The Scandinavian Element in the United States

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

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.