Swedish Americans

History

Mass migration from Sweden to North America did not start until the middle of the 19th century. The country's climatic conditions made it difficult to expand agricultural areas in accordance with the growing population, which rose from under 2.5 million in 1815 to over 4 million in 1865; in spite of massive emigration, another million people had been added by the end of the century. After modest beginnings in the preceding decades, the number of Swedish arrivals in the United States skyrocketed to over 20,000 in 1868 and even more the year thereafter. These figures were not reached again until the 1880s, when as many as 330,000 Swedes landed on American shores, peaking at 46,000 in 1887.

Since another approximately 200,000 each arrived during the final decade of the 19th century and the first of the 20th, the census of 1910 reported more Swedish-born Americans than any other ethnicity. The changes in American immigration policy in the 1920s, which ultimately limited the regular admission of Swedes to 3,314 per year, and the social and economic transformation of their home society marked the end of Swedish mass emigration.

Altogether, more than 1.2 million immigrants from Sweden were registered in the United States between 1820 and 1950. This put the sparsely populated nation on Europe's northern periphery eighth among all countries of origin during that period. The relatively low rate of return migration among Swedes as well as other Scandinavians further increased their impact on American society. Especially important for this impact was the regional concentration of the immigrants in select states. Even though Swedes were not as fully clustered as their Norwegian neighbors, they, too, settled predominantly in the upper midwest. In 1910, the number of foreign-born Swedish Americans amounted to 665,000, with another 699,000 belonging to the second generation. A majority of them had their residence in a belt stretching from western Illinois to the northern plains. In absolute numbers, Minnesota's 268,000 Swedes constituted the biggest contingent in 1910, followed by 230,000 in more populous Illinois; in relative terms, Minnesota's almost 13 percent far outdistanced the 4.9 percent in Nebraska and Washington State. A substantial minority of Swedes had also been drawn to the industrializing cities of the eastern seaboard, with close to 90,000 of them having settled in New York State in 1910 and almost 70,000 in Massachusetts.

As the largest group of immigrants from Scandinavia, Swedes displayed considerable diversity in regional, social, and professional background. Since religious practice remained highly regulated in Sweden until the middle of the 19th century, early emigration contained a visible religious component. The utopian settlement of Bishop Hill in Illinois, founded by the spiritual rebel and prophet Erik Jansson in 1846, constituted its most sensational example. Designed as a new Jerusalem based on Christian communitarianism, the settlement attracted over 1,000 settlers, but it was marred by the assassination of its leader and economic setbacks and dissolved in 1861.

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