The Swede is more melancholy than the Norseman, and his letters to friends in the old country are full of the expression of feeling. He has the temperament for pietism, which has always been marked among the Swedish-Americans because they have been dissenters rather than adherents of the state church. Formerly the Swedes came from the country, and were conservative; but of late they have been coming from the cities, and are of a radical and even socialistic spirit.
The Norwegian bears the stamp of a more primitive life. Squeezed into the few roods betwixt mountains and fjord, he has eked out the scanty yield of his farm by grazing the high glacier-fed meadows and gleaning the spoil of the sea. The need which ten centuries ago drove the Vikings to harry Europe, to-day forces their descendants into all the navies of the world. Granite and frost have made the Norse immigrant rough-mannered, reserved, and undemonstrative, cautious in speech, austere in church life, and little given to recreation. German Gemüthlichkeit is not in him, nor has he the Irishman's sociability. Often he is as taciturn as an Indian, and the lonely farm-houses on the prairie, where not a needless word is uttered the livelong day, contribute many young people to the city maëlstrom.
The Norwegian immigrant has the high spirit of a people that has never known the steam-roller of feudalism, of peasants who held their farms by allodial tenure, and could order the king himself off their land. He has more pride of nationality than the Swede, gets into our politics sooner, and is more aggressive in improving his opportunities. He has the name of being truer to his friends and to his word. Firms declare that they lose less by his bad debts. "The Swede," remarks an educator, "will show the white feather and desert you in a pinch; but not the Norwegian." A mine "boss" thinks he can distinguish Scandinavians by type. "The smooth, white-haired fellows," he says, "have a yellow streak in them; but the dark, or sandy-haired fellows, with a rough skin and rugged features, are reliable." In the Northwest, the nickname "Norsky" is more apt to be used in a good-natured way than the term "Swede."
INTELLECTUAL ABILITY
Since our editors and public men tender each nationality of immigrants—as soon as they have money and votes—nothing but lollipops of compliment, one is loth to proffer the pungent olive of truth. But it is a fact that many who have to do with the Americans of Scandinavian parentage question whether marked ability so often presents itself among them as among certain other strains. The weight of testimony indicates that resourcefulness and intellectual initiative are rarer among them than among those of German descent. Teachers find their children "rather slow," although few fall behind. Scandinavian students do well, but they are "plodders." They beat the Irish in close application, but less often are they called "brilliant."
Of 19,000 Americans recognized in "Who's Who in America," 332 were born in Germany, 151 in Ireland, 68 in France, 54 in Sweden, 42 in Russia, 41 in the Netherlands, 34 in Switzerland, 33 in Austria, 30 in Norway, 28 in Italy, and 14 in Denmark. The Scandinavians have reached prominence far less often than the French, Dutch, and Swiss Americans, and not so often even as the Germans. To the first thousand men of science in America, our Swedish fellow-citizens contribute at the rate of 5.2 per million as against 1.8 for the Irish, 7.1 for the Germans, 7.4 for those born in Russia, and 10.4 for those born in Austria-Hungary.
It is a fair question, then, whether our Scandinavians represent the flower of their people as well as the root and stalk. No doubt in venturesomeness they surpass those in like circumstances who stayed at home. No doubt they brought in full measure the forceful character of the race; but, thanks to our bland, syrupy way of appraising the naturalized foreign-born, the question of comparative brain power never comes up.
Now, oppression or persecution had very little to do with the outflow from Scandinavia. The immigrants came for a better living, for, in the main, they have been servants and common laborers, with a sprinkling of small farmers and a fair contingent of craftsmen. We have had very few representatives of the classes enjoying access to higher education, business, the professions, and the public service. Having fair prospects at home, the more capable families very likely contributed fewer emigrants than the rest. A professor of Swedish parentage tells me that he has noticed that the successful Swedes he meets traveling in this country are wholly different in physiognomy from the immigrants. The faces here strike him as duller and less regular than the faces of people in Sweden. Other Swedish-Americans, however, contend that formerly caste barriers in the fatherland so blocked the rise of gifted commoners that the immigrant stream is as rich in natural ability as is the Swedish people at home. Rugged Norway has less to hold at home the more capable stocks; but still one meets with candid Norwegian-Americans who think our million of Norse blood represent the brawn rather than the brain of their folk.