The Danish Immigration.

The Danish immigration began much later than the Norwegian and Swedish, and its proportions were inconsiderable until after the Civil War. Not until 1869 did the annual influx of Danes reach 2,000. Tho the population of Denmark was and is somewhat greater than Norway’s, yet the Danish immigration has never in any one year equalled the Norwegian, and in but seven years has it been more than one-half. As against Norway’s total of nearly 600,000 from 1820 to 1905, Denmark’s is only about 225,000.[138] In calculating the immigration, however, a large allowance must be made. Since the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were acquired by Prussia in 1864 and 1866, their emigrants have of course been recorded as German. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the movement from Denmark has lacked momentum; its proportions are relatively small; and the influence of the Danes in the United States is much less important than that of either of the other Scandinavian nationalities.

The causes of the smaller emigration from Denmark are to be found in the nature of the people and in the conditions of the kingdom itself. Generally speaking, the Danes are not highly enterprising, adventurous, or self-confident; instead of daring all and risking all for possible, even probable, advantage, they remain at home, for,

“Striving to better, oft we do mar what’s well.”

Want is practically unknown in Denmark outside the slums of Copenhagen. The condition of the common people has steadily improved since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when nearly all the land was in the hands of the nobility; at the present time, six-sevenths is owned by the peasants. While this change has been going on, another, of even greater significance, has taken place.

Improved methods of cultivation, in the course of a hundred years, have multiplied the productive power of the land by ten, which is equivalent to increasing tenfold the available area of the kingdom. No nation, except the United States and Canada, has in recent times had such agricultural prosperity.[139]

As already noted, the activity of the Mormon missionaries drew off into the wilderness of Utah nearly 2000 Danes between 1850 and 1860, and nearly 5000 more in the next decade. In the two Prussian duchies after 1866, the discontent of Danes who preferred emigration to German rule drove a large number to the United States; and as these were far from being sympathizers with Mormonism, they found homes in the middle west. Settlements sprang up after 1870 in Wisconsin, at Racine; in Iowa, at Elk Horn in Shelby County and in the adjoining counties of Audubon and Pottawatomie; and in Douglas County (Omaha), Nebraska, just across the line from Pottawatomie County, Iowa. It should be noted in this connection that all the Danish settlements save those in Utah, were well within the frontier line, and hence are not to be classed as pioneering work, for which the Danes have shown little inclination.

The efforts of the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, organized at Neenah, Wisconsin, in 1872, have been several times directed deliberately to the organization of new Danish colonies, always, of course, with a view to strengthening the church or to carrying out some of its peculiar ideas. Of the four colonies,—in Shelby County, Iowa, in Lincoln County, Minnesota, in Clark County, Wisconsin, and in Wharton County, Texas,—that in Iowa is the most noteworthy and successful. Soon after 1880, the church secured an option on a tract of 35,000 acres in Shelby County from a land company. In return for 320 acres to be given by the company to the church for religious and educational purposes when one hundred actual settlers were secured, the church promised to use its influence to secure settlers for the whole tract. The company agreed for three years time to sell only to Danes at an average price of $7 per acre, for the first year, with an advance not exceeding $.50 per year for each following year. The end of the first year found more than the required number of settlers, the church received its grant, and still maintains its worship, a parochial school, and a high school, in a community which numbers about 1,000 Danes. The other colonies have been less successful.[140]

The Danish element in America has always lacked unity and solidarity. Even in their European home the Danes possess no strong national ambition, and no national institution claims their enthusiastic and undivided support. The Danish church, or churches, has gripped its immigrant sons and daughters less closely than similar organizations among the Swedes and Norwegians. It is estimated that only one out of fifteen of the Danes in the United States belongs to some church, while one out of five of the Swedes, one out of three and one-half of the Norwegians, and one out of three of the total population of the country, is connected with an ecclesiastical organization.[141]

One reason for the low ebb of church influence among the Danes is undoubtedly the wranglings of the clergy over matters of theology and polity, a continuation of the factional differences between the followers of Bishop Grundtvig and the anti-Grundtvigians or Inner Mission people in the years 1854-1895. In its beginning, the Danish Lutheran Church in America unanimously adopted this resolution: “We, the Danish ministers and congregations, hereby declare ourselves to be a branch of the Danish National Church, a missionary department established by that church in America.”[142] The government of Denmark recognized this relation; graduates of the University of Copenhagen, who received calls to churches in America, were ordained by a bishop in Denmark, and were appointed by the King as regular ministers in the Danish Church; and since 1884 the Danish Government has made a small annual appropriation for the education of ministers for the American branch of the Danish Church. This allowance was at first spent in Denmark, but since 1887, in the United States.[143] But with all this effort at maintaining unity and continuity, the American branch has not been united, peaceable or effective.

If the test of supporting educational institutions for their own people be applied to the Danes, the same deficiency of interest and contributions as in matters ecclesiastical, will be revealed. The attempt of the Grundtvigians to set up the peculiar “high schools” which they maintained in Denmark, for instruction of the common people in Scandinavian history, mythology, religion, language, and literature, all in Danish, was doomed to failure.[144] The first of these schools was located at Elk Horn, Iowa, in the midst of the largest Danish settlement in the United States, yet in the fifteen years after its establishment in 1878 the average attendance never reached forty. Four other schools, in Ashland, Michigan, in Nysted, Nebraska, in Polk County, Wisconsin, and in Lincoln County, Minnesota, all established between 1878 and 1888, suffered from like indifference and lack of financial help; not one averaged thirty pupils per year. Aside from tuition, the contributions of the Danes for educational purposes did not reach fifty cents per communicant during any consecutive five years up to 1894.[145] This is a poor showing alongside the three dollars per communicant contributed by the Norwegians when they were building Decorah College in 1861 to 1865.[146]