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CHAPTER X.
Social Relations and Characteristics

While the normal unit in Scandinavian immigration is the family, a considerable proportion of the immigrants has consisted of young, unmarried men and women. Not infrequently the young man left behind him a sweetheart who followed a little later when a solid foundation was laid for the prospective family; or perchance, if sufficiently prosperous, he went back at some Christmastide to marry her and bring her to America. In any case, the farm meant a home, and the marriage back of it was generally between two of the same nationality. Still, intermarriages between Scandinavians and persons of American or of other alien stock, are not infrequent, tho the number and significance of such marriages is more a matter of personal opinion and estimate than of exact statistics, since the latter are lacking. The opinions expressed in this chapter are based upon the inconclusive figures of the census reports, upon a study of a large number of brief biographies, and upon a considerable acquaintance with conditions in the Northwest. The biographies, it should be noted, are almost exclusively of men of Scandinavian birth, whose intermarriage with American women is less common than that of American men with Scandinavian women.³¹⁹

Before the flood tide of immigration in the period beginning about 1880 brought to America so many young, unmarried women, intermarriages were more infrequent than in the later time. Hence the discussion of the matter in the Census Report of 1880 would not necessarily hold true for the subsequent period: “There is but one important element (other than the Irish) which manifests an equally strong indisposition to intermarriage, viz., the Scandinavian. This element appears in an important degree in but few of the States and Territories embraced in the following tables, but in these the effects of intermarriage are slight. Thus in Wisconsin, while there are 42,728 persons born on our soil having both Scandinavian father and Scandinavian mother, there are but 2,083 persons having a Scandinavian father and an American mother. In Dakota, the respective numbers are 10,071 and 418; in Minnesota 69,492 and 1,906… It will be noted that in some of the States and Territories where the Scandinavians are few and where it is notorious that they are thoroly mingled with the general population, the proportion of intermarriages is not a low one.”³²⁰ The figures for the children of such mixed marriages given in the reports of the Twelfth Census certainly reveal a decided increase in the number, especially when the necessary allowance is made for the decreasing birthrate naturally incident to the development of urban communities and to filling up of States, which took place between 1880 and 1900.³²¹

In these two decades, large numbers of young unmarried women, moved by the same economic motives as the young men, came to the United States and took service among the Americans as domestic servants. The demand for capable and well-trained servants far exceeded, and still exceeds, the visible supply, and the wages which seemed high to the American housewife seemed trebly high to the girl who received in cash wages in the old home only $20 or $30 per year.³²² In the new service the girls must perforce learn English rapidly or fail, so they learned the language and also the ways of the American household. In return they gave an honest, good-tempered, and trustworthy if sometimes clumsy service. If they were not always evidently grateful for the instruction and patience of the mistress of the household, if frequently they married soon after they were trained into efficient and satisfactory servants, they should not be condemned wholesale! While the marriages of these strong, healthy, intelligent, domestically capable young women with non-Scandinavian young men of the middle and lower classes constitute the larger proportion of intermarriages, the intermarriage of the American-born Scandinavian girls, trained in the public schools and colleges, with American men is also frequent, and no reservation as to the mixture of social classes needs to be made.

Large families have been a prominent characteristic of the home life of the Northmen in America’s Northwest. Race suicide should not be charged against the Scandinavians either in their new homes or in their old, for in spite of the steady drain which emigration has made upon the population of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark for fifty years, each country in each decade has shown an increase of population, due solely to natural increase.³²³ In America this natural fecundity was re-enforced by the conditions under which settlement was made, for large families are characteristic of the early years of a developing agricultural frontier. So when the Scandinavians entered the newly-opened regions of the Great West and found land and food abundant, both immediately and prospectively, they felt no necessity for enforcing prudential or other checks upon the increase of population. Putting the case more positively, circumstances put a premium upon families with numerous children; the farmer welcomed additions to his circle of boys and girls who would grow up into helpers upon the expanding cultivated acreage of the farm, and later take up land near the original homestead, buttressing it with prosperous allied homes. Families of ten and twelve were common, while others reached sixteen, eighteen, and even twenty-four.³²⁴ In his remarkably detailed reminiscences of Norwegian settlers in Wisconsin and the further Northwest, the Rev. J. A. Ottesen refers to families of his friends and acquaintances, sometimes in exact figures, as seven, ten, or fourteen children, and sometimes in such general phrases as “many children,” or “several children,” making use of these phrases no less than seventeen times in three columns of a single article.³²⁵

An examination of several thousand biographical sketches of Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes who have attained some degree of success in the American West, the very class which would first begin to limit the size of the family, leads to the conclusion that the average number of children per family among them is between four and five. In other words the average is nearly double that of the United States taken as a whole.³²⁶

Closely connected with this immigration of so many young, unmarried girls of the servant class, is the question of sex morality and illegitimacy. The statistics relating to this question are particularly unsatisfactory so far as the United States is concerned, even for a land where the scientific statistician is a recent product, and where the collection of social statistics, left mainly to the States and to local authorities, is very loosely carried on. The motives for concealment and for prevarication are obvious, and the records of municipal courts, even if closely inspected, would not give much more than a scant minimum of information applicable to an estimate of the Scandinavian element in the population.

To judge from the figures given for certain cities in Norway and Sweden, it would be natural to expect a much higher percentage of illegitimate births among the immigrants from those countries than among persons of American ancestry. The United States Consul at Stockholm reported for 1884 for the whole of Sweden that 10.2 % of all births were illegitimate; for the city of Stockholm alone, 29.3 %.³²⁷ Twelve years later the figure for the whole kingdom was 11 %.³²⁸ For Norway, the figure for the kingdom was 7.2 % for 1896; in the city of Christiania, 15.4 % of the 5,349 births in 1895 were illegitimate.³²⁹

Such statistics are certainly ominous, whatever the allowance which should be made for peculiar social conditions in Europe, which make the begetting of children after betrothal and before actual wedlock a less heinous offence against good order and morality than in America. But over against these startling figures stands the fact that it does not seem to be harder to maintain order and decency in cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul, or in the Scandinavian wards of Chicago, than it is in Detroit or Boston, or in the other alien quarters of Chicago itself. Nor does an inspection of the court and police records of cities of the Northwest for crimes and offences against decency, or against women, give cause for any special alarm for the future morality of the Scandinavians of that section.

For a safe and conclusive estimate of the contributions made by the Scandinavian element to the delinquent and defective classes of society, no very complete or satisfactory data are at present to be had. A detailed study of the statistics of these classes in Wisconsin and Minnesota warrants the judgment that the immigrants from Northern Europe, and their immediate descendants, have a much smaller percentage of paupers and criminals and a much larger percentage of insane, than do either the Germans or the Irish, the two other alien elements which approach the Scandinavians in importance in those States.³³⁰ But these statistics are at best unconvincing, because they are acknowledgedly incomplete, and because in them little attempt is made to distinguish between the children of American descent and those born of immigrant parents in America.

The experts working out the interpretation of the results of the Twelfth Census (1900) have made distinct progress towards a fair comparative judgment in matters relating to social classes and conditions. John Koren, for example, the son of the veteran Norwegian Lutheran pastor, the Rev. V. Koren, and an investigator and writer of unusual weight, points out that the insane in hospitals are at least ten years of age, while there are few children under fifteen among the immigrants as compared with the number under that age among the native whites, and he accordingly concludes that “Of the whites at least 10 years of age in the general population of the United States in 1900, 80.5 % were native and 19.5 % were foreign-born; while of the white insane of known nativity enumerated in hospitals on December 31, 1903, 65.7 % were native and 34.3 % were foreign-born. Relatively, therefore, the insane are more numerous among the foreign born whites than among the native.”³³¹ How much more convincing is such a cautious and careful estimate than the sweeping generalizations of another recent writer: “Roughly speaking, the foreigners furnish more than twice as many criminals, two and one-third times as many insane, and three times as many paupers as the native element.”³³²

The statistics for the insane in hospitals at the end of 1903 and of those admitted during 1904, as given by Mr. Koren, show a strikingly high percentage of insane persons of foreign parentage in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Iowa. No other State comes within ten per-cent of the ratio of the first three. Of those enumerated in December, 1903, 56 % in Wisconsin, 48 % in Minnesota, 52 % in North Dakota, and 34 % in Iowa, were of foreign parentage; the percentages of the admissions for 1904 were 53 % in Wisconsin, 55 % in Minnesota, and 33 % in Iowa.³³³ In all these States the Scandinavian element has been numerous for at least two generations. Figures gathered for this study for the period between 1885 and 1895, before the children of the Scandinavian immigrants reached in very considerable numbers what might be termed the age for acquiring insanity, gave similarly significant conclusions. Of the inmates of the state hospitals for the insane in Minnesota, the foreign-born Scandinavians were 28 % in 1886 and 30.7 % in 1890; of the admissions to the state hospital at St. Peter in 1890, 35 % were Norse. Of the total admissions for the State in 1900, 23 % were Scandinavians, while in the Fergus Falls hospital, located in the heart of a more recently settled Scandinavian area, 40 % were of that nationality; Wisconsin reports show like percentages.³³⁴ All of these statistics warrant the general conclusion that of all the foreign-born, the Scandinavians are the most prone to insanity.³³⁵

If one seeks for adequate reasons for this unusual tendency to insanity, he will not find ready satisfaction. Undoubtedly the difference of environment and the severer strain upon muscle and nerve imposed by American industrial conditions, by which the machinery of the individual must run at a higher and unwonted speed, will account for part of the phenomena, but these causes operate alike upon all classes of immigrants. The change from the mountains of Norway, or from the rugged sea-coast of the great Northern peninsula, to the rolling prairies and the vast silent plains of the interior of the United States, has also its depressing effect. The very flatness of the land, its extremes of temperature, the fierce tornadoes of wind, the bewildering, imprisoning storms of snow, with no friendly mountain or forest to offer a body of protection or a face of comfort, and the isolation of the life of the frontier farmer and his family, together with the severity of their labor – all these are causes operating with peculiar force in the case of the Norwegian and Swedish immigrants. Dr. Gronvald, writing in 1887, stated his conviction that the women of these classes, especially the Norwegians, were predisposed to nervous disorders and insanity by early and frequent child-bearing, and from early rising from child-bed.³³⁶

Since the Norse immigrants have rarely if ever been charged with illiteracy, dependency, pauperism or mendicancy, the remaining social test, usually considered co-ordinate with that for insanity, is the proportion of criminals contributed to the total of delinquents.³³⁷ Earlier computations must undergo the same severe correction as do the estimates regarding the insane. By 1885 there were in the Northwest large communities made up of the older Norwegian and Swedish settlers and their descendants, and other communities comprising great numbers of recently arrived immigrants. According to the State census of 1885 in Minnesota, the Scandinavians formed 16.5 % of the population, and the Germans, 11.5 %. The reports of the wardens of the State’s prisons for 1886 show 8.7 % of the prisoners to be Scandinavian, and 7.4 % German. The population of the State during the next five years grew rapidly; the Scandinavian element increased faster than the German and nearly twice as fast as the native American. Yet in 1890 the percentage of the prisoners who could be identified as Scandinavian was only 7.1 %.³³⁸

In Wisconsin, where the increase of population in the last ten years of the nineteenth century was in the native-born of Scandinavian parentage, rather than in the number of immigrants, the reports of the Waupun State Prison may be supplemented by those of the State Industrial School, the reformatory for first offenders between the ages of fifteen and thirty. In 1900, the foreign-born Scandinavian population of Wisconsin was 5 % of the total, and the Scandinavian population of foreign-born parentage was 10 % of the total.³³⁹ Of the prisoners received at Waupun, the Scandinavians were: 1891, 4.1 %; 1898, 4.4 %; 1900, 3.7 %. Of boys and young men received at the Industrial School, those of Scandinavian parentage were: 1890-1892, 7 %; 1896-1898, 6.5 %; 1900-1902, 6.6 %.³⁴⁰

In the matter of petty offences which are usually tried in the police courts, particularly cases arising out of intemperance, the records of convictions in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Chicago, together with the statistics of city prisons and workhouses, indicate that the Northmen are clearly the chief offenders.³⁴¹

CHAPTER XI.
The Scandinavian in Local and State Politics

The Scandinavian usually entered the field of politics rather slowly; he took out his “first papers” for the purpose of acquiring land, not that he might vote in the next election. In the early years of his settlement he was too busy building and paying for a home, learning English, and adopting American customs, to give much time or attention to public affairs. The clearing of woodland, the breaking up of the prairie, and the transformation of a one-room shack into a frame dwelling required severe labor and all his energies. Not until the leisure of some degree of success was his, did he yield to his natural inclination for politics of the larger sort.

The Norwegian, of all the men of the Northern lands, has the strongest liking for the political arena, and has had the most thoro political training at home. Since 1814 he has lived and acted in a community markedly democratic. He understands the meaning of the Fourth of July all the better because he, and his ancestors for two or three generations in their home by the North Sea, celebrated on the Seventeenth of May the independence of Norway and the advent of republicanism. His sense of individuality and equality is stronger than that of his cousins to the east or south, and he steadily and stubbornly fights for the recognition and maintenance of his rights. In 1821, before the first real immigrants sailed for the United States, Norway abolished nobility, while Sweden and Denmark still retain the institution. Equipped thus, and educated in such a vigorous school, it is the Norwegian rather than the Swede or Dane who figures most largely in the political activities of the American Northwest.

Several causes operating on the western side of the Atlantic augmented these natural advantages of the Norwegians. In their settlements they had ten or fifteen years the start of the Swedes, and in the formative period of Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Dakota they greatly outnumbered both the Swedes and Danes. They went into new States and territories, and, settling on farms, profited by the power which the rural portion of a developing region usually exercises in politics. On the other hand, tho the Swedes in Illinois since the early fifties, and in Kansas since the late sixties, have formed decidedly the larger part of the Scandinavian population of those two States, they have by no means taken a part in politics equal to that taken by the Norwegians. In 1890 the foreign-born Swedes in Iowa were more numerous than the foreign-born Norwegians, and in Minnesota about equal in number, but these figures do not fairly represent the political strength of the two elements, for to the foreign-born Norwegians must be added those of the second and third generation of persons of purely Norwegian extraction.³⁴² The sons, and even the grandsons of the early Norwegian settlers were voters before the Swedish immigration greatly exceeded the Norwegian.³⁴³ Broadly speaking, the early political pre-eminence of the Norwegians has never been overcome.

For the common people of Sweden and Denmark, political experience practically began with the agitation for the reforms of 1866 and 1867. The peasants and burghers thus came to think definitely and decisively about what they desired and of the means for securing the wished-for reforms. It may therefore be asserted without reservation that after 1870 the average Scandinavian immigrant brought to America a fairly clear understanding of the meaning of republicanism; elections, representation, local self-government, and constitutions, are neither novel nor meaningless terms to him; he is ready to fill his place, play his part, and cast his vote, as “a citizen of no mean city.” In the discharge of their civic duties, the Scandinavian voters have had the aid of several unusually well edited newspapers in their own languages. Since active participation in politics and patriotism are not always synonymous, one branch of the Scandinavian peoples may be just as patriotic as another. Certain it is that in the Civil War the Swedes were every whit as prompt and hearty in their response to calls for men, and as thoro in their efficiency and courage as soldiers, as were the Norwegians.

From a political view-point, the importance of the Norse immigrants in the agricultural regions of the West has not been fully recognized. At first thought, it would seem that location in a city or town, with its intimate associations and sharper competitions, with its friction of frequent contact with Americans, should be more conducive to rapid Americanization of immigrants, than the life of the farm or of the rural village, with its isolation and narrow horizon. More careful consideration will make clear that the opportunities for political action beyond merely casting a vote, are really much better in a new, thinly-settled township than in a ward of a large town or city. It surely was not a hunger for the sweets of political influence or official place which led the Scandinavians into frontier regions; but once there, with the old political ties forever severed by taking out their “first papers,” with partial title to land entered by preemption or by homesteading, their first and greatest steps in Americanization were safely made, and each one carried certain political consequences. Local political organization had to be effected somehow as a given locality filled up, and it happened frequently that there were none but Scandinavians to undertake the task. No matter what their political inclinations, no matter what form of organization they would have preferred, only one course was open to them: to get information as to the laws and customs of the United States and of the States in which they were settled, to prepare for the elections, and to assume the responsibilities of the necessary offices. Over and over again these things were done promptly and well by men in whose veins coursed only Viking blood, by men but recently transplanted from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

Whenever a township became populous enough to have a name as well as a number on the surveyor’s map, that question was likely to be determined by the people on the ground, and such names as Christiana, Swede Plain, Numedal, Throndhjem, and Vasa leave no doubt that Scandinavians officiated at the christening.³⁴⁴ Besides the names of townships, Minnesota alone has no fewer than seventy-five post-offices whose names are unmistakably Norse, – Malmö, Ringbo, Ibsen, Tordenskjold, and the like. It was in organizing these new townships, working the town machinery, carrying on elections, levying and collecting taxes, and laying out roads, that the Scandinavian immigrants learned the rudiments of American politics.³⁴⁵ In studying the accounts of the formation of scores of towns inhabited wholly or in major part by Norwegians or Swedes – accounts usually written by Americans, and often going into minute details – not one was found which describes any noteworthy irregularity. Except for the peculiar names no one would suspect that the townmakers were born elsewhere than in Massachusetts or New York.

In some cases probably more than one-fifth of the men of the community shared in the actual administration of town affairs; and while this ratio decreased with the growth of the town, the tendency of the Scandinavian settlers to move on from one new region to another gave many of them continuing opportunities to gain political experience. Had the same number of men located in the larger towns or cities, their active duties as citizens would generally have ended with the casting of their annual ballot. A few might have become policemen, commissioners, or even aldermen, but they would have made an insignificant percentage; the management or mismanagement of finances, schools, streets, sanitation, and public services would go on without their efforts or participation.

A few illustrations selected almost at random, will give a concrete idea of the process just described. Two townships in Fillmore County, Minnesota, were organized in 1860, and received the familiar Old World names, Norway and Arendahl; at the first election, all the officers chosen in both townships were Norwegians, and for twenty years and more, the Norwegians continued to fill nearly all the offices.³⁴⁶ Another and later example is found in Nicollet County, Minnesota, farther west than Fillmore County, where the township of New Sweden was formed in 1864. Thirty votes were cast at the first election, and at the first town-meeting, held three months later, all the offices were filled by the election of six Swedes and four Norwegians.³⁴⁷ Five years later this township was divided and the name Bernadotte was given to the new township; by the first election, all ten offices were filled by Swedes.³⁴⁸ Other Minnesota towns, Johnsonville in Redwood County (1879), Wang in Renville County (1875), and Stockholm in Wright County (1868), were similarly organized and officered by Norwegians and Swedes.³⁴⁹

As the townships developed, and the villages grew into cities with large foreign-born elements, the familiar and characteristic Northern names continue to fill the official records. Stoughton, Wisconsin, the capital, so to speak, of the solid old Dane County settlement, is a case in point. So late as 1901 the roster of the city ran as follows:

Mayor, O. K. Roe, born in Dane County of Norwegian parents

President of the Council, J. S. Liebe, born in Laurvik, Norway

Aldermen, four born in different parts of Norway, two born in Dane County of Norwegian parents.³⁵⁰

Much of the business in these new communities in their first years was carried on in a foreign tongue. Certainly election notices and documents of that sort were issued in Norwegian or Swedish, and sometimes orders, ordinances, and laws. No evidence, however, has come to hand to prove that any official records were ever kept in any other language than English, even in villages composed almost exclusively of Norwegians or Swedes.³⁵¹

One of the first offices that had to be filled in the growing settlement was that of postmaster; for no considerable number of people, educated and intelligent, will long be content with a postoffice twenty miles away.³⁵² In 1856 there were five Scandinavian postmasters in Minnesota alone.³⁵³ Thus the immigrant settlers came in contact with the national government at the postoffice more directly and frequently than they did at the land-office.

Township affairs shade off almost imperceptibly into county affairs in the western States, and the Scandinavians soon began to take part in the latter. No records are at hand for the Wisconsin settlements, but in 1858 the first Norwegian was elected to the board of supervisors in Goodhue County, Minnesota, and in the following year Hans Mattson, who was active in building up the town of Vasa, where he filled various town offices, was elected auditor of the county.³⁵⁴ He continued to fill the office until July, 1862, tho in name only for the last months, for in the minutes of Board of Supervisors of Goodhue County appears the resolution that “because the County Auditor, Hans Mattson, has voluntarily gone to the war with a company of soldiers, a leave of absence shall be extended to him, and that the office shall not be declared vacant so long as the deputy properly performs the duties of the place.”³⁵⁵

Hans Mattson was only one of many who found Goodhue County politics and a term of service in the army excellent fitting schools for larger activity in State affairs. One of the Norwegians who served an apprenticeship in Wisconsin, a journeymanship in Iowa, and came to the master-grade of citizenship – office-holding – in Minnesota, was Lars K. Aaker, who represented Goodhue County in the Minnesota Legislature in 1859-1860. After service as first lieutenant in Mattson’s Scandinavian Company, he again sat in the Legislature in 1862, 1867, and 1869. Again after twelve years of residence in Goodhue County he moved to Otter Tail County, and represented that county in the State Senate, later becoming Register of the United States Land Office. In 1864, he moved again, to Crookston, in the extreme northwestern corner of Minnesota, where he served as Receiver of the Land Office from 1884 to 1893.³⁵⁶ As the counties and towns have multiplied, by the biological process of division, in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Scandinavian names recur more and more frequently in their records, tho it is not always easy, especially since 1880, to identify such names, for the Norsemen have had a habit of Americanizing their original names or changing them altogether either with or without legal process.³⁵⁷

The county offices which seem to be most attractive to the Scandinavians are those of sheriff, treasurer, auditor, and register of deeds. The lists of county officers for several years in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, show that the number of Swedes and Norwegians in the four offices just mentioned was closely proportioned to their percentage in the population of the States named.³⁵⁸ Because the Scandinavians are less numerous in the other county offices, their proportion of the total offices in the counties of the States falls considerably below their proportion of the population. Estimating on the basis of a sure minimum, with the difficulties in identifying names eliminated, the Scandinavians for several years about 1895 filled approximately one-fifth of the 1235 county offices in Minnesota, one-fifth of the 268 in North Dakota and one-tenth of the 702 in Wisconsin. Their numbers relative to the population in each State were respectively one-fourth in Minnesota, two-fifths in North Dakota, one-eighth in Wisconsin, and one-fifth in South Dakota. More recent illustrations are to be found in the election of 1904. In Traill County, North Dakota, the sixth in size of the forty counties in the State, the sheriff, judge, treasurer, auditor, register, surveyor, coroner, and superintendent of schools were of Scandinavian origin; in Lac Qui Parle County, Minnesota, a similar clean sweep was made; while in Yellow Medicine County seven out of ten principal officers were Scandinavians.³⁵⁹

The first Scandinavian to enter the field of State politics was James D. Reymert, a Norwegian, who represented Racine County in the second constitutional convention of Wisconsin in 1847, and later in the Assembly of that State, first from Racine County and then from Milwaukee County in 1857.³⁶⁰ He was also a candidate for presidential elector on the Free Soil ticket in 1840.³⁶¹ The son of a Scotch mother, and receiving part of his education in Scotland, he was better prepared than other Norwegians for taking part in politics, and for the work of editing the first Norwegian newspaper in America, Nordlyset– “The Northern Light” – which appeared in 1847 as a Free Soil organ.³⁶² In the constitutional convention he was not active in the debates, tho he advocated a six-months’ residence as a qualification for voting, saying, “as to foreigners, the sooner they were entitled to vote, the better citizens they would make.”³⁶³ For one provision of the Wisconsin constitution he was personally responsible: Article VII, section 16, which directed the legislature to establish courts or tribunals of conciliation.³⁶⁴ But in spite of the command, “The legislature shall pass laws” for these courts, no such law was ever passed in Wisconsin.