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.