In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

❖ 5 ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ Chapter 1 Friends and Neighbors? Patterns of Norwegian-Swedish Interaction in the United States Dag Blanck In 1980 the Norwegian American professor Sverre Arestad of the University of Washington recalled his childhood in a small settlement known locally as “Snus Hill,” near Bellingham, Washington, consisting of ten Swedish and twentyfour Norwegian households. Reflecting on the relationship between the two groups, he noted that the larger number of Norwegians on Snus Hill might have given them an advantage over their Swedish neighbors. Still, Arestad remembered , this did not seem to be the case. The real divide was not between the two national groups but rather was seen in religious terms, between a pietistic majority and those who belonged to the local Norwegian Synod congregation. Nationality was, according to Arestad, of little concern. He rarely heard some private complaint against Swedes in general on political grounds, and he noted that in school, “We always spoke our respective languages on the playground and got along just fine. Norwegian or Swede, who cared? Just leave this problem to the children.”1 A second vignette comes from the Midwest, where a retired Norwegian American professor of English at Illinois’s Augustana College, established in 1860 by Swedish immigrants, reflected on his childhood. In talking about ethnic relations in his hometown—a compact Norwegian American rural settlement in southeastern Minnesota—he noted that he was ten years old before he realized that there was a group of people called Swedes.2 These observations by two Norwegian American academics raise questions about the nature of Norwegian and Swedish American identity in the United States and of the relationships between the two groups. How did these groups see and interact with each other? Did they cooperate or was there hostility? What role did ethnic background play in relationship to other modes of identification ? And what have the labels Norwegian and Swedish meant over time? Is it also possible to speak of Scandinavians? In a 1976 article comparing Swedish and Norwegian ethnicities in America, the noted Norwegian American linguist Einar Haugen observed that so far no history of the Scandinavians in America has been written. Thirty-five years have passed, but Haugen’s comment is still correct. This book is not a comprehensive 6 ❖ Dag Blanck history of Scandinavian Americans, but it seeks to examine the relationships between the two largest Scandinavian immigrant groups in the United States, the Swedes and the Norwegians. It casts a wide net, attempting to capture the dynamics of inter-Scandinavian contacts in the United States in a variety of social spheres. It covers topics such as politics, religion, folklore, literature, language , and identity formation among Norwegians and Swedes, as well as offering several community and regional studies.3 Norwegians and Swedes were, by far, the two largest Scandinavian immigrant groups in the United States. A total of about 2.9 million Danes, Finns, Icelanders, Norwegians, and Swedes came to the United States over the course of roughly a century, between 1825 and 1930. Of these, close to three-fourths, or 2.1 million , were Norwegians and Swedes. The Swedes were more numerous than the Norwegians, sending some 1.3 million persons to America, while the Norwegian immigrants numbered about 800,000. They settled in many parts of the United States, with a concentration in the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and parts of the East Coast. In some areas, such as the Upper Midwest, they have left longlasting imprints on local and regional cultures and identities. In 1910 there were one million first- and second-generation Norwegian Americans and close to 1.4 million first- and second-generation Swedish Americans. The groups came out of similar yet distinctive social, cultural, and linguistic circumstances in Europe. Once in the United States they developed their own, often thriving,ethniccommunitiesalongseparatetrajectories.Still,theircommonalities were also visible, partly because the American host society tended to group them together, partly because they settled in proximity of each other. In many ways, they were the groups with which both interacted the earliest and most extensively once Norwegians and Swedes began reaching beyond their own ethnic boundaries . They were often neighbors, had similar occupations, married each other, cooperated, and developed comparable—but not ­ identical—­ religious, cultural, and ethnic traditions. The relationship was not always harmonious; there was also friction and competition, and H. Arnold Barton, the well-known historian of Swedish America, speaks of a “sibling relationship.”4 The book covers many aspects of Norwegian-Swedish relations in the United States...

Share