NORWEGIAN-AMERICANS AND WISCONSIN POLITICS IN THE FORTIES

Abstract

NORWEGIAN-AMERICANS AND WISCONSIN POLITICS IN THE FORTIES1 By Bayrd Still A member of the Wisconsin legislative council once implied that he would rather vote for a Negro than for a Norwegian . This happened on the eve of Wisconsin's statehood, while the members of the territorial council were attempting to determine a particular suffrage qualification in the territory . Marshall M. Strong declared that Negroes were " as deserving of a vote and [the] privileges of freemen as are many of the whites, and more so as a class in this territory than are the Norwegians." "The negroes here," he said, "were more intelligent, more civilized, better acquainted with our institutions. ..." He " had seen the Norwegians living without what any other people would have considered the most absolute necessaries of life, burrowed so to say in holes in the ground, in huts dug in the banks of the earth." That he was at once challenged is to be expected; the response both of members of the council and, later, of the press, indicated that Strong's words did not necessarily represent a majority opinion about the Norwegians in Wisconsin . The delegate from the Milwaukee area assured Strong that the Norwegians "in Milwaukee County, and he presumed they had as many as Racine, were not such a degraded race of beings as he had represented them." But Strong's attitude does raise a question about the political prestige of the Norwegian group at that moment. The damaging words were spoken in 1846. In the next two years Wisconsin was to achieve admission to the Union. 1A paper read at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on November 13, 1933, at a meeting of the Norwegian-American Historical Association. 58 WISCONSIN POLITICS 59 Here is an opportunity to examine the participation of Norwegian-Americans in Wisconsin politics of the late forties . From two Norwegians who traveled in the West in 1847 we learn that their countrymen were not then taking an active part in Wisconsin political life. In that year the consul L0venskjold traveled among the approximately seventyfive hundred Norwegians who then comprised the Wisconsin settlements of that nationality. His report paints no attractive picture of the conditions under which they existed. Many settlers complained that they had been healthier in Norway; there was much actual sickness; their liberty was not as great as they had expected. Where log houses did not shelter the settlers L0venskjold found them dwelling " to a large extent in sod huts almost underground, with only the roofs projecting above the surface." Many were cursing "the persons who through glowing accounts had led them to come " ; yet, with the true expansiveness of frontiersmen, they had determined to be patient, hoping ultimately to build a better place for their children to live. As for political activity, the consul reported that the Norwegian settlers played no part in this field - perhaps because they were as yet unacquainted with the English language and American life and because they were generally ignorant of the subject - an ignorance that had led Americans to call them the " Norwegian Indians." Indeed, L0venskjold could not boast of the political influence of his Norwegian countrymen on the Wisconsin frontier. Along with L0venskjold came Ole Munch R seder, a Norwegian commissioned to investigate legal procedure in the United States and other countries. From Rœder's letters, written in 1847 and 1848, we learn of the Norwegian reaction to Wisconsin's state constitutional movement. Many foreigners traveling in America during the period 1830-50 were writing accounts of what they saw. None, not even 60 STUDIES AND RECORDS De Tocqueville, exhibits a keener interest in the state constitutional process than Raeder. Having come into the West by way of the Great Lakes, (and it was West in those days, for at the Sheboygan port two Indians in blankets came down to the ship) Raeder paused for a moment in Milwaukee . This, he said, ranked "first among American cities for the energy and rapidity with which it has grown." A few years before it had been but a nameless spot in the wilderness; now it had a population of eleven or twelve thousand. Yet a boy only sixteen or seventeen years old was the...