An analysis of this list of Representatives shows that eleven of the sixteen were Norwegians of the first or second generation of immigrant stock, four were Swedes, and one a Dane. Six of the eleven were born in America, three of them in the old Wisconsin settlements; only one of these represented the district in which he was born, the rest receiving their reward in the newer western sections into which they had migrated with the movement of population beyond the Mississippi.
Different Federal administrations have deemed it wise to “recognize” the Scandinavian among other elements of the political population, in making appointments in the diplomatic and consular services of the United States. One of the most notable instances is that of the selection of John Lind, the former governor of Minnesota, as the personal representative of President Wilson in Mexico during the troubled months of 1913 and 1914 and as adviser to the United States embassy in Mexico City during the period following the recall of Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson. Another instance of appointment in this service is that of Lauritz Selmer Swenson, a Norwegian of the second generation, born in Minnesota, who was minister to Denmark from 1897 to 1906, and later received appointments as minister to Switzerland and to Norway, terminating the latter in 1913.[386] Rasmus B. Anderson represented the United States at the Danish court from 1885 to 1889, being at that time a Democrat. He was born in Wisconsin of pure Norse parentage, and had served as professor of the Scandinavian languages in the University of Wisconsin.[387]
The appointment of Nicolay A. Grevstad as minister to Uruguay and Paraguay in 1911 was a fitting recognition of ability combined with long and able service to the people of the older, or middle, Northwest as editor of the Minneapolis Tribune, the Minneapolis Times, and the great Chicago daily, Skandinaven (1902-1911). Hans Mattson, a Swedish veteran of the Civil War, was consul general at Calcutta from 1883 to 1885;[388] Soren Listoe, the Danish editor of Nordvesten of St. Paul, Minnesota, was consul at Düsseldorf, 1882-3, consul at Rotterdam, 1897-1902, and consul general at the same city, 1902-1914.[389] At Rotterdam he succeeded L. S. Reque, a Norwegian from Iowa. Several other men have served for long terms in minor positions in the foreign service.[390]
[CHAPTER XII.]
Party Preferences and Political Leadership
The great majority of the Scandinavians, prior to 1884, were thoro-going and uncompromising Republicans, and tho the party still holds most of them, profiting largely from their natural conservatism and their loyalty to a principle, it can by no means depend upon them with the assurance it had in the “good old days” when to find a Scandinavian voter in the Northwest was to find a Republican.
The causes which determined the early party affiliations of the naturalized sons of the Vikings, in the broad area of State and Federal affairs, are to be found in the character of the immigrants themselves and in the great questions agitating the country at the time they became citizens. Coming to the United States with an endowment of natural independence, with an innate respect for government, and with an inclination for public concerns, their interest was at once actively aroused in the great problem of slavery that vexed national life from the time of the Sloop Folk to the Civil War. As their information about the slave system grew more exact, and as the tremendous significance of the restriction of the slave area as a cardinal political issue was made clear to their minds, they became of one mind in the mighty agitation. Neither they nor their ancestors for hundreds of years had held slaves; few of them had ever seen a slave, for their numerous traders and sailors, with slight exceptions, had no smell of blood of the African slave trade on their hands.[391] It was not chance, therefore, which kept the stream of North European immigrants from flowing into the South and Southwest; no attractiveness of climate or soil could compensate for the presence of Negro slavery. A horror and hatred of slavery colored their thinking from their first month in the New World; it was first a moral, then a political, conviction, not the sentiment of individuals, but the well-reasoned opinion of the whole community.