In the many monographs and more pretentious works dealing with various phases of the economic history of the United States, much attention has been given to the tariff, manufacturing, banking, currency, transportation, and public lands. Only recently have the economic results of immigration begun to receive the attention which their importance deserves. For a long time the excellent work of Professor Richmond Mayo-Smith, Emigration and Immigration (1890), notable for the strength and breadth of its general treatment, was quite alone in its field. Mere statistical studies no longer suffice, and just as the census-taking of the Federal Government has changed from the simple, old-fashioned inventory of numbers—so many heads, black and white, native-born and foreign-born—to an elaborate investigation of the life problem of the population, so the meaning of immigration as a whole, and of Scandinavian immigration in particular, requires a discussion extending beyond annual and decennial statistics and maps of the density of settlement.
In the economic development of the Northwest, as compared with the history of the Eastern, Middle, or Southern States during the nineteenth century, the three principal topics are immigration, the Federal land policy, and improvements in transportation. In a peculiar manner the last two subjects are interwoven with the story of the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes in America. When people by the hundreds of thousands were settled in the West, when commerce and manufacturing arose upon the sound basis of a prospering agriculture, then and not till then, protection, currency, and bimetallism might be accepted as real and immediate issues.
The Scandinavian immigrants along the frontiers, like the other pioneers all through the prairie west, were from the first vitally interested in securing some form of cheap transportation of the produce of the farms to a good market; railroads were indispensable to the development of the agricultural areas of the Great West. Western Pennsylvania might find profit in 1794 in shipping the quintessence of its agriculture across the mountains in demijohns; the cattlemen of the South and Southwest might drive their products to market on the hoof; but at the very best these were exceptional, inelastic, and primitive methods. Many pioneer Norwegians and Swedes in Minnesota and Iowa were obliged to carry their wheat and corn forty and fifty miles to have it ground for their families, but they could not hope to haul any great amount of ordinary farm produce over the abominable roads of the West for a distance greater than forty miles and make a profit.[184] Without the hope of railroads, the vast stretches of cereal-producing land in the trans-Mississippi would long have remained virgin soil. Yet without assurance that population would rapidly increase in numbers and in complexity of life, thus giving a large traffic in both directions, no railroad company would build out into the thinly settled area.[185]
Broadly speaking, then, the real problem of the Northwestern frontier after 1850 was: how to put more and ever more men of capacity, endurance, strength, and adaptability into the upper Mississippi and Red River valleys, men who first break up the prairie sod, clear the brush off the slopes, drain the marshes, build the railroads, and do the thousands and one hard jobs incident to pioneer life, and then turn to the building of factories and towns and cities. Not every sort of man who could hold a plow or wield a hoe would do: Chinese coolies, for example, would hardly be considered desirable, even with all their capacity for hard work, persistence, and patience. Furthermore, it is plain now, that the West could not have looked to the Eastern States alone to send out an industrial army sufficient in numbers and spirit for the conquest of the new empire and the extraction of its varied resources at the desired speed. The demands were too severe, the rewards too remote and uncertain for the average prosperous native-born citizen. The aliens from the western side of the Atlantic, as it were by regiments and battalions, must re-enforce the companies westward-bound from the older States; in such a situation the Scandinavians were all but indispensable to rapid material progress in the Northwest after the middle of the last century.
It is not easy to realize how attractive to the Northland immigrants were the broad, level lands of the West, to be had from the United States Government on the easiest of terms, both before and after the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862. Scarcely in their dreams had they conceived of soil so fertile, so readily tilled, and so cheaply acquired. To speak to a Norwegian from Thelemarken, to a Swede from Smaaland, or to a Dane from the misty, sandy coast of Jutland, about rich, rolling prairies stretching away miles upon miles, about land which was neither rocky, nor swampy, nor pure sand, nor set up at an angle of forty-five degrees, about land which could be had almost for the asking in fee simple and not by some semi-manorial title—this was to speak to his imagination rather than to his understanding. The letters from immigrants to their old friends in Europe continually dilated on these advantages, sometime with a curious mingling of humor and pathos. One of these communications, which was printed as a small pamphlet in 1850, sets forth in large letters, that the land was so plentiful that the pigs and cattle were allowed to run at will.[186] What more could be asked of Providence by a poor peasant or “husmand,” owing to his landlord, for the little strip of land on which he lived, the labor of two or three days each week?[187]
These strictly economic advantages of soil and price were not the only attractions for the sons of the Northlands. Both the traveller and the prospector for a site for a settlement were deeply impressed by the general appearance of the rolling country of the Northwest with its abundance of streams and lakes. During her visit to Wisconsin and Minnesota in the fall of 1850, Frederika Bremer saw with quite prophetic vision, the possibilities of the region:
“What a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become! Here would the Swede find again his clear, romantic lakes, the plains of Scania rich in corn, and the valleys of Norrland; here would the Norwegian find his rapid rivers, his lofty mountains, for I include the Rocky Mountains and Oregon, in the new kingdom; and both nations their hunting fields and their fisheries. The Danes might here pasture their flocks and herds, and lay out their farms on richer and less misty coasts than those of Denmark.... Scandinavians who are well off in the old country ought not to leave it. But such as are too much contracted at home, and who desire to emigrate, should come to Minnesota. The climate, the situation, the character of the scenery, agrees with our people better than that of any other of the American States, and none of them appear to me to have a greater or a more beautiful future before them than Minnesota. Add to this that the rich soil of Minnesota is not yet bought up by speculators, but may everywhere be purchased at government prices.... There are here already a considerable number of Norwegians and Danes.”[188] The Swedish air-castle took material shape rapidly; during forty years the name Minnesota, even more than Iowa, or Wisconsin, was a name to conjure with among the laborers and would-be farmers of the old kingdoms.[189]
Of the peculiar fitness of the Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes for this promotion of economic progress in a great section of the country, there is practically a unanimous opinion. A dispassionate, mature estimate is expressed officially by an agent of the British Government sent out to study the question of immigration in the United States. “It is generally admitted,” he states, “that physically, morally, and socially, no better class of immigrants enter the United States. In some respects they are the most desirable of all.”[190] A first-hand observer of their work as western farmers wrote in 1868 concerning the settlers in a Norwegian township in Minnesota, “They open their farms quicker, raise better stock than most any other class, and quickly become wealthy.”[191] In a hearing before the Industrial Commission in 1899, Hermann Stump, a prominent German, testified that the Scandinavians “are really the best immigrants who come to the United States.”[192]
While the Scandinavians were admirably fitted to become substantial citizens and to develop their own properties, and while the prospect of possessing a farm was the most potent and pervading influence affecting their movements after about 1850, the very high rate of wages paid in the United States, as compared with the wages in Europe, was everywhere an important factor among the immediate attractions. All of the western States, in the first decade of their growth, were exceedingly anxious to secure settlers who should take up and improve the vacant square miles, thus adding to the population and to the taxable values of the commonwealth. At the same time there was a large and steady demand for wage-labor; the farmers needed helpers; the construction of internal improvements, begun and projected, like the rapidly expanding railroad systems, could be carried on only by the aid of an abundance of laborers.[193]
These needs could not be met by any considerable migration of laborers from the eastern States, for there the development of manufacturing and of transportation by land and by sea would operate to keep up wages and so to hold the laborers. The hard labor of the Far West, therefore, must be done, if done at all, by those who had not already found places for themselves in the industrial system of the United States, and for such services a good rate of wages would be paid, or at least a rate sufficient to draw the desired labor. In 1851 the $15 per month received by some Swedes working as farm hands near Buffalo, New York, was considered “big wages.”[194] At the same time laborers on railroad construction in the West were receiving $.75 and $1 per day. Whether measured as real or nominal wages, these rates were certainly higher than even the average skilled laborer could earn in Norway or Sweden.[195] Tho the wages in the peninsular kingdoms rose considerably from 1850 to 1875, there was still at the later date and afterwards a large differential in favor of the American scale, whether for skilled or unskilled laborers. The experienced agricultural laborer in the fields of Illinois or Wisconsin received two or three times as much as the corresponding worker in Norway and Sweden, while in new States like Minnesota the multiple was even greater.[196] Still more marked were the differences between skilled laborers, such as carpenters and smiths, in America and Europe even after the panic of 1873.[197]