Obviously, emigrant letters must be subjected to critical evaluation before they can be used as historical documentation. In referring to De, Der Tog Hjemmefra prior to its publication, Karl Larsen wrote that “the confidential letter is the unwitnessed meeting of two people.” If one contrasts such confidential, personal letters with those “emigrant letters” written expressly for publication in newspapers, magazines, etc., the difference is quite ap
parent.14
The emigrant letters dealt with in the following were written to be read by none other than the private recipient and, perhaps, his or her family and friends. Only these letters can tell the personal, inside story of emigration history. Only these documents can bring to life those anonymous persons who contributed to the founding of modern America. They make it possible for us to “interview” the letter writers and enquire about their aims, their choices and their goals. The various biases and motives leading to its writ
ing in the first place often lay hidden in the private letter. An attempt, conscious or unconscious, is made to influence the recipient, either by the words themselves or between the lines. The letter writer has made choices about what to describe and what not to describe, about the way to tell the story, what words to use, what to suggest and what to distort. In using
A letter written in Chicago on October 15, 1865, by Carl Christian Jensen. This letter, with its lithograph of Chicago in the 1860s, is unique.
Arhus, Denmark. 1909. On the left-hand corner an udvandrings kontor, the office of an emigration agent. (With the exception of the page from the Copenhagen Police Emigration Records, the pictures accompanying this article are the property of Søllerød Museum, Søllerød, Denmark.)
emigrant letters as something more than absorbing, often exciting reading, the historian must put himself in the place of the recipient and attempt to uncover the realities behind the confidential letter. Only then can such letters become valuable, both as personal and as historical documents.
Danish emigration to North America was at once both a mass movement and an individual departure. It was a mass movement in that at least 380,000 Danes emigrated between 1820 and 1930. Each individual leave- taking, however, was based on a personal decision. No country parishes or towns in Denmark were left completely uninhabited as a result of emigra
tion. Emigration was an individual-psychological phenomenon very much influenced by external factors.15 The most important of these was the letters from America. News from overseas, as reported by those who had seen the new world, spread in ever-widening circles in local communities. The letters rarely contained a definite promise of riches and gold, yet, for better or worse, the tempting words told of a world free of the confining limita
tions of home. Occasionally, a letter would contain a prepaid ticket to America, and sometimes the letter writer himself returned home to collect family, friends and whoever else might want to accompany him.
The effect of the emigrant letter as a stimulus to emigration must be seen in light of the motives to write from America.16
Roughly speaking, emigrant letters can be divided into 3 main categories:
1. The propaganda letter: either a letter filled with optimism, containing more or less obscure enticements, or the opposite, a letter full of critical remarks about America, based on the writer’s negative experience in his new country. On the surface, the propaganda letter is not very different from the “public letter” written to newspapers and other publications in praise of, or censoring, conditions in America. The difference is that the propaganda of the private letter is kept on the personal level and is a response to the immigrant’s own experience of hardship, loneliness, homesickness, etc.
2. The money letter: often, but not always, a request for funds. It should be noted that, contrary to an oft-repeated myth, the source of that private flow of money across the Atlantic was not always the “rich uncle” in America. Many emigrant letters were written for the sole purpose of seeking financial assistance from home. There are, of course, also letters from well-established immigrants who sent money to Denmark as proof of the comfortable life they were enjoying in the United States.
3. The contact letter: a letter written simply to maintain contact with the family back home. While the first two types of letter were written primarily during the period of adjustment in America, the contact letter became more common as the emigrant adapted to his new life and established himself as an immigrant. Paradoxically, the contact letter was written during that period in which contact with the homeland was slowly weakening. This was the period in which the emigrant burned his bridges, became assimilated and perhaps found it difficult to write correct Danish, in short, a period in which letter-writing called for some effort or a really good tale to tell. Many such letters are from emigrants who had not been heard from for many years.
Naturally, the distinctions between these three types of letters are not always clear. Every emigrant letter has a much more varied content than is suggested by these three categories. But behind the often “higgledy-pig
gledy” reeling off of news, it is possible to identify a few primary motives behind the dispatch of a particular letter. The personal letters as such are the emigrant’s own “inside story” as he or she wished to tell it. At the same time, these documents provide excellent source material for the historian wishing to analyze the immigrant experience in general, and how emigra
tion was promoted by personal contact, in particular. The following will deal with that category of letter described here as “the propaganda letter.”