Akenson argues that hard times in Sweden before 1867 produced a strong push effect, but that for cultural reasons most Swedes refused to emigrate and clung on at home. Akenson says the state wanted to keep its population high and: :The upper classes' need for a cheap and plentiful labor force, the instinctive willingness of the clergy of the state church to discourage emigration on both moral and social grounds, and the deference of the lower orders to the arcade of powers that hovered above them—all these things formed an architecture of cultural hesitancy concerning emigration. A few "countercultural" deviants from the mainstream did leave and showed the way. The severe economic hardship of the "
Great Deprivation" of 1867 to 1869, finally overcame the reluctance and the floodgates opened to produce an "emigration culture".
European mass emigration: push and pull Large-scale European emigration to the United States started in the 1840s in Britain, Ireland and Germany. That was followed by a rising wave after 1850 from most
Northern European countries, and in turn by
Central and
Southern Europe. Research into the forces behind this European mass emigration has relied on sophisticated statistical methods. One theory which has gained wide acceptance is Jerome's analysis in 1926 of the "push and pull" factors—the impulses to emigration generated by conditions in Europe and the U.S. respectively. Jerome found that fluctuations in emigration co-varied more with economic developments in the U.S. than in Europe, and deduced that the pull was stronger than the push. Jerome's conclusions have been challenged, but still form the basis of much work on the subject. Emigration patterns in the
Nordic countries—Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland—show striking variation. Nordic mass emigration started in Norway, which also retained the highest rate throughout the century. Swedish emigration got underway in the early 1840s, and had the third-highest rate in all of Europe, after Ireland and Norway. Denmark had a consistently low rate of emigration, while Iceland had a late start but soon reached levels comparable to Norway. Finland, whose mass emigration did not start until the late 1880s, and at the time part of the
Russian Empire, is usually classified as part of the Eastern European wave. During the later 19th century, the major shipping lines financed Swedish emigrant agents and paid for the production of large quantities of emigration
propaganda. Much of this promotional material, such as leaflets, was produced by immigration promoters in the U.S. Propaganda and advertising by shipping line agents was often blamed for emigration by the conservative Swedish
ruling class, which grew increasingly alarmed at seeing the agricultural labor force leave the country. It was a Swedish 19th-century cliché to blame the falling ticket prices and the pro-emigration propaganda of the transport system for the
craze of emigration, but modern historians have varying views about the real importance of such factors. Brattne and Åkerman have examined the advertising campaigns and the ticket prices as a possible third force between
push and
pull. They conclude that neither advertisements nor pricing had any decisive influence on Swedish emigration. While the companies remain unwilling, , to open their archives to researchers, the limited sources available suggest that ticket prices did drop in the 1880s, but remained on average artificially high because of
cartels and
price-fixing. On the other hand, H. A. Barton states that the cost of crossing the Atlantic dropped drastically between 1865 and 1890, encouraging poorer Swedes to emigrate. The research of Brattne and Åkerman has shown that the leaflets sent out by the shipping line agents to prospective emigrants would not so much celebrate conditions in the New World, as simply emphasize the comforts and advantages of the particular company. Descriptions of life in America were unvarnished, and the general advice to emigrants brief and factual. Newspaper advertising, while very common, tended to be repetitive and stereotyped in content.
Mid-19th century Swedish mass migration took off in the spring of 1841 with the departure of
Uppsala University graduate
Gustaf Unonius (1810–1902) together with his wife, a maid, and two students. This small group founded a settlement they named
New Upsala in
Waukesha County, Wisconsin, and began to clear the wilderness, full of enthusiasm for frontier life in "one of the most beautiful valleys the world can offer". Though he would eventually become disillusioned with life in the U.S. and return to Sweden, his reports in praise of the simple and virtuous pioneer life, published in the liberal newspaper
Aftonbladet, had already begun to draw Swedes westward. The rising Swedish exodus was caused by economic, political, and religious conditions affecting particularly the rural population. Europe was in the grip of an
economic depression. In Sweden, population growth and repeated crop failures were making it increasingly difficult to make a living from the tiny land plots on which at least three quarters of the inhabitants depended. Rural conditions were especially bleak in the stony and unforgiving
Småland province, which became the heartland of emigration. The American Midwest was an agricultural antipode to Småland, for it, Unonius reported in 1842, "more closely than any other country in the world approaches the ideal which nature seems to have intended for the happiness and comfort of humanity." Prairie land in the Midwest was ample,
loamy, and government-owned. From 1841 it was sold to
squatters for $1.25 per acre, ( as of ), following the
Preemption Act of 1841 (later replaced by the
Homestead Act). The inexpensive and fertile land of
Illinois,
Iowa,
Minnesota and
Wisconsin was irresistible to landless and impoverished European peasants. It also attracted more well-established farmers. The political freedom of the American republic exerted a similar pull. Swedish peasants were some of the most literate in Europe, and consequently had access to the European egalitarian and radical ideas that culminated in the
Revolutions of 1848. The clash between Swedish
liberalism and a repressive
monarchist regime raised political awareness among the disadvantaged, many of whom looked to the U.S. to realize their republican ideals. Dissenting religious practitioners also widely resented the treatment they received from the
Lutheran State Church through the
Conventicle Act. Conflicts between local worshipers and the new churches were most explosive in the countryside, where dissenting
Pietist groups were more active, and were more directly under the eye of local law enforcement and the
parish priest. Before non-Lutheran churches were granted toleration in 1809, clampdowns on illegal forms of worship and teaching often provoked whole groups of Pietists and
Radical Pietists to leave together, intent on forming their own spiritual communities in the new land. The largest contingent of such dissenters, 1,500 followers of
Eric Jansson, left in the late 1840s and founded a community in
Bishop Hill, Illinois. Baptists, including the exiled
F. O. Nilsson and fellow preachers
Gustaf Palmquist and
Anders Wiberg, started Baptist churches in the Midwest. The
Mission Friends, who emigrated in the 1860s, would later found the
Evangelical Free Church and
Evangelical Covenant Church denominations. Lutherans such as
Lars Paul Esbjörn – influenced by Pietism and Methodism and felt he was denied advancement in the church because of it – also found new opportunities in the United States. There he became one of the founders of the
Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Church. Swedish Methodist pioneers like began to emigrate in the 1840s. Mormon converts found religious freedom in the United States as well. The first Swedish emigrant guidebook was published as early as 1841, the year Unonius left, and nine handbooks were published between 1849 and 1855. Substantial groups of
lumberjacks and iron miners were recruited directly by company agents in Sweden. Agents recruiting construction builders for American railroads also appeared, the first in 1854, scouting for the
Illinois Central Railroad. The Swedish establishment disapproved intensely of emigration. Seen as depleting the labor force and as a defiant act among the lower orders, emigration alarmed both the spiritual and the secular authorities. Many emigrant diaries and memoirs feature an emblematic early scene in which the local clergy warns travellers against risking their souls among foreign
heretics. The conservative press described emigrants as lacking in
patriotism and moral fibre: "No workers are more lazy, immoral and indifferent than those who immigrate to other places." Emigration was denounced as an unreasoning "mania" or "craze", implanted in an ignorant populace by "outside agents". The liberal press retorted that the "lackeys of monarchism" failed to take into account the miserable conditions in the Swedish countryside and the backwardness of Swedish economic and political institutions. "Yes, emigration is indeed a 'mania'", wrote the liberal
Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning sarcastically, "The mania of wanting to eat one's fill after one has worked oneself hungry! The craze of wanting to support oneself and one's family in an honest manner!" The great
Swedish famine of 1867–1869, caused by consecutive wet and dry years, followed by a year of mass epidemics, led to the migration to the US of 60,000 Swedes during that period--the start of the mass migration. Another contributing factor was the poverty of 19th-century Sweden, made worse by the abusive solutions practiced to complement the strict
Poor Care Regulation of 1871, such as the
rotegång, the
pauper auction and
child auctions.
Late 19th century plantation. Sugar production remained non-mechanized and labor-intensive with low wages throughout the 19th century, fuelling the workers' dream of American opportunity and modern agricultural machinery. near Hallock, Minnesota, 1882 , in 1887. Olof Olsson emigrated from Nerikes kil in 1880. Swedish emigration to the United States reached its height in the 1870–1900 era. The size of the Swedish-American community in 1865 is estimated at 25,000 people, a figure soon to be surpassed by the
yearly Swedish immigration. By 1890, the
U.S. census reported a Swedish-American population of nearly 800,000, with immigration peaking in 1869 and again in 1887. Most of this influx settled in the
North. The great majority of them had been peasants in the old country, pushed away from Sweden by disastrous crop failures and pulled towards the United States by the cheap land resulting from the 1862
Homestead Act. Most immigrants became pioneers, clearing and cultivating the virgin land of the Midwest and extending the pre-Civil War settlements further west, into
Kansas and
Nebraska. Once sizable Swedish farming communities had formed on the prairie, the greatest impetus for further peasant migration came through personal contacts. The iconic "America-letter" to relatives and friends at home spoke directly from a position of trust and shared background, carrying immediate conviction. At the height of migration, familial America-letters could lead to chain reactions which would all but depopulate some Swedish parishes, dissolving tightly knit communities which then re-assembled in the Midwest. A growing proportion stayed in urban centers, combining emigration with the flight from the countryside which was happening in the homeland and all across Europe. Single young women, most commonly moved straight from field work in rural Sweden to jobs as live-in
housemaids in the urban United States. "Literature and tradition have preserved the often tragic image of the pioneer immigrant wife and mother", writes Barton, "bearing her burden of hardship, deprivation and longing on the untamed frontier ... More characteristic among the newer arrivals, however, was the young, unmarried woman ... As domestic servants in America, they ... were treated as members of the families they worked for and like 'ladies' by American men, who showed them a courtesy and consideration to which they were quite unaccustomed at home." They found employment easily, as Scandinavian maids were in high demand, and learned the language and customs quickly. Working conditions were far better than in Sweden, in terms of wages, hours of work, benefits, and ability to change positions. In contrast, newly arrived Swedish men were often employed in all-Swedish work gangs. The young women usually married Swedish men and brought with them in marriage an enthusiasm for ladylike, American manners and middle-class refinements. Many admiring remarks are recorded from the late 19th century about the sophistication and elegance that simple Swedish farm girls would gain in a few years, and about their unmistakably American demeanor. A number of well-established and longtime Swedish Americans visited Sweden in the 1870s, making comments that give historians a window on the cultural contrasts involved. A group from Chicago made the journey in an effort to
remigrate and spend their later years in the country of their birth, but changed their minds when faced with the realities of 19th-century Swedish society. Uncomfortable with what they described as the social snobbery, pervasive drunkenness, and superficial religious life of the old country, they returned promptly to the United States. The most notable visitor was
Hans Mattson (1832–1893), an early Minnesota settler who had served as a colonel in the
Union Army and had been Minnesota's
secretary of state. He visited Sweden in 1868–69 to recruit settlers on behalf of the
Minnesota Immigration Board, and again in the 1870s to recruit for the
Northern Pacific Railroad. Viewing Swedish class snobbery with indignation, Mattson wrote in his
Reminiscences that this contrast was the key to the greatness of the United States, where "labor is respected, while in most other countries it is looked down upon with slight". He was sardonically amused by the ancient pageantry of monarchy at the ceremonial opening of the
Riksdag: "With all respects for old Swedish customs and manners, I cannot but compare this pageant to a great American circus—minus the menagerie, of course." Mattson's first recruiting visit came immediately after consecutive seasons of
crop failure in 1867 and 1868, and he found himself "besieged by people who wished to accompany me back to America." He noted that: A more recent American immigrant,
Ernst Skarstedt, who visited Sweden in 1885, received the same galling impression of upper-class arrogance and
anti-Americanism. The laboring classes, in their turn, appeared to him coarse and degraded, drinking heavily in public, speaking in a stream of curses, making obscene jokes in front of women and children. Skarstedt felt surrounded by "arrogance on one side and obsequiousness on the other, a manifest scorn for menial labor, a desire to appear to be more than one was". This traveller too was incessantly hearing American civilization and culture denigrated from the depths of upper-class Swedish prejudice: "If I, in all modesty, told something about America, it could happen that in reply I was informed that this could not possibly be so or that the matter was better understood in Sweden." Swedish emigration dropped dramatically after 1890; return migration rose as conditions in Sweden improved. Sweden underwent a rapid industrialization within a few years in the 1890s, and wages rose, principally in the fields of mining, forestry, and agriculture. The pull from the U.S. declined even more sharply than the Swedish "push", as the best farmland was taken. No longer growing but instead settling and consolidating, the Swedish-American community seemed set to become ever more American and less Swedish. The new century, however, saw a new influx.
Religious confusion In the 1800s–1900s, the Lutheran State Church supported the Swedish government by opposing both emigration and the clergy's efforts recommending sobriety. This escalated to a point where its priests even were persecuted by the church for preaching sobriety, and the reactions of many congregation members to that contributed to an inspiration to leave the country (which however was against the law until 1840). == 20th century ==