Reading the Past

Abstract

O laf Martin Oleson (subject of the previous profile in this issue) immigrated to Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1870 from Norway and quickly established himself as a successful business leader in the community. At the same time, he worked tirelessly to promote a native-language singing group in his community and similar groups across the country. Such stories are the stuff of history. Because all lowans have immigrated to this state from other places—yes, even the Meskwakis of Tama County— immigration has long been a popular topic for historians of all types, as well as for readers of history. How did immigrants adapt to their new surroundings? What traditions did they bring with them from their points of emigration, how long did those traditions survive, and how did they change? For a long time, historians focused on the process of assimila­ tion—the integration of immi­ grants into the dominant, prevail­ ing culture of their new home. The "melting pot" metaphor for assimilation has persisted in the popular imagination long after professional historians proposed other more apt metaphors, such as the patchwork quilt or mosaic, which emphasize the piecing together of separate, distinctive elements into a pluralistic whole rather than a "melting down" of those elements into a homo­ genous, undistinguished mass. Historians now repeatedly call attention to the remarkable persis­ tence of Old World traditions and to the ways the host culture adapted to immigrants as well as the ways immigrants adapted to it. Although many of those recent studies focus on immigrants to the nation's urban centers, one of the best studies focuses on the rural Midwest and draws much of its evidence from Iowa's German and Scandinavian immigrant commu­ nities: Jon Gjerde's The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Gjerde's themes are timely ones at a time when Iowa politi­ cians worry about new immigrants who seem slow to adopt their host culture's language and values. The Minds of the West opens by noting that in the mid-19th centurv some native-born Americans in the East worried that "foreign minds" with little or no appreciation for Ameri­ can traditions, institutions, and religious and political values would come to dominate in the Middle West, threatening the future of the United States if they were not quickly amalgamated. Who were these dangerous foreigners? They were immigrants from northern Europe, including, among others, the Norwegian immigrants who settled around Decorah and across Iowa's north­ ern counties, the Swedish immi­ grants in Page, Montgomery, and Webster Counties, the Danish immigrants in Audubon County, and the more numerous German immigrants scattered across the state and the region. In these relatively isolated, culturally de­ fined enclaves, Old World values shaped institutions—family, church, and community—and relationships within them. Espe­ cially in these communities, but even when they settled in more mixed communities, immigrants persisted in using their native languages and celebrating native traditions for decades—in some places even for generations. They founded native-language news­ papers and musical groups and established separate schools and churches where they taught their children and worshiped in their native language until—in a part of Iowa history that few would point to with pride—harassment and public pressure (official and unofficial) forced them to give up such practices during World War I. The immigrants' loyalty to their adopted nation was built largely on the freedom it offered them to retain the values they brought with them to their new home. "Indeed," Gjerde argues in The Minds of the West, "a political environment that permitted immigrants to maintain their religious beliefs and converse in their home language worked to augment loyalties to the nation." At the same time, allegiance to the nation that offered the freedom to recreate religious and cultural traditions often came into conflict with the hierarchical and authori­ tarian religious and family struc­ tures that those ethnic communi­ ties recreated. It is the resulting "interactions, tensions, and conflicts" that are the main focus of The Minds of the West, as Gjerde traces them in the context of churches, families, and political participation.