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Introduction

There’s a lot of history in your life, isn’t there?” With a note of surprise, Magnhild Johnsen offered this observation while responding to an interviewer’s questions about when and why she had left the country of her birth. Like most others with whom we spoke, Magnhild did not readily view her personal experiences as historically significant. Yet the events she recounted were both dramatic and revealing.

Born in Kristiansand, Norway, in 1909, Magnhild arrived in the United States at the age of twenty, a single woman planning to do housework for a year and then return home for further education. When she did finally return, she brought a husband and two young children and the year was 1939. Caught in Norway by World War II, the Johnsens aided the resistance movement through the trying years of German occupation. After the war, the family crossed the Atlantic again, eager to renew their American identities.¹

A life like Magnhild Johnsen’s does indeed contain “a lot of history.” So, too, do the lives of the more than two hundred other immigrants whose oral history interviews have been deposited in the Scandinavian archives at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. The present work draws upon a selection of their stories to portray the dynamics of Scandinavian immigration to the Pacific Northwest during the early decades of the twentieth century.

These personal accounts sketch the intricate patterns of family life in turn-of-the-century Scandinavia. They communicate the emotions that attended the leave-taking and convey striking details of the journey to a new home across the ocean. In lively and sometimes poignant fashion, the reminiscences illuminate the process of adapting to American society and the avenues for perpetuating the cultural heritage. Everyday life and associations, not politics or theological controversies, are the subject of the first-person narratives. The words come from “ordinary” persons, as opposed to persons with established public reputations.

In two respects this approach constitutes a unique contribution. First, no previous book on the Scandinavians in North America has been based on oral testimony. Several collections of immigrant letters are available, the most recent being Solveig Zempel’s In Their Own Words: Letters from Norwegian Immigrants (1991). Letters offer a contemporaneous and often intimate record from which a concrete image of the immigrant experience can emerge; oral history relies on memory and the direct solicitation of information to reveal how individuals value and interpret various aspects of the past. The two types of first-person source material thus not only supplement in important ways the official historical record, but also complement each other. Second, much inquiry and analysis in regard to the Scandinavian presence in the Pacific Northwest after 1910 await the attention of researchers. This presentation suggests relevant parameters and themes and thus aims to stimulate systematic investigations of the period and the region.²

The Legacy of the Homeland

The immigrants carried the imprint of their native cultures and values into, and through, the new lives they established in the United States. Recent studies of settlements in the Upper Middle West document in detail how communities could be “transplanted” from Scandinavia, so that kinship and other interpersonal ties remained intact and key institutions like the church were replicated.³ Broadly speaking, both chain migration—members of a family or neighbors following after one another—and the maintenance of regional homeland loyalties were important features of Scandinavian immigration to the Pacific Northwest as well.⁴ Still, it might reasonably be argued that the links were less compelling and less fundamental to the shape of the immigrant experience in the Pacific Northwest than was true in the Midwest, given that the major influx of Scandinavians into the Pacific Northwest occurred during a later phase of the mass migration and that urban environments received a good share of the twentieth-century newcomers.⁵

The interview excerpts that follow provide a way to examine the fabric of Scandinavian culture within the Pacific Northwest immigrant experience. With oral history, the focus shifts from “hard” indicators like census, tax, and church records into the “soft” realm of personal experience and expression. Out of the personal particulars, general patterns of behavior and sentiment emerge and invite interpretation. In the case of these immigrants to the Pacific Northwest, the patterns suggest an intricate and sturdy web of homeland influences. Familial ties and connections can be discerned across geographical space. Childhood values and childhood habits resonate in the vocabulary used to describe occupational choices. The choice of a mate, the response to American lifestyles, the articulation of ethnic identity—in these and other aspects of immigrant life the informants reveal the dynamics that marry cultural continuity to cultural transformation.

The five parts of the anthology 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 or written autobiographical form may be heard and recognized. Third, oral history affirms human experience as the stuff out of which the fabric of history and culture is woven. Thus, it compels us to pay tribute to the roles of individual human beings. Oral historian James Bennett points out that affirmation of the importance of individuals is especially critical in an era when we otherwise confront “massive forces that grind up and spit out our humanity.” Bennett continues, “By preserving the experiences we deem important by whatever particular criterion, we symbolize and show respect for human beings in general, as ends in themselves rather than always as means to reach other things, in endless processes of consumption and repetition.”¹³ Humanistic oral history suggests an affinity between personal narrative and literary narrative. When we listen to people’s stories in their own words, we reconstruct the texture of life as it is lived.

The goal of the interview project was the establishment of a tape archive for Pacific Lutheran University. Those interviewed emigrated between 1900 and 1930 from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden and settled, either immediately or eventually, in the Pacific Northwest. The interviews were all conducted as mini-life histories. Deriving from a single encounter with an elderly immigrant, the recording session covered a wide range of topics. Project interviewers were equipped with a standard questionnaire (see Appendix) but were instructed to follow the contours of the individual’s own special circumstances rather than to move mechanically through the prepared questions. As a result, each conversation produced an oral record with slightly different characteristics and emphases.

Fewer than a fifth of all the interviews, forty-five out of 240, are presented here. The choice of whom to include was dictated by the desire to offer a balanced selection, as well as by the desire to highlight lively and engaging storytellers. Needless to say, these two factors sometimes tugged against one another and necessitated compromises. In addition, there was the practical need to create a manageable and welcoming selection. Suffice it to say that the first draft incorporated twice as many immigrant voices as found in the present volume. As noted above, a conscious decision was made to include a generous representation of women’s stories.

The tapes were transcribed—a painstaking and never-perfect task—followed by an equally painstaking and imperfect task, namely the editing of the transcriptions. An oral history interview is a conversation, steered by the interviewer; as such, multiple interpersonal dynamics affect narrator response. The most faithful record of the conversation would include all the interviewer’s questions and comments along with the responses. To highlight the first-person narrative, as I wished to do, required radical editing. All questions have been eliminated. Material has been freely moved and combined, and much has been omitted. But, with the exception of an occasional translation, factual correction, or pronoun reference, nothing has been added. The words on the page are the words of the narrator. Necessary notations and explanations have been placed in brackets or notes.

Because these selections reflect oral speech, aspects of the text require the reader’s indulgence. Interference from the native language is stronger in some cases than in others; but throughout, there are ample instances of imperfect grammar and inconsistent verb tenses. I trust that the attempt to retain the flavor of immigrant speech does not impede the reader’s understanding or convey an unintended lack of respect for the individuals who generously shared their impressions and experiences.

The interviews were conducted in a spirit of trust—trust that the narrator would respond openly and honestly. Yet one must constantly keep in mind that the narrators were asked to review events from many decades past. Some accomplished this with more agility than others, though in all cases the process of reflection tints the story being told. It is a bit disconcerting to review interviews with three siblings and to discover that each presents different information about the parents; in some respects the stories complement each other, but they also contradict each other with regard to certain dates and events. Folklore enters some of the reminiscences, too; an uncanny number of the immigrants, or their friends and relatives, just missed the fateful voyage of the Titanic.

As part of the editing process, many details have been checked and questionable items eliminated. Still, the reader is cautioned that “true” history as remembered by one witness may not be factually or representatively “true” and also that certain aspects of the situation may have been omitted or repressed. Further, it is worth stressing that one cannot claim statistical validity for the demographic patterns and the circumstances revealed on the tapes. In fact, the perspectives presented here may be skewed, in that referrals to interviewees derived, in large part, from a network of church and ethnic organizations. “Unaffiliated” Scandinavians were not so easily identified, nor were the “nonsurvivors” available to offer their side of the story. It should also be pointed out that the information supplied is not always as complete as one might wish; the identification of family photographs, for example, is sketchy.

Such interpretive and presentational difficulties do not diminish the general significance of the memories captured on tape and now on the printed page. They are a unique source of sociocultural and historical information. In particular, they highlight the human experiences and values that make up the immigrant legacy from the “top of Europe.”

NOTES

1. Magnhild Johnsen’s story will be found in Part One below.

2. See the Bibliography for additional publications of immigrant letters and diaries and for the major studies of early Scandinavian settlement in the Pacific Northwest.

3. See the essay by Ann Marie Legreid, “Kinship and Crossing: The Role of Family and Community in the Migrations from Inner Hardanger, 1836–1900,” in Øyvind T. Gulliksen, Ingeborg R. Kongslien, and Dina Tolfsby, eds., Essays on Norwegian-American Literature and History Volume II (Oslo, 1990), 57–72. A major study of the phenomenon is Robert C. Ostergren, A Community Transplanted: The Trans-Atlantic Experience of a Swedish Immigrant Settlement in the Upper Middle West (Madison, Wisconsin, 1988).

4. One striking example is provided by the Selbu community in eastern Washington; see Marvin G. Slind, “Norse to the Palouse: The Selbu Community,” in Bunchgrass Historian, 10:4 (1982), 10–19. See also Slind and Fred C. Bohm, Norse to the Palouse: Sagas of the Selbu Norwegians (Pullman, Washington, 1990).

5. Scandinavian emigration during the nineteenth century is generally seen as dominated by families and that of the twentieth century by young adults. See, for example, the chapter “Change and Unrest, 1865–1915” in Ingrid Semmingsen, Norway to America: A History of the Migration, trans. by Einar Haugen (Minneapolis, 1978), 106–120.

6. Scandinavians had, of course, a presence in North America well before this. A Swedish colony was established in Delaware already in 1638. And Viking expeditions had reached the shores of eastern Canada by the year 1000.

7. See Hans Norman and Harald Runblom, Transatlantic Connections (Oslo, 1988) and Sture Lindmark, “End of the Great Migration,” Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 20:1 (1969), 25–41.

8. Carlton C. Qualey, Norwegian Settlement in the United States (Northfield, Minnesota, 1938), 188.

9. See chapter II, “Settlement Patterns and Occupations,” in Jorgen Dahlie, A Social History of Scandinavian Immigration, Washington State, 1895–1910 (New York, 1980).

10. Calvin F. Schmid, Social Trends in Seattle (Seattle, 1944), 99. Foreign-born Scandinavians made up five percent of Seattle’s total population in 1940, with the heaviest concentration of Norwegians and Swedes living in the area of the city known as Ballard.

11. For striking photographic documentation of this ethnic presence, see Kristina Veirs, ed., Nordic Heritage Northwest (Seattle, 1982).

12. Louis M. Starr, “Oral History,” in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 20 (New York, 1977), 440.

13. James Bennett, “Human Values in Oral History,” in Oral History Review, 11 (1983), 5.