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In comparing statistics of such counties as Fillmore and Chisago, showing their growth in wealth and productivity, as reported in the decennial census, two facts regarding the nativity and parentage of the population must be kept clearly in mind if the full significance of the work of the men of alien stock is to be appreciated: first, that the increase of the foreign born is largely made up of adults; second, that the increase of the native-born is in reality an increase of the purely Norwegian or Swedish element, the sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of foreign-born parents, for the census-taker, even in 1900, did not penetrate beyond the first degree of ancestry.

The tabulation given in Appendix II illustrates the economic progress of three Minnesota counties in which the Norse factor has been strong from the early days of their settlement: Fillmore, Chisago, and Otter Tail, one of the newer counties in the west-central part of the State. From these figures some conception of the influence of the North European in one American commonwealth may be obtained. These are not unique cases, but rather they are what might be called normal counties of their class, counties whose population is made up more or less of good native-born settlers from the older Eastern States.

Several processes already discussed will be easily and forcibly illustrated by these tables. In Fillmore County, for example, the oldest of the three, the increase of the foreign-born element was most rapid in the decade 1870-1880, while during the next ten years there was a distinct falling off, due beyond any doubt to the rise in the price of lands in that county and to the opening up of new counties like Otter Tail where just as good land was to be had at the minimum rate. This falling off was paralleled in the same decade in Chisago County, while both the rise and decline in the number of foreign-born Norwegians going into Otter Tail County occur in the two later decades, 1880-1890 and 1890-1900, when the Dakotas were filling up.

The continuing additions to the acreage of farm lands and the steady transformation of unimproved areas into improved areas, indicate the extent to which the labor of alien hands was enhancing the value of the prairies even down to 1900, and presumably since that date. The figures for the increase of the cash values of the farms, including fences, etc., but not improvements, have been chosen because the increases in the total valuations of counties is not infrequently due to the rise of considerable villages and cities, and to the building of railroads, and to these enterprises in contrast with the evolution of agricultural values, the Scandinavian is a comparatively insignificant contributor. The extent to which this development of rural areas may go, is curiously evidenced in the names of the subdivisions of the relatively new Otter Tail County. Of its sixty-two townships in 1900, not less than thirteen bear unmistakable Scandinavian (Norwegian) names – Aastad, Aurdal, Norwegian Grove, St. Olaf, Tordenskjold, Throndhjem, etc.

The price which the immigrant-agriculturist was willing to pay for his coveted free-hold farm was not measured in dollars and cents alone. In a very real way, the land was to become the property of the highest bidder, tho each one paid $1.25 per acre; the land was sure to go to him who would in the long run put the most of himself into the bargain – muscle, courage, patience, pride in his family, and the future of himself and his family as over against the present. It was due in no small degree to the composite nature of this individual investment by the man from Europe’s Northwest, that he so promptly and intelligently succeeded in acquiring free of debt his farm and home in the American Northwest.²³⁵

Another reason for his nearly uniform success lies in the fact that he was brought up to a more careful and intensive system of farming than his average American neighbor. Perhaps, too, he works harder than the American, but hard work, long and unflinchingly continued, is a fundamental condition of the success of a farmer whatever his nationality. From the Scandinavian immigrant’s point of view, he does not work so hard in the United States, in order to gain a given result, – ownership of his own farm, for illustration, – as he would have had to work in the land of his birth. Personal interviews with scores of men in various parts of the Northwest confirm the opinion expressed to Miss Bremer in Wisconsin so far back as 1850, when pioneering was as hard as at any time since the “Sloop Folk” landed in New York: “About seven hundred Norwegian colonists are settled in this neighborhood, all upon small farms… I asked many, both men and women, whether they were contented; whether they were better off here or in old Norway. Nearly all of them replied, ‘Yes, we are better off here; we do not work so hard, and it is easier to gain a livelihood.’”²³⁶

In a discussion of the competition of the immigrants with American laborers, an eminent scholar maintains that the Scandinavians of the West have succeeded where the American with a better start has failed.²³⁷ He questions if this success is a survival of the fittest, if it has not been purchased at the expense of American labor which is forced elsewhere, because the Americans will not endure the hard work and live on the coarse fare, through which the immigrants win their success.²³⁸ However true this might be as a generalization about immigrants as a whole, it can hardly be true of the Swedes and Norwegians, except in so far as they have been more willing than the native American to live the life of a pioneer and to stick to the soil. But this cannot fairly be called forcing out American labor, or driving the American to the wall; immigrant labor went in where there was no labor of any kind. Furthermore, up to 1890, there was certainly plenty of land for all the American, or native-born, laborers who desired to devote themselves to that sort of work by which the Scandinavians were gaining their independence. If the agricultural land of the vast West be looked upon as a national asset, to be held for cautious and discriminating distribution to examined and approved settlers, then it may be that the foreigner has occupied land which might have sometime fallen to a better man.

The standard of living among the Scandinavian settlers, whether on the frontier or in the towns, has not been very different from that of their American neighbors. It cannot vary much in a sod-house on the prairie, in a cabin on a claim, or in a log-hut in a clearing, whether the occupant be of Viking or Puritan descent.²³⁹ The food was Indian corn, sometimes ground in a coffee-mill, occasionally wheat, milk, fish, wild fowl, pork, and common vegetables; the clothing was often primitive and always rough, and in the early days, at least, “men in wooden shoes and home-made woolen jackets were no uncommon sights at their religious meetings, or even when they were locked in holy matrimony before the altar.”²⁴⁰ But with prosperity, Americanization, and the settling up of the region about them, they took to comforts and luxuries just as soon as they could afford them. During the autumn of 1886 the writer spent more than six weeks in the family of a well-to-do Danish farmer in central Minnesota, and made frequent calls at the homes of Swedish and American neighbors; very little perceptible difference could be observed in the standards of living, whether judged by furniture, dress, or food. In the gradations up to the wealthy families of the larger towns and cities, the same statement would be true. If any modifications were to be made, it would be that Scandinavians set a more bountiful table, and give more attention than the Americans to festivals and celebrations.

The men of Scandinavian stock have by no means devoted themselves exclusively to agriculture, tho it has already been shown how dominant with them is the desire for the possession of land and the independence which that possession brings. In business – trade, manufacturing, and finance, – and in the professions, in all that differentiates the village or urban community from time rural, they have, especially since 1890, played an active part. A rising percentage of skilled laborers and of those who had in the Old World experience with business affairs, marked the immigration from Northern Europe after 1880. The accumulated wealth of the earlier immigrants sought investment in the thriving towns of the newer commonwealths of the Northwest. Villages which sprang up along railroads, became cities with the advent of other lines; water power has developed fast; the forests were to be turned into lumber and its further manufactured products. The Scandinavian villages and wards of great cities evolved their own stores, shops, factories, and banks just as they did their churches, lodges, and other social organizations, manned by men of ambition, ability, skill, and resourcefulness.

Both in the cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, Rockford, and Madison, and in the more homogeneous villages of the solidly Scandinavian counties, Norwegian and Swedish merchants and tradesmen, catering to Americans as well as to persons of their own nationality, rapidly achieved success and fortune. Seven years after landing, a Swedish immigrant is reported in 1873 to have built up in Anoka, Minnesota, the largest grocery establishment in that section, doing an annual business of $100,000.²⁴¹ In the city of Minneapolis one of the largest department stores west of Chicago, and probably the greatest Scandinavian business house in the country, is that of S. E. Olson & Co., which does a yearly business of about $2,000,000, and in the height of the season employs more than 700 persons.²⁴² Scattered over the Northwest are scores of enterprising Scandinavian individuals and firms engaged in business as merchants, grain-dealers, contractors, etc., whose annual business passes $100,000.²⁴³

The manufacturing industries in which the Swedes and Norwegians play the more active part are those closely related to agriculture and the forest – the cutting and sawing of lumber, the manufacture of furniture, and the manufacture of agricultural implements. By foresight and shrewd investments in timber lands in Wisconsin and Minnesota, a certain Norwegian immigrant accumulated nearly a million dollars; a Swedish immigrant in like manner built up the C. A. Smith Lumber Company of Minneapolis, one of the great manufacturers of the upper Mississippi Valley, with works occupying seventy acres, employing upwards of 800 men, and with branch lumber yards situated in western Minnesota and in the Dakotas.²⁴⁴

The manufacture of furniture is the chief occupation of the Swedes of Rockford, Illinois, who comprise fully one-third of that city’s population of 30,000. In 1875 fifteen Swedes organized the Forest City Furniture Company, with a capital of $50,000; ten years later, Rockford was the second city in the country in the production of furniture, and in 1893 there were more than twenty furniture companies with a capital varying from $50,000 to $200,000. Nearly all of these companies were organized on the co-operative basis, nearly all were composed of Swedes, and nearly all were earning a clear profit of 20 per-cent and upwards.²⁴⁵ Other notable instances of successful Scandinavian manufacturers are John A. Johnson, whose works for making agricultural implements in Madison, Wisconsin, employed about 300 men; the great printing and publishing house of John Anderson & Company of Chicago, from which are issued the daily and weekly editions of “Skandinaven,” and the Swedish-American Publishing Company of Minneapolis, publishing the widely circulated “Svenska Amerikanska Posten.”²⁴⁶

The economic progress of the immigrants from the Northlands may well be gauged by the number of public and private banking establishments in the Northwest controlled by them. Surprisingly numerous are the men who, after gaining a competency as merchants, grain-dealers (one of these built twenty-five elevators along the Great Northern Railway), land speculators, and lumbermen, have turned to banking as their communities developed. The market for capital was active, ready to absorb large or small amounts; rates of interest ran from ten to twenty per cent.; the thrift and honesty of the Norse folk were equivalent to a bond. Hence small banks with $25,000 and $50,000 capital multiplied, not always on the soundest basis, it should be said, though this does not imply dishonesty. In Minneapolis, between 1874 and 1900, the names of no less than six Scandinavian banks appear, the largest becoming the strong Swedish American National Bank with a capital of $250,000.²⁴⁷ Smaller cities like Sioux City and Boone, Iowa, have developed similar sound banks capitalized for $100,000. Not all Scandinavian bankers, however, have escaped the temptations of “high finance,” though the total of failures is comparatively small. One of the most notorious and shameful examples of bank-wrecking in recent years occurred in Chicago in 1906, when Paul O. Stensland, for years the trusted and honored and admired president of the Milwaukee Avenue State Bank, the depository of hundreds of working men and small tradesmen, wrecked the bank through speculations in real estate, fled to Africa, and was brought back and placed in the Joliet prison for a term of fifteen years.²⁴⁸

As the regions into which the Scandinavian immigrants have gone so determinedly as agricultural settlers have gradually become more complex in their economic structure, these men and women have once more illustrated their notable capacity to adapt themselves to the new conditions and to share in new advantages. The second and third generation will probably develop much the same tendency city-ward which the Americans of the same class show so markedly; and they will take their share of the honors and emoluments of business, manufacturing, banking, the technical professions, and the so-called learned professions.

CHAPTER IX.
The Religious and Intellectual Standpoint

The social results of the settlement of a body of aliens in any country, as compared with the economic, are far more undefinable and elusive, even when the settlement is compact and homogenous, like that of the Dutch in New York or the French in Louisiana. But when a particular element, like the Irish or the Scandinavian, in a complex population, is distributed over a wide area, with accessions running through three-quarters of a century, the problem of its social influence and importance becomes vastly more difficult. No study or observation of such a well-established racial group, outside of the purely statistical, at best can reach far beyond an impression or an individual opinion; it cannot arrive at a convincing and conclusive scientific deduction.²⁴⁹ Looked at in its length and breadth, the question of social results of Scandinavian immigration takes various forms. Have the foreign-born citizen and his immediate descendants adapted themselves rapidly and vitally to the best American customs in business, politics, education, and religion? Have they learned English quickly? What has been their attitude towards such questions as intemperance, slavery, and public honesty? Are they re-enforcing the best standards of public and private morality prevailing in the communities into which they come?

Fundamental to this discussion, is the general effect of the process of immigration and new settlement, upon the physical and intellectual state of the immigrant and his offspring. It has already been pointed out that the immigrants of the nineteenth century, like those hardy souls of the sixteenth, who left England, Holland, France, or Sweden, were the more adventurous and determined men and women of their parishes, and that the incidents and anxieties of settling up affairs in their old homes and of getting off for America, would stir to quicker thinking the minds of even the slow and inert. Then came the influence of adjustment to the ways of a new and larger world, with its greater distance, its more rapid communication, its more strenuous activities, its new language, and its different climate and diet; all these re-enforced the original, quickened impulse, and of necessity affected both subtly and powerfully the mind and body of two generations.

The change has in general been for the better, tho some observers think they see a retrogression, especially in physical respects. A Norwegian physician who spent about nine months in the United States in 1892, wrote for a Christiania medical journal an article in which he declared: “That the Norwegian race in the United States is declining physically, every one, I think, who has spent some time among our emigrated countrymen there must admit. But the change is a slow one.” The causes, as he saw them, were the unwholesome climate of the Northwest, the unsuitable food of the farmers, the cold, damp houses of the prairies, and the abuse of alcoholic liquors and tobacco. By way of final summary of opinions, he states that “the general rule is that, these dark sides to the contrary notwithstanding, the social conditions in America and its democratic institutions are conducive to individual thinking thereby contributing to the development of individual talent, great or small as that may be.”²⁵⁰

The views of Dr. Kraft were more or less disputed by several Norwegian physicians in the United States, in The North for January and February, 1893. Dr. Harold Graff, writing to the periodical in which Dr. Kraft’s article originally appeared, says: “With astonishing rapidity, the wide mouth and ungainly nose of the specific Norwegian peasant type become modified and disappear, the difference between the physiognomy and facial expression of parents and children being often bewilderingly great… I have interviewed some of the oldest and most experienced physicians practising in this country, and also other intelligent Norwegians who have travelled among their countrymen in the States, without as yet having heard any divergent opinion whatever. All agree that the Norwegian race in every respect is progressing in both mind and body.”²⁵¹ Others, who were not so sure of the physical improvement, agree as to the intellectual quickening. In a word, if the transplanting of the tree has not certainly produced an improved trunk or foliage, it has bettered the quality of the fruit. The next logical step is to attempt to estimate the value of such fruit in the American market.

The two obvious ways of determining the influence of a foreign element, are to compare it with some other foreign-born constituent longer and better known, and to compare it with the native American. The latter is the fairer criterion, but it is not easy to ascertain and define what are the purely American characteristics with which comparison is to be made. Statistics on social matters are so incomplete that reliance must be placed upon the consensus of opinion of thoughtful, sympathetic observers and students of American life, whether they be statesmen and philosophers bred in the United States, or scholarly, penetrating foreigners like James Bryce and Alexander de Toqueville.²⁵² Such men of insight agree that the American ideal comprises love of freedom, independence, and equality; respect for law, government, education, and social morality (including reverence for the family and the home); and lastly a willingness to share the common burden and, if need be, to make a common sacrifice for the permanent welfare of the commonwealth.

In acquiring the use of English and in maintaining high standards of education, the Scandinavians have an unimpeachable record which no other foreign, non-English-speaking element can equal. Illiteracy in Norway and Sweden is almost unknown. Taken together, these two kingdoms have less than one per-cent of illiteracy, and among the recruits in Sweden in 1896 only .13 % were unlettered, and only .63 % were unable to write.²⁵³ Personal acquaintance with many hundreds of Scandinavians, on both sides of the Atlantic, has failed to reveal to the writer a single adult who was unable to read and write.

One of the very first matters to receive attention in a Scandinavian settlement in the United States, has been the establishment of a school, and, as speedily as possible, the instruction has been given in English, partly because the school laws of most of the States would not recognize a public school conducted in a foreign language, and partly because the settlers desired to have the children know English.²⁵⁴ For a year or two in some of the isolated communities, as in Arendahl, Fillmore County, Minnesota, in 1857-8, it was necessary to conduct the schools in Swedish or Norwegian; but only rarely has any attempt been made to continue systematic, regular instruction exclusively in the mother-tongue by the maintenance of year-long parish schools. The immigrants have frequently been insistent, and properly so, upon some scheme by which they might be able to educate their children in the use of the mother-tongue; but schools for this purpose have usually supplemented rather than supplanted the ordinary public school.²⁵⁵ In a very few localities, like the older settlements in Goodhue County and Fillmore County, Minnesota, Allamakee County, Iowa, and Dane County, Wisconsin, parish schools are still maintained throughout the year.²⁵⁶

The church schools are more commonly a sort of summer vacation school supported either by the persons whose children attend, or at the expense of the whole congregation; in them are taught the language of the parents and the preacher, the church catechism, and something of church history; sometimes especial attention, as in the case of the Danish Grundtvigian “high schools,” is given to keeping alive the traditions of the European kingdom from which sprang the immigrants. The teacher of both the language and the doctrines of religion is customarily a student in some theological seminary of the denomination to which the congregation belongs. The Lutherans have kept up these vacation schools more consistently than any other Scandinavian church. The report of the parochial schools of the United Norwegian Lutheran Church for 1905 showed that on the average almost thirty days were devoted to the church school in each of the 750 congregations reporting.²⁵⁷

The clergy are mainly active in this mild paternalism, upon which the younger people not infrequently look with disfavor, for to the second generation it appears an unnecessary perpetuation of an un-American custom, a scheme for emphasizing peculiarities and differences rather than a means of hastening the process of amalgamation. Sometimes the younger men have revolted and broken entirely with the Lutheran church, identifying themselves with American congregations, or drifting out on the wide sea of religious indifference.

The loyalty of the Scandinavians to the public school system has been of far-reaching consequence to the immigrants themselves as well as to American society. There is always a more or less strongly marked tendency among aliens speaking a foreign language to congregate in groups in the country or in certain wards in large towns and cities, and out of this tendency springs a sort of clannishness which cannot be avoided and which is not peculiar to any class, for the immigrants naturally follow the lines of least resistance. They go to those whom they know, to those whose speech they can understand, to those from whose experience they may draw large drafts of suggestion and help. But this clannishness with the Swedes, Norwegians and Danes, has been but a stage in their evolution out of which, through the gates of the English language, public schools, naturalization, and increased prosperity, they have passed to broader relations. The filling up of the Scandinavian quarters of great cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Paul, may modify the effect of their persistent attachment to the public school; but so far the public school is the great foe to clannishness, and loyalty to it one of the best evidences of the desire of these people from the Northern lands to become Americanized. In the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, with their large Scandinavian population, there was not in 1907 a single parish in which the parochial school lasted through the year, and only a few in which vacation schools were maintained.

In higher education the Scandinavians have allowed their denominational zeal to outrun their judgment. They have founded numerous seminaries and so-called colleges, but almost invariably as a part of the necessary equipment of a religious denomination, for how could a self-respecting sect, no matter how young or how slightly differentiated from its older brethren, permit its children to attend the schools of those whose denominational beliefs or practices had become objectionable enough to warrant a schism in the church? A few of these institutions, like Luther College, at Decorah, Iowa, Gustavus Adolphus College at St. Peter, Minnesota, Augustana College at Rock Island, Illinois, and Bethany College at Lindsborg, Kansas, have maintained an excellent standard of work and exercise a wide and beneficent influence.²⁵⁸ The great majority, however, have simply wasted resources by the multiplication of ambitious, struggling, poorly-equipped, so-called colleges, with little or no endowment, and often dependent upon the congregations of the denomination which gave them birth.²⁵⁹

One of the results of the excessive splitting-up of the Scandinavian churches is that the energies which ought to be concentrated are frittered away on unnecessary schools. A separate denominational school and a family paper seem to be indispensable parts of the machinery of every newly organized sect, no matter how young or how small or how poor it may be.²⁶⁰ The number of these institutions continually varies with the ups and downs of the denominations trying to support them. In 1893, Mr. J. J. Skordalsvold, a graduate of the University of Minnesota, put the number of Scandinavian colleges, schools, and seminaries in the United States at thirty-six, with an attendance of about five thousand.²⁶¹ Sixteen of these, with an attendance of twenty-five hundred, one-half of the total, were located in Minnesota. By 1900 the sixteen had grown to twenty schools, having property worth $500,000, one hundred and sixty teachers, and three thousand students.²⁶² In that state, however, and in others like North Dakota, these schools are likely to follow the same course as many of the schools of other pioneering Protestant denominations, and become little more than preparatory schools on the one hand, or theological seminaries on the other, leaving to the State university the maintenance of higher education in every field save arts and theology. Even as secondary schools, not many of them will be likely to survive the third generation of the original immigrants, unless they are much better endowed than any one of them is at the present time.²⁶³ The Red Wing Seminary (Hauge Synod) of Red Wing, Minnesota, founded in 1878, is essentially an ordinary private secondary school with a theological course attached, and three-fourths of its work is conducted in English.²⁶⁴ Bethany College at Lindsborg, Kansas, one of the three prosperous Swedish colleges, and perhaps the most ambitious, is substantially an English-speaking college, with nine departments of instruction, and in 1912 a registration of 919. Only in the classes in Swedish language and literature is the instruction given in Swedish, tho “Swedish is required of all students preparing to enter the ministerial work of our Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church.”²⁶⁵ Luther College, the Norwegian institution at Decorah, Iowa, has followed along the same course only not quite so far. Several years ago the proportion between English and Norwegian as media of instruction was slightly in favor of the English in the college classes; in the classes in the preparatory department, in the literary societies, and in the conversation of the students, English was decidedly predominant.²⁶⁶ The practice of this, the oldest, and in some respects the soundest and most influential, of the Scandinavian colleges, is sure to be adopted by the lesser schools which survive their adolescence.

From a religious standpoint, the most noteworthy characteristic of Scandinavians wherever found, is their intense Protestantism. Everywhere and always they are uncompromising enemies of the Roman Catholic church, and there are barely enough Catholics among them in Europe and in the United States to prove that it is possible to convert one of them to that faith. In fact, their dislike of Catholicism is an instinct coming down from Reformation times rather than a matter of experience or close-at-hand observation; but so strong is this feeling that it colors, consciously or unconsciously, their relations in politics and society in the United States. Their distrust of the Irish is at bottom more a religious than a racial instinct, even when it takes an active form. While this dislike and suspicion are still real and large, it has undoubtedly been reduced by the breaking-up of the old rigid lines of Lutheranism, which has taken place in the last two decades in the United States.

Each of the three peninsular kingdoms of Northern Europe has an established Lutheran church, administered by bishops, which holds still the great majority of the people. Toleration has been generally practiced for a half century, the sole exception being the ban against Jesuits in Norway.²⁶⁷ Of all the Protestant churches, none is more rigidly orthodox than the Lutheran, none is more unwilling to admit changes in its traditional creed; only a few years ago, the Norwegian Synod in America re-affirmed its belief in the literal inspiration of the Bible. Yet in spite of this conservatism, the Lutherans settled in the United States have invariably rejected the episcopal form of government, and have organized upon a more or less democratic basis. No matter how loyal they were to the Establishment in the Old World, a bishop has not appeared to be necessary to their happiness or salvation in the New. The Lutheran Church proper has kept within its folds a much larger percentage of Swedes than of Norwegians in the United States, the characteristic independence of the latter leading many of them even farther than mere separation from the mother-church. The persistence of the centrifugal force of dissent shows itself again and again in the violent polemics and divisions which have marked the course of Norwegian church history in America.²⁶⁸ While this divisiveness may in some degree be due to the fashion set by the early settlers of whom many were dissenters, probably the deeper cause is to be found in the general freedom from religious restriction and prescription which characterizes the whole United States and especially the West.