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Part One / Homeland

Spread across the northern roof of Europe, the Scandinavian countries have been marked physically, economically, and culturally by their position on the periphery. The climatic conditions and challenging landscapes of the Far North influenced settlement patterns and circumscribed resource-based occupations like farming and fishing. Compared with other parts of western Europe, industrialization arrived late, and traditional lifestyles persisted to some extent into the early decades of the twentieth century. Precious literary and folk treasures like the sagas, ballads, and folktales were preserved in unique quantities, while modern artistic giants like Henrik Ibsen fled Scandinavian cultural provincialism to nurture their creative talents on the Continent.

Counterbalancing this image of life at the margins is the historical record of vigorous Scandinavian interactions with other cultures, most dramatically represented by the Viking expeditions, which reached both across the North Atlantic and deep into Russia. By the nineteenth century, the seafaring industries—shipping and whaling—and the steady emigration of Scandinavians to North America—and to a lesser extent other parts of the world—confirmed that Scandinavian isolation, never total, was crumbling rapidly in an era of improved transportation and communication.

Climatic conditions vary from the marine-influenced regions of Denmark and coastal Norway to the sub-polar continental zones of Finland and northern Sweden. The heavy forests of Sweden and Finland give way in the west to the mountains and fjords of Norway and in the southwest to the wind-blown heaths of Denmark. Out in the mid-Atlantic, Iceland’s hot springs and lava fields present a stark and arresting landscape. In much of the region, farmers struggle with rugged terrain and marginal natural vegetation. The spectacular light summer nights contrast with a winter palette of eery blues and blacks.

The ties among the five countries are long-standing and too complex to enumerate fully here. The historian Franklin Scott writes that the Scandinavians “have a common cultural tradition, have been in and out of various political combinations with one another, and think of themselves as a group. They have their differences, each of the five nations is an entity, yet each is far more different from other nations outside the group than it is from any of the brother nations within the group.”¹ Of primary importance to this family relationship are the linguistic ties that make it possible for the majority of Scandinavians to communicate with each other without formal translation.

In 1900, when the immigrants featured here were being born, the five countries boasted a combined population of 12,500,000. Denmark, Finland, and Norway were roughly equal in size, with 2.5, 2.7, and 2.2 million inhabitants respectively. Sweden’s population numbered 5.1 million. Iceland was still part of the Danish kingdom.²

Industrialization came to the Nordic region during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Whereas agriculture still dominated the economic landscape in 1870, a fundamental shift had occurred by the turn of the century, and the manufacturing and service industries had begun to assume a leading role. Finland retained its rural profile longer than did Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; sixty-six percent of the Finnish population was still employed in agriculture and related fields in 1910. The four decades immediately prior to the First World War were a time of high economic growth, as exports increased, industry expanded, and emigration absorbed much of the natural population growth. People moved into the urban centers to take service and factory jobs and gradually the conveniences of modern life entered their homes.³

The oral history narratives document the continuation of subsistence farming alongside the development of an urban, money-based economy. Torvald Opsal notes, “You had plenty to eat, but there was no cash.” In order to pay for Torvald’s trip to Bergen to be cleared for emigration, the Opsal family sold one of their cows. Food and clothing production required steady and energetic workers. Ester Sundvik says of her mother, “She was never idle. When she sat down, she knitted stockings and spun wool and linen and all kinds of things that she was busy with.” Moreover, Ester’s mother ran the farm single-handed, raised three daughters, preserved and stored foods in the era before refrigeration, and served as the local midwife. Remarkably, this demanding lifestyle produced few complaints, perhaps in part because “we didn’t know anything else.” Torvald Opsal’s maternal grandmother was likewise a model of endurance—“just a quiet, hardworking woman, light, small, could outrun any sheep until the day she died.”

Andrew Johnson and family at his mother’s home in Sweden (see p. 47)

Torvald Opsal emphasizes the unrelenting physical labor of rural life: “Working, that was something we had to do when we started to walk. There was no playing; even going to school we never had any time to play.” According to Martin Rasmussen, the schoolteacher knew “how to use the rod” and his mother how “to keep us in line.” Likewise, when Martin left the farm to become a machine-shop apprentice, a strict disciplinary system applied—“the boss, he would hit you.”

On the whole, life in the country was quiet and peaceful. The daily routine revolved around survival tasks. Pleasure came principally from good hearty food. Christmas served as a cherished respite from routine fare and labor. The pastor and the schoolteacher functioned as the principal authority figures. People relied on each other for assistance. Ina Silverberg’s family had more resources than most, so her father distributed seed to the neighbors in the spring; in return, the neighbors helped him at harvest time.

At the same time, much was changing. Martin Rasmussen chronicles some of the innovations on their rather large farm in southern Denmark, including the transition from manual labor to farm machinery and the introduction of fertilizer. There was also substantial migration from the country into the cities. Else Goodwin tells of her father and his eleven siblings, “They were raised out in the country, but most of them drifted into Copenhagen.” Farm laborers became streetcar operators, prison guards, and small business owners.

The city dwellers recognized the importance of maintaining contact with the land. Gretchen Yost describes how the government would send children to stay with families in the country and how her mother always kept flowers in the kitchen window—a bright contrast to the dreary tenement apartment. Else Goodwin also received a school vacation in the country; what is more, her family leased a colony garden—“all these plots of land where you put up a little summer house and have your garden.” For Bergljot DeRosa, outdoor recreation as a skier and hiker provided the vital link with the natural world—“I could walk alone and just look around and be perfectly at ease and peace.”

Just as women filled a central role in the farm economy, so women often bore major responsibility within the urban setting. Gretchen Yost’s mother was a widow who relied upon her own manual labor and the odd jobs undertaken by the children in order to make ends meet. Else Goodwin’s mother helped run the family’s mangle shop. With Bergljot DeRosa’s father often at sea, her mother raised six children and managed the household; like her grandmother, she was “really, really strong.”

The traditional household units were not as static as one might imagine. One reason households fluctuated was the early departure of children to live and work outside the home. Large families and limited resources made it practical, even mandatory, for children to leave home. A young person might be attached to another household to receive training and provide labor; often the employers were relatives or neighbors. A second major reason for the volatile household composition was parental absence, caused by work, emigration, or death. Seamen and fishermen were absent for long periods of time; and their occupations, like many others, carried physical risks. The death of a parent was a childhood experience faced by a remarkably high number of the interviewees.

The Scandinavians had a high rate of literacy. Public education was nurtured from early in the nineteenth century. A public school law was introduced in Denmark as early as 1814, in Norway in 1837, in Sweden in 1842, and in Finland in 1866. As the school systems evolved, attendance was expected from the age of seven to the time of confirmation, although the school term in rural districts lasted at most twelve weeks a year.⁴ Upon confirmation, usually at age fourteen, a young person was considered an adult, responsible for his or her own welfare.

The school curriculum included a solid introduction to the Bible and to Lutheran doctrine. The Lutheran Church has been the state church of the Scandinavian countries since the Reformation. Persons are born into the Lutheran church and well over ninety percent of Scandinavians remain members throughout their lifetimes; but the church has not escaped criticism or the development of rival religious bodies. Where the state church failed to satisfy the spiritual needs of the population, parallel lay organizations sprang up, typically centered in a prayer house or mission house. Andrew Johnson offers an interesting account of his family’s involvement with the Swedish Mission Covenant.

Political events of the early twentieth century color some of the individual stories. Finland experienced great turmoil when the Russian tsar extended his domination of this neighbor to the west. Many Finns fled the country in 1901–1902, in response to a new conscription law that demanded that Finnish males fight, as necessary, in and for Russia.⁵ The Danes of North Slesvig, including Martin Rasmussen, found themselves drawn into World War I on the German side, in spite of their fervent anti-German sentiments.

In examining the reasons why these immigrants left the land of their birth, the gender stereotyping familiar from novels of the emigration—man as bold adventurer and woman as reluctant companion—fails to apply. For just like their male contemporaries, Scandinavian women actively sought new opportunities and new horizons. In a nuanced presentation of life in northern Norway, Henny Hale gives powerful expression to the forces that restricted her at home and those that beckoned to her from across the sea. She recalls the heavy burden of physical labor, the constant specter of death at sea, and the confining physical landscape—symbolic of her limited options. As she emphatically states, “I felt like I was choking, ‘cause I couldn’t see over the mountains.”

Thus driven, or pushed, by negative features of her Norwegian environment, Henny Hale simultaneously experienced the allure of America. She heard fantastic stories, especially from her father, whose own desire to go to America remained unfulfilled. “We thought America was lined with gold all over the place,” she says. Many of her relatives had already emigrated and they sent back beautiful presents. The fancy clothes in particular impressed the young country girl. With America, Henny associates luxury, sophistication, and relatives. With Norway, in spite of the memories of loving parents and lovely summer nights, she associates drudgery, death, and despair. At the age of twenty, she found herself obsessed with the idea of emigration—“I wanted to go to America, period.”

Magnhild Johnsen journeyed across the Atlantic just in time to be caught in the grip of war. But her 1938 journey was from west to east. As a remigrant to Norway, she lived through the German Occupation, a participant in the resistance movement and a witness to much suffering. The family decided to return to the United States in 1948, because of “too many sad memories from the war.” The Johnsen family represents an important segment of the twentieth-century immigrant population, namely those who remigrate. As many as one in five returned to live, for a time at least, in the Scandinavian homeland. Frequent trips back and forth were also not uncommon. In some cases, the “emigrants” never actually settled down on this side of the Atlantic, but rather “commuted” for a number of years in response to seasonal work patterns.

Overseas migration was one of several unstable elements in the lives of Scandinavian families during the early part of the century. Still, the geographical and cultural space that came to separate family members as a result of emigration distinguished the transatlantic move from the partings otherwise woven into the rhythm of family life. Not surprisingly, then, the leave-taking sparked emotions that were otherwise kept in check. Sometimes the parents refused a formal good-by, fearing an unseemly flood of tears. Sometimes the kiss or tear or solemn word of love did find expression, as when Ina Silverberg’s father placed his hands on her head and offered his blessing. These unusual circumstances made a lasting impression upon the departing offspring, although to judge by their testimony, the emigrants themselves found that excitement and anticipation overshadowed much of the pain and guilt of departure.

Then, too, the emigrants could look ahead to an established network of relationships in the distant western United States, where relatives and neighbors had already established homes. A study of Swedish-American Line passengers between 1922 and 1930 showed that two-thirds of them were joining relatives in America, one-fifth of them traveling on prepaid tickets.⁶ Seen in this light, emigration was not abandonment of the family; by and large, it was an extension of well-established social patterns and priorities.

The interviews in this section are arranged to give first a picture of rural life and then an impression of urban childhoods.

NOTES

1. Franklin D. Scott, Scandinavia (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975), 1.

2. B. R. Mitchell, “Statistical Appendix 1700–1914,” in Carl M. Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe, 4 (London, 1973), 747–749. Iceland was granted status as a separate kingdom under the Danish crown in 1918; in 1944, it became an independent republic.

3. Lennart Jörberg, “The Industrial Revolution in the Nordic Countries,” in The Fontana Economic History of Europe, 399, 377–378.

4. B.J. Hovde, The Scandinavian Countries, 1720–1865, 2 (Boston, 1943), 606.

5. Reino Kero, “The Background of Finnish Emigration,” in Ralph J. Jalkanen, ed., The Finns in North America: A Social Symposium (Hancock, Michigan, 1969), 58.

6. Florence Edith Janson, The Background of Swedish Immigration 1840–1930 (1931; reprinted New York, 1970), 484.