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On the Trail of The Immigrant

<h2>VIII THE SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRANT</h2> THE steerage of an English vessel on which the Scandinavian immigrants travel is not the forbidding place usually found on the steamers which sail from Continental ports. The passengers have cabins assigned to them, their meals are served in human fashion, and the general appearance of everything is in keeping with that of the travellers who come from the best peasant stock of Europe. The Scandinavian peasants bear no taint of past slavery; and as far back as their “Saga” reaches, they were freemen. When the new light which first shone at Wittenberg travelled northward, it found ready entrance into Swedish hearts, and Scandinavia has ever been the bulwark of Protestantism, so that wherever its story is written, the name of Gustave Adolphe has a prominent place. With scarcely any exception the Scandinavian immigrant is a Protestant, a confessed adherent of some church, and in most cases an ardent worker and worshipper. Repeatedly during services on shipboard I have found that every Scandinavian present took an active interest in it, and on the Sabbath the number of Bible readers and students was astonishingly large. There is practically no illiteracy among them and the steerage passenger who read nothing on his journey was an exception; the quality of the reading was also remarkable, for on one journey I counted among fifty books, nine of Sheldon’s “What would Jesus do?” and only fourteen novels of a purely secular character. The demeanour of the Scandinavian immigrant is quiet, unobtrusive, almost melancholy; and when he sings it is always in a minor key, his folk-song having the dreaminess of the Orient and being as far removed from the jig of his Irish fellow traveller as the North is from the South. He is homesick from the time he steps on board of ship until he reaches his home “in the land where there is no more sea”; and the asylums of the Northwest are full of Scandinavian men and women who have sunk into hopeless melancholia because of homesickness. Yet in spite of this most of the immigrants remain in America and more than any other foreigner blend completely into the national life. There is scarcely such a thing as a second generation of Scandinavians, although the first generation never loses its love and longing for fair “Scandia.” A great many who come know the English language or at least some words, and being in touch here with a spirit which is as serious as their own it is no wonder that they remain, and become merged in the national life. Not one who comes is a pauper, although not a few are poor; yet nearly all are rich in a heritage of health and character which unfortunately they do not always retain on this side of the Atlantic. In fact it is proved that the second generation is weaker physically, and many of the older immigrants claim that it has lost much moral fibre also. This complaint which I have heard from all foreigners about their descendants is largely due to the natural tendency to overrate the past and to underrate the present. It is also true that the second generation undervalues the heritage which the parents brought with them from across the sea; and in not a few cases because of that, it becomes morally and spiritually bankrupt. <ANTIMG src="images/ill_pg_114_sml.jpg" width-obs="349" height-obs="500" alt="From stereograph copyright—1905, by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y. FAREWELL TO HOME AND FRIENDS Close of kin to us are the Scandinavians, not only in race, but in thought and in ideals. More than any other element do they blend quickly and thoroughly with our national life." title="FAREWELL TO HOME AND FRIENDS" /> From stereograph copyright—1905, by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y. FAREWELL TO HOME AND FRIENDS Close of kin to us are the Scandinavians, not only in race, but in thought and in ideals. More than any other element do they blend quickly and thoroughly with our national life. I have seldom seen Scandinavian immigrants of more than middle age, and most of them are young men and women between eighteen and thirty-six. Some remain in the large cities of the East where they are valued as servants, gardeners and dairymen, more of them drift to Jamestown, N. Y., as mechanics; but the large majority of immigrants go to the Northwest where they have been “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” where they have turned the sod of far stretching acres towards the sun and where their cattle graze upon a thousand hills. They like the melancholy plains of the Dakotas; the cold winters remind them of their own far North, and if any strange country ever grows to them like home it certainly is this hospitable region in whose mills and factories, beginning at Chicago and ending in that West which each day comes nearer to the true East across the Pacific, they are toilers, skilled labourers and trusted foremen. I have yet to find the shop where they are not liked; although their less industrious fellow workmen of other nationalities call them treacherous—a word which they themselves do not quite understand; but which means that the Scandinavians “get ahead,” and that is often cause enough to give them a bad name. In all my dealings with them I have found them frank and generous, and while playing farmer in order to know them better, my fellow labourer has many a time hitched the horses for me, or shovelled my portion of the corn, and when he found that I was only a make-believe farmer did not betray my confidence. With such experiences and with such high esteem of the Scandinavian, I joined a party of young Swedes who were travelling from Chicago to the Northwest. They were disgusted by that city, by its moral and physical filth, its noise and its few glimpses of God’s heaven, and I congratulated them upon going to Minneapolis which I described in glowing terms as a clean and godly city in which an American population of New England descent combined with this wholesome Scandinavian element in making a model city. Eager to have America shine to them in its very best light I offered myself as their guide through the city, an offer which they readily accepted. We had scarcely stepped out of the Union Depot before I wished that I had not said anything about the godliness of Minneapolis; for we were set upon by thugs, fakirs and lewd women in such numbers and in such a disgusting manner that I thought for a moment I had struck the Bowery in its palmiest days. Dozens of squares around the depot and deep into the heart of the city were filled by brothels of the most disgraceful kind; pictures were displayed in show windows and in the open porticos of museums which would make a Paris street gamin blush, and the whole city seemed to be stricken by some fatal disease. Policemen were neither ornamental nor useful, city detectives were employed by gamblers to hustle the fleeced stranger out of town, the mayor, the sheriff and who knows who else were in league with gamblers and thieves, while vice was everywhere rampant and did not even have to defy the law for there was no law. Newspaper men whom I interviewed, told me that Minneapolis was considered by travelling men the “toughest” town this side of Butte, Montana. Ministers said that they were helpless and many told me that it was none of their or my business; officials were paralyzed, the mayor was a fugitive from justice, the chief of police was about to be sent to the penitentiary for safe keeping; and all of them agreed that these conditions were in no small measure due to the Scandinavian population which was not fitted for public responsibility. I had just come from Jamestown, N. Y., which has about the same population of Scandinavians, where they had elected a Swedish mayor who gave great satisfaction, where many offices were held by Swedes, and where I had heard no such complaints. In Minnesota generally, no taint attached itself to such Scandinavians as Knute Nelson, Lind and others who had served in high offices in state and nation; therefore I was shocked, puzzled and disappointed. I found the common verdict in Minnesota to be: “We can’t trust the Swedes in public offices;” and the number of defaulting county and city treasurers of Scandinavian nationality (especially Swedish) who spent a few years in Stillwater prison, makes the generally accepted estimate of the high character of the Swede as a citizen waver not a little. If this estimate be true it may be due first of all to the Swedish churches, which have not as a rule, in common with a large share of the American churches, sufficiently emphasized the fact that “righteousness exalteth a nation,” and that it can become exalted only through a righteous citizenship. The Lutheran churches have been busy preaching doctrines and have been so eager to maintain the Augsburg confession that they have not laid much stress upon upholding the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and all that it means for the Kingdom of God. The “Mission Friends,” as a large body of Swedish Christians calls itself, has been so busy in common with Methodists and Baptists, doing evangelizing work, and building up its local church membership, that it has forgotten that it has something to do with saving the state or the city. The second cause may be ascribed to the clannish feeling fostered by cunning politicians, which makes these people vote for a Scandinavian no matter what his character is, just because he is one of their own. In this as in the first case I do not wish it to appear that the Scandinavian is a sinner above all others, but he has been remarkably unfortunate in the character of the officials whom he has chosen, and it will take a great deal of repentance and general betterment to make the people of Hennepin County unsuspicious of the Scandinavian office seeker. The very worst thing in our national life, the most corrupting thing in every way is this voting as Scandinavians or Hungarians, and not as Americans. It amounts in many cases to a kind of treason and deserves to be treated as such. The politicians and the political party which foster that sort of thing are in a small but very dangerous business which does more to hamper the American consciousness in the foreigner than any other thing I know of; and is to-day the great poison which needs to be eliminated from the national life. In nine cases out of ten the foreigner is made a scapegoat by designing politicians who give him a small office which pledges him to do an unfair and often a dishonest thing. In the Northwest it has brought a stigma upon the Swedes: a bad reputation which they do not deserve and which they must throw off for their own good and for the good of the country. The third and perhaps the best reason for this state of affairs is the fact that in common with other foreigners they have had a poor example set them by the Americans. Minneapolis citizens were so busy making money that they did not realize that their city was in the hands of thieves and robbers who not only “killed the body,” but cast many a soul into hell. One is roused to anger by the disclosures of graft in St. Louis, Philadelphia and other cities too numerous to mention; but when city officials like the mayor of the city and the chief of police, both of them of good American stock, are proved to be in league with gamblers and other immoral folk who corrupt the youth and destroy the trustful foreigner who comes from farm and forest, then one’s indignation ought to know no bounds. Justly, the Swedes of Minneapolis say, “the big rascals were Americans supported by American voters, many of them in Christian churches and highly esteemed in business and social life.” Nor can the contented citizen of that beautiful place take any satisfaction in the fact that some of the rascals were brought to justice and that the conditions have changed. This miserable state of affairs might still exist if the aforesaid rascals had not quarrelled with each other and finally destroyed themselves. Scarcely any one in Minneapolis deserves the credit of having lifted his voice against it or raised a protest because of the encroachment of a vice which has no bounds and which can be made harmless only by being driven away. For a city to give up its waterfront to palaces of shame where openly and defiantly, women plied their fearful trade, is poor business, poor esthetics, poor ethics and poor Christianity. Its encroachment upon the Union Depot where every stranger enters, and its perfect freedom to obtrude itself, is all poor politics as it certainly is a poor introduction to that beautiful city’s life. How much the foreigner is to blame I cannot tell, but this is true: that Minneapolis has the best foreign element and of course some of the worst; it has a vigorous, earnest American population with a noble heritage, and yet it has failed not only in making an all-around citizen of that foreigner but even in governing its own city; and the usual excuses of an ignorant, Sabbath-breaking foreign element do not hold good here, for the foreigner in Minneapolis obeys the Sunday law, goes to church (one church has over 4,000 worshippers on Sunday night), is not ignorant or vicious, and yet he is said to be a poor citizen. After all the blame must fall largely upon those Americans who have lost the backbone of the Puritans and the vision of the Pilgrims, who feel little responsibility towards the great city problem, and rest content with the fact that they live in parks, that the saloon cannot encroach upon their dwellings, and then are willing to let the rest go as it pleases and where it pleases. If their pastors lift the prophetic voice, they are “fired,” even as Savonarola was burned, and it amounts to the same thing. There is a perfect stream of new ministers who come and go, and many go away broken in body and in spirit. In the politics of the state, the Scandinavian has a well-deserved and honoured place, and the administration of Governor Johnson goes far to disprove any aspersions cast upon his people. One of the most interesting communities in Kansas is the Swedish town of Lindsburgh, where Bethany College is located. It has become an intellectual and musical centre, and its influence is as wholesome as it is large. I am not defending the foreigner; he has his faults, and too often does not make the most of his great opportunity, but he is as clay in the hands of the American who can make of him what he pleases. In Jamestown, N. Y., you have a strong American community with firm convictions, and this same Scandinavian becomes like it. In Minneapolis you have no such strong convictions of righteousness and you have a Scandinavian population which men in authority say is unfit to exercise its citizenship. Our cities need to cultivate a twentieth century Puritanism—broad and deep, intense yet sympathetic, unyielding yet charitable; and they will find that the most ready imitators will be the foreigners; especially these Scandinavians who were our kinsmen before they came here and who are ready to be our brothers, and heirs of the same Kingdom. In everything which makes a strong people and a great state they have taken an active and conscientious part. They are staunch supporters of the public schools; their children finally become teachers and in every academy and university of the northwest the Scandinavians are an important contingent, industrious and faithful as students, scholarly and loyal as professors. Their churches are well built, well supported, and more and more their pastors are taking their places as true leaders among the people. They are intensely interested in the larger mission of the gospel and in the evangelization of the world; they believe in missions, pray for missions, give to missions, and thus have a wide horizon. In the Northwest they are the greatest foes of the liquor traffic, and one can always count on many of them in an effort to enforce existing laws or frame new ones for its restriction or destruction. Neither they nor any nationality which has come to America is alike good or free from serious faults, but a man would have to be short-sighted indeed not to realize that they have brought to this country rich moral treasures which we have not sufficiently used or developed. What a people we might be, if we would appropriate all that the Jew brings of spiritual vision and cut down his business ardour and craftiness by our own emphasis of the nobler gift; if we would receive the Slav’s virgin strength and plant upon it all that we of older civilization have learned to hold precious; if we would emulate the German’s thoughtfulness and thoroughness and not imitate and encourage him in the trade in lager beer and the use of it. What a nation we should be if we would take the Hungarian’s devotion to his native land and make it burn with just such a true fire upon the altar of this country; and finally, if we would mingle all the virtues that the nations bring us with the seriousness and loftiness of the Scandinavian’s mind and heart,—if we did this through one generation, in one city of our country we would bring the Kingdom of God down upon the earth. Nor is this all a pious wish or simply a flow of rhetoric: we shall have to do that,—cultivate in one another the best gifts,—or we shall reap a harvest of the worst; for in the Scandinavian we can see how the very best may become like the worst simply through our own neglect. We must believe about one another only the best, for people, like bad boys, live up to their reputation. This country ought to be no place for racial or national hatreds, and no people must be branded as this or that simply because of one superficial or even deep seated fault. How often I have heard from well meaning, respectable people: “You can’t trust the Scandinavians, they are immoral, they are treacherous;” when in fact they had no proof for their assertions, and simply sowed seeds of discord of which they must some day reap the harvest. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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