Summer 2002
Volume 28, Number 4

Discovering Viking America
by J. M. Mancini

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In 1874, Professor Rasmus Bjørn Anderson of the University of Wisconsin offered the following unapologetic assessment of his ancestors, the Norwegians. "Yes," he wrote, "the Norsemen were truly a great people! Their spirit found its way into the Magna Charta of England and into the Declaration of In[d]ependence in America. The spirit of the Vikings still survives in the bosoms of Englishmen, Americans and Norsemen, extending their commerce, taking bold positions against tyranny, and producing wonderful internal improvements in these countries."1 Anderson's statement provides the template for an immigrant historical literature that would span two centuries and two nations and would provide Scandinavians with a powerful strategy for the attainment of ethnic autonomy. Arguing that the Norsemen had discovered America nearly five centuries before Columbus, Anderson rejected more familiar immigrant literary strategies of assimilation or resistance and attempted to win a place for New World Norwegians by rewriting the very foundation myths of the American nation.2 By discovering Viking America, Anderson was able, at the most vulnerable moment in the trajectory of acculturation, to fashion an immigrant history of his own and to script his group's entry onto the American stage.

See Also Donald A. Davie: Poet: Patriot: Interpreter (Autumn 1982) Hayden White: Historical Pluralism (Spring 1986) Pierre Vidal-Naquet: Atlantis and the Nations (Winter 1992) Michael Ragussis: The Birth of a Nation in Victorian Culture: The Spanish Inquisition, the Converted Daughter, and the 'Secret Race' (Spring 1994)

Anderson himself was the beneficiary of an earlier Norwegian immigrant strategy that began to come to fruition in his own generation: the choice to move west rather than to settle in the urban industrial centres of the east. This decision placed Norwegian immigrants at the physical and political margins of the nation. Within this frontier context, which had the added benefit of seeming less threatening to the native born than the wards that bore America's urban immigrant politicians, Norwegian Americans enjoyed their first major political successes. Indeed, their ascent within the American power structure in the second generation was predicated not on their assimilation (as frontier theorists might have expected), as much as on their ability to consolidate the political margin. In particular, they proved adept at using ethnic bloc voting, enabled by the unusually high percentage of immigrants and relative lack of an entrenched power structure in the upper Midwest (fig. 1) to gain access to local, state and national politics. Thus, it is no accident that Minnesota congressman, governor, and Senator Knute Nelson, who as a Norwegian American was unable to reach Congress in the more settled district that included Minneapolis and Saint Paul, made his first successful entry into national politics in 1882 only after the creation of a brand new congressional district in Minnesota's heavily immigrant Upper Country.3

Norwegians and other Scandinavian immigrants employed a similar strategy within higher education, first by founding a host of long-lived institutions of their own and then by making a place for themselves within the newly-forming, less dug-in public universities of the west such as Minnesota, Iowa, Wyoming, and Anderson's own University of Wisconsin, which itself had created Anderson's position as a response to immigrant pressure.4 If figures like Nelson acted as political brokers between the immigrant west and the established east, so too did Scandinavian American cultural politicians, and it was within this context that they began to pursue the Vikings. The literature of Viking discovery made a number of claims about the Scandinavian origins of the American past. First, it argued that the Vikings had been the true discoverers of America. Second, it argued that Scandinavians, as the progenitors of the American "race" and the creators of democracy itself, were America's ancestors in body and mind. And, finally, it argued not only that Scandinavians had arrived first but they had done it better, by suggesting that the Vikings had negotiated the most vexing aspect of New World discovery--contact with Native peoples and its genocidal implications--more successfully than their later arrivals. In this way, Viking theorists inverted a discourse of discovery that usually limited the options of immigrants because for Scandinavians, discovery did not begin with Columbus and did not end in genocide.5

But if Scandinavian immigrants' claim to a special place within American culture was not based on assimilation to North American norms, it was not based on an assault on the native born, either. If discovery theorists were happy enough to blame Columbus for the bloodier aspects of the conquest of America, they were reluctant to condemn their Anglo-American hosts directly. Professor O. M. Norlie of Luther College, for instance, shuddered at the horror of the Columbian conquest but described the settling of the United States as harmonious and conflict-free. With a striking lack of irony, he wrote in his 1925 History of the Norwegian People that "the great migrations of the early centuries were nearly always accompanied by violence and bloodshed, by conquest and subjugation of the native population. The immigration to America has been peaceful."6 Indeed, in both form and content, immigrant arguments for Viking discovery took the shape of a compromise with the elite. Discovery theorists were much more likely than immigrant novelists and poets to write in English, and they celebrated American institutions. Even the choice of Viking discovery as a theme for Scandinavian immigrant literature was governed by its simultaneous appeal to both immigrant and native-born constituencies; although Viking discovery became an ethnic literature, it was also a powerfully American theme by the end of the nineteenth century, appearing in numerous works by the native born. Within their discussions of Viking discovery, moreover, immigrant writers embraced contemporary elite discourses and cast their argument for acceptance in terms that clearly had been set by the native born. It was this strategy of compromise and appropriation that set Viking theorists apart and allowed them to make a case for their presence in America without embracing ethnic assimilation per se.

1. Rasmus B. Anderson, America Not Discovered by Columbus: An Historical Sketch of the Discovery of America by the Norsemen in the Tenth Century (1874; Chicago, 1877), p. 63; hereafter abbreviated A.

2. There is a vast and fraught literature on the question of the immigrant cultural response to relocation. In the main, historians have set up this problem as a dialectic between assimilation and resistance, exemplified at either pole by Oscar Handlin's seminal The Uprooted (1951; Boston, 1973), and John Bodnar's The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, Ind., 1985). Even as "resistance" emerged as the dominant paradigm in the 1980s (seen, for example, in the hostile response to Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez [Boston, 1982]), however, it proved to be unsustainable as a fit-all theory, and signs of its instability mark much of the literature of the past two decades. Both Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York, 1983) and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991), two otherwise brilliant works, stumble on their inability to reconcile a desire for (authentic) immigrant resistance to the reality of assimilation. Thus when Rosenzweig's makers of ethnic saloons, fraternal associations, and foreign-language presses are inevitably ground down into a homogenized army of cinema-watching, motorcar-driving robots, and assimilation turns Roediger's music-sharing, race-mixing, land-loving Irish into psychologically damaged, race-baiting Irish Americans, both seem to suggest that this represents a falling away from immigrants' "true" selves. This problem is not limited to contemporary scholarship but is rooted in historical analyses of immigration and assimilation, such as Randolph Bourne's seminal essay "Trans-National America," in War and the Intellectuals, ed. Carl Resek (New York, 1964), pp. 107Ð24. Indeed, it is possible that Bourne furnished contemporary immigration scholarship with one of its central ironies: its insistence, on the one hand, on the "constructedness" of ethnicity--seen, for example, in Mary Waters's fascinating Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley, 1990), or David Hollinger, Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995)--and its clear suggestion on the other that assimilation is defined by a loss of authenticity.

3. See Millard L. Gieske and Steven J. Keillor, Norwegian Yankee: Knute Nelson and the Failure of American Politics, 1860-1923 (Northfield, Minn., 1995), p. 99. As David Emmons has shown, this consolidation of the margins can also be seen in Irish America in the case of Butte, Montana, where the fact that the Irish were the "first" immigrants meant that they were able in large part to create, rather than merely to bend to, the social, cultural, political, and economic structures of the community. See David M. Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1925 (Urbana, Ill., 1989). 4. Clearly there were differences between the constituent Scandinavian immigrant groups, and I do not wish to suggest that there were not. What is important in this context, however, is that authors from a number of different backgrounds--Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and mixed--used the Vikings and used the more general strategies outlined here.

5. Of course, there were other factors that increased Scandinavians' "ethnic options." On the most obvious level, their ethnic and religious makeup make them less vulnerable to racism than other immigrants; as white Protestants, they managed to avoid the most abusive programs of assimilation other groups suffered, particularly before the First World War, and they were never in the racially liminal position occupied by Jewish or Irish immigrants. Nonetheless, the choices they made within this context were instrumental. For a fascinating look at how the limits placed on other immigrant groups could influence the outcome of such choices, see Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, 1996).

6. O. M. Norlie, History of the Norwegian People in America (Minneapolis, 1925), p. 73.