The Creation of an Ethnic Identity: Being Swedish American in the Augustana Synod, 1860-1917 - Hardcover

Blanck, Dag

9780809327157: The Creation of an Ethnic Identity: Being Swedish American in the Augustana Synod, 1860-1917

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809327155 ISBN 13: 9780809327157

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

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Analyzing the development of a Swedish American identity

The Creation of an Ethnic Identity: Being Swedish American in the Augustana Synod, 1860–1917 analyzes how Swedish American identity was constructed, maintained, and changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Augustana Synod, the largest religious-based organization created by Swedish immigrants in the United States, played an important role in establishing what it meant to be Swedish American.

In this study, author Dag Blanck poses three fundamental questions: How did an ethnic identity develop in the Augustana Synod? What was that identity? Why was an ethnic identity formed? Based on primary sources formerly unknown or neglected, The Creation of an Ethnic Identity examines the Lutheran Augustana Synod, Augustana College, and the Augustana Book Concern to provide insights into how ethnic identity is constructed within a major religious body, a central educational institution, and a major publishing house.

Starting from the concept of ethnicity as something created or invented, Blanck goes on to explore how it was possible for a white European immigrant group like the Swedes to use its ethnicity as a tool of integration into American society. The nature of their ethnicity, says Blanck, was both determined by their cultural origins and also the values and nature of American society as they perceived it. Becoming Swedish American was also a way of becoming American.

The volume, which is augmented by illustrations, integrates the most critical scholarship on immigration and ethnicity over the past half century and provides a strong argument about how ethnicity is shaped over time within an immigrant group.

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About the Author:

Dag Blanck is an assistant professor at the Centre for Multiethnic Research at Uppsala University in Sweden and the director of the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.

Review:

The present book is a revised and updated version of Dag Blanck's Ph.D. dissertation, originally publishedin Sweden (1997). It addresses the question of identity formation within the Augustana Synod, the most im�portant Swedish American Lutheran body, from its founding in 1860 to American entry into World War I. Inspired by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's path-breaking collection, The Invention of Tradition (1983), and Benedict Anderson's equally important Imagined Communities (1983), Blanck sets out to inves�tigate how the leadership of Augustana actively sought to construct a specifically Swedish American identity. Furthermore, challenging the view that boundary main�tenance is more important for ethnic identity formation than the "cultural stuff" inside, Blanck analyzes what constituted this identity. Finally, Blanck grapples briefly with the question of why an ethnic leadership attempted-with considerable success-to foist its views of identity on the whole Swedish American com�munity.

In pursuing these objectives, Blanck follows three lines of investigation. First, he studies the educationalsystem at the synod's oldest and largest educational in�stitution, Augustana College, investigating both aca�demic curricular developments and various extracurric�ular activities, such as student literary societies and ethnic festivities. Blanck also analyzes the makeup of the student body, most of whose members, it turns out, remained within "the Augustana sphere" throughout their careers, many of them as ministers.

Second, Blanck examines the activities of the Au�gustana Book Concern (ABC), in his view "one of the most important building blocks in the creation of a Swedish-American identity within the Augustana Synod" (p. 159). The ABC functioned as a cultural gate�keeper, importing many works of nineteenth-century established romantic authors from Sweden but exclud�ing others, notably those of modern writers considered immoral. The ABC also published books itself-almost half of them nondenominational-again informed by the synod's "special perspective." Among these publi�cations, schoolbooks figured prominently and are es�pecially worth analyzing, since they may be expected to mirror the leadership's ethnic ambitions.

Finally, Blanck explores the establishment of a Swed�ish American historical tradition within the synod. Finding inspiration in Orm Overland's concept of "home-making myths" (Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 1870-1930 [2000]), Blanck notes how a specifically Swedish Amer�ican tradition was created out of such elements as the early Swedish presence in North America, myths of ideological gifts (claiming Swedish American contribu�tions to the American Revolution and to the concept of freedom), and the celebration of "culture heroes" such as Civil War engineer John Ericsson and Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus. The establishment of an annual "Founders Day" at Augustana and the celebration of the synod's 1910 "Golden Anniversary" helped sustain these traditions.

Blanck's main thesis is that the 1890s were pivotal for the establishment of a specifically Swedish American identity. Before that point, the Augustana Synod was dominated at both grass-roots and leadership levels by Swedish immigrants with strong local and regional Old World attachments, as well as powerful ties to nine�teenth-century Swedish low church revivalism, and only weak ideas about national identity. From the 1890s, with immigrants from an urbanizing and industrializingSweden still arriving in America but many of them now displaying only limited interest in the Swedish Amer�ican community, the synod became dominated by sec�ond-generation Swedish Americans from the tradi�tional areas of recruitment in the Midwest. Under these circumstances, the leadership set out to construct a spe�cifically Swedish American identity out of Swedish, American, and Swedish American components: "This ... actively formulated ethnicity of the second phase was thus radically different from the unreflected upon and taken-for-granted sense of Swedish identity pre�sumed during the first period of the synod's history, and we can thus say that the Augustana Synod went from being Swedish to being Swedish American" (p. 194).

In this well-conceived study, a couple of points do invite criticism. First, Blanck distinguishes between eth�nic and religious identity, seeing a separate ethnic iden�tity developing from the religious roots during the 1890s. Since the concepts of religion and ethnicity over�lap, Blanck's alternative juxtaposition of the religious element with "cultural traditions" is more precise (e.g., pp. 7, 9, 68-69, and 192). Second, Blanck all but ex�cludes the contemporary political context from his in�vestigation, even though George M. Stephenson, in his classic study The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigra�tion:A Study of Immigrant Churches (1932), emphasized the Augustana Synod's powerful Republican sympa�thies and basic conservatism. A stronger focus on the political environment would have led Blanck to con�sider Theodore Roosevelt's xenophobic "anti-hyphen�ate" campaign in his discussion of a 1916 Swedish American article titled, "Shall We Do Away With the Hyphen?" (pp. 157-158). More critically, the ethnically virulent atmosphere is ignored completely in connec�tion with Blanck's crucial analysis of a Swedish Amer�ican schoolbook published on the eve of American en�try into World War I (pp. 145-150).

These points should not detract from the fact that Blanck has written a scholarly and well-argued book. Students and scholars studying ethnic identity forma�tion, as well as people interested in Swedish American and Scandinavian American history, will read it with great benefit.

(Joan Brondal The American Historical Review 2008-09-23)

Recently in the pages of this journal, Matthew Jacobson made a compelling plea for a greater sensitivity toward the transnational character of the field of immigra�tion and ethnoracial history. Citing Oscar Handlin and John F. Kennedy, among others, he stressed the ways in which the field is inherently transnational, yet how the national has often intruded on our scholarship. As persuasive as Jacobson's point is regarding the field, his essay revealed an incomplete appreciation of its historiography. The work of W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, Dorothy SwaineThomas, Frank Thistlethwaite, and Marcus Lee Hansen, to cite only a few examplesfrom which Handlin and Kennedy might have profited, had explicitly transnational elements. Each in his or her own way attempted to view emigration and immigra�tion as an integrated process that wed world capitalist development and the turn to modernity into a comprehensive whole. As scholars have recently rediscovered the transnational wheel, their understanding of those who preceded them is often lacking.

I write this in the context of this review because scholars who have focused on the Scandinavian migration - including Hansen and Thomas, but also Theodore C. Blegen, Ingrid Semmingsen, Kristian Hvidt, and Harald Runblom - have been remarkably transnational in their conceptualization of it. The books considered inthis review, particularly those by Dag Blanck and H. Arnold Barton, illustrate that this understanding endures. Both in their own way, Blanck and Barton exhibit an understanding of the developments in the United States and the Swedish homeland.Odd Lovoll's orientation, in contrast, because his unit of analysis is the small town, is neither national nor transnational, but rather localist.

Lovoll has long been fascinated by the small town in the Norwegian American past, and his study of Benson, Minnesota, addresses this interest. Whereas Nor�wegian immigrants were among the most rural of any ethnic group in the United States, they were instrumental in the growth of midwestern small towns as well. And whereas scholars have focused their attention on the Norwegian farmer and big-city dweller, they have, Lovoll argues, given short shrift to the small town story. Lovoll's richly illustrated narrative thus fills a void, and he provides us with a lively description of Benson over a century and one-half. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I reviewed Lovoll's book for publication.)

Benson, located in Swift County in western Minnesota, had Norwegian Ameri�can residents from its inception and continued to be associated with Norwegian America as a result. To be sure, the town contained those from a variety of back�grounds, including Yankee elements that dominated the financial institutions and the professions. Despite this heterogeneity, much of the business of the town was conducted in the Norwegian language. Even non-Norwegian businesses made ef�forts to attract Norwegian American customers, and their proprietors attempted to learn Norwegian.

Perhaps the most interesting element, which foreshadows the discussion of Blanck and Barton to come, is the flowering of ethnicity in the twentieth century. Lovoll notes that a matrix of Norwegian institutions grew in the early decades of the century. Even more interesting is his discussion of what he calls the persis�tence of ethnicity later in the century, when leaders discovered that they could market ethnicity. Small towns vied for the honor of being the "Lutefisk Capital" of the nation; they competed to see which burg could roll the largest piece oflefse, flatbread made from potatoes; and Benson claimed what might be considered the dubious distinction of being the "klubb capital of Minnesota," the state's hub for the production of heavy potato dumplings.

Lovoll's is a valuable study, but it is unclear to me whether its subject is Norwe�gian America or the peculiarities of immigrant ethnicity in a small town. On the onehand, the story of Benson is set in the Norwegian American past with discursionsinto such topics as the larger patterns of Norwegian migration. On the other, Lovollgrapples to some degree with the variety of ethnic groups in this small town, a topic dealt with in the past by figures as diverse as Sinclair Lewis and Merle Curti.

Whereas Lovoll's study is a focused case study of one small town, Dag Blanck'sstudy is a careful analysis of the Augustana Synod and its role in shaping a Swedish American identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Swed�ish presence in the United States in this era was substantial. Some 1.3 million Swedes moved there during the century of migration ending in 1924. As a literate population, their output of print media was even more remarkable. The Swedish American press was the second largest foreign-language press in the United States(after German language imprints) in 1910. Blanck demonstrates that the AugustanaSynod, the largest religious organization among Swedish Americans, was the most significant Swedish American institution. By the 1920s, Blanck clearly shows, at least one-quarter of Swedish Americans were affiliated with the Synod (p. 33).

Blanck's argument has two interconnected components. First, the content of ethnic expression was transformed in the half century after 1860, and, second, the shifting patterns of identity among those who identified as Swedish American werepivotal in this transformation. In the three decades after 1860, Swedish Americansattached relatively little significance to a Swedish American ethnicity. Rather, they relied on an extant Swedish literature and simultaneously placed less emphasis on the preservation of Swedish language in the United States. Blanck argues that this approach resulted from two facts: the relatively weak Swedish American institu�tional structure between 1860 and 1890, and Swedish Americans' less-than-secure class position in the United States.

Around 1890, an identity shift began to occur. No longer as interested in the English language and assimilation, Swedes in the Augustana Synod began to empha�size the importance of the Swedish language and the creation of a unique Swedish American culture. In this second phase, then, Swedish ethnicity emphasized, and began to coexist with, a Lutheran identity. Ironically, Swedish Americans, many of whom were not born in Sweden, sought to create an ethnic identity with little familiarity of the Sweden that their parents forsook. Whereas Swedish Americansin the first phase simply relied on Swedish classics, those in the second period had to construct their Swedish American identity.

This transition is related to Blanck's second point: the transition of Swedish America to one increasingly of American origin. After painstakingly researching the backgrounds of the students of Augustana College, Blanck shows that American�-born Swedish began to dominate the student body after 1890. Moreover, children with white-collar backgrounds, rather than the sons and daughters of farmers and laborers, also came to predominate. Blanck, ever alert to changes taking place in Sweden, notes that these students developed an idealized view of Sweden, charac�terized by romanticism, patriotism, and idealism, just like their counterparts across the Atlantic.

Blanck explores the content of this Swedish American identity and notes the ways in which it conforms to the "homemaking myths" outlined by Orm Overland in his 2000 study. The myths stressed the role that Sweden played in the foundation of America, stemming from both the Viking discoveries and the early colonial settlements in Delaware. Swedish Americans outlined as well the ideological gifts, most notably in the form of political freedom that they argued typified the early Scandinavian government. Finally, the homemaking myths underscored Swedish America's blood sacrifice in war, most notably in the American Revolution and the Civil War. With cultural heroes such as Gustavus Adolphus and John Ericcson, who invented the Union's first ironclad ship, Swedish Americans could tell a storyof their role in the American pageant. Swedish Americans were at the forefront of promoting core values in the American myth: the creation of a republic that prom�ised liberty and a nation that later destroyed the menace of slavery. Blanck thus underscores the ways in which the second generation's identity creation was part of its strategy to interact with American society. As Russell Kazal has noted with regarded to "old-stock" Germans, Swedish American mythmaking was cognizantof the larger American myth. It enabled Swedish Americans to place themselves in the racial and ethnic hierarchies of the time. Thereby, Blanck concludes, "Swed�ish immigrants and their children living in turn of the century America were, by becoming Swedish American, also becoming American" (p. 201).

H. Arnold Barton has provided us with a collection of essays of previously published pieces, most of which appeared in the Swedish-American Historical Quarterly. The essays are arrayed chr...

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