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.

Bound together on this great question, then so dominant, they naturally maintained unity on other political questions as well as on slavery; and when once their ideas were fixed, any change would be effected slowly and with difficulty. The newcomers, in their first months in the older settlements, were speedily indoctrinated with anti-slavery sentiment. Thus it came about that one party received and retained the vast majority of the Scandinavians down to 1884, simply because a bent that way was given in the early years of immigration from the Northern peninsulas, and because the question of the status of the Negro, in one form or another, continued to be a political issue.

The first appearance of the Norwegians in State politics in Wisconsin, as already noted, was under the Free Soil banner between 1846 and 1848, when that State was endeavoring to form a constitution. The first constitution submitted to the people, in 1847, was rejected by a large majority, including a separately-submitted provision granting equal suffrage to Negroes. While the State decisively voted thus, the counties in which the Scandinavian vote was largest—Racine, Walworth, and Waukesha—showed large majorities in favor of giving the Negroes political privileges equal to those of the Whites. On the other hand, counties where the German votes were numerous stood solidly against equal suffrage, seemingly because in the constitutional convention the question of Negro suffrage was coupled with that of the granting of suffrage to foreign-born, in a way that greatly displeased the Germans.[392] When the second convention finished its constitution, in 1848, resolutions were introduced to provide for printing and distributing translations of the document, 6000 copies in German, and 4000 copies in Norwegian, a hint of the relative strength of the two groups.[393]

The relation of James Reymert and his Nordlyset to the Free Soil movement has been mentioned. When the Democratic papers mercilessly criticised the little sheet and poked fun at its name, the paper was sold by Reymert to Knud Langeland in 1849, and by him removed to Racine; the name was changed to Demokraten, but the politics of the paper were not affected.[394] As a political organ among the Norwegians, it was ahead of the times; the support of the paper was insufficient to pay the bills, and it was discontinued in 1850. The Norwegian immigrants were unaccustomed to a purely secular press; they preferred to have their politics wrapped up in papers labelled “religious.” Langeland declares that many of them considered it a sin to read a political newspaper.[395] But the Free Soil sentiment was too strong to go without printed expression in Norwegian; and accordingly the propaganda continued in the form of speeches of Chase, Seward, Hale, Giddings, and other anti-slavery leaders, which were translated into Norwegian and mixed in with non-political matter in Maanedstidende, a paper whose publication, after the failure of Demokraten, Langeland undertook along with four clergymen, Clausen, Preuss, Stub, and Hatlestad.[396]

As they read these speeches of the great leaders, as they heard from Negroes themselves the evils of slavery, as they learned of the high-handed doings in Kansas, the zeal of the Scandinavians for human freedom increased. There were no old party traditions, feelings, or feuds, to keep them from judging the issue of slavery’s expansion on its merits; no loyalty to the memories of dead heroes held them in mortmain. Some few of them voted for Cass in 1848 and for Pierce in 1852, but by 1856 there was only one issue for them: simply and straightforwardly and almost to a man, they became Republicans.[397] The Democrats, of course, did not let the children of the North go without an effort to secure them in their ranks. In 1856 Elias Stangeland of Madison, Wisconsin, started a Norwegian paper, Den Norske Amerikaner, in support of James Buchanan. His efforts to get Langeland to undertake the editorship failed because the latter was an ardent admirer of Fremont. The paper had a short life, and probably Langeland is right in attributing its disappearance to the withdrawal of the Democratic subsidy.[398] A long time was to elapse before a successful attempt would be made to maintain a Democratic paper in Norwegian or Swedish.

What the anti-slavery agitation left undone towards making the Scandinavians unswervingly Republican, was accomplished by the Civil War. The lingering glories of the golden age of the Democracy of Jackson and Jefferson were entirely obscured by the attitude of the Democratic party toward the conduct of the war. Only when the memories of the Civil War grew less vivid and less influential with new arrivals from the Old World, and not until moral questions were superseded in political discussions by economic questions relating to the tariff, currency, and labor, did the Scandinavians begin to arrange themselves in any considerable numbers outside the Republican ranks.

Four times during the last thirty-five years the Scandinavian voters in large numbers, under varying circumstances and in different degrees in different States, have abjured Republican leadership. After each such excursion they have returned, for the most part, to their old party relations, but never with quite the same fervent, reliable zeal for Republican principles and candidates. The development of the bacillus of independence is unmistakable. One defection affected Wisconsin alone, the only instance where the Democrats profited directly by the votes of large numbers of Scandinavians. At a later time, when the Free Silver and Populist ideas took strong hold on the Northwest, the Scandinavian vote re-enforced the personal popularity of John Lind, the Swedish candidate of the Populist-Democratic party, and secured his election, tho the rest of the Fusion ticket suffered defeat.

The first time Norse voters broke from the Republican ranks was in connection with the Greenback movement which began with the depression following the panic of 1873 and culminated in the election of 1880. Many of them, especially the Swedes in Illinois, became out-and-out Greenbackers or Independents. In his book on the Swedes in Illinois, published in 1880, C. F. Peterson gives brief biographies of some seven hundred Swedes, men of all walks of life above day laborer, who may be considered as representatives of the 40,000 Swedes in Illinois at that time.[399] At least they represent the classes which would be least likely to be led off into economic heresies. Of 628 whose party affiliations are stated, 472 were Republicans; 76, Independents; 55, Greenbackers; and 25, Democrats or Prohibitionists. In other words, out of the total number canvassed, more than twenty per-cent were dissenters from Republican orthodoxy.

The relation of political and religious sentiment is strikingly illustrated in analyzing these biographies, for those who were Lutherans or Methodists were usually Republicans in politics, and proud to belong to “the party of moral ideas.”[400] Those stating their religious preferences as Lutheran numbered 388, and of these only 10 were Democrats, 16 were Greenbackers, and 19 were Independent. On the other hand, of 131 who belonged to the three political parties last mentioned, 87 were in religion also Independent, Free Thinkers, or “Ingersollites”. For States other than Illinois, no such complete contemporary data are available; but since the Greenback vote in Minnesota was only 2% of the total, and in Wisconsin 3%, it is fair to assume that the Scandinavians did not desert the Republican standard in very large numbers in those States.

The second case of considerable defection among the Republican Scandinavians occurred after the widespread development of agrarian discontent in the late eighties. The farmers and laborers, American and Scandinavian alike, felt the stress of hard times, turned to political agencies for relief, forsook the old parties, and formed the party called variously the Populist, People’s, and Farmers’ Alliance Party. Besides those Norwegians and Swedes who had been for years Republicans, whose political color was fixed by the mordant of slavery and the Civil War, there was then a very large number of men who arrived in the vast immigrant invasions between 1880 and 1885, and who were just coming into the full exercise of the rights of citizenship. An increasing proportion of these later arrivals went to the large cities and towns. All of them were moved less by the traditions of “moral ideas” and more by the contagious discontent of the older settlers and by the arguments of industrial and political agitators.

In the election of 1890 a serious break occurred in the Republican Party in Minnesota and in the Dakotas. There was a general impression in the rural districts of Minnesota that the Republican candidate for governor, William R. Merriam, a wealthy banker of St. Paul, was renominated for his second term by a political ring composed of lumber-kings, wheat dealers, and millers who combined to cheat and rob the farmer. Accordingly the Farmers’ Alliance nominated a third ticket headed by S. M. Owen, the editor of an agricultural paper in Minneapolis, who polled a vote of 58,513, and reduced Merriam’s vote of 1888 by about 46,000.[401] Merriam was re-elected by a plurality of less than 2,500, tho he had had more than 24,000 two years before.

A careful examination of the votes for 1888 and 1890 in such strong Scandinavian counties as Otter Tail, Douglas, Chisago, Freeborn, Polk, and Norman leaves no doubt that the Swedes and Norwegians in very large numbers either voted for Owen, or refused to vote for Merriam.[402] In some cases the Republican vote fell off one-half and even two-thirds, and third-party Alliance candidates for the legislature were elected. A prominent Norwegian writer estimated that “25,000 Norwegian-born farmers turned their backs upon Mr. Merriam and voted for Mr. Owen for governor,” disregarding the injunction of the Scandinavian Republican press to “stick to the grand old party, for the grand old party is particularly favorable to the Scandinavians, and the best political party in America.”[403]

At the next state election in the presidential year, 1892, a Norwegian ran for governor on the Republican ticket, and a large part of the Scandinavian deserters wheeled into line and voted the Republican ticket. With a total vote only 15,000 greater than in 1890, the vote for the Republican candidate for governor increased in round number 20,000, for the Democratic candidate, 9,000, and for the Prohibition candidate, 4,000, while the vote of the Alliance or People’s party fell off 20,000.[404]

Conditions in North Dakota and South Dakota were even more favorable to the new party than in Minnesota.

Estimates based on a study of statistics and newspapers have been confirmed by prominent officials of those States, one of whom declares that “in some localities quite a per-cent has joined the Populist party; but it is very rare indeed to find a Scandinavian Democrat.”[405] Another believes that a considerable portion of the Scandinavians voted the Populist ticket in 1892 and in 1894, but that they were normally believers in the protective principle and therefore naturally affiliated with the Republican party.[406] A German lawyer of Valley City, North Dakota, a Democrat, practically agreed with the Norwegian city attorney of Devil’s Lake in the same State, the one saying that a large part of the Norse voters were Populists, the other declaring that the Populist party was largely composed of Scandinavians.[407] All agreed that these voters later tended to return to their former Republican alliance. It may be doubted, however, whether the hold of the protection idea is one of the primary reasons for Scandinavian Republicanism. At any rate the vote of the Hon. Knute Nelson for the Mills Bill for tariff revision in 1888—one of six Republican votes for the measure—did not make him politically persona non grata or a suspicious character among his Norwegian or Swedish brethren.

Another index of the shifting of political sentiment among the Norse voters is found in the changes in the party affiliations of Scandinavian newspapers, tho the varying importance of these journals imposes special caution in interpreting these figures. It would be obviously unfair to offset the staunch and well-supported Republicanism of the ably-edited and widely-circulated Skandinaven of Chicago with the less stable Normannen of Stoughton, Wisconsin, which had not one-third the circulation nor one-tenth of the influence of the metropolitan journal.[408] The “mugwump spirit” of the press is well illustrated by the case of Norden, a Norwegian weekly of Chicago, Republican up to 1884, when it took an independent attitude. In 1888 it became avowedly Democratic and supported Grover Cleveland for the presidency. This move was made only after the proprietor and editor assured themselves that the patrons of the paper would sustain them in the proposed change.[409]

Of the secular political Scandinavian papers published in Minnesota in 1889 nine were Republican—five Norwegian or Norwegian-Danish, four Swedish; three were Democratic,—all Norwegian; two were Prohibitionist,—one Norwegian and one Swedish; and one was Labor,—Norwegian.[410] In the next five years, the independent press in Minnesota and other states increased in numbers at least, and included such influential journals as Amerika and Folkebladet. George Taylor Rygh, professor of Scandinavian languages in the University of North Dakota, estimated in 1893 that “until a few years ago over four-fifths of the [Scandinavian] secular press were strictly Republican in politics. One after another has ceased to defend the Republican party, and today not more than one-third of the whole number are strictly Republican.”[411] While this personal opinion or impression is probably exaggerated, it may represent approximately the temporary state of that year if proper emphasis be laid on the word “strictly.” Since there appears to be no evidence that these papers, with two or three exceptions, were subsidized to induce their change of political creed, it is reasonable to conclude that they had behind them a solidified constituency, for they were run neither for personal amusement, pure philanthropy, nor mere partisan propaganda.

The third defection occurred in Wisconsin alone, and took its rise in a purely local question. Its interest lies in the peculiar and remarkable temporary alliance to which it led. The Wisconsin Legislature passed an act, approved April 18, 1889, “concerning the education and employment of children.”[412] To the ordinary provisions for coercing parents and children, so that all children between the ages of seven and fourteen years should attend at least twelve weeks in some public or private school in the city or town or district in which they lived, nobody objected. But the fifth section of the act, which was known as the Bennett Law, was in certain church circles, like a dash of vitriol in the face:

“No school shall be regarded as a school under this act unless there shall be taught therein as a part of the elementary education of the children, reading, writing, arithmetic, and United States history, in the English language.”

The last four words of this section, innocent and reasonable as they look to the average American, stirred up one of the bitterest political fights ever known in Wisconsin. The Roman Catholic church, unalterably committed to a system of parochial schools in many of which instruction is given in a foreign language, was for once in accord with the German and Scandinavian Lutherans who maintained similar schools. The compulsory use of English in instructing pupils in specified subjects turned priests and pastors and whole congregations into active, vociferous politicians, for Germans, Norwegians, Poles, and Bohemians claimed the right to educate their children in parochial schools of their own choosing. Was not education education, whether carried on in English or German or Polish or Norwegian? Were not the graduates of church schools, even tho they spoke English brokenly or with brogue, just as intelligent, just as capable, just as industrious, and just as honest, as those educated in the “little red school house” and the public high school?[413] The chairman of the Lutheran Committee on School Legislation stated the matter clearly from the standpoint of the churches:

“The Lutherans of Wisconsin do not oppose the Bennett Law because they are the enemies of the English language.... The Lutherans oppose the present compulsory school law because—whether designedly or not—it in fact infringes on the rights of conscience guaranteed by the constitution, and the right of parents to educate according to their convictions, their own children.... In short, the Lutherans insist upon their right to establish private schools at their own expense, and regulate them, without any interference on the part of the State, ... that their children may become Lutheran Christians as well as loyal and good citizens.”[414] The official circular of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction of Wisconsin, dated January 25, 1890, almost a year after the passage of the act, was a statement of the opposite point of view, and a justification of attempts to enforce the law. Incidentally it was a political pamphlet as well. Superintendent Thayer said: “The thing that is antagonized by this law is the practice of allowing children of this State of proper school age, to pass that period of life without acquiring the minimum of education in elementary branches; without acquiring the ability to think in the language of the country, to express themselves intelligibly in that language, orally, in writing, and in business forms.”

All through the latter part of 1889 and the first ten months of 1890, the agitation went on. The press gave great space to it; some papers through several months, both in Wisconsin and in the neighboring States where Lutherans and Catholics were numerous, offered “symposiums” which printed arguments on both sides.[415] Public Opinion summarized the sentiment for the larger world.[416] Church assemblies took action, and finally an Anti-Bennett Law convention was held in Milwaukee, June 4, 1890.

The Democrats were not slow in seizing the advantage offered, and managed their campaign of 1890 very shrewdly. The combination of sternly anti-Catholic German and Norwegian Lutherans, usually Republican, with Roman Catholics, under the Democratic banner, was irresistible. In spite of the frantic appeals of the Republican press and speakers for loyalty to the American flag and to the “little red school house,” the Democrats elected their candidate for governor, and a legislature pledged to give the desired relief. By the six-line act of February 5, 1891, the Bennett Law was repealed, and two months later another compulsory education act was passed without the offensive and troublesome four words.[417] The work of the Lutheran-Catholic alliance was done; the heterogeneous, naturally antagonistic elements fell apart; and in a few years old party lines were re-established. The plurality of 28,000 by which the Democratic Governor, G. W. Peck, was elected in 1890, overcoming the usual Republican plurality of about 20,000, was reduced at his re-election in 1892 to 7,700. In 1894 the Republican candidate defeated Governor Peck by the handsome plurality of 50,000 votes.[418]

While the Bennett Law agitation was going on in Wisconsin, a similar, but milder disturbance occurred in Illinois. The compulsory education act of the latter State, which went into effect July 1, 1889, was closely, if not deliberately, modelled after the Wisconsin statute, and enacted that “no school shall be regarded as a school under this act, unless there shall be taught therein in the English language, reading, writing, arithmetic, history of the United States, and geography.”[419] In the campaign of 1890, the Republican candidate for State Superintendent of Education, favoring the new compulsory education law, was defeated by some 36,000 votes by Raab, the Democratic candidate who opposed the law. The Norwegians and Danes in the city of Chicago probably voted for Raab in large numbers, tho he won the Swedish wards of that city by small pluralities. In such counties as Knox, with its two thousand Swedish voters, and Winnebago (in which is situated the city of Rockford, with about fifteen hundred Swedish voters), where one-third of the foreign born population was at that time Scandinavian, the Republican candidate received large majorities. A writer for America, the periodical published in English for Scandinavian readers, claimed proudly that “the large Swedish settlements in Henry, Rock Island, Bureau, De Kalb, Henderson, Warren, Mercer, Ford, Whiteside, and other counties cast a solid vote for Edwards.... The Swedes were in favor of compulsory education almost to a man.”[420] In the city of Chicago, the County Superintendent of Schools for Cook County was re-elected by a plurality of 23,000 tho he favored the compulsory law. The repeal of the law of 1889 was not so prompt in Illinois as it was in Wisconsin, for it was not until 1893 that a new and expurgated compulsory education measure took its place.[421]

A close and detailed examination of the legislative journals and the statutes of the Northwestern States does not reveal above a half-dozen laws which can be said to be due to the leadership and direct influence of the Scandinavians as such. On the other hand, in the field of general legislation these men have been indistinguishable from the native-born in ability, efficiency, and uprightness; the gross and net products of the labors of those legislatures with many Scandinavian representatives in such states as Minnesota and North Dakota, are not perceptibly different from the output of legislatures in which no Swede or Norwegian ever sat, as in Michigan or Colorado. Scarcely a law has been passed for the purpose of catering to the preferences, or of catching the vote, of the sons of the Northlands.

An exception to this general statement is the Minnesota law of 1883 providing for the establishment of a “professorship of Scandinavian language and literature in the State University, with the same salary as is paid in said University to other professors of the same grade.” The man to be chosen must be “some person learned in the Scandinavian language and literature, and at the same time skilled and capable of teaching the dead languages so called.”[422]

The motives of the makers of the law were benevolent enough, and circumstances warranted its passage, but nothing could better illustrate the utter carelessness and looseness with which American State legislators do their work, than this simple statute. It was drawn up by a distinguished American lawyer, Gordon E. Cole of St. Paul, at the request of Truls Paulsen by whom it was introduced into the legislature.[423] It created a chair of “Scandinavian language,” when there is no such language, living or dead; the professorship was established “in the State University,” when the laws of the State recognize no institution bearing such a name. The Norwegian who presented the bill, the legislature (including twenty-one other Norwegians and Swedes) which passed it, and the Governor who signed it, all showed the same quality of ignorance and neglect of fact, law, and English. A second law, undoubtedly based directly upon the first, even to copying its confusion of terms, was the act passed by the legislature of North Dakota in 1891, creating a chair of Scandinavian language and literature in the University of North Dakota.[424]

Another statute having still more distinct Scandinavian earmarks was passed by the legislature of North Dakota in 1893, providing for tribunals of conciliation, to be composed of four commissioners of conciliation elected in each town, incorporated village, and city. The measure was modelled in a feeble and tentative fashion after a statute of Norway, where such courts have been in operation since 1824, proving especially efficient in securing amicable adjustment of petty neighborhood difficulties.[425] But the law in North Dakota speedily fell into “innocuous desuetude,” in spite of the enormous percentage of Norwegians in that State; its construction was defective; its constitutionality was questioned; its machinery was cumbersome and expensive. During its first two years, many communities failed to elect commissioners, and no serious attempt was made to comply with its provisions; even the Norwegians themselves manifested no anxiety or haste to make use of this characteristically Norwegian court. Nor did the amendment of 1895, substituting for compulsory use of the tribunal hearings at the request of one party and with the consent of both parties, improve matters. One Norwegian attorney pronounced the law “an unmitigated absurdity under present conditions,” because most suits in the United States arise out of contracts, debts, titles, etc., rather than out of neighborhood quarrels, slanders, and the like.

In all matters relating to temperance and temperance legislation, the Scandinavian voters have almost invariably been on the side of restriction of the saloon and the liquor traffic. They have supported prohibition in Iowa and in the Dakotas, high license in Minnesota, and the patrol-limit system in Minneapolis.[426] The prohibition State and local tickets, especially in Minnesota, and in the Dakotas, always have a large proportion of Norwegians and Swedes among their nominees.[427] The best illustration of this sentiment, however, is to be found in the history of prohibition in North Dakota. When the new constitution for the proposed State was made and presented to the people in 1889, the section which provided for the absolute prohibition of both the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors was submitted separately to the voters. Thus the prohibition issue was presented fairly and squarely to every man in the State. The constitution itself was carried by a majority approximating twenty thousand in a total vote of upwards of thirty-five thousand; the prohibitionist section received a majority of 1159. Analysis of the vote by counties makes it clear that in every county where the Scandinavians predominated, with a single exception, the section was carried by fair majorities.[428] The question of re-submission of this section to the vote of the people of the State came up in 1895, and was postponed indefinitely by the House of Representatives of the State of North Dakota by a vote of twenty-six to twenty-two, fourteen of the sixteen Scandinavian members of the House voting with the twenty-six.[429] This seems to justify the opinion of the Secretary of State of North Dakota: “Nearly all Scandinavian members of the legislature have invariably voted against the resubmission of the question to the people.... It is safe to say that at least three-fourths of the Scandinavian population of this State favor prohibition, and one-half of them are earnest advocates of the law.”[430]

The only remaining question as to the political influence of the Scandinavians is the claim of the Swedes and Norwegians for “recognition” at the hands of old parties; and the concessions which such claims have extorted. From the foregoing accounts, it is evident that the Scandinavians have been ready in fitting themselves into the political system of the United States. Altho they have not been guilty of that excessive and pernicious activity in the field of public affairs which has characterized some classes of immigrants settling by preference in the great cities, it must be admitted that they have now and then appealed to race pride and prejudice and jealousy, re-marking boundary lines and distinctions which should be obliterated. The practical politicians, on their part, have not hesitated to stir up, for party advantage, the sensitiveness of naturalized citizens to real or imaginary slights and discriminations against them by “the other party.”

The appeal of the Norwegian and Swedish press is not infrequently based frankly on the essential sentiment of clannishness: “Scandinavians in Superior and other places should always support a country man for election to public office,” and if he is in all ways worthy, “we should all together rally around him, lay aside all small considerations, and honor him with our trust and esteem.”[431] Ridiculing the narrowness of these “demands,” another editor, under the heading “From Norway, Birthplace of Giants,” suggests a full Republican ticket of Norwegians, including Rasmus B. Anderson, “Republican pro tem.,” and also a full Democratic ticket of Norwegians, including Rasmus B. Anderson, “thinking that he may next year be a Democrat again.”[432] This trick of asserting their political importance in the Northwestern States was very early learned; and so long as party managers bid for votes in the tongues of the aliens, bribing them with nominations of the foreign-born, just so long will these groups of adopted citizens reiterate and multiply their demands, just so long will they capitalize their voting power and collect a generous interest in the shape of nominations and appointments. It must not be supposed that the Norwegian and Swedish party papers in America exist for the primary purpose of forwarding the political interests of people of those nationalities as such, for they do not, any more than do the partisan papers printed in English, but the Scandinavian groups are so large and so definite that appeals to them to stand together as a race for their own interests are inevitable.

So early as 1870, one of the leading Norwegian newspapers declared that it was time for the Norwegians to get a Representative in Congress just as well as other nationalities—“ligesaavel som andre nationaliteter.”[433] The editor suggested that the eight thousand Norse voters in the southern Minnesota district hold a convention the day before the regular Republican convention, and agree upon a candidate for the Congressional nomination: if the Republicans refused to nominate him, put on the screws! About twenty years later this very method was resorted to in North Dakota, when the Scandinavians of that State “in mass convention assembled,” proceeded to pass resolutions and to organize the Scandinavian Union of North Dakota, to secure for themselves “that share in the government to which their competency, their character and numerical strength, and their rank as pioneers in all matters of civilization entitle them.” While declaring that it believed that every man should stand or fall on his own merits, the convention resolved “that we have seen with deep regret the disposition of a large number of our fellow citizens in some parts of North Dakota to discriminate against us, because we are Scandinavians, and that an unprovoked war has been waged against us.”[434] The Hon. M. N. Johnson, presiding officer, presumptive beneficiary of the Union, an aspirant for nomination as Representative, stated the case very frankly: “The Scandinavians constitute a majority of the Republican party in North Dakota. Under the territorial government they have not received many official favors, but with the opening of statehood it is proper that they should have some recognition. The Scandinavians are not disposed to leave the Republican Party. They are heartily loyal to the organization and its principles.... We have the numerical strength to demand and secure justice, and all we ask is fair play.... We are simply organizing our forces for united action in urging our just demands.”[435] Their just demands consisted in “from three to five of the State officers, and if they stand together and attend the primaries, there is no doubt but that they will get what they ask for.”[436]

The effectiveness of this movement is sarcastically summed up by a correspondent of The North, in reporting the Republican convention: “M. N. Johnson’s Scandinavian League has evidently come out of the small end of the horn. To be sure M. N. was made the chairman of the convention and the dear Scandinavians got honorary mention in the resolutions: but M. N.’s chairmanship was evidently devoid of results beneficial to the Scandinavians, and as for resolutions—talk is cheap!”[437]

In an editorial in English Skandinaven discussed “Governor Sheldon’s Mistake” in 1893: “Upwards of one-third of the population of South Dakota is of Scandinavian birth or origin, while Scandinavians furnish not less than one-half of the Republican vote of the State. Governor Sheldon is apparently oblivious to this fact; for in making his appointments he saw fit to ignore the Scandinavian-American citizens of South Dakota. For the sake of the Republican party of the State this mistake is very much to be regretted. The Scandinavians are sensitive of their rights as American citizens.... What has the Republican party of South Dakota done to Governor Sheldon that he should deal it such a dangerous blow?”[438] Five years later the governor of Minnesota was accused of a like offence in that, on the State boards appointed by Governor Merriam, the Scandinavians were “insufficiently represented,” having only five out of one hundred members, or one-twenty-fifth, when they constituted one-third of the population of the State.[439]

The pettiness of these squabbles over political “recognition” and spoils is well illustrated by a letter written in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to a Minneapolis newspaper in 1889: “While our people here number over 3000, and the Irish only 1400, the latter hold a still larger percentage of offices than they do in your city. This year for the first time the Scandinavians (or more correctly speaking, the Danes) have succeeded in obtaining a place on the police force”![440]

These insistent demands do not stop with simple recognition of the Scandinavian race: different sections must be satisfied. The most influential Swedish paper of the Northwest announced in 1890 that “what we on the other hand with full propriety and without the least danger of transgression can demand, is a man of Swedish descent at the head of one of our State departments.... To deny them (Swedes) this just recognition would stir up bad feeling, and would be looked upon as a slight, not to say contempt.... Our brethren, the Norwegians, are a little more numerous in Minnesota, than the Swedes, although not equally good Republicans. They, too, are entitled to a place on the State ticket, and for a long time have had one [Lieutenant Governor Rice].”[441]

The failure of the Scandinavians to receive what some of them consider a just and due reward, one in proportion to their numbers and their devotion to one party, is not to be attributed wholly to the hardness of heart of the party leaders, nor to their shortsightedness. Nor can it be fairly charged to any strong dislike of Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes for each other: the Swedes, for example, have never bolted a ticket because it happened to be headed by a Norwegian.[442] In addition to the extension of religious antagonism into politics, “there is still another reason for the limited success of the Scandinavians in the political field, and that is their natural apathy [antipathy?] to following a leader. Each one considers himself competent to work on his own hook. To follow a leader seems incompatible with their ideas of liberty. Yet without union and without leaders, victory is impossible.... ‘Everybody for himself, and the Devil for the hindmost’ is the law governing American life, and this the Irish have learned, while the Scandinavian is generally waiting for someone to come along and offer something with the polite ‘if you please.’ But he has to wait.”[443]

The Scandinavian press, in complaining of “a failure to get a due share of offices,” in declaring that Norwegians are “entitled to ten seats” in the Wisconsin legislature when they happen to have but three, or in insinuating that they have never been fittingly recognized in Iowa, resorts to political claptrap, often quite unworthy of the journal printing it. The facts so easily forgotten are that the counties and legislative districts in which the Scandinavians are a ruling majority are comparatively few, while the districts in which they are an influential minority are very many.[444] The system of representation in the United States is not based on any racial divisions or class distinctions, and not until some scheme of minority representation is adopted can any foreign element get its “share” of the political plums. It would be hard to suggest a more dangerous and disrupting experiment, in these decades when aliens by the hundreds of thousands, not to say millions, enter the country and are incorporated into the body politic, than to attempt to “recognize” the various alien factors in complex public affairs, even if they were all as adaptable as the men from the Northlands. Nothing would do more, for example, to develop the latent religious and racial antipathies between the Scandinavians and the Irish. The fundamental assumption, therefore, which lies back of all claims for “recognition” of Swedish-Americans, or other hyphenated Americans, as such, savors of ward politics and the machine, rather than of political equity or right, and just so far as it does this it menaces social and political safety.