Dag Blanck is an assistant professor at the Centre for Multiethnic Research at Uppsala University in Sweden and the director of the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.
Recently in the pages of this journal, Matthew Jacobson made a
compelling plea for a greater sensitivity toward the transnational
character of the field of immigration and ethnoracial history.
Citing Oscar Handlin and John F. Kennedy, among others, he stressed
the ways in which the field is inherently transnational, yet how
the national has often intruded on our scholarship. As persuasive
as Jacobson's point is regarding the field, his essay revealed an
incomplete appreciation of its historiography. The work of W. I.
Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Frank
Thistlethwaite, and Marcus Lee Hansen, to cite only a few examples
from which Handlin and Kennedy might have profited, had explicitly
transnational elements. Each in his or her own way attempted to
view emigration and immigration as an integrated process that wed
world capitalist development and the turn to modernity into a
comprehensive whole. As scholars have recently rediscovered the
transnational wheel, their understanding of those who preceded them
is often lacking.I write this in the context of this review because
scholars who have focused on the Scandinavian migration - including
Hansen and Thomas, but also Theodore C. Blegen, Ingrid Semmingsen,
Kristian Hvidt, and Harald Runblom - have been remarkably
transnational in their conceptualization of it. The books
considered in this review, particularly those by Dag Blanck and H.
Arnold Barton, illustrate that this understanding endures. Both in
their own way, Blanck and Barton exhibit an understanding of the
developments in the United States and the Swedish homeland. Odd
Lovoll's orientation, in contrast, because his unit of analysis is
the small town, is neither national nor transnational, but rather
localist. Lovoll has long been fascinated by the small town in the
Norwegian American past, and his study of Benson, Minnesota,
addresses this interest. Whereas Norwegian immigrants were among
the most rural of any ethnic group in the United States, they were
instrumental in the growth of midwestern small towns as well. And
whereas scholars have focused their attention on the Norwegian
farmer and big-city dweller, they have, Lovoll argues, given short
shrift to the small town story. Lovoll's richly illustrated
narrative thus fills a void, and he provides us with a lively
description of Benson over a century and one-half. (In the interest
of full disclosure, I should say that I reviewed Lovoll's book for
publication.) Benson, located in Swift County in western Minnesota,
had Norwegian American residents from its inception and continued
to be associated with Norwegian America as a result. To be sure,
the town contained those from a variety of backgrounds, including
Yankee elements that dominated the financial institutions and the
professions. Despite this heterogeneity, much of the business of
the town was conducted in the Norwegian language. Even
non-Norwegian businesses made efforts to attract Norwegian
American customers, and their proprietors attempted to learn
Norwegian. Perhaps the most interesting element, which foreshadows
the discussion of Blanck and Barton to come, is the flowering of
ethnicity in the twentieth century. Lovoll notes that a matrix of
Norwegian institutions grew in the early decades of the century.
Even more interesting is his discussion of what he calls the
persistence of ethnicity later in the century, when leaders
discovered that they could market ethnicity. Small towns vied for
the honor of being the "Lutefisk Capital" of the nation; they
competed to see which burg could roll the largest piece of lefse,
flatbread made from potatoes; and Benson claimed what might be
considered the dubious distinction of being the "klubb capital of
Minnesota," the state's hub for the production of heavy potato
dumplings. Lovoll's is a valuable study, but it is unclear to me
whether its subject is Norwegian America or the peculiarities of
immigrant ethnicity in a small town. On the one hand, the story of
Benson is set in the Norwegian American past with discursions into
such topics as the larger patterns of Norwegian migration. On the
other, Lovoll grapples to some degree with the variety of ethnic
groups in this small town, a topic dealt with in the past by
figures as diverse as Sinclair Lewis and Merle Curti. Whereas
Lovoll's study is a focused case study of one small town, Dag
Blanck's study is a careful analysis of the Augustana Synod and its
role in shaping a Swedish American identity in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. The Swedish presence in the United
States in this era was substantial. Some 1.3 million Swedes moved
there during the century of migration ending in 1924. As a literate
population, their output of print media was even more remarkable.
The Swedish American press was the second largest foreign-language
press in the United States (after German language imprints) in
1910. Blanck demonstrates that the Augustana Synod, the largest
religious organization among Swedish Americans, was the most
significant Swedish American institution. By the 1920s, Blanck
clearly shows, at least one-quarter of Swedish Americans were
affiliated with the Synod (p. 33). Blanck's argument has two
interconnected components. First, the content of ethnic expression
was transformed in the half century after 1860, and, second, the
shifting patterns of identity among those who identified as Swedish
American were pivotal in this transformation. In the three decades
after 1860, Swedish Americans attached relatively little
significance to a Swedish American ethnicity. Rather, they relied
on an extant Swedish literature and simultaneously placed less
emphasis on the preservation of Swedish language in the United
States. Blanck argues that this approach resulted from two facts:
the relatively weak Swedish American institutional structure
between 1860 and 1890, and Swedish Americans' less-than-secure
class position in the United States. Around 1890, an identity shift
began to occur. No longer as interested in the English language and
assimilation, Swedes in the Augustana Synod began to emphasize the
importance of the Swedish language and the creation of a unique
Swedish American culture. In this second phase, then, Swedish
ethnicity emphasized, and began to coexist with, a Lutheran
identity. Ironically, Swedish Americans, many of whom were not born
in Sweden, sought to create an ethnic identity with little
familiarity of the Sweden that their parents forsook. Whereas
Swedish Americans in the first phase simply relied on Swedish
classics, those in the second period had to construct their Swedish
American identity. This transition is related to Blanck's second
point: the transition of Swedish America to one increasingly of
American origin. After painstakingly researching the backgrounds of
the students of Augustana College, Blanck shows that American-born
Swedish began to dominate the student body after 1890. Moreover,
children with white-collar backgrounds, rather than the sons and
daughters of farmers and laborers, also came to predominate.
Blanck, ever alert to changes taking place in Sweden, notes that
these students developed an idealized view of Sweden,
characterized by romanticism, patriotism, and idealism, just like
their counterparts across the Atlantic. Blanck explores the content
of this Swedish American identity and notes the ways in which it
conforms to the "homemaking myths" outlined by Orm Overland in his
2000 study. The myths stressed the role that Sweden played in the
foundation of America, stemming from both the Viking discoveries
and the early colonial settlements in Delaware. Swedish Americans
outlined as well the ideological gifts, most notably in the form of
political freedom that they argued typified the early Scandinavian
government. Finally, the homemaking myths underscored Swedish
America's blood sacrifice in war, most notably in the American
Revolution and the Civil War. With cultural heroes such as Gustavus
Adolphus and John Ericcson, who invented the Union's first ironclad
ship, Swedish Americans could tell a story of their role in the
American pageant. Swedish Americans were at the forefront of
promoting core values in the American myth: the creation of a
republic that promised liberty and a nation that later destroyed
the menace of slavery. Blanck thus underscores the ways in which
the second generation's identity creation was part of its strategy
to interact with American society. As Russell Kazal has noted with
regarded to "old-stock" Germans, Swedish American mythmaking was
cognizant of the larger American myth. It enabled Swedish Americans
to place themselves in the racial and ethnic hierarchies of the
time. Thereby, Blanck concludes, "Swedish immigrants and their
children living in turn of the century America were, by becoming
Swedish American, also becoming American" (p. 201). H. Arnold
Barton has provided us with a collection of essays of previously
published pieces, most of which appeared in the Swedish-American
Historical Quarterly. The essays are arrayed chronologically,
beginning with the colonial migration and followed by the early
migrants in the Janssonist movement, the massive migration in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the diminishing
migrant streams after 1924. Barton's topics are eclectic, including
a consideration of immigrant letters, the place of women in the
Swedish American community, and the curious partnership and rivalry
between Norwegian and Swedish immigrants in the United States. In
this review, however, I will focus on the core of Barton's work,
which grapples with Swedish American identities and their
relationship to developments in Sweden and the United States, and
which therefore nicely complements Blanck's study. Barton has
published widely on this topic in the past, and this collection is
a nice primer on his previous work. One of the strengths of
Barton's work is his sensitivity to conditions in Sweden that
informed the Swedish migration story, with Swedes reacting in a
variety of ways to massive migration to America. Swedish observers,
from the beginning of the migration in the mid-nineteenth century,
puzzled over the meaning of the migration itself. Some were
strongly opposed to the it because they saw emigrants as vain
profit seekers who were betraying Mother Sweden. Others wished to
investigate the problem of emigration and its meaning for
contemporary Sweden. Still others saw Swedish immigrants as
.inheritors of the greatness of Sweden and as the best and truest
Americans. By 1900, three distinctive schools of thought had
crystallized that reflected these postures, which had as much to
say about contemporary Sweden as to the meaning of the migration.
Those who decried the emigration formed Nationalf�reningen mot
emigrationen (National Society against Emigration), a conservative
group which encouraged a remigration that, it believed, would
nurture a stable rural population and strengthen Sweden by
forestalling the temptation of the city and internationalist
social movements. Those who wished to study the problem of
emigration found their calling by contributing to a multivolume
study - published around the time of the Dillingham Commission
report in the United States - that was aimed at fostering social
reform in an industrializing society. And those who celebrated the
emigration established Riksforeningen for svenskhetens bevarande i
utlandet (The National Society for the Preservation of Swedish
Culture in Foreign Lands), a group that aimed at seizing the
opportunity of "overseas Swedes" to enrich and empower Sweden.:
Each of these groups lost strength as world war and reduced
emigration streams diminished the emigrant problem, but each had
reflected an important element in Swedish society. The National
Society against Emigration reflected a romantic and bucolic view of
Sweden. The scholars, who studied the emigrant in the context of an
industrializing society, provided a blueprint for the evolution of
Sweden's response to industrialization and its social welfare
system. And those who looked to overseas Sweden reflected a
transnational perspective that is so common today in national
communities in many nation-states. As Swedes reacted to the
emigration, Swedish Americans constructed an ethnic identity.
Again, Barton is attentive to the historical conditions that
informed the development of these identities. Like Blanck, he
argues that Swedish Americans in the early phases of the migration
were less concerned than later with the preservation of their
Swedishness. Many wished to learn English; many abandoned the
Lutheran church; most wished to assimilate into American life.
Following Blanck, he notes that Augustana College stressed the
importance of the English language in its early years. Why? Part of
the answer lies in the Swedish past. Barton explains that the early
immigrants were leaving a land that was experiencing a rapid
decline in its folk culture, which was being replaced by an
acceptance of urban gentility. Religious awakenings, moreover, were
coursing through the Swedish countryside, and peasants, whether
they emigrated or not, were concerned with a proper pietistic
perspective rather than accepted tenets of Lutheranism. Finally,
the emigrants did not have a strong Swedish consciousness. They
were understandably more attached to ties of kinship and to their
home community than to the Swedish state and nation. These
perspectives, transferred from Sweden, were complemented by
conditions in the United States. Without a solid ethnic
institutional structure, and hoping to attain the age-old peasant
dream of economic independence, early Swedish immigrants lived in
local communities that often did not place a high priority on
creating a Swedish-specific institutional structure. All of this
changed amid the massive migration in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. An increasingly large Swedish American
community fostered the growth of an institutional structure-a
Swedish-language press, churches and colleges, and ethnic
organizations-that placed a premium on sponsoring a sense of
Swedishness in the United States. As return migration became
increasingly common, moreover, the ties to the homeland were less
likely to be attenuated. At the same time, Swedish America was
influenced by a national romantic movement occurring in Sweden that
created a heightened sense of patriotism and appreciation of
Swedish folk culture. The outcome of these changes was twofold.
First, an increasingly complex institutional structure was formed
that was less localist in nature and cultivated a national Swedish
tradition. The Swedish language was standardized and increasingly
valued as a component of the Swedish American identity. In effect,
this was an example of "peasants becoming Swedish" in the United
States. Related to this was a second outcome: the content of this
tradition itself. The architect of the tradition was Johan Alfred
Enander, longtime editor of Hemlandet, the Swedish newspaper in
Chicago. Enander's work is another example of Overland's
"homemaking myths." He argued that the Vikings were instrumental in
enabling the "freedom" that spread not only throughout the British
Isles, but America as well. Swedes, moreover, were among the first
founders of America with their New Sweden colony in Delaware; in
fact, they were more honest than the cynical and avaricious Dutch
and English. Swedish America was present in Congress under the
Articles of Confederation period, and its role was momentous in
fighting the war against slavery. As a paragon of freedom and the
struggle against unfreedom, and as an exemplar of the courage of
the Vikings in contrast to the papist Columbus, Swedish America
could use its myth to stress its position as loyal adherents to the
larger Protestant American myth.Barton and Blanck clearly
illustrate the complementarities and conflicts between and among
Swedes, Swedish Americans, and the larger American community. Both
have their faults. Blanck often reads like the published
dissertation that it is; it often is overly repetitive in
summarizing its major findings. Barton is a collection of pr"
The present book is a revised and updated version of Dag Blanck's
Ph.D. dissertation, originally published in Sweden (1997). It
addresses the question of identity formation within the Augustana
Synod, the most important Swedish American Lutheran body, from its
founding in 1860 to American entry into World War I. Inspired by
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's path-breaking collection, The
Invention of Tradition (1983), and Benedict Anderson's equally
important Imagined Communities (1983), Blanck sets out to
investigate how the leadership of Augustana actively sought to
construct a specifically Swedish American identity. Furthermore,
challenging the view that boundary maintenance is more important
for ethnic identity formation than the "cultural stuff" inside,
Blanck analyzes what constituted this identity. Finally, Blanck
grapples briefly with the question of why an ethnic leadership
attempted-with considerable success-to foist its views of identity
on the whole Swedish American community.In pursuing these
objectives, Blanck follows three lines of investigation. First, he
studies the educational system at the synod's oldest and largest
educational institution, Augustana College, investigating both
academic curricular developments and various extracurricular
activities, such as student literary societies and ethnic
festivities. Blanck also analyzes the makeup of the student body,
most of whose members, it turns out, remained within "the Augustana
sphere" throughout their careers, many of them as ministers.Second,
Blanck examines the activities of the Augustana Book Concern
(ABC), in his view "one of the most important building blocks in
the creation of a Swedish-American identity within the Augustana
Synod" (p. 159). The ABC functioned as a cultural gatekeeper,
importing many works of nineteenth-century established romantic
authors from Sweden but excluding others, notably those of modern
writers considered immoral. The ABC also published books
itself-almost half of them nondenominational-again informed by the
synod's "special perspective." Among these publications,
schoolbooks figured prominently and are especially worth
analyzing, since they may be expected to mirror the leadership's
ethnic ambitions.Finally, Blanck explores the establishment of a
Swedish American historical tradition within the synod. Finding
inspiration in Orm Overland's concept of "home-making myths"
(Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States
Home, 1870-1930 [2000]), Blanck notes how a specifically Swedish
American tradition was created out of such elements as the early
Swedish presence in North America, myths of ideological gifts
(claiming Swedish American contributions to the American
Revolution and to the concept of freedom), and the celebration of
"culture heroes" such as Civil War engineer John Ericsson and
Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus. The establishment of an annual
"Founders Day" at Augustana and the celebration of the synod's 1910
"Golden Anniversary" helped sustain these traditions.Blanck's main
thesis is that the 1890s were pivotal for the establishment of a
specifically Swedish American identity. Before that point, the
Augustana Synod was dominated at both grass-roots and leadership
levels by Swedish immigrants with strong local and regional Old
World attachments, as well as powerful ties to nineteenth-century
Swedish low church revivalism, and only weak ideas about national
identity. From the 1890s, with immigrants from an urbanizing and
industrializing Sweden still arriving in America but many of them
now displaying only limited interest in the Swedish American
community, the synod became dominated by second-generation Swedish
Americans from the traditional areas of recruitment in the
Midwest. Under these circumstances, the leadership set out to
construct a specifically Swedish American identity out of Swedish,
American, and Swedish American components: "This ... actively
formulated ethnicity of the second phase was thus radically
different from the unreflected upon and taken-for-granted sense of
Swedish identity presumed during the first period of the synod's
history, and we can thus say that the Augustana Synod went from
being Swedish to being Swedish American" (p. 194).In this
well-conceived study, a couple of points do invite criticism.
First, Blanck distinguishes between ethnic and religious identity,
seeing a separate ethnic identity developing from the religious
roots during the 1890s. Since the concepts of religion and
ethnicity overlap, Blanck's alternative juxtaposition of the
religious element with "cultural traditions" is more precise (e.g.,
pp. 7, 9, 68-69, and 192). Second, Blanck all but excludes the
contemporary political context from his investigation, even though
George M. Stephenson, in his classic study The Religious Aspects of
Swedish Immigration: A Study of Immigrant Churches (1932),
emphasized the Augustana Synod's powerful Republican sympathies
and basic conservatism. A stronger focus on the political
environment would have led Blanck to consider Theodore Roosevelt's
xenophobic "anti-hyphenate" campaign in his discussion of a 1916
Swedish American article titled, "Shall We Do Away With the
Hyphen?" (pp. 157-158). More critically, the ethnically virulent
atmosphere is ignored completely in connection with Blanck's
crucial analysis of a Swedish American schoolbook published on the
eve of American entry into World War I (pp. 145-150).These points
should not detract from the fact that Blanck has written a
scholarly and well-argued book. Students and scholars studying
ethnic identity formation, as well as people interested in Swedish
American and Scandinavian American history, will read it with great
benefit.--Joan Brondal "The American Historical Review" (9/23/2008
12:00:00 AM)
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