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During the Swedish emigration to the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, about 1.3 million Swedes left Sweden for the United States. The main pull was the availability of low cost, high quality farm land in the upper Midwest (the area from Illinois to Montana), and high paying jobs in mechanical industries and factories in Chicago, Minneapolis, Worcester and many smaller cities. Religious freedom was also a pull factor for some. Most migration was of the chain form, with early settlers giving reports and recommendations (and travel money) to relatives and friends in Sweden, who followed the same route to new homes. A major push factor inside Sweden was population growth and the growing shortage of good farm lands. Additional factors in the earliest stages of emigration included crop failures, the lack of industrial jobs in urban Sweden, and for some the wish to escape the authority of an established state church. After 1870, transatlantic fares were cheap. By the 1880s, American railroads had agents in Sweden who offered package deals on one-way tickets for entire families. The railroad would ship the family, their house furnishings and farm tools, and provide a financial deal to spread out payments for the farm over a period of years. Swedish migration peaked 1870-1900. By 1890, the U.S. census reported a Swedish-American population of nearly 800,000. Many of the immigrants became classic pioneers, clearing and cultivating the prairies of the Great Plains, while others remained in the cities, particularly Chicago. Single young women usually went straight from agricultural work in the Swedish countryside to jobs as housemaids. Many established Swedish Americans visited the old country in the later 19th century, their narratives illustrating the difference in customs and manners. Some made the journey with the intention of spending their declining years in Sweden. After a dip in the 1890s, emigration rose again, causing national alarm in Sweden. At this time, Sweden's economy had developed substantially, but the higher wages prevailing in the United States retained their attractiveness. A broad-based parliamentary emigration commission was instituted in 1907. It recommended social and economic reform in order to reduce emigration by "bringing the best sides of America to Sweden". The commission's major proposals were rapidly implemented: universal male suffrage, better housing, general economic development, and broader popular education, measures which also can be attributed to numerous other factors. The effect of these measures on migration is hard to assess, as World War I (1914–1918) broke out the year after the commission published its last volume, reducing emigration to a mere trickle. From the mid-1920s, there was no longer a Swedish mass emigration. == Early history: the Swedish-American dream == (詳細はestablished a colony on the Delaware River in 1638, naming it New Sweden. A small, short-lived colonial settlement, New Sweden contained at its height only some 600 Swedish and Finnish settlers (Finland being part of Sweden). It was lost to the Dutch in New Netherland in 1655. Nevertheless, the descendants of the original colonists maintained spoken Swedish until the late 18th century. Modern day reminders of the history of New Sweden are reflected in the presence of the American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia, Fort Christina State Park in Wilmington, Delaware, and The Printzhof in Essington, Pennsylvania. The historian H. A. Barton has suggested that the greatest significance of New Sweden was the strong and long-lasting interest in America that the colony generated in Sweden. America was seen as the standard-bearer of liberalism and personal freedom, and became an ideal for liberal Swedes. Their admiration for America was combined with the notion of a past Swedish Golden Age with ancient Nordic ideals. Supposedly corrupted by foreign influences, the timeless "Swedish values" would be recovered by Swedes in the New World. This remained a fundamental theme of Swedish, and later Swedish-American, discussion of America, though the recommended "timeless" values changed over time. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Swedes who called for greater religious freedom would often refer to America as the supreme symbol of it. The emphasis shifted from religion to politics in the 19th century, when liberal citizens of the hierarchic Swedish class society looked with admiration to the American Republicanism and civil rights. In the early 20th century, the Swedish-American dream even embraced the idea of a welfare state responsible for the well-being of all its citizens. Underneath these shifting ideas ran from the start the current which carried all before it in the later 20th century: America as the symbol and dream of unfettered individualism.〔Barton, ''A Folk Divided'', 5–7.〕 Swedish debate about America remained mostly theoretical before the 19th century, since very few Swedes had any personal experience of the nation. Emigration was illegal and population was seen as the wealth of nations.〔Kälvemark, 94–96.〕 However, the Swedish population doubled between 1750 and 1850,〔See Beijbom, "(Review )".〕 and as population growth outstripped economic development, it gave rise to fears of overpopulation based on the influential population theory of Thomas Malthus. In the 1830s, the laws against emigration were repealed.〔Barton, ''A Folk Divided'', 11.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Swedish emigration to the United States」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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