During the early heyday of Norwegian immigration to the northern plains, during the First Dakota Boom of the 1880s, nobody celebrated Syttende Mai. Occasionally a newspaper, doing its best to make a cultural translation, would note on 17 September the occurrence of what it called “Norwegian Independence Day.”
Nice try, only a little premature. Norwegian Independence Day would be 7 June, marking the day in 1905 that Norway dissolved its official ties to the tyrannous Swedes. Syttende Mai, rather, commemorates the signing of the Norwegian Constitution at Eidsvoll in 1814. Gratulerer med dagen! is an appropriate greeting for your Norwegian friends on either date.
It was after the latter date of Norwegian independence in 1905 that Syttende Mai celebrations emerged like pasqueflowers on the prairies. Suddenly communities needed monuments to Grieg, Aasen, Bjornson, Wergeland, and even the rapacious rover Rollo. The early twentieth century became a time of wondrous resurgence for immigrant identity--specific immigrant identity.
Arguably, Peak Norske occurred on 17 May 1906, on which holiday the Norwegians of Grand Forks heralded the establishment of a Scandinavian library at the University of North Dakota. Actually, the observance spanned three days, with the main event in the Metropolitan Theatre on the 17th, as the papers reported, “The city is full of the brave sons and fair daughters of romantic Norway.”
Professor John Tinglestad had been gathering volumes for the library, more than a thousand already. Hired in 1901, he was the first full-time professor of Scandinavian languages at the university, delivering on the law passed by the legislature in 1891 requiring the teaching of Scandinavian languages. And here, owing to the honest documentation provided by the Norwegian language program at UND, I have to note a disturbing rhetorical undercurrent emerging at the earliest stages of Norwegian consciousness in the state. It seems that Norwegian immigrants from Fargo had insisted as early at 1884 that a representative of their “race” must be appointed to the UND faculty.
The big address on 17 September 1906 was by Asle Jorgenson Gronne, of Lakota, a member of the board of trustees and the key mover behind the Scandinavian library. Gronne, a second-generation Norwegian, was a rising Republican who would serve in the US Congress and Senate as a prominent progressive and isolationist.
Gronne took pains to portray Norwegians as the best sort of immigrant stock, as “true and loyal citizens.” He argued that the United States had become “a great nation simply because” it had “permitted people from all parts of the world to share and participate in the great wealth and blessings this country had in store.”
Gronne made it plain, however, that in addition to democratic values and a work ethic, an essential quality of these laudable immigrants was that they were of the “Caucasian race” — and he used those words. He was liberally inclusive of a catalog of desirable immigrants — “the practical Englishman, the philosophical German, the polite Frenchman, the sturdy Scandinavian, the brawny Scotchman and the witty son of the Emerald Isle.” Utterly absent from his exposition are the people who at the time of his speaking had pushed annual immigration totals above a million per year: the New Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.
So, Gratulerer med dagen!, my Nordic friends. Perhaps you and I might talk a little more about what we celebrate.
