On the Trail of the Immigrant

by Edward Alfred Steiner

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.

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.