Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2007 Immigrant identities in the rural Midwest, 1830-1925 Knut Oyangen Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the Race and Ethnicity Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Oyangen, Knut, "Immigrant identities in the rural Midwest, 1830-1925" (2007). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 15995. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/15995 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Immigrant identities in the rural Midwest, 1830 - 1925 by Knut Oyangen A dissertation submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Major: Agricultural History and Rural Studies Program of Study Committee: Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Major Professor Christopher Curtis Andrejs Plakans Xiaoyuan Liu Charles Dobbs Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2007 Copyright © Knut Oyangen, 2007. All rights reserved. UMI Number: 3274824 UMI Microform 3274824 Copyright 2007 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1. THE GASTRODYNAMICS OF DISPLACEMENT: IMMIGRATION, PLACE-MAKING, AND GUSTATORY IDENTITY 18 CHAPTER 2. LANDSCAPES IN THE MIND: PERCEPTION, PLACE, AND IDENTITY 62 CHAPTER 3. STATUS, CLASS, AND IDENTITY 97 CHAPTER 4. IMMIGRANTS AND AGRICULTURE: A CASE STUDY 143 CHAPTER 5. IMMIGRANTS AND POLITICAL REPRESENTATION: A CASE STUDY 176 CHAPTER 6. IMMIGRANTS AND POLITICAL MOBILIZATION 204 CONCLUSION 234 BIBLIOGRAPHY 241 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation is a study of European immigrants in the rural Midwest during the era of mass migration.1 Most such studies have focused on collective experiences. Some scholars have sought to generalize about a single nationality group, often with reference to some kind of organized activity such as religion, politics, or education. Others have examined small rural places dominated by one immigrant group, or explored assimilation and “Americanization” in an ethnically mixed settlement. These studies have expressed a shared desire to generalize, to find the “typical,” to identify the “community,” to scrutinize the organizations, structures, and cultural forms that tied people together as a collective. While recognizing the shortcomings of essentialism and showing deep concern for the ways in which the social world is constructed (at least in recent years), scholars have nevertheless directly or indirectly looked for “essences,” and for summary characterizations of the experiences of large groups, formulated in striking book titles. Thus rural German-speaking women were “contented among strangers” while Norwegians saw their “promise fulfilled.”2 The emphasis on collective experience is understandable. Recent scholars have rightfully sought to correct an earlier view of the frontier as a place of unrestrained individualism, as the historical record shows nineteenth century migrants and immigrants joining together to create a wide variety of formal and informal institutions. Furthermore, 1 For the purposes of this dissertation, the “era of mass migration” may be loosely defined as the period from about 1830 to 1925. We are now in a second era of mass migration, but it obviously involves few Europeans migrating to the rural Midwest. 2 Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, Contented among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Odd Lovoll, The Promise Fulfilled: A Portrait of Norwegian Americans Today (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 2 students of immigration history have worked to discredit early work which placed an undue emphasis on the immigrant as an alienated, uprooted person adrift in a society of atomistic individualism and rapidly losing all connection with the old country and its culture.3 As a multitude of studies have since demonstrated, many immigrants (and even their children and grandchildren) retained strong ties to specific ethnic cultures and attempted to maintain some connection with those cultures in American contexts. Some have gone so far as to label this a “transplantation” of culture from Europe to the United States. Although this dissertation will express some doubts about the theoretical possibilities and historical realities of such a transfer of cultural practice from one physical and social environment to another, the emphasis on community and cultural continuity has been a much needed corrective to the still common myth of a nineteenth- century “melting pot” which rapidly submerged cultural differences and made communal identities irrelevant. But there remains a need to consider immigrants as individuals, simply because all the sensory, mental, and emotional experiences of human beings are encountered by the individual, however much these experiences are conditioned, modified, and interpreted by means of collective norms, discourses, and conceptual apparatuses. Focusing exclusively on the social determinants of immigrant experience reduces human differences to a set of social, cultural, and economic variables and implicitly denies the importance of the raw immediacy and unpredictable contingencies of individual 3 The fullest expression of the old view was Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951); the beginning of the new orthodoxy was Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted,” in Journal of American History 51 (1964): 404-417. The most comprehensive work taking “transplantation” as its central theme, although limited to the study of urban immigrants, is John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 3 existence. Even in the nineteenth century, with the moral and intellectual discipline of the nation-state and the capitalist system converging to establish translocal norms of respectable conformity, human thought and behavior could not be reduced to simple formulas.4 Individual life-stories and psychological idiosyncrasies continued to affect how people experienced and interpreted their existence and how they acted toward others. Historians and others dabbling in the study of the human world have perhaps been too eager to employ the tools of the modern surveillance state, to “see like a state,” as it were.5 They have embraced the procedures of classifying, quantifying, and ordering people according to governance-relevant characteristics used to promote the rationalization of the bureaucratic state. Although helpful in producing many kinds of knowledge, these strategies may have led scholars in the humanities and social sciences to place too much emphasis on those elements of human experience that can easily be measured. One of the primary aims of this dissertation is therefore to divert attention away from the institutional world of immigrants’ churches, schools, families, and communities, and to venture beyond the study of the preservation of highly visible collective traditions into the world of individual experience. Thus a more open-ended view of cultural adaptation can be adopted, as we try to imagine a post-migration reconfiguration of individual identities that despite the influence of overarching social imperatives varied considerably depending on context, personality, and life-stories. Only then can the seemingly trivial events of everyday life be re-instated to historical significance as the 4 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: 1780 – 1914 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003). 5 The term is borrowed from James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). 4 often traumatic or transformative experiences they were. This approach is not meant to imply that those scholars primarily concerned with institutional and communal features of immigrants’ lives and identities have been in error. Instead, it is meant to complement previous work by utilizing a different perspective. In order to fully explore the possibilities of this new perspective, I have chosen to study a wide range of phenomena related to the lives of immigrants in the rural Midwest in the age of mass migration from about 1830 to the 1920s. As the coverage of themes ranging from foodways to political representation indicates, the emphasis has been on arriving at a multifaceted end product rather than answering a single question in a cohesive, linear fashion. Nonetheless, several recurring themes contribute to joining the disparate parts into a whole. One of the most prominent themes is what I choose to call displacement. This is a deliberate effort to interrogate the concepts of agency and reproduction so frequently employed in recent literature on the European immigration