Conclusion

The meaning of the word American as applied to the inhabitants of the United States, has undergone a great change as they have multiplied fifteenfold in numbers and many times in varieties of nationalities in the course of a century. In that progress the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes have played a conspicuous and constructive part. As late as 1840, American ordinarily meant a white person of English descent, born in America or resident in the United States long enough to understand and accept as fundamental and vital certain political and social ideals and ideas. That simple and definite significance applies no more. The American race is already alarmingly complex, tho the old type has been more closely adhered to than would be expected from an enumeration of the elements which have gone into the crucible.

In temperament, early training, and ideals, the Scandinavians more nearly approach the American type than any other class of immigrants, except those from Great Britain. In such features as adaptability and loyalty without reservation, no exceptions need be made. They have not come to the New World merely to get away from Europe, nor to escape Siberian exile or an Abyssinian war; nor has their motive been one of ordinary adventure-seeking. Theirs has been a determined purpose and a serious resolve to “arrive” somewhere in America, and, finding their places, to fill them with honorable endeavor and steady ambition. They have come as families, or with a wholesome desire to establish families for themselves. Most of them have fallen considerably below the best types of their own nationalities; their conservatism has sometimes been of the degenerate sort bordering on stolidity; their independence and individualism has come painfully near stubbornness; and their shrewdness has not infrequently developed into insincerity. They have now and then manifested a clannishness which led them into disagreeable, if temporary, complications.

The fact that this characteristic or that tendency exists in an immigrant or alien element, should not cause disturbance of mind to the good citizen, the statesman, or the scholar; the real question is whether this characteristic or tendency is growing stronger or disappearing more or less rapidly. For example, is the stolidity of a group deepening, or does mental agility develop in the second and third generation? That the Scandinavians have readily outgrown much of their clannishness, perceptibly quickened their energies in the new environment, and developed notably in social, commercial, and political efficiency cannot be seriously questioned by any one who studies their activities as a whole, or who has observed them for two generations.

The immigrants from the North are decently educated, able-bodied, law-abiding men and women, not illiterates, paupers, or criminals. They are not here as exiles from home and country for a few years, after which they purpose to return to their native lands, there to enjoy a cheap and narrow idleness. They are in the United States as citizens, to become thoroly and loyally American. Their ingrained habits of industry and economy, coupled with a natural conservatism and shrewdness, have given them material success and contributed in large measure to the prosperity of the States in which they have made their settlements. They have ever striven for homes, and while some of them have been content for a few years to serve others, the proletariat has not been largely recruited from them. Mere wage-earning has not been a permanent condition, but a stepping stone to a greater or less degree of independence. In politics and in war they have evidenced their ability to stand side by side with the native-born of New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, and, with real faithfulness and efficiency to fill such places, low or high, as shall be opened to them.

Tho as Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes they will gradually disappear, becoming indistinguishable from other Americans, their fundamental characteristics cannot be blotted out even in the third and fourth generation. Men do not change so readily, even under the most favorable conditions. Fresh additions from Europe will continue to re-enforce the old stock; but they too will be sturdy, independent, and Protestant. It is not too much to expect that their virtues of intelligence, patience, persistence, and thrift, will be preserved as they mingle in the current of national life. The demand for these qualities will be steady; the supply on the part of the Scandinavians will not be readily exhausted. The intermarriage and amalgamation of two peoples so closely allied as the Scandinavians and Americans connotes much of promise and little of danger.

Several forces will continue to operate in the future, as they have in the past, against perpetuating any distinctively Scandinavian influence on the population or institutions of the United States. All three Northern peoples are particularly free from other than traditional ties and sentimental attachments binding them to the mother countries. No one of the three kingdoms is great or powerful in the affairs of Europe; the heroes of the past, like Gustavus Adolphus, are too far away in time to affect powerfully the imaginations of today. Patriotism with them in the Old World is quite as much a sentiment or love for the parish or the homestead as it is a fierce and militant passion for the power and leadership of the nation. No dramatic outbursts of national feeling, or antagonisms to ancient enemies, will rekindle old enthusiasms in the American Scandinavians. Even the prospect of war between Norway and Sweden, when the former dissolved the Dual Monarchy, did not profoundly stir the Swedes or Norwegians in the Northwest; and had war broken out all the recruits from America could probably have been shipped across the Atlantic in one voyage of a small steamship.

Furthermore, no great and permanent causes centering in Europe continually demand their active and intense sympathy and financial aid, knitting them closely together, as in the case of the Irish or the Russians. The Scandinavian contributions to European causes have been filial and fraternal, never political, never revolutionary, never such as to raise a national issue in America. Their church organizations, decentralized, centrifugal rather than centripetal, recognizing no unity under a temporal head, cannot be turned into a keen, insinuating political weapon. They have no secret societies ramifying through their settlements, no Mafias, “Molly Maguires,” anarchist lodges, or other badges of ancient servitude or foreign hates.

The Scandinavians, knowing the price of American citizenship, have paid it ungrudgingly, and are proud of the possession of the high prerogatives and privileges conferred. They fit readily into places among the best and most serviceable of the nation’s citizens; without long hammering or costly chiseling they give strength and stability, if not beauty and the delicate refinements of culture, to the social and economic structure of the United States.

For all these reasons the difficulties of the United States in adjusting the life and ideals and institutions of the nation to the presence of foreigners are reduced in the case of the Scandinavians to a minimum. The Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes are not likely to furnish great leaders, but they will be in the front rank of those who follow with sturdy intelligence and conscience, striving to make the land of their adoption strong and prosperous,—“a blessing to the common man,” according to the original vision of America seen by Sweden’s great king Gustavus Adolphus. They will be builders, not destroyers; their greatest service will be as a mighty, silent, steadying influence, re-enforcing those high qualities which are sometimes called Puritan, sometimes American, but which in any case make for local and national peace, progress, and righteousness.