By David Gordon, associate editor
Retaining Norwegian culture and identity were highly important to Waldemar Ager in the half century that he lived in Eau Claire, according to local historian Brian Blakeley.
Blakeley spoke about Ager to some 30 people at the L. E. Phillips Memorial Public Library Thursday evening (Feb. 28). His talk was part of the Waldemar Ager Association’s celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Norwegian-born journalist and novelist. Blakeley, an Eau Claire native who moved back here after retiring from the history faculty at Texas Tech University, is in the midst of researching and writing a three-volume history of Eau Claire.
Ager was born in Norway and was part of a major emigration from there to the United States. At that time, “the main exports of Norway had been herring and people,” Blakeley noted.
To Eau Claire in 1892
Ager came to Chicago in 1885 and moved to Eau Claire in 1892 to work for the Reform, a weekly Norwegian language newspaper. He was employed here as both a journalist and a worker in the owner’s print shop.
“He found a city that suited him very well” because he found “an already existing large Norwegian community,” Blakeley said.
However, the city changed dramatically in the ensuing half century and “Ager’s life changes because Eau Claire changes,” he said.
Preservation of Norwegian culture
Blakeley said Ager was a strong advocate for preserving Norwegian culture through the retention of the Norwegian language, which evolved to written form only in the late 19th century. This was due to the country’s political history, which resulted in Court Danish and then Swedish becoming the spoken languages.
“He’s important in a linguistic sense” because he helped “to create and popularize” Norwegian as a written language,” Blakeley said of Ager. He added that Ager was valued more in Norway – for his books – than he was in America for either his journalism or his books, both written in Norwegian.
Three approaches to ethnicity
Blakeley said Ager dealt with three distinct time periods in regard to how ethnicity was viewed here. From his arrival until the start of World War I, the city was clearly divided along ethnic lines that included Germans, Irish and Norwegians, and these divisions were generally accepted.
That changed with the advent of World War I, when German-Americans were viewed with suspicion if not outright hostility. Ager defended German-Americans and argued that they were being criticized too heavily on the basis of unproven suspicions and allegations, Blakeley said.
He also noted that Ager was close to being a pacifist but nonetheless gave lukewarm support to America’s entry into the war.
The “Melting Pot”
Blakeley said the third view of ethnicity, starting with the end of World War I, highlighted the “melting pot” approach, which held that immigrant groups should meld into American society rather than retaining their own language and culture. He said Ager strongly opposed this view, arguing that “hyphenated-Americans” were the essence of the United States, and needed to retain ties to their homelands because this gave them “a sense of the past.
“Without a sense of the past, there’s no hope for the future,” Blakeley said in regard to Ager’s stance.
Ager dealt negatively with this issue in his 1917 novel, On the Way to the Melting Pot, and elsewhere. By the early 1930s, saddened by the general acceptance of the “melting pot” model, Ager stopped writing novels and produced only short stories from 1931 until his death in 1941, Blakeley said.
That reaction came, in part, from the realization that most Norwegian immigrants (among others) wanted to study English and move as quickly as possible into Eau Claire’s “Yankee society,” Blakeley said. This trend made it desirable to marry outside one’s own ethnicity and it was often a matter of pride to “marry a Yankee,” he said.
This applied first to German-Americans and then to Norwegians, who felt a sense of pride in “studying to be a Yankee,” he added.
‘A very complicated person’
Blakeley called Ager “a very complicated person” and noted that “there is no single Ager.” One example he cited was that while support for prohibition was a thread running consistently through Ager’s life, he nevertheless believed that drunkards were redeemable.
Blakeley also noted Ager’s adamant opposition to the gradual trend toward the use of English in his church – founded in 1865 as the First Norwegian Evangelical Church. That trend produced major battles within the church and led to the breakaway of 137 members who formed in 1910 what was then known as Grace English Lutheran Church (now Grace Lutheran Church). By 1935, when his church changed its name to First Lutheran Church and formally adopted English for its services, Ager was almost alone in his displeasure at this “radicalism,” Blakeley said.
‘. . . kind to people’
Ager generally was much less rigid in dealing with people directly, compared to his written stances, according to Blakeley.
“He tried desperately to be kind to people,” Blakeley said.
When the issue of enforcing Prohibition “blew the city apart,” Ager tried to diffuse the heated feelings with humor, Blakeley said. Referring to the inconsistent enforcement of Prohibition, Ager – with tongue in cheek – suggested the creation of a “Bureau of Americanization” where “ignorant immigrants” could find out which laws were intended only to convey an attitude and which ones were meant to be enforced.
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