Swedish emigration to the United States

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Swedish emigrants board a ship in Gothenburg in 1905

The emigration from Sweden to the United States and earlier in the colonies of North America began in 1638, had its greatest extent in the 19th and early 20th century and ended after the First World War largely. Between 1840 and 1930, over 1.2 million Swedes immigrated to the United States .

history

In 1638, 18 years after the Mayflower landed , the Kingdom of Sweden, as a major European power at the time , sent settlers to the Atlantic coast of North America who were supposed to establish a trading colony. This foundation, known as New Swedes and comprising about 500 settlers on the lower reaches of the Delaware River, was lost by the Swedes in 1655 to the Republic of the United Netherlands , and in 1681 the area was integrated into the Thirteen Colonies . Some Swedish settlers stayed there, so that a Swedish language island existed until the 19th century . In the further 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, the immigration movement dried up, as conditions in the country, which had withdrawn as a great power , were largely stable. Only a few Swedes emigrated for trade or adventure reasons. In the American War of Independence , thousands of Swedes served on the side of the United States; Hans Axel von Fersen in particular distinguished himself in the battle of Yorktown .

The changing strength of the migration waves in the 19th and 20th centuries reflects the respective conditions in both countries. From 1820 there was a sharp increase in the population and rural exodus in Sweden , particularly from Värmland and Småland , due to a lower mortality rate and advances in medicine ; Sweden's population doubled between 1750 and 1850. In addition, the country was heavily dependent on its agriculture and hardly industrialized; because of the prevailing real division , many families had no livelihood. Therefore, after 1840, mass emigration began, which increased particularly strongly in the 1860s. In 1841 Gustaf Unonius founded the first Swedish settlement Nya Uppsala (New Uppsala ) in Wisconsin in Waukesha County . In 1845 a group of Swedish farmers settled in Iowa and named their Jefferson County settlement New Sweden. In the mid-1840s, groups began organizing migration. 1500 religious nonconformists from central Sweden settled in the Bishop Hill Colony in Henry County, Illinois between 1846 and 1850 . This first wave of immigration with around 20,000 people was stopped by the Civil War .

The Homestead Act , which came into effect in the United States in 1862, also facilitated immigration from the Old World , which grew stronger again after the end of the Civil War in 1865. Most of the people who left Sweden between 1868 and 1914 went to the United States. Between 1868 and 1873, about 100,000 people, mostly farmers , emigrated to the United States due to a famine in northern Sweden and Finland . Due to the founder crash and the subsequent Great Depression in the United States from 1873, emigration slowed down again. The largest wave of migration was the one between 1880 and 1893, when around 475,000 people moved, in addition to agricultural workers, wood, mine and factory workers from the cities, as industrialization and urbanization had started in Sweden . The economic depression in the USA in 1893 and the comparatively good situation in Sweden slowed down immigration, which, however, picked up again in the 1900s with 35,000 immigrants from Sweden in 1903 alone.

In 1908 a report was published on behalf of the Swedish Reichstag , which named the causes of emigration ( poverty , dissatisfaction ). This was followed by social reforms in Sweden, for example universal male suffrage was introduced, the quality of housing and popular education improved. After the First World War , which stopped migration, Swedish emigration continued but gradually came to a standstill, particularly due to the Great Depression in the late 1920s.

About 20 percent of the exiles returned at the beginning of the 20th century, especially after the Great Depression; many could invest substantial sums of money earned in the United States. The majority stayed there as Swedish Americans. Since then, Swedes have immigrated to the United States mainly for reasons of family reunification .

Settlement priorities and influences

Distribution of Americans with Swedish ancestry in 2000

From the 17th century onwards, the Swedish settlers brought the construction of their wooden huts to the east coast of North America, which were widely used there as log cabins . Immigrants since the 1840s, especially under the Homestead Act 1862, settled mainly in the Midwest , where land was cheap to buy ( Minnesota , Kansas , Illinois ). Minnesota became the "Swedish state" of the USA. Around Chicago at times almost all landowners were of Swedish origin, and Milwaukee had a particularly high proportion of the population next to the city of Chicago . Well-known Swedish Americans are the engineer John Ericsson and the aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh . At the turn of the 20th century, more and more Swedish immigrants settled in the cities of the west and east coasts, so that by 1900 sixty percent of Swedish Americans lived in cities. Chicago was temporarily the city with the world's second most Swedes (after Stockholm ). By 1930 the number of first and second generation Swedish Americans reached about 1.5 million people. The 1990 census showed that 4.7 million people were of Swedish origin, which means 13th place among the ethnic groups in the United States, of which almost 40 percent were in the Midwest, 30 in the West and 15 percent each in the South and Northeast. Acculturation proceeded without major problems, particularly in the northern states of the Midwest, where a Protestant, northern European culture prevailed and many Swedes moved in the vicinity of German and Scandinavian immigrants. As the first Swedish American, John Lind was elected to the United States Congress in 1886 ; like most of them, he was a member of the Republican Party , while some labor movement supporters such as Joe Hill joined them in later waves of immigration . Many of the Swedish American politicians were shaped by progressive ideals and “Midwestern Populism”.

Culture of remembrance

In the House of Emigrants (Utvandrarnas hus) in Växjö (Småland), there is a documentation center since 1968th The tourist route Utvandrarnas väg recalls the time of emigration. Even Vilhelm Moberg vierbändiger novel The Emigrants (2002) deals with this issue.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ New Sweden Iowa. In: DalaKarl.com (English).
  2. ^ Swedish Immigration to America. In: Emmigration.info (English).
  3. ↑ Sweden: Where did they go? In: European-Emigration.com.
  4. ↑ Sweden: Famous Emigrants. In: European-Emigration.com.
  5. ↑ Mark A. Granquist: Swedish americans. In: EveryCulture.com (English).
  6. ^ Vilhelm Moberg: The emigrants. Novel in four volumes. Claassen, Hildesheim 2002, ISBN 3-546-00032-3 (= The Novel of Emigrants Volume 1).