ABSTRACT
During the summer of 1938, Swedish and Finnish Americans celebrated the 300th anniversary of the founding of New Sweden (1638–1655), the short-lived seventeenth-century Swedish colony on the Delaware River. Since some of the seventeenth-century Swedish colonists had been Finnish speaking or had originated from what later became Finland, Finnish Americans celebrated the event as the starting point of the Finnish presence in North America. This chapter examines how the politics of race informed representations of Finnishness at the 1938 Tercentenary. Finnish Americans were politically and linguistically divided, and this chapter examines how the different political actors and the Finnish- and Swedish-language press represented the question of Finnish racial ancestry. The different actors understood the question of racial ancestry as important, but often for different reasons. Drawing on contemporary debates on race and nationalism in the United States, Finland, Scandinavia, and the international communist and anti-fascist movements, the different actors constructed divergent ideas on Finnish racial ancestry and its contemporary political relevance. No simple consensus emerged as to how Finns in the United States should think about their racial ancestry, but the Tercentenary gave expression to several competing interpretations, which still shared some basic premises on race and ancestry.
