The Heart of the Heartland

There is a county west of the Missouri River in South Dakota populated by eighteen hundred souls. It is named Haakon County after King Haakon VII of Norway. Back across the river, the towns of Roslyn and Pierpont were once both 100 percent Norwegian. Multiple governors of the state were also Norwegian, and down by Sioux Falls, where the Sons of Norway host annual torsk feeds, is where Norwegian immigrant Ole Rolvaag drew inspiration to write Giants in the Earth (1927), recounting the Norwegian pioneers who braved the windswept prairie in their attempt to become American yeoman farmers.Although Rolvaag's prairie farmers are probably the best-known Norwegian immigrants, the true centers of Norwegian life in the United States are Minnesota's twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, as David Mauk expertly explains in this new volume. Mauk, a long-time professor of American studies at the University of Oslo, notes that nearly half of the population of Minneapolis in the late nineteenth century was Norwegian or Swedish (St. Paul is remembered as an Irish Catholic city, but it was still over a quarter Scandinavian during this era). Mauk rightly places great emphasis on place and context, taking note of the influence of the Mississippi River dividing the cities, its role in their economic development, and the relationship of the rural hinterlands to the growth of the cities.The Norwegians in Minneapolis did not typically arrive right off the boat from Norway, but mostly moved into the city after a tour of duty on a Midwestern farm, or perhaps a homestead along the Midwest/Plains borderlands out in the Dakotas. Between the 1830s and 1880s, 80 percent of Norwegian immigrants settled in rural areas of the Midwest stretching from northern Illinois and Iowa through to Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. With economic hard times and the scarcity of land in the home country, some Norwegians moved to coastal sea towns while many “chose instead to emigrate to the American Midwest” where there “was an enormous amount of good land with which they could pass on their traditional farm culture to future generations” (p. 26). “The emigration from Norway to the American Midwest,” Mauk explains, “primarily represented a way of preventing the next generation from falling into landlessness and the lower social status and material poverty it would bring in a rural peasant society” (p. 28). Norwegians came to dominate some rural Midwestern counties and brought with them varying regional cultures depending on where they had been living in Norway. Chain migration from particular areas of Norway to particular areas of the rural Midwest was common. Some observers thought the “docile and subservient Norwegian peasant” who emigrated to the Midwest became an “independent and self-reliant American farmer” (p. 32).The Norwegians who directly settled in the Twin Cities and those that moved there from Midwestern farms built thriving communities. Mauk describes a panoply of civic organizations and fraternal lodges and community celebrations that are markers of a high degree of social capital. The Seventeenth of May (Syttende mai), or Constitution Day, when Norwegians celebrate their independence from Sweden, was a major holiday in Minneapolis starting in the 1870s and 1880s, marking the city as the “hub or population capital of Scandinavian America” (across the river in St. Paul, where the Irish lived, the big celebration was St. Patrick's Day) (p. 131). Beyond Minneapolis, American Norwegians “claimed as their hinterland the American Northwest to the Pacific Coast,” leaving Minneapolis the “heart of the heartland” for Norwegian America (p. 142). Minnesota Historical Society Press should be applauded for giving Mauk a platform to present his extraordinary history of Norwegian America, representing decades of diligent research and data collection. Mauk's virtuoso performance represents the best the historical profession has to offer, taps into a story that is essential to Midwestern history, and reveals in intricate detail the tales of, arguably, the nation's most successful immigrant group

Archaeology · Geography · Norwegian · Political science · Sociology · Twin cities · Demography · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies