Kendric Charles Babcock

“ The Norwegian is above all democratic. He is simple, serious, intense, severe even to bluntness, often radical and visionary, and with a tendency to disputatiousness. [13] There is an unmeasured quantity of passion and imagination in [18] him, as there are unmeasured stores of power and beauty in the snows of his mountains and the waters of his coast. He has the capacity for high and strenuous endeavor, even verging on the turbulent, but he rarely has developed the qualities of a great leader. Like the Swede, the Norwegian is fond of music, but it is of a different sort. ”

“ 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? ”

“ It is the story of the transformation of a wide-stretching wilderness—of an ever-advancing frontier—into great cities, diversified industries, varying social interests, and an intensely complex life. Wave upon wave of races of mankind has flowed over the developing and enlarging West, and each has left its impress on that area. Across the trail of the Indian and the trapper, the highway of the pioneer on his westward journey, have spread the tilled fields of the farmer, or along it has run the railroad. The farm has become a town-site and then a manufacturing city ”

“ For all these reasons the difficulties of the United States in adjusting the life and ideals and institutions of the nation to the presence of foreigners are reduced in the case of the Scandinavians to a minimum. The Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes are not likely to furnish great leaders, but they will be in the front rank of those who follow with sturdy intelligence and conscience, striving to make the land of their adoption strong and prosperous,—“a blessing to the common man,” according to the original vision of America seen by Sweden’s great king Gustavus Adolphus. ”

“ Measured by character and training, the Baltic race in America stands up well to the test, not only in the foreign-born alone, but in the second and third generation born on American soil. If generations of ignorance, mental inertia, social depression, political passivity, shiftlessness, and improvidence stretch behind the immigrant, if his religion be chiefly a superstition or strongly antagonistic to the principles of the Republic, and if he be physically inferior and long inured to the hardships of a low standard of living, just so far is he an undesirable addition to American population. ”

“ Too much stress, however, should never be laid on the character of any one group of immigrants, lest it warp the judgment upon the immigration movement as a factor in American progress. The ardent political reformer in New York City, seeing the political activity of the Irish, and the easy, fraudulent enfranchisement of newly-arrived aliens, cries in a loud voice for restriction or prohibition of immigration. The California labor agitator, feeling chiefly the effect of Chinese efficiency in the labor market, would close the gates of the country to all the eastern nations. ”

“ Patriotism with them in the Old World is quite as much a sentiment or love for the parish or the homestead as it is a fierce and militant passion for the power and leadership of the nation. No dramatic outbursts of national feeling, or antagonisms to ancient enemies, will rekindle old enthusiasms in the American Scandinavians. Even the prospect of war between Norway and Sweden, when the former dissolved the Dual Monarchy, did not profoundly stir the Swedes or Norwegians in the Northwest ”

“ 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. ”

“ This trick of asserting their political importance in the Northwestern States was very early learned; and so long as party managers bid for votes in the tongues of the aliens, bribing them with nominations of the foreign-born, just so long will these groups of adopted citizens reiterate and multiply their demands, just so long will they capitalize their voting power and collect a generous interest in the shape of nominations and appointments. ”

“ Young men who had prospered in the new life returned to the homesteads of their fathers and became, temporarily, missionaries of the new economic gospel, teaching leisurely but effectively by word of mouth and face to face, instead of by written lines at long range. One such man was Knud A. Slogvig, who returned to his home in Skjold in 1835 after ten years in America, not as an emigrant agent nor as a propagandist, but as a lover to marry his betrothed,—an early example which thousands of young Scandinavians in the years to come were to follow gladly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Save around Lake Mjösen, the Leir, Vos, and Throndhjem, there can scarcely be found in all Norway anything like a broad rich meadow. The farm products are almost literally mined from the rocks. “It is by dogged, persistent, indomitable toil and endurance, backed up in some cases by irrepressible daring, that the Norwegian peasant and fisher-folk—three-fourths of the population—carry on with any show of success their struggle against iron nature.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Scandinavian contributions to European causes have been filial and fraternal, never political, never revolutionary, never such as to raise a national issue in America. Their church organizations, decentralized, centrifugal rather than centripetal, recognizing no unity under a temporal head, cannot be turned into a keen, insinuating political weapon. They have no secret societies ramifying through their settlements, no Mafias, “Molly Maguires,” anarchist lodges, or other badges of ancient servitude or foreign hates. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From an opposite point of view, when a man travels in leisurely fashion up and down Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, and finds a dozen race elements—English, German, Norwegian, or Russian—he begins to understand the real benefit to the nation of the coming of this vast, varied, peaceful army. [1] The scale of immigrants runs from the pauper or the diseased alien, awaiting deportation on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, to the rich Norwegian or German owning a thousand-acre farm in North Dakota, and to the millionaire Swedish lumberman or manufacturer of Wisconsin or Minnesota. ”

“ Co-ordinate with the school and the church, as a social force to be estimated, is the press. Newspapers and periodicals of various sorts in foreign languages inevitably follow the settlement of any considerable number of aliens in a given community, for people of education and ambition will look in a familiar medium for their news and gossip, their instruction in commerce and politics, as well as their teaching in religion. So the Chinese and Japanese on the Pacific Coast, no less than the Germans, Italians, and Greeks on the Atlantic, have their dailies and their magazines. ”

“ The farmers and laborers, American and Scandinavian alike, felt the stress of hard times, turned to political agencies for relief, forsook the old parties, and formed the party called variously the Populist, People’s, and Farmers’ Alliance Party. Besides those Norwegians and Swedes who had been for years Republicans, whose political color was fixed by the mordant of slavery and the Civil War, there was then a very large number of men who arrived in the vast immigrant invasions between 1880 and 1885, and who were just coming into the full exercise of the rights of citizenship. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mere wage-earning has not been a permanent condition, but a stepping stone to a greater or less degree of independence. In politics and in war they have evidenced their ability to stand side by side with the native-born of New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, and, with real faithfulness and efficiency to fill such places, low or high, as shall be opened to them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In a word, the Scandinavian immigration since 1850 is simply the earlier Scandinavian immigration enlarged in numbers, with broader and deeper significance. The areas of interest in emigration in Europe gradually extended to every part and every class of the three Northern kingdoms; and the localities attractive to Scandinavians in the United States, expanded until eight contiguous States in the Old Northwest and the Newer Northwest showed each a foreign-born population of Northmen numbering more than thirty thousand. In the State of Minnesota they now reach close to a quarter of a million. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The causes which determined the early party affiliations of the naturalized sons of the Vikings, in the broad area of State and Federal affairs, are to be found in the character of the immigrants themselves and in the great questions agitating the country at the time they became citizens. Coming to the United States with an endowment of natural independence, with an innate respect for government, and with an inclination for public concerns, their interest was at once actively aroused in the great problem of slavery that vexed national life from the time of the Sloop Folk to the Civil War. ”