Pole Raising and Speech Making by Jennifer Eastman Attebery

Author:Jennifer Eastman Attebery [Attebery, Jennifer Eastman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Folklore & Mythology
ISBN: 9780874219999
Google: W3rgCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2015-11-01T04:08:17+00:00

In the toast Bundsen expressed the value of gathering together based on common heritage. He specified that heritage as including a sense of homeland, language, culturally specific pastimes, customs, literature, the arts, and a common history. Even though in his era he did not yet have the term ethnicity available, he clearly outlined its components and expressed its emic value. He used two assertions and comparisons to illuminate ethnicity. One assertion is that people who have left their nations share a universal, “natural” tendency to love the land they have left and its culture. Interestingly, in supporting this assertion, he refers to Americans and Chinese as others who have experienced migration. In both cases, these would have been surprising references, as emigration from America was light during his era and there was significant prejudice against the Chinese as immigrants to America.20 A second assertion was that Swedish Americans should be “clannish” even though they were criticized for being so. Describing this quality with a medical metaphor that implies its healing quality—“we stick together like sticking plaster”—Bundsen defended clannishness as the key to Swedish American success both within the ethnic community and outside of it. Within a decade of the delivery of this toast, he might have found this message less viable, at least to an outsider audience, in the midst of a Nativist point of view that ethnic celebrations were not American.21

The concern over heritage also appeared in the spring-to-summer celebrations of the Utah Scandinavians, but the ostensible common thread in Utah was not Swedishness but rather a secular Scandinavianness. But as Midsummer programs were shaped by participants, this attempt at secular Scandinavian Americanness blurred into both civil religion and explicitly sacred concerns. The public celebrations held in the Salt Lake City area represented efforts not only to cut across ethnic boundaries within the broad category “Scandinavian,” but also (as mentioned in chapter 2) to ally religious, political, and arts-oriented segments of the Scandinavian population. The city-county committee’s multiethnic membership was one means of assuring parity among the Scandinavian countries of origin in the activities presented at the Midsummer celebration. The attempt at Scandinavianness was simultaneously undercut and augmented, though. For example, however Scandinavian in intent, the 1891 Midsummer celebration at Draper hinted strongly of Swedishness in the pole raising, folk dancing around the pole, and the Swedish national colors. Perhaps this was why the Swedish-language newspaper Utah Korrespondenten called it a “real national celebration.”22 The newspaper’s editor Otto Rydman was a staunch supporter of maintaining Swedish culture as distinct from Scandinavianness (Olson 1949, 3–6). Scandinavianness is a topic that we will revisit in chapter 7 in a comparison of Scandinavianness in Montana and Utah. Here, it will suffice to say that within Utah’s Mormon population, Scandinavianness was a programmatic choice enabled by formal mechanisms such as lay committees, the LDS mission, LDS Scandinavian meetings, and the church’s encouragement of immigrant assimilation.

We can compare the Denverite Bundsen’s sentiments, in which he pulled back from the idea of worshipping, with a

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