Abstract
The ’love and hate’ of American democracy is a global and historical phenomenon and feeling. In Experiencing American Democracy (ExAm), the research group will explore how this unfolded and was evoked for Nordic men and women, their communities and organizations, commemorations and narratives, from the early 1800s until the present. Few countries have had more emigrants traveling to the United States than the Scandinavians. This provides a unique possibility to study the role of migration for the conceptions, circulations and commemorations of American democracy as lived and everyday experiences through a transatlantic public sphere.
By examining interchanges between Scandinavia and America on the level of individuals, communities and organizations (and not just governments and states), the ExAm group aims to produce new understandings of how and why American democracy has been and continues to be a forceful ‘emotive’ in the political discourse of Nordic societies. ExAm brings together scholars from the faculty of humanities, theology and law and utilizes digitization methodologies in the study of literary, historical and contemporary material. The aim is to yield the role of American democracy for Nordic societies, mindsets, men and women in a transatlantic, historical perspective, and explore the interconnectedness of emigration and Americanization.
1: Background, objectives and relevance
Nordic history books and studies of transatlantic relations tend to regard Americanization as a post-war phenomenon (ex. Kipping & Bjarnar 1998, Byrkjeflot 2002, Hagemann, 2004 Thue 2006, Danielsen 2022). The emergence of the United States as global hegemon, boosted by Marshall aid, American jazz, youth culture and the later Vietnam War protests, was identified as a key or important force in shaping contemporary Scandinavia. The upshot is that the two centuries long relationship between the United States and Scandinavia – whether at the level of the individual, family, community, market or state – is seldom acknowledged. Specifically, American democracy – as ‘America’ itself – has since its birth in the 18th century been a (contested) point of reference for the world, including Nordic societies. It has been, and continues to be, admired and despised, celebrated and criticized, and for highly different and changing reasons. This suggests that American society and democracy can be viewed not only as an idea, but also as an ‘emotive’ (Reddy 2001: 104) in the political discourse of the world, due to its ongoing ability to arouse intense feelings of love and admiration, hate and contempt.
The interdisciplinary research group Experiencing American Democracy (ExAm) asks what the global phenomenon and feeling of ‘love and hate’ of American democracy has had to say for the Nordic societies − and Norway and Norwegians in particular. Specially, we will study how processes of American democratization were viewed, experienced and felt ‘from below’ over sustained periods of time, and how these experiences factored into both the Americanization of Nordic societies and aversion to the United States. In doing so, the ExAm group questions conventional notions of Americanization as a post-war event led by American authorities, diplomats and market interests, seeking to frame it as a longue durée process, which accelerated after large-scale European and Scandinavian migration and inter-continental travel.
With close to 50 million Nordic and European emigrants in the 19th and early 20th century, itself an unprecedented social phenomenon in modern history, there was diverse participation in the first “great experiment” in mass contemporary democracy − the United States. The Norwegian and Swedish emigration rate were exceptional – only Ireland experienced emigration at a relatively higher level (Connolly 2022). Around 3 million Scandinavians emigrated, with approximately 800,000 Norwegians alone departing for North America between 1830 and 1920, while as much as a fifth may have re-migrated (Wyman 1993: 80).
Many of those emigrating from the Nordic region reflected and reported back upon their lives in American society and its political system, voicing their own experiences and feelings in “the country of freedom” – constituting a communicative double and reflexive movement of “going back and forth and coming back” between the USA and Scandinavia (Markovits et al. 2006: 2-3, Marklund & Petersen 2013). This movement of accounts of American democracy contributed to what Henrik Mathiesen has identified as a transatlantic public sphere (Mathiesen 2021). The mass exodus arguably made the Scandinavian countries “Emigrant nations”, a concept embracing population at home and also abroad, beyond territorial borders, in transatlantic communities (Choate 2008:3).
The ExAm group aims to study, over longer periods of time, these Nordic encounters with American democracy following Fung’s four “major conceptions of democracy – minimal, aggregative, deliberative, and participatory” (Fung 2007: 448). In doing so, the group seeks to better understand democracy and democratization of society as an embodied and lived experience, an everyday phenomenon and its broader impacts. While Dzelzainis and Livesey (2013) explored the contestations of American democracy in British culture, the ExAm group aims to investigate how and by who these contestations were articulated, expressed and depicted among Scandinavian immigrants, expatriates and travelers in the USA, and if and how they circulated back and inflected Norwegian and Nordic societies, public and political debates, collective memories, and narratives from the early 1800s until the current days.
Through this work, the ExAm group contributes to several tracks of the UiO:Democracy program. First, it relates directly to Track 5: Democracy in everyday life by exploring the phenomenology of Scandinavian immigrants’ arrival in a society of a nascent and ambitious political democracy, and how these experiences differed according temporally (when they emigrated) and spatially (where they immigrated to in the United States and made their living – e.g., urban vs rural, East vs West, North vs South). Moreover, the ExAm project identifies how Nordic experiences of American democracy changed over time according to the integration of Scandinavian immigrants into American society, and in sync with transformations in American constitutionalism, political systems, and citizenship. While the experiences of Scandinavians, from all walks of life, moving from ‘the old world’ in ‘the new world’, and back again, provides unique takes on the vision of Track 5, the project also addresses Track 1: Democracy as form of governance and the institutions of democracy, as it provides empirical and normative accounts of citizens on how they encountered democratic governance in a formative and influential period. Finally, by moving the perspective from the level of governments and states to organizations and citizens, included those without formal political power yet with resources to act politically in the everyday, the project is also relevant for the track 2, Citizens, diversity, and inequality. Formal political rights have never been a precondition for political action, and the ExAm group will devote particular attention to ‘dissident citizens’ (Sparks 1997).
2: Knowledge needs, novelty and ambition
While vast and long-standing research into transatlantic migration has provided significant insight into the migratory experience, we know less about USA as a space for democratic learning and critique, in particular how American democracy was experienced, talked about, and felt in the everyday life on both sides of the Atlantic. In hundreds of thousands of letters, numerous of them reprinted and distributed widely, migrants writing home typically compared and criticized European and American societies (Mathiesen 2021). Yet, there are few studies of how such criticism was received, including on topics of how race and whiteness factored into Nordic encounters, discourses and memories of America and American democracy. More recent analyses have demonstrated a range of fruitful perspectives on the transatlantic dimensions of Norway and Norwegian political discourses (Mathiesen 2021, Okkenhaug & Skeie 2022; Frydenlund, Hamre, & Avelin 2020; Frydenlund, Hamre, Avelin 2021; Joranger 2021; Mestad 2017; Olson 2012, Rath 2023). Contributions such as these suggest, but have not directly addressed, the consequences of migration for homeland political discourse. Like older attempts to describe and analyze consequences of migration for Norway (Skard 1976), they identify the challenges and thus invite further investigations into the early ‘Americanization’ of Nordic political discourses, public debates and commemorations, and as ground for the later USA-initiated Americanization of Europe in the post-war years. The historiography on emigration to the USA has lately also been influenced by the ‘racial turn’ (Ignatiev 1995, Thaler 1997, Brodkin 1998, Riall 2022). Sverdljuk et. al. (2021) provides, for instance, evidence of how whiteness impacted identity formation among Scandinavians in the USA; Jensen (2021) explores the effects of the identification with ‘white people’ among Nordic immigrants in the USA had on Norwegian-American Sami people; Larsen (2021) examines American suffragists use of the ‘white’ Scandinavia when campaigning for the federal vote; while Kjebekk (2020) shows how the concept ‘ethnic Norwegian’, gaining force in Norwegian political debate from the 1990s, was first used by Norwegian-Americans as part of the ethnic revival of many Americans in the 1960s.
In excavating and analyzing these exchanges and influences, the ExAm group will draw upon a wide range of theories, given its members belong to different traditions of research in the humanities, social science, and law, including history, literature, gender and media studies, sociology and theology. In addition, critical theories of various kinds, including feminist and gender studies, postcolonial studies and research on religion, class and race are particularly relevant for the project, as is transnationalism and the transnational turn and conceptual history. Notably, the project borrows key concepts from the history of emotions such as ‘emotive’, emotional community (Rosenwein 2000) and emotionology (Stearns & Stearns 1985), which means the social rules for expressing (or suppressing) ones likes and dislikes within a socially coherent, yet diverse group – as were Scandinavian immigrants in the USA. Likewise, theories concerning circulation of ideas, knowledge and practices, world views and societal models serve as a premise for the project, especially the assumption that circulation not only facilitates the transformation of what is being circulated (Sarasin 2011), but information and experience moves back and forth in double movements (Markovits et al. 2006: 2-3). Last but not least, the ExAm group is inspired by studies of memory, which enables the exploration of the role of Nordic migration for the conceptions, circulations and commemorations of American democracy as lived and everyday experiences, ‘from below’, and on both sides of the Atlantic.
The main aims of ExAm:
- to bridge the gaps in the research on Scandinavian migration to the USA by relating it to the history of Nordic encounters of American democracy and the later Americanization of Nordic societies.
- to develop an analytical framework and suitable methodologies based on a combination of digital tools, distant reading, close reading, hermeneutics, and media-analysis, to investigate empirically the interchanges between Scandinavia and America on the level of individuals, organized communities, and civic organizations, with a focus on how they expressed, depicted and voiced their own experiences and feelings for American democracy and legacies.
- to follow how these expressions circulated among Scandinavian Americans and with others, and across the Atlantic to relatives and communities back home in a transatlantic public sphere, and how it differed not only over time but according to context and power, networks and citizenship available to the Scandinavian individuals and actors within the multi-ethnic republic that the USA constituted in the 1800s.
- to produce new understandings of how and why American democracy has been and continues to be an emotive, an ambivalent reference in the political discourses of the Nordics, and how post-war Americanization as political, economic and cultural events were no more than “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs”, to quote Fernand Braudel (1981: 21) in the history of Nordic encounters with American democracy.
3: Empirical object of study and key pillars
The scope of the activities and work packages (see below) includes refinement of theories, methods, research and communication, and will cross all main periods in the history of Nordic migration to the USA from the early 1800s until present days. The first, main phase, at least in a Norwegian context, started in the mid 1820s and lasted until the Homestead Act of 1862 provided federal land grants to Western settlers. This second phase which took off in the 1860s was characterized by mass migration from Scandinavia to the USA, due to improved communication technologies, the rise of migration agencies and tourism, intensified contact and interaction between Nordic and American civil organizations and public intellectuals, and increased re-migration back to Scandinavia. This phase lasted until US authorities in the early 1920s, and throughout the interwar years, introduced tighter restrictions on immigration, which coincided with new laws of racial segregation. The third phase of post-war migration was related to the emergent role of USA as political world power, and as a forerunner of major developments in technology and science, higher mass-education, manufacturing, and business. During this period, new groups of Scandinavians left for the USA to study, work, live and many to return.
Combining analytical novelty with mixed methods, the ExAm group allows for studying American democracy as it was experienced by ‘the many’, and by Scandinavian immigrants in the USA, as much as by central historical actors travelling to “the land of promise”, or the “Athens of America” as the Norwegian feminist activist Aasta Hansteen described it (Holm 2024 forthcoming). Actors such as Hansteen, the author and women’s movement activists Frederika Bremer, the liberal oriented diplomat and state servant Ole Munch Ræder and the radical labor activists Marcus Thrane and Louis Pio (Rasmussen 2023), to mention some of the early Scandinavians travelling to the USA studied in this project, were and are still relatively well known to the Nordic public. Their experiences with American democracy have never been related and compared with those of ‘ordinary’ Scandinavian emigrants in the way the ExAm project does however, to better understand how they shaped Nordic societies as these experiences circulated through a transatlantic public sphere.
Narrowing down the project to the study of key Scandinavian historical actors, central movements and organizations, such as the labor movement, the feminist movement, the church reform movement and Nordmands-Forbundet and its Nordic counterparts, and communities and states where Scandinavians settled and visited, the ExAm group aims to renew the migration historiography on Scandinavia and the USA.
To provide structure for the work ahead and ground for academic outputs, and other forms of dissemination, the ExAm project is divided into three interconnected thematic work packages and one cross-cutting theme which will be coordinated by project core group members. All work packages will form the basis for publications, public outreach and dissemination (see below and Milestones).
Key pillars (I-IV)
I: Conceptions of American democracy. A guiding idea for the ExAm project, is that American democracy was and continues to serve as an example to follow and avoid in Scandinavian political debates, contingent on the prevailing political dynamics in both spheres. This multivalent nature of the experience invites us to explore how ‘American democracy’ worked as a concept and model among American-Scandinavians and others, asking who invoked it, how, when, where, with what aims. Knowing that democracy was a highly contested, ambiguous, and abstract concept until the mid-19th century, with its associations to popular and direct sovereignty, the ExAm project asks to what extent and how peoples’ experiences with American democracy later helped transforming it into a specific concept for political action in a Nordic context. American constitutionalism was essential for the development and growth of Norwegian constitutionalism, and was an important source of modern political and legal ideas up and until the civil war and afterwards (Slagstad 1995, Smith 1995, Helgadóttir 2006). The studies in this work package will examine the different ways how Scandinavians made sense of this novel, energetic, and unconventional America – the America of liberty and slavery – and its seeds for the emerging ‘love and hate’ relationship. What did Scandinavians, here and over there, see in this peculiar and complex mirror?
II: Circulations of experiences. This theme addresses the wider implications of transatlantic mobility of people, civic organizations and prominent actors and their lived experiences, focusing mainly on the period 1825-1925, but also in the years following. The mass exodus from Scandinavia strongly influenced politics in the home countries, including discourses on emigration and civil society initiatives. Seeing the Scandinavian countries as “Emigrant nations”, a concept that embraces populations across nation state borders (Green and Weil 2007, Choate 2008, Riall 2022), the studies in this work package will examine the capillary networks created by emigration and expatriation, tying the Scandinavian countries in myriads of ways to societies overseas. How were experiences of migration and democracy expressed in the public sphere, by civil organizations and individuals, and how did transatlantic mobility factor into, or help create transatlantic public – and semi-public – spheres for the circulation of Nordic encounters of American democracy? Contributions will discuss the interconnected transatlantic crossings of experiences of migration and democracy through transmedial and transnational approaches.
III: Commemorations and use of migration history. This theme addresses commemorations of Scandinavian history in the United States, through monuments, museums, anniversaries, and history writings from the 19th century until today, and the commemoration of emigration to the USA in Scandinavia. An important point of departure for the studies in this work package, is Nora’ (1984) lieux de mémoire. Containing both material and immaterial places of commemoration in the public, this concept and metaphor is well suited to study what Halbwachs (1950) called collective memory. In the transatlantic public sphere, Scandinavians emigrants may have helped create powerful memories, which constantly crossed between the private and the public, the individual and the collective. The question thus is, how do we study memory as social and historical phenomenon under these particular conditions and circumstances? Double historicity is a concept that can help, exploring together both the process of commemorating and what is being commemorated, seeing this process in the context of a transatlantic sphere and a cornucopia of communities engaged in constant commemoration and re-commemoration.
IV: Cross-cutting dimensions: Mixed methods.The ExAm group aims to further sharpen its theoretical and methodological toolkit by developing and sharing experiences with the use of digital methods such as text mining on larger corpuses of literary and historical sources (fiction, periodicals, letters, newspapers, pictures) and initiating OCR-scanning of relevant non-digitized material. An important part of the activities of the ExAm group will be thus devoted to the use of digital tools to make use of already existing as well as proposed digitized resources in cooperation with the Norwegian National Library, as part of the lead-up to the bicentennial celebration in 2025 of Norwegian emigration to the USA. The ExAm project which coincides with this celebration, will cooperate closely with the National Library, especially as it holds a monumental Norwegian-American archive, including Norwegian-American newspapers, literature, and collections of letters. These will be exploited through digital humanities methods in cooperation with the Lab for Digital Humanities at the National Library and members of the ExAm group.
4: Group organization, networks and related projects
The ExAm group is organized to combine empirical analysis with analytical and methodological explorations, and to enhance communication and networks with external audiences and key partners beyond the University of Oslo (UiO). The group is hosted by Department of Archaeology, Conservation, and History (IAKH), in close collaboration with its research group Democracy, Freedom and Boundaries, and brings together an interdisciplinary, historically attuned team of more than 25 researchers, both emerging scholars and established professors. The ExAm scholars from the University of Oslo represent the Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Theology, and the Faculty of Law, working in cooperation with external participants and relevant research projects from across Norway, the Nordic countries, and the United States. The ExAm group thus offers a fruitful scholarly environment for emerging scholars and PhD candidates, including the PhD scholar hired as part of the project.
ExAm will be managed by a coordinating interdisciplinary core group consisting of project leaders Hilde Sandvik and Eirinn Larsen (history and gender studies, IAKH), Ruth Hemstad (history, the Norwegian National Library), Terje Rasmussen (sociology and media studies, IMK) and Aud Valborg Tønnessen (theology, TF). All have extensive experiences in leading research projects and communicating with the public on TV, Radio, podcasts and through public lectures. In addition, a research assistant/project coordinator will be hired to help with the daily running of the project together with the leaders.
The research group consists of several scholars at the host department IAKH: Elisabetta Cassina Wolff, Steinar Sæther, Eirik Wig Sundvall, Byron Rom-Jensen, Sunniva Engh, Øystein Sørensen, Mikael Lyngaas, Mona Holm, Odd Arvid Storsveen and Henrik Olav Mathiesen; and from the Faculty of Law Ola Mestad (legal history). From other Norwegian and Nordic institutions: Nils Olav Østrem (history), Anna Bohlin (literature), Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger (history), Marthe Hommerstad (history), Jana Sverdljuk (gender studies), Bård Frydenlund (history), Per Kristian Aschim (church history), Siv Ringdal (cultural history) Helge Danielsen (history), Jørn Brøndal and Anders Bo Rasmussen (American studies), Dag Blanck (American studies), Torbjörn Nilsson (history) and from US: Daron W. Olson (history). Many of these and a wider network of scholars are already involved in the planned publications.
The ExAm project coincides with the bicentennial celebration of Norwegian emigration to the US in 2025 and the group will cooperate closely with key partners of the celebration, such as the Bicentennial Committee, the Norwegian Emigrant Museum at Ottestad/Hamar, the Norwegian Constitutional Museum Eidsvoll 1814 and the National Library of Norway.
Research output, teaching initiative and dissemination
The ExAm group will publish its findings in two monographs, two edited volumes (one in Norwegian and one in English and both have been initiated already), peer-reviewed articles and one peer-reviewed special issue of an international journal. In addition, one edited source collection will be prepared as part of the project on published letters from Norwegian emigrants.
Connected to the planned publications and in collaboration with established research groups, annual workshops and seminars are organized. In addition, we will arrange a major transatlantic conference in 2025 as part of the bicentennial celebration of Norwegian emigration to the USA. Important research and stakeholder networks are furthermore the American Studies Association of Norway (ASANOR), the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS), and the Norwegian-American Historical Association (NAHA), together with their publication channels. The ExAm research group will apply for a further, more extensive research project through RCN’s FRIPRO call late 2023 and CAS in 2024.
The ExAm group will develop one or several courses designed specifically to let students ‘practice’ history and commemoration of Nordic encounters of American democracy in Scandinavia and the USA by cooperating and contributing with the Norwegian Emigrant Museum at Ottestad, the Norwegian Constitutional Museum Eidsvoll 1814 and the Norwegian National Library. We will direct students as well as project members to contribute towards the local history wiki. Additionally, core members are supervising students on relevant themes on BA, MA and PhD levels.
The ExAm group intends to cooperate with the free online resource Norgeshistorie.no, University of Oslo, which for several years have produced radio programs and podcasts for the Norwegian state radio channel, NRK P2. Under the headline “Amerika & oss/America & us”, the ExAm group will communicate and help celebrate the 2025 jubilee with new knowledge and approaches to enhance the level of critical thinking, including generally around the jubilee, why the year ‘2025’ is to be celebrated, and how questions of democratic governance formed an important part of the resulting transnational public sphere. These and other kinds of activities will bring the ExAm group in direct contact with the public. As part of the bicentennial, the project will also initiate a public meeting to discuss historical and present-day experiences of migration and transnational communities in a dialogue with immigrants, politicians, and scholars from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. This will provide important input and tools for further research on global migration and its impact on Norwegian and Nordic societies and democracies today as in the past.
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