Hans Gastonvian

Aftonbladet, Sweden

Ellis Island-  1841

Historian- Rebecca Hembarsky

The Difficulties of Immigrating For Swedish Male Immigrants

            In the late 19^th century up until 1929 many Swedish men immigrated to America.  During this time Sweden was in a depression and the United States offered available land, wide scale employment, religious tolerance, and freedom from mandatory military service.  But not everything about coming to America was great.  For Swedish male immigrants, their immigration experience included the harsh trip over on boat, the difficult admittance in to the U.S., and the problems of making a new life and setting up a house.

            The first big difficulty was the harsh trip over.  In the middle of the 19^th century, many Swedes came to the American shores.  The fare was relatively cheep, only $12-$15 per person on cargo ships with  iron ores.  But even though the fare was cheep providing enough food for the trip was not.  They had to supply food for a 7-10 week trip.  This made the fare so high that it limited passengers to farmers, skilled artisans, and industrial workers.  The price was not the only bad thing about the trip.  Just getting to the ship would take a time and money.  They also couldn’t take most of their valuable things.  When they packed they took clothes, tools, and limited household goods.  Also, immigrants who made this trip were subject to diseases from crowded conditions.  Many suffered from seasickness and according to some accounts one in ten people did not survive the trip. 

This was a bad aspect of immigrating to America but it was not the worst.  According to a man that worked on Ellis Island monitoring incoming shipments of people, things could get very bad.  

“Hysteria over the immoral alien was followed by a two-year panic over the “Hun”.  Again 
inspectors, particularly civilian secret service agents, were given carte blanche to make arrests on suspicion.  Again Ellis Island was turned into a prison, and I had to protect men and women from a hue and cry that was but a little concerned over guilt or innocence.  During these years thousands of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians were taken without trial from their homes and brought to Ellis Island." ¹ 

One young man remembered his experience coming over and how confused he felt.  “Before I left Sweden, I had to go to the doctor and get a clean bill of health; that I had been vaccinated against smallpox.  I remember in the shipyard they checked my head for lice.  If you had lice your hair came off.  In NY we spent three days on the boat because Ellis Island was filled up.  I remember I had a tag on.  We walked like a cattle herded into this great big hall.  They had tables there and they asked you questions in English and, as I remember it, you had to have 50 dollars to show that you weren’t destitute, and there were different rooms.  There were a lot of tan colored rooms and netting to separate them.” ² 

When Swedish immigrants arrived in a community they often sought out other Swedes, and people of their own religion.  They did this because when they first arrived they were looked down upon and often exploited by other citizens of the US.  The church was an important factor in the life of the new immigrants both socially and spiritually.

When Swedes first arrived in the US they headed west because that was where all of the open land was.  Because this was well known in Sweden,  most other Swedes immigrated there too.  After docking,  most Swedes continued westward to settlements in Wisconsin and Illinois.  Most traveled via a combination of steamboat and horse drawn wagon.  Many traveled by rail or boats along the Eerie canal to Buffalo, then by boat across the Great Lakes to the prairie land of the Upper Mississippi Valley or to Chicago.  From there they traveled by wagon in to the heart land of America.  They built log cabins across Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.  The journey took about 4 or 5 months and often exhausted a family’s entire savings.  When arriving in their new homes all the adults in the family usually tried to find work.  One owner of a business said  “The Swedes are highly valued as workers, so highly even that if you go and ask for work they may ask if you are Swedish, in that case you can get work right away.”³  The men usually tried to find work as farm laborers, on the railroads, in construction, as a logger, logging camp cook, farmer, blacksmith, shipwright, or millwright.  Within two or three years they hoped to meet their family goal, which was amassing enough savings to purchase a farm.  But even with all of these skills and high demand most families were not successful and sent back letters of doubt.  But, in the letters they did not tell about the bitter Midwestern winters and about fatal diseases. Choler and malaria, in particular, claimed the live of many children.  So people kept coming looking for a better life.

                Even with the hardships of a harsh trip over on boat, the difficult admittance in to the U.S., and the problems of making a new life and setting up a house, immigrants still came to America.  It lasted until 1929 when the stock market crashed and the Great depression made economic opportunities no more plentiful in America then in Sweden.

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1. Ambrose, Stephen and Brinkley, Douglas, Witness to America, Harpers Collins Publishers, 1998, p. 345
2.Peter Marton Coan, Ellis Island Interviews, Facts on File INC., 1997 P. 340-342
3. Allison McGill, The Swedish Americans, Chelsea House Publishers, 1997, p. 58-59