<p>The aim of this thesis is to shed light upon the construction of identity within the Swedish- Canadian immigrant group during the first half of the 20th century. The most important sources of ethnic and nationalistic influences this study scrutinizes are the homeland Sweden, Swedish-America, Scandinavian-Canada and the Canadian host society. It also examines the interaction with other social identities, such as gender and religion. Theoretically, this dissertation takes its point of departure in Fredrik Barth’s assumptions on cultural boundaries and ethnic grouping, which emphasizes the meeting and confrontation with other groups as a trigger in the development of a new ethnic identity. The study is carried out on three partly interacting levels: the individual, the organizational and the official/ rhetorical level.</p><p>On the individual level, the first generation Swedes in Canada was probably as Swedish as they could be concerning identity, culture and social networks. But as it turned out, the shattered Swedish immigration, the vast and often hardly passable Canadian landscape, together with indirect help from the Canadian government, would prevent an extensive establishment of ethnic organizations. The surplus of single Swedish-Canadian men also affected the transference of Swedishness negatively in the change of generations.</p><p>The intense dialogue with Swedish America, mostly conducted through the Augustana Synod and the Vasa Order, contributed to a new sense of Swedishness. Both these Swedish- American organizations had “Diaspora ambitions” and they relatively soon established a certain cooperation with the pan-Swedish movement in Sweden. Women played an important social, economical as well practical role in both secular and religious organizational life. Many Swedish-Canadians congregations and organizations would have had no future, if not for the women’s commitment.</p><p>Swedish rhetoric on the official level was carried out by men, to men, in a male language and imaginary. In this context the term Swede thus became synonymous with Swedish man. Both outspoken desires from the Swedish homeland and its actual internal development were considered and reformulated in Swedish-Canadian rhetoric. When the nationalistic discourse changed in Sweden, the Swedish-Canadian rhetoric changed in the same direction. Swedes in Canada also responded to ethnic competition, especially from Norwegians, by trying to define how the two related groups differed. Of certain importance was the signals given from the host society. With a general suspicion of foreign elements together with a demand for assimilation, the Canadian government seems to have hastened the integration process of Swedish-Canadians.</p>

The aim of this thesis is to shed light upon the construction of identity within the Swedish- Canadian immigrant group during the first half of the 20th century. The most important sources of ethnic and nationalistic influences this study scrutinizes are the homeland Sweden, Swedish-America, Scandinavian-Canada and the Canadian host society. It also examines the interaction with other social identities, such as gender and religion. Theoretically, this dissertation takes its point of departure in Fredrik Barth’s assumptions on cultural boundaries and ethnic grouping, which emphasizes the meeting and confrontation with other groups as a trigger in the development of a new ethnic identity. The study is carried out on three partly interacting levels: the individual, the organizational and the official/ rhetorical level. On the individual level, the first generation Swedes in Canada was probably as Swedish as they could be concerning identity, culture and social networks. But as it turned out, the shattered Swedish immigration, the vast and often hardly passable Canadian landscape, together with indirect help from the Canadian government, would prevent an extensive establishment of ethnic organizations. The surplus of single Swedish-Canadian men also affected the transference of Swedishness negatively in the change of generations. The intense dialogue with Swedish America, mostly conducted through the Augustana Synod and the Vasa Order, contributed to a new sense of Swedishness. Both these Swedish- American organizations had “Diaspora ambitions” and they relatively soon established a certain cooperation with the pan-Swedish movement in Sweden. Women played an important social, economical as well practical role in both secular and religious organizational life. Many Swedish-Canadians congregations and organizations would have had no future, if not for the women’s commitment. Swedish rhetoric on the official level was carried out by men, to men, in a male language and imaginary. In this context the term Swede thus became synonymous with Swedish man. Both outspoken desires from the Swedish homeland and its actual internal development were considered and reformulated in Swedish-Canadian rhetoric. When the nationalistic discourse changed in Sweden, the Swedish-Canadian rhetoric changed in the same direction. Swedes in Canada also responded to ethnic competition, especially from Norwegians, by trying to define how the two related groups differed. Of certain importance was the signals given from the host society. With a general suspicion of foreign elements together with a demand for assimilation, the Canadian government seems to have hastened the integration process of Swedish-Canadians.

In the 1880s, capitalism as a social and economic system integrated new geographic areas of the American continent. The construction of the Duluth &amp; Iron Range Railroad (D&amp;IR), financed by a group of Philadelphia investors led by Charlemagne Tower and later owned by the US Steel was part of this emerging political economy based on the exploitation of human and material resources. Migrant labor was in demand as it came cheap and, generally, floated between various construction-sites on the “frontier” of capitalism. The Swedish immigrants were one part of this group of “floaters” during the late 1800s and made up a significant part of the force that constructed and worked on the D&amp;IR between the 1880s and the 1920s. This book deals with power relations between groups based on class and ethnic differences by analyzing the relationship between the Anglo-American bourgeois establishment and the Swedish and other immigrant workers and their children on the D&amp;IR and in the railroad town of Two Harbors, Minnesota. The Anglo-American bourgeois hegemony in Minnesota, to a large extent, dictated the conditions under which Swedish immigrants and others toiled and were allowed access to American society. I have therefore analyzed the structural subordination and gradual integration of workers and, in particular, immigrant workers, in an emerging class society. The book also deals with the political and the cultural opposition to Anglo-American bourgeois hegemony that emerged in Two Harbors and that constructed a radical public sphere during the 1910s. In this process, new group identities based on class and ethnicity emerged in the working class neighborhoods in the wake of the capitalist expansion and exploitation, and as a result of worker agency. Building on traditions of political insurgency an alliance of immigrant workers, particularly Swedes, Anglo skilled workers and parts of the local petty bourgeoisie rose to a position of political and cultural power in the local community. This coalition was held together by the language of class that became the basis of a local multi-ethnic working class identity laying claim to its own version of Americanism. The period of preparedness leading up to the Great War, the war itself, and its aftermath, produced a reaction from the Anglo American bourgeoisie which resulted in a profound change in the public sphere as a coalition between “meliorist middle class reformers”, represented primarily by the YMCA and local church leaders and the D&amp;IR and its program of welfare capitalism launched a broad program to counter socialism locally, and to forge new social bonds that would cut across class lines and ethnic boundaries. By this process, the ethnic working class in Two Harbors was offered entry into American society by acquiring citizenship and by their inclusion in a broader civic community undifferentiated by class. But this could only be realized by the workers’ adoption of an Anglo-American national identity based on identification with corporate interests, a new local solidarity that cut across class lines and a white racial identity that diminished the significance of ethnic boundaries. By these means the Swedish immigrants, or at least a portion of them, became Americans on terms established by the D&amp;IR and its class allies.