Estonian Americans

Estonia is a European country on the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea, a former Soviet republic. Estonia is one of the least populous countries in Europe, and Estonian Americans are one of the country's smallest ethnic groups, numbering only about 25,000. A former Soviet republic that gained independence and became a democracy in the 1990s, Estonia is considered a Nordic country by some of its citizens, having more in common culturally and linguistically with Finland than with Latvia or Lithuania.

Estonian immigration to the United States was sparse until the World War II era. The first Estonians arrived as part of the Swedish colonization of North America along the Delaware River in the 17th century, but they were few in number. Until 1922, those Estonians who did immigrate to the United States—farmers driven away by the Russian Empire's changing agricultural policies, and sailors who jumped ship—were identified as Russians in immigration records. Notable turn-of-the-century Estonian communities were founded in San Francisco and New York, and [Page 815]rural communities in Fort Pierre, South Dakota; Bloomville, Wisconsin; Chester, Montana; and Dickenson, North Dakota. When the 1905 Estonian revolution failed, groups of socialists fled political reprisals by immigrating to the United States, joining the growing socialist movement here. There are no reliable figures for the Estonian presence in the United States before the middle of the 20th century, but estimates of the 1930 Estonian American population vary from about 3,500 to nearly 100,000.

What immigration did occur was constricted in the 1920s by newly restrictive immigration laws, but the first significant wave of Estonian immigration came in the World War II years. War refugees and political refugees fled Estonia during the war and in response to the Soviet takeover of the country after the war. In contrast to the 1905 minor wave, this group was nationalistic and strongly antisocialist. Most fleeing Estonians settled in Sweden or Germany, but 15,000 came to the United States. The 20th-century immigrants settled primarily in cities. About half settled in the northeastern cities of New York, Boston, Baltimore, District of Columbia, and parts of Connecticut and New Jersey; about one-fifth settled in Los Angeles and San Francisco; the remainder settled in midwestern cities and parts of the south and northwest.

Estonian Americans are well assimilated into American culture, and since World War II, most Estonian immigrants have become citizens. Relative to the size of the population, there are many Estonian American cultural organizations and fraternal groups. There are also a number of Estonian churches. The Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church, with 38 congregations, has over 12,000 members—nearly half as large as the Estonian American population (though, of course, not all of its members are Estonian, and membership includes non-Estonian spouses). The Estonian Baptist Church in New York was one of the first Estonian churches founded and remained an important cultural center even for non-Baptist Estonians. There are a small number of Estonian Orthodox and Pentecostal parishes in the major cities. This religious diversity reflects the diversity of the Estonian people, as well as the very different circumstances surrounding various waves of immigration; the 1905 socialists, for instance, were not always atheist, but typically eschewed organized faith, especially since Estonia's Lutheran Church at the time had long been dominated by Baltic-German oppressors. That same oppression, though, also motivated the founding of an Estonian Lutheran Church in New York in 1896, by Hans Rebane, a Lutheran minister to whom the American German Missouri Lutheran Synod had reached out. Rebane's church provided Estonian immigrants with a Lutheran parish of their own, outside Baltic-German control; an outspoken leader, Rebane was a vocal opponent of the later socialist immigrants.

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