Like the immigrants from Great Britain, the Scandinavians came with a male preponderance of about three-fifths. About a quarter of them were servants at home, a third were common laborers, and a sixth were skilled laborers. They have brought far less skill than the British, and distinctly less than the Germans and the Bohemians.
In point of literacy they lead the world. One finds an illiterate among every twenty German immigrants of more than fourteen years of age. Of immigrants from other nations, one may find an illiterate among every twenty-three Dutch, thirty-eight Irish, fifty-two Welsh, fifty-nine Bohemians, seventy-seven Finns, one hundred English, and one hundred and forty-three Scotch; but the proportion among those who come from Scandinavia is one in two hundred and fifty. What a contrast between these and the Lithuanians and South Italians, half of whom are unable to read any language!
It is perhaps the strain of melancholy lurking in Northern blood that gives our Scandinavians a tendency toward insanity slightly in excess of the foreign-born as a whole, and decidedly greater than that of Americans. In susceptibility to tuberculosis they make a worse showing than any others among our foreign-born save the Irish. They die of it oftener than do their children born in this country, but even these suffer twice the losses of their American neighbors. But the scourge is still worse in the old country; so very likely we have here not a race weakness, but a penalty for unhygienic conditions. In the bitter North, with the forests disappearing, people came to dread fresh air, and the trouble began as soon as the open hearth gave way to the tight stove.
In our Northwest many Scandinavians board up or nail down their windows for the winter, and in such homes one appreciates the mot evoked by the query, "Why is the country air so pure?" The answer is, "Because the farmers keep all the bad air shut up in their houses." The second generation are taking to ventilation, and in their children very likely the Hyperboreans' horror of fresh air will have wholly disappeared, and with it their special susceptibility to the white plague.
The study of several thousand mixed marriages in Minneapolis has led Professor Albert Jenks of the University of Minnesota to this conclusion: "The Irish blood tends to increase fecundity, and the Scandinavian blood tends to decrease fecundity, of other peoples in amalgamation." Is this contrast due to the Scandinavians being so fore-looking, whereas the Irish give little heed to the future; to the fact that the Scandinavians are the purest Protestants, while the Irish are the purest Roman Catholics; or to the coming together in the Scandinavians of prudence and Protestantism with a high status of women? At any rate, such caution in family is startling when one recalls that old Scandinavia was the mother hive of the swarms of barbarians that kept South Europeans in dread a thousand years, or notes what William Penn found among the Swedes on the Delaware two hundred and thirty years ago: "They have fine children and almost every house full; rare to find one of them without three or four boys and as many girls; some six, seven, or eight sons."
The primitive man commits crime from passion; the developed man commits more of his crimes from cupidity. Proverbially honest, the Scandinavian is less prone than the American to seek his living by crookedness. The gamut of exploit that reaches from the Artful Dodger to Colonel Sellers is alien to him. Nor is he subject to the wild impulses that often crop out in the Italian or the Slav. Much of his crime springs from disorderly conduct, and drink must bear most of the blame, for on the Scandinavian nature liquor has a disastrous effect.
ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE SCANDINAVIANS
Pytheas of Marseilles, the explorer who about the time of Alexander the Great gave the world its first news of Norway, said that the people of Thule made from honey "a very pleasant drink." This beverage could hardly have touched the right spot, for when the product of the still reached the Thulites they fell upon it with the joyous abandon of the inexperienced. A century ago Scandinavia was the home of hard drinkers. Even yet, in our cities, the "toughest" saloons are kept by old-time Norsemen, who left the fatherland before it began to dry out. One hears a proverb which runs, "What won't the German do for money and the Swede for whisky!" As charity seekers and hospital patients, our Scandinavians are not so alcoholic as the British, but more so than the Teutons. More and more, however, they come to us temperate, and strong believers in sumptuary legislation; for within a generation Scandinavia has become the Sahara whence issue the desiccating simooms—Gothenburg system, samlag system, etc.,—which have taken much "wet" territory off the map.
FAVORITE OCCUPATIONS
Rugged Norway freezes into the souls of her sons a sense of the preciousness of level, fertile land, and there are no great cities to infect the imagination of her country dwellers. What wonder, then, that in 1900 nearly four-fifths of our Norwegians were outside the cities, most of them sticking to the soil like limpets to a rock! In 1900 half of them were tillers, and sixty-three per cent. of their grown sons. For the rest, they are to be found in the forecastles of the great lakes, in the copper and iron mines of upper Michigan, in the coal-mines of Iowa, in Northern lumber-camps, where they wield another pattern of ax than did their forbears, who, eight centuries ago, were known as "ax-bearers" in the Eastern emperor's body-guard. They work in the building trades, on the railroads, in the flour-mills of the wheat centers, and in the furniture-mills, the plow-wagon-and-implement factories of the hardwood belt. From his vast new circle of opportunities, the Norwegian immigrant chooses those that enable him to continue his life at home. He insists on getting his living in connection with soil, water, and wood. In the East he shuns mill drudgery, but shines as a builder. A fourth part of the Norwegian wage-earners in New York are carpenters, while none are on the farms. In Iowa two-thirds are on the farms, and only seven per cent. are in the building trades.