The children and grandchildren of the immigrants, except in certain large and compact settlements, chiefly in the cities, prefer English, and commonly use that language in conversation and in correspondence with each other. In the Swedish and Norwegian wards of such cities as Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Rockford, and in a county like Goodhue in Minnesota, where the presence of large numbers of the foreign-born makes the use of the foreign tongue imperative in the homes, streets, markets, and places of business, and where the news is read in a Scandinavian daily or weekly, the tendency to keep to the speech of their ancestors is strong. The preacher and the politician alike understand this, and the literature, speeches, and even the music, in the campaigns for personal and civic righteousness are presented in no unknown tongue, as the theological seminaries and Scandinavian departments in other institutions, and the Swedish and Norwegian political orators in critical years, bear abundant witness.
Co-ordinate with the school and the church, as a social force to be estimated, is the press. Newspapers and periodicals of various sorts in foreign languages inevitably follow the settlement of any considerable number of aliens in a given community, for people of education and ambition will look in a familiar medium for their news and gossip, their instruction in commerce and politics, as well as their teaching in religion. So the Chinese and Japanese on the Pacific Coast, no less than the Germans, Italians, and Greeks on the Atlantic, have their dailies and their magazines. Since the three Norse peoples, practically without illiteracy and with active and ambitious minds, have settled in a large number of moderate-sized communities, frequently isolated from each other, and since their differences of opinion in matters religious and ecclesiastical are often positive and aggressive, the number of their publications of all kinds since the middle of the last century is curiously large, and quite as remarkable for their migratory and short-lived character.
The newspapers usually serve as the chief means of keeping informed concerning the general news of the European home-lands, as well as of the United States. Nearly all the larger papers publish regular European correspondence, summaries of events, letters, and clippings, under such headings as “Sverige,” “Fra Norge,” etc.[299]
The newspapers and magazines render another service by the publication, on the instalment plan, either as a part of the regular columns or as inserted sheets, of standard works of the great Scandinavian writers or of translations of the masterpieces of English and American authors. Since these novels, essays, and histories are so printed that they may be folded up and form a pamphlet for preservation, the periodical serves both as newspaper and library. “It was the Swedish-American press which caused the Swedish literature, as it is in America, to spring up.”[300]
The dailies of Chicago, Minneapolis, and Duluth, in particular, publish every week scores of communications from subscribers in all parts of the Northwest, in a department devoted to neighborhood news or gossip. The old settler writes his reminiscences, sometimes a brief letter called out by some event, sometimes at great length, like the Rev. J. A. Ottesen’s “Contribution to the History of our Settlements and Congregations,” which ran through eleven numbers of the weekly paper Amerika, from April to September of 1894, and gave very minute details of immigrant families unto the third and fourth generation, as they had passed under the kindly eye of the patriarchal old pastor in his service of forty years among them.[301] Great numbers of these communications relate to the conditions and prospects of local settlements as viewed from the settler’s standpoint—crop conditions, market prices, wages, opportunities for labor, nature and prices of nearby land, schools, religion. As a revelation of the real mind of a community or of an element of the population, showing the inducements and motives operating upon the immigrant, and his response, they are exceedingly valuable, and in some important respects almost unique.
The editors and business agents of the larger and more enterprising Scandinavian papers very early began making journeys about the country, especially into the newer parts, in the interests of their papers; incidentally they were spying out the land for themselves, but indirectly they were furnishing first-hand observations of frontier conditions to the hundreds who were moved to reinvest themselves and their small accumulations. One of these “circuit riders” was Johan Schröder, editor of Fædrelandet og Emigranten, founded at La Crosse, in 1864, who published a little book of information for immigrants in 1867, after one of his extensive journeys among the settlements.[302] Three years later he made a trip into Minnesota as far as Otter Tail County—“En Snartur i Nordvesten”—and was deeply impressed with the possibilities of that fertile section, to which many men of his nationality were already looking, as the Newtown folk in Massachusetts Bay looked in 1636 toward the Connecticut country, with a “strong bent of their spirits to move thither.” Such words as these were as seed sown in good soil: “So far as I have journeyed about in the prairie counties of Minnesota and Iowa, I have not yet met with any county which in multiplicity of natural resources can come up with Otter Tail. Immigration this year is very strong. Both newcomers direct from Norway, and older farmers from Iowa, Wisconsin and Southern Minnesota take their various ways thither.”[303] The “America fever” of the Old World was now the “West fever,” and again more of the “West fever.”[304] These articles were not mere generalizations, but often, as in those just quoted from, they gave the exact and practical information the reader would desire—break-up of the prairie would cost $25 or $30 for five acres on which to grow wheat and potatoes, cash to be had by working on the nearby railroad at $2.50 per day, salt to be had at five cents per pound, butter could be sold for ten cents per pound, fish and game were abundant,—also mosquitoes![305]
The first of a long line of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish periodicals in the west, was a little paper called Nordlyset (Northern Light), which began publication in the Norwegian colony in Racine county, Wisconsin, in 1847, with James D. Reymert as editor. It was a small four-page sheet which at the start espoused the cause of the Free Soil party. In 1850 it changed hands, and was re-christened Demokraten; tho its subscription list increased to three hundred, the venture proved a failure.[306]
After 1850 the number of Scandinavian newspapers and religious periodicals multiplied rapidly. Langeland, himself an editor and publisher of the time, mentions five of these publications on the Norwegian side alone in the decade following 1850.[307] Skandinaven, whose foundation marks an era in the Scandinavian press, dates back to this period. From its small beginnings has grown a great metropolitan daily, with a circulation of 20,000, besides its semi-weekly and weekly editions which have a circulation all over the Northwest of nearly 50,000.[308] In the ten years after 1870, a second expansion in the number of publications took place, tho the fifteen Scandinavian papers given in the list published in the standard newspaper directory for 1870, make an almost insignificant showing by the side of the two hundred and fifty or more printed in America in German.[309]
The Swedish press in the United States began somewhat later than the Norwegian, but it manifested a stability and steadiness of progress which the latter too often lacked. Hemlandet was founded in 1855 as an organ of Swedish Lutheranism, but in 1870 it was a political as well as a religious journal, with 4,000 subscribers to the weekly edition, and 2,000 to the monthly,—“the largest circulation of any Swedish political newspaper in this country.”[310]
The high-water mark in the number of these publications in the Northern tongues seems to have been in 1892 or 1893, when Rowell mentions 146, of which Minnesota is credited with 33, Illinois with 30, Iowa with 13, and Wisconsin with 10, a total for these four States of 86, with a reported total of 140,000 subscribers, out of 550,000 subscribers for all the Scandinavian papers in the country. By 1901, the number of papers had fallen off—many suspended in the hard times after 1893[311]—but the number of subscribers increased for the whole country to more than 800,000, and for the four States just enumerated, to more than 650,000.[312]