Category Archives: Population

When will we ever learn?

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Recently, I attended a residents association meeting in our little pocket of San Fernando Valley, all part of the city of Los Angeles, where almost four million people live. There was one topic on the minds of the almost one hundred attendees: homelessness.

The homeless are everywhere in this city, as much part of the everyday life here as the cars, the sun, and the surf. There are homeless tent camps to the west of us, as well as to the east. They seem entrenched, as after a large cleanup the other day, when new tents sprung up the day after with new people and, soon, new piles of trash.

Los Angeles County with ten million people is said to have 66,000 homeless, or twenty percent of all unhoused in the United States. 41,000 of them are found within the city limits. There might be many more. How do you count them accurately in the time of Covid?

On Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, between 4,000 and 8,000 homeless live steadily, of all age groups, 58 percent of them Black, 24 percent Latinos, and 13 percent White. But they are really omnipresent in the city, an everyday witness of a larger societal failure to take care of, to treat, to house, the poor, the mentally sick, the addicts, as California’s wrestles with a serious lack of affordable housing and mental healthcare facilities. That failure, accompanied by rising homicide rates and other crime numbers, is the central issue for the voters on Tuesday.

Yes, inflation will also be on the voters’ minds, particularly in view of the highest gas prices in the nation, now at seven or even eight dollars per gallon, but there’s not much the individual voter or the local politician can do about that. Inflation is fought by the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC. And although the recent tragic mass shooting in Texas and Buffalo, New York have shaken up people here just like everywhere else in America, California already has the nation’s toughest gun laws. So, here are not the glaring policy failures of the homelessness crisis.

The Democrats dominate in California and there are no signs of change in that respect. Governor Gavin Newsom will be reelected, so will his attorney general and his choice for US senator, Alex Padilla. To win outright on Tuesday, over 50 percent of the vote is needed. If that is not achieved, the two top candidates, regardless of party affiliation, will square off in November’s general election. The Republicans will be hard pressed to win any state-wide races, but they will likely have some success in the 53 races for the nation’s largest congressional delegation in Washington.

In the race for who will be the new mayor of Los Angeles, America’s second largest city, the mood among the voters is bad, as Steve Lopez reports in today’s Los Angeles Times: fatigue, irritation, cynicism. The question is: how many will actually vote? Few, is probably the answer


The leading candidate, Black congresswoman Karen Bass, is a former Speaker of the California Assembly, whom the Los Angeles Times has endorsed, calling her “an extraordinarily qualified, battle-tested, mission-driven leader.” In the last poll before Tuesday, Bass has the support of 38 percent of likely voters.

But, once again, many voters are seeking solutions to problems from a non-politician. In the efforts last year to recall, unseat, Governor Newsom, disgruntled voters sought the answer in a libertarian talk radio host with no political experience. He lost badly, and rightly so.

Now, their savior is billionaire developer (sounds familiar?) Rick Caruso, a Republican until recently, who has bombarded the city with political commercials, using over 30 million dollars of his own money, promising to “clean up” Los Angeles and break what he claims to be the “long chain of corruption and failure.”  Caruso, “the Donald Trump of Los Angeles” as the Los Angeles Times once called him, is supported by 32 percent in that same poll. A November runoff is likely.

When will we ever learn?

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Walter Mondale, of Minnesota’s Scandinavian political legacy, is dead

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With Walter F. Mondale’s death last Monday in Minneapolis, one of the few remaining of Minnesota’s great generation of Scandinavian politicians, is gone.

Starting in 1892, when the Norwegian immigrant Knute Nelson was elected governor, Minnesota’s Scandinavian immigrant generations came to shape, even dominate, the state’s politics for decades. Since that year and up to 1999, all but five of Minnesota’s twenty-six governors have been of Scandinavian/Nordic descent, the last one being Swedish Arne Carlson, 1991-99, who told me, during the research for my book, Scandinavians in the State House – How Nordic Immigrants Shaped Minnesota Politics, that we are probably seeing the end of the line of Scandinavian governors in Minnesota. “There is no new Scandinavian generation here,” he said. But Minnesota’s unique Scandinavia political legacy lives on, as University of Minnesota professor Larry Jacobs once told me: “It’s like a fork in the road, and Minnesota has taken the Scandinavian way, and even though the Scandinavians are not running the state, we are on the road that the Scandinavians have put us on.” 

Two of those Minnesota Scandinavians were Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, both descendants of Norwegian immigrants, who became not only US senators but US vice presidents and both, eventually, the Democratic Party’s candidates for President, in 1968 and 1984, respectively. As vice president in the Jimmy Carter administration 1976-80, Mondale paved the way for the new, modern vice presidency, and as presidential candidate, he chose the first woman, New York’s Geraldine Ferraro, as his running mate. 

I first met Mondale, whose family and name came from the little village of Mundal in Norway,  in 1984, barnstorming through the Midwest as he sought the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, a nomination that he would ultimately win only to be thoroughly defeated by Ronald Reagan in November that year, winning only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.  It was a humiliating defeat, but defeat never slowed Mondale down. He did not “crawl under a desk or complain about his losses,” as Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar writes in a New York Times op-ed today. He continued “the good fight” as his autobiography was called, until the end, at 93, still active and still respected, even beloved, and not only in Minnesota.  And I know, Klobuchar also writes, that “Mondale (who died the day before the jury found former police office Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd) was with us rooting for justice.” 

Almost a year earlier, in an op-ed in Minneapolis Star-Tribune in June 2020, Mondale had written that had “watched with horror” Floyd’s death but “felt pride as so many Minnesotans peacefully took to the streets demanding justice.” America, he wrote, “remains scarred by unacceptable disparities,” concluding:

“Each generation is tasked with the hard work of serving in the great fight for justice. Our neighbors who took to the streets over the past few weeks have joined a great cause. I thank them.” 

I can’t claim to have known Walter Mondale, or “Fritz” as he was called, well. During the presidential election campaign of 1984, with his campaign plane full of journalists, there was no opportunity for one-on-one conversations, but I met him again a couple of years ago in connection with my Minnesota book project, interviewed him at length, saw a bit of him socially, and was always struck with how friendly and unpretentious he was.  

When former Minnesota governor, Wendell Anderson, grandson of Swedish immigrants, died in 2016, many hundreds came to his memorial service at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, among them Walter Mondale and his old friend, Warren Spannaus, former state attorney general. At the service, decorated in Sweden’s blue and yellow colors, the prominent mingled with the less prominent in typical low-key Minnesota fashion. Mondale and Spannaus lingered and chatted, and as the two political war horses walked out of the church by themselves in the afternoon heat, Mondale took off his jacket and swung it over one shoulder. They crossed the busy street with the help of two traffic cops and walked slowly up the block as cars buzzed by. At the corner, a woman, waiting for a bus, greeted the two before they turned into a side street where they had parked, apparently unable to find parking in the church parking lot. They climbed into an old car and Spannaus drove off, with the former vice president of the United States as passenger in the front seat.

Growing up in a little town in southern Minnesota, by the border to Iowa, Mondale told me that the one thing his parents stressed was the belief in learning and education. “There was no excuse for ignorance.” But, he continued, they never put this to us as Norwegian values, and Mondale never visited Scandinavia until late in life, as vice president, when, stepping off the plane, he breathed deeply and said, “It smells like Minnesota.” He told me that the huge presence of Scandinavians in Minnesota “has had a big effect on the fundamental direction of our state,” and that legacy “is not a thing of the past but it has merged with our values in Minnesota.” 

I had set out to tell that story in my Minnesota book, and I was so surprised, and pleased, of course, hearing from Mondale shortly after it was published in 2017: 

“Dear Klas:  I just finished reading your wonderful new book, Scandinavians in the State House, and I loved it. It hits exactly the right spot and it fills up and describes in detail a lot of elements that we miss here close to home. I loved the chapter on the Finns. Well, I love them all. It’s an example of the depth of your scholarship.”

I asked Mondale if I could publicize his note and he graciously agreed. Today, it’s framed and hangs proudly on the wall in my home in Los Angeles, California.  Thank you, Mr. Vice President, thank you, Fritz.

“Now it is your turn to let freedom ring”

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Today, as Congressman and civil rights veteran John Lewis was laid to rest at a funeral service in Atlanta, Georgia, America saw another side of this country, the opposite side of Trump’s America.

The contrasts could not have been starker, and it renewed our hope that better days are ahead.

Here is Lewis’ op-ed article in the New York Times today, written just a day or so before his death on July 17. It’s a call to action to all Americans of good will.

“Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation”

By John Lewis

“While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.”

 

 

 

Reading, reading about a different America

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Massachusetts with its seven million inhabitants is slowly opening up after two months of serious lockdown and 87,052 coronavirus cases and 5,862 deaths, 37 of them here in the Berkshires in the western part of the state, where I live, which has seen an unchanged number of deaths for thirteen days.

That’s encouraging. Still, the reopening will last over four phases over several months. We are treading carefully, seeking to avoid a second virus wave. Eventually, our little town, where almost everything has been closed except the supermarkets and the liquor stores, the hospital and the gas stations, will come alive again. I look forward to seeing people, who are not afraid of each other, to having a drink at a bar surrounded by noisy customers, or ordering a favorite Neapolitan pizza, to going to the movies or a museum.

Spring has been unusually cold but, finally, this week has warmed up and summer is approaching. But it will be a summer like no one else, at least for a very long time, for it will be a summer without all that the Berkshires ordinarily has to offer: the Boston symphony at Tanglewood, serious dance at Jacob’s Pillow, museums like MassMoca, theater like Shakespeare & Company – all closed and with cancelled summer programs.

It’s been quiet here for the past months and it looks like it will continue to be quiet for quite some time. Actually, I have not minded the quiet, cooking and eating well, taking a walk, obsessively following the day’s corona news, and then reading and reading…The bookstores and the libraries have also been closed, but I have called Matt at his “The Bookstore” in neighboring Lenox and ordered books, to pick them up curbside a couple of days later.

And so, I have and have made a big, new discovery — Pekka Hämäläinen — about as Finnish a name as there is. Born, raised, and educated in Helsinki, Finland’s capital, he somewhere along the way became interested in early North American history, particularly Native American history, taught at universities in Texas and California before becoming Rhodes Professor of American History at University of Oxford and conducting research on nomadic empires in world history.

His two books, Comanche Empire from 2008 and Lakota America – A New History of Indigenous Power from 2019 — both published by Yale University Press — have been true revelations and given me a new and different perspective on America and American history.

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Comanche Empire, which won the 2009 Bancroft Prize in American history, has been called “revisionist” history, revisionist, maybe, because it looks at American history from the point of view of its original people, the American Indians. It’s about an empire, Hämäläinen writes, which did not exist according to conventional history, but, in fact, ruled the southern plains in the American Southwest (Texas, New Mexico, northern Mexico) in the 18th and 19th centuries, defeating all the other tribes, including the Apaches, and restraining and overshadowing the Spanish, French, Mexicans, and Anglo/Euro-Americans. The Comanches formed an “interregional power with imperial presence” reaching “unparalleled heights of political and economic influence, material wealth, and internal stability” until their final defeat in the Texas Panhandle in 1875.

That defeat occurred just a year before the American Indians’ last big victory, up north at Little Bighorn in Montana, when the Lakota/Sioux-led forces killed General Custer and all his two hundred men. That victory, “Custer’s Last Stand,” led, in 1890, to the Wounded Knee Massacre and the final end of Lakota power in the West. The story of the Lakotas, as Hämäläinen tells it, from their beginning around the Great Lakes to rulers of the northern plains led by famous chiefs such as Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse, is perhaps more widely known than the story of the Comanches, but it is just as riveting and just as impressive as a scholarly endeavor.

Both are, simply, beautiful books, and my biggest reading discovery during these days of coronavirus. Thank you, Pekka!

 

“An excellent book,” writes Danish professor about my Minnesota book — nice!

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“All in all, Bergman has written an excellent book that any layman or scholar with an interest in Minnesota’s Nordic past will enjoy reading,” concludes Danish professor Jørn Brøndal in his review of my book about Minnesota’s Scandinavian political legacy.

The review was published in the latest issue of the Norwegian-American Historical Association’s journal Norwegian-American Studies (https://www.naha.stolaf.edu).

Klas Bergman, Scandinavians in the State House: How Nordic Immigrants Shaped Minnesota Politics (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2017). 6×9 inches, 20 b&w photos, index. viii + 310 pp. ISBN 9781681340302. $19.95

By Jørn Brøndal

In this interesting book, Klas Bergman explores how Nordic immigrants and their American-born progeny helped shape Minnesota’s political culture all the way from the 1850s to the present. During those years thousands of Nordics participated in Minnesota politics, several of them reaching high positions of power, including twenty-one governorships from 1893 to 1999.

The book offers short, incisive biographies of an impressive array of Minnesota’s Nordic politicians. As one might expect, ample room is made for exploring such towering figures as U.S. senator Knute Nelson (dates in office 1895–1923), Governors John B. Lind (1899–1901), Floyd B. Olson (1931–1936), and Wendell R. Anderson (1971–1976), as well as vice presidents and later Democratic presidential nominees Hubert H. Humphrey (1965–1969) and Walter F. Mondale (1977–1981). More controversial leaders are also examined. The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety under Governor Joseph A. A. Burnquist (1915–1921) put civil liberties under massive pressure during World War I. Also, Burnquist’s fight in the 1918 Republican primary against Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. turned ugly. Governors Hjalmar Petersen (1936–1937) and Harold Stassen (1939–1943) each employed red-baiting and anti-Semitism in their election bids.

Two dimensions of Bergman’s study stand out. First, he demonstrates the historical importance of an amazing array of left-leaning grassroots activists, including such Swedish-American radicals as Walfrid Engdahl, Walter Malte Frank, and Carl Skoglund, each of whom left Sweden in the wake of the General Strike of 1909, only to resume their labor activism in Minnesota. Whereas Engdahl and Frank ended up joining the Farmer-Labor Party, Skoglund was a central leader of the landmark Minneapolis Teamsters’ Strike of 1934, later emerging as a Trotskyist and serving time in jail. Minnesota’s Nordic radicals, however, also included many Finns of the Iron Range whose reception in Minnesota was negative, to the point of one draft resister being lynched during World War I. The Finns, it turns out, were more politicized and radicalized than any other group, and when the American version of the Communist Party was founded in the early 1920s, more than forty percent of its members were Finns. During Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror, many Minnesota Finns made the disastrous decision of migrating to Soviet Karelia.

The second dimension of Bergman’s book that stands out is his comprehensive coverage of the various political currents coursing through Minnesota from the territorial days to the present. Here, the Scandinavians, especially the Norwegians and Swedes, played a central role. They did so first as staunch Republicans but from the end of the nineteenth century also as Populists and then as activists within the Progressive movement and its radical offshoot, the Nonpartisan League, in the early twentieth century. During the 1930s many of them joined the Farmer-Labor Party, “the most successful third party in American history” (150), and from 1944 the liberal Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), while also contributing to keeping the postwar GOP moderate and reform-minded. Generally prudent, pragmatic, and progressive—and oftentimes informed by a secularized version of Lutheranism—the Scandinavians of Minnesota helped build a result- and reform-oriented political culture.

From the turn of the millennium, to be sure, the traditionally progressive state GOP took a conservative turn. In that sense, Bergman suggests, even as the DFL “stayed true to its Scandinavian roots . . . the Republican Party became ever less Scandinavian” (194). Nevertheless, as Larry Jacobs of the University of Minnesota suggests, notwithstanding the recent waning of Scandinavian-American political leadership, “we are on the road that the Scandinavians have put us on” (252).

Based on an impressive amount of historical literature and primary sources, including oral history interviews and the author’s own talks with Minnesota leaders and grassroots, Bergman’s account is transnational in scope, focusing not only on Minnesota but also on Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, and Icelandic history. The book is skewed somewhat toward the Swedes, for instance, in its rather surprising coverage of the contemporary Somali presence both in Minneapolis’s Sixth Ward—an old Scandinavian stronghold—and in Sweden. Minor quibbles involve the book’s unclear distinction between the meaning of “liberal” and “progressive” and the use of “Scandinavian” and “Nordic” interchangeably. Of course, any analysis of Scandinavian influences on Minnesota’s political culture will have to include impressionistic elements, as Bergman’s book indeed does. To be pedantic, Danish-American George A. Nelson was not elected to the Wisconsin Assembly in 1899 but only years later (190). As a journalist rather than a historian, Bergman loyally quotes many historians while rarely challenging their accounts.

All in all, Bergman has written an excellent book that any layman or scholar with an interest in Minnesota’s Nordic past will enjoy reading.

Jørn Brøndal is professor of American studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He specializes in U.S. ethnic, racial, and political history.

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Minnesota’s Scandinavian political legacy lives on!

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Vesterheim, the magazine of the Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa, recently published my article about how Scandinavian immigrants and their ancestors have shaped Minnesota politics.

The article is based on my  book, Scandinavians in the State House — How Nordic Immigrants Shaped Minnesota Politics, published by Minnesota Historical Society Press in 2017.

It’s nice to see the continued interest in this unique Scandinavian aspect of American history and politics.

Enjoy, I hope!

VesterheimMinnesota072019

 

Moving on…to the blue Berkshires

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I have moved. Again! My friends say.

Yes, I have moved many times during my years in America, mainly from coast to coast and back again, except for many months once in the Upper Midwest, more precisely in Minnesota, when I researched my book about the Scandinavian immigrants’ role and influence on Minnesota politics.

Now, after many years in Maryland just outside Washington, DC, and after a year and a half in Los Angeles, my new home is the little town of Great Barrington in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, in New England, America’s northeast corner, up towards Canada.

Moving is part of being American. People move for many reasons; one is politics, maybe more so today than ever in this politically divided nation. Politics played a role when my wife and I decided to move to Massachusetts. It mattered that this is a blue state, just like Maryland, although both have Republican governors, and just like solidly Democratic Los Angeles. Our congressmen, whose names and political ideology have become more important since we became U.S. citizens with the right to vote, have come to reflect our politics — in Maryland’s Montgomery County through the leading progressive Jamie Raskin; in Los Angeles, through Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee after the sweeping democratic election victory in 2018; and here in the Berkshires, through Richard Neal, for whom the election thrust him into the chairmanship of the important Ways and Means Committee and a leading role in the fight to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns.

The Berkshires is not an economically rich area with a median house hold in come of $39,000 per year. It’s rural, but unlike many other rural areas around America, its 131,000 residents are Democrats — Hillary Clinton captured over 67 percent of the vote here in the 2016. But, also here, Donald Trump is ever present, well covered in the excellent local paper, the Berkshire Eagle, and dinner conversations, just like elsewhere in this country, are often dominated by the man in the White House. The fact that Massachusetts has three presidential candidates, two Democrats – senator Elizabeth Warren and congressman Seth Moulton — and one Republican, former governor William Weld, has contributed to the heightened political debate in the Berkshires and in the state as a whole. No other state disapproves as much of Trump as Massachusetts, so it’s really no wonder that his only, at least so far, challenger for the Republican nomination has come from here.

In Great Barrington this time of the year, as in all the little towns among the rolling hills of the Berkshires, the residents have gathered to debate and vote on local issues in a sort of unique direct democracy. At my first Annual Town Meeting the residents filled the local high school’s auditorium in an impressive showing of political participation. Still, the 468 who came was only a small percentage of the town’s 4,746 registered voters of whom 1,235, or 26 percent, actually voted in the local office elections a week later. Not so impressive…

The local issues even required an extra evening of debate to resolve. They included the town’s budget, schools and libraries, roads and bridges, and many zoning issues. We gave the town’s middle school a new name, W.E.B. Du Bois, after the legendary African American scholar and civil rights leaders, who was born and raised here; we upheld a ban for the second time on small plastic bottles; and we debated, just like all the other Berkshire towns the issue of pot – marijuana – now legal in Massachusetts.

We already have a shop that sells recreational marijuana and most days, actually every day, there is a long line of buyers, many from neighboring New York and Connecticut, where pot is not, at least not yet, legal. Four more shops have been approved and are set to open. A possible new, big marijuana growing facility is being discussed up the road. Other surrounding towns have turned out to be more skeptical and have voted no to any pot businesses. Now, the residents of Great Barrington seem to be getting a bit nervous and, maybe, we should limit the number of marijuana establishments? Let’s look into that, the Town Meeting decided.

This is the first time I live in a small town. It’s exciting, in a low-key kind of way. Spring is finally here, with lush, green leaves on the trees in our back yard down to the quick little river that flows by. Winter, to which I should be used after growing up in Sweden, was a bit rougher than I had anticipated, especially after the previous so-called winter in Los Angeles.

And summer is rapidly approaching, with all of Berkshires cultural attractions waiting: the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood; art exhibits and concerts at MASS MoCA celebrating its 20th anniversary with Annie Lennox; August Renoir will be at the Clark Institute; the Norman Rockwell Museum turns 50; Herman Melville turns 200. There are exciting new plays at Shakespeare & Company and Barrington Stage; bluesman Buddy Guy is coming to town, and Arlo Guthrie is at his Guthrie Center at the Old Trinity Church, of Alice’s Restaurant fame, just across the street from our new home; and on and on…

It’s almost exhausting. And if the weather holds and you want to get away from it all, it’s easy to go hiking or swimming or canoeing or just sit by the river and listen to the water flowing by, quickly.

Academic journal reviews my Minnesota book

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My book on Minnesota’s Scandinavian political legacy (Scandinavians in the State House: How Nordic Immigrants Shaped Minnesota Politics) has been reviewed in “The Journal of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study.”

A “tour de force,” writes Daron W. Olson, professor at Indiana University East. Bergman, he continues, “has written a comprehensive and balanced account of Scandinavian politics in Minnesota” and “he makes a strong case that Scandinavian cultural values have shaped the political culture of the state.”

The review can be found in the Scandinavian studies’ journal Volume 90, No. 4, Winter 2018, published by the University of Illinois Press, http://scandinavianstudy.org/our-journal. My book was published in 2017 by Minnesota Historical Society Press.

 

 

 

 

 

The Somali breakthrough in Minnesota politics

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The Somali immigrant community in Minnesota, the center of the Somali diaspora in the United States, has been nibbling for years at entering the state’s politics. Heavily concentrated in central Minneapolis, in the old Scandinavian neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside, their first political success came in 2010 on the city’s school board, followed, in 2013, when a Somali immigrant was elected to the city council, and then, in 2016, when a Somali woman handily beat a long-time incumbent to get elected to the State Legislature.

These new Americans political success had come slowly and over a number of years, but last night’s primary election results in Minnesota were the definitive breakthrough of the Somali immigrant population in the state’s politics.

Not only did Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee woman, who came to American when she was eight years old, win the Democratic primary for a seat  in the US House of Representatives, but her seat in the State Legislature will be filled by a fellow countryman, Mohamud Noor.   They both handily won their Democratic primaries, Omar capturing 48 per cent of the vote and beating the experienced former Speaker of the State House, and Noor winning with 40 percent of the vote. Both of them will represent heavily Democratic districts, and there is little doubt that they will be elected in November.

The Somali election victories are truly historic and they underscore the fact that the Somalis are in Minnesota politics to stay. These first victorious Somali politicians are all first generation immigrants, born in the old country and arriving in America at various ages. As they settled in central Minneapolis, the neighborhood that used to be heavily Scandinavian and called “Snoose Boulevard” the area became known as “Little Mogadishu.” And just like the Scandinavian immigrants before them, these new Somali immigrants sought political clout using their ethnic concentration in the center of the city.

(For more on this, please see my book, Scandinavians in the State House: How Nordic Immigrants Shaped Minnesota Politics. Minnesota Historical Society Press)

But what is new, as Ibrahim Hirsi recently wrote on the Minnesota news site, MinnPost, and what he called a “milestone,” is that there now is a second generation Somali-Americans, born in America — “Somalis without the accent” — entering Minnesota politics. 28-year-old Omar Fateh, born in Washington, DC, is one of them, and he is like all the other Somali-American political candidates, well-educated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees,

But last night, Fateh only came in third in the State House District 62A, south of downtown Minneapolis. He was narrowly beaten by two other Somali-Americans competing in the Democratic primary, which was won by Hodan Hassan, a clinical worker, immigrant and a single mom. In a tight race, she captured 28 percent of the vote, beating also another Somali immigrant, Osman Ahmed, long active in Minnesota politics.

As the American-born political generation is starting to knock on the door, the first foreign-born Somali generation clearly still have political clout. But the fact that a new generation seems to stand ready to take over is a most encouraging sign.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Swedish-American Historical Quarterly on my book “Scandinavians in the State House”

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Here is a review of my book about the Scandinavian political legacy in Minnesota. It is written by Kevin Proescholdt, editor of the Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, and published in January 2018, Vol. 69, No. 1.  

Bergman, Klas. Scandinavians in the State House: How Nordic Immigrants Shaped Minnesota Politics. Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2017. 310 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index, endnotes. ISBN: 978-1- 68134-030-2.

Minnesota is often referred to as the most Scandinavian of all the United States. Tens of thousands of immigrants from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland did indeed settle in Minnesota, and over time these immigrants exerted an enormous influence on the state, including its politics. Since 1892, for example, Minnesota has had twenty governors of Nordic descent. Between 1915 and 1976, every Minnesota governor was of Swedish or Norwegian descent except for one Finland- Swede and one Dane. And the numbers of these governors are dwarfed by the thousands of Nordics who have served in local and county positions and state legislative offices, across the state and through the decades. Two such Nordics from Minnesota have even served as vice president of the United States.

Klas Bergman’s Scandinavians in the State House tells the story of the Scandinavian influences in Minnesota politics, and how those influences have shaped, and continue to shape, Minnesota politics today. Far more than just a compilation of Scandinavians who were elected to offices in the state, and far more than an uncritical filiopietistic, cheer–for-our- own-ethnic-group portrayal, this book delves into the widely varying backgrounds of Scandinavians in Minnesota, and how that diversity of experiences helped create the rich and enduring influence on the politics of the state.

The book is arranged somewhat, but not strictly, chronologically. This deviation from a purely chronological arrangement allows the author to delve more deeply into topics that may not neatly fit a straight chronological pattern, topics such as “Radicals in Exile” or “Finns on the Range.”

The books begins in detail looking at the “four pioneers” in the state capitol, the first Scandinavians to be elected governor of Minnesota: Norwegian immigrant and Civil War veteran Knute Nelson in 1892, a Republican; Swedish-born John Lind in 1898, a Democrat; John A. Johnson, also a Democrat and son of Swedish immigrants, elected in 1904; and Adolph Olson Eberhart, also born in Sweden, and elected as a Republican in 1908. Though traditionally affiliated with the Republican Party, “the Scandinavian vote was far from monolithic,” even in these early years of gubernatorial success.

The cleavages among the Scandinavian voters were widened even further during the tumultuous years between the turn of the twentieth century and the end of World War I. The Nonpartisan League gained strength among Scandinavians during this time—especially in rural areas—and Swedish immigrant Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. (the father of the famous aviator) became a nationally recognized member of Congress from Minnesota and opponent of World War I. Lindbergh challenged Governor J. A. A. Burnquist (the son of Swedish immigrants) in the Republican primary for governor in 1918 amid the toxic politics of war-time repression and strident xenophobia, and eventually lost to Burnquist, splitting the Swedish vote mostly along urban-rural lines.

One of my favorite chapters in the book is “Radicals in Exile,” a chapter reprinted in the April 2017 issue of this journal. This chapter provides a nice counter-balance to the image of Swedish immigrants in Minnesota as pioneer farmers like Karl-Oskar from Vilhelm Moberg’s emigrant novels. The chapter follows the lives of three Swedes—Walfrid Engdahl, Carl Skoglund, and Walter Malte Frank—who had all been blacklisted in Sweden for participation in the General Strike of 1909 or for other labor activities, and were essentially forced to emigrate. Though none of the three was ever elected as governor, all three became active in Minnesota politics via such avenues as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), the Farmer-Labor Party (later the Demo- cratic-Farmer-Labor Party), the Socialist Party, or the Communist Party.

After World War II, the author writes of the emergence of the two modern political parties in Minnesota, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, led by Nordic-American Hubert H. Humphrey; and a progressive Republican Party, a moderate and internationalist party shaped by the former “Boy Governor” Harold Stassen of German/ Czech/Norwegian descent. The author attributes much of the progressive nature of the state and its politics to the Scandinavian influences brought by the masses of Scandinavian immigrants who settled in the state and became involved with the state’s politics and public life.

Klas Bergman ends the book in a most interesting way. In the penultimate chapter, entitled “From Snoose Boulevard to Little Mogadishu,” he describes how Somali immigrants of today have taken a page from the playbook of the old Scandinavian immigrants in the south Minneapolis Sixth Ward. Once a stronghold of Scandinavian Americans, the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and the broader Sixth Ward today have become a stronghold for Somali immigrants. Like their Scandinavian predecessors, the Somali immigrants have exerted their political power, and with growing success. In 2013, for example, Somali immigrant Abdi Warsame won an impressive victory over the incumbent city council member to represent the Sixth Ward on the City Council. In 2016 Ilhan Omar, a thirty-three-year-old Somali-American woman who had fled Somalia as a child, defeated a long-time DFL member of the state legislature, becoming the first Somali American elected to any state legislative office in the country. The Somali-American immigrants of today are following the same path to political office in the same neighborhoods that were blazed by the Scandinavian immigrants of a century or more ago.

There is much to recommend in Scandinavians in the State House. It is well researched (including citations of many articles from this Quarterly), well written and well documented, and the author conducted more than ninety interviews to supplement his meticulous research. It is a must-read for understanding the influence of Scandinavian Americans on the political life of Minnesota.

KEVIN PROESCHOLDT

EDITOR, SWEDISH-AMERICAN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

http://www.swedishamericanhist.org