Swedish Chicago

The Shaping of an Immigrant Community, 1880–1920

Anita Olson Gustafson

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781609092467
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

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.

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 in southern and central Sweden—the regions that ranked highest in rates of emigration—was already pushed to its limit and could not accommodate the expanding population.

The exact causes of the mass migration from Sweden to the United States varied over time. Sten Carlsson divides the era into five time periods in order to explain with greater precision the origins of this population movement. His analysis reflects the sensitivity of emigration trends to variations in the labor needs of the United States. The 14,500 Swedes who left for America between 1845 and 1854 (Stage One) consisted of fairly secure artisans and farmers, as well as some religious dissenters such as the Janssonists who found their way to Bishop Hill, Illinois.⁵ These people settled in America because it offered greater economic opportunities and social and religious freedom than they experienced in Sweden. Swedish crop failures in 1867 and 1868 produced emigrants who were perhaps the most desperate of all the Swedish emigrants. From 1868 to 1873, 103,261 people emigrated from Sweden (Stage Two), and even after the period of famine subsided, the flow of traffic continued as many people left to settle with their relatives in the United States or were lured by the open farmland in the American West. From 1873 to 1878, conditions in Sweden improved and emigration figures diminished.

The largest number of Swedish immigrants arrived after 1879. Migration surged from 1879 to 1893 (Stage Three) when nearly half a million Swedes arrived in the United States, an average of over 32,500 per year. A number of economic conditions created this mass exodus. In 1879, crises in the timber and iron industries led many sawmill workers and metalworkers to emigrate. The greatest number of emigrants during the decade of the 1880s came from Sweden’s agricultural sector, which was devastated when an influx of grain from Russia and the United States caused the bottom to fall out of the Swedish grain market. These problems induced younger children from farm families, farmhands and maidservants to migrate. While the rural exodus continued in the early 1890s, emigration broadened to also include more Swedes with industrial, urban backgrounds as more people left Stockholm and industrial areas in northern Sweden.

Economic depression in the United States diminished the flow of people to America between 1893 and 1900. Then, from 1900 until the beginning of World War I (Stage Four), nearly 290,000 people left Sweden, and authorities there began to worry about the adverse effects of this population depletion upon the country’s labor supply. During this period increasing labor conflicts in Sweden led many workers to emigrate, especially those blacklisted for their labor activity. The 1920s represented the last phase of Swedish emigration to America, when over 100,000 people left (Stage Five). Depression in the United States in the 1930s effectively ended the attractions the labor market once held, and Sweden’s modernizing economy and social welfare system opened up new opportunities and security to Swedish workers, bringing the era of Swedish mass migration to a close.⁶

After 1860, migration shifted from a family movement to one dominated by unmarried individuals, due in large part to the growth of labor opportunities in urban areas. Carlsson characterizes the average Swedish emigrant during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as someone much like Carl Olson: a young, unmarried man or woman, who neither owned property nor possessed secure, permanent employment.⁷ To these people, a move across the Atlantic represented a viable option in their search for work. In many cases, family and friends who preceded them to America created networks of communication and settlement that eased their transition into living quarters and workplaces. Swedish immigrants in America also helped their family and friends migrate in a more direct way, by purchasing a prepaid ticket for them to travel from Sweden. Furthermore, a significant number of Swedes realized that their migration need not be permanent. Lars-Göran Tedebrand estimates that 18 percent of Swedes who arrived in America from 1875 to 1930 returned to their homeland.⁸ The growing ease of transatlantic travel, expanded trade between Europe and the United States, and improved communication that brought news of American events to remote Swedish villages, all served to broaden the Swedish worldview and allowed Swedes to assess employment options with a global perspective.

THE JOURNEY FROM SWEDEN

By 1880, few Swedes encountered great hardships on the journey from Sweden to America, even if the trip at times became tedious and uncomfortable. Before the mid-1860s, sailing vessels carried Swedish immigrants directly from Sweden to America, a difficult passage that lasted on average between six and eight weeks. Lars Ljungmark points out that beginning in the 1850s through the 1860s, English and American steamship lines gained control of the Atlantic overseas passenger traffic, reducing the length of the journey significantly. After the 1860s, Swedish travel patterns changed and immigrants usually traveled from Göteborg by ship over the North Sea to the English port city of Hull, by railroad from Hull to Liverpool, and then over the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York, Boston, or Quebec.⁹ Immigrants usually traveled in steerage, where they slept in rooms with a dozen or more other passengers and had no privacy. By the late 1880s steam travel had completely replaced sailing vessels, and the crossing generally took between ten and twelve days. The entire journey was longer, however, since many immigrants who took trains to Göteborg from their home villages waited there several days for a ship to sail to Hull, and again waited in Liverpool for a vessel to depart for America. Despite these delays, the entire journey was much less arduous than what faced earlier immigrants from Sweden.

Immigration from Sweden to America, as well as from other European countries, was big business by the late nineteenth century, and a number of shipping lines competed for passengers. Cunard, Inman, Allan, and Guion Lines dominated the industry and hired subagents to lure immigrants to purchase tickets on their vessels. Ljungmark notes that subagents earned commissions of $1.35 to $2.70 per emigrant and “gradually acquired the role of salesmen for the glowing opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic—land, jobs, and the American way of life.”¹⁰ Despite the activity of these agents, Ljungmark concludes that the overall trends of migration had more to do with the lure of American land and labor opportunities and the difficulty of conditions in Sweden than with the work of the subagents. By 1915, the Swedish American Line joined the competition for passengers and offered direct service from Göteborg to New York, but immigrant traffic from Sweden was soon disrupted by war, and soon thereafter by economic depression. By the 1930s, the heyday of immigrants traveling from Sweden to America was long past.

Many Swedish immigrants found ways to personalize the journey from Sweden to America. Emigrants’ families and friends often accompanied them to the nearest train station to bid farewell. Hilma Svensson, for example, listed twenty relatives and close friends who saw her off at the train station in Sweden, some of whom brought flowers and reading material for the journey.¹¹ Others may not have had such a large farewell party, but eventually they all set out on their own or with others traveling to the same destination. For Hilda Svensson (no apparent relation to Hilma noted above), after bidding farewell to her father and brother at the train station in Sävsjö, she took a train to Göteborg, where she had to wait for five days until boarding a ship headed across the North Sea to Hull, England. There she boarded another train to Liverpool where again she waited for four days until boarding her ship to cross the Atlantic, a vessel that carried 1,400 passengers to America. The voyage started smoothly, but about halfway into the trip the ship encountered a storm at sea in which water ran down the stairways and passengers were forced to stay below deck. After eleven days, however, they arrived in Boston, much to Hilda’s relief. She soon found herself on yet another train and arrived two days later in Chicago. From start to finish, her journey lasted three weeks and three days and followed a pattern of travel typical for most immigrants.¹²

Despite the rough weather, many people had pleasant memories of the transatlantic crossing. E. E. F. Frost wrote to his parents that “We got food on the boat, so much we could not eat more, and good food too. The worst part of the journey was the train, because you had to sit really cramped, and you could hardly think about sleeping.”¹³ Hilma Svensson noted in her journal that “The [ship’s] crew was so polite to us. We had good food and service the entire time, from 8 in the morning until 12 at night. . . . We slept well every night, with 16 to 20 in each cabin.”¹⁴ Pleasant traveling companions also made the journey much more enjoyable. Hilma Svensson wrote that “During the entire trip, we were four girls who kept each other company,” all coming from the Jönköping area of southern Sweden. Svensson recalled that “We cooked coffee in our coffee pot two times each day. When it was ready, we got good cakes from the bakery on the boat.¹⁵ Two of the women separated from the group in Boston to head for Brockton, Massachusetts. Svensson and another friend journeyed together as far as Chicago, where the latter continued on to Portland. While not all immigrants agreed that they liked the food served on the ships, few faced intolerable conditions typical of journeys earlier in the nineteenth century.¹⁶

Finding safe companions with whom to travel was of paramount concern to young, single immigrants, particularly women. In 1912, Hanna Carlson admonished her younger sister, Hildur, not to travel alone should she decide to come to Chicago. “I know what people say, that it is not hard to travel alone and that you can find companionship along the way. . . . But if you should come here, don’t travel without safe companionship.”¹⁷ Anders Gustafsson wrote to his brother-in-law Johannes Jansson: “I wrote earlier about your daughter—she could have had pleasant traveling companions [with whom to come to America], but it was too late to send her a ticket by the time I heard that she might want to come. If you want to send her here, she could go with Holm’s mother, or with Clas Jansson from Hagen.”¹⁸ When so many were leaving the Swedish countryside for America, it was usually not too difficult to find traveling companions for the journey. Furthermore, many poor immigrants who followed family and friends to America traveled there on prepaid tickets purchased by those same earlier immigrants they hoped to join. Not only did this make the experience more agreeable and safe to all involved, it reflected the complex webs of relationships evident among Swedish immigrants and those left behind. As Swedes settled in Chicago, it was easier for others to follow.¹⁹

CHAIN MIGRATION

The increasing ease of transatlantic travel allowed for immigrants to make rational choices to migrate that often followed preexisting patterns. Jon Gjerde documented the chain migration of a group of rural Norwegian immigrants who left the village of Balestrand, Norway and settled on farmland in the upper middle western United States.²⁰ In a similar fashion, many Swedes who moved to Chicago followed people from their village or other relatives who traveled before them. With more children surviving into adulthood in late nineteenth-century Sweden, few families could afford to care for all of their children. Often, as young people came of age, they faced the choice of working on a neighboring farm or moving to an American city. If an older sibling or neighbor had already made the trek to America, it was reassuring to those who followed. The possibility of land ownership and economic advancement in the crowded countryside of Sweden was remote, and thus the move to a city such as Chicago offered the real possibility of improvement and security.

Providing a comprehensive analysis of chain migration to Chicago such as the one conducted by Gjerde is no easy task. However, gleaning smaller snippets from church records in Chicago is possible and provides evidence of family migrations carried out over a period of years. For example, a sample of members of the Austin Covenant Church on Chicago’s West Side, traced back to their home parishes in Sweden, clearly illustrates the tradition of emigration established within many of the families who worshiped at the church.²¹ Although such an approach does not provide overarching statistics regarding how common chain migration was among all of Chicago’s Swedes, it does bring to life personal stories of immigrants who moved to the city and gives evidence of the family context in which they made their decisions. It also synthesizes records ...