Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
While MN and the Dakotas certainly own the "Scandinavian-American" category, saying that significant Scandinavian communities didn't exist elsewhere in the US is going a bit too far.
Digging through Encyclopedia of Chicago entries, there were around 150,000 people born in Scandinavian countries (primarily Sweden and Norway) living in Chicago by 1930, and likely an equal number of 2nd-gens by then as well.
That's obviously no rival to the Twin Cities, but it's not nothing either. I have to imagine that other legacy cities likely had Scandinavian migrant communities as well.
|
Pretty much every nationality that immigrated in large numbers to the Midwest, I would think, had strong representation in Chicago. Maybe the Finns were an exception because they were really, really concentrated around Lake Superior and avoided big cities.