There
was little Danish immigration to the United States until the middle
of the 19th century. The most significant early arrival was Claus
Lauritz Clausen
who arrived in 1842.
Soon afterwards he became pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church
at Heart Prairie on the shore on Whitewater Lake in Wisconsin. In
1851 he began publishing a Lutheran Church newspaper. The following
year he became editor of Emigranten,
the first Norwegian language newspaper published in the United States.
In Emigranten campaigned against
slavery and on the outbreak of the Civil
War his close friend, Colonel Hans Heg,
commander of the Scandinavian Regiment, persuaded him to become its
chaplain. Other Danish settlers who joined the regiment included Sivert
Pederson, Joseph Mathiesen and
Soren Pederson.
Religious bodies in the United States sent missionaries to Denmark
and encouraged people to migrate to the New World. By 1860 Mormon
missionaries had persuaded about 2,000 Danes to settle in Utah. One
third of these lived in Sanpete County. Anthony
Lund became the leader of this group and he served as a member
of Utah's territorial legislature.
There were much larger numbers of Lutherans and by the end of the
century the Danish Church had 56 ministers, a theological school at
West Denmark, Wisconsin, an immigrant mission in New
York and an orphanage in Chicago.
Unemployment in Denmark resulted in an increase in emigration to the
New World. Steamships left Denmark and arrived in the United States
10 days later. It is claimed that one ship alone, the Frederick
VIII
transported more than half a million immigrants from Scandinavia to
America.
The 1870 Census revealled that there were over 30,000 Danish born
people in the United States. Most were living in the agricultural
regions of Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Kansas. Danish
immigration reached its peak in 1882 when 11,000 people arrived. Most
were small farmers and labourers but after 1890, a growing number
of artisans and professional men decided to move to the United States.
Danish immigrants were involved
in the reform movement. Laurence Gronlund,
was an executive member of the Socialist
Labor Party and wrote several books such as The
Coming Revolution: Its Principles
(1878), Cooperative
Commonwealth (1884), Our
Destiny (1891), The
New Economy (1898) and Socializing
a State (1898).
Jacob
Riis was pioneering photo-journalist employed by several newspapers
in New York. In December,
1889, his account of city life, illustrated by photographs, appeared
in Scribner's Magazine. This
created a great deal of interest and the following year, a full-length
version, How
the Other Half Lives, was published.
Other books by Riis include Children
of the Poor (1892), Out
of Mulberry Street (1898),
The Battle With
the Slum (1902) and Children
of the Tenement (1903).
Between 1820 and 1920 over 300,000 immigrants came from Denmark. This
was far less than other Scandinavian countries such as Sweden
(1,000,000) and Norway (730,000).
An investigation carried out in 1978 revealled
that since 1820 over 364,000 people emigrated to the United States
from Denmark. This amounted to 0.7 per cent of the total foreign immigration
during this period.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
