Norwegian Newspapers in America: Connecting Norway and the New Land

Chapter 6. The Golden Age of Norwegian America

a247a chapter 6 The Golden Age of Norwegian America The Norwegian American press will exist and tend to its mission according to its ability as long as it is needed. Judging by all portents under the sun there will be a need for it a long, long time to come. The excerpt above was Decorah-Posten’s optimistic answer to its own question in its September 5, 1924, issue: “Are the days of the Norwegian American press soon counted?” “When its mission is done,” editor Kristian Prestgard further wrote, “it will cease by itself just as quietly as it came into being.” In Prestgard’s opinion, this would not happen any time soon. This issue had been raised fifty years earlier, Prestgard suggested, and he stated with confidence that it would likely be asked fifty years later.1 The 1920s witnessed a last hurrah for many Norwegian American activities. Prestgard could not have foreseen the dire consequences of the deep depression that commenced at the end of that decade. Though severely challenged by the intolerant nativism of World War I, a Norwegian American community flourished from the mid-1890s until the end of the 1920s—in many respects the Golden Age of Norwegian America. Norwegians were secure in their ethnic identity; it was a maturing ethnic subculture—confident of its place in America. By 1900 the second generation outnumbered the Norwegian-born population . These children of immigrants did not consistently embrace 248  norwegian newspapers in america their parents’ ethnic traditions; indeed, as their parents might lament , many rejected the foreign ways of the immigrant population. This disappointment notwithstanding, the Norwegian American community saw many promising developments: the emergence of a celebratory identity where the American-born generations were invited to take part, the success of secular and religious institutions , a flourishing of voluntary organizational life, and a new large influx of immigrants as the American economy revived after the economic slump of the 1890s. These circumstances brightened the future for the established Norwegian American newspapers at the start of the twentieth century: some journals modernized production; circulations were in general on the rise; and the major journals even turned a good profit. A large and growing Norwegian American national community welcomed news organs in the language of home. The jaundiced and xenophobic attitudes generated by World War I for the first time placed limitations on the foreignlanguage press; even so, many Norwegian Americans, several of them recent arrivals, found it easier to read about the hostilities and their impact on the old homeland in their native tongue. The decade of the 1920s, with loss of subscribers and advertising and increasing costs, produced a crisis for the Norwegian-language press, perhaps acknowledged by Prestgard in posing the question about its future. By then, for a large percentage of subscribers, the­ Norwegian-language newspapers supplemented a subscription to an American English-language daily. The Norwegian American Community In 1910, according to the federal census, nearly every third Norwegian , counting only the immigrants and their children, almost one million people in all, resided in the United States. Norway’s population in 1910, toward the end of mass emigration, reached 2,391,782. That year the immigrant generation peaked at 403,858 persons as registered by census takers; the second generation, surpassing the first, numbered 577,377. The vast majority of the Norwegian American population still lived in the Upper Midwest, but, as the following table demonstrates, they resided in large numbers in many regions of the United States: golden age of norwegian america 249 The figures above reflect the third and final mass immigration wave from Norway, 1900–1914, and the greater U.S. geographical spread; the movement from the core Norwegian settlements in the Upper Midwest continued unabated to the Pacific Coast area. New opportunities in the fishing and lumber industries made the Pacific Northwest a particularly attractive terminus for immigrants from coastal Norway. Immigrants headed for the cities to a greater extent than earlier arrivals; even so, especially in the Upper Midwest , the children of the immigrants, following their parents’ lead, resisted the pull of the city. In Minnesota in 1900, for example, second-generation Norwegians were only 18 percent urbanized, a percentage that increased to only 34 percent by 1920. The statistics for the immigrants for these same years were 28 and 39 percent respectively; the higher percentages for the immigrant generation evidence the impact of the post...