Pole Raising and Speech Making: Modalities of Swedish American Summer Celebration by Jennifer Eastman Attebery (review)

In recent years Scandinavian American historiography has been characterized by a number of studies dealing with different kinds of identity-formation processes among immigrants and their descendants. This line of research has been an important complement to the demographic and social dimensions that characterized the field for many years, especially in Scandinavia. Jennifer Eastman Attebery has been an important voice in this "cultural turn" among scholars of the Swedish American community. Her 2007 book Up in the Rocky Mountains: Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience (University of Minnesota Press) broke new and important ground by using immigrant letters to analyze the creation of a Swedish American identity. In addition she focused her (and our) attention on the specific conditions of the Swedish Americans of the Intermountain West, an area that had received relatively little attention up until that time.

In her new book, Attebery continues her explorations of identity processes among Swedish Americans in the northern Rocky Mountains—Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. She uses a variety of celebrations as a way of understanding how Swedish Americans related to traditions of both their ancestral and adopted lands, and how these traditions became a central part in the creation of new identities specific to the experiences of the migrants and their descendants in America. The celebrations that form the core of her analysis are what she calls "spring-to-summer celebrations," occurring from May to July. They include American holidays, such as Decoration Day (today, Memorial Day), and the Fourth of July, as well as Swedish celebrations connected to Midsummer, and specific Mormon celebrations, such as Pioneer Day (commemorating the entry of the first Mormons into the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847).

This is a rich book that makes use of a number of sources in archives and libraries in both the United States and Sweden. Attebery's use of the Swedish-language press in the Rocky Mountain states is particularly effective, and she shows how much can be done with this often elusive and unwieldy source material. She also continues to be informed by letters and by a number of speeches and orations given at the various events.

Midsummer is a central celebration in Swedish America—or as Attebery puts it, "what could be more Swedish American than Midsummer?" (p.6). She gives us a careful and interesting discussion of a variety of Midsummer celebrations in Swedish America in general, and in the Rockies in particular. She shows how Midsummer celebrations were uncommon during the early phase of the migration and were introduced into Swedish America around the turn of the nineteenth century, a time during which such celebration underwent a revival in Sweden. It was often Swedish Americans returning from a summer visit to Sweden who brought an awareness of the tradition to Swedish America, and a willingness to celebrate it. Altough Midsummer celebrations were occasions to meet with family or friends, they increasingly took on organized and public dimensions. In the major urban settlements of Denver and Salt Lake City, Midsummer excursions, or utflykter, often by train, were arranged for travel to parks or recreational areas where picnics were held, food was eaten, and full programs presented.

In 1894 in Eden Park in Bountiful, Utah, for example, a midsummer pole was raised together with dancing, singing, and games. A formal program followed, with more music and speeches. Atteberry has an interesting discussion of the oratorical components of the celebrations, where leaders of different factions of the Swedish American community, such as Dr. Charles A. Bundsen of Colorado, were given an opportunity both to speak to and speak for their fellow immigrants. The contents of these addresses were not always explicitly ethnic, and often resembled non-ethnic US rhetorical styles of the times; yet as Attebery shows, they also functioned as a way of creating and maintaining local Swedish American communities.

Midsummer was not the only spring-to-summer celebration...