In 1850 there were only eighteen thousand Scandinavians in the United
States. The tide rose rapidly in the sixties and reached its height in
the eighties, until over two million Scandinavian immigrants have made
America their home. They and their descendants form a very substantial
part of the rural population. There are nearly half as many Norwegians
in America as in Norway, which has emptied a larger proportion of its
population into the American lap than any other country save Ireland.
About one-fourth of the world's Swedes and over one-tenth of the
world's Danes dwell in America.
The term Scandinavian is here used in the loose sense to embrace the
peoples of the two peninsulas where dwell the Danes, the Norwegians,
and the Swedes. These three branches of the same family have much in
common, though for many years they objected to being thus rudely
shaken together into one ethnic measure. The Swede is the aristocrat,
the Norwegian the democrat, the Dane the conservative. The Swede,
polite, vivacious, fond of music and literature, is "the Frenchman of
the North," the Norwegian is a serious viking in modern dress: the
Dane remains a landsman, devoted to his fields, and he is more
amenable than his northern kinsmen to the cultural influence of the
South.
The Norwegian, true to viking traditions, led the modern exodus.
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