New Land, New Lives. Janet Elaine Guthrie
are designed to illustrate this process. The homeland is explored through memories of family and childhood and then viewed in the context of the decision to emigrate. The new land is encountered and analyzed, both physically and psychologically, on the immigrant journey and during the early years of adjustment. New lives are forged around work and family, but remain informed by tradition.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the typical Scandinavian emigrants were young, unmarried adults, motivated by economic pressures to seek employment overseas. Among them were a large number of women; by 1905, between thirty-five and fifty percent of the emigrants from the individual Nordic countries were female. In recognition of this fact, and to counter the male bias of earlier research in the field, the documentation of women’s experiences served as a priority for the oral history project. The shape of this book has also been influenced by a strong commitment to inclusiveness. Because immigrant women typically filled the role of tradition bearers, their insights and actions are critical to an understanding of the legacy of the European homeland.
To set the context for the individual immigrant voices, I offer an overview of the emigration from Scandinavia followed by a discussion of the oral source material and the editorial principles that have guided me in presenting the material in written form.
The Emigration from Scandinavia
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Scandinavian countries sent a high percentage of their populations to North America. Altogether, some two and a half million residents of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden traversed the Atlantic during the period of mass emigration. The magnitude of the population movements is illustrated by the fact that Norway lost as many citizens as had comprised her total population in 1800.
The rate of emigration fluctuated in response to economic and social conditions in both Scandinavia and the United States. But overall, there was a mushrooming effect—the greater the number of emigrants, the greater the returning stream of America letters and the greater the number of both published and informal accounts of American life available to the populace in Scandinavia. Such firsthand information instilled confidence in those who remained behind. Prepaid tickets sent by relatives in the new land and energetic promotion efforts by steamship and railroad agents added to the enticement. For those infected with “America fever,” the only cure was to venture across the ocean.
Groups of Scandinavians arrived in North America during the first half of the nineteenth century, and by the 1850s the movement was clearly established.6 The peak of emigration was reached during the 1880s. The flow tapered off during the 1890s, when the United States suffered an economic downturn, then picked up again after the turn of the century. The First World War reduced out-migration to a trickle; and soon after the war, the United States government enacted restrictions on the number of immigrants permitted annually from any one country. This quota system took effect in 1921; a stricter quota introduced in 1924 took final form in 1929. The allotted quota spaces were used almost to capacity throughout the 1920s, but the Great Depression finally halted the tide of mass emigration. In fact, taking Sweden as an example, more persons returned to the homeland than emigrated to the United States between 1930 and 1934.7
Areas of Scandinavian settlement developed in the Upper Midwest, particularly in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and North Dakota. Then, after the settling of the middle western territories, the immigrants began turning their faces farther westward and a favored destination became the Pacific Northwest, the Puget Sound region in particular.
Prior to the 1870s, only a few Scandinavians found their way to the west coast. One source reports sixty-five Norwegians in Washington and forty-seven in Oregon Territory in 1870.8 But by the 1880s, when the railroads reached the Pacific Northwest, a sufficient influx of immigrants caused Scandinavian churches and organizations to be established in the urban centers. Tacoma, Washington, provides a good example. A Swedish Lutheran congregation began in Tacoma in 1882 and a Norwegian Lutheran congregation in 1887. The Swedish Valhalla Lodge was founded in 1884, the Normanna Chorus in 1888, and the Danish Brotherhood in 1889. Both the Swedish-language newspaper Tacoma Tribunen and the Norwegian-language Tacoma Tidende began publication in 1890. All this activity suggests the emergence of a vibrant Scandinavian presence.
Between 1890 and 1910, more than 150,000 Scandinavians settled in the Pacific Northwest, an average annual influx of about 7,500. Washington received the bulk of these persons. By 1910, Scandinavians comprised the largest ethnic group in the state, constituting over twenty percent of the foreign-born population. It was not uncommon for immigrants to move west in stages, finding their way to the coast after two or more years of work in the Midwest. The evidence suggests that persons from the Nordic region felt a kinship with the natural surroundings and economic base of the Pacific Northwest. Fishing, lumbering, and farming were leading industries in the Northwest, just as they were in Scandinavia, and the mountains, lush forests, and protected waters resembled those of the homeland.9
Cities like Seattle, Spokane, and Tacoma welcomed a great many of these immigrants. By 1940, almost 20,000 first-generation Scandinavians were living in Seattle, a number equal to thirty percent of the city’s foreign-born population.10 Some smaller communities also developed obvious ethnic profiles. Selah in central Washington became home to Swedish farmers and members of the Mission Covenant Church. Poulsbo in western Washington attracted Norwegian settlers. Astoria, at the northern border of Oregon’s coast, offered Finnish immigrants jobs in the fishing and wood-products industries. Danish farmers found their way to Enumclaw, Washington, and Icelanders to Blaine. To these examples could be added other towns like Silverton and Junction City, Oregon, and Stanwood, Washington.
The imprint of the Scandinavians remains strong in the Pacific Northwest, as evidenced by a rich array of ethnic festivals and organizations.11 But, by and large, the present-day participants are members of the second and third generations. Nationwide, the number of first-generation Scandinavians shrank from around one million in 1940 to around three hundred thousand in 1975. Since the majority of those who emigrated prior to the Depression were born before 1910, their ranks have thinned considerably during the past fifteen years. With a few exceptions, the resource represented by the actual immigrants from early in the century is now gone. That demographic reality heightens the value of the oral history material on which this book draws.
The Oral History Project
The general significance of preservation activity—saving historically important buildings, artifacts, and texts—is rather well understood in today’s society. The whys and hows of oral history research are less familiar. Louis M. Starr of Columbia University has provided this now standard definition of oral history: “Oral history is primary source material obtained by recording the spoken words—generally by means of planned, tape-recorded interviews—of persons deemed to harbor hitherto unavailable information worth preserving.”12 Interviewing itself is a time-honored tool of journalists and folklorists, but tape recording has given new dimensions to the scholarly use and interpretation of interviews.
As indicated above, New Land, New Lives draws on recorded life histories to depict the personal experiences of those who participated in the last waves of mass emigration from Scandinavia. In deciding to seek grant funding for, and to engage my students in, the interviewing of first-generation Scandinavians, I was motivated by three specific advantages of the oral history method. First, as Louis Starr stresses in his definition, oral history makes it possible to retrieve specific, otherwise unavailable information. Second, oral history enables us to broaden the historical record. Women, ethnic minorities, workers, and others whose experiences and perspectives are seldom rendered in official documents