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CHAPTER VIII.
Economic Forces at Work

In the many monographs and more pretentious works dealing with various phases of the economic history of the United States, much attention has been given to the tariff, manufacturing, banking, currency, transportation, and public lands. Only recently have the economic results of immigration begun to receive the attention which their importance deserves. For a long time the excellent work of Professor Richmond Mayo-Smith, Emigration and Immigration (1890), notable for the strength and breadth of its general treatment, was quite alone in its field. Mere statistical studies no longer suffice, and just as the census-taking of the Federal Government has changed from the simple, old-fashioned inventory of numbers – so many heads, black and white, native-born and foreign-born – to an elaborate investigation of the life problem of the population, so the meaning of immigration as a whole, and of Scandinavian immigration in particular, requires a discussion extending beyond annual and decennial statistics and maps of the density of settlement.

In the economic development of the Northwest, as compared with the history of the Eastern, Middle, or Southern States during the nineteenth century, the three principal topics are immigration, the Federal land policy, and improvements in transportation. In a peculiar manner the last two subjects are interwoven with the story of the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes in America. When people by the hundreds of thousands were settled in the West, when commerce and manufacturing arose upon the sound basis of a prospering agriculture, then and not till then, protection, currency, and bimetallism might be accepted as real and immediate issues.

The Scandinavian immigrants along the frontiers, like the other pioneers all through the prairie west, were from the first vitally interested in securing some form of cheap transportation of the produce of the farms to a good market; railroads were indispensable to the development of the agricultural areas of the Great West. Western Pennsylvania might find profit in 1794 in shipping the quintessence of its agriculture across the mountains in demijohns; the cattlemen of the South and Southwest might drive their products to market on the hoof; but at the very best these were exceptional, inelastic, and primitive methods. Many pioneer Norwegians and Swedes in Minnesota and Iowa were obliged to carry their wheat and corn forty and fifty miles to have it ground for their families, but they could not hope to haul any great amount of ordinary farm produce over the abominable roads of the West for a distance greater than forty miles and make a profit.¹⁸⁴ Without the hope of railroads, the vast stretches of cereal-producing land in the trans-Mississippi would long have remained virgin soil. Yet without assurance that population would rapidly increase in numbers and in complexity of life, thus giving a large traffic in both directions, no railroad company would build out into the thinly settled area.¹⁸⁵

Broadly speaking, then, the real problem of the Northwestern frontier after 1850 was: how to put more and ever more men of capacity, endurance, strength, and adaptability into the upper Mississippi and Red River valleys, men who first break up the prairie sod, clear the brush off the slopes, drain the marshes, build the railroads, and do the thousands and one hard jobs incident to pioneer life, and then turn to the building of factories and towns and cities. Not every sort of man who could hold a plow or wield a hoe would do: Chinese coolies, for example, would hardly be considered desirable, even with all their capacity for hard work, persistence, and patience. Furthermore, it is plain now, that the West could not have looked to the Eastern States alone to send out an industrial army sufficient in numbers and spirit for the conquest of the new empire and the extraction of its varied resources at the desired speed. The demands were too severe, the rewards too remote and uncertain for the average prosperous native-born citizen. The aliens from the western side of the Atlantic, as it were by regiments and battalions, must re-enforce the companies westward-bound from the older States; in such a situation the Scandinavians were all but indispensable to rapid material progress in the Northwest after the middle of the last century.

It is not easy to realize how attractive to the Northland immigrants were the broad, level lands of the West, to be had from the United States Government on the easiest of terms, both before and after the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862. Scarcely in their dreams had they conceived of soil so fertile, so readily tilled, and so cheaply acquired. To speak to a Norwegian from Thelemarken, to a Swede from Smaaland, or to a Dane from the misty, sandy coast of Jutland, about rich, rolling prairies stretching away miles upon miles, about land which was neither rocky, nor swampy, nor pure sand, nor set up at an angle of forty-five degrees, about land which could be had almost for the asking in fee simple and not by some semi-manorial title – this was to speak to his imagination rather than to his understanding. The letters from immigrants to their old friends in Europe continually dilated on these advantages, sometime with a curious mingling of humor and pathos. One of these communications, which was printed as a small pamphlet in 1850, sets forth in large letters, that the land was so plentiful that the pigs and cattle were allowed to run at will.¹⁸⁶ What more could be asked of Providence by a poor peasant or “husmand,” owing to his landlord, for the little strip of land on which he lived, the labor of two or three days each week?¹⁸⁷

These strictly economic advantages of soil and price were not the only attractions for the sons of the Northlands. Both the traveller and the prospector for a site for a settlement were deeply impressed by the general appearance of the rolling country of the Northwest with its abundance of streams and lakes. During her visit to Wisconsin and Minnesota in the fall of 1850, Frederika Bremer saw with quite prophetic vision, the possibilities of the region:

“What a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become! Here would the Swede find again his clear, romantic lakes, the plains of Scania rich in corn, and the valleys of Norrland; here would the Norwegian find his rapid rivers, his lofty mountains, for I include the Rocky Mountains and Oregon, in the new kingdom; and both nations their hunting fields and their fisheries. The Danes might here pasture their flocks and herds, and lay out their farms on richer and less misty coasts than those of Denmark… Scandinavians who are well off in the old country ought not to leave it. But such as are too much contracted at home, and who desire to emigrate, should come to Minnesota. The climate, the situation, the character of the scenery, agrees with our people better than that of any other of the American States, and none of them appear to me to have a greater or a more beautiful future before them than Minnesota. Add to this that the rich soil of Minnesota is not yet bought up by speculators, but may everywhere be purchased at government prices… There are here already a considerable number of Norwegians and Danes.”¹⁸⁸ The Swedish air-castle took material shape rapidly; during forty years the name Minnesota, even more than Iowa, or Wisconsin, was a name to conjure with among the laborers and would-be farmers of the old kingdoms.¹⁸⁹

Of the peculiar fitness of the Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes for this promotion of economic progress in a great section of the country, there is practically a unanimous opinion. A dispassionate, mature estimate is expressed officially by an agent of the British Government sent out to study the question of immigration in the United States. “It is generally admitted,” he states, “that physically, morally, and socially, no better class of immigrants enter the United States. In some respects they are the most desirable of all.”¹⁹⁰ A first-hand observer of their work as western farmers wrote in 1868 concerning the settlers in a Norwegian township in Minnesota, “They open their farms quicker, raise better stock than most any other class, and quickly become wealthy.”¹⁹¹ In a hearing before the Industrial Commission in 1899, Hermann Stump, a prominent German, testified that the Scandinavians “are really the best immigrants who come to the United States.”¹⁹²

While the Scandinavians were admirably fitted to become substantial citizens and to develop their own properties, and while the prospect of possessing a farm was the most potent and pervading influence affecting their movements after about 1850, the very high rate of wages paid in the United States, as compared with the wages in Europe, was everywhere an important factor among the immediate attractions. All of the western States, in the first decade of their growth, were exceedingly anxious to secure settlers who should take up and improve the vacant square miles, thus adding to the population and to the taxable values of the commonwealth. At the same time there was a large and steady demand for wage-labor; the farmers needed helpers; the construction of internal improvements, begun and projected, like the rapidly expanding railroad systems, could be carried on only by the aid of an abundance of laborers.¹⁹³

These needs could not be met by any considerable migration of laborers from the eastern States, for there the development of manufacturing and of transportation by land and by sea would operate to keep up wages and so to hold the laborers. The hard labor of the Far West, therefore, must be done, if done at all, by those who had not already found places for themselves in the industrial system of the United States, and for such services a good rate of wages would be paid, or at least a rate sufficient to draw the desired labor. In 1851 the $15 per month received by some Swedes working as farm hands near Buffalo, New York, was considered “big wages.”¹⁹⁴ At the same time laborers on railroad construction in the West were receiving $.75 and $1 per day. Whether measured as real or nominal wages, these rates were certainly higher than even the average skilled laborer could earn in Norway or Sweden.¹⁹⁵ Tho the wages in the peninsular kingdoms rose considerably from 1850 to 1875, there was still at the later date and afterwards a large differential in favor of the American scale, whether for skilled or unskilled laborers. The experienced agricultural laborer in the fields of Illinois or Wisconsin received two or three times as much as the corresponding worker in Norway and Sweden, while in new States like Minnesota the multiple was even greater.¹⁹⁶ Still more marked were the differences between skilled laborers, such as carpenters and smiths, in America and Europe even after the panic of 1873.¹⁹⁷

The eloquence of these figures, and of the conditions behind them, was not left to do its work by chance in the private letters of immigrants or in the occasional pamphlet. States and counties, as well as railroad corporations disseminated very widely and systematically the knowledge of the opportunities open to the laborer in the great West. If he were a man who would progress from a temporary tho necessary factor in construction or in the field, to a permanent settler taking up vacant land, so much the better for the State and the corporation. Fortunately for those great railroads, which were pushing construction and receiving large subsidies in public lands, they found just such men in the Swedes and Norwegians. As the Rock Island railroad pushed across Illinois and Iowa, as the Northern Pacific built out through Minnesota and Dakota, and as the road now known as the Great Northern carried its lines from St. Paul into the Red River valley, and on across North Dakota, the Scandinavian and the Irishman supplied the demand for labor front 1850 to 1890, in precisely the same way as the Italian, Pole, Mexican and Greek have been doing in later years.

When construction of a railroad ended, the demand for immigrants merely changed its form and became cumulative. The dividends of any railroad running out into a new country depend on the development of the tributary territory, and this is especially true of the land-grant roads which owned half of the land within ten miles of their tracks. Thus it came about that the Scandinavians were doubly valuable, first as laborers for wages, and second as independent farmers in the townships made accessible by the new lines.¹⁹⁸ It was, indeed, faith in human nature, and especially Swedish and Norwegian human nature, which led to the construction and profitable operation of hundreds of miles of new roads in Minnesota and Dakota after 1880. One prominent railroad man estimated that each settler (presumably each head of a family) meant in the long run from $200 to $300 a year for the railroad.¹⁹⁹

The fulfilment of the expectations of the builders of railroads and commonwealths was often surprisingly prompt. The prophetic insight of at least one “captain of industry,” President James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway Company which built its transcontinental system without land-grant, was as sure a reliance for capital as the subsidy of the federal Government. Speaking in 1902 at Crookston, in the center of the great Scandinavian region in northwestern Minnesota, he described in striking terms the growth of farm values, and of the railroad business in some of the towns in Minnesota and North Dakota: “I took the best towns [of the Red River valley] outside Crookston [for comparison with towns in North Dakota]… I will give you the annual business. Warren’s last year’s railroad business with our company was $86,000; Hallock, $94,000, – a respectable sum; Stephen, $87,000; Ada, $81,000… Langdon [in North Dakota] … away up towards the boundary, upon Pembina Mountain, $210,000; Osnabrock, I hardly know where it is myself, $101,000; Park River, $170,000; … Bottineau, away at the west end of the Turtle Mountains, where a few years ago people said it was too far away; could not live there and could not raise anything if they did live there, $258,000… Land up there [around Bottineau], worth $3, $5, and $8 an acre, and a few pieces $10 an acre, a few years ago, is worth today $25 and $30 per acre.”²⁰⁰

The railroads left nothing undone to stimulate the economic desire of the Scandinavians to migrate to their particular sections of land and to the adjoining government sections. Several companies maintained for years regular immigration or land agents, besides a considerable and variable corps of sub-agents, port agents, and lecturers; some of them paid the expenses of men representing groups of prospective immigrants, who desired to visit and report upon a particular locality. The St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railroad advertised in “Facts about Minnesota” (1881): “The settler – his family, household goods, live stock and agricultural implements – will be carried from St. Paul to any point on either of our lines at one-half the regular price.”

Besides these efforts and inducements, the railroad companies prepared handbooks in different languages, distributed them widely throughout the East and West, and circulated them systematically in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.²⁰¹ A few of the companies even sent special representatives to Europe to work directly with the people of those countries. The Hon. Hans Mattson left the office of Secretary of State in Minnesota in 1871 to become the liberally paid European agent for the Northern Pacific Railroad whose resources he was to advertise from his headquarters in Sweden.²⁰² He was not, however, to organize regular parties of emigrants. A high official of one of the northwestern roads summed up the matter by saying, “There is as much competition among the railroads desiring to attract immigrants, as among dry-goods stores in aiming to attract customers.”

The northwestern State governments were hardly less interested in inducing immigrants to help fill up the vacant square miles and townships than were the railroads, for developed farms meant towns, diversified industry, and greater assessment values, which, being translated, meant much-needed public buildings, institutions, and improvements. The competition of the States, for immigrants such as the Norwegians, re-enforced and parallelled that of the railroad and land companies. Wisconsin appointed a Commissioner of Emigration in 1852, who resided in New York, and employed a Norwegian and a German assistant.²⁰³ The following year another Act created a Traveling Emigrant Agent, and prescribed that he should “travel constantly between this State and the city of New York,” to advertise “our great natural resources, advantages and privileges, and brilliant prospects for the future.”²⁰⁴ Pamphlets by the thousand in German, Norwegian, and Dutch were sent out in America and Europe. The office was abolished in 1855, but in 1867 another Act created an unpaid Board of Immigration and appropriated $2,000 for printing pamphlets in English, Welsh, German, and the Scandinavian languages.²⁰⁵ The State even went so far, in a later Act, as to authorize the Board, in its discretion, to help with money, “such immigrants as are determined to make Wisconsin their future home.”²⁰⁶

The Board was succeeded by a Commissioner (Ole C. Johnson) in 1871, whose office was in turn abolished in 1874. The story of Wisconsin’s later organizations for promoting immigration ought almost to go into the chapter on politics – a new Board in 1879, abolished in 1887, renewed for two years in 1895, and revived for another two years in 1899.²⁰⁷ In 1880, at the request of the president of the Wisconsin Central Railway Company, K. K. Kennan, agent of the land department of that company, was also appointed agent for the State in Europe, without expense to the State.²⁰⁸

For the same purposes, and with the same methods, Iowa had a Commissioner, 1860-1862, and a Board (of which the Rev. C. L. Clausen was a member), 1870-1874, which sent agents to Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, where they published articles in the newspapers and stirred up emigration sentiment.²⁰⁹

Minnesota, likewise, in 1867 created a Board of Emigration, and Hans Mattson was appointed secretary. He proved a very efficient officer, and not the less so because at the same time, as he admits, he acted as land agent for one of the great railroad companies, whose line went through Wright, Meeker, Kandiyohi, Swift and Stevens counties.²¹⁰ Of the work of the Board, Mattson gives a convincing summary: “In the above-named localities there were only a few widely scattered families when I went there in 1867, while it is now (1891) one continuous Scandinavian settlement, extending over a territory more than a hundred miles long and dotted over with cities and towns, largely the result of the work of the board of emigration during the years 1867, 1868, and 1869… Our efforts, however, in behalf of Minnesota brought on a great deal of envy and ill-will from people in other States who were interested in seeing the Scandinavian emigration turned towards Kansas and other States, and this feeling went so far that a prominent newspaper writer in Kansas accused me of selling my countrymen to a life not much better than slavery in a land of ice, snow, and perpetual winter, where, if the poor emigrant did not starve to death, he would surely perish with cold. Such at that time was the opinion of many concerning Minnesota.”²¹¹

The secretaries or commissioners of immigration were usually men of alien birth or extraction, and therefore intelligent and sympathetic in their labors for succeeding immigrants.²¹² Probably no State gave better care, guidance, and protection to foreigners coming as settlers than did Minnesota, and naturally, with a Swede as commissioner, the Scandinavians were “preferred stock.” The work of the Minnesota commission included the appointment of interpreters to meet immigrants at New York, Montreal, and Quebec and accompany them to Minnesota; provision for temporary homes for the new-comers until they went to their chosen locality; and wide publication of newspaper articles in different languages. Pamphlets containing maps and detailed descriptions of States and counties were distributed at railroad stations and on steamers, in America and in foreign countries.²¹³ It would be stretching the truth a little to say that these circulars sent out by States, counties, and railroad companies were always strictly accurate and ingenuous, but they brought the desired results, not in one campaign alone, but year after year. Taken as a whole the energies of the State and railroad agents, were honorable, well-managed, and highly beneficial to both the States and the immigrants. The best evidence for this statement lies in the figures of the censuses of 1880, 1890, and 1900 for the population of Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.²¹⁴

The value of so many tens of thousands of immigrants added to the assets of western commonwealths, – so many scores of thousands of “hands,” to make use of the colloquial term for labor units, – is at once great and difficult to measure or estimate. In economic terms, how much is a full-grown, healthy, intelligent, literate young man worth to a community into which he drops himself, for is he not as much a finished labor-performing machine as a new traction engine or a span of mules, either of which the assessor would set down in his books? The risks and pains and costs of up-bringing through unproductive years, of educating, of training for occupation, have all been borne by another community; the increment of wealth arising from his labor, providence, and skill will enrich the United States.

Yet it is not a fair test of the value of an immigrant to this country to measure it by the cost of his bringing up and education, either by the standards of his old home or by the American standards. Professor Mayo-Smith pointed out the fallacy in the oft-quoted estimate of Kapp, made up on this basis, that “the capital value of each male and female immigrant was about $1,500 and $750 respectively, making an average of $1125.”²¹⁵ Dr. Young, formerly Chief of the United States Bureau of Statistics, chooses as a basis the “market value” rather than the “cost of production,” and estimates the approximate yearly addition made by each immigrant to the realized wealth of the country in the form of farms, buildings, stock, tools, and savings, to be about $40, which, capitalized at 5 %, gives $800 as the value of each immigrant.²¹⁶ An interesting German calculation in 1881, made in much the same way as Dr. Young’s, put the capital value of each immigrant at $1,200.²¹⁷ Another method of gauging the amount contributed to the earnings of the country by each immigrant, is to multiply the average daily wage of $1 by one-fifth the total number of immigrants, and that by 300, the number of working days in the year.²¹⁸ Taking the values of the immigrant over fourteen years of age and under forty-five, as $1000, and estimating conservatively that 80 per-cent of the foreign-born enumerated in the census of 1900 reached the United States between those ages, the Scandinavians so enumerated represented a capital value of about $850,000,000, to which the immigration from the North countries in the next five years added not less than $230,000,000. Viewed from one point, this capital was just so much given by the gods of plenty to accelerate the development of the West.

Another phase of the economic advantages of Scandinavian immigration has to do with the cash capital brought by the incoming thousands. While the first Norwegians were of the poorest class of the community, who escaped from unfavorable conditions almost empty-handed, squeezed out from the bottom of society, as it were through cracks and crevices, and while many of the later arrivals have had no other capital than strong hands and equally strong determination, the great proportion of adults have brought with them average sums variously estimated from $22 to $70 each. G. H. Schwab of New York, whose firm was general American agent for the North German Lloyd Steamship Company, estimated the average money or money equivalent brought by the Scandinavians, at $22 per head, probably including children in the calculation.²¹⁹ W. W. Thomas, Jr., Commissioner of Immigration for Maine, and later minister to Sweden, states that 900 Swedes who came to Maine in one year, besides clothing, tools, and household goods, had $40,000 in cash; and elsewhere he puts the average at $50 per head.²²⁰ The figures from Wisconsin, which received better material than the average, would naturally run higher; in 1880 the official estimate of cash brought by each immigrant was “from $60 to $70.”²²¹ Assuming an average of 50,000 Scandinavian immigrants per year for the last thirty years, – a safe minimum – and an average of $50 cash per capita, the annual addition to the cash capital of the country would be at least $2,500,000.

Whatever may be gained in this way is, however, offset by the steady stream of remittances flowing from America to Northern Europe, especially during the last quarter of a century, and by the large sums spent by the thousands of erstwhile immigrants returning to their old homes for a winter or for a vacation.²²² Many a son, prospering in America, has contributed regularly to the support or added comfort of his parents or family in the fatherland; every holiday season swells the mail sacks with letters containing money-orders and drafts. During 1902 at least $1,000,000 was sent to Norway alone.²²³ In the last two months of 1903, it is estimated that $3,000,000 went from the United States to the Scandinavian countries in these personal remittances.²²⁴ Another sort of remittance which does not immediately take the form of cash, is the prepaid ticket for passage to an American port, sent to friends and relatives to assist them to emigrate. The United States consuls at Bergen and Gothenburg reported that about one-half of the emigrants from Norway and Sweden in 1891 made the journey on tickets sent from America.²²⁵ In this connection, it should be noted that the money thus spent by immigrants is not in the nature of a permanent investment of hoarded earnings; it is not the remittance of “birds of passage” like some Italians, for example, who will shortly follow it. In comparison with the millions of dollars sent home by Italian immigrants in an average year, the Scandinavian remittances and spendings are almost insignificant.²²⁶

From the first, great numbers of the immigrants have come with no other capital than strong and willing hands, stout hearts, and an unchanging land-hunger. They served for a time as laborers on the older farms, in town, in the lumber camps, or in railroad construction, saving their money, learning American ways, and acquiring some English, but as soon as money enough was saved, perhaps in a year, to buy forty or eighty acres of government land at the minimum price, a yoke of oxen or a team of horses, and a few necessary farm tools and implements, the prospective farmer moved upon new land and started out for himself. Under the Homestead Act of 1862 the amount of capital required for the beginning of operations was greatly reduced, and it was under this act that the lands of the northwestern States beyond the Mississippi were so rapidly taken up.²²⁷

A typical illustration of the process described is found in Levor Timanson, who came with his father in 1848, at the age of eighteen, to Rock County, Wisconsin, where he worked for several years as farm laborer, carpenter, and mason. He visited Iowa and Minnesota in 1853 in search of satisfactory land; finding it at Spring Grove, in the latter State, he settled down there as a grain and stock farmer. In 1882 he owned 840 acres of land of which 550 acres were under cultivation.²²⁸ A study of the histories of counties and townships in eastern Iowa and Minnesota, and of the biographies which usually accompany them, reveals clearly the fact that the larger part of the Scandinavian farmers resident in those counties in the sixties and seventies spent from one to five years in Wisconsin or Illinois before moving into the Farther West.²²⁹ They were in turn apprentices and journeymen, and finally attained to the full dignity of masters of their own estates.

The economic as well as the social importance of the tendency of the Scandinavian immigrants to settle upon the unoccupied farm lands of the West, can scarcely be over-emphasized. It gains still more striking significance when the figures showing such settlement are compared with those of some other races which have more recently contributed largely to the immigrant population; for the man who owns and develops a farm necessarily makes a permanent, long-time investment of himself and his family in a reproductively extractive industry; while the wage-earner in the mines or in lumbering is quite likely to be a “bird of passage,” engaged in destructively extractive industries, with only vague notions of, or longings for, citizenship and its responsibilities. Professor John R. Commons, perhaps the best statistical authority on this subject, gives some striking figures illustrative of the farm-ward tendencies of different alien elements, showing the percentage of total number of males in 1890 engaged (1) on farms, (2) as farmers and planters, and (3) as laborers not specified:²³⁰

From calculations based upon the reports of the censuses of 1870, 1880, and 1890, it appears that one out of four of the Scandinavians was in the last year engaged in agriculture; of the Americans, one out of five; of the Germans, one out of six; and of the Irish, one out of twelve.²³¹

One of the very natural consequences of the tendency of the Norse immigrants to seek agricultural locations, and to seek them along the advancing frontier, is the township and even the county, particularly in Minnesota and the Dakotas,²³² peopled almost solidly with the men and women of one nationality. The names of post-offices and townships, and the assessment rolls of the counties, bear witness to the density of these settlements which were made up of immigrants in both the first and second stages, composed in part of people coming from the older colonies like those in Dane County, Wisconsin, or Henry County, Illinois, or Goodhue County, Minnesota, and in part of newcomers direct from their Old World homes. About 1880, the names of those whose land abutted upon the two railroads traversing Houston County, Minnesota showed plainly this process of massing. Taken in order, the first twenty-two names were those of American, Irish, and German settlers; then followed nineteen, all Scandinavian save two.²³³ Fillmore County, Minnesota, one of the older counties, largely Norwegian from its beginning, and Chisago County, on the eastern border of the same State, a stronghold of the Swedes from its first settlement, are excellent examples of the economic contributions made to the State by the Scandinavian element through its development of the wilderness into cultivated fields and prosperous villages. Of the transformation of Dakota before 1890, and the part of the sons of the North in it, a writer says: “Most of them came with just enough to get on Government land and build a shack… Now they are loaning money to their less fortunate neighbors… Every county has Norwegians who are worth from $25,000 to $50,000, all made since settling in Dakota.”²³⁴