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Book Reviews
Ethnic Politics in "the Most Progressive State"
| BRØNDAL, JØRN. Ethnic Leadership and Midwestern Politics: Scandinavian Americans and the Progressive Movement in Wisconsin, 1890-1914. Northfield, MN: The Norwegian-American Historical Association; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xi + 379 pp. Introduction, maps, notes. $40 (cloth), ISBN 0-87732-095-0.
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With Ethnic Leadership and Midwestern Politics, Jørn Brøndal enters what might at first seem a crowded field. His study of Scandinavian-American political leaders in Wisconsin at the turn of the twentieth century tackles subjects—ranging from ethnic politics in the Midwest to Wisconsin progressivism—that have generated large and distinguished literatures. What more could be said on these topics? |
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Quite a bit, to judge from Brøndal's clearly written, closely argued, and impressively researched book. By focusing on the political leadership of a key ethnic component of Wisconsin's progressive coalition, he explores how ethnic leaders both experienced and helped to shape the transition to a new style of mass, issue-oriented politics. Some of these leaders drew on, while others sought to downplay, a particular kind of ethnic identity. Brøndal's argument is not without limitations, but at its best, it illuminates how ethnic identity and "mainstream" political practice can influence one another. |
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Brøndal examines how, between 1890 and 1914, Scandinavian-American leaders developed distinctly secular collective identities, whether pan-Scandinavian or specifically Norwegian-American, Swedish-American, or Danish-American. These identities served to "gloss over internal differences within the group" (5) generated by conflicts over issues such as temperance. Brøndal does not reject the older, "ethnocultural" interpretation that sees ordinary Midwestern voters in the late nineteenth century as dividing along "pietist" and "ritualist" lines.1 Many Norwegian-American and Swedish-American voters "were informed by a religious pietism that tended to place them solidly within the ranks of the Republican Party" (4). Politicians, however, deployed secular ethnic identities in hopes of defusing ethnocultural conflicts and electing fellow ethnics to office. |
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Such an approach meshed well with a late-nineteenth-century electoral system in which candidates appealed for votes on the basis of their ethnic background, partisan affiliation, place of residence, and experience—what Brøndal terms the "matrix of party, nationality, locality, and personality" (124). This "politics of tradition" (7) allowed for a degree of ethnic representation: by the 1890s, Wisconsin's Republican Party customarily reserved a place on its state ticket for a Scandinavian American and a German American. But such traditional politics came under assault from insurgent Republican Robert M. La Follette and his allies—soon to call themselves "progressives"—who attempted to alter the terms of debate by stressing "future-oriented" social and economic issues (161). One intended casualty, Brøndal argues, was nationality: La Follette and his followers tried to avoid ethnic issues while campaigning and aimed, indeed, at "the eradication of the ethnic factor from politics" (146). Yet those followers included some Scandinavian-American politicians, who, Brøndal posits, were actually attracted by La Follette's stance on nationality, in part because it implied his acceptance of them on equal terms. |
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