Socialist Dissent Among Norwegian Americans: Emil Lauritz Mengshoel, Newspaper Publisher and Author

Abstract

2 Socialist Dissent Among Norwegian Americans: Emil Lauritz Mengshoel, Newspaper Publisher and Author by Odd-Stein Granhus In the autumn of 1941 the new editor of Nordisk Tidende of Brooklyn, Carl Soyland, traveled among his fellow Norwegian Americans to record the life stories and viewpoints of some of them, which the following year would be presented as a series of interviews in his newspaper under the heading "Whom Do We Meet?" On leafing through the subscription file for Minneapolis, he had come across a name- E. L. Mengshoel - that triggered a memory of caustic letters to the editor written in curious old-fashioned handwriting. They had maintained, among other things, that it would do no harm if Norwegian Americans, as descendants of Vikings, had a little more of their Viking forefathers' spirit.1 In Minneapolis, Soyland, tempted by the strong opinions and colorful style of his contributor, found a thin, silverhaired man in his mid-seventies with a rugged face. In his bedsitting room, surrounded by his bed, a gas stove, some bookshelves , and a piano, the old man was at his little desk reading Cervantes' Don Quixote in Spanish through a magnifying glass, supported by a Spanish dictionary and a notebook for especially difficult words.2 The walls were decorated with his own oil paintings, and enthroned on top of his piano were busts of Bjornstjerne Bjornson and Henrik Ibsen. Although Soyland had become used to the multifarious 27 28 Odd-Stein Granhus tastes of his compatriots in America, he had rather expected the Pentateuch than this, he remarked drily. During the interview old Mengshoel informed him that they were in fact colleagues ; in his time he had written and privately published two novels, he had worked on and edited three NorwegianAmerican newspapers himself as well as publishing his own socialist weekly for twenty-two years. He had retired from his job with the Minneapolis General Electric Company a couple of years earlier, a job he had held since his newspaper ceased publication in 1925. A TELLER OF TALL TALES About his background he told Soyland that he was only half Norwegian; his mother was Hungarian and only sixteen years old when she came to Norway with a band of Gypsies. His father had been a law student but was shipped off to America as the black sheep in his family when he fathered the illegitimate child. One year after his birth, Mengshoel had been taken away from his young mother and was from then on raised by his paternal grandparents. Because of conflicts with his grandparents, he broke with them in his early twenties and went to sea. In November, 1891, he jumped ship in Pensacola, Florida, and got a job as a handyman with the county surveyor in Alcoo, Alabama, over the winter. There he happened to meet in person a famous boyhood friend of his employer - Mark Twain! - who spent a couple of months with the family Mengshoel worked for and stayed with. Mengshoel could converse with him daily. As a matter of fact he had a fifty-page manuscript about this and other adventures of his youth, he revealed to Soyland. Needless to say, the colorful socialist editor charmed his colleague at Nordisk Tidende , who promised his readers that Mengshoel's interesting reminiscences would soon appear in his newspaper. He told them about his recent meeting in a coffee shop in New York with the Norwegian Labor party prime minister, Johan Nygaardsvold, exiled because of the German occupation of his homeland. Nygaardsvold had told him about his years in America, working on the railroad in Socialist Dissent Among Norwegian Americans 29 Oregon in 1903-1904. When Soyland asked him if he had read any Norwegian- American newspapers at that time, the prime minister confirmed that he had subscribed to several of them, but the one he remembered best was one called Gaa Paa , edited by someone called Mengshoel. Carl Soyland's article ends on a wistful note: "What a strange world. Today Nygaardsvold is an exiled prime minister of a country under the heel of her enemy. The world is in flames. Mengshoel sits old and quiet in his room reading about Don Quixote who...