The Scandinavians had a high rate of literacy. Public education was nurtured from early in the nineteenth century. A public school law was introduced in Denmark as early as 1814, in Norway in 1837, in Sweden in 1842, and in Finland in 1866. As the school systems evolved, attendance was expected from the age of seven to the time of confirmation, although the school term in rural districts lasted at most twelve weeks a year.4 Upon confirmation, usually at age fourteen, a young person was considered an adult, responsible for his or her own welfare.
The school curriculum included a solid introduction to the Bible and to Lutheran doctrine. The Lutheran Church has been the state church of the Scandinavian countries since the Reformation. Persons are born into the Lutheran church and well over ninety percent of Scandinavians remain members throughout their lifetimes; but the church has not escaped criticism or the development of rival religious bodies. Where the state church failed to satisfy the spiritual needs of the population, parallel lay organizations sprang up, typically centered in a prayer house or mission house. Andrew Johnson offers an interesting account of his family’s involvement with the Swedish Mission Covenant.
Political events of the early twentieth century color some of the individual stories. Finland experienced great turmoil when the Russian tsar extended his domination of this neighbor to the west. Many Finns fled the country in 1901–1902, in response to a new conscription law that demanded that Finnish males fight, as necessary, in and for Russia.5 The Danes of North Slesvig, including Martin Rasmussen, found themselves drawn into World War I on the German side, in spite of their fervent anti-German sentiments.
In examining the reasons why these immigrants left the land of their birth, the gender stereotyping familiar from novels of the emigration—man as bold adventurer and woman as reluctant companion—fails to apply. For just like their male contemporaries, Scandinavian women actively sought new opportunities and new horizons. In a nuanced presentation of life in northern Norway, Henny Hale gives powerful expression to the forces that restricted her at home and those that beckoned to her from across the sea. She recalls the heavy burden of physical labor, the constant specter of death at sea, and the confining physical landscape—symbolic of her limited options. As she emphatically states, “I felt like I was choking, ‘cause I couldn’t see over the mountains.”
Thus driven, or pushed, by negative features of her Norwegian environment, Henny Hale simultaneously experienced the allure of America. She heard fantastic stories, especially from her father, whose own desire to go to America remained unfulfilled. “We thought America was lined with gold all over the place,” she says. Many of her relatives had already emigrated and they sent back beautiful presents. The fancy clothes in particular impressed the young country girl. With America, Henny associates luxury, sophistication, and relatives. With Norway, in spite of the memories of loving parents and lovely summer nights, she associates drudgery, death, and despair. At the age of twenty, she found herself obsessed with the idea of emigration—“I wanted to go to America, period.”
Magnhild Johnsen journeyed across the Atlantic just in time to be caught in the grip of war. But her 1938 journey was from west to east. As a remigrant to Norway, she lived through the German Occupation, a participant in the resistance movement and a witness to much suffering. The family decided to return to the United States in 1948, because of “too many sad memories from the war.” The Johnsen family represents an important segment of the twentieth-century immigrant population, namely those who remigrate. As many as one in five returned to live, for a time at least, in the Scandinavian homeland. Frequent trips back and forth were also not uncommon. In some cases, the “emigrants” never actually settled down on this side of the Atlantic, but rather “commuted” for a number of years in response to seasonal work patterns.
Overseas migration was one of several unstable elements in the lives of Scandinavian families during the early part of the century. Still, the geographical and cultural space that came to separate family members as a result of emigration distinguished the transatlantic move from the partings otherwise woven into the rhythm of family life. Not surprisingly, then, the leave-taking sparked emotions that were otherwise kept in check. Sometimes the parents refused a formal good-by, fearing an unseemly flood of tears. Sometimes the kiss or tear or solemn word of love did find expression, as when Ina Silverberg’s father placed his hands on her head and offered his blessing. These unusual circumstances made a lasting impression upon the departing offspring, although to judge by their testimony, the emigrants themselves found that excitement and anticipation overshadowed much of the pain and guilt of departure.
Then, too, the emigrants could look ahead to an established network of relationships in the distant western United States, where relatives and neighbors had already established homes. A study of Swedish-American Line passengers between 1922 and 1930 showed that two-thirds of them were joining relatives in America, one-fifth of them traveling on prepaid tickets.6 Seen in this light, emigration was not abandonment of the family; by and large, it was an extension of well-established social patterns and priorities.
The interviews in this section are arranged to give first a picture of rural life and then an impression of urban childhoods.
NOTES
1. Franklin D. Scott, Scandinavia (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975), 1.
2. B. R. Mitchell, “Statistical Appendix 1700–1914,” in Carl M. Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe, 4 (London, 1973), 747–749. Iceland was granted status as a separate kingdom under the Danish crown in 1918; in 1944, it became an independent republic.
3. Lennart Jörberg, “The Industrial Revolution in the Nordic Countries,” in The Fontana Economic History of Europe, 399, 377–378.
4. B.J. Hovde, The Scandinavian Countries, 1720–1865, 2 (Boston, 1943), 606.
5. Reino Kero, “The Background of Finnish Emigration,” in Ralph J. Jalkanen, ed., The Finns in North America: A Social Symposium (Hancock, Michigan, 1969), 58.
6. Florence Edith Janson, The Background of Swedish Immigration 1840–1930 (1931; reprinted New York, 1970), 484.
Henny Hale
“I couldn’t see over the mountains.”
Born in Eidet, Vesterålen, Norway, in 1903, Henny Hale emigrated in 1923 on a ticket supplied by an uncle in Tacoma. She did domestic work and became involved in activities at Tacoma’s Normanna Hall, where she met her husband. Upon marrying, she quit work. The Hales had two daughters.
My family was a good family. They were well thought of and they were hardworking. I guess we were very poor. We didn’t know we were poor, because we had a happy home life. And we had God-fearing parents; I think that made a lot of difference.
My father was a fisherman and a farmer. Father would go to Finnmarken in the late spring to fish, until he had to come back to work on his farm; and in the winter he went to the Lofoten Islands for cod.* My mother died when she was thirty-six, leaving six children. She was a slender, pretty little thing, and she shouldn’t have had to die so young. I remember her going down to the sea to get the heads of the fish and go home and boil them up and bring them to the barn for the cows. Mother used to crochet curtains and she had a loom and wove all the rugs for our floors. She was very handy. How she found the time I don’t know. Besides that, she was a seamstress and sewed for other people.
We used peat for heat; we had peat bogs all over the place. My dad would cut off about six thousand peat squares every spring; and we children had to slice these squares in six little slices with a spade. That was heavy work. We with our little legs would stand there and slice up all these and then set them to dry. It was marvelous fuel. We