by CARL H. CHRISLOCK io Name Change and the Church , 1918-1920 ON the JUNE Norwegian 7, 1918, the Lutheran first biennial Church convention in America, of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America, held in Fargo, North Dakota, resolved to drop the word "Norwegian" from its official name. Constitutional proprieties , however, prevented final action at this time. Formally, the name-change resolution was a constitutional amendment requiring affirmative action by two successive conventions. However, distribution of the vote - 533 for the resolution to 61 against - created a presumption in favor of ratification in 1920. Adverse reaction was widespread and strident. "To judge by the space our papers allocate to the namechange question, the uproar is assuming dimensions that threaten to put both the Nonpartisan League and the war in the shade," wrote one prominent Norwegian American in September.1 While it is hazardous to guess which side initially enjoyed majority support within the constituency , the end of the war in Europe, together with a backlash against the excesses of postwar nativism, seems to have tipped the balance in favor of those wishing to 1 A. H. Lindelie, in Normanden (Grand Forks, North Dakota), September 12, 1918. 194 NAME CHANGE AND THE CHURCH return to the old name. In late September, 1919, a full eight months before the second biennial convention was to meet, the church council, which had initiated the name-change proposal in the first place, recommended that it should not be adopted. The 1920 convention ratified this recommendation by a vote of 577 to 296. In other words, the full name was retained; it would survive until 1946. In that year, the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America was officially rechristened the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, one of the synods that coalesced in 1960 to form the present American Lutheran Church. Few episodes more clearly illuminate the response of Norwegian America to the climate of the World War I period than the so-called name-change controversy. Not that it per se was charged with the significance attributed to it by contemporaries. In the minds of participants, on both sides of the controversy, however, the future of an organization that claimed the allegiance of nearly half a million Norwegian Americans seemed to be at stake.2 Was this church to retain its Norwegian-American orientation , or was it to become an "unhyphenated" American institution, unswervingly loyal to the Lutheran confessions , to be sure, but nevertheless unambiguously "American" and not "foreign" ? The assumption of linkage between this question and the name permeates the entire debate of 1918-1920. History may have invalidated this assumption: in the years following World War I, the NLCA "Americanized" as rapidly while 2 Membership in the NLCA in 1918 totaled 443,563; Beretning om Den norsk lutherske kirkes f0rste extraordinaere faellesm0te avholdt i Fargo , North Dakota fra 6te til 12te juni 1918 , 515 (Minneapolis, 1918). Although some allowance has to be made for non-Norwegian members, the NLCA unquestionably ranked as by far the largest Norwegian-American "ethnic" society . An estimate of the membership of so-called secular societies made in 1914 placed their total at about 60,000; Carl G. O. Hansen, "Det norské foreningsliv i Amerika," in Johs. B. Wist, ed., Norsk-amerikanernes festskrift 1914, 290 (Decorah, Iowa, 1914). 195 Carl H. Chrislock operating under the old name as, for example, the Lutheran Free Church, which never officially designated itself as Norwegian. Nevertheless, if one understands that participants in the debate accepted the notion of linkage between label and orientation, the significance of the controversy to them becomes comprehensible. The maintenance of ethnic consciousness by Norwegian Americans - which the "Americanizers" were happy to sacrifice in deference to other priorities but which Norse enthusiasts passionately desired to reinforce and strengthen - depended substantially on the church. Such ethnic societies as the Sons of Norway, the Norsemen's Federation and, above all, the bygdelag had grown impressively since 1900, but thousands of Norwegian Americans had only one point of contact with their ancestral heritage - the local congregation of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America. This church also provided the Norwegian-American community with a number of essential services not readily available elsewhere. Although a growing...