S�REN JAAB�K, AMERICANIZER IN NORWAY: A STUDY IN CULTURAL INTERCHANGE

Abstract

S0REN JAABiEK, AMERICANIZE 11 IN NORWAY: A STUDY IN CULTURAL INTERCHANGE BY FRANKLIN D. SCOTT Norway and the United States show extraordinary cultural parallels: "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people" was written by a Norwegian statesman eighteen years before Lincoln independently created the phrase. Norway was one of the few countries of the world in the nineteenth century which, like the United States, practiced judicial review and governmental separation of powers. The basic struggle with nature was similar, both in literature and in fact; in Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil of Norwegian Finnmark and in Ole Rplvaag's Giants in the Earth of South Dakota. A rational but vigorous individualism characterizes The Man of Norway and The Man of America, and each feels peculiarly at home in the land of the other. All this and more prompts one to ask: Is there some obscure affinity between the Norwegian and the American mind, or is the similarity of outlook and of political structure brought about by ascertainable cause? The likeness is not one of size, between a nation of 4,000,000 and a nation of 150,000,000. Nor can it be in a total Norwegianization of America. Norwegians have indeed contributed much to American culture. Many hundreds of thousands of Norwegians have migrated to the United States, and there may be blended in the American people almost as much Norwegian blood as flows in Norway itself. But this 84 S0REN JAABiEK 85 could hardly be enough to leaven the vast and diverse elements of our widespread population. Why are the two countries so much alike in individual outlook and social philosophy? Certain explanatory factors can be surmised. For instance, both Norway and the United States have drunk inspiring drafts from the wellsprings of English freedom, from Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. Both Norway and the United States have enjoyed a happy connection with the sources of European culture - many generations of contact without embroilment, tempered by a geographic aloofness that has long permitted their choosing what they wanted, leaving what they did not want. Both countries have displayed a certain psychology of detachment that may have had something to do with this similarity of "national character" that puzzles us. We can point to other factors which more directly helped to build the cultural likeness between the two peoples: Both peoples have been nourished by a common heritage of ideas of justice and the dignity of the individual; both have cherished Christian ideals; both have read the same literature and their ears are attuned to the same music. Yet this line of thought is treacherous indeed. Much of it applies with equal validity to the Germans, the Irish, the French. Furthermore, it implies that today's similarities also existed in earlier centuries. But Norway, at the opening of the nineteenth century, was far different from the Norway of today, and far different also from the America of either 1800 or 1951. The similarities of thought and culture are primarily a phenomenon of recent times. If then we accept the unlikenesses of 1800 and the likenesses of the mid-twentieth century, it is clear that as we seek for the factors producing similarity we must seek them especially in developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries themselves. In a broad way we all recognize and understand many of 86 FRANKLIN D. SCOTT the forces of cultural interchange. We know that a good story told to two traveling salesmen in New York may be in Hollywood in two hours and going the rounds of the Paris cafés in two days. A new gun or a new bomb cannot be kept for long from our most dangerous potential enemy, even by all the power of the Pentagon. A new architectural style or technique belongs to the world as soon as the building has been erected, though it be in Patagonia or in Greenland. But what of the more intangible things - political ideologies , spiritual values, philosophies of life? For such things many carriers are needed, not just one. Marco Polo, for example , was a lone reporter of lands that were utterly strange. People listened...