Scandinavian immigration and relocation in US history.
Before the 19th century, the people of the Scandinavian lands—Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland—had often visited North America.
Some came for exploration, some came to launch colonial adventures, and some came to stay and follow their faith. But by the end of the United States' first century of existence, Scandinavians began to come by the tens of thousands, and they came to start new lives for themselves. In so doing, they filled the Great Plains and the cities of the North; they founded new, distinctive communities from Connecticut to California; and they helped build the America of the 20th century.
Early Arrivals
Travelers from Scandinavia first set foot in the Western Hemisphere more than a thousand years ago, and may even have been the first Europeans in North America. Beginning in the 7th century, the Vikings, a seagoing people from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, roamed widely over much of the planet, founding settlements in far-off lands and trading with, or raiding, the local inhabitants. Some of the Vikings' surviving sagas mention the birth of a baby boy in a distant settlement named "Vinland".
Today, a few scholars have suggested that Vinland might have been an island off the coast of present-day New York, but no one knows for sure. Regardless, every October 9 many Scandinavian Americans still celebrate the birthday of Leif Erickson, the Viking captain who founded the settlement of Vinland and thus, they maintain, discovered America.
By the 17th and 18th centuries, the Vikings were a dim memory, and the people of Scandinavia began to look to North America as a possible colonial destination. As was the case with other European elites of the time, wealthy Scandinavians considered the eastern seaboard of the Americas a promising site for investment and sought to launch colonial enterprises there.
At the same time, many ordinary Scandinavians, chafing at the limited religious and political freedom in their homelands, saw the New World as a land of liberty, and traveled there to found new communities where they might practice their conscience in peace.
It was in the 19th century, however, that the great migration of Scandinavians to the U.S. took place. The once-prosperous Scandinavian nations were rocked by political strife and social upheaval as regional wars and agricultural disasters created tremendous instability in everyday life.
Meanwhile, official corruption, the policies of powerful state churches, and an increasing disparity between the rich and the poor drove many thousands of Scandinavians to seek a better life elsewhere. By the middle of the century, the time was ripe for mass immigration, and Scandinavians began arriving in American ports in large numbers.
Each group of immigrants-those from Sweden, from Norway, from Denmark, Finland, and Iceland-would take a different path to life in the United States.
The Swedes
Of all the immigrants from Scandinavia, those from Sweden were the first to come to the U.S., and they came in the greatest numbers. In the early 17th century, the nation of Sweden had become a substantial power in Europe, and it joined with other powerful nations in launching colonial enterprises in the New World.
In 1637, a group of Swedish speculators, together with German and Dutch investors, formed the New Sweden Company in order to send a trade expedition to North America. The next year, the Company's two ships, the Fågel Grip and the Kalmar Nickel, sailed into Delaware Bay, where the settlers founded the town of Fort Christina, now the city of Wilmington, Delaware.
Over the next two decades, the farms and villages of New Sweden spread out along both banks of the Delaware River, well into present-day New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, as more immigrants, mostly Swedes, arrived from Scandinavia. By 1657, though, the small colony was swallowed up by the larger New Netherlands, which was in turn subsumed by the massive English settlement founded by William Penn.
The Swedish presence in the mid-Atlantic states continued for more than a century, though, and still survives in family names, churches, and in the distinctively Swedish notched-corner log cabins that became a staple of the European settlement throughout North America.
When Swedes returned to the United States in the 19th century, they came as part of a mass migration, not a colonial adventure. In the 1830s and 40s, small groups of farmers had begun to make the long voyage to the U.S.
in search of more land or religious freedom. By the middle of the century, however, Sweden was in the throes of a national population crisis—the small country's population had doubled from 1750 to 1850, and was still growing. Tillable land became more and more scarce, and famine swept the nation, killing 22 out of every 1,000 Swedes.
Emigration regulations were eased, and the 1860s saw a massive movement of Swedes fleeing their homeland; between 1861 and 1881, 150,000 traveled to the United States, 100,000 of whom came in just five years, between 1868 and 1873.
The majority of these immigrants, after arriving in East Coast port cities, quickly made their way to the new states and territories of the Midwest, drawn by the promise of open land and by the "America letters" of their compatriots.
In addition, many immigrants were aggressively recruited by representatives of U.S. steamship lines and railroad companies, as well as by local governments seeking new settlers for remote parts of the country.
Recruiters and correspondents alike extolled the bounties of the American landscape, and sometimes provided exaggerated accounts of the comfort and profitability of settler life. In 1850, the Swedish novelist and feminist Fredrika Bremer visited a group of Swedish farmers in Pine Lake, Wisconsin, and found their daily existence to be more difficult than some descriptions had promised.
It is lake scenery, and as lovely and romantic as any may be imagined--regular Swedish lake scenery; and one can understand how those first Swedish emigrants were enchanted, so that, without first examining the quality of the soil, they determined to found here a New Sweden and to build a New Uppsala! I spent the forenoon in visiting the various Swedish families. Nearly all live in log houses, and seem to be in somewhat low circumstances.
One farmer told her, "None who are not accustomed to hard, agricultural labor ought to become farmers in this country. No one who is in any other way well off in his native land ought to come hither. ."
Hard labor aside, by the end of the century Swedish immigrants had fanned out across the wheat belt of the United States, working largely as farmers, but also finding work in mining, railroad work, and urban trades and professions. In the 1910 census, nearly half of all Swedish immigrants and their descendants lived in three states: 1/5 lived in Minnesota, 1/6 in Illinois, and 1/14 in New York.
Many others moved on to the Pacific Northwest states, where they found that the dense woods and rugged coastline reminded them of home, and where they could put their timbering skills to work. At the same time, more urban immigrants began arriving from Sweden, and these increasingly chose U.S. cities as their destination. In 1900, Chicago was home to 150,000 Swedes and Swedish Americans, and was widely considered the second-largest Swedish city in the world.
In 1924, Congress passed the Immigration Act, which set strict quotas on immigration to the U.S. and brought Scandinavian immigration to a virtual standstill. By this time, though, the Great Lakes states were major centers of Swedish culture, with Swedish politicians lobbying for Swedish votes at meetings of Swedish social clubs, while the members read Swedish newspapers. Meanwhile, other Scandinavian immigrants were arriving and building their own communities nearby—sometimes literally next door.
The Norwegians
Although Sweden sent more emigrants to the United States than any other Scandinavian country, Norway sent a greater percentage of its population—nearly 1 million people between 1820 and 1920. Indeed, some estimates suggest that during the great immigrations of the 19th century Norway lost a higher proportion of its people to the U.S. than any country other than Ireland.
Emigration from Norway to North America started more slowly, however. Some Norwegian adventurers accompanied Dutch colonists to New Amsterdam in the 17th century, and members of the Moravian religious sect joined German Moravians in Pennsylvania in the 18th.
Norwegian immigration's Mayflower moment came in 1825, during a period of particularly fierce religious strife in Norway. In July of that year, a group of six dissenting families, seeking a haven from the official Norwegian state church, set sail from Stavanger in an undersized sloop, the Restaurationen.
When it arrived in New York harbor after an arduous 14-week journey, the Restaurationen caused a sensation, and the local press marveled at the bravery of these Norwegian pilgrims. Local Quakers helped the destitute emigrants, who eventually established a community in upstate New York. Today, their descendants are still known as "sloopers".
Word of the sloopers' arrival, and of other Norwegians' success in the U.S., soon reached their homeland, and America letters circulated as never before. In the 1840s, prospective emigrants could read a new magazine, Norway and America, that published stories of Norwegians in the New World, and successful emigrants toured Norway, some sponsored by financial concerns in the U.S. One emigrant, Andreas Ueland, described the effect that one homecoming emigrant had on his compatriots.
A farmer from Houston County, Minnesota, returned on a visit the winter of '70-'71. He infected half the population in that district with what was called the America fever, and I who was then the most susceptible caught the fever in its most virulent form. No more amusement of any kind, only brooding on how to get away to America. It was like a desperate case of homesickness reversed.
Immigration surged after the U.S. Civil War and followed many of the same patterns as the Swedish immigration that preceded it. By the end of the 1860s there were more than 40,000 Norwegians in the U.S. More than one-ninth of Norway's total population, 176,000 people, came in the 1880s.
These immigrants, mostly rural families, made their way to the newly-opened lands of the Midwest, settling in Minnesota and Wisconsin, then moving west to Iowa, the Dakotas and sometimes the Pacific Coast. By the end of century, urban Norwegians had begun to arrive in substantial numbers as well, and formed lasting communities in the cities of the Great Lakes and East Coast. Norwegian immigration dropped off dramatically after the Immigration Act of 1924, and quickly slowed to a few thousand a year—a rate that has remained largely unchanged to the present day.
The Danes
Like the immigrants of countless other nations, many immigrants from Denmark came to the United States for religious reasons. The Danish immigrants of the 19th century were unique, however, in that they came to North America as part of the first mass influx of the pilgrims of a new religion: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
For centuries, small groups of Danes had visited and lived on the shores of the New World. Danes had joined Dutch expeditions to navigate the Hudson River in the 17th century, and in 1728 the Danish explorer Vitus Bering charted the Alaskan straits that bear his name. The New Amsterdam colony was home to many prominent Danes, including Jonas Bronck, whose land north of Manhattan Island became widely known as Bronck's, and, eventually, the Bronx. In addition, small numbers of Danes fled the established Dutch Reform Church to join larger, usually German, religious communities on the East Coast.
The greatest surge of Danish immigration came, however, in the wake of a small group of missionaries who arrived in Copenhagen in 1850, spreading the word of a new faith from America.
In the following years, several thousand Danes converted to Mormonism, and roughly half of those converts left for the United States—nearly 20,000 by the end of the century. Once in the U.S., most joined their fellow believers on the trek to the distant territory of Utah, an arduous journey of many months, usually made on foot.
The terse, handwritten diary of Danish immigrant John Peter Rasmus Johnson conveys some sense of the hardships of the trek, as the travelers endured disease, dangerous weather and terrain, and attacks by bandits, anti-Mormon vigilantes, and hostile Native Americans. By the end of the 19th century, Utah was home to the largest community of Danish immigrants in the United States.
At the same time, many Danish immigrants came to the U.S. for economic and social reasons, seeking a new beginning, insulation from European wars, or a stronger economy. Denmark had, however, avoided much of the land loss and famine that plagued their Scandinavian neighbors in the 19th century, and never lost as great a percentage of its population to emigration as did Norway and Sweden.
The Danes who did seek a new life in the U.S. settled primarily in Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, the Dakotas, and Iowa, which eventually became the most Danish of all states. Danes were more urban than most other Scandinavian immigrants, and although many tried grain and dairy farming upon their arrival in the U.S., most eventually moved to cities and towns.
Some towns and neighborhoods took on an entirely Danish character, but by and large the Danes mingled within larger communities, preserving their own religious and linguistic traditions, but living and working alongside neighbors who were often Scandinavian immigrants themselves. By the 1970s, roughly 360,000 Danes had settled in the United States.
The Finns
For the people of Finland, mass emigration to the United States did not begin until very late in the 19th century, and the number of Finnish immigrants does not compare with those of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Emigration had a tremendous effect on the Finnish homeland, however, which in a few decades lost roughly ten percent of its population.
Early Finnish immigration to North America is very difficult to track, as the land that is now independent Finland was claimed by several competing countries over much of its history. Although it seems certain that Finnish explorers and colonists joined the Dutch and Scandinavian expeditions to eastern shores of the New World, they were often classified on ship's rosters as citizens of Sweden or Russia. It is known, however, that Finns were among the first Europeans to settle in Alaska, during the early 19th century, and even served as the territory's governors.
By the middle of the 19th century, Finns had begun arriving in the U.S. in significant numbers, many fleeing the increasingly anti-Finnish policies of the Russian government. Recruiters for U.S. companies and governments traveled to Finland to encourage emigration, as did some of the successful earlier emigrants. As a result of these recruiting efforts, many early Finnish immigrants were guided to very specific locations in the U.S., and small Finnish communities sprang up in locales as far-flung as Calumet, Michigan; Gloucester, Massachusetts; and Montgomery, Alabama.
At the turn of the 20th century, Finnish immigration exploded. The decades of struggle for Finnish independence from Russia were at a boiling point, and Finns fled the instability in their homeland at a breathtaking rate. Between 1890 and 1914, more than 200,000 Finns arrived, two-thirds of total Finnish immigration to that point, and more than 30,000 followed before immigration was curtailed in 1924.
The new Finnish immigrants poured into the farms and lumber mills of the Great Lakes states, the mines of the western mountains, the factories of New York City, and, later, into the auto plants of Detroit. In 1900 the Finnish population of Detroit was 15; in 1938 it was 15,000. Michigan became, and remains, the heart of Finnish America.
Finns faced greater challenges than many of the Scandinavian immigrants that preceded them. The Finnish language is radically different from all other European languages, and Finnish-speaking immigrants had greater difficulty learning English than those who spoke Swedish or Norwegian.
As a result, many Finnish immigrants were relegated to low-paying unskilled jobs that did not require English-language skills, such as factory work and manual labor. At the same time, the decades of high Finnish immigration coincided with a period of increased public hostility towards immigrants, and Finns were often subjected to discrimination in housing and jobs, as well as public insults and physical attacks.
Despite these challenges, the Finnish communities of the U.S. grew and thrived, and continued to do so. In the 2000 census, 623,000 people identified themselves as Finnish Americans.
The Icelanders
Emigration from Iceland began later than any other Scandinavian country, due in part to the small island nation's extreme isolation. Icelandic immigration is also difficult to track, as many Icelandic immigrants to the U.S. were counted as citizens of Denmark, which controlled Iceland at the time.
However, it is clear that in the late decades of the 19th century between 10,000 and 15,000 emigrants set out from Iceland to the U.S.—a total that approached one-fifth of the entire Icelandic population. Early emigrants included new converts to Mormonism who joined the Danish exodus to the Utah territory, as well as a few adventurers who founded a colony in Wisconsin in the 1860s.
The main emigration began in the 1870s, when families and groups of families began moving to the Great Lakes states, seeking to escape the famine and overcrowding that had struck Iceland just as they had other Scandinavian lands. At first, the Icelanders did not arrive in sufficient numbers to start their own communities, and so tended to attach themselves to Norwegian or Swedish farm settlements, or to go to work for established farmers. Within a few decades, though, Icelandic towns had been founded in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and Icelandic schools established.
As with other Scandinavian immigrants, the Icelanders began to move west as the century drew to a close, seeking more available land in the Dakotas, and even moving across the Rockies to the West Coast. Many Icelanders found the Pacific Coast more agreeable that the windswept Dakotas, and settled in the farm country of Washington, Oregon, and California.
The Dakotas remained the heart of Icelandic America, however, even after Icelandic immigration tapered off at the turn of the century. After Iceland gained its independence and new immigration all but ceased, Icelandic American culture intermingled to a certain degree with that of other Scandinavian immigrants, particularly the Norwegians'. However, Icelandic identity is still strong among the descendants of immigrants, and in the 2000 census more than 42,000 Americans claimed to be descendants of Icelandic immigrants.
Scandinavian America
The Scandinavian immigrants not only built new lives in the United States; they also built a new culture. As immigrants from Scandinavia flooded into sparsely populated areas of the U.S., they helped create a particularly Scandinavian way of life, melding the varied religious, culinary, literary, and linguistic traditions that they brought with them with those that they found in their new country. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the Great Lakes states, the northern Great Plains, and in enclaves scattered among northern U.S. cities, a visitor might imagine that he or she was traveling through a unique new nation—Scandinavian America.
Language and Education
As Scandinavian immigrants arrived in the U.S., they brought a diverse group of native languages with them, and they quickly established institutions to nurture and promote their linguistic heritage. In Scandinavia, the official Lutheran Church had required that all children be taught to read and write, and so Scandinavian immigrants arrived in the U.S. with a very high level of literacy in their native tongues. Wherever Scandinavians settled, Scandinavian-language newspapers and publishing houses quickly sprang up.
Over the decades, more than 1000 Swedish newspapers and magazines were founded, and over 350 Finnish newspapers. Some of the larger papers, such as the Norwegian Decorah-Posten and the Danish Bien, were read across the U.S. and became de facto national newspapers for their respective communities.
Novels by Scandinavian authors were offered by some newspapers as subscription premiums, and were also available in the Scandinavian bookstores that appeared in most northern cities. In the 1920s, Norwegian immigrant novelist Ole Rölvaag became the first, and most celebrated, major Scandinavian immigrant author in the U.S. when his novel Giants in the Earth was published in both Norwegian and English.
Churches also played a major role in preserving Scandinavian languages in the U.S., as well as serving as important social institutions. Most of the schools founded by new Scandinavian immigrants were operated by churches and other religious institutions, and a significant percentage of all Scandinavian-language publishing was religious in nature, often sponsored or directly owned by Lutheran synods.
The first Scandinavian institutions of higher education in the U.S. were also church-sponsored, including the Swedish Augustana College in North Dakota, the Norwegian Luther College in Iowa, and the Finnish Suomi College in Michigan.
Community
In their home countries, most Scandinavians had belonged to a village hall or other organization, and as soon as immigrant communities established themselves in the U.S., they set about founding new social clubs.
These societies—the Swedish Vasa Order, the Finnish Knights of Kaleva, the Sons of Norway, and the Danish Brotherhood, among many others—performed crucial social-welfare functions, as they provided financial aid to struggling families and offered unemployment benefits to vulnerable immigrant workers.
At the same time, they promoted the language and culture of the immigrants' homelands and served as all-purpose community centers, hosting local choirs, cooking clubs, sports teams, and, in many Finnish social clubs, a community sauna. As the Scandinavian-American communities became more established, some of these clubs became important forces in electoral politics, and local politicians were eager to win their endorsement.
Some Scandinavians also marshaled the communal spirit of their homeland to form collectively-owned businesses, or cooperatives. Cooperatives had been well known in many Scandinavian countries, especially in Finland, and Scandinavian America came to be dotted with cooperatively owned farms, dairies, and stores.
Social Activism
The Scandinavian tradition of collective action also led many immigrants to take active roles in American social reform movements. From the 1840s on, Scandinavian immigrants were well represented in the movement for the abolition of slavery, and with the onset of the Civil War volunteered in great numbers to fight, overwhelmingly for the Union.
Many Union companies consisted entirely of Scandinavians, and one company, from the tiny Bishop Hill community in Illinois, was made up solely of Swedes. At the turn of the century, the writer and Danish immigrant Jacob Riis led a journalistic crusade to expose the horrific living conditions endured by the inhabitants of America's urban slums, which included many new immigrants. Riis' book How the Other Half Lives, a classic of muckracking literature, brought about a great wave of protest and led to major housing reform in the U.S.
Many Scandinavians also took an active role in the burgeoning U.S. labor movement. Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish miners and loggers participated in strikes throughout the Great Lakes states and the mountain West, sometimes as members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World union, also known as the Wobblies. The Swedish immigrant Joe Hill, born Joel Hägglund, was a prominent IWW member and wrote many of the union's rallying songs. After Hill was executed for murder in 1914, under what his sympathizers claimed were false pretenses, he became the subject of folk songs himself.
Scandinavians Today
As the 20th century moved forward, Scandinavian America moved forward as well, and Scandinavian immigrants and their descendants took leading roles in all areas of American life.
Scandinavian Americans took an especially prominent role in electoral politics, particularly in the heartland of Scandinavian immigration. In 1895, the Norwegian immigrant Knute Nelson became the first U.S. senator of Scandinavian descent, serving the state of Minnesota for nearly 30 years. Ever since, Minnesota has always had at least one senator of Scandinavian descent.
The Scandinavian Americans Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey both reached the U.S. vice-presidency, though they were defeated in their presidential campaigns. Earl Warren, the son of a Norwegian father and a Swedish mother, served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969, and ruled on many of the pivotal cases of the Civil Rights era.
Scandinavian Americans also found success in business and academia. Entrepreneurs Arthur Andersen, Ole Evinrude, Conrad Hilton, and John Nordstrom founded the businesses that still bear their names. In academia, the chemists Christian Anfinsen and Glenn Seaborg, as well as the physicist Ernest Lawrence, were each awarded the Nobel Prize for their research.
The Swedish American Seaborg was involved in the discovery of at least nine elements, including plutonium, and even had an element named after him—Seaborgium.
In the 1920s and 30s, the age of mass communications got underway, and Americans of Scandinavian descent were among the first multimedia stars. The actor and Swedish immigrant Greta Garbo, the Norwegian-American athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the Norwegian-American crime fighter Elliot Ness, and the Swedish-American aviator Charles Lindbergh all helped launch the new culture of celebrity.
Meanwhile, Scandinavian Americans were also undertaking distinguished careers in the arts. Carl Sandburg, the son of Swedish immigrants, became one of the most-read poets in United States, and was named the Poet Laureate of Chicago. Novelist Nella Larsen, the daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian father, was one of the most promising writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Later in the century, the Swedish immigrant Claes Oldenburg was hailed as a pioneer of the Pop Art movement, and every year thousands of visitors walk under the St. Louis Gateway Arch, one of the most beloved works of the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen.
Today, the great era of Scandinavian immigration is more than a century distant, but the cultural legacy of the Scandinavian immigrants is alive and well.
Many of the great Scandinavian newspapers are still being published, and have been joined by an increasing number of Web sites in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, and Icelandic. Scandinavian-American social clubs, choirs, debating societies, and sports teams can still be found across the U.S., and every year tens of thousands of Americans gather at conventions and festivals to celebrate their Scandinavian-American heritage.
