the United States and relate American political and economic trends to developments in other parts of the world, and that approach led to a clearer understanding of how and why people came to North Amer ica. Secondly, Hansen's global perspective led him to investigate why people decided to leave their native lands, and he made de tailed "transnational" studies of emigrants as they moved away from specific conditions in various parts of Europe and on to the varying conditions of their new homes overseas.Is Thirdly, Han sen's view of migration as a global process led him to follow migra tions around the world and also to write a book about migrations back and forth across the Canadian border (a subject largely ignored since his day).I6 He saw the importance of comparative research and would have been excited about studies like Maria Bjerg's recent comparison of Danish immigrants on the Iowa prairie and the Ar gentine pampa.17 Hansen himself once told of three ships leaving the port of Hamburg around 1840, one bound for the United States, one for Brazil, and the one for Australia, all carrying German emi grants, and he sketched the varying fates of these immigrants in their new homelands. IS Finally, Hansen's broad perspective led him to avoid the extraction of any single immigrant group from the plu ralistic matrix of global migrations. This global approach, as Marcus Lee Hansen used it, spoke di rectly to what Donna Gabaccia perceived to be the main weakness of immigration and ethnic studies at the end of the twentieth cen tury. That weakness could be traced, she wrote, "to the continued

34 predominance of case studies of particular immigrant and ethnic groups, to resistance to comparative study of interethnic relations, and to historians' reluctance to tackle the recent past."19 Hansen's writings demonstrated an approach that overcame these weak nesses. Although they were written over half a century ago, they really could point the way to the future.

Marcus Lee Hansen and Scandinavian Immigration To summarize, a host of well-known scholars of immigration and ethnicity are telling us to get on the Hansen bandwagon, and they are telling us where it is headed. If we are to clamber on board, it will mean a change in the direction of Danish-American and Scandinavian-American history. We are not much for bandwagons, so before we board it, perhaps we should ask whether Marcus Lee Hansen ever had anything specific to say about Scandinavian immi gration to America. The answer is, not much, because he seldom dealt with any eth nic group in isolation, but enough to allow us to see how he did it. Hansen read the Scandinavian languages (among several other languages), and he conducted research in the libraries and archives of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. He frequently used Scandina vian examples in his writings. Just as frequently, however, he used English, German, Irish, Scottish, or Swiss examples because his main subject at the time was the stream of emigration to the United States that came from many parts of northwestern Europe. Let me take as an example one chapter from The Atlantic Migra tion, chapter six, entitled "Pioneers of the Great Migration." This chapter dealt with transatlantic migration in the years 1825-43. Hansen briefly mentioned the first party of Norwegian immigrants, the so-called Sloopers of 1825, and a Scandinavian settlement at Pine Lake, Wisconsin, established in 1841 by the Swedish clergy man, Gustav Unonius. He used both as examples to illustrate his assertion that religious dissatisfaction was the motive behind Scan dinavian emigration of those years.20 The rest of the chapter dealt with a wide range of topics: hard times in Europe, the revolutions of 1830, the sporatic international labor flows of the era, the opposite effects of poor-law reform in England and in Wales, the specific background to the emigration of German liberals, Prussian and Saxon religious dissenters, Bavarian Jews, English artisans, Irish Protestants from the south and from Ulster, and Welsh farmer-

35 miners, all of whom were parts of the flow of half a million immi grants from Europe to the United States in those years.21 In short, Hansen was writing about a migration that included Scandinavians, but he was not really writing about Scandinavian immigration. No, Hansen was writing about something else: the history of a movement that was starting to sweep through the whole continent of Europe and drive millions of its peoples to new home lands across the North Atlantic Ocean. To understand emigration from Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries, Hansen be lieved that one had to see it within this broader context.

Swedish Americans in 1790 There were a few occasions, however, when Marcus Lee Hansen wrote more specifically about Scandinavian immigration. One case had its beginnings in the late 'twenties, and the context is an impor tant one for the history of American immigration. It all began when Congress passed the immigration law of 1924, establishing a na tional quota system. The law was to be applied in two phases. Dur ing phase one, lasting until 1927, the quotas were to be based on the 1890 census. Each national group was to be allocated a quota pro portionate to its percentage of the total U.S. population in that cen sus. Phase two would introduce quotas based on the ethnic compo sition of the United States in 1920. However, that turned out to be very difficult to determine. The censuses since 1850 had recorded each individual's country of birth and parents' country of birth. That was easy enough to tabulate, but there were problems nonetheless. What about Danes, for example, who emigrated from Schleswig (S0nderjylland) between 1864-1920? The U. S. census listed them as Germans because they came from what was then Germany. This meant that they and their descen dants would contribute to the establishment of an even larger Ger man quota, while they would not be added to the total of immi grants from Denmark, so the Danish quota would be smaller as a result. And what about all those millions who were born in the United States of American-born parents? The censuses did not show where their ancestors came from. How could quotas be established to take their ancestry into consideration? Among these people were all de scendants of colonial settlers. How many were they, what percent age of the U. S. population of 1920 did they comprise, and what were their ethnic origins? Who could say? The problem proved to

36 be so vexing that President Coolidge eventually reported to Con gress that more research was needed, and the upshot was that phase two was postponed until 1929.22 It was at this point that young Marcus Lee Hansen entered the stage. The government turned to the scholarly community, and the American Council of Learned Societies engaged Hansen, already a recognized authority on immigration, together with Howard F. Barker, an expert on family names, to prepare a report on the ethnic composition of the United States in the first U. S. census of 1790.23 As part of this project, Hansen reported on the Swedish-American population of 1790.24 In that way, Scandinavian-American history became a focus of Marcus Lee Hansen's research. The Barker-Hansen study concentrated on five major ethnic elements in the white population of 1790. Barker took the British and Germans, and Hansen took the Dutch, French, Swedes, and all people of European origin in regions of the later United States be yond the scope of the 1790 census. Barker's approach was to apply a highly theoretical method of surname analysis to the census data. Hansen, on the other hand, approached his part of the task as an historian, using historical methods and a variety of sources. Hansen began very broadly by asserting that the framework of American history must include "all quarters of the globe," adding that colonial history in general "perhaps ought to be written in terms of its growing population, marking off the stages in the occu pation of the land" and giving particular attention to key factors like market forces, Indian relations, and imperial systems.25 This ap proach put immigration and ethnic history, seen in an economic and political context, at the very heart of the study. It was the way that Hansen always wrote history: to him, the history of America was the history of its people in time and space. As he considered the colonial population of 1790 within this framework, Hansen began with a comparative approach. He noted that the Swedish and Dutch Americans of that year were mainly descendants of seventeenth century colonists in New Sweden and New Netherland, whereas most of the French, Irish, and German populations descended from eighteenth century immigrants. Han sen explained the lack of eighteenth century Dutch immigration in global terms, noting that there were greater inducements to migrate to South Africa during that century. Regarding Swedes, he said that when their imperial incentive was lost, population pressures were not great enough to sustain continued emigration until the nine-

37 · teenth century. 26 The early Dutch and Swedish colonists estab lished compact core settlements, while groups arriving later tended to fill in and scatter more widely. Nevertheless, "The colonial popu lation was not fluid," Hansen wrote, "and even as late as 1790 set tlements were islands in a comparative wilderness and the popula tion of each island was usually characterized by a common ori gin."27 He described the basic pattern as that of a "mosaic" or "bed quilt," with various groups "marked off from one another by walls of forests, swamps, and mountains."28 After comparing the colonizing peoples with later arrivals, Han sen went on to compare patterns of assimilation within the two co lonial cores of New Sweden and New Netherland. The populations of the Swedish and Dutch colonies slowly increased over time. Dutch ethnicity dominated the Hudson valley, especially in the Esopus region along the Catskills, where later settlers of diverse ori gins felt compelled to learn to speak Dutch, assimilate into the Dutch community, and even adopt Dutch surnames. The pattern in New Sweden, on the other hand, was one of growing diversity, not assimilation. By 1790, the descendants of New Sweden colonists were scattered among many other peoples of European origin in parts of what had become the states of Pennsyl vania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Within the Swedish communities of 1790, the Swedish language was still spoken, Swed ish Lutheran churches were maintained, and a rural Swedish way of life persisted.29 In some parts of northern Delaware, Hansen esti mated that Swedish Americans comprised as much as 22-24% of the total white population in 1790.30 Other peoples had come into the region, however, and had formed their own communities: English Quakers, Welsh Quakers, Germans of many sects and creeds, and Scotch-Irish, all of them separated, as Hansen put it, "by boundaries as sharp as any ethnological lines in central Europe."31 Thus Hansen's comparative method threw new light on both colonial regions and raised a host of questions that would not have been apparent otherwise. Why was Dutch culture so powerful in its ability to absorb other peoples? Why the did Swedes become a mi nority in what had once been their own colony, while clinging to their language and culture as persistently as the Dutch? After comparing patterns of assimilation in these two regions, Hansen examined the diaspora up to 1790 of the Swedish and Dutch stocks in North America. He began by disputing the well established myth of American individualism that pictured the lone

38 frontiersman wandering into the wilderness with nothing but his dog, his axe, and his Kentucky rifle. Hansen described quite a dif ferent pattern of collective movement - like the swarming of bees, as he put it - which resulted in daughter settlements of "[n]eighbors [who] were migrating in company or responding to common eco nomic and geographical forces."32 The Dutch expanded up the Hudson until their way was blocked by the Iroquois and the French north and west of Albany, then they poured across the Hudson into northern New Jersey and even Pennsylvania, forming new Dutch farming communities wher ever they settled. The Swedish diaspora went in different directions. From their increasingly diverse colonial core around the Delaware estuary, the Swedes began to spread out at an early date, moving mainly along river valleys, northwards into New York and the Dutch settlements (where they were absorbed into the Dutch-speaking population), southwards along the shores of Chesapeake Bay into English speaking regions, eastwards along the Jersey side of the Delaware and inland, and westwards along the Schuylkill, then down the val leys of the Appalachians. Hansen was surprised to discover the ex tent of this diaspora, which brought significant numbers of Swedish descendants as far south as Virginia and the Carolinas, where the given names of "Hance" (Hans) and "Mounce" (Mons) gave them away, even when their surnames were anglicized.33 In short, the parameters of the project required Marcus Lee Hansen to deal with colonial Swedes as a discrete group, but even as he did so, he continued to see them in a comparative perspective within the context of global population movements motivated mainly by economic, demographic, and political factors. This was the approach that Jon Gjerde described as "world history with a mi grational perspective."34 Hansen concluded his part of the Barker-Hansen study with tables of 1790 population estimates, county by county and state by state. He arrived at a grand total of 21,100 Americans of Swedish ancestry in 1790. This figure gave the politicians something to go on. Double that population every quarter-century on your way to the twentieth century - a rate of growth, incidentally, that Hansen thought was too rapid - and you could add over 800,000 colonial descendants to the Swedish-American stock that existed in 1920, giving Sweden a larger immigration quota after 1929.35 Yes, they really did set the immigration quotas that way.

39 Norwegian Americans in 1932 The year after the Barker-Hansen report appeared in print, Marcus Lee Hansen turned his attention to the Norwegians. He published a proposal urging that a Norwegian exhibit be included in the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933.36 This pro posal showed how Hansen assessed the value of ethnic awareness to a well-established Scandinavian group and to American civiliza tion in general. It was written at a point in time when European ethnic communities were still strong in America, but also when the Great .Depression and the New Deal's strong national agenda seemed on the verge of overwhelming the local particularities of ethnicity. Hansen addressed the question of how to celebrate a century of achievement in a great American city. He granted that "technical and scientific advance" would inevitably find a prominent place in Chicago's centennial celebration, but he warned that material fac tors must not be allowed to overshadow the fact that "history is made by people." Chicago's first century 1833-1933 had "witnessed the greatest human migration in history," when "[u]pwards of thirty-five mil lions of Europeans tore themselves loose from a European environ ment and planted their lives and institutions upon American soil." More than any other place, Chicago and its Midwestern hinterland were the products of this migration. Moreover, the migration was not simply "a transportation of labor, a shift of brawn and muscle" from Europe to America. Every immigrant "left behind family con nections, personal friends, social institutions and traditions," at the same time bringing a part of them along. In this respect, Norwe gians were no different from any other immigrants. "A million per sonal ties bound the Norway of the old World to the Norway of the new" among those of the immigrant generation, "broading the indi vidual's outlook and enriching the community's experience." Even as he narrowed his focus to the Norwegian-American experience, Hansen continued to see it in the perspective of world migrations. At this point, Hansen introduced the generational model for which he later became famous. The second generation, he wrote, "has been encouraged to forget," and their culture became poorer as a result. Sons and daughters of the foreign-born were ashamed of their recent origins and tried to hide them. Eventually, however, a third generation succeeded the Americanized and culturally impov-

40 erished children of immigrants. "Normally it is the third generation of any migrating people that becomes aware of its heritage," he as serted. This generation wants to know "the details" of the "exo dus:" what province or village in the old country their grandparents came from, why they settled where they did, how they survived the tough pioneering years, and what filled their lives "besides toil." Unfortunately, said Marcus Lee Hansen in 1932, this history has not been written. Textbooks of American history treated immi grants "with about as much sympathy and understanding as a Mas sachusetts Indian would reveal in describing the landing of the Pil grim Fathers." One notable exception was the case of Americans of Norwegian descent. Hansen asserted that they possessed "an epic of [their] pioneer years" in 0. E. Relvaag's novel, Giants in the Earth, and a "balanced and judicious presentation of [their] early settle ment" in Theodore C. Blegen's Norwegian Migration to America, be sides the many other publications of the Norwegian-American His torical Association. At that time, Danes in America possessed a massive compilation of their own history compiled by P. S. Vig, Danske i Amerika, pub lished in two volumes in 1908-24, but those volumes were in Dan ish, which meant that the younger generation could not read them, while the Norwegian works were in English.37 The richness of their literary heritage gave Norwegian Ameri cans a special responsibility regarding the Chicago exposition, Han sen argued. It would not be possible to provide space in the exposi tion for "every one of the hundred or more national elements" rep resented in Chicago, but there should be "a dozen" exhibits featur ing well-documented groups like the Norwegians in America. The result of these exhibits, said Hansen, would be to awaken pride in the achievement of immigrants in American life. "Un doubtedly every spectator with Norwegian blood in his veins" he wrote, "no matter how lukewarm his attitude towards history has previously been, will tum aside to visit the memorial erected to the honor of his ancestors." This would lead to a heightened awareness of family heritage and a desire to learn more about it. Several such exhibits, representing various immigrant groups, would awaken the ethnic pride of all visitors to the exhibit and develop a desire to know more about their own heritage, even if it was not represented in one of the exhibits. In short, Marcus Lee Hansen argued that scholarship and writ ing about the life of Norwegians and other immigrants could serve a

41 valuable social purpose in making people aware of their heritage. This in tum, he believed, would lead to a better America. "Ameri can social history of the last century," Hansen wrote, "is a discour aging account of lost opportunities." Millions of immigrants ar rived, bringing with them "the peasant folklore and domestic craftsmanship of a hundred different peoples ... languages that had already produced rich literatures ... [and] an appreciation in the fin est in the music and the arts." Many immigrants "had the genius that in a favorable atmosphere would have created new master pieces. But conditions on pioneer farms and in the congested areas of industrial cities constituted a stony soil in which to plant the seeds of a foreign culture." As a result, when the children of immi grants began to prosper, they "adopted the prevailing American culture as a sign of success," and all the rich traditions they had brought to America were cast aside. Hansen was convinced, however, that a deeper, hidden ethnic ity still survived: "it is difficult to believe that mental traits of crea tion and appreciation developed in any nationality through hun dreds of years of community life are lost in the course of one or two generations." Ethnic exhibits in the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition could be the spark that rekindled this latent ethnic crea tivity, and this in tum would enrich American civilization as a whole. "The second and third generations can learn what their for bears possessed and what they have lost." They could learn to ap preciate Ibsen and Grieg if they were Norwegian - or Grundtvig, Kierkegaard, and Carl Nielsen if they were Danish - without losing their appreciation for Shakespeare and Gershwin. Then the second century of the "Prairie Empire will reveal a greater progress in the finer things of life than was possible in the first." The stunning thing about this essay of Marcus Lee Hansen, be sides the richness of its conceptual setting, is the author's confidence that the field of immigration history can be a means of social reform and cultural enlightenment. Although he says very little about the content of Norwegian and Scandinavian immigration history, the context into which he places it is exhilarating.

Conclusion Jon Gjerde concluded his 1999 article by asserting that "there is no one archetypical story" of American immigration. People ar rived on the shores of the American colonies and the United States at different times and for different reasons."38 In a sense, that may

42 be true, but that is not really how Marcus Lee Hansen saw it. Han sen's search was an unrelenting quest for the unities underlying the infinite variety of immigration history. Despite all the differences of origins, language, culture, religion, time, or circumstances, these transoceanic and transcontinental migrations were all parts of one and the same grand story to Marcus Lee Hansen. All people came from somewhere, all migrant streams arrived at some destination, and, if it was North America, once they were here, they all had to find a way to live together. If they later went back home or moved on to Australia or Canada, or if new peoples from new homelands joined the flow, the process simply entered a new phase: it was a global process without end. True enough, some groups held power in this process, while others were victims, but power relationships, together with all other aspects of culture, were constantly changing: they were part of the same evolving story. The broad unities in the global history of migration, rooted in the concrete experiences of specific peoples in specific times, places, and situations, were what meant most to Marcus Lee Hansen. He devoted his career to investigating these unities: unities between the old world and the new, Canada and the United States, colonists and immigrants, governments and migrants, migrants and people who made a business of migration. Marcus Lee Hansen found it impossible to dislodge the history of Scandinavian immigration from the context of global migrations, because he believed that to see it in isolation would be to distort it as history and misunderstand its significance. There is still much food for thought in such an approach.

1 A shorter version of the paper was presented during the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, on 5 May 2000. 2 Oscar Handlin, "Introduction," The Atlantic Migration 1607-1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States, by Marcus Lee Hansen (New York: Harper & Row Torchbook Edition, 1961), xiv. 3 On Hansen's connection to his Danish background, see John Robert Christianson, "Marcus Lee Hansen Returns to His Roots," The Bridge 198710/1: 67-81. 4 Moses Rischin, "Marcus Lee Hansen: America's First Transethnic Historian," The Bridge 1984, 7 /2: 22-52.

43 . 5 Peter Kivisto and Dag Blanck, eds., Americans and Their Generations: Studies and Commentaries on the Hansen Thesis after Fifty Years (Rock Island: Swenson Swedish Immigration Center and Augustana Col lege Library, 1987). Contributing scholars included a number of prominent sociologists, as well as historians like John Higham, Thomas J. Archdeacon, Moses Rischin, Philip Gleason, H. Arnold Barton, and Victor Greene. 6 J. R. Christianson, "The Letters of Marcus Lee Hansen," On distant Shores: Proceedings of the Marcus Lee Hansen Immigration Conference, Aalborg, Denmark, June 29-July 1, 1992, edited by Birgit Flemming Larsen, Henning Bender, and Karen Veien (Aalborg: Danes World wide Archives, 1993), 13-34. Jon Gjerde, "The 'Would-be Patriarch' and the "Sell-Made Man:' Marcus Lee Hansen on Native and Immi grant Farmers in the American Middle West," Larsen et al. 1993, 35- 55. 7 "Forum: Immigration History - Assessing the Field," Journal of American Ethnic History, Summer 1999, 18/4: 40-166, with assess ments by Jon Gjerde, George J. Sanchez, and Erika Lee; comments by Rudolph J. Vecoli, Donna Gabaccia, and Elliott Robert Barkan; and responses by Gjerde and Lee; see 41, 116, 131, 163. See also Philip Gleason, "A Message from the President," The Immigration and Ethnic History Newsletter, November 1999, 5. The session at the AHA meeting was organized by Betty Bergland. 8 M. L. Hansen, The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant (Rock Island, Illinois: Augustana Historical Society, 1938), 9. Marcus Lee Hansen, The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant, A republica tion of the 1937 address with introductions by Peter Kivisto and Oscar Handlin (Rock Island: Swenson Swedish Immigration Re search Center and Augustana College Library, 1987), 15. Kivisto and Blanck 1987 also reprint the essay on 191-203; the phrase quoted is on 195. This idea was deeply embedded in Hansen's thought and found expression in many of his writings. 9 Will Herberg used the term, see Philip Gleason, "Hansen, Herberg, and American Religion," Kivisto and Blanck 1987, 85. 10 Dag Blanck, Becoming Swedish-American: The Construction of an Ethnic Identity in the Augustana Synod, 1860-1917 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 1997), 25. 11 Besides Blanck 1997, see J. R. Christianson, "Scandinavian Americans," Multiculturalism in the United States: A Comparative Guide to Acculturation and Ethnicity, ed. John D. Buenker and Lor man A. Ratner (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 103-29; and April Schultz, Ethnicity on Parade: Inventing The Norwegian · Ameri-

44 can Through Celebration (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1994). 12 Marcus Lee Hansen, The Immigrant in American History, edited with a foreward by Arthur M. Schlesinger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), and Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migra tion 1607-1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States, edited with a foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger (Cam bridge: Harvard University Press, 1940). 13 Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration 1607-1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States, edited with a foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger, with an introduction to the Torchbook Ed~tion by Oscar Handlin (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961). Marcus Lee Hansen, The Immigrant in American History, edited with a foreward by Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964). 14 On the London lectures, see Christianson 1993, 24-28. 15 Gjerde himself has written a masterpiece of transnational migra tion history in his study, From Peasants to Farmers: The Migration from Balestrand, Norway, to the Upper Middle West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 16 Marcus Lee Hansen, The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples, Volume I: Historical, completed and prepared for publication by John Bartlet Brebner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940). 17 Maria Bjerg, "A Tale of Two Settlements: Danish Immigrants on the American Prairie and the Argentine Pampa, 1860-1930," Annals of Iowa 2000 59/1: 1-34. 1s Hansen, The Immigrant 1940, 24-25. 19 Quoted in Erika Lee, "Response," Journal of American Ethnic His tory, Summer 1999, 18/4: 164. Odd S. Lovoll has tackled the recent past in The Promise Fulfilled: A Portrait of Norwegian Americans Today (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, published in coopera tion with the Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1998), see the review in The Bridge 1999 22: 104-07. 20 Hansen 1961, 141. The emigration of Danish Baptists and Mor mons did not begin until after 1850, see Kristian Hvidt, Flight to America: The Social Background of 300,000 Danish Emigrants (New York: Academic Press, 1975), 147-55. 21 Hansen 1961, 120-45. 22 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925, 2nd edition (New York: Atheneum, [1963) 1981), 316-24. Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1931 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1932), 107-09. For

45 an overview, see William S. Bernard, "Immigration: History of U.S. Policy," Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Themstrom (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 493; and Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 282-84. 23 Howard F. Barker and Marcus L. Hansen, "American Council of Learned Societies Report of the Committee on Linguistic and Na tional Stocks in the Population of the United States," Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1931 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1932), 1: 107-441. 24 Barker and Hansen 1932, 391-97. 25 Barker and Hansen 1932, 371. 26 Barker and Hansen 1932, 363. As for Germans and Irish, they were treated by Barker, but Hansen summarized the French, pri marily Huguenots, whom he described as more widely dispersed and more thoroughly assimilated ("denationalized") than the Dutch and Swedes, a process accelerated by Anglo-American hostility to the French during most of the eighteenth centuiry, see Barker and Hansen 1932, 380-90. 27 Barker and Hansen 1932, 373. 28 Barker and Hansen 1932, 361. 29 Barker and Hansen 1932, 391. 30 Barker and Hansen 1932, 393. 31 Barker and Hansen 1932, 381. 32 Barker and Hansen 1932, 361, see also 367. 33 Barker and Hansen 1932, 395. Later authors explained this wide dispersal by asserting that the New Sweden colonists, especially those of Finnish origin, possessed wilderness skills that placed them in the vanguard of the movement into the Appalachian and trans Appalachian backwoods and shaped the culture of the American frontier, see especially Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups, The Ameri can Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (Balti more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 34 Gjerde 1999, 17. 35 The ACLS's Committee on Linguistic and National Stocks in the Population of the United States assumed that the colonial Dutch population doubled itself every twenty-five years, but Hansen ob jected that this rate of growth was probably too large, see 120. For subsequent research on the ethnicity of the U.S. population in 1790, see Abraham D. Lavander, "United States Ethnic Groups in 1790:

46 Given Names as Suggestions of Ethnic Identity," Journal of American Ethnic History, 1989, 9/1: 36-66. 36 Marcus L. Hansen, "A Century of Norwegian-American Progress and the Future," Norden, November 1932; reprint in the Marcus Lee Hansen scrapbook compiled by his niece, Joyce Hansen Saunders. 37 Peter L. Petersen and John Mark Nielsen, "Peter S0rensen Vig: Danish-American Historian," Danish Emigration to the U. S. A., ed. Birgit Flemming Larsen and Henning Bender (Aalborg, Denmark: Danes Worldwide Archives in collaboration with the Danish Society for Emigration History, 1992), 124-41. 38 Gjerde 1999, 60.