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Down to the close of the Civil War the Scandinavians exercised very little influence in State politics. Here and there one or two of them appeared as members of conventions or of the legislatures, but even in Wisconsin the number rarely went above two in a single session of the legislature.³⁶⁵ By 1870 many of the Norwegians and Swedes were well-to-do, while others who had served in the Civil War returned to their homes with the prestige conferred by honorable service in that great struggle. Furthermore, the suspicion with which foreign-born citizens had been viewed was greatly reduced, if not dissipated, by the highest evidence which any man can give of his patriotism and loyalty to his adopted country. No one might thenceforth deny them any of the rights, privileges, and honors of the political gild. Accordingly the number of them elected to the legislatures in the Northwest after 1870 increases noticeably both in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and in the Dakotas, where rapid material development and growth of population furnished unusual political opportunities which the Norwegians and Swedes were not slow to improve.

In the Wisconsin legislature of 1868 sat 2 Norwegians; in 1869, 3; in 1871, 4.³⁶⁶ In Minnesota, the figures are striking: 1868, 2 Scandinavians; 1870, 4; 1872, 9; and 1873, 13.³⁶⁷ Since then the percentage of Norse representatives has steadily grown, tho it is not always easy to determine the racial stock from which a native-born officer came. Recent Wisconsin legislatures had apparently out of a total membership of 133, in 1895, 5 Scandinavians; in 1901, 10 (1 Dane, 1 Swede, and 8 Norwegians); in 1903, 6.³⁶⁸ The Minnesota legislature of 1893 had 9 out of 54 senators, and 20 out of 114 representatives, who were of Viking origin – fully one-sixth of the total membership.

In the legislatures of 1899 and 1905 the numbers were as follows:³⁶⁹

In the newer States to the West, the percentages rise still higher. In North Dakota, the legislature of 93 members contained 17 men of Scandinavian parentage in 1895, and 18 in 1901 – 16 Norwegians (4 American born), one Dane, and one Icelander.³⁷⁰ Unofficial figures for 1904 gave the Scandinavians 38 out of 140 members.³⁷¹ South Dakota in 1894 had 15 Norwegians (5 native-born) and 5 Swedes, in a legislative body of 127; in 1897, 17; in 1903, 16; and in 1904, 17.³⁷²

In the executive and administrative departments of State government, as distinguished from the legislative, the participation of the Scandinavians notably increased after 1869. In the summer of that year, a Scandinavian convention was held in Minneapolis for the express purpose of booming Colonel Hans Mattson for the office of Secretary of State in Minnesota. Of his fitness there was no doubt, for in addition to holding local offices in Goodhue County and his service in the army, he had for two years served as Commissioner of Emigration. The Republicans took the hint and nominated him almost unanimously in September, and his election followed. He served one term at this time and by re-elections filled the same office from 1887 to 1891.³⁷³ So frequently have Swedes and Norwegians been elected to this office both in Minnesota and in the Dakotas that it might almost be said that they have a prescriptive right to it.³⁷⁴ In the thirty-seven years ending in January, 1907, the Swedes filled the office in Minnesota sixteen years and the Norwegians four years.³⁷⁵ Other State offices like those of Treasurer, Auditor, and Lieutenant Governor, not to mention commissionerships and appointments to boards, have also been frequently filled by Scandinavians in the States of the Northwest.³⁷⁶

The first Scandinavian to reach the eminence of a governorship was Knute Nelson, an emigrant from Voss, near Bergen in Norway, in 1849, who, after service in the Civil War, was elected in succession to the legislatures of Wisconsin and Minnesota and to the Congress of the United States. Nominated by acclamation for governor of Minnesota on the Republican ticket in 1892, he was elected by a plurality of 14,620 votes; two years later he was unanimously re-nominated, and re-elected by a plurality of more than 60,000 votes.³⁷⁷ He served only one month of his second term, accepting election to the United States Senate, to the disappointment, not to say the disgust, of many who had voted for him for Governor, who considered him in duty bound to serve in that capacity after accepting their suffrages.

The second Scandinavian governor was a Swede born in Smaaland, who landed in the United States in 1868 at the age of fourteen – John Lind. Passing up through such political gradations as county superintendent of schools, receiver of the United States Land Office, and Republican representative in Congress, he allied himself with the free-silver movement of 1896 and became the Fusion candidate for governor of Minnesota. Opposed by the leading Swedes who remained loyal to the Republican party, he was defeated by a small majority, tho supported by many of the Norwegians. The Spanish War, in which he served as quartermaster of volunteers, gave him a new claim to popular favor, and when he again ran for governor in 1898 he was elected by a combination of Democrats and Populists, turning his former deficiency of 3,496 into a plurality of 20,399.³⁷⁸ This victory was due more to a revolt against the Republican candidate than to clannish support of a Swede by Swedes, for the two strongholds of the Swedes, Chisago and Goodhue Counties, went Republican as usual, while the German and Irish wards of St. Paul and Minneapolis gave majorities for Lind.

The third of Minnesota’s Scandinavian governors came into office under circumstances of distinctly dramatic character. John A. Johnson was born of Swedish parents in the State over which he was to be made ruler; at the age of fourteen he became the support of his mother and of the family, save the inebriate father who was sent to an almshouse where he died. When nominated by the Democrats in 1904, Johnson had been for eighteen years editor of a country newspaper printed in English. The Republicans, especially their candidate for governor, a coarse-grained, distrusted, machine politician, endeavored to make political capital out of the fact that Johnson’s father died in the poorhouse. The Democratic leaders persuaded Johnson with some difficulty to let the plain truth be told, and told on the stump – and Johnson, the son of a Swedish immigrant, a man from a small, interior city, a Democrat in a State strongly Republican as a rule, won by a plurality of 6,352 votes in a Presidential year, when Theodore Roosevelt carried the State by 161,464.³⁷⁹ Two years of vigorous but quiet administration brought the reward of a renomination and re-election in 1906 by a plurality of 76,000.³⁸⁰ Again in 1908, another presidential year, Governor Johnson was re-elected by 20,000 plurality, though Taft received a plurality of 85,000.³⁸¹

The death of Governor Johnson in October, 1909, made the Republican Lieutenant Governor, Adolph Olson Eberhardt, the fourth Scandinavian executive of Minnesota. He was born in Sweden, the son of Andrew Olson, and came to America in his eleventh year. He added Eberhardt to his name by permission of the proper court in 1898 because several other persons in his community also bore the name of Adolph Olson. Governor Eberhardt reached the governor’s chair by various business and political experiences – as a lawyer, contractor, United States Commissioner, deputy clerk of the United States District and Circuit Courts, State senator, and lieutenant governor. He was re-elected in his own right in 1910 by a plurality of 60,000, and again in 1912 by 30,000.³⁸²

James O. Davidson rose to the governorship of Wisconsin through long service in subordinate capacities. Of Norwegian birth, immigrating in 1872, he was elected to the Wisconsin legislatures of 1893, 1895, 1897; twice chosen State Treasurer; elected Lieutenant Governor on the ticket with R. M. LaFollette, and upon the election of the latter to the United States Senate succeeded him as governor in January, 1906. In the summer of that year Senator LaFollette vainly stumped the State to prevent Davidson’s nomination for Governor on the Republican ticket, and in the election that followed the Norwegian-born, soundly-experienced Governor was chosen by the handsome plurality of 80,247 votes.³⁸³ In 1908 he was re-elected by a plurality of 76,958.

Still further up the political scale, men from Northwestern Europe have been taking an active part in national affairs. Sixteen of them have been elected to the House of Representatives of the Federal Congress. The first one to achieve this high position was Knute Nelson who sat in the House from 1883 to 1889 as the Representative of the Fifth Minnesota District. In 1895 he was chosen United States Senator and has served continuously since March 4, 1895.³⁸⁴ Others who have served for several terms in the House are: Nils P. Haugen, a Norwegian representing a Wisconsin district from 1887 to 1895; John Lind, a Swede, who represented the Second Minnesota District from 1887 to 1893; Asle J. Gronna, who was a member of the House from 1905 to 1909, and succeeded Johnson as Senator from North Dakota, serving up to the present time; Gilbert N. Haugen, another Wisconsin-born Norwegian, who has represented the Fourth Iowa District since 1899; Andrew J. Volstead, a Minnesota-born Norwegian, who has sat for the Seventh Minnesota District since 1903; and Halvor Steenerson, born in Dane County, Wisconsin, of Norwegian stock, who has represented the Ninth Minnesota District since 1903.³⁸⁵ Martin N. Johnson, who was born of Norwegian parents in Wisconsin, had his first legislative experience in the Iowa legislature, sat in the House as representative at large from the new State of North Dakota from 1891 to 1899, and then, after a period of retirement, was sent to the United States Senate from the same State, serving from March, 1909, until his death in October of the same year.

An analysis of this list of Representatives shows that eleven of the sixteen were Norwegians of the first or second generation of immigrant stock, four were Swedes, and one a Dane. Six of the eleven were born in America, three of them in the old Wisconsin settlements; only one of these represented the district in which he was born, the rest receiving their reward in the newer western sections into which they had migrated with the movement of population beyond the Mississippi.

Different Federal administrations have deemed it wise to “recognize” the Scandinavian among other elements of the political population, in making appointments in the diplomatic and consular services of the United States. One of the most notable instances is that of the selection of John Lind, the former governor of Minnesota, as the personal representative of President Wilson in Mexico during the troubled months of 1913 and 1914 and as adviser to the United States embassy in Mexico City during the period following the recall of Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson. Another instance of appointment in this service is that of Lauritz Selmer Swenson, a Norwegian of the second generation, born in Minnesota, who was minister to Denmark from 1897 to 1906, and later received appointments as minister to Switzerland and to Norway, terminating the latter in 1913.³⁸⁶ Rasmus B. Anderson represented the United States at the Danish court from 1885 to 1889, being at that time a Democrat. He was born in Wisconsin of pure Norse parentage, and had served as professor of the Scandinavian languages in the University of Wisconsin.³⁸⁷

The appointment of Nicolay A. Grevstad as minister to Uruguay and Paraguay in 1911 was a fitting recognition of ability combined with long and able service to the people of the older, or middle, Northwest as editor of the Minneapolis Tribune, the Minneapolis Times, and the great Chicago daily, Skandinaven (1902-1911). Hans Mattson, a Swedish veteran of the Civil War, was consul general at Calcutta from 1883 to 1885;³⁸⁸ Soren Listoe, the Danish editor of Nordvesten of St. Paul, Minnesota, was consul at Düsseldorf, 1882-3, consul at Rotterdam, 1897-1902, and consul general at the same city, 1902-1914.³⁸⁹ At Rotterdam he succeeded L. S. Reque, a Norwegian from Iowa. Several other men have served for long terms in minor positions in the foreign service.³⁹⁰

CHAPTER XII.
Party Preferences and Political Leadership

The great majority of the Scandinavians, prior to 1884, were thoro-going and uncompromising Republicans, and tho the party still holds most of them, profiting largely from their natural conservatism and their loyalty to a principle, it can by no means depend upon them with the assurance it had in the “good old days” when to find a Scandinavian voter in the Northwest was to find a Republican.

The causes which determined the early party affiliations of the naturalized sons of the Vikings, in the broad area of State and Federal affairs, are to be found in the character of the immigrants themselves and in the great questions agitating the country at the time they became citizens. Coming to the United States with an endowment of natural independence, with an innate respect for government, and with an inclination for public concerns, their interest was at once actively aroused in the great problem of slavery that vexed national life from the time of the Sloop Folk to the Civil War. As their information about the slave system grew more exact, and as the tremendous significance of the restriction of the slave area as a cardinal political issue was made clear to their minds, they became of one mind in the mighty agitation. Neither they nor their ancestors for hundreds of years had held slaves; few of them had ever seen a slave, for their numerous traders and sailors, with slight exceptions, had no smell of blood of the African slave trade on their hands.³⁹¹ It was not chance, therefore, which kept the stream of North European immigrants from flowing into the South and Southwest; no attractiveness of climate or soil could compensate for the presence of Negro slavery. A horror and hatred of slavery colored their thinking from their first month in the New World; it was first a moral, then a political, conviction, not the sentiment of individuals, but the well-reasoned opinion of the whole community.

Bound together on this great question, then so dominant, they naturally maintained unity on other political questions as well as on slavery; and when once their ideas were fixed, any change would be effected slowly and with difficulty. The newcomers, in their first months in the older settlements, were speedily indoctrinated with anti-slavery sentiment. Thus it came about that one party received and retained the vast majority of the Scandinavians down to 1884, simply because a bent that way was given in the early years of immigration from the Northern peninsulas, and because the question of the status of the Negro, in one form or another, continued to be a political issue.

The first appearance of the Norwegians in State politics in Wisconsin, as already noted, was under the Free Soil banner between 1846 and 1848, when that State was endeavoring to form a constitution. The first constitution submitted to the people, in 1847, was rejected by a large majority, including a separately-submitted provision granting equal suffrage to Negroes. While the State decisively voted thus, the counties in which the Scandinavian vote was largest – Racine, Walworth, and Waukesha – showed large majorities in favor of giving the Negroes political privileges equal to those of the Whites. On the other hand, counties where the German votes were numerous stood solidly against equal suffrage, seemingly because in the constitutional convention the question of Negro suffrage was coupled with that of the granting of suffrage to foreign-born, in a way that greatly displeased the Germans.³⁹² When the second convention finished its constitution, in 1848, resolutions were introduced to provide for printing and distributing translations of the document, 6000 copies in German, and 4000 copies in Norwegian, a hint of the relative strength of the two groups.³⁹³

The relation of James Reymert and his Nordlyset to the Free Soil movement has been mentioned. When the Democratic papers mercilessly criticised the little sheet and poked fun at its name, the paper was sold by Reymert to Knud Langeland in 1849, and by him removed to Racine; the name was changed to Demokraten, but the politics of the paper were not affected.³⁹⁴ As a political organ among the Norwegians, it was ahead of the times; the support of the paper was insufficient to pay the bills, and it was discontinued in 1850. The Norwegian immigrants were unaccustomed to a purely secular press; they preferred to have their politics wrapped up in papers labelled “religious.” Langeland declares that many of them considered it a sin to read a political newspaper.³⁹⁵ But the Free Soil sentiment was too strong to go without printed expression in Norwegian; and accordingly the propaganda continued in the form of speeches of Chase, Seward, Hale, Giddings, and other anti-slavery leaders, which were translated into Norwegian and mixed in with non-political matter in Maanedstidende, a paper whose publication, after the failure of Demokraten, Langeland undertook along with four clergymen, Clausen, Preuss, Stub, and Hatlestad.³⁹⁶

As they read these speeches of the great leaders, as they heard from Negroes themselves the evils of slavery, as they learned of the high-handed doings in Kansas, the zeal of the Scandinavians for human freedom increased. There were no old party traditions, feelings, or feuds, to keep them from judging the issue of slavery’s expansion on its merits; no loyalty to the memories of dead heroes held them in mortmain. Some few of them voted for Cass in 1848 and for Pierce in 1852, but by 1856 there was only one issue for them: simply and straightforwardly and almost to a man, they became Republicans.³⁹⁷ The Democrats, of course, did not let the children of the North go without an effort to secure them in their ranks. In 1856 Elias Stangeland of Madison, Wisconsin, started a Norwegian paper, Den Norske Amerikaner, in support of James Buchanan. His efforts to get Langeland to undertake the editorship failed because the latter was an ardent admirer of Fremont. The paper had a short life, and probably Langeland is right in attributing its disappearance to the withdrawal of the Democratic subsidy.³⁹⁸ A long time was to elapse before a successful attempt would be made to maintain a Democratic paper in Norwegian or Swedish.

What the anti-slavery agitation left undone towards making the Scandinavians unswervingly Republican, was accomplished by the Civil War. The lingering glories of the golden age of the Democracy of Jackson and Jefferson were entirely obscured by the attitude of the Democratic party toward the conduct of the war. Only when the memories of the Civil War grew less vivid and less influential with new arrivals from the Old World, and not until moral questions were superseded in political discussions by economic questions relating to the tariff, currency, and labor, did the Scandinavians begin to arrange themselves in any considerable numbers outside the Republican ranks.

Four times during the last thirty-five years the Scandinavian voters in large numbers, under varying circumstances and in different degrees in different States, have abjured Republican leadership. After each such excursion they have returned, for the most part, to their old party relations, but never with quite the same fervent, reliable zeal for Republican principles and candidates. The development of the bacillus of independence is unmistakable. One defection affected Wisconsin alone, the only instance where the Democrats profited directly by the votes of large numbers of Scandinavians. At a later time, when the Free Silver and Populist ideas took strong hold on the Northwest, the Scandinavian vote re-enforced the personal popularity of John Lind, the Swedish candidate of the Populist-Democratic party, and secured his election, tho the rest of the Fusion ticket suffered defeat.

The first time Norse voters broke from the Republican ranks was in connection with the Greenback movement which began with the depression following the panic of 1873 and culminated in the election of 1880. Many of them, especially the Swedes in Illinois, became out-and-out Greenbackers or Independents. In his book on the Swedes in Illinois, published in 1880, C. F. Peterson gives brief biographies of some seven hundred Swedes, men of all walks of life above day laborer, who may be considered as representatives of the 40,000 Swedes in Illinois at that time.³⁹⁹ At least they represent the classes which would be least likely to be led off into economic heresies. Of 628 whose party affiliations are stated, 472 were Republicans; 76, Independents; 55, Greenbackers; and 25, Democrats or Prohibitionists. In other words, out of the total number canvassed, more than twenty per-cent were dissenters from Republican orthodoxy.

The relation of political and religious sentiment is strikingly illustrated in analyzing these biographies, for those who were Lutherans or Methodists were usually Republicans in politics, and proud to belong to “the party of moral ideas.”⁴⁰⁰ Those stating their religious preferences as Lutheran numbered 388, and of these only 10 were Democrats, 16 were Greenbackers, and 19 were Independent. On the other hand, of 131 who belonged to the three political parties last mentioned, 87 were in religion also Independent, Free Thinkers, or “Ingersollites”. For States other than Illinois, no such complete contemporary data are available; but since the Greenback vote in Minnesota was only 2 % of the total, and in Wisconsin 3 %, it is fair to assume that the Scandinavians did not desert the Republican standard in very large numbers in those States.

The second case of considerable defection among the Republican Scandinavians occurred after the widespread development of agrarian discontent in the late eighties. The farmers and laborers, American and Scandinavian alike, felt the stress of hard times, turned to political agencies for relief, forsook the old parties, and formed the party called variously the Populist, People’s, and Farmers’ Alliance Party. Besides those Norwegians and Swedes who had been for years Republicans, whose political color was fixed by the mordant of slavery and the Civil War, there was then a very large number of men who arrived in the vast immigrant invasions between 1880 and 1885, and who were just coming into the full exercise of the rights of citizenship. An increasing proportion of these later arrivals went to the large cities and towns. All of them were moved less by the traditions of “moral ideas” and more by the contagious discontent of the older settlers and by the arguments of industrial and political agitators.

In the election of 1890 a serious break occurred in the Republican Party in Minnesota and in the Dakotas. There was a general impression in the rural districts of Minnesota that the Republican candidate for governor, William R. Merriam, a wealthy banker of St. Paul, was renominated for his second term by a political ring composed of lumber-kings, wheat dealers, and millers who combined to cheat and rob the farmer. Accordingly the Farmers’ Alliance nominated a third ticket headed by S. M. Owen, the editor of an agricultural paper in Minneapolis, who polled a vote of 58,513, and reduced Merriam’s vote of 1888 by about 46,000.⁴⁰¹ Merriam was re-elected by a plurality of less than 2,500, tho he had had more than 24,000 two years before.

A careful examination of the votes for 1888 and 1890 in such strong Scandinavian counties as Otter Tail, Douglas, Chisago, Freeborn, Polk, and Norman leaves no doubt that the Swedes and Norwegians in very large numbers either voted for Owen, or refused to vote for Merriam.⁴⁰² In some cases the Republican vote fell off one-half and even two-thirds, and third-party Alliance candidates for the legislature were elected. A prominent Norwegian writer estimated that “25,000 Norwegian-born farmers turned their backs upon Mr. Merriam and voted for Mr. Owen for governor,” disregarding the injunction of the Scandinavian Republican press to “stick to the grand old party, for the grand old party is particularly favorable to the Scandinavians, and the best political party in America.”⁴⁰³

At the next state election in the presidential year, 1892, a Norwegian ran for governor on the Republican ticket, and a large part of the Scandinavian deserters wheeled into line and voted the Republican ticket. With a total vote only 15,000 greater than in 1890, the vote for the Republican candidate for governor increased in round number 20,000, for the Democratic candidate, 9,000, and for the Prohibition candidate, 4,000, while the vote of the Alliance or People’s party fell off 20,000.⁴⁰⁴

Conditions in North Dakota and South Dakota were even more favorable to the new party than in Minnesota.

Estimates based on a study of statistics and newspapers have been confirmed by prominent officials of those States, one of whom declares that “in some localities quite a per-cent has joined the Populist party; but it is very rare indeed to find a Scandinavian Democrat.”⁴⁰⁵ Another believes that a considerable portion of the Scandinavians voted the Populist ticket in 1892 and in 1894, but that they were normally believers in the protective principle and therefore naturally affiliated with the Republican party.⁴⁰⁶ A German lawyer of Valley City, North Dakota, a Democrat, practically agreed with the Norwegian city attorney of Devil’s Lake in the same State, the one saying that a large part of the Norse voters were Populists, the other declaring that the Populist party was largely composed of Scandinavians.⁴⁰⁷ All agreed that these voters later tended to return to their former Republican alliance. It may be doubted, however, whether the hold of the protection idea is one of the primary reasons for Scandinavian Republicanism. At any rate the vote of the Hon. Knute Nelson for the Mills Bill for tariff revision in 1888 – one of six Republican votes for the measure – did not make him politically persona non grata or a suspicious character among his Norwegian or Swedish brethren.

Another index of the shifting of political sentiment among the Norse voters is found in the changes in the party affiliations of Scandinavian newspapers, tho the varying importance of these journals imposes special caution in interpreting these figures. It would be obviously unfair to offset the staunch and well-supported Republicanism of the ably-edited and widely-circulated Skandinaven of Chicago with the less stable Normannen of Stoughton, Wisconsin, which had not one-third the circulation nor one-tenth of the influence of the metropolitan journal.⁴⁰⁸ The “mugwump spirit” of the press is well illustrated by the case of Norden, a Norwegian weekly of Chicago, Republican up to 1884, when it took an independent attitude. In 1888 it became avowedly Democratic and supported Grover Cleveland for the presidency. This move was made only after the proprietor and editor assured themselves that the patrons of the paper would sustain them in the proposed change.⁴⁰⁹

Of the secular political Scandinavian papers published in Minnesota in 1889 nine were Republican – five Norwegian or Norwegian-Danish, four Swedish; three were Democratic, – all Norwegian; two were Prohibitionist, – one Norwegian and one Swedish; and one was Labor, – Norwegian.⁴¹⁰ In the next five years, the independent press in Minnesota and other states increased in numbers at least, and included such influential journals as Amerika and Folkebladet. George Taylor Rygh, professor of Scandinavian languages in the University of North Dakota, estimated in 1893 that “until a few years ago over four-fifths of the [Scandinavian] secular press were strictly Republican in politics. One after another has ceased to defend the Republican party, and today not more than one-third of the whole number are strictly Republican.”⁴¹¹ While this personal opinion or impression is probably exaggerated, it may represent approximately the temporary state of that year if proper emphasis be laid on the word “strictly.” Since there appears to be no evidence that these papers, with two or three exceptions, were subsidized to induce their change of political creed, it is reasonable to conclude that they had behind them a solidified constituency, for they were run neither for personal amusement, pure philanthropy, nor mere partisan propaganda.

The third defection occurred in Wisconsin alone, and took its rise in a purely local question. Its interest lies in the peculiar and remarkable temporary alliance to which it led. The Wisconsin Legislature passed an act, approved April 18, 1889, “concerning the education and employment of children.”⁴¹² To the ordinary provisions for coercing parents and children, so that all children between the ages of seven and fourteen years should attend at least twelve weeks in some public or private school in the city or town or district in which they lived, nobody objected. But the fifth section of the act, which was known as the Bennett Law, was in certain church circles, like a dash of vitriol in the face:

“No school shall be regarded as a school under this act unless there shall be taught therein as a part of the elementary education of the children, reading, writing, arithmetic, and United States history, in the English language.”

The last four words of this section, innocent and reasonable as they look to the average American, stirred up one of the bitterest political fights ever known in Wisconsin. The Roman Catholic church, unalterably committed to a system of parochial schools in many of which instruction is given in a foreign language, was for once in accord with the German and Scandinavian Lutherans who maintained similar schools. The compulsory use of English in instructing pupils in specified subjects turned priests and pastors and whole congregations into active, vociferous politicians, for Germans, Norwegians, Poles, and Bohemians claimed the right to educate their children in parochial schools of their own choosing. Was not education education, whether carried on in English or German or Polish or Norwegian? Were not the graduates of church schools, even tho they spoke English brokenly or with brogue, just as intelligent, just as capable, just as industrious, and just as honest, as those educated in the “little red school house” and the public high school?⁴¹³ The chairman of the Lutheran Committee on School Legislation stated the matter clearly from the standpoint of the churches: