INTRODUCTION

Reuben George Soderstrom was born on March 10, 1888, on a small farm west of Waverly, Minnesota, to two proud but impoverished Swedish immigrants, John and Anna Soderstrom. He was the second of six children, one of whom died in infancy. The Soderstroms would not stay in Waverly, or anywhere, for very long; the family moved six times in Reuben’s first nine years of life. “Home” during this period ranged from brick farmhouses to church basements to crowded apartments serving as house, business, and nursing home. The family suffered crop failures, poverty, and infant death on more than one occasion. Despite these losses, neither John nor Anna appeared to regret their emigration to the United States, holding firm in their belief in the American Dream—the idea, as Reuben later wrote, that “each and every person can rise to any position that his merits entitle him to rise to, unhampered and free of any class distinction.”[1]

Chronicling the life of Reuben Soderstrom, we are forever indebted to a deeply affectionate, 1974 self-published scrapbook and biography titled Reuben G. Soderstrom, penned by Reub’s younger sister, Olga Soderstrom Hodgson. Following Reuben’s death in 1970 and at the urging of Reuben’s first grandson, Carl W. Soderstrom, Jr., Olga wrote 23 memorable, detail-filled pages chronicling first-person accounts of Reuben’s life—particularly his childhood—that otherwise would have been lost. She writes:

People often ask me what moved him, what things in his life made him choose to devote his life to the labor movement. I believe I have answered this in telling of his early life. He knew poverty, firsthand, he experienced child labor. He knew the loneliness of separation from his family at such an early age. These were his formative years, and they were not happy ones.[2]

As a result, the opening pages of this book rest on Olga’s manuscript and will quote it liberally, as it speaks of the family’s early years with accuracy and color. Informed by this manuscript, let us first take a look at Reuben’s parents and the arduous journeys both took from Sweden to America for a new life full of risk, loss, love and hope. The story of Reuben G. Soderstrom is the story of his immigrant parents, the story of farmers and laborers, and the story of America itself.

The Soderstrom Family

As Olga tells us, “It was Dad who encouraged the family to come to America. In Sweden when a boy reached twenty-one years of age, he had to submit to compulsory military service. This Dad opposed, he was a sincere conscientious objector, and did not want any part of the military. If Dad had lived to see America adopt the compulsory military conscription, he would have been most unhappy.”[3]

In addition to conscription, many onerous class distinctions beset the Soderstroms’ native Sweden. Beginning in 1827, the Swedish government passed countrywide laws redistributing village farmland that had been openly tilled for generations, destroying the traditional character of Swedish life. Many Swedish farmers, including those who lived along the southern streams (the soder strom) of the Småland province were forced to become torpare, or tenant farmers, relying on meager gains from tiny plots to see them through the brutal winters.[4]

Life for the Soderstroms was hard. In good years, meals consisted of potato pancakes, fried turnips, soured milk, and bits of pike, perch, or pickled herring. But repeated crop failures, combined with a population explosion driven by “peace, vaccine, and potatoes,” wrought famines that lasted years and killed countless thousands.[5] In these times, impoverished farm families relied on starvation recipes like barkbrod,a bread made of flour mixed with bark and roots, to mask the hunger.[6]

John Soderstrom’s family experienced inequities in their spiritual life as well. The Svenska kyrkan,the official Swedish Lutheran Church, strongly favored employers and the ruling class, demanding that parishioners pay “pew rentals.” The more a family could afford, the closer to the front they sat, their status increasing with every row. Those who could not afford to pay had to sit or stand in the rear, publicly designating them as poor farmers or laborers. In response, the Free Church (frikykororelsen) and many revivalist movements broke away, stressing social reform and religious freedom.[7] These congregations were often led by pastors who were self-made scholars, driven by the firm conviction that the Word of God was free for all who chose to accept His teachings.

John Soderstrom was one of these pastors. Born in 1846, he spent considerable time and effort studying the Bible; he embraced a religious life by his late teens. Even at this young age, John displayed the qualities that would come to define him: a gentle heart, dedication to his Lutheran faith, belief in moral service to the less fortunate, and an optimism that could at times override his better judgment. These attributes would also infuse him with a chronic restlessness throughout his (and Reuben’s) life. A natural seeker born into the role of the eldest and only son, he would spend his life providing great warmth and emotional support to his family, but little financial security.  

Heeding the wishes of his father and mother, Anders and Catherine Soderstrom, teenaged John apprenticed with a skilled cobbler after showing no interest in joining the family tradition as a tailor. John watched the family finances dwindle year after year, and by the 1860s, only the kyrkoherde (local clergy) could afford his father’s tailoring skills. A cobbler, however, could usually find work, and indeed throughout his life John would repeatedly fall back on this skill as his one reliable source of meager income.

By his late teens, however, John had already moved from cobbling to clergy. While his calling may have satisfied his intellectual and religious passions, it paid virtually nothing. Even in flourishing free churches, the lack of pew rent and relative poverty of the congregation meant pastors subsisted on little to no pay. This did not faze John; never in his life did he actively solicit money for his preaching. At the same time, however, John’s father was struggling harder than ever to support his family, which now numbered seven. The year 1867 proved to be particularly devastating for Sweden, as a wet summer rotted the crops and precipitated a nation-wide famine.[8] It was at this time that many Swedish families, including the Soderstroms, looked to a faraway land for hope—America.

The American Dream

In America, John knew, there was wealth. Earlier waves of Swedish immigrants had written home with excitement, describing the New World’s “Earthly delights.” Frequently read and passed among families, these letters, amerikabrev, even made it into local newspapers. America, it appeared, offered all the imagination could entertain. There was also religious freedom, especially important to the young preacher and pacifist who objected to the mandatory 30 days’ annual military duty required of all Swedish men. As Reuben later wrote, “The thoughts of the Lowly Nazarene have come closer to assuming reality in America than in any other country in the world.”[9] And so the Soderstroms joined an impoverished, ragtag sea of immigrants that flooded the ports of America’s eastern seaboard. Olga recounts:

John Frederick Soderstrom, Reub’s dad, came to America with his father Anders and his mother in about 1867. Other members of this family coming to America at this time were sisters Emma and Sophie. The Soderstrom family, when they left Sweden in 1867, brought very few belongings with them. One thing, though, they did take along was an old French Vuillaume Violin, which was carried by Reub’s grandfather on the boat.

Dad (John Soderstrom) and his parents settled in Chicago. His sister, Sophie, went to Streator…Grandfather Anders, his wife, son John and Emma settled on Foster Ave. in Chicago, Ill. Grandpa Anders was a tailor and worked at his trade…Andrew Lind, who later married Emma Lind, stayed in Chicago. Son-in-law Andrew Lind and Reub’s dad, John, started a business, they had a shoe store on the corner of LaSalle Street and North Avenue in Chicago, and continued in this business until they were burned out by the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.[10] 

After Stockholm, Chicago boasted the second largest concentration of Swedish people in the world. Although the Soderstroms’ destination was not unique among immigrants—Illinois was the largest destination for immigrants outside New York—their skill set was. One quarter of those arriving in America were laborers, but clothiers and cobblers, in contrast, constituted less than one percent, and Anders soon found work as a tailor.[11] Although mass production (partly the result of supplying the army during the Civil War) limited demand for handcrafted wares, John built a clientele of laborers by repairing workmen’s boots. Within a few years, John and Andrew had built a decent business. But John’s main desire had always been to preach. Seeking a life beyond the Swedish neighborhood of LaSalle Street (where even the newspapers were Swedish), he began trading labor for English lessons.

But unbeknownst to John—an immigrant in his 20s in bustling Chicago—his future wife was just a child back in Sweden, part of a family about to embark on its own arduous journey to the new world.

ANNA CEDERHOLM, REUBEN’S MOTHER

The Cederholm Family

Anna Gustafa Eriksson was born on September 5, 1866, in northern Sweden. Her father died in the years that followed, and her mother Martha was quickly remarried to Carl Cederholm, who took young Anna as his own daughter. In 1872, Martha bore a son, Eric, and also adopted a son named Oscar. Although forged from necessity and tragedy, the Cederholm family was very close knit, and the values that sustained it—stoicism, self-sufficiency, and adaptability—would make Anna the anchor of her own family through the trials they would later face in America.

Immediately following Anna’s birth, Sweden descended into famine as the rain and rot of the previous year turned into devastating drought. This disaster was further complicated by an outbreak of Cholera that ravaged the North throughout the 1860s—an inhospitable place for a newborn.[12]

The Cederholms lived in Jämtland, a north-central Swedish province. The Jämts had always been fiercely independent. Formerly a peasant republic with its own law, currency and parliament, the region traditionally rejected the hierarchy and inequity that had defined the rest of Sweden. Its churches had existed without pew order, and the people had long respected “no other rank except age and life-time.”[13] Despite five hundred years of Norwegian domination and subsequent Swedish control, the Jämts continued to resist modernity and industry. However, not even they could keep out the influences of “land reform” that had affected Sweden’s peasant farmers, reducing many—including Carl—to statare, landless workers paid in kind (stat) for their toil on the fralsejord (large estates owned by the nobility).[14]

Daily Life

To ease the hunger, Carl Cederholm supplemented the grain, milk, and potatoes from the short farming season with wild fish and game. The herring, rabbit, elk and reindeer that he prepared himself helped sustain the family through the long winter. He also cut and sold timber, using long wooden skis to trek across the frozen landscape. Martha and Anna labored as well, turning tanned hides and fur into pants, boots, jackets, and breeches, while the money from logging provided wool and cotton for shirts and caps. These were incredibly important in a land where the sun would dip below the horizon for months on end, and exposed skin could catch frostbite in minutes. In the summer they picked wild lingonberries and maintained a garden of turnips, carrots, peas and cabbage. All these would be pickled, preserved and stored in the root cellar Carl had built.

Though the family could work twenty-hour days in the summertime, life also held its share of fun and joy. Anna and Eric both attended the local folkskolen, or primary school. Anna would spend much of her childhood sledding, skating and skiing with her sister and best friend Olga. Athletic and adventurous, she would ski for hours, and routinely challenged and beat the local boys in skating races. Once, while racing an elder schoolboy on unsteady ice, Anna cut too close to open water, the ice cracking underneath. Falling in could mean death in minutes, but instead of slowing, Anna charged even faster as water splayed from her skates. She gained a reputation for fearlessness.

Festivals also punctuated the tough year with fleeting moments of fun and celebration. Months of pickled herring and turnip and pepper soup finally ended with fresh crops for the Midsummer festival, with hand-sewn holiday outfits to honor the occasion. Winter was filled with joyous gatherings, complete with gingerbread biscuits (lussekatter) and games like almond in the risgryngrot pudding, which foretold a girl’s marriage. Christmas Eve brought with it smorgasbords, lye-soaked cod (lutfisk), and frestelse, a potato casserole with anchovies and cream.

But without land of his own, Carl had no way to improve his family’s status or prospects. Like the Soderstroms fifteen years prior, the Cederholms were unable to buy land in Sweden; they too had thrilled at tales in the amerikabrev. Unlike the “first wave” of immigrants in the 1860s that included Anders and John, however, more recent Swedish immigrants settled not in Illinois but in the upper Midwest. Their letters referred to it as the “Delarna of America” after the province in central Sweden, and there was the tantalizing promise of land. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered applicants up to 160 acres of undeveloped land west of the Mississippi River, a seeming impossibility to the peasant farmers of Sweden. A farmer, Carl decided that this was where he could buy land and build an inheritance for his son and a home for his family. Year by year, he saved whatever he could until finally, in 1882, he and his family joined nearly a half million other Swedes in the second great wave of immigration to America.[15] 

JOURNEY TO AMERICA

From Sweden

Olga writes, “Mother came to America when she was sixteen years old. She came with her mother and step-father (her father having died in Sweden) and brother Eric in 1882.”[16] Travel to the new world was not a single journey but several, stretching across countries, oceans and continents by buggy, boat and train. Families could take only what could personally carry. Each traveler typically carried a satchel containing a set of clothes, some food (mostly knackebrod, a type of Swedish flatbread) and a few prized possessions. Anna’s mother kept her church shoes and a good dress, Anna a locket from her best friend.

Like the Soderstroms fifteen years earlier, the Cederholms made their way to Gothenburg, the largest seaport in Sweden. In 1867, the Soderstroms had traveled the roughly 30 miles from nearby Akerby to the city of Vaxjo in a horse-drawn carriage crowded with others fleeing the famine. From there a train took them 150 miles west to the Kettegat bay. In 1888, the Cederholms made most of their 500-mile trek south by train, sleeping on hard wooden benches as they traveled through mountains, marshes, forests and fields.

Port cities like Gothenburg would have been alien to those raised in the Swedish countryside. Rural dialects such as Anne’s Jämska were replaced with Swedish, which had been taught in school but rarely used. Vendors hawked coarse boiled crayfish and potato pancakes up and down the Kungsportsavenyn, a world-class central avenue built in the 1860s and 70s that led to a beautifully landscaped park in the city center. People of all lands and stations filled the streets as boats clogged the harbor, passing to their final destination.

To England

Swedish immigrants could not travel directly from Gothenburg to New York. First they had to journey by boat to Hull, England. Although not the longest part of the journey, this was full of dangers posed not only by the famously fierce waters of the North Sea but from the wider world they were about to enter. Travelers were no longer kinsmen but suspicious foreigners, at best a nuisance and at worst potential source of disease, crime and poverty. Once docked, authorities herded foreign passengers into crowded streetcars to take the them to “immigrant hotels,” often under police escort. Dark and dreary, Hull filled many homesick travelers with foreboding. “The buildings looked big and gray,” recounted immigrant Irja Laaksonen after her stay in the city. “In fact, everything looked gray. Even the cobblestones in the street appeared very big and gray.”[17]

From Hull, transmigrants would traverse the English Midlands by rail to Liverpool. Travelers were crammed in trains, often with no room to sit during the long trip. Upon arrival they often found themselves immediate targets for robbery and grift. “Mancatchers” fleeced emigrant pockets through trickery, theft, and outright thuggery. Disease posed an even greater danger, threatening to end a family’s journey before it had truly begun. Port Sanitary Authorities boarded all ships, and passengers showing signs of illness were separated from their families and thrown into isolation hospitals. Often, impoverished travelers would have no choice but to leave their loved ones behind, armed only with the distant hope that they might somehow be reunited in the New World. “I promised that we would wait for him…he would only be taken ashore to have his throat swabbed,” wrote one migrant mother of her last words to her ill son before the authorities took him away. “I followed him with my eyes for as long as I could, and then I cried—yes, I cried as I sailed…it is terrible to be separated from a child so brutally and to have to send him away from me with a lie!”[18]

One can imagine Carl Cederholm guiding his small family through the strange, noisy crowd of peddlers, beggars, fraudulent ticket scalpers, food vendors, and thieves; seeing foreign garments and hearing English for the first time; witnessing the loading and unloading of strange cargo while pushing through the dockside crowds in search of the boat to America.

On Sea

After waiting a week in the hectic port, migrants would finally board a ship for America. Mid-century immigrants such as the Soderstroms typically traveled by sail, while the Cederholms and other late-century migrants took steamboats, traveling on the lower “tween decks” between the main deck and the cargo hold. Ventilation holes allowed water to seep in and too few portholes made the tween deck dark and dank. The massive boilers created a humid, hostile environment. With the only toilets up on deck (one allotted for every 100 migrants) travelers often turned to buckets tucked in corners for relief, creating an awful stench. “They came in steerage,” Olga writes of the Cederholms’ trip, “and Mother said it was terrible. They were crowded in the bottom of the ship. It was unsanitary—not nearly enough food and they were fed mostly soup.”[19]

The Cederholms were allotted an eighteen inch by six feet bunk, stacked four high in the family section up to six high in common steerage. The top bunk was the most prized, as rampant seasickness ensured the bottom bunks were almost constantly soiled with vomit. Passengers brought their own bedding, usually a coarse blanket and a straw pillow stitched from used sail canvas purchased for a shilling. They also provided their own wares; two to three shillings would buy a tin wash basin, cup, mug, plate, and utensils. The Cederholms both competed for and shared food, bunks, and toilets with people they didn’t know, people who spoke unfamiliar languages.

Two meals a day were held in the walkway between berths, with tables lowered from the ceiling to create a space so narrow two adults could not pass at once. Passengers dipped their cups in a bucket of thin soup or stew, with every fifth or sixth man receiving a loaf of hard white bread to share. Adults were issued a cup of coffee at breakfast (occasionally children were given cocoa) and were allowed three quarts of water per day. After meals, wares were “cleaned” in communal basins that quickly filled with trash and detritus.  

The weeks-long journey was often treacherous and the conditions were miserable. Many passengers died of disease, and even more suffered through trench mouth, lice, and body ulcers. Storms, rough water, and mechanical failure also added to the danger. At night, men were allowed on deck to drink smuggled liquor while women stayed below, watching the children as they traded songs and stories from their homelands. All had suffered through similar inequities of religious suppression and property disenfranchisement; all dreamed of a future life in America.

Arriving in America

In 1882, Carl and Martha Cederholm arrived with their family at Castle Garden, America’s first immigrant receiving center (later supplanted by Ellis Island in 1892). The circular, sandstone fort in Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan had been in operation since 1855 and was by far the most dominant US port; over 70% the nearly 300,000 annual immigrants to enter the United States came through New York City.[20] It was originally intended to be a safe harbor for newcomers, protecting them from swindlers and offering honest information and currency exchange. As the years passed, however, the castle had become rife with corruption and incompetence.

Although they were not in the majority, the Cederholms still had many compatriots; Swedes were the fourth-largest migrant group during this period after Germans, Irish and British.[21] This position, however, made them particularly vulnerable. Runners were rampant, offering their “services” to Swedes who, lost in a sea of German and English, trusted their kinsmen’s offer to help sell their goods, exchange their money, and find work. Most often, the goods were stolen, the cash counterfeit, and the work close to indentured servitude.

The immigration process of entering nineteenth century America smacked of overcrowding, inequality, and abuse. Not all arrivals were required to endure the inspection process; first and second class passengers went through a cursory examination on-ship. Other medical and legal inspections were reserved for those traveling in the lower decks. Only after immigrants could prove that their papers were in order and that they were in good health would they finally be allowed to take their first brave steps on New World soil.

NEW LIFE IN THE NEW WORLD

The Cederholm Homestead

The Cederholms continued to Chicago and then straight on to Minnesota. The state government there was friendly to Swedish immigration, with Hans Mattson, a Swedish immigrant and Civil War Colonel, serving as Secretary of State. Carl Cederholm had learned that those able (and willing) to make the journey could purchase land for $1.25 an acre. In addition to the $100 fee to transport his family of four from Gothenburg to Chicago, Carl had saved enough money to buy land, seed, tools, one dairy cow, and the timber necessary to build a cabin. After spending the first month in a one-bedroom apartment, the Cederholm family finally purchased a homestead near Grandy. With the help of his son Eric, Carl immediately began building a small cabin. According to Olga:

They settled in a Swedish settlement in Isanti Co. near Grandy, Minn. Here they built a log cabin…built on eighty acres of farm land which they cleared of trees and brush…The log cabin Grandma and Grandpa built consisted of two small rooms downstairs and an unfinished attic. The meals were prepared and eaten in the summer kitchen (when it was added), but to begin with were prepared in the kitchen of the log cabin (one of the small rooms), the other small room was a bedroom.[22]

The two-story, two-room structure with unfinished floors was properly sealed to help the family withstand the negative-twenty-degree winter nights. By August of 1882, Carl was ready to plant his first crop of winter wheat and dig a root cellar into the side of the hill. Anna and her mother, meanwhile, gathered herbs and fruit for the winter months and planted a vegetable garden. In their second year, the family continued to build, dividing the second story into bedrooms and adding a proper kitchen with a cast-iron stove. They also added a chicken coop for a newly acquired rooster and five hens.

Before long, the Cederholms lived off the land; livestock produced wool, cheese, eggs, and the occasional meal, while gardens provided vegetables to be canned and pickled. Hunting kept the family flush with white-tailed deer, pheasant, and turkey; fishing yielded walleye, trout, and largemouth bass. Forests offered varied fruits for jams and preserves, as well as herbs. Surrounded by fellow Swedish immigrants, they spoke their (near) native language and celebrated familiar festivals like midsommerafton (midsummer festival) and atta Maja (to May) in traditional fashion.  

There was, however, one key difference between the Cederholms’ old and new lives: Carl now owned his own land and labor. He could sell his wheat, invest in next year’s crops, and make improvements to his home. He had already begun dreaming of purchasing the 80-acre lot adjacent to his own.

John Soderstrom Weds Anna Cederholm

While Anna Cederholm journeyed with her family from Jämtland to Minnesota, John Soderstrom was also on the move. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire consumed four square miles of Chicago, devouring all wooden buildings in its path—including the cobbling shop John shared with his brother-in-law, Andy Lind. Instead of staying behind to rebuild on the ashes, John was pulled to a more pacific life of farming and preaching in the Minnesota countryside that resembled his native Småland in Sweden. It was there, as the pastor of a Swedish Lutheran Mission Church in St. Paul, that John met and married his first wife, Louise, in 1873. John certainly loved her; no matter where he lived, he made sure to hang a thirty-inch portrait of her in the household parlor for the rest of his life.[23] Sadly, their marriage was cut short by disease; beautiful but frail, the young Louise died of tuberculosis in 1883, leaving the 37-year-old Soderstrom widowed and childless.

At about the same time, Anna Cederholm had begun work as a housemaid and nanny for an affluent family in St. Paul while her father built up the farm near Granby. “After arriving in the United States, they stopped in St. Paul, Minn. Mother went to work here, immediately, as a hired girl,” Olga writes. “Her salary was five cents a week…Mother often talked of how hard she had to work as a hired girl and how little she was paid. While in St. Paul, she attended the Swedish Lutheran Mission Church and there she met our dad who was pastor of the church.”[24]

Here the twisting paths of these two hardscrabble, indomitable immigrant families intersected and merged into a central narrative forward; at age 38, John Soderstrom, recent widower and pastor of a small congregation, met Anna Cederholm, age 18, a newly arrived immigrant and housemaid who attended his parish with the family that employed her. After a brief courtship over communal dinners, church events, and conversation, they married on October 16, 1884.    

A happy event, perhaps, but the scandal of a 38-year-old pastor marrying an 18-year-old parishioner was too much for the church to handle. Protests grew within the congregation. The couple was soon on the move, equipped only with John’s naïve optimism and Anna’s determination to find a stable and fulfilling life.

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