Swedish Chicago: The Shaping of an Immigrant Community, 1880–1920

By Anita Olson Gustafson

Between 1880 and 1920, emigration from Sweden to Chicago soared, and the city itself grew remarkably. During this time, the Swedish population in the city shifted from three centrally located ethnic enclaves to neighborhoods scattered throughout the city. As Swedes moved to new neighborhoods, the early enclave-based culture adapted to a progressively more dispersed pattern of Swedish settlement in Chicago and its suburbs. Swedish community life in the new neighborhoods flourished as immigrants built a variety of ethnic churches and created meaningful social affiliations, in the process forging a complex Swedish-American identity that combined their Swedish heritage with their new urban realities. Chicago influenced these Swedes' lives in profound ways, determining the types of jobs they would find, the variety of people they would encounter, and the locations of their neighborhoods. But these immigrants were creative people, and they in turn shaped their urban experience in ways that made sense to them. Swedes arriving in Chicago after 1880 benefited from the strong community created by their predecessors, but they did not hesitate to reshape that community and build new ethnic institutions to make their urban experience more meaningful and relevant. They did not leave Chicago untouched—they formed an expanding Swedish community in the city, making significant portions of Chicago Swedish. This engaging study will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in immigration and Swedish-American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781609092467

Book preview

Swedish Chicago

THE SHAPING OF AN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY, 1880–1920

Anita Olson Gustafson

NIU Press

DeKalb, IL

© 2018 by Northern Illinois University Press

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18      1  2  3  4  5

978-0-87580-791-1 (paper)

978-1-60909-246-7 (e-book)

Book and cover design by Yuni Dorr

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

CONTENTS

GUSTAFSON LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

SWEDISH IMMIGRATION TO CHICAGO

CHAPTER 2

THE SWEDISH IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN CHICAGO

Finding a Middle Ground

CHAPTER 3

CHURCH GROWTH IN SWEDISH CHICAGO

CHAPTER 4

VIKINGS, ODD FELLOWS, AND TEMPLARS

Voluntary Association in Sweden and Chicago

CHAPTER 5

SWEDISH NATIONALISM IN A NEW LAND

Toward a Swedish American Identity

EPILOGUE

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

GUSTAFSON LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1.   Carl and Hanna (Carlson) Olson wedding picture.

FIGURE 2.   Map of census tracts of Chicago in 1920, showing areas and density of Swedish neighborhoods.

FIGURE 3.   Old Main at North Park College.

FIGURE 4.   Dalkullen Publishing and Importing Company

FIGURE 5.   Hanna Carlson before emigrating.

FIGURE 6.   First Covenant Church Picnic, Chicago, 1880s.

FIGURE 7.   Immanuels Kyrkan Chicago 1907 Calendar.

FIGURE 8.   Immanuels Kyrkan Sunday School, 1903.

FIGURE 9.   Ladies Aid Group, North Park Covenant Church, Chicago, 1890s.

FIGURE 10. Covenant Home of Mercy, 1886.

FIGURE 11. Svithiod Chorus, 1896.

FIGURE 12. Postcard of Sångarfest i Chicago, 1905.

FIGURE 13. Viking Lodge Harald Members in Regalia.

FIGURE 14. Postcard of Swedish National Society Christmas Fair, 1916.

FIGURE 15. Portrait of the first officers of the Swedish Educational League, approximately 1915.

TABLE 1.     Membership in Chicago’s Swedish Churches, 1880–1920.

TABLE 2.     Swedish Churches established in Chicago until 1920.

TABLE 3.     Membership Statistics, Chicago’s Svithiod and Viking Orders, 1880–1920.

INTRODUCTION

This book examines the history of the Swedish community in Chicago between the years 1880 and 1920, a time when immigration from Sweden soared and the city itself grew remarkably. During these years, the Swedish population in the city moved from three centrally located ethnic enclaves to neighborhoods widely scattered throughout the city, and this study traces that outward progression and the impact it had upon Swedish ethnic identity. My central argument is that, rather than ethnicity disappearing as Swedes moved to new neighborhoods, the early enclave-based culture successfully survived and adapted to a progressively dispersed pattern of Swedish settlement in Chicago and its suburbs. Swedish community life in the new neighborhoods flourished as immigrants built a variety of ethnic churches, created meaningful and diverse social affiliations, and in the process, forged a complex Swedish American identity that combined their Swedish heritage with their new urban realities.

For the tens of thousands of emigrants who left Sweden for Chicago, the move to Chicago and subsequent moves within the city were not random acts. Many of these individuals viewed their decision to leave Sweden with little regret as they hoped for a more prosperous future; others longed for the life they had left behind in Sweden and never quite adjusted to the urban bustle surrounding them.¹ Overall, these immigrants were dreamers; they had high expectations of improving their lives and economic circumstances. They made decisions about their future in an increasingly global economy and labor market in an era when, due to improvements in communication and transportation, Chicago was a well-known destination for Swedish emigration. The Sweden they left behind was becoming overpopulated while at the same time remaining economically underdeveloped. So they followed the trail of men and women who had migrated before them and who often provided connections that helped them find work and housing. Most of them left behind a rural past for the economic and social opportunities provided by a burgeoning American city. Hence, they faced a dual adjustment process—from Sweden to America and from a rural past to an urban future.

Without a doubt, Chicago shaped these Swedes’ lives in profound ways, determining the types of jobs they would find, the variety of people they would encounter, and the locations of neighborhoods where they would live. But these immigrants were also a creative group of people. They brought with them a strong sense of their ethnicity that they continued to express in Chicago, settling in Swedish neighborhoods and continuing to correspond with those whom they left behind in Sweden. They also built Swedish institutions and they spoke the Swedish language in their homes, churches, and clubs. Swedes arriving in Chicago after 1880 benefited from the strong community already created by their predecessors, but they did not hesitate to reshape that community and build new ethnic institutions as necessary to make their own urban experience more meaningful and relevant. Ultimately, their decisions—whether to emigrate, to make Chicago their permanent home, or to move to a new home in the city—were made in the context of the evolving Swedish community in Chicago, their strong family connections, and the changing nature of the urban landscape and economic environment in Chicago. They did not leave Chicago untouched, but rather, they shaped the expanding Swedish community in the city—in effect, making significant portions of Chicago Swedish.

In other words, Swedish ethnicity in America was continuously developing. An important purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of what it meant to be an ethnic American at the turn of the twentieth century, and how notions of ethnicity changed over time, even within particular ethnic communities. Most historians now agree that immigrants did not lose their past upon arrival in America, nor were they able to completely retain their traditions unchanged. Adaptation to America was not linear, but involved a process of change that combined a person’s past experiences with his or her present conditions. For example, Josef J. Barton examines changes in traditional behavior among Slovaks, Italians, and Rumanians in Cleveland and argues for a model of assimilation that accounts for persistence of the relation between ethnicity and social status while it allows for the strength of assimilative forces.² The key to this process is to distinguish between acculturation, a change in habits and beliefs, and structural assimilation, the entrance into close personal relationships with members of the charter society. Kathleen Neils Conzen, in her study of the German community in Milwaukee, points out that the complex, highly stratified German ethnic community retarded structural assimilation in American society but it did not preclude it.³ Writing about Italian immigrants in San Francisco, Dino Cinel argues that continuity and change should not be viewed as mutually exclusive categories: The drive for material success put a premium on change; the attachment to tradition made Italians resist it.⁴ The Italian attitudes toward assimilation were often ambivalent and contradictory.

Hence, models of assimilation that stress America as a melting pot on one hand, or a salad bowl of cultural pluralism on the other, need to be modified. Jon Gjerde, studying rural Norwegians in Wisconsin, suggests understanding adaptation as a dialectic process. Adaptations were often the outcome of familiar types of behavior functioning under new conditions rather than entirely new behavioral concepts.⁵ John Bodnar furthers this point by portraying the immigrant as an intelligent individual who was able to selectively choose the most meaningful aspects of the new culture while retaining remnants of the old, creating a synthesis of the two.⁶ Peter Kivisto refers to this phenomenon as variable ethnicity in which immigrants play an important role in the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of ethnic attachments and loyalties.⁷ Werner Sollors calls it the invention of ethnicity, in which new immigrant groups constantly change and redefine themselves.⁸ Kathleen Neils Conzen and others refine this point further by arguing that ethnicity is a process of construction or invention which incorporates, adapts, and amplifies preexisting communal solidarities, cultural attributes, and historical memories. That is, it is grounded in real life context and social experience.⁹

This study focuses on how the Swedish community created new ways of ethnic interaction that synthesized their past with their present—in the process creating a middle ground that was both Swedish and American.¹⁰ It builds on the most comprehensive work about the Swedish community in Chicago, Ulf Beijbom’s 1971 study Swedes in Chicago: A Demographic and Social Study of the 1846–1880 Immigration, but offers a very different interpretive framework. Beijbom focuses on the early Swedish community, documenting the squalid conditions of the initial Swedish settlements and the subsequent development of three tightly knit enclaves. His demographic approach utilizes census material through 1880 to track Swedes in Chicago, and after that date, he predicts a linear pattern of assimilation in which suburbanization led directly to Americanization. The logical conclusion of this perspective is that the qualitative aspect of Swedish community life related directly to the tight settlement patterns of Swedes in the city and eroded after they left those enclaves. My book challenges that assumption: I argue that Swedish ethnicity remained strong in Chicago after 1880, even if it was transformed into more scattered and complex residential patterns.¹¹

My research has benefited from and overlapped with the work of other historians who deal more directly with the qualitative components of the Swedish community. In 1992 Philip J. Anderson and Dag Blanck compiled and edited Swedish-American Life in Chicago: Cultural and Urban Aspects of an Immigrant People, 1850–1930. These articles cover a range of issues contributing to community life, such as religion, socialism, trade unionism, Swedish literary and educational trends, and the role of women. The authors follow up on many of the issues raised by Beijbom and fill in the gaps in the post-1880 period.¹² Another important study is Per Nordahl’s 1994 book Weaving the Ethnic Fabric: Social Networks Among Swedish-American Radicals in Chicago 1890–1940. Nordahl focuses on the labor movement, and examines how the community that met the Swedes when they came to Chicago was characterized by competition and fragmentation.¹³ All of these historians paint a picture of an ethnic community that continued to thrive well into the twentieth century as older immigrants matured and others continued to arrive directly from Sweden, creating a complex interaction of people, ideas, and institutions in Swedish Chicago.

In challenging Beijbom’s contention that Swedish ethnic identity disappeared as settlement became more dispersed, I show that urban settings can be rich in complex communal relationships. Scholars once portrayed a strict dichotomy between rural and urban societies, the former being rich in expressions of community and the latter fostering a social order that alienates and isolates its people.¹⁴ According to this argument, relationships that occurred in a community were based on common place and common experience. By extension, immigration from rural areas in Europe to urban America was also considered, in the words of Oscar Handlin, an uprooting experience. Community expressions were lost as immigrants in America faced an alienating and uncertain future.¹⁵ This study argues against declining notions of community in the modernizing urban context of Chicago.

My interpretation builds on the work of scholars who have discounted a conceptualization of community based on rural sentimentalities, arguing that it romanticized the past and infused rural society with communal meanings that it did not in reality possess.¹⁶ Thomas Bender further points out that the theory of territorially based community is not relevant in modern society. To define community in such static and sharply demarcated terms denies the process of historical development and confuses a particular manifestation of community with its essential character. Bender suggests that after about 1870, American communities became less territorially based and relied more upon extended social networks marked by mutuality and emotional bonds.¹⁷ This was exactly the type of community Swedes in Chicago created after 1880—one based upon diverse affiliations that connected them to others with similar values and cultural understandings. And their presence in the city helped further reshape that community.

One important means of measuring and examining the creation of an immigrant community is to look at the network of Swedish voluntary associations created in Chicago between 1880 and 1920. These networks are a major emphasis of this book. Although not all Swedes in Chicago joined an ethnic organization, those who did so were people who wanted to shape their social and cultural environment; these joiners were part of a self-articulated Swedish community. According to Dag Blanck, these people made up the heart of the Swedish community. They understood that being part of the Swedish community meant more than originating from the same country, it meant actively involving themselves in institutions of their choosing.¹⁸ Raymond Breton further argues that an ethnic community should be understood as a cultural-symbolic entity, a system of ideas, images, and symbols in which individuals construct a meaningful experience within its boundaries.¹⁹ Community is, therefore, a negotiated order and Swedish organizational joiners can be viewed as community creators.

Swedish immigrants continued to create and re-create their community life in Chicago, combining their previous experiences in Sweden with their new life in an American city. This process of community renewal was not a simple one, as immigrant arrivals continued to bring new ideas and experiences with them from Sweden. In other words, not only was the Swedish community in Chicago evolving, so too was the Sweden from which the immigrants came. Swedish economic, social, religious, and cultural trends changed significantly between 1880 and 1920. Hence, as the Swedish community in Chicago grew in size, visibility, and complexity after 1880, newcomers infused it with energy and influences very different from those of earlier immigrants. Dag Blanck remarks that this Swedish American identity exhibit[s] a duality . . . that draws on cultural elements from both Sweden and the United States while at the same time maintaining a distance from both.²⁰

As Swedes in Chicago created their internally complex community, they also operated within an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse city. German and Irish settlers significantly outnumbered Swedes from the 1880s through the 1910s. By the 1920 census, the surge in immigration from Eastern Europe moved Polish and Italian settlers in Chicago numerically ahead of the Swedes. When World War One broke out and many white male workers were pulled into the war, black migration from the South grew to fill the void. As more African Americans arrived in Chicago as part of the Great Migration, racial tensions in the city exploded into open racial hostility when white workers returning from the war attempted to regain their jobs in a tightening economy.²¹ Chicago was a contested space where racial and ethnic dynamics provided the context for the formation of a Swedish American identity.

By the early twentieth century, Swedish immigrants in America identified with notions of whiteness that allowed them entry into mainstream American culture. As they forged a Swedish American identity in the evolving and expansive cityscape of Chicago, Swedes were careful to promote their proud Nordic heritage in order to distinguish themselves from groups many Americans perceived as less desirable. As David R. Roediger points out, the contested nature of whiteness was not new. He argues that in the nineteenth century, working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the white working class.²² He points out that Irish immigrants embraced notions of white supremacy as they sought to win acceptance as white among a native population that often saw them as other, mitigating the development of a wider class consciousness. Matthew Frye Jacobson further suggests that a line between who was white and who was not was contested well into the twentieth century. Native-born white Americans often saw immigrants from various parts of Europe as belonging to separate and distinct races and questioned their ability to assimilate into American social and political culture. In such a context it was crucial for a group to embrace its identity as white. As Jacobson argues, "Becoming Caucasian . . . had been crucial to the politico-cultural saga of European migration and settlement, and the process by which this came about touches the histories of every other racially coded group on the American scene."²³

The existence of nonwhite groups in America helped further define many Europeans as white by the early twentieth century, and this was certainly the case for the Swedes. As Dag Blanck points out, Swedish immigrants were well aware of these dynamics and sought to position themselves favorably in the U.S. ethno-racial hierarchy.²⁴ For example, Blanck notes that Swedes living in antebellum Texas embraced slavery. Swedish immigrants in the Midwest identified with the Republican Party in the mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Swedish settlers in Worcester, Massachusetts emphasized their Protestantism and internalized anti-Irish stereotypes. For a group of people leaving behind the rigid social structures of Sweden, it was more important than ever to assure that the Swedish working class in America would be afforded privileges of inclusion that went along with conceptions of race. By 1900, through the efforts of Swedish American leaders and reinforced by settlement patterns where they most frequently lived beside other northern European immigrant groups, Swedish immigrants had firmly established themselves as white Americans.

This book creates a link between Swedish residential patterns, their dispersal throughout the city of Chicago, and the community affiliations created by the immigrants themselves. Chapter 1 provides background on the Swedish migration to Chicago. It also charts the movement of Chicago’s Swedes away from the centralized enclaves of the pre-1880 era to a number of regions on the outskirts of the city. Chapter 2, using immigrant letters and journals, examines the immigrants’ perceptions of the transitions they experienced. Chapter 3 focuses on the Swedish churches that provided a framework for the elaboration of Swedish religious dialogue and expression in a setting very different from Sweden. As immigrants moved from Sweden to Chicago, and as they moved within Chicago, their religious affiliations provided important sources of stability in their lives even while those affiliations reflected at times divisive theological disputes. In America, however, religious nonconformity and voluntarism made the churches very different kinds of associations than they had been in Sweden.

Secular associations, particularly the large fraternal orders, provided another kind of membership and, like the churches, created webs of affiliation, primarily for Swedish men in Chicago. In doing so, they added to the organizational diversity in Swedish Chicago and reflected deep divisions between religious and secular Swedes. Chapter 4 discusses secular organizations, showing how their internal operations created mechanisms for mutual support among their members through social relationships and economic safeguards. Chapter 5 looks at the more elite organizations in the Swedish community: those that attempted to unite the various Swedish associations in Chicago in order to promote the idea that Swedes fit well within the white American mainstream, and others that tried to provide a clearinghouse for Swedish ideas and debates. The end result was a very dynamic, diverse, divided, and dispersed Swedish community, rooted solidly in the proliferating and changing neighborhoods in which the Swedish immigrants lived.

Overall, the move from Sweden to America did not result in a linear process of adaptation, nor did assimilation directly correlate with residential dispersal. Swedish immigrants held on to meaningful traditions and behaviors—as evidenced by the nature of their participation in Swedish churches and secular organizations—while taking hold of other American institutions and habits. In some respects, their behavior in Chicago was fairly typical among many white American urban dwellers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: as conditions in the inner city deteriorated and new immigrants and African Americans arrived in the city, Swedes moved to new, more isolated neighborhoods and commuted to work. In doing so, they did not sacrifice their Swedish ethnic identity. Their adaptation to life in Chicago was a synthetic development that combined the old with the new, creating a new Swedish American culture—a middle ground between their Swedish past and the American present. The immigrant generation began the process of acculturation, leaving it to their children and grandchildren to achieve complete structural assimilation.

This project has been a lengthy work in progress, and I am grateful to the many people who have assisted me over the years. Many thanks to Henry C. Binford and Josef J. Barton, who helped me develop my ideas as a graduate student at Northwestern University. Philip J. Anderson, Dag Blanck, Timothy J. Johnson, Per Nordahl, and the late Erik Lund helped me refine key aspects of my argument. My good friend and colleague Melissa Walker offered valuable feedback as my manuscript neared completion. My husband, Charles, my son, Karl, and my mother, Lorraine, gave valuable moral support. Financial assistance was provided at various stages by the Thord-Gray Memorial Fund, the American Scandinavian Foundation, the Alumnae of Northwestern University and, in the form of a sabbatical leave, Presbyterian College. More recent assistance has come from Amy Farranto and Nathan Holmes at Northern Illinois University Press, archivists Anna-Kajsa Echague and Stephen Spencer at the F. M. Johnson Archives and Special Collection at North Park University, and Joel Thoreson at the Archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Finally, this manuscript would not have reached completion without the mentorship of the late H. Arnold Barton. I am grateful for the time he took to read and reread my manuscript and to offer valuable advice for further revision and improvement. His outstanding scholarship in Swedish American history provides a foundation for all of us who work in this field and he is sorely missed.²⁵

CHAPTER 1

SWEDISH IMMIGRATION TO CHICAGO

If you come [to America], don’t travel without safe companionship.

—Hanna Carlson to her sister, Hilma, still in Sweden

The movement of Swedish people to Chicago was part of a larger pattern of migration from Scandinavia to the United States. Sweden was one of the many European regions sending its sons and daughters to North America in search of work and a more secure future. Overpopulation and the comparatively late industrialization of the Swedish economy, coupled with the attraction of an expanding American labor market, convinced 1,250,000 Swedes to leave their homeland between 1845 and 1930. The majority of these people settled in the United States, and one million never returned to Sweden. In 1910, one-fifth of all people who were born in Sweden lived in America. Only Ireland and Norway lost a higher proportion of their population in the migration to America.¹ As these Swedes transitioned to their new homes, they brought significant portions of their Swedish culture with them and forged Swedish American communities throughout the United States. From 1880 to 1920, Chicago grew to become the largest Swedish urban community in America; hence it played an important role in the larger Swedish migration.

One typical Swede who moved to Chicago was Carl Olson, whose arrival in Chicago coincided with a surge in the growth of the Swedish community in that city. Although Carl was only one single man who immigrated to America, his story represented that of many of Chicago’s Swedish immigrants. Born in 1883 in the rural parish of Regna in Östergötland, Sweden—a province southwest of Stockholm—Carl grew up in modest circumstances. He lived on a small farm named Borstorp, of which his father Per Gustaf Olsson was part owner, and where his family had lived for several generations. Borstorp was beautifully situated on a winding country road. In one direction lay the parish church, where his grandparents were buried and where his parents would also one day be laid to rest; in the other direction lay a farm named Ralstorp where Hanna Carlson lived, the woman who would follow him to America and whom he would one day marry. At age twenty, Carl moved to America to find employment. He worked in a lumberyard in Benton Harbor, Michigan and a coal mine in West Virginia, and he poured cement in St. Louis, Missouri before moving to Chicago. Carl returned to Sweden in 1906 and then permanently moved to Chicago in 1909 where, after a series of odd jobs, he became a building contractor. Hanna followed Carl to Chicago in 1910, traveling in the company of his younger brother, Eric Albin Olson, and finding employment in Chicago as a domestic servant in a wealthy American family until she and Carl were married in the city in 1918.² Settling in Chicago, Carl and Hanna took part in a vibrant ethnic community that helped ease their transition to their new home.

What compelled Carl, Hanna, and Eric—and thousands of others of their generation—to follow the lead of earlier immigrants and leave their ancestral home for an uncertain future in urban America? How could they reconcile their rural, agricultural upbringing in a beautiful region of gently rolling hills to living in a city of more than a million people who spoke a countless variety of languages and who lived in houses built on small city lots? And why would they willingly choose such an undertaking? More than any other factor, Carl Olson moved to America to pursue economic opportunities unavailable to him in Regna. He was the seventh child and the third son in his family. He held out little hope of inheriting a substantial portion of his parents’ rather meager property, since laws of inheritance in Sweden dictated that property be divided equally among all sons and daughters of a family. Furthermore, his betrothed, Hanna Carlson, lived on a larger and more prosperous farm, and by emigrating Carl believed that he had a greater chance of achieving economic success and proving himself worthy of Hanna’s hand in marriage. If he stayed in Regna, his only option would be to work as a farmhand and hope to save enough money to one day buy his own farm—a scenario as unappealing as it was unlikely.³ To an ambitious young man like Carl Olson, the move to America represented his best chance for social and economic advancement. He and hundreds of thousands of other Swedish men and women became part of a transatlantic labor market fueled by the uneven pace of industrial growth that left few opportunities for economic advancement in Sweden.

Although economic dislocations encouraged Swedes to leave, emigration was not an act of sheer desperation for most Swedish migrants. Swedes were better educated than most people in the Western world. Estimates put the basic literacy rate in 1850 at 90 percent, slightly higher than figures for the white American population, and second in Europe only to Iceland.⁴ Advances in agriculture and medicine actually contributed to the need for so many to emigrate: cultivation of the potato and development of a compulsory smallpox vaccine led to a decline in mortality rates in the early nineteenth century, and birthrates remained high throughout the period of mass emigration. Farmland