The resulting oral history archive is housed in the Scandinavian Immigrant Experience Collection in the Robert A. L. Mortvedt Library at Pacific Lutheran University. The interview material presented here has been drawn exclusively from that archive. As such, it represents a new source of information about the Scandinavian presence in North America.
I am very grateful for the capable assistance rendered by fellow interviewers Inger Nygaard Carr, Cynthia S. Klein, Donna Mallonee, and Morrene Head Nesvig. Serving as student assistants for the project were Linda Carlson, Carol Skog Fox, Becky Husby, Kimberly Labes, Andrea Leuenberger, Phillip Nelson, Karen Olson, Julie Peterson, Patricia Sargent, Laura Schubert, and Laurie Stumme. Media services supervisor Layne Nordgren and his student assistant Damon Kirk helped with specific tasks, as did community volunteer Patricia Nelson. As Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations, Molly Edman facilitated the requisite outside funding. Isabel Watness and other members of the PLU Humanities staff provided essential office support.
Mary Sue Gee supplied valuable research assistance during the final stage of project activity and helped me select the interviews for this book. PLU archivist Kerstin Ringdahl shared her expertise and enthusiasm throughout. Both Kerstin and Mary Sue have my deep thanks. I also gratefully acknowledge the indispensable advice and encouragement of Norwegian-American Historical Association editor Odd Lovoll. Other friends and colleagues who smoothed the way for this publication include Sue Davidson, Bjørn Jensen, Pat Kelley, Joanne Klein, Steve Murray, Harald Naess, Tiina Nunnally, Audun Toven, and Solveig Zempel. My work also benefited greatly from a sabbatical leave and a Regency Advancement Award from Pacific Lutheran University, a grant-in-aid from the American Association for State and Local History, and a Faculty Growth Award from the American Lutheran Church.
Of course, none of this activity could have gone forward without the cooperation and generosity of the people we interviewed. Their stories enriched and inspired me, both personally and professionally. To them and their families I owe a profound debt of gratitude.
This book is dedicated to my husband Ulf Rasmussen, whose path to the United States from Norway wove the saga of the immigrant experience into the fabric of my day-to-day existence. His unflagging support, including the sacrifice of countless weekends and evenings of companionship, made it possible for me to complete the necessary research, transcribing, editing, and writing. For his patience, good humor, and constant encouragement, he deserves, as the Scandinavians say, a thousand thanks!
Janet E. Rasmussen
Lincoln, Nebraska
New Land, New Lives
Scandinavian Immigrants to the Pacific Northwest
Introduction
There’s a lot of history in your life, isn’t there?” With a note of surprise, Magnhild Johnsen offered this observation while responding to an interviewer’s questions about when and why she had left the country of her birth. Like most others with whom we spoke, Magnhild did not readily view her personal experiences as historically significant. Yet the events she recounted were both dramatic and revealing.
Born in Kristiansand, Norway, in 1909, Magnhild arrived in the United States at the age of twenty, a single woman planning to do housework for a year and then return home for further education. When she did finally return, she brought a husband and two young children and the year was 1939. Caught in Norway by World War II, the Johnsens aided the resistance movement through the trying years of German occupation. After the war, the family crossed the Atlantic again, eager to renew their American identities.1
A life like Magnhild Johnsen’s does indeed contain “a lot of history.” So, too, do the lives of the more than two hundred other immigrants whose oral history interviews have been deposited in the Scandinavian archives at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. The present work draws upon a selection of their stories to portray the dynamics of Scandinavian immigration to the Pacific Northwest during the early decades of the twentieth century.
These personal accounts sketch the intricate patterns of family life in turn-of-the-century Scandinavia. They communicate the emotions that attended the leave-taking and convey striking details of the journey to a new home across the ocean. In lively and sometimes poignant fashion, the reminiscences illuminate the process of adapting to American society and the avenues for perpetuating the cultural heritage. Everyday life and associations, not politics or theological controversies, are the subject of the first-person narratives. The words come from “ordinary” persons, as opposed to persons with established public reputations.
In two respects this approach constitutes a unique contribution. First, no previous book on the Scandinavians in North America has been based on oral testimony. Several collections of immigrant letters are available, the most recent being Solveig Zempel’s In Their Own Words: Letters from Norwegian Immigrants (1991). Letters offer a contemporaneous and often intimate record from which a concrete image of the immigrant experience can emerge; oral history relies on memory and the direct solicitation of information to reveal how individuals value and interpret various aspects of the past. The two types of first-person source material thus not only supplement in important ways the official historical record, but also complement each other. Second, much inquiry and analysis in regard to the Scandinavian presence in the Pacific Northwest after 1910 await the attention of researchers. This presentation suggests relevant parameters and themes and thus aims to stimulate systematic investigations of the period and the region.2
The Legacy of the Homeland
The immigrants carried the imprint of their native cultures and values into, and through, the new lives they established in the United States. Recent studies of settlements in the Upper Middle West document in detail how communities could be “transplanted” from Scandinavia, so that kinship and other interpersonal ties remained intact and key institutions like the church were replicated.3 Broadly speaking, both chain migration—members of a family or neighbors following after one another—and the maintenance of regional homeland loyalties were important features of Scandinavian immigration to the Pacific Northwest as well.4 Still, it might reasonably be argued that the links were less compelling and less fundamental to the shape of the immigrant experience in the Pacific Northwest than was true in the Midwest, given that the major influx of Scandinavians into the Pacific Northwest occurred during a later phase of the mass migration and that urban environments received a good share of the twentieth-century newcomers.5
The interview excerpts that follow provide a way to examine the fabric of Scandinavian culture within the Pacific Northwest immigrant experience. With oral history, the focus shifts from “hard” indicators like census, tax, and church records into the “soft” realm of personal experience and expression. Out of the personal particulars, general patterns of behavior and sentiment emerge and invite interpretation. In the case of these immigrants to the Pacific Northwest, the patterns suggest an intricate and sturdy web of homeland influences. Familial ties and connections can be discerned across geographical space. Childhood values and childhood habits resonate in the vocabulary used to describe occupational choices. The choice of a mate, the response to American lifestyles, the articulation of ethnic identity—in these and other aspects of immigrant life the informants reveal the dynamics that marry cultural continuity to cultural transformation.
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