Book Review

Canada and the United States

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, almost every European immigrant group created what Orm Øverland calls "homemaking myths." These myths often claimed presence on the North American continent prior to the English (easiest in the case of Scandinavians and Italians) or at least a status co-equal to Anglo-Saxons in the founding and perpetuation of American ideals. The myths also almost always contained stories of "blood sacrifice" in which members of their group died in wartime fighting bravely for those American ideals. If this wasn't enough to claim a special and exclusive right to call America home, the myths claimed that the ethnic group brought with them from their homeland ideological gifts perfectly compatible, even necessary, to American ideals. They were better Americans because of their ethnicity. The Norwegians had their own unique spin on foundational stories: because the Vikings had conquered much of the area from which came the first colonials, Norwegians were more "American" than the Pilgrims. While on the surface, these rather naïve homemaking myths appear to be a good example of assimilation, or at least a capitulation to the superiority of an Anglo-Saxon version of American ideals, Øverland argues that they were a justification for a "multicultural America" in the context of intense pressure to Americanize.

1

In creating these myths, immigrant leaders responded to a dominant narrative that placed Anglo-Saxonism at the apex of American culture and to a disintegration of ethnicity among some of their own group members. While certainly not a new argument, Øverland's focus on the comparative experience of European immigrant groups and on the striking similarities of their responses to Anglo-Saxon Americanism tells us much about the formation of ethnic group identities in this period.

. . .