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Welcome Home Mr Swanson
Swedish Emigrants and Swedishness on Film
By Ann-Kristin Wallengren, Charlotte Merton Nordic Academic Press
Copyright © 2014 Nordic Academic Press and Ann-Kristin Wallengren
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-91-87675-13-3
CHAPTER 1
The movies and emigration to America
An introduction
'Perhaps the most significant event in the history of modern Sweden.' This is how the historian Lars Ljungmark characterizes Swedish emigration to the US in the period 1860–1923. In the academic world this important and revolutionary process has been the focus of much research and literature, and our understanding of the various consequences of emigration is comprehensive and continues to grow. In the general consciousness, both among Swedes in Sweden and among Swedish Americans, Vilhelm Moberg's Karl-Oskar and Kristina are regarded as the archetypical emigrants. Moberg's series of novels and the films by Jan Troell based on them have profoundly influenced public opinion about Swedish emigration to America, and, as Göran Hägg points out, thanks to Moberg the history of emigration has become one of the central Swedish myths or narratives. Thanks to these books and films, the common picture of the Swedish emigrant as a farmer from Småland who emigrated with his family in the mid nineteenth century and settled in Minnesota because it was the state that was much like Sweden, has had an enduring impact, and as late as the mid–1990s the narrative was augmented further by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson's retelling in the form of a musical, Kristina from Duvemåla. However, Moberg's version tells only a limited part of the history of Swedish emigration to the US — even if, as the critic Jens Liljestrand writes, it has 'come to replace the historical facticity'. Between 1840 and 1930 over a million people emigrated from Sweden to North America. The majority of them remained in the US, but it is estimated that up to a fifth returned to Sweden in the years 1875–1925, and even more after 1930. Emigration to America proceeded in waves. The first great wave, if we discount the pioneers who settled in Delaware in the seventeenth century, was formed by pious Jansonites in the 1840s. This was followed by the great hunger-driven emigrations towards the end of the 1860s, the period depicted by Moberg and Troell. By far the greatest number left for the US during the years of mass emigration from 1880 to 1914, an exodus which was so troubling for Sweden that the government not only commissioned a detailed inquiry, but went so far as to found an association whose purpose was to oppose emigration. In the last wave of emigration, people fled the Depression in Sweden during the 1920s.
Is it true that the typical emigrant was a farmer attracted by new land in Minnesota? There were indeed a great many farmers among those who left Sweden, but between 1850 and 1920 fully one-quarter of emigrants were town-dwellers. Emigrant farmers rarely moved directly on to their new farmland in the US; instead, nearly all of them remained in a town or city for a while to earn money, most often in Chicago. The reason why Minnesota and Illinois became home to so many of the immigrant Swedish families was because that was where the limit of cultivation lay at that time; but Swedes also settled in Texas and, later, on the West Coast, mostly around Seattle and in various parts of California. During the later periods of emigration it became increasingly common for immigrants to settle permanently in the cities, and by 1920 Chicago was Sweden's second largest city, ranked according to the number of Swedish inhabitants. Swedish immigrants were often eager to remain in the Chicago area if they had relatives or acquaintances already living there. During the first decades of the twentieth century, only seventeen per cent of immigrants worked as farmers, and in cities and towns they worked in factories or as craftsmen of various kinds. Many Swedes distinguished themselves in the construction industry in particular.
The waves of emigration did indeed include many people from the southern province of Småland, especially from what were then the counties of Jönköping and Kalmar. In many cases emigration was motivated by religion; their home area was characterised by fervent revivalist and Free Church movements. However, many emigrants also came from other southern provinces (Skåne and Blekinge), central Sweden (Bohuslän, Östergötland, the city of Gothenburg, and, in some periods, Älvsborg) and various regions in the north of Sweden. Most often, emigrants were not entire families, but single men or women, especially during the later waves of emigration. At times, single women between 15 and 29 years old were the most common emigrants, and often found employment as maids or in other forms of domestic service.
In this book I analyse how emigration, emigrants, and returning Swedish Americans have been construed and represented in Swedish film. The focus is on motion pictures from the period 1910–50, and to some extent subsequent developments until around 1980. The picture presented by Swedish movies is an ambivalent one. Emigrants could be seen as traitors to the nation, representing what were perceived as the negative aspects of America — or, as doughty settlers, seeking a new life in a land of opportunity, and returning to Sweden with a modernizing spirit and democratic ideals. Which of these depictions is used is often linked to how the Swedish national identity is valued.
Swedish immigrants to the US created a cultural identity and community through activities such as running their own newspapers, publishing literature from their own publishing houses, and staging plays. Swedish Americans also went to the cinema, and Swedish films were imported for showing to Swedish American groups, both privately and through distribution companies. In this book I will analyse the films chosen by the Swedish immigrants for distribution, how and where these films were shown, and how they were reviewed in the press. I will then go on to discuss those aspects of the old country that were chosen for reproduction — those that Swedish Americans wished to remember and identify with, and which became a part of a transnational Swedish American identity. I consider notions of Swedishness and representations of America and Sweden, and how, in the light of those representations, those who emigrated to America were portrayed in film, as well as how Swedish Americans regarded their Swedishness and how they construed their transnational cultural identity with the help of the movies. Finally, I take a closer look at how Swedish American women have been depicted in American film, which, given how emigrant women were construed in Swedish movies, makes for an interesting comparison. From this perspective, issues such as cross-dressing, national affiliation, and the depiction of role models are important to study as part of the two film cultures. When it comes to the Swedish context, there has been very little prior research on film, media, and emigration to the US. The representation of Swedish Americans on film is only briefly discussed in Birgitta Steene's article 'The Swedish Image of America', and in H. Arnold Barton's monograph A Folk Divided, with both painting a simplified and cursorily researched picture. Per Olov Qvist, who has studied a wide variety of contextual aspects of Swedish film in the 1930s, mentions Swedish Americans and how inconsistently they are depicted in the movies at that time, but while he gives some examples of typical characterizations, his is not a detailed study of the subject. The showing of Swedish movies among Swedish Americans, and the uses to which they were put, has not been studied at all.
There is more extensive research into the importance of theatre, literature, and the press in the construction of a new migrant identity or in creating a collective memory of the old country. In his dissertation on the image of the US in Swedish prose fiction, Lars Wendelius focuses on the ways in which Swedish Americans were represented — a body of research which I have used extensively. Wendelius has written several monographs and articles in which he discusses Swedish American culture, most notably from the viewpoint of literature, but also in a general cultural sense. The Swedish American theatre — staged performances by the Swedish diaspora and Swedish American artists who toured the US — have been thoroughly analysed by Anne-Charlotte Harvey and Lars Furulund in a number of different publications. Swedish American newspaper publishing has been considered by many historians, including Anna Williams, Lars Furulund, and Ulf Jonas Björk. I will return to this research later in the book.
There is now a considerable amount of research into American immigrant groups and their media, but it rarely has historical ambitions and is often concerned with the production of film and other media in exile. Also, there is not exactly an abundance of research into how emigration and emigrants have been construed and represented within national film traditions. One example is Stephanie Rains's recent The Irish-American in Popular Culture, 1945–2000, which looks at the representation of Irish-American women and men in American film, and at the ways that representations of the Irish family in American film influence memories of the old country. Rains writes about popular culture in general, but gives most weight to visual representations. The most extensive literature of all concerns Italian immigrants in American film; one example would be the research of Giorgio Bertellini.
Even though a historical perspective is not particularly common in studies of emigration as it appears in film and other media, there are many similarities between the historical situation and how today's exile groups use film and media to maintain various forms of contact with their homelands. Here the film and media scholar Hamid Naficy has been very influential, and although mainly concerned with how Iranians in the US today use Iranian television, there are surprising parallels with how Swedish Americans used and described feature films and documentary shorts made by Swedish filmmakers between 1920 and about 1950. This reveals the similarities between the Swedes' situation as immigrants in the US and today's immigrants in Sweden: the Swedes in the US were segregated, not least in the cities; they founded ethnic and cultural associations to strengthen their identity and to maintain solidarity in the face of other immigrant groups; they founded their own schools, universities, churches, and congregations; and they used media of various types to keep in touch with the culture of their homeland. The satellite dishes which are to be found on nearly every balcony in the areas of Swedish cities with a high proportion of immigrant residents are not a new phenomenon — the immigrant Swedes in the US maintained contact with the home country and built their new identities using the same cultural practices.
Swedish emigration to the US was a national trauma, which was taken up and addressed in the cultural sphere, including in movies. Film, an art form which is at once popular, commercial, and artistic, has a rare ability to capture general attitudes, opinions, and ideas. Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of those who have shown how narratives can attempt, in a symbolic sense, to solve or deliberate upon social or political problems, for example, issues based upon ethnicity, class, or gender. These issues are construed through such narratives as unavoidable or natural. Analysis can elucidate these practices, and film, which is both a system of representation and a narrative structure, richly rewards an ideological analysis.
It is important to bear in mind that films do not simply reflect real-world relationships or values, neither does reality contain intrinsic or self-evident truths with which the fictional world of film is bound to align. My theoretical starting-point is that films express, represent, and construe national and cultural identities, as well as ideas, thoughts, and opinions that are prevalent in a society at various historical moments. In agreement with theories of culture and constructionism, my understanding is that art, culture, and society mutually influence one another — culture is not just a reflection of societal relations, but rather it is the case that cultural expressions are to the highest degree the co-creators of attitudes and ideologies. As Jostein Gripsrud writes, representations always present something in a particular way, and so representation always also involves construction. The media reproduce and reinforce prevailing attitudes and ideological dispositions, and are therefore co-creators of the content of those ideas and attitudes, as well as their cultivation, survival, or propagation. In accordance with the English-speaking school of cultural studies, whose view of the media and society has been discussed by Stuart Hall in a number of publications, the starting-point for my analysis is that cultural expressions are representations of our culture and our society, but that such expressions both describe cultures and societies and propagate and form them. This also captures what is for me an ideological–critical stance: a critique of ideology should expose representations that favour a dominant group and highlight how that group presents its own representations as common sense and generally accepted truths. This practice is plainly in evidence in the Swedish film industry's productions.
The theoretical basis of this book, and an analytical screen for various analyses, is provided by a sort of ideological conglomerate, consisting of the concepts 'nationalism', 'nation', 'Swedishness', 'ideology', 'identity', and 'citizenship'. Discourses on what is national, on nationalism, and on the phenomena related to them, were very prominent in Swedish movies about migration and migrants, at least as late as the 1950s. As soon as the concept of the 'nation' is raised, it becomes hard to avoid taking into account Benedict Anderson, and his idea of an imagined community and the media-based discourse connected with this conceptualized affinity. Anderson and other sociologists argue that media-based communication was of crucial importance for the construction of the national consciousness and a national identity. That is, 'the collective consumption of mediated communication serves to create a sense of national community'.
For Anderson, who was writing about the growth of European nations, the printed word was the medium that had the greatest importance in nation-building, and in developing a sense of unity among members of a nation that could only be imagined. Thomas Elsaesser and others who study film have pointed out that it is a dangerous simplification to apply Anderson's discussions wholesale to other mass media, and argue that his theories are more useful when applied to television than to film. Others, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm in his book Nations and Nationalism, have emphasized the identity-creating power of film. Hobsbawm notes that during the twentieth century people 'had new opportunities to identify with their nation with the help of the new forms of expression found in the modern, urbanizing high-technology society. Two important examples should be noted. The first ... was the birth of modern mass media: the press, the cinema, and radio. Through these popular ideologies could be standardized, given a unified form, remodelled, and, of course, also used as deliberate propaganda by states or private interests.' The media scholar David Morley, who has extensively studied the media, memory, and identity, and the sociologist Kevin Robins, have noted that the visual media are crucial intermediaries of the national identity: 'Film and television media play a powerful role in the construction of collective memories and identities.' For Sweden in particular, the ethnologist Orvar Löfgren, among others, has studied the role of the media in nation-building.
The literature on the nation and film has often been concerned with how movies could be nation-specific in an aesthetic sense, or what characterized a particular national film culture — often, how it distinguished itself from Hollywood productions. Since 1980, this field of research has concentrated more on the ways in which films are expressions of national or cultural discourses. I wish to show how Swedish film played an active part in the national discourse, in the building of a national identity according to which it was necessary to share particular values and norms perceived as specifically Swedish in order to be a genuine citizen (which did not prevent other national film cultures from regarding the same attitudes as characteristic of their national mentality too, of course). There was a strong sense in which Sweden should be seen as the foremost nation, Swedish characteristics should be regarded as the most lofty and moral, and striving for homogeneity was manifest.
The first research on national film was essentialist in character, in that it investigated films' narratives, iconography, and recurrent ideas with the aim of saying something about each nation's values and opinions. Since then, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and others have introduced the constructionist stance common in cultural studies. I too base my analyses on a constructionist line of reasoning, although the conceptual world of the movies is almost entirely essentialist. Films present the nation, national identity, and their characteristics as biological or essentialist, while I see them as being fundamentally constructionist.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Welcome Home Mr Swanson by Ann-Kristin Wallengren, Charlotte Merton. Copyright © 2014 Nordic Academic Press and Ann-Kristin Wallengren. Excerpted by permission of Nordic Academic Press.
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