ABSTRACT

When in the summer of 1917, Ernst W. Olson – the editor of Ungdomsvännen, a Swedish-American monthly for young adults – decided to publish a short war poem by Swedish-American author Carl Lönnquist (Lönnquist, 1917: 168), he certainly did not predict the degree of condemnation the magazine would subsequently face as a result. The publication of the four-stanza elegy which criticized the decision of the American authorities to enter the First World War, not only aroused indignation among the readers, but forced Olson to resign from his office, and marked the onset of the end of the magazine’s two-decade-long existence on the Swedish-American literary market. Yet, nothing in the Lönnquist’s poem was inconsistent with the previous approach of Ungdomsvännen and many other Swedish-American newspapers to the ongoing conflict. The analyses of the ethnic press market, conducted by H. Arnold Barton, Sture Lindmark, and Finis Herbert Capps among others, linked the Swedish-American press with Germanophile attitudes during the first years of the war. Examples of such newspapers include Svenska Amerikanaren, which described Swedes as the most pro-German of all the nationalities in the United States (Chicago, 31 December 1914), and Hemlandet, which encouraged Sweden to join the Central Powers (Chicago, 6 August 1914) (Barton, 1994: 245–246. Cf. Lindmark, 1971; Capps, 1966). Following the example of other Swedish-American newspapers and periodicals, both before and after the outbreak of the war, Ungdomsvännen consistently exposed their young subscribers to numerous texts and visual materials with a distinct pro-German bias, praising American neutrality, denouncing the actions of Russia, and emphasizing the deep and ingrained connection between Germany and the immigrants’ homeland of Sweden. The year of 1917, however, marked the American entrance into the war and the beginning of a new era for narratives of ethnic warfare.