Lars Hansson1
Communicating Migration History
The House of Emigrants, Gothenburg
In this article, I present The House of Emigrants in Gothenburg, how we deal with migration history and try to connect the present with the past. Examples of how migrated Swedes were exposed to xenophobia in the USA are mentioned, and how Swedish Ameri-cans used their old historical connections to America to achieve a higher position in an ethnical hierarchy. The Americanization of the Swedes during World War I is also presented, as is an example of fruitful comparison between Fords’ English School for Immigrants and Swedish for Immigrants in Sweden. Finally, the latest exhibition, the emigrant ship “The Green Parrot”, is described as an example of connecting migration history to migrants’ experiences of today.
Migration is a very important issue for societies today. A histor-ical perspective on peoples’ movements is crucial for understanding the problems we face all around the world. The House of Emigrants is a migration museum located in Gothenburg, which was by far the greatest emigration port in Sweden. Approximately 1 million Swedes departed from this city between 1850 and 1930, mostly to the USA. The House of Emigrants has exhibitions of the Swedish Emigration to the USA, but also temporary exhibitions of migration history. The services include genealogy service for visitors. The combination of ex-hibitions and genealogy service attracts many visitors. Some visitors also donate archive material, which otherwise could have been lost. We have many visitors from different schools, who receive a guided tour of our exhibitions and a lecture about the Swedish migrants’ ex-periences of the past, and how this can be connected to the visitors’ own experiences and to the international world they live in today.
The exhibition of the Swedish emigration to USA has a Eu-ropean perspective, as the emigration of 1,5 million Swedes was a small part of a huge migration of 35 million Europeans to North
America.2 It is possible to make fruitful comparisons with other
ethnic groups of emigrants, with earlier ones like the Germans and Irish, and with the later emigrants from South and Eastern Europe. One very important fact is that Swedish immigrants in USA could experience xenophobia in the 19th Century. It is very important for
visitors to see that also Swedes could and can be targets for racism. Sometimes Swedes were not considered to be white in the USA.3
A testimony of this is an Anglo-American man writing to his par-ents in St. Paul, Minnesota, from a lumber camp in Lake County in 1901:
9/10th of the men here are roundheads & the most dis-gusting dirty lousy reprobates that I ever saw… There are probably 15 white men here to 60 Swedes… It is only in the evening that I am forced to associate with these beasts they call Swedes that I get depressed… Walking behind a string of Swedes is something impossible to a person with a delicate nose… It is an odor which could only come from generations of unwashed ancestors & no man can hope to acquire it in one lifetime without the aid of heredity.4
Swedes and Scandinavians could also be mocked in different kind of cultural events such as musicals. Yonn Yonson was a fictious Swed-ish immigrant in a musical written by Gus Heege around 1890. The character was a caricature of a stupid but strong immigrant with
The House of Emigrants in Gothenburg, Sweden, is located at the previous Customs House, where all the emigrants where shipped out during the great emigration period 1850 to 1930. Photo: Micael Litzell.
a rural background. The play is partly set in a lumberjack camp in northern Minnesota. In the end of the musical Yon Yonson leaves his Scandinavian heritage and becomes part of the American socie-ty. The marks of caricature had by then disappeared.5
The first Swedish emigrants in USA had a relatively lower sta-tus than those who arrived later. Swedish American ethnic leaders, though, used early historical connections between Scandinavia and America to claim belonging on their own behalf. The examples of the viking Leif Erikson who was supposed to have discovered America 500 years before Columbus and the Swedish colony New Sweden in 17th century, were both used in this way. The Swedes were also con-sidered to be more genuinely American, as new immigrant groups ar-rived from eastern and southern Europe. This facilitated for the for-mer to move upward in an ethnic hierarchy.6
The Swedes position in the labour market in USA improved over time. There was a distinct difference between the first and second generation of immigrants, the latter made a clear upward move in the hierarchy. While the first generation of immigrants held lower posi-tions, the children of Swedish immigrants managed to climb to bet-ter occupations, such as clerks, supervisors, skilled workers etcebet-tera.7
The Swedish American community produced substantial amounts of publications of various kinds. Besides a huge production of books and booklets also a lot of periodical publications were published. In 1910, at the height of the Swedish American cultural sphere, there were 58 weekly magazines and the biggest Swedish American news-papers in Chicago and Minneapolis had an edition of more than 50 000 newspapers weekly. These newspapers not only kept the Swedish American culture together, they also played a crucial role in explaining how the American society functioned to the Swedish immigrants.8
The exhibition at the House of Emigrants also describes the pro-cess of Americanization of the Swedish immigrants. This propro-cess ac-celerated with the US entry into World War I against Germany. This meant that the immigrants had to show loyalty to their new country, and one way of doing this was to abandon their old European lan-guage and speak English.9
We find comparisons between Swedish immigrants of the past in USA and immigrants of today in Sweden very fruitful. One exam-ple of this is language training for immigrants. Henry Ford had 60 percent immigrants in the workforce at his factory in 1917.10 For the
production system to function properly, it was crucial that communi-cation between the workers and supervisors worked well.11 Thus,
Eng-lish School for immigrants was estabEng-lished at Ford’s plant. This was not only language training though, the pupils also learned to become a modern efficient worker and consumer.12 In the exam ceremony
pu-pils went into a large bowl which should be “symbolling the Amer-ican melting pot”. They went in wearing their old European clothes and went out in a new American suit waving an American flag.13 This
is an example of language training embedded in liberal ideology.14
A fruitful comparison can be made with language training in Swe-den. This country was transformed from being an emigrant country to an immigrant society after World War II.15 The number of
immi-grants increased during the 1960s and consequently language train-ing became a critical issue.16 In 1965 free language training, Swedish
for immigrants, was introduced and was organised by the educational organizations.17 The labour movement had a very strong position in
Sweden during the 1960s, and the Workers Educational Association was the most important organisation performing the language train-ing.18 This language training was consequently also embedded in a
specific ideology – but this time a Social Democratic one. Language training can, as we have seen from these two historical examples, be embedded in different ideologies, depending on political context. It’s a fruitful example of comparison between historical Swedish emigra-tion and immigraemigra-tion to Sweden in the last decades. In our exhibi-tion, we make many other comparisons, for example migrants’ com-munication with their old country then and now, ethnic stores and restaurants for Swedish Americans and for immigrants in Sweden today, work and leisure activities then and now etcetera.19
The exhibition at House of Emigrants expanded with opening of the emigrant ship “Green Parrot” in May 2017. The name was used by the inhabitants of Hull in Great Britain for the ships of the Wil-son line, which brought the Swedish emigrants the first part of their journey across the North Sea from Gothenburg.20 After Hull, the
emigrants went by train to Liverpool from where they continued across the Atlantic Ocean to New York.21 In the new exhibition, the
visitors can entry and experience the interior of the ship. Visiting pupils from schools will receive an emigrant identity and participate in puzzle story – searching for personal items inside the ship. Ana-logue pedagogics are being used, which altogether creates an intense atmosphere of a migrant ship – rich possibilities are given for com-parisons with migrants’ experiences today.
The visitors to our exhibitions can also contribute with their own migration experiences through interviews. By performing interviews, we produce new knowledge and many times the persons interviewed also bring us new source material. The House of Emigrants cooper-ate with Oral History in Sweden – a Swedish network for performing oral history with participants from many universities and museums. During the last decades, many interviews have been made with im-migrants by the House of Eim-migrants, and also by the Swedish Mi-gration Center and the Swedish Emigrants Institute – totally almost 900 interviews. This means a production of new and very valuable knowledge about migrants’ experiences for future research. Through the Oral History projects, The House of Emigrants have also coop-erated with various immigrant organizations and communities.
The House of Emigrants also produce exhibitions on migration history for other arenas in Gothenburg and other parts of Sweden. These have been displayed at the Farm Workers museum in Sca-nia, at Kvarnby Folk High School in Malmo, at the University of Gothenburg, and at other places. These exhibitions have had many different topics such as Iranian emigration, Syrian Womens’ stories, immigration to the sugar beet fields in the south of Sweden from the province of Galizia in southern Poland in the beginning of the 20th century etcetera. These exhibitions connect migration history to
challenges of peoples’ migration today. Summary
Migration is one of the most important questions in societies all over the world today. The contribution that can be made from mi-gration museums is showing that mimi-gration has been part of hu-man experience for all of our history. Consequently, migration is
not some qualitatively new phenomenon, instead it has been crucial for the development of Sweden and other societies for millennia. The House of Emigrants offers connections and comparisons be-tween the great Swedish and European emigration a century ago to America and migrants experiences today. When visitors see that also Swedes can be victims of xenophobia and racism, this creates preconditions for empathy towards refugees. But the positive histor-ical examples of successful integrative practises can also be learned, such as how the Swedish American press played a guiding role for the integration of Swedish Americans into the American society.
New important knowledge can also be produced if we include the visitors into the communication of migration history. Geneal-ogists continuously contribute to their family history, but also new source material for the archives. In oral history projects of various kinds, more than 900 interviews with immigrants in Sweden have been performed the last decades, but much more could and will be done of this kind of projects. Oral history makes writing of history from below possible, it makes it possible to produce significant new knowledge of the history of migrants around the turn of the second millennia.
Notes
1. Lars Hansson is director of development at the House of Emigrants in Gothenburg and doctor of history. He has done research on Finnish im-migration to Sweden, Swedish eim-migration to Denmark and Germany and General Motors factory in Sweden. He participated in the founding of the Swedish network ”Oral history in Sweden”, and has worked with Research circles in two projects. He has also produced a number of exhibitions on migration and labour history.
2. Statistics Sweden http://www.scb.se/statistik/_publikationer/be0 701_ 19-50 i02 _br_04_be51st0405.pdf
3. Engren, Jimmy, Railroading and Labor Migration. Class and Ethnicity in
Ex-panding Capitalism in Northern Minnesota, the 1880s to the mid 1920s,
Göte-borg 2007, p. 349.
4. Vecoli, Rudolph, “Immigrants and the Twin Cities, Melting Pot or Mosa-ic”, in Anderson, Philip J. & Blanck, Dag (eds.): Swedes in the Twin Cities, St Paul 2001, p. 17.
5. Harvey, Anne-Charlotte, “Swedish Theater”, in Anderson, Philip & Blanck, Dag (eds.), Swedes in the Twin Cities: Immigrant Life and the Minnesota
Ur-ban Frontier, St Paul 2001, p. 156.
6. Blanck, Dag, “’A Mixture of People with Different Roots’. Swedish Amer-icans in the American Ethno-Racial Hierarchies”, in Journal of American
Ethnic History Vol 33, No 3 2014, p. 45 ff; Hjorten, Adam, Border-Crossing Commemorations. Entangled Histories of Swedish Settling in America, p. 294.
7. Engren, 2007.
8. Beijbom, Ulf A., “The Swedish Press” in Sally M. Miller (ed.) The Ethnic
Press in the United States, New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.
9. Klug, Thomas, “Employers’ Strategies in the Detroit Labor Market, 1900-1929”, in Liechtenstein, Nelson & Meyer, Stephen: On the Line. Essays in
the History of Auto Work, Urbana and Chicago 1989, p. 56 ff.
10. Klug 1989, p. 49 ff.
11. Meyer, Stephen, “Adapting to the Immigrant Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory 1914-1921” in Journal of Social History 14, no 1 (Autumn 1980), p. 69.
12. Firsht, Elena, “’Assembly line Americanization’: Henry Ford Progressive Politics”, in Michigan Journal of History, Fall 2012 edition, p. 4.
13. Peterson, Joyce Shaw, American Automobile Workers 1900-1933, Albany 1987, p. 23.
14. Hansson, Lars, Att producera disciplinerade amerikaner och skötsamma
svenskar. Ford English School för invandrare jämförd med Svenska För Invan-drare, Emigranternas hus skriftserie 1, 2017, Göteborg 2017, p. 13.
15. Runblom, Harald & Norman, Hans, From Sweden to America: A History of
Emigration, Uppsala 1976; Beijbom, Ulf, Mot löftets land: den svenska utvan-dringen, Stockholm 1995.
16. Olsson, Lars, Hundra år av arbetskraftsinvandring: från kapitalismens ge-nombrott till folkhemsbygget i Sverige”, in Ekberg, Jan (red), Invandring
till Sverige – orsaker och effekter. Årsbok från forskningsprofilen AMER, Växjö
2003, p. 22 ff.
17. Johansson, Jesper, ”Så gör vi inte här i Sverige. Vi brukar göra så här.” Retorik
och praktik i LO:s invandrarpolitik 1945-1981, Växjö 2008, p. 162.
18. Johansson 2008, p. 229 ff.
19. Hansson 2017, p. 9 ff.
20. Dunge, Manne, ”Wilsonlinjen och emigrationen”, in Unda Maris
21. Pålsson, Paul, ”Post- och passagerarfart över Nordatlanten ca 1865-1939. Om fartyg och rederier som haft särskild betydelse för nordiska resenärer”, in Unda Maris 1989-1991, Sjöfartsmuseet i Göteborg 1992, p. 9 ff.
References
Beijbom, Ulf, Mot löftets land: den svenska utvandringen, Stockholm 1995. Blanck, Dag, “’A Mixture of People with Different Roots’ Swedish Americans
in the American Ethno-Racial Hierarchies”, in Journal of American Ethnic
History Vol 33, No 3 2014.
Dunge, Manne, ”Wilsonlinjen och emigrationen”, in Unda Maris 1989-1991, Sjöfartsmuseet i Göteborg 1992.
Engren, Jimmy, Railroading and Labor Migration. Class and Ethnicity in
Ex-panding Capitalism in Northern Minnesota, the 1880s to the mid 1920s,
Göte-borg 2007.
Firsht, Elena, “’Assembly line Americanization’: Henry Ford Progressive Poli-tics”, in Michigan Journal of History, Fall 2012 edition.
Hansson, Lars, Att producera disciplinerade amerikaner och skötsamma sven-skar. Ford English School för invandrare jämförd med Svenska För Invan-drare, Emigranternas hus skriftserie 1, 2017, Göteborg 2017.
Harvey, Anne-Charlotte, “Swedish Theater”, in Anderson, Philip & Blanck, Dag (eds), Swedes in the Twin Cities: Immigrant Life and the Minnesota
Ur-ban Frontier, St Paul 2001.
Johansson, Jesper, ”Så gör vi inte här i Sverige. Vi brukar göra så här.” Retorik och
praktik i LO:s invandrarpolitik 1945-1981, Växjö 2008.
Klug, Thomas, “Employers’ Strategies in the Detroit Labor Market, 1900-1929”, in Liechtenstein, Nelson & Meyer, Stephen, On the Line. Essays in
the History of Auto Work, Urbana and Chicago 1989.
Meyer, Stephen, “Adapting to the Immigrant Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory 1914-1921” in Journal of Social History 14, no 1 (Atumn 1980). Olsson, Lars, ”Hundra år av arbetskraftsinvandring: från kapitalismens genom-brott till folkhemsbygget i Sverige”, in Ekberg, Jan, (ed) Invandring till
Sver-ige – orsaker och effekter. Årsbok från forskningsprofilen AMER, Växjö 2003.
Peterson, Joyce Shaw, American Automobile Workers 1900-1933, Albany 1987. Pålsson, Paul, ”Post- och passagerarfart över Nordatlanten ca 1865-1939. Om
fartyg och rederier som haft särskild betydelse för nordiska resenärer”, in
Runblom, Harald & Norman, Hans, From Sweden to America: A History of
Em-igration, Uppsala 1976.
Vecoli, Rudolph, “Immigrants and the Twin Cities, Melting Pot or Mosaic”, in Anderson, Philip J. & Blanck, Dag, Swedes in the Twin Cities: Immigrant Life
