Norwegian Newspapers in America: Connecting Norway and the New Land

Chapter 1. Pioneer Years

a1a chapter 1 Pioneer Years The press has become a power in all languages in this country. With this pithy statement, the Chicago journal Skandinaven (The Scandinavian)—destined to become the largest Norwegianlanguage newspaper in the United States and, indeed, for some time the entire world—in January 1888 assessed the influence of the press in America. Newspapers were a part of American life and exhibited a basic community-building function. The press made its way into villages and country towns and flourished in large urban centers. The history of American journalism extends back to the early eighteenth century with the establishment in 1704 of the first successful continuous newspaper in the colonies, the Boston NewsLetter . In their multitude of visages and objectives in the ensuing centuries, newspapers shaped and challenged the new nation. The press became a powerful cultural, social, and political institution through shifting historical and social circumstances. The pioneer Norwegian newspaperman Knud Langeland was clearly correct when he described America as “the Land of Newspapers.”1 The non-English-language press represents a notable manifestation of American journalism; immigrant journals printed in foreign languages became nearly as commonplace as the mainstream American press. They bore witness to America as a land of immigration. The first issue of the German-language newspaper Philadelphische Zeitung (Philadelphia Times) appeared among German settlers in Pennsylvania the spring of 1732. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the Zeitung heralded establishment of a sepa- 2  norwegian newspapers in america rate German-language press. The German American press was not only the earliest foreign-language press in America but throughout its history the largest. However, as Carl Wittke explains, not until German immigration picked up in the 1830s after a hiatus of over thirty years and then greatly increased in the decade before the Civil War did the German-language press expand significantly. Large numbers of new German immigrants, particularly hundreds of political refugees of the 1848 revolution, arrived, and many of the Forty-Eighters became active in journalism and spread their reform message in the German-language press. Immigration from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden inspired journals published in Dano-Norwegian and Swedish to appear in that same decade; in the postbellum years, immigrants from many other parts of the world created increased diversity at a rapid pace; newspapers appeared in Yiddish, Russian, Slovak, Czech, Greek, Italian, Polish, Finnish, and many other mother tongues foreign to most Americans. Thus, the foreign-language press in the United States has endured since colonial days, not in competition with but as a special expression of American journalism alongside the much larger English-language press. Robert E. Park in The Immigrant Press and Its Control determined that in 1919 there were­ “forty-three or forty-four languages and dialects spoken by immigrant peoples in the United States.” He continued, “Each one of these little communities is certain to have some sort of co-operative or mutual aid society, very likely a church, a school, possibly a theater , but almost invariably a press.” In The German-language Press in America, Wittke concurs, stating, “There is scarcely a nationality or language group in the United States, however small, that has not at some time or other supported its own press.” He is obviously right in his claim, as suggested by the success of Skandinaven, that “there have been more foreign-language papers and periodicals published and read in America, in proportion to population, than in the home countries from which their readers came.”2 “The mother tongue is the natural basis of human association and organization,” Park states; its literary forms assumed added significance. Only through the written language could immigrant populations of the same nationality living in many parts of the United States be united. The newspapers published in the home- pioneer years 3 land’s language created a sense of national ethnic communities; one may define a Norwegian America, if you will, but also a Swedish America, a German America, a Greek America, and a great number of other “imagined communities” grounded in national roots and consciousness. The Norwegian American press was thus not unique but part of a general phenomenon among the many immigrant groups as well as in American society more broadly. In its initial issue, dated June 1, 1866, Skandinaven explained how for several years “a strong general wish among Norwegians in Chicago [was] to have a newspaper in the ancestral language published here.” Skandinaven’s...