Much of the business in these new communities in their first years was carried on in a foreign tongue. Certainly election notices and documents of that sort were issued in Norwegian or Swedish, and sometimes orders, ordinances, and laws. No evidence, however, has come to hand to prove that any official records were ever kept in any other language than English, even in villages composed almost exclusively of Norwegians or Swedes.[351]
One of the first offices that had to be filled in the growing settlement was that of postmaster; for no considerable number of people, educated and intelligent, will long be content with a postoffice twenty miles away.[352] In 1856 there were five Scandinavian postmasters in Minnesota alone.[353] Thus the immigrant settlers came in contact with the national government at the postoffice more directly and frequently than they did at the land-office.
Township affairs shade off almost imperceptibly into county affairs in the western States, and the Scandinavians soon began to take part in the latter. No records are at hand for the Wisconsin settlements, but in 1858 the first Norwegian was elected to the board of supervisors in Goodhue County, Minnesota, and in the following year Hans Mattson, who was active in building up the town of Vasa, where he filled various town offices, was elected auditor of the county.[354] He continued to fill the office until July, 1862, tho in name only for the last months, for in the minutes of Board of Supervisors of Goodhue County appears the resolution that “because the County Auditor, Hans Mattson, has voluntarily gone to the war with a company of soldiers, a leave of absence shall be extended to him, and that the office shall not be declared vacant so long as the deputy properly performs the duties of the place.”[355]
Hans Mattson was only one of many who found Goodhue County politics and a term of service in the army excellent fitting schools for larger activity in State affairs. One of the Norwegians who served an apprenticeship in Wisconsin, a journeymanship in Iowa, and came to the master-grade of citizenship—office-holding—in Minnesota, was Lars K. Aaker, who represented Goodhue County in the Minnesota Legislature in 1859-1860. After service as first lieutenant in Mattson’s Scandinavian Company, he again sat in the Legislature in 1862, 1867, and 1869. Again after twelve years of residence in Goodhue County he moved to Otter Tail County, and represented that county in the State Senate, later becoming Register of the United States Land Office. In 1864, he moved again, to Crookston, in the extreme northwestern corner of Minnesota, where he served as Receiver of the Land Office from 1884 to 1893.[356] As the counties and towns have multiplied, by the biological process of division, in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Scandinavian names recur more and more frequently in their records, tho it is not always easy, especially since 1880, to identify such names, for the Norsemen have had a habit of Americanizing their original names or changing them altogether either with or without legal process.[357]
The county offices which seem to be most attractive to the Scandinavians are those of sheriff, treasurer, auditor, and register of deeds. The lists of county officers for several years in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, show that the number of Swedes and Norwegians in the four offices just mentioned was closely proportioned to their percentage in the population of the States named.[358] Because the Scandinavians are less numerous in the other county offices, their proportion of the total offices in the counties of the States falls considerably below their proportion of the population. Estimating on the basis of a sure minimum, with the difficulties in identifying names eliminated, the Scandinavians for several years about 1895 filled approximately one-fifth of the 1235 county offices in Minnesota, one-fifth of the 268 in North Dakota and one-tenth of the 702 in Wisconsin. Their numbers relative to the population in each State were respectively one-fourth in Minnesota, two-fifths in North Dakota, one-eighth in Wisconsin, and one-fifth in South Dakota. More recent illustrations are to be found in the election of 1904. In Traill County, North Dakota, the sixth in size of the forty counties in the State, the sheriff, judge, treasurer, auditor, register, surveyor, coroner, and superintendent of schools were of Scandinavian origin; in Lac Qui Parle County, Minnesota, a similar clean sweep was made; while in Yellow Medicine County seven out of ten principal officers were Scandinavians.[359]
The first Scandinavian to enter the field of State politics was James D. Reymert, a Norwegian, who represented Racine County in the second constitutional convention of Wisconsin in 1847, and later in the Assembly of that State, first from Racine County and then from Milwaukee County in 1857.[360] He was also a candidate for presidential elector on the Free Soil ticket in 1840.[361] The son of a Scotch mother, and receiving part of his education in Scotland, he was better prepared than other Norwegians for taking part in politics, and for the work of editing the first Norwegian newspaper in America, Nordlyset—“The Northern Light”—which appeared in 1847 as a Free Soil organ.[362] In the constitutional convention he was not active in the debates, tho he advocated a six-months’ residence as a qualification for voting, saying, “as to foreigners, the sooner they were entitled to vote, the better citizens they would make.”[363] For one provision of the Wisconsin constitution he was personally responsible: Article VII, section 16, which directed the legislature to establish courts or tribunals of conciliation.[364] But in spite of the command, “The legislature shall pass laws” for these courts, no such law was ever passed in Wisconsin.
Down to the close of the Civil War the Scandinavians exercised very little influence in State politics. Here and there one or two of them appeared as members of conventions or of the legislatures, but even in Wisconsin the number rarely went above two in a single session of the legislature.[365] By 1870 many of the Norwegians and Swedes were well-to-do, while others who had served in the Civil War returned to their homes with the prestige conferred by honorable service in that great struggle. Furthermore, the suspicion with which foreign-born citizens had been viewed was greatly reduced, if not dissipated, by the highest evidence which any man can give of his patriotism and loyalty to his adopted country. No one might thenceforth deny them any of the rights, privileges, and honors of the political gild. Accordingly the number of them elected to the legislatures in the Northwest after 1870 increases noticeably both in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and in the Dakotas, where rapid material development and growth of population furnished unusual political opportunities which the Norwegians and Swedes were not slow to improve.
In the Wisconsin legislature of 1868 sat 2 Norwegians; in 1869, 3; in 1871, 4.[366] In Minnesota, the figures are striking: 1868, 2 Scandinavians; 1870, 4; 1872, 9; and 1873, 13.[367] Since then the percentage of Norse representatives has steadily grown, tho it is not always easy to determine the racial stock from which a native-born officer came. Recent Wisconsin legislatures had apparently out of a total membership of 133, in 1895, 5 Scandinavians; in 1901, 10 (1 Dane, 1 Swede, and 8 Norwegians); in 1903, 6.[368] The Minnesota legislature of 1893 had 9 out of 54 senators, and 20 out of 114 representatives, who were of Viking origin—fully one-sixth of the total membership.
In the legislatures of 1899 and 1905 the numbers were as follows:[369]