Illinois Issues Summer Book Section                     

Philip J. Anderson and Dag Blanck (eds.). Swedish-American Life in Chicago: Cultural and Urban Aspects of an Immigrant People, 1850-1930. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. 394 with illustrations, notes and index. $42.50 (cloth).

Chicago holds a unique place in the history of Swedish immigration to America. In 1890 Swedes comprised the third largest immigrant group, after the Germans and Irish, in a city one-third of whose inhabitants were foreign-born. In 1900 Chicago was — after Stockholm — the world's largest "Swedish" city. Hence a broad study of Chicago's Swedish element is an invaluable addition to the University of Illinois Press's new "Ethnic History of Chicago" series.

From a Swedish-American viewpoint, this book is of particular significance. By 1910, close to 10 percent of America's Swedish population lived in Chicago, not counting its independent suburbs. A large proportion of the Swedish immigrants to America passed through the city or at one time resided there. Familiarity with Chicago was thus a common denominator of the Swedish-American experience. Moreover, Chicago was, almost from the beginning of the great Swedish migration in the 1840s, the undisputed "capital" of Swedish America, the nerve center of an entire ethnic culture.

This latter aspect makes Swedish Chicago particularly relevant to the present state of Swedish-American studies. Following pioneering work on the subject by Swedish-American historians — much of it pursued by avocation only — scholars in Sweden became seriously interested in the Swedish-American experience by the 1960s, concentrating at first on statistical analysis of the emigration. Over the last decade, however, interest both in Sweden and America has turned increasingly not only to the immigrants' cultural life but to the very creation of their ethnic identity. The present volume provides a guide to and a sampling of these new directions, which are summarized by the editors in their fine integrating introduction.

Over the last decade, however, interest both in Sweden and America has turned increasingly not only to the immigrants' cultural life but to the very creation of their ethnic identity

The book consists of 24 contributions by American and Swedish scholars to a conference sponsored by the Swedish-American Historical Society at Chicago's North Park College in 1988. A wide variety of topics are covered, including the socioeconomic structure of Chicago's Swedish ethnic community, its religious life, secular societies, literary activity, theater, educational institutions, labor organizations, leading personalities, and relations with other ethnic groups, as well as the image of Chicago in Sweden created by travel accounts and by both Swedish and American fiction. Still, as the editors admit, significant topics await further exploration. Fore-

July 1993/Illinois Issues/31

most among these, in my view, would be the Swedish-American newspapers, comprising the second largest ethnic press in America, after the German, according to a recent study, and strongly centered in Chicago; Swedish-American musical life, especially the flourishing choral societies; and Swedish-American business enterprises and their role in promoting ethnic life. The present volume is no less welcome for revealing such uncharted vistas.

Courtesy of the Nordiska Museets Arkiv/Nordic Museum Archives, Stockholm, Sweden Swedes worked many trades in Chicago. This photograph from the end of the 19th century shows representatives from four different skilled professions. Pictured on the far left is August Palm, the leader of the labor movement in Sweden, who visited Chicago in 1900.

While recognizing the high overall quality of the contributions, I find some of the essays especially suggestive. Beginning in 1880, where Ulf Beijbom's groundbreaking 1971 study Swedes in Chicago left off, Anita R. Olson traces the progressive suburbanization of Chicago's Swedish population to 1920, showing how geographic dispersal was counterbalanced by the creation of a citywide, institutional ethnic community. In a broad-ranging survey, Harald Runblom compares the situation of Swedes in Chicago with that of other ethnic groups in the city, as well as of Swedes in smaller, more ethnically concentrated North American cities. Per Nordahl makes a strong case for the characteristically Swedish style of labor organization and the idealism of Swedish-dominated locals in the Chicago building trades. In addition, Eric Johannesson and Dag Blanck provide a fascinating analysis of the ethnic symbolism and rhetoric surrounding, respectively, erection of the statue of Carl Linnaeus (the great 18th-century Swedish botanist) in Lincoln Park in 1891 and Swedish participation in the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Eric R. Lund challenges the stereotype of Swedish-American political naivete and apathy in his treatment of the Swedish-born Fred Lundin, the kingmaker behind Mayor W.H. ("Big Bill") Thompson's elections in 1915 and 1919. Timothy J. Johnson and Byron J. Nordstrom point up the differences between the broad-based, fraternal Svithiod Order and the elite, cosmopolitan Swedish Engineers' Society of Chicago. The Swedes in America have traditionally been viewed — and have viewed themselves — as rural pioneers on the Midwestern frontier. Still, by 1910, some 60 per cent of them had already become urban dwellers. Anderson and Blanck's welcome and valuable collection redresses the balance, not only in its specific focus upon Chicago, but by illuminating, in absorbing detail, the entire urban dimension of the Swedish-American experience and its central significance for the cultural life of the ethnic group as a whole. �

H. Arnold Barton is professor of history at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He served as editor of the Swedish-American Historical Quarterly from 1974 to 1990.

32/July 1993/Illinois Issues