Dakota Made

ONE Scandinavian is an enigma, two form a society, three become a political minority and in time a state. The binding force is a dream. Consider North Dakota. In the foreground a bleak, unpainted house — sun-beaten, shadeless, surrounded by horizons of wheat. Two old people with sun blotches on their faces, like the color of rust clots on a head of fine wheat, sit at a meal. A large line from the cheek to the corner of the mouth is the characteristic mark of the man. It is a furrow his plough might have made. Stooped over a potato-filled plate, overalls smelling of work, he eats, tired. The woman, full from the waist down, hides the mailorder-house chair. Wrinkles, few born of smiles, hide her years. She squints over a Scandinavian newspaper published in Grand Forks. The silence is stirred only by a dream that seeps out of her slitted eyes. North Dakota is far away to her; it is too close to him.

Here is enigma, society, dream. Travel the high-centred gravel roads from Jamestown to Bismarck, from Minot to Williston, from Devils Lake to Grand Forks, and you find many such bits of the old world. The dream may be a mist to the enigma, but it is an unmistakable adhesion to society. It keeps these old people on a lonely farm. It builds communities. It segregates these people in certain sections of every town. The dream hangs about the pictures in the carefully sealed parlors. It causes ploughing men to curve a furrow or watch a cloud. It hovers about a street corner in Fargo as two business men greet each other in melodious Swedish. It brings people together on Sunday. A smörgåsbord, a cup of coffee, will start the very movement of a dream. The smell of fish, the glisten of snow, the skis of a boy, the talk of a neighbor — all these re-create an old idea. Some fiddler with old songs at his bow’s end will catch the resonance of some group and start feet a-dancing to the dream.

Ever since I have lived in North Dakota I have wondered: why America for these? These two old people, these Sunday afternoons, these dreams — why? Anyone can see wonderment flying in and out of everything. It is not a wonderment of fear, nor of poverty. They have money: hear those cartwheels clink as they dance? They own more land than they ever rented in Scandinavia. Their children, Jon, Per, and Thelma, graduate from the university. Each year the Swansons have a new car, the Jensens a new radio. The Nords go home to Sweden every other summer. All of them have kept abreast of America. They seem content. But isn’t it a bit bewildering to grow old in a new country? As I’ve watched a certain longing come from out the twilight to their eyes, I’ve often wondered.

Much of this first longing deepens into a larger dream. It loses itself in the desire these people have for their children. When the need to finger older things comes; when the western loam is much too deep, too sticky, and too black; when the feel for smaller farms, for husbanded trees, for unyielding soil comes — then is the time to think of sons and daughters. Perhaps it is hard to change a dream of the mother country into a dream for one’s children. But there is less heartache that way, and more work can be done.

Eventually, by the process of wishing, this dream becomes the song of youth. These college sons and daughters, with their fine training and their fine clothes — they are worth boasting about. The recitation of their success is like a pot of coffee after work. It heightens the sense of expectancy and drugs the sense of recollection.

These youths with dreams to fulfill, these products of crossed visions, what is their dream? Can they allay the fears of loneliness their parents have? The university should give us a partial answer, for here are an inconsiderate group of Scandinavian sons and daughters. Inconsiderate? Yes, because they become either mental berserkers or ploughboys of the western world. They are unique — these Olsons, Thoresons, Lindquists, and Bjorksons. The blond-headed ones, like spring-called dandelions, carry sunlight with them, with their big, animal mouths in smile, their Borglum faces, and their throats shaped to the yoke. Some are as patient and strong as beasts, others quick-tongued and active.

In them the wish their parents had has become a reality. All the dreaming has produced energy. The folks at home could never say these youths are idle. Thor can be seen in football togs hurling the thunderbolts in his shoulders against Yggdrasil’s enemies. Odin mounts the soap box with throaty strength. Loki fingers draw plans for ideal buildings, or fondle figures from a stick of wood. The stage is tramped with Ibsen fervor. Profligate energy, willfulness, pride, are evident in these college people. Are these qualities but the natural zest of youth, or can they be linked in any way to the Scandinavian heritage? Are they all that is left of three hundred years of immigrant struggle?

I wanted to find out, I began, therefore, to analyze two Scandinavian friends of mine. Both had been born in America but bred in the Scandinavian tradition. Ernie looked like the caricaturist’s dream of a Swede. His English pronunciation still retained a mysterious click in it. But he had a talent in his hands. A pencil and a brush lost their aestheticism in his grip, but they drew. ‘Swede’ was always patient with them and with my skepticism.

He taught me a great deal, that artist. I used to sit and watch him work. Hour after hour he would placidly, determinedly letter diplomas, so that, having earned a few dollars, he might work at his own dream. Yet, when he caressed his own easel, there was little abandon in his face. I saw the same placidity, the same evenness of facial muscles, the same enigma. Only a faint darkness in his light blue eyes told me that desire played with his heart.

As I had wondered about his people, so had I wondered of ‘Swede’s’ desires. This patient energy of his, how was it fulfilling the Scandinavian dream? Why did he forget the classroom when the wheatfields were like his hair, and the wand so dry it bit the nostrils sharp-like? That day I saw him crush a head of wheat in his hand and bring the milky paste to his tongue — why? Why did he sometimes fling his books into a corner and sit watching the dusk fade from red to purple, or rub his hands through the dust in a shaft of light?

I came close to finding out one day when his brother came and they talked Swedish by the hour. The softness of that tongue did miracles with ‘Swede’s’ face. Caught in a foreign spell, he lost his university tag, his Americanisms, and his lack of laughter. He seemed almost, nakedly Swedish, a thing of inherent grace. I meant to ask him what they had said, but he had taken a brush and a pair of old shoes and had gone.

My other university friend was a Norwegian, dark and sensitive, ashamed of his betraying tongue and his poor parents. He had a sense of the beauty of things, however, that few of us could even approach. He was ashamed of that, too.

Once out in a windbreak, behind the university’s power plant, we stood looking at uncut underbrush and trees, dying in their heads. I wandered what kind of people had pestered this wind-swept place until trees had grown. He halfturned to me, a cool greenness in his face, and said that perhaps the planters of these trees had carried an image of Norway in the corner of their eyes. Such an image had become a cataract, like the black spot in a bulldog’s eye. It had interfered with their vision, but had filled them with the shadow of trees. These trees were transplanted visions.

I beckoned him further, but he feared the curiosity, the probing. He could not bear the prick of difference. He was ashamed of his foreign insight, his sense of beauty. I met him again yesterday. There was no sadness in his eyes, no green thing. He looked so American, I could not lift one image to disturb.

The problems of these two friends of mine seem fiction. But ‘Swede’ is still wandering somewhere, brush in hand, searching for a strange peace. ‘Norskie’ is penned up in a beautiless office trying to become something he is not, and, unfortunately, succeeding. These are not fiction. While neither one is indicative of the practical task of his race, yet both of them suggest an attempt on their part to satisfy some dream their parents once had. Their inner strength or weakness is but an outcropping of the sensitiveness of their people.

These young people are the third generation, the pre-World War children, the bête noire of the immigrant struggle. Behind them are two generations’ adjustment and maladjustment. Their dissatisfied grandparents, who came to America in the 1870’s and 1880’s, bequeathed them the inward struggle which was the result of their experience. These grandfathers made many North Dakota farms, built flat railroad beds, and strengthened many willowing towns. They gave the second generation birth on American soil. These ‘seconds’ were literally raised with the problem in their mouths. The crosscurrents of both American and Scandinavian life blew over them. They attended American schools and they lived in communities which perpetuated the thought of the old world. Their imaginations were trained to construct from the merest suggestion the proper illusion of Scandinavia. To their children, the third generation, they gave two things: the wounds of the struggle and the salve of time.

Such a life’s mixture filters out a strange psychology in these young men. My most intimate contact with this psychology came in Minot, North Dakota. Here in this Northwest town many Scandinavians hold their song fests, their picnics, church suppers, and political rallies. On such days the air is filled wit h an old-world jargon and a newworld dream. The brilliant colors of Sunday dresses are heightened by the unpressed black cloth of the male attire. Delicious cakes, tasty fish, unusual breads, food and drink of great variety, are heaped upon the old boards of a park table. It is a gala time for everyone but the young people. They must listen to foreign languages as though they understood. Old folk songs with unfamiliar music are supposed to inspire them. They cannot dance with the gusto of the older people. They do not know the old games. They are out of color, in their collegiateAmerican clothes. Grandmother and her circle are a bit ashamed of their ignorance. Their unconcern is attributed to the harmful influence of American schools. The young people are ashamed themselves. They have been born with the desire to mingle but taught the inhibitions that throttle that desire. Consequently they must make a choice: remain in the Scandinavian community among their families, or go, alone.

I have watched this dilemma confront many of the professional men of Minot — men whom I knew as boys, who had never seemed different to me. But when I returned to Minot two years ago I found these friends Scandinavianconscious.

I found Johan pleading a land case in court. His clients were Scandinavians, ignorant of American legal procedure. He was trying to bring Norwegian and American ideas of property into agreement. He had the look of Esau as he listened to his people plead for their land. His inheritance seemed a slight thing to him then, and yet he chose to remain in the uncomfortable mid-channel of duty and desire.

Boyer had an office in the Lutheran Hospital. He had specialized in obstetrics in order to give his people better children. But the years of facing superstitions, old-world cures, and fear had taken his crusade from him. And I noticed a nostalgia about his face as he told me he had given up his people and his task.

Erik, the history shark of our class, was about to leave for Sweden. Two things had formed a cancer in his heart: school-teaching and politics. As a history teacher in the new junior high school he had been accused of radicalism and communism. He told me he had been modifying his language, thwarting his enthusiasm, omitting his conclusions, closing his mind for seven years, solely because his ideal of historical facts, inherited from his liberal father, could not be exposed in the American classroom.

Ole Lund and Erik had tried politics. They had fought Boyesen’s control of the Scandinavians. But the sixty-fiveyear-old boss, with his rural similes, his farm sense, and his grain philosophy, had been too much for them. He had known the vote formula, they had not. The older people had called Ole and Erik disloyal upstarts and had crushed them. Erik was going to Sweden and to no more dreaming.

This meeting with my friends is now two years behind me. Since then I have thought about their problem. It is such a personal thing, this third generation’s enigma. I am not much closer to it now than I was years ago in Miss Kelly’s home room. They were carefree then; now each is faced with an inheritance that keeps coming to the surface. They are out there in that western section of North Dakota, on the rim of the most desolate country I have ever seen, trying to find an answer. Everything reminds them of their past. When the wind blows fine snow in their faces and the stars are as clear as a baby’s eyes, they must be very close to some distant land two generations removed. When the wheat that promised so much in June is thin and heat-colored in July, and all the sky billows with waves of copper sunshine, they must dream of ancient water against a coast, or pines smelling of cool earth. They cannot escape that which has been born in them.

It is these sensitive ones who make the problem interesting. The many who have become Americans in thought and practice have not such tragic faces. Always they seem to have lived in those clapboard houses, with their store furniture, their modern kitchens, their comfortable but nondescript surroundings. None of the pioneer glamour is near them. But these misfits of mine have all the freshness of the adventurer. Their grandfathers conquered the wind with a mud house, conquered the soil with willful vigilance. Their fathers fought to keep their inheritance. These friends must fight for life. The task is just as difficult as of old, and almost the same. The ‘dumb Swede’ may have become the smart farmer, the ‘crafty Norwegian ‘ may have become the politician or the statesman, but the dreaming pioneer of the third generation is still unnamed. To North Dakota and to me he is but an enigma.