If one seeks for adequate reasons for this unusual tendency to insanity, he will not find ready satisfaction. Undoubtedly the difference of environment and the severer strain upon muscle and nerve imposed by American industrial conditions, by which the machinery of the individual must run at a higher and unwonted speed, will account for part of the phenomena, but these causes operate alike upon all classes of immigrants. The change from the mountains of Norway, or from the rugged sea-coast of the great Northern peninsula, to the rolling prairies and the vast silent plains of the interior of the United States, has also its depressing effect. The very flatness of the land, its extremes of temperature, the fierce tornadoes of wind, the bewildering, imprisoning storms of snow, with no friendly mountain or forest to offer a body of protection or a face of comfort, and the isolation of the life of the frontier farmer and his family, together with the severity of their labor—all these are causes operating with peculiar force in the case of the Norwegian and Swedish immigrants. Dr. Gronvald, writing in 1887, stated his conviction that the women of these classes, especially the Norwegians, were predisposed to nervous disorders and insanity by early and frequent child-bearing, and from early rising from child-bed.[336]
Since the Norse immigrants have rarely if ever been charged with illiteracy, dependency, pauperism or mendicancy, the remaining social test, usually considered co-ordinate with that for insanity, is the proportion of criminals contributed to the total of delinquents.[337] Earlier computations must undergo the same severe correction as do the estimates regarding the insane. By 1885 there were in the Northwest large communities made up of the older Norwegian and Swedish settlers and their descendants, and other communities comprising great numbers of recently arrived immigrants. According to the State census of 1885 in Minnesota, the Scandinavians formed 16.5% of the population, and the Germans, 11.5%. The reports of the wardens of the State’s prisons for 1886 show 8.7% of the prisoners to be Scandinavian, and 7.4% German. The population of the State during the next five years grew rapidly; the Scandinavian element increased faster than the German and nearly twice as fast as the native American. Yet in 1890 the percentage of the prisoners who could be identified as Scandinavian was only 7.1%.[338]
In Wisconsin, where the increase of population in the last ten years of the nineteenth century was in the native-born of Scandinavian parentage, rather than in the number of immigrants, the reports of the Waupun State Prison may be supplemented by those of the State Industrial School, the reformatory for first offenders between the ages of fifteen and thirty. In 1900, the foreign-born Scandinavian population of Wisconsin was 5% of the total, and the Scandinavian population of foreign-born parentage was 10% of the total.[339] Of the prisoners received at Waupun, the Scandinavians were: 1891, 4.1%; 1898, 4.4%; 1900, 3.7%. Of boys and young men received at the Industrial School, those of Scandinavian parentage were: 1890-1892, 7%; 1896-1898, 6.5%; 1900-1902, 6.6%.[340]
In the matter of petty offences which are usually tried in the police courts, particularly cases arising out of intemperance, the records of convictions in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Chicago, together with the statistics of city prisons and workhouses, indicate that the Northmen are clearly the chief offenders.[341]
[CHAPTER XI.]
The Scandinavian in Local and State Politics
The Scandinavian usually entered the field of politics rather slowly; he took out his “first papers” for the purpose of acquiring land, not that he might vote in the next election. In the early years of his settlement he was too busy building and paying for a home, learning English, and adopting American customs, to give much time or attention to public affairs. The clearing of woodland, the breaking up of the prairie, and the transformation of a one-room shack into a frame dwelling required severe labor and all his energies. Not until the leisure of some degree of success was his, did he yield to his natural inclination for politics of the larger sort.
The Norwegian, of all the men of the Northern lands, has the strongest liking for the political arena, and has had the most thoro political training at home. Since 1814 he has lived and acted in a community markedly democratic. He understands the meaning of the Fourth of July all the better because he, and his ancestors for two or three generations in their home by the North Sea, celebrated on the Seventeenth of May the independence of Norway and the advent of republicanism. His sense of individuality and equality is stronger than that of his cousins to the east or south, and he steadily and stubbornly fights for the recognition and maintenance of his rights. In 1821, before the first real immigrants sailed for the United States, Norway abolished nobility, while Sweden and Denmark still retain the institution. Equipped thus, and educated in such a vigorous school, it is the Norwegian rather than the Swede or Dane who figures most largely in the political activities of the American Northwest.