Wartime hysteria and Quad-City Swedes, 1917

A Religious Community’s Response to Wartime Nativism: Swedish-American Lutherans in Rock Island at the Onset of World War I. Presented at Illinois History Symposium, Illinois State Historical Society, Lincoln Land Community College, Springfield, April 20, 2017.

By Peter Ellertsen

When planning got under way for the quadricentennial of the Lutheran Reformation in 1917, it seemed like an opportune time for American Lutherans to celebrate. It would mark the 400^th anniversary of the day, on October 31, 1517, that Martin Luther posted his challenge to the papacy on the doors of Wittenberg cathedral in Germany. And it would come at a time when America’s Lutheran immigrant cultures were flourishing. 

“The Lutheran Church in America next year will have an opportunity as never before to impress upon Americans of every denomination the value of the fruits of the Reformation as they are still enjoyed by all people,” wrote the editors of The Lutheran Companion, a Swedish-American church weekly published in Rock Island in the fall of 1916. Since the time of Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus, they added, Swedes had made common cause “with the Church of the Land of Luther,” and Swedish-Americans should join other Lutherans in the 1917 celebration “in order that it may be as impressive as possible and be fruitful of the greatest amount of good to the community.”¹ 

In the event, things didn’t turn out quite as planned. By April the United States was at war with the Land of Luther, and the climate of public opinion had changed dramatically.

As the home of the Swedish-American Augustana Lutheran Synod and its seminary at Augustana College, Rock Island and the adjacent city of Moline were caught up in the events of the day as the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917. Together with Davenport, Iowa, they were known as the Tri-Cities. (Today the area, encompassing 18 municipalities, is known as the Quad-Cities.) The college was located halfway between Rock Island and Moline, away from the “taverns, pool halls, and theaters” of either downtown business district, in the words of a college historian, and it served both the local community and a national constituency.² The experience of the Swedish-American community there during World War I can shed light on what it means to be an American whose religious affiliation is widely distrusted during time of war. While every ethnic community and faith tradition is unique, the Swedish-American experience a hundred years ago may be instructive in understanding what happens in other contexts, including that of Muslims in America (and, for that matter, Sweden) today. 

In the 1910s, the Tri-Cities were a metropolitan area of 100,000 straddling the Mississippi River. Rock Island (population 24,335 in the 1910 census) and Davenport (population 43,028) were the oldest, having been settled since frontier days when pioneers from the South moved into the upper Mississippi Valley. Both were considered river towns, with the commercial sector of the economy predominating. Rock Island was considered the more raffish of the two, not always without reason, but both were prosperous and boasted a variety of civic improvements. Moline (population 21,492) was more industrial, with John Deere’s main “plow shop” or manufacturing plant located along the river.³ 

Overall, the Tri-Cities were ethnically diverse. German-Americans in Davenport, many of them descendants of political refugees from a failed 1848 revolution in Schleswig-Holstein who were still open to supporting socialist candidates for local office, had a flourishing subculture of Turner halls, brass bands and cultural venues.  “Although Germans ran for political office, sat on boards and commissions, and participated in the social life of the city, a substantially separate German-American culture persisted until well into the twentieth century,” according to local historian William Roba, Davenport also had a Swedish Lutheran church, founded in 1883 by members of First Swedish Lutheran in Rock Island.⁴

In Rock Island and Moline, the dominant ethnic culture was Swedish, from 1850, when the Rev. Lars Esbjorn founded First Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church in what became Moline’s downtown area.  A circuit rider whose home base was in rural Andover, some 25 miles east of Moline, Esbjorn was also a founder of the Augustana Synod and the first instructor at Augustana College, when it was a struggling affair with a dozen ministerial students meeting in a church basement in Chicago. (It moved to Rock Island and Moline in 1875.) By the 1910s, Swedes in Moline were heavily involved in municipal politics, working with the Yankee business elite, who dominated the Republican party. According to a monograph by Dag Blanck and and Harald Runblom, Swedes in Rock Island came to form somewhat of an academic and cultural elite:

… the Swedes of this period of steady population growth provided the basis for the development of an institutionally complete ethnic community and the emergence of an ethnic leadership. These leaders included pastors and professions affiliated with the Lutheran Augustana Synod and its home institution, Augustana College – located in Rock Island literally on the border of Moline. While some of these leaders were active in politics, their main emphasis tended to revolve around the construction of a distinctive Swedish-American consciousness, and thus their main arena for activity tended to be cultural rather than political. In contrast, Swedish-American professionals and businessmen in Moline were quite active as a group politically, and the most important ethnic leaders derived from this cohort.

One of the synodical publications at Rock Island, a weekly newspaper named The Lutheran Companion, especially stands out. Begun in 1892 for English-speaking alumni of the college, it soon carried news items on “English,” or English-speaking, congregations and “took on the appearance of a church newspaper” in spite of efforts to maintain its appeal to young people. In 1910 its name was changed from the Young Lutheran’s Companion, according to a standard history of synodical publications, and it “found its place as the English organ of the church … during the difficult period of language transition.”⁴

In the city of Rock Island, no single ethnic group predominated, although enough Germans and Swedes lived there to support both a German Lutheran church and First Swedish Lutheran downtown, as well as Zion Evangelical Swedish Lutheran Church and Grace English Lutheran Church near the Augustana campus. (It was called an “English Lutheran” congregation not because of the ethnicity of its members but because its services were conducted in English, an innovation at the time.) Rounding out Rock Island’s religious diversity were the Catholic parishes and several smaller ethnic Methodist, Baptist and free church congregations.⁵ The pastor at Grace English Lutheran was the Rev. Ira Nothstein, a librarian at the college and writer for Lutheran Companion.

At Augustana College and the Swedish immigrant churches in Rock Island and Moline, the Lutheran musical heritage was to be a major part of the 400th anniversary celebration, highlighted by the premiere on campus at the annual Synod assembly of a Reformation Cantata with music by J. Victor Bergquist and a text by Ernst W. Olson. By the winter and early spring of 1917, preparations were well under way. But on April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany, casting a shadow over any celebration involving the “Land of Luther.” The event was held as scheduled, but the assembly took on a muted, ambivalent, almost sorrowful tone. At the same time students and faculty at Augustana threw themselves into the war effort.⁶ Thus, they set the tone for the war years.

Not only in Rock Island but nationwide, Swedish-Americans of the Augustana Synod adopted an attitude toward the war that was narrowly drawn from the Lutheran confessions of faith, an attitude that distanced itself from the widespread religious nationalism of the day. In this, it was closer to J.C. Squire, an up-and-coming English poet of the day who wrote in 1915:

God heard the embattled nations sing and shout,
“Gott strafe England!” and “God save the King!”
God this, God that, and God the other thing.
“Good God!” said God, “I’ve got my work cut out.⁷

Augustana Synod Swedes, on the other hand, prayed for the strength to preach God’s word as they understood it and administer the sacraments in a world consumed by war and sin. They weren’t opposed to the war effort. In fact, they supported it. But they didn’t fully embrace the nationalistic fervor of the day and they didn’t lose sight of their own institutional goals as Lutherans of Swedish-American descent.  

“Coward, Liar Biff! Plunk!”: Nativism and wartime exceptionalism

War brought with it a fighting spirit in more ways than one. On the front page of the Rock Island Argus on April 2, adjacent to the text of President Wilson’s declaration of war, was a story headlined “Coward, Liar Biff! Plunk! Lodge Wins” about a fist fight between Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, R-Mass., and a constituent in the U.S. Capitol. (The constituent, a member of a peace delegation, later changed his mind about the war and enlisted.) That night in Rock Island, according to the Argus, patrons of an unnamed “thirst parlor” on 17^th Street “made an insulting remark” and got into a brawl with local militia who had been called up to guard the Rock Island Arsenal and other area industries. Charges against both were dismissed when they apologized the next morning in police court. A few days later, two men were fined $100 each and sentenced to 20 days in jail in the aftermath of another brawl, and Rock Island’s police magistrate “authorized the militia men to make arrests themselves of any man who in any way sought to ridicule the flag or the country in this hour of crisis.”⁸

In Rock Island, the manifestations of patriotism were by and large positive, as draft registration rallies were scheduled and troop trains began to roll through town, but wartime patriotism brought with it a hostility to foreigners and ethnic minorities. One train that lay over for several hours at the Rock Island depot carried regular Army troops who had been fighting Pancho Villa’s irregulars on the Mexican border. “Gee, I’m glad to get away from Douglas [Arizona], believe me,” a trooper joked to a reporter for the Argus, inadvertently reflecting another source of wartime xenophobia. “There you are not permitted to take a shot at the greasers when they sneak up on you, but, thank goodness, in France we will have some comeback.” The war brought other changes as well. In Moline, the Swedish National Association, meeting at the Mission Tabernacle in June, voted to call off its annual celebration of midsummer, a traditional Swedish holiday. “Arrangements for the usual midsummer picnic in [the city’s] Prospect Park were started several months ago,” the Argus reported, “but since then conditions have materially changed.” It added:

There is at the present time no call for a demonstration, and in the face of the situation that confronts our country all good citizens are more disposed to serious private thinking than public celebration. While citizens of Swedish origin may cherish their antecedents without prejudice to their loyalty, their Americanism is so complete as to overshadow all other considerations in the present crisis. This was the tenor of the discussion preceding the resolution to call off the celebration for this year.⁹

Especially on the national level, hostility to ethnic minorities – known as “hyphenated Americans” – would manifest itself with overt efforts to suppress German-American cultural institutions. Increasingly, it would be consumed with unease about developments in Russia, not to mention home-grown American socialists and labor organizers, as the socialist and communist revolutions unfolded in that country. But it was mixed up with longstanding cultural attitudes as well, and Swedish Americans were not immune to its effects. 

As historian Robert H. Zeiger suggests, writing from a perspective of his family’s own complex German-American history,  “powerful crosscurrents of difference, dissent, and perspective” complicated the issues of the day for Americans of German, eastern European and Irish heritage. Underlying attitudes and immigrant loyalties often were overlaid by a powerful American exceptionalism, and many immigrants – perhaps most – negotiated these crosscurrents in uniquely individual ways. Zieger adds:

It was possible to love German culture while hating German authoritarianism and militarism, to cherish English literature while abhorring English snobbery and arrogance, to be Irish without wishing for British humiliation. Millions of so-called hyphenated Americans experienced the tragedy of the Great War less in terms of national aspirations and hatreds than in familiar and personal loyalties and concern for relatives and loved ones still in Europe. 

As Zieger makes clear throughout, long before the United States entered the war, President Wilson consciously framed his statements of war aims to emphasize a sense of American exceptionalism. America would go to war, he told Congress April 2, the same day as Senator Lodge’s fist fight in the Capitol building, to “make the world safe for democracy … to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth …God helping her, she can do no other.”¹⁰ The echo of Martin Luther would not have been perceived as ironic.

However, there was a darker strain to the American exceptionalism of the day. Peter Schrag suggests in Not Fit for our Society, his history of nativism from the earliest days to the ongoing 21^st-century hysteria over Mexican immigration, that World War I was only one aspect of a xenophobia directed at the immigrants, many from eastern and southern Europe, who flocked to the cities and became both the builders and the “most visible casualties” of the increasingly industrial economy of the early 20^th century: 

As industrialization, World War I, and the Russian revolution drew the nation into a globalized world we didn’t understand and that, in our founding, we thought we had forever put behind us, they brought yet another round of nationalism and xenophobia. With the war, Beethoven and Bach became composers non grata in American concert halls. States all through the Midwest stopped German-English bilingual education in the public schools. 

In Iowa and Nebraska, this extended to all public uses of the language – including church services. “Let those who cannot speak or understand the English language,” proclaimed the governor of Iowa, just across the river from Rock Island, “conduct their religious worship in their home.”  ¹¹ Augustana Synod Lutherans, well more than half of whose services were conducted in Swedish at the time, were understandably concerned. 

In general Swedish-Americans, whose immigrant culture was northern European and initially agrarian rather than industrial, found themselves on both sides of the xenophobia of the day. In the time-honored tradition of immigrant groups throughout American history, they tended to be leery of newer arrivals and to consider their own Swedish institutions as bulwarks of democracy. But their language, their culture and their religious affiliation had German roots, which gave them a degree of sympathy with Germany. Moreover, Sweden was able to maintain its neutrality throughout the war in Europe, although its government was perceived as favoring Germany and its allies, and Swedes in America watched with horror as the Russian revolutions progressed and unrest deepened in Sweden’s hereditary enemy. 

Swedish-Americans escaped the worst xenophobia of the period, but they did not escape it entirely. In an important monograph Sture Lindmark of Uppsala University, who closely studied the immigrant media, observes that at the onset of fighting in 1914, their “attitude toward the war and the belligerents was based to a great degree on what was best for Sweden.” He elaborates:

During their childhood they had learned that Russia was Sweden’s most dangerous foe. They had also learned that Germany was the bulwark against the westward advance of barbarianism. It was therefore natural that many Swedes took Germany’s side in the initial stages of the war. The Swedish Americans recommended that the United States remain neutral and not be lured into the war.   

Certainly this was true of the Swedish-Americans who wrote for the Lutheran Companion. According to Lindmark, Swedish-Americans were widely suspected of disloyalty and “[a]mong Swedish Americans, it was primarily members of the Augustana Synod who were said to sympathize with Germany.” This suspicion seems to have been largely unfounded. Significantly, Lindmark adds, “In the official records of the Augustana Synod, however, there is nothing that would seem to indicate defeatism or disloyalty among its members.”¹² In actuality, the situation appears to have been thoroughly ambiguous. 

As historian Mark Granquist of Luther Seminary notes, “Scandinavian-American Lutherans, who still employed their immigrant languages and were often equally isolated from ‘English’ society, were often lumped together with the German-Americans in the popular imagination.” To this somewhat anomalous situation, Swedish-American Lutherans nationwide responded, in Granquist’s words, by “support[ing] the American war and relief efforts with great enthusiasm” and distancing themselves when necessary from their German co-religionists. Swedish-Americans sometimes also spoke of Swedish contributions to the western democracies, often comparing them to Gustavus Adolphus’ role in the 17^th-century European religious wars, and of their “duty to bring to the altar of our new homeland, as our most previous gift, the best of Swedish culture,” especially in a time when Americans spoke of “America first, America last, America forever.”¹³

In the Tri-Cities, the Swedish community was already distinct from the German, since German immigrants tended to settle more on the Iowa side of the river. But the Augustana Synod cooperated nationally with several predominantly German-American synods, among other Lutherans, in resisting the harshest of xenophobic measures, assigning chaplains and other matters.

“‘Old Glory’ waves in the breeze night and day at Augustana”

For a variety of reasons, Swedes in Rock Island County were well positioned to ride out the storm. For one thing, they were the dominant ethnic minority in Rock Island and Moline, where they were politically powerful as well. For another, Augustana College was widely accepted as a local institution of higher learning. Its general education courses attracted not only Swedish-American pre-ministerial students nationwide, but its commercial and scientific departments enrolled young men and women of all ethnic backgrounds from the Tri-City area. Most important of all, perhaps, the college and the synod took immediate steps to roll with the times.

Across the Mississippi in Davenport, the Germans were not so lucky. Two vignettes in a history by local human interest columnist Bill Wundram of the Quad-City Times bring out the difference. On the one hand, the war brought a “wave of hysterical patriotism” on the Iowa side of the Mississippi River, in Wundram’s words, even though “Davenport, and much of the rural Iowa farmland, had been developed by the immense rush of German immigrants.” Not only was German banned in the schools, where it had been a required course before the war, but the German Savings Bank of Davenport was renamed the American Commercial Bank and the long-established German-language newspaper Der Demokrat went out of business. “Germans, many of them prominent citizens, went into the closet,” Wundram says, and, as the war continued, “bitterness spread locally against German citizens.” ¹⁴ 

In Rock Island, the mood was different from the offset. “On the April day of 1917 that America entered the war,” says Wundram, who has a seasoned newsman’s eye for a good story, “the all-male Augustana College band marched – hup, two-three-four – to a recruiting office that had been set up in Rock Island’s [downtown] Spencer Square. The band enlisted in a group, stayed together, and bolstered enthusiasm for our soldiers in France.”¹⁵  Later that month, the Lutheran Companion reported with evident pride that “practically the whole school family, students and professors, and many other friends of the institution gathered at the Rock Island station to bid farewell to the College Band which then departed for Springfield, Ill., where the boys were to be mustered into the hospital service of the United States. We were rather forcibly reminded, on this occasion, that the war has really come close to us, and the parents of these boys, no doubt, will pray more earnestly than ever for their country in the impending crisis.”¹⁶

As soon as war was declared, college president Gustav Andreen contacted the commandant at Rock Island Arsenal, a military installation on an island in the Mississippi River between Rock Island and Davenport, about instructing students in basic military drill. “After chapel exercises this morning President Andreen suggested to the assembled students and teachers of Augustana College that they endeavor to do something for the work on the American Red Cross,” the Argus reported on April 5. “A motion was made and unanimously carried to this effect and a committee was appointed to ascertain in what way the college could be of assistance to the work of the Red Cross and also accomplish something worth while for this purpose.”¹⁷ The Lutheran Companion elaborated:

Regardless of previous sentiments as to the Great War, Augustana stands as a unit for the Government and the Nation, local and true, now that that it was found advisable and necessary that we as a nation should become active participants in it. The loyalty of Augustana was tested in the 60’s and not found wanting. It is to be tested again now and in a greater war than that which was waged then, it shall not be found wanting. Whether we shall be called to the colors to serve at the front, wherever that may be, or asked to serve at home, may we do it with the purpose and in the hope that we contribute to a permanent world peace. 

At the spring semester drew to an end, the Lutheran Companion returned to the theme:

“Old Glory” now waves to the breeze night and day over the old college building at Augustana. The oldest of our institutions, which gave a number of its students to fight for our country in the sixties, and which now has given a large quota of its men to fight for the cause of democracy in the world, is American in spirit and truth. It stands for the divine rights of the people, and these rights will prevail everywhere. There is a tendency these days to look down upon everything Lutheran as foreign and un-American, but our Lutheran institutions will be found among the foremost to combat this tendency and to prove that they possess the true American spirit, by their loyalty to our country and their willingness to sacrifice in the hour of its need. ¹⁸

Things came to a head soon thereafter. The school year ended with commencement exercises on May 28, and the long-awaited quadricentennial celebration of the Reformation came in mid-June, at the Augustana Synod’s annual meeting. 

More than 2,000 delegates from Swedish-American parishes nationwide poured into Rock Island for the event, many of them on special cars attached to Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy passenger trains. Among them were a 30-piece band from First Lutheran Church of Jamestown, N.Y., a Swedish enclave on Long Island. “As the Augustana band is now [in basic training] at Springfield, the courtesy of the First Church of Jamestown in sending its band to furnish music for the convention is very highly appreciated by the arrangement committee and delegates,” said the Argus’ correspondent. Local papers covered the synodical meeting in some detail, and most of the next issue of Lutheran Companion was given over to a detailed account by Ira Nothstein, pastor of Grace English Lutheran. ¹⁹ All in all, the annual meeting, the 58^th and the third to be held at the college, was a gala affair. Music was a large part of it.

In his opening remarks to the synod assembly, the Rev. L.A. Johnston, president of the Augustana Synod, touched on the war:

We glance over the past year, today. It is a serious time in which we are living. Great world events are in the making. The great world-war continues with increased violence. Sin is the cause of war. Covetousness and material gain, yea, all kinds of lusts are at the bottom of the war. God has long called men to repentance, but they have not listened. God now calls for repentance by means of war. The time of our visitation has come. As yet, however, we do not see signs of repentance before God. … It is with sadness of heart that we think that the United States is now actually and formally in the great war; but we must lay down all opposition to the program of the government, and yield ourselves to the inevitable, and give the administration what help we can.”²⁰

Johnston briefly mentioned the 400^th anniversary, citing Lutheran doctrine and saying, “It is our duty to contend for these blessings faithfully as our forefathers have done since the time of the Reformation,” but most of his remarks were taken up with subjects like the Augustana Book Concern, the synod’s publishing arm, and the Women’s Home Missionary Society, which celebrated its 25^th anniversary that year. 

He also touched on the synod’s assorted schools, colleges, hospitals and orphanage, as well as such matters as a “spirit of pleasure-seeking and materialism” among young people: “It is reported that 65 percent of the moving picture shows are immoral, and yet these are regularly visited by whole families even on the Lord’s Day. These and other harmful amusements are robbing the souls of hundreds of thousands, and make us feel inexpressibly sad.” Later, toward the end of the five-day meeting, the long-disputed “question of introducing inter-collegiate football came up for discussion as the result of a petition from the students of Augustana College, which was referred to the Synod by the synodical council, and was by the Synod referred to the boards of the various colleges.” Clearly, the synod’s elders had their work cut out for them, not only because of the war in Europe.

Music was an important part of the conference. It had been planned that way – Lutherans have always been conscious of their musical heritage, and they intended to showcase it. On the first day, more than 2,000 people gathered in a large auditorium when the opening hymn and liturgy were sung. “A temporary altar, erected on the platform, had transformed the place of meeting into a sanctuary; while the festival chorus, composed of over two hundred selected singers from all parts of the Synod, completely filled the background, and gave the scene a truly festive appearance.”   

But the high point of the synod assembly, at least musically speaking, came on Saturday, June 16, with the premiere performance of The Reformation Cantata, a rather high-flown account of Luther’s struggles during the 1500s set to familiar Lutheran chorale melodies interspersed with lengthy recitatives. It was performed in Swedish, but printed copies of the music also carried an English translation. The composer, music professor J. Victor Bergquist, led a chorus of singers from 14 states and soloists from New York and Chicago as well as Rock Island, who “united in giving with earnest and finished ease the master work of the authors.” Nothstein said “Prof. Bergquist’s work was received with evident enthusiasm.” The Rock Island Argus and the Moline Dispatch also had high praise for the cantata, and the Dispatch’s review was picked up by The Music News of Chicago:

Taking up his baton, [Bergquist] had under him, not only the orchestra and soloists, but a huge choral body of nearly 400 local members of choruses and many visitors from other parts of the country who had had no opportunity for any complete rehearsal until that day, and great credit is due the result achieve, everyone working with a will and a desire to do their best for the production of the cantata. The text, written by Ernst W. Olson, is one of much poetic beauty, and treats of the conflict of Lutheranism against Rome and the thanksgiving and triumph of “God’s word despite all evil powers,” and while a complete reformation may be yet a long way from the millennium in this day of conflict and upheavals, the same spirit of fighting for convictions pervades humanity, which, it is to be hoped, in time may come to agree upon a world religion, devoid of all sectarianism.

All in all, the premiere of Bergquist’s and Olson’s Reformation Cantata was a success. A writer for the Lutheran Companion (probably Nothstein) had only one quibble: “Why was it that the Augustana Synod celebrated the quadricentennial of the Reformation with the English practically excluded from the programs?” Not only were the sermons and addresses all week long in Swedish, but Olson’s Swedish text of the cantata was performed on Saturday night. “If this had been a celebration of some Swedish event or of some event in the early days of our Synod we should have had nothing to say, but since it was the celebration of the quadricentennial of the Reformation, an event of world importance and world interest, we simply fail to grasp why the synod let such an opportunity to bear witness before all men to the Reformation truths slip out of its hands.”²¹ As Augustana’s main English-language publication, the Companion was beating that drum long before war broke out in Europe, and it would keep beating the drum long after it ended. 

“All God’s warring children, …. German or English, French or Russian”

When the United States declared war on Germany, it put American Lutherans in a bind. As John Higham suggests in Strangers in the Land, animosity toward German-Americans, though real enough, “tended to assume a vague, generalized form” and “the phraseology of the attack was directed less at Germans as such than at an entirely disembodied category: the ‘hyphenated American,’ i.e. the immigrant of divided loyalty.” This new category, amorphous as it was, obviously included Swedes. Patrick J. Houlihan of Oxford and the University of Chicago, notes that this was part of a larger picture:

Ethnic ties complicated religious loyalties in Protestant-dominated empires such as the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as Catholic Austria-Hungary, Orthodox Russia, and the Islamic Ottoman Empire. U.S. Catholics of German and Irish heritage, for example, were noticeably reticent about supporting the Allied cause, even after the American Catholic hierarchy positively affirmed the Allied cause after the U.S. declaration of war on Good Friday 1917. ²²

Swedish-American Lutherans were in much the same boat. 

“Despite the fact they were always ready and willing to show their patriotism, the Swedes could not entirely hide their displeasure with the declaration of war,” says Sture Lindmark. This led to a certain amount of internal bickering and, at least in some quarters, a sense that “it was primarily members of the Augustana Synod who were said to sympathize with Germany.” This suspicion seems to have been largely unfounded. Significantly, Lindmark adds, “In the official records of the Augustana Synod, however, there is nothing that would seem to indicate defeatism or disloyalty among its members.” In actuality, the situation appears to have been thoroughly ambiguous, and any sentiments that might be construed as disloyal were followed by strenuous protestations of patriotism and loyalty. However, as Lindmark also makes clear, Swedish-American newspapers on more than one occasion were harassed; anti-war Swedish-American politicians like U.S. Reps. Charles A. Lindberg Sr. and Ernest Lundeen, R-Minn., suffered political consequences. At times, Swedish-Americans had a reputation as “slackers” who ducked military service. In Rockford, 138 young men were sentenced to a year in jail for refusing to register for the draft in June. Most of them were Swedes, and many of them were members of Rockford’s Socialist Club.²³ For the most part, however, Swedish-Americans escaped the kind of violence, hatred and intimidation sometimes meted out to Germans. 

Swedish-Americans in the Illinois Tri-Cities, however, seem to have been particularly well positioned to ride out the storm. For one thing, the most important Swedish institutions in Moline and Rock Island were Augustana Synod churches and the synodical college. They were quite conservative politically, and they were known members of the community rather than being examples of some amorphous, disembodied category, with or without the hyphen. Thus the Rock Island Argus reported with pride in June, “The Augustana band is to lead a big parade in Springfield next Tuesday, [draft] registration day, in which the members of the Sixth regiment from Camp Lowden will take part. The patriotic parade will be part of the program arranged by the Springfield city council for registration day.”²⁴ While the seminary drew Swedish-American ministerial students nationwide, the college was largely a local institution and one in which local people took pride. 

I don’t want to suggest too many parallels with today’s very different forms of nativism, international conflict and religious bigotry, but it is not unusual for communities to rally around local ethnic or religious minorities that are targets of perceived hostility, including, for example, mosques in Tampa, San Antonio and Uppsala in Sweden. In Illinois, anonymous graffiti outside the Islamic Society of Greater Springfield’s mosque recently proclaimed, “You are a cherished part of our community.”²⁵ There is nothing in the historical record to suggest that anyone in Rock Island in 1917 thought of Augustana and Swedish-Americans as anything other than that. 

Even in Davenport, where German-American faced a hostile environment and the governor of Iowa banned the use of foreign languages in public, the Swedish Lutheran church was growing; in a few years, in 1924, it would move from a former Swedish enclave down by the river up onto the bluffs. “Leadership in the church was rapidly passing out of the hands of the founders to a new generation eager to communicate the same Gospel in the English language,” says a history of the church, now known as Grace Lutheran. “Changes had also taken place in the neighborhood in which the first church stood and one by one the families which had settled in the neighborhood of their spiritual home moved to other parts of the city.” ²⁶ Grace Lutheran’s experience was typical. Wartime nativism no doubt hastened the switch from Swedish to English, but the change was already well under way, as inevitable as the scattering of Swedish-Americans away from ethnic neighborhoods to the new residential areas made accessible by the automobile. 

At the same time, something deeper than the cultural assimilation of an immigrant group seems to have been at work.  To get at it, we shall have to step back and take a hard look at how America’s churches, both Catholic and Protestant, responded to the war.  

As Patrick Houlihan notes, the First World War “highlighted the complexities of religiosity in multi-ethnic societies adjusting to industrial warfare.” In very general terms, many American Catholics – including some members of the hierarchy – tended to have a subdued, even skeptical attitude toward the war, while “English-speaking Protestant denominations such as Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians were much stronger supporters of U.S. intervention.”²⁷ In this Swedish-American Lutherans found themselves closer to the Catholics, although they were still influenced by an anti-Catholic heritage going back to the Reformation. Certainly the Lutheran Companion and its writers supported the American war effort, as well as the lofty goals promulgated by President Woodrow Wilson, but they tended to be reticent about it. We will return to this point.

On the other hand, most English-speaking American Protestants were all in. “Mainline Protestant Christianity remained aggressively masculine and centered on the redemptive uplift of the white Anglo-Saxon races, deeply suspicious of Catholic, Jewish, and non-white participation in the war effort,” says Houlihan, adding that Wilson’s “call of arms” and his “demonization and suspicion of ‘subversives’” were grounded in the American religious experience and “past traditions dating back to the Puritan origins of the “City upon a Hill’.” 

Billy Sunday, the popular evangelist, made quite a production of it. At a revival in New York, he proclaimed “Our flag has never been furled, and it is now unfurled for the liberty of the world.” A newspaper account continued, “Uttering this last sentence with one foot upon his chair and one upon the pulpit, he suddenly seized an American flag and waved it back and forth, while his hearers cheered frantically and finally burst out into singing.” Billy Sunday’s point was essentially that of a 1917 manifesto titled “No False Peace” that he signed, together with 60-odd Protestants of all stripes, including not only revival preachers like Sunday but also liberals, modernists, pastors, college presidents, editors and missionaries. Urging war against Germany, they said a just God “would not look with favor upon a people who put their fear of pain and death, their dread of suffering and loss, their concern for comfort and ease, above the holy claims of righteousness and justice and freedom and mercy and truth.”²⁸ 

Of course, it goes without saying that Germany also put its trust in the righteousness of a just God. In 1914 the German emperor’s court chaplain proclaimed, “We are going into battle for our culture against the uncultured, for German civilization against barbarism, for the free German personality bound to God against the instincts of the undisciplined masses. And God will be with our just weapons! For German faith and German piety are ultimately bound up with German faith and civilization.” The other belligerents, on both sides of the conflict, called on God as well. Perhaps the last word should go to the above-cited English poet J.C. Squire, who wrote in 1915:

God heard the embattled nations sing and shout,
“Gott strafe England!” and “God save the King!”
God this, God that, and God the other thing.
“Good God!” said God, “I’ve got my work cut out!²⁹  

In much the same vein as the poet, Carl J. Bengston, editor of Lutheran Companion, said in 1915 that God did not take sides in the war and God’s “smile is equally benignant on all His warring children, whether they be German of English, French or Russian.”³⁰ 

Wartime patriotism, evangelism and the Augsburg Confession

Lutherans, at least in America, tended to shy away from bellicose rhetoric like Billy Sunday’s – and that of the pastors, editors and publicists of the mainline Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational churches who supported the war effort. Instead, the columns of Lutheran Companion practically ached with a sense of brokenness, sin and tragedy even after America entered the war. Synod president Johnston’s opening address at the 1917 synodical assembly in Rock Island was one of many such expressions. Certainly it stood in marked contrast to any crusade to make the world safe for democracy. 

Citing a study of 19^th-century voting patterns by Paul Kleppner and a study of German Lutherans during World War I by Frederick Luebke, historian Richard Gamble of Hilldale College suggests that “pietist” or evangelical Christians who supported crusades to make American society conform to their concept of godly behavior tended to be more outspoken in their support for the war than “confessionalists” or “ritualists” who were concerned more with doctrinal issues and did not feel as “compelled to enter [the war] on the side of the Allied Powers and civilization and Christianity against barbarism and the wrong kind of holy wars.” Gamble’s terms are borrowed from Lutheran history, which saw a pietist movement arise in the 1700s stressing personal piety over Lutheran orthodoxy, which had been largely codified in the Augsburg Confession of 1530. “Confessional” Lutherans, then, were those who followed Augsburg and other Lutheran confessions.

Gamble’s distinction is useful when he suggests Americans can be classified not by “class or even broadly speaking citizens’ ethnicity or religious affiliation but more narrowly how they worshipped, whether they looked at the world and politics as pietists [or evangelicals] eager to transform American manners and morals or as confessionalists determined to adhere to their denomination’s creeds, liturgy, and sacraments, regardless of their impact on the wider culture or how often they were accused of being sectarian.” ³¹ I would submit that by 1917, Swedish-American Lutherans of the Augustana Synod fell on the confessional side of the ledger, at least on issues of war and peace.  In fact, it was named after the Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana in Latin), although, in practice, most of its members combined pietistic and confessionalist impulses. Certainly synod president Johnston’s address at the synod assembly qualifies as confessional. 

“Christianity is the only hope of the world,” he said. “Worldly culture and civilization have shown their incapacity to give the world a new birth. May the Christian Church prepare itself for the reconstruction period to follow the war!” But instead of an ecumenical crusade to make the world safe for democracy, Johnston pivoted to the celebration of the “Lutheran Reformation, which has given rich treasures and blessings to the whole world, but a special heritage to the Lutheran Church, which she must preserve for future generations. This heritage is the most blessed Gospel of the Triune God, the sacraments committed to the Church, the way of prayer to the throne of grace through Jesus’ blood and not through popes and saints, justification before God through faith in Christ, and liberty of conscience and religion. It is our duty to contend for these blessings as faithfully as our forefathers have done since the time of the Reformation.” ³² The rest of his address, as noted above, was given over to a nuts-and-bolts account of such matters as Sunday schools, building funds, the Women’s Home Missionary Society and the Augustana Book Concern.

  The contrast here couldn’t be clearer, not only with Billy Sunday and the American evangelists but also with Lutherans in Germany, many of whom celebrated the 400^th anniversary with a nationalistic “Luther Renaissance” marked, in Phillip Jenkins’ words, by “an outpouring of superpatriotic speeches, of nationalism at its most high-flown, with an undercurrent of anti-Semitism.” ³³ There was none of that in Rock Island.

In fact, what stands out most to a reader a hundred years later in the Lutheran Companion’s coverage of the war is how even-handed, level-headed and practical it was. I would suggest that Swedish-Americans in Rock Island experienced the war in essentially the same way overall as their “English” neighbors. Especially was this true of the Augustana College students who volunteered for military service or threw themselves into the war effort on the home front. Yet at the same time, faculty, synodical officials and writers for the Lutheran Companion weighed in on wartime developments with a distinctly Swedish-American perspective, often in concert with other Lutherans. To use Gamble’s term, they can be considered as confessionalists, and Gamble says their story has yet to be told in full. “The challenge for historians is to bring to light those pastors, seminary professors, and chaplains on the field who did not grab headlines with their war sermons, books, and editorials,” he suggests:

Such a study might uncover a group of apolitical preachers who cared for their flock on Sunday, 8 April 1917 – the Sunday after Congress declared war – much as they had done every Sunday before, a definable group who carried on preaching from the lectionary … regardless of the distractions of war and politics.  Perhaps they prayed with particular urgency for those in authority in a time of national crisis and met the extraordinary demands of a congregation whose sons had enlisted or would soon be drafted. But they never thought of displaying the Stars and Stripes or on in their churches and certainly not draped across their altars … and never thought of interpreting God’s promises to Israel and to the church as if they were meant for the United States.³⁴
The shoe fits. In time of war and peace alike, services in the Augustana Synod’s churches followed the age-old cycle of assigned lectionary readings for Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Trinity that they had inherited from the Church of Sweden.  And as war broke out, synodical writers for the Lutheran Companion found occasion to advocate for precisely the same ecclesiastical issues – including more use of English in Swedish-American churches – as they had before the war and would continue to advocate long after it was over.

Notes

¹ “The Augustana Synod and the Quadricentennial” Lutheran Companion, Oct 14, 1916, p. 2. Cf. Mark Granquist, “American Lutherans and the First World War,” in American Churches and the First World War, ed. Gordon L. Heath (McMaster Divinity College Series 7. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2016), pp. 60-61. A Lutheran synod is an umbrella organization of congregations along regional, doctrinal or ethnic lines. King Gustav II Adolf, 1594-1632, commanded Protestant armies during the Thirty Years War and died in combat in what is now Germany. He is considered a Swedish national hero.

² Thomas Tredway, Conrad Bergendoff’s Faith and Work: A Swedish-American Lutheran, 1895-1997 (Rock Island: Augustana Historical Society, 2014), pp. 26-27. My profile of the Tri-Cities is drawn from Bill Wundram,A Time to Remember: Celebrating a Century in Our Quad-Cities (Davenport: Quad-City Times, 1999), ; Frederick Anderson, ed. Joined by a River: The Quad Cities (Davenport: Lee Enterprises, 1982), pp. 84-85; William Roba, The River and the Prairie: A History of the Quad-Cities, 1812-1960 (Davenport: Hesperian Press, 1986), pp. 104-07, 111-13, 145; and Dag Blanck and Peter Kivisto, “Immigrants by the Mississippi: Ethnic Relations in Moline, Illinois,” in Blanck and Harald Runblom, ed., Swedish Life in American Cities (Uppsala Multiethnic Papers 21. Uppsala: Centre for Multiethnic Research, Uppsala University, 1991), ____. See also Maria Erling and Mark Granquist, The Augustana Story: Shaping Lutheran Identity in North America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2008), pp. 99-100, 227-29; Dag Blanck, The Creation of an Ethnic Identity: Being Swedish American in the Augustana Synod, 1860-1917 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 70-105.

³ Roba, River and Prairie, p. 101; “Swedish History,” Quad-City Times, Jan. 31, 2015 http://qctimes.com/news/local/government-and-politics/swedish-history/article_3371ed1d-f075-5a24-b834-67a40419787c.html.

⁴ Blanck and Kivisto, “Immigrants,” p. ___; Daniel Nystrom, A Ministry of Printing: History of the Publication House of Augustana Lutheran Church, 1889-1962 (Rock Island: Augustana Press, 1962), pp. 62-64. Its Swedish-language counterpart was Augustana.

⁵ Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Rock Island County, ed. Newton Bateman and Paul Selby (Chicago: Munsell, 1914), Vol. I, pp. 660-63. Although First Lutheran was located downtown, it was founded in 1870, the year the college moved to Rock Island, and “many college students were called to assist in the work.” 100 Years of Service in the Kingdom, First Lutheran Church, Rock Island, Illinois, 1870 [Rock Island, 1970], pp. 2-3. 

⁶ In my discussion of the broad trends on the home front during American’s war years, I follow Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 194-263; Mark Granquist, “American Lutherans and the First World War,” in American Churches and the First World War, ed. Gordon L. Heath (McMaster Divinity College Series 7. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2016), pp. 53-70.

⁷ Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), p. 3.

⁸ “Coward, Liar Biff! Plunk! Lodge Wins,” Rock Island Argus, April 2, 1917, p. 1; “Insult Soldiers and are Nabbed,” Argus, April 3, 1917, p. 9; “Two Jailed for Militia Insults,” April 6, 1917, p. 5; “Senator Attacks Constituent,” United States Senate https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senator_Attacks_Constituent.htm.

⁹ “Regimental Band in Concert Here,” Argus, June 6, p. 5; “Swedish Festival Is Not To Be Staged,” Argus, June 5, 1917, p. 10. The Mission Tabernacle, now known at First Covenant Church of Moline, was founded in 1876 by Lutherans as the Svenska Evangeliska Lutherska Gustaf-Adolfs Församling, named after the same King Gustav II Adolf mentioned above, and affiliated with the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant denomination in 1890. James R. Lundell, “History,” First Covenant Church of Moline http://www.firstcovenantmoline.org/history.htm.

¹⁰ Zieger, America’s Great War, pp.  xi-xii, 14-15, 53.

¹¹ Peter Schrag, Not Fit for our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 7, 85. 

¹² Sture Lindmark, Swedish America, 1914-1932: Studies in Ethnicity with Emphasis on Illinois and Minnesota (Studia Historica Upsaliensia XXXVII. Uppsala: Läromedelsförlagen, 1971), pp.  79-82, 133-34. 

¹³ Mark Granquist, “American Lutherans on the Home Front During World War I,” Journal of Lutheran Ethics, 5.2 (February 2005)  https://www.elca.org/JLE/Articles/696; Dag Blanck, The Creation of an Ethnic Identity: Being Swedish-American in the Augustana Synod, 1860-1917 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 104, 178-81. 

¹⁴ Bill Wundram, A Time to Remember: Celebrating a Century in Our Quad-Cities (Davenport: Quad-City Times, 1999), pp.132-33. 

¹⁵ Wundram, pp. 131-32; cf. Joined by a River, p. 65

¹⁶ Lutheran Companion, April 28, 1917, p. 202. Brief news notes on the college were carried under standing headlines reading “Our Institutions” and/or ““Augustana College and Theological Seminary.” Rather than repeat the standing heads, I will cite these notes by date and page number.

¹⁷ “College to Take Up the Military,” Argus, April 5, 1917, p. 3; 

¹⁸ Lutheran Companion, April 28, 1917, p. 202; May 17, 1917, p. 237.

¹⁹ “Synod Opens Its Session Tonight,” Argus, June 13, p. 3; Ira Nothstein, “The Augustana Synod Meeting of 1917,” Lutheran Companion, June 23, 1917, pp. 296-305.

²⁰ Nothstein, “Synod Meeting,” p. 298. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations and information about this meeting are drawn from Nothstein’s report. 

²¹ Excerpt from review by Mary Lindsay Oliver, Moline Dispatch, in Music News, Chicago, Vol. 9 (July 6, 1917), No. 9, p. 25, Google Books: “The Synod Meeting of 1917,” Lutheran Companion, June 30, 1917, p. 317. A transcription for voice and piano is available on line, Reformationskantat: för sopran, tenor, bas, kvartett, kör och orkester, by Ernst W. Olson and J. Victor Bergquist (Rock Island: Augustana Book Concern, 1917), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008949988.

²² Higham, Strangers in the Land, p.198; Patrick J. Houlihan, “The Churches,” in 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel et al. Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014. http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/the_churches

²³ Lindmark, Swedish America, pp. 79-80, 125. Articles by George Stephenson, an Augustana College graduate who went on to teach at the University of Minnesota, seem to be the source of much of this discussion. He was a prolific writer with decided opinions about assimilation and Americanization, among other subjects, but his flair for advocacy sometimes led him to take controversial positions. See Stephenson, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932), 451-52, 459.

²⁴ “Reviews Troops at the Arsenal,” Argus, June 2, 1917, p. 7. Camp Lowden was located in Springfield, at what is now the Illinois State Fairgrounds.

²⁵ See Chip Osowski, “New Tampa Mosque Flooded with Community Support Following Arson,” WFLA-TV, Feb. 27, 2017  http://wfla.com/2017/02/27/new-tampa-mosque-flooded-with-community-support-following-arson/; John McCormack, “Support Pours in After Mosque Burns,” San Antonio Express-News, Jan. 30, 2017 http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Faithful-gather-to-show-support-after-fire-10892795.php; Rose Troup Buchanan, “Swedish Residents ‘Love-Bomb’ Uppsala Mosque in Outpouring of Support After Attacks,” Independent (UK), Jan. 2, 2015 http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Faithful-gather-to-show-support-after-fire-10892795.php; Mary Hansen, “Friendly Chalk Message Brightens Day at Springfield Mosque,” State Journal-Register, Nov. 14, 2016  http://www.sj-r.com/news/20161114/friendly-chalk-message-brightens-day-at-springfield-mosque.

²⁶ “Swedish History,” Quad-City Times, Jan. 31, 2015. 

²⁷ Houlihan, “The Churches.” Cf. Patrick Cary, “The First World War and Catholics in the United States,” in Heath, American Churches, pp. 32-52.

²⁸  Richard M. Gamble, “Together for the Gospel of Americanism: Evangelicals and the First World War,” in Heath, American Churches, pp. 15-17, 27. For Lutherans, the term can be a source of confusion since its etymology is from the Greek word euangelikos, “of or pertaining to the Gospel,” and its European cognates, evangelisch in German and evangelisk in Swedish, are commonly used as a synonym for “Lutheran.” 

²⁹ Quoted in Jenkins, Great and Holy War, p. 3.

³⁰ Quoted in Erling and Granquist, Augustana Story, p. 228. 

³¹ Gamble, “Gospel of Americanism,” 20-21, 29.

³² Nothstein, “Synod Meeting,” p. 298.

³³ Houlihan, “The Churches”; Jenkins, Great and Holy War, pp. 174-76. 

³⁴ Gamble, “Gospel of Americanism,” 29-30. 

[Slightly revised and uplinked Dec. 10, 2025]