Too much stress, however, should never be laid on the character of any one group of immigrants, lest it warp the judgment upon the immigration movement as a factor in American progress. The ardent political reformer in New York City, seeing the political activity of the Irish, and the easy, fraudulent enfranchisement of newly-arrived aliens, cries in a loud voice for restriction or prohibition of immigration. The California labor agitator, feeling chiefly the effect of Chinese efficiency in the labor market, would close the gates of the country to all the eastern nations. The social worker, knowing mainly and best the degradation of the Hungarians in the mines, or of the Hebrews in the sweatshops, prophesies naught but evil from foreign immigration. From an opposite point of view, when a man travels in leisurely fashion up and down Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, and finds a dozen race elements—English, German, Norwegian, or Russian—he begins to understand the real benefit to the nation of the coming of this vast, varied, peaceful army.[1] The scale of immigrants runs from the pauper or the diseased alien, awaiting deportation on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, to the rich Norwegian or German owning a thousand-acre farm in North Dakota, and to the millionaire Swedish lumberman or manufacturer of Wisconsin or Minnesota.
For more than half a century, the United States has been almost a nation of immigrants, a mixture of races in the process of combination; upon the exact nature of this combination, whether it take the form of absorption, amalgamation, fusion, or assimilation, depends future political and social progress.
The writer has for years felt a profound conviction of the vital importance of this whole problem of the alien, and a corresponding belief in the value of the investigation of each cohort in the national forces. Hence this attempt at a sympathetic study of the Scandinavian element in American life and of its contributions to the evolution of the Northern Mississippi Valley during the last sixty years.
In such a study, the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes, like all other citizens of foreign birth, must be judged by the character and preparation which best fit men to contribute to the permanent progress of a self-governing people. What are the signs of readiness for full Americanization? The fundamentals are manliness—Roman virility—, intelligence, and the capacity for co-operation, ennobled by “dignified self-respect, self-control, and that self-assertion and jealousy of encroachment which marks those who know their rights and dare maintain them”;[2] devotion to law, order, and justice; and a ready acquiescence in the will of the majority duly expressed.[3]
Such qualities in America have been the especial possession of that sub-race of the Caucasian stock which the later ethnologists call the Baltic, in contradistinction to the co-ordinate sub-races, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean or Ligurian. This Baltic race has for centuries occupied the British Isles, the northern plains of Germany, and the North European peninsulas, being found in its purest state in Norway, Sweden, and Scotland. The people of this sub-race, asserts the writer of an admirable article on racial characteristics, are mentally “enterprising and persevering, and cheerfully dedicate most of their time and thought to work.... They are liberally gifted with those moral instincts which are highly favorable to the creation and growth of communities, altho not always so favorable to the individual who possesses them; they are altruistic, fearless, honest, sincere. They love order and cleanliness, and attach considerable importance to the dress and personal appearance of individuals.”[4] While the other Caucasian sub-races do not lack these qualities, their most dominating characteristics are different; for example, one may exemplify the artistic or the idealistic side of human nature.
As related to the progress of civilization in America, all immigrants fall into three classes: those who powerfully re-enforce the strength and virtue of the nation, those who supplement its defects with desirable elements, and those who lower its standards and retard its advancement. Hence, those immigrants will be presumably the most desirable to America who come from the regions where the purest Baltic stock now exists, that is, north of a line running east and west through Brussels, and especially in north-central Germany and the Scandinavian peninsula.
Measured by character and training, the Baltic race in America stands up well to the test, not only in the foreign-born alone, but in the second and third generation born on American soil. If generations of ignorance, mental inertia, social depression, political passivity, shiftlessness, and improvidence stretch behind the immigrant, if his religion be chiefly a superstition or strongly antagonistic to the principles of the Republic, and if he be physically inferior and long inured to the hardships of a low standard of living, just so far is he an undesirable addition to American population. But, on the other hand, if his homeland show a very low percentage of illiteracy; if his life has been saturated with the ideas of thrift and small economies; if he hold himself free from domination by priest, landlord, or king; and if his history be the story of a sturdy struggle for independence, he should be rated high and welcomed accordingly, for it is of such stuff that mighty nations are made.
The student of Scandinavian immigration in the nineteenth century is not left to conjecture in his endeavor to estimate the probable result of the injection into American society of this foreign-born element. Before the second generation of English and Dutch settlers in America in the seventeenth century had grown to manhood, the Swedes began a colony upon the Delaware River; and their descendants are still a distinguishable part of the population of the lower Delaware valley. This beginning of Swedish immigration to America is particularly instructive because the settlements undertaken in the period of the Thirty Years War drew their recruits from the same classes of Swedish society as the movements of the nineteenth century, and developed under substantially similar conditions and along much the same lines.
The Swede of the seventeenth century and the Swede of the nineteenth century are essentially one in character, for two hundred years have wrought less change in him than in his cousins of Germany and England. The accounts of Stockholm, its people and its surroundings, written in the early seventeenth century, might serve, with very little modification, to describe the large features of the Sweden and the Swedes of today. Great progress has of course been made in two centuries, but in political wisdom, high moral courage, and benevolent purpose, Gustavus Adolphus and his advisers were distinctly in advance of the first two English Stuarts and their courts.
Perhaps no better illustration of this difference could be found than in the plans for the beginnings of the colonies on the James River and on the Delaware River. The scheme for a colony on the Delaware was originally outlined by the great Gustavus himself in 1624, but sterner duties took his energies; and after the fatal blow on the field of Lützen, it devolved on his daughter, Queen Christina, and her faithful minister, Oxenstjerna, to carry out his plan for establishing a colony which was to be “a blessing to the common man,” a place for “a free people with wives,” and not a mere commercial speculation or a haven for aristocratic adventurers and spendthrifts.[5]