| Scandinavian America
The Scandinavian immigrants not only built
new lives in the United States; they also built a new culture.
As immigrants from Scandinavia flooded into sparsely populated
areas of the U.S., they helped create a particularly Scandinavian
way of life, melding the varied religious, culinary, literary,
and linguistic traditions that they brought with them with those
that they found in their new country. During the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, in the Great Lakes states,
the northern Great Plains, and in enclaves scattered among northern
U.S. cities, a visitor might imagine that he or she was traveling
through a unique new nation—Scandinavian America.
Language and Education
As Scandinavian immigrants arrived in the U.S., they brought
a diverse group of native languages with them, and they quickly
established institutions to nurture and promote their linguistic
heritage. In Scandinavia, the official Lutheran Church had required
that all children be taught to read and write, and so Scandinavian
immigrants arrived in the U.S. with a very high level of literacy
in their native tongues. Wherever Scandinavians settled, Scandinavian-language
newspapers and publishing houses quickly sprang up. Over the
decades, more than 1000 Swedish newspapers and magazines were
founded, and over 350 Finnish newspapers. Some of the larger
papers, such as the Norwegian Decorah-Posten and the
Danish Bien, were read across the U.S. and became de
facto national newspapers for their respective communities.
Novels by Scandinavian authors were offered by some newspapers
as subscription premiums, and were also available in the Scandinavian
bookstores that appeared in most northern cities. In the 1920s,
Norwegian immigrant novelist Ole Rölvaag became the first, and
most celebrated, major Scandinavian immigrant author in the
U.S. when his novel Giants in the Earth was published
in both Norwegian and English.
Churches
also played a major role in preserving Scandinavian languages
in the U.S., as well as serving as important social institutions.
Most of the schools founded by new Scandinavian immigrants were
operated by churches and other religious institutions, and a
significant percentage of all Scandinavian-language publishing
was religious in nature, often sponsored or directly owned by
Lutheran synods. The first Scandinavian institutions of higher
education in the U.S. were also church-sponsored, including
the Swedish Augustana College in North Dakota, the Norwegian
Luther College in Iowa, and the Finnish Suomi College in Michigan.
Community
In their home countries, most Scandinavians had belonged to
a village hall or other organization, and as soon as immigrant
communities established themselves in the U.S., they set about
founding new social clubs. These societies—the Swedish
Vasa Order, the Finnish Knights of Kaleva, the Sons of Norway,
and the Danish Brotherhood, among many others—performed
crucial social-welfare functions, as they provided financial
aid to struggling families and offered unemployment benefits
to vulnerable immigrant workers. At the same time, they promoted
the language and culture of the immigrants' homelands and served
as all-purpose community centers, hosting local choirs, cooking
clubs, sports teams, and, in many Finnish social clubs, a community
sauna.
As the Scandinavian-American communities became more established,
some of these clubs became important forces in electoral politics,
and local politicians were eager to win their endorsement.
Some Scandinavians also marshaled the communal
spirit of their homeland to form collectively-owned businesses,
or cooperatives. Cooperatives had been well known in many Scandinavian
countries, especially in Finland, and Scandinavian America came
to be dotted with cooperatively owned farms, dairies, and stores.
Social Activism
The Scandinavian tradition of collective action also led many
immigrants to take active roles in American social reform movements.
From the 1840s on, Scandinavian immigrants were well represented
in the movement for the abolition of slavery, and with the onset
of the Civil War volunteered in great numbers to fight, overwhelmingly
for the Union.
Many Union companies consisted entirely of Scandinavians, and
one company, from the tiny Bishop Hill community in Illinois,
was made up solely of Swedes. At the turn of the century, the
writer and Danish immigrant Jacob Riis led a journalistic crusade
to expose the horrific living conditions endured by the inhabitants
of America's urban slums, which included many new immigrants.
Riis' book How the Other Half Lives, a classic of muckracking
literature, brought about a great wave of protest and led to major
housing reform in the U.S.
Many Scandinavians also took an active role
in the burgeoning U.S. labor movement. Swedish, Norwegian, and
Finnish miners and loggers participated in strikes throughout
the Great Lakes states and the mountain West, sometimes as members
of the radical Industrial Workers of the World union, also known
as the Wobblies. The Swedish immigrant Joe Hill, born Joel Hägglund,
was a prominent IWW member and wrote many of the union's rallying
songs. After Hill was executed for murder in 1914, under what
his sympathizers claimed were false pretenses, he became the
subject of folk songs himself. |
