About Hemlandet

Hemlandet

Hemlandet was a Swedish-American newspaper begun in 1855 in Galesburg, Illinois, and later published in Chicago. It was the first Swedish-language newspaper in America, and for much of the nineteenth century it was the dominant voice of Swedish Lutheran immigration. Founded by the Lutheran minister Tuve Hasselquist as a religious weekly, it was transformed over four decades by its editor Johan Alfred Enander into a general newspaper for Swedish-Americans, before merging into a rival Chicago paper in 1914.

The name Hemlandet means "The Homeland," and the fuller title under which it long appeared, Hemlandet, det gamla och det nya — "The Homeland, the Old and the New" — captured its purpose exactly. It bound Swedish immigrants to the country they had left while instructing them in the country they had joined, and it did so at a time when Swedish emigration to the United States was becoming a mass movement.

Tuve Hasselquist and the Galesburg Founding

Hemlandet was founded in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1855 by Tuve Hasselquist, a Swedish Lutheran minister who had become one of the leading organizers of Swedish Lutheran life in America. Galesburg, in Knox County in western Illinois, stood amid some of the earliest Swedish settlements in the Midwest, and it was a natural place for a Swedish press to begin. Hasselquist published the paper through the Swedish Lutheran Publication Society, which he founded in Galesburg to supply the immigrant churches with Swedish-language print.

The paper was published in the interest of evangelical religion and Christian reform. In its early years it advocated the cause of abolition, the spread of temperance and opposition to secret societies — the characteristic moral programme of the Swedish Lutheran pietism Hasselquist represented. Its original content was primarily religious: sermons, church news and instruction for scattered congregations whose members might see a pastor only rarely.

Det Rätta Hemlandet and the Sister Publications

In 1856 Hasselquist also founded Det rätta hemlandet, "The True Homeland," a publication whose focus was even more strictly religious than Hemlandet's. It later became Rätta Hemlandet och Missionsbladet, with an emphasis on mission work, and in 1869 it merged with Augustana, another of Hasselquist's publications, becoming Rätta Hemlandet och Augustana.

The Publication Society's output extended well beyond newspapers. Reorganized and moved with its founder, it and its successors were responsible for publishing most of the Swedish-language books produced in the United States in the era, particularly hymnals and other Lutheran church materials, and it issued periodicals including the Minnesota Posten in the late 1850s. Print, in Hasselquist's design, was the connective tissue of a church scattered across a continent.

The Move to Chicago in 1859

In 1859 Hemlandet moved to Chicago along with Hasselquist and his Swedish Lutheran Publication Society. Chicago was becoming the great Swedish city of America, the port of entry and employment centre for tens of thousands of Swedish immigrants, and the move placed the paper at the heart of the population it served. Hasselquist went on to serve as the first president of the Augustana Synod when that Swedish Lutheran body was organized in 1860, holding the presidency for a decade, and Hemlandet's fortunes were closely tied to the Augustana church it helped to build.

The Chicago years brought catastrophe as well as growth. The Swedish Lutheran Publication Society was severely damaged in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed much of the city's Swedish district along with the society's plant. The society, and the paper with it, rebuilt, and Hemlandet continued as the senior Swedish publication in the country.

From Church Paper to Political Newspaper: Sundelius

During the 1860s the paper's character began to change. When P. A. Sundelius became its editor in the late 1860s, Hemlandet's coverage of general issues shifted from the denominational toward the political. News of American public life, of Sweden and of the wider Swedish-American community took up more of its columns, and the paper began to function less as a church gazette and more as a newspaper in the ordinary sense.

The change reflected the maturation of Swedish America itself. By the end of the 1860s the immigrants included not only farmers and church members but urban workers, tradesmen and voters, and a purely devotional weekly could no longer hold them. In 1869 Sundelius left Hemlandet for another Swedish-language newspaper, Svenska Amerikanaren, carrying the argument over the paper's direction into a lasting rivalry between the two Chicago titles.

Johan Alfred Enander's Forty Years

Sundelius was succeeded by Johan Alfred Enander (1842–1910), who became editor-in-chief and, over time, publisher of Hemlandet. Enander spent forty years editing the paper, and during that long tenure he completed the transformation of the weekly church periodical into a general newspaper for Swedish-Americans. Under Enander, Hemlandet — appearing from 1870 under the title Gamla och nya hemlandet, "The Old and New Homeland" — covered politics, news from Sweden, community affairs and literature for a national Swedish-American readership.

Enander was himself a notable figure in Swedish-American letters, a historian of his own community as well as its editor, and his standing gave the paper authority in both the immigrant community and in Sweden. The Hemlandet of his era stood for the conservative, Republican-leaning, church-friendly mainstream of Swedish America, and rival papers — Svenska Amerikanaren, Svenska Tribunen and others founded from the 1860s onward — defined themselves partly in competition with it. Swedish-American political solidarity in the period was remarkable: it was estimated in 1899 that some ninety-nine percent of Swedes in America were Republicans, a consensus Hemlandet both reflected and reinforced.

The Swedish-American Press Around Hemlandet

Hemlandet's distinction as the first Swedish-language newspaper in America should not obscure the crowded field it eventually faced. Hasselquist's dominance was contested from the 1860s: Svenska Amerikanaren began in Illinois in 1866, the paper that became Svenska Tribunen followed, and New York's Nordstjernan from 1872 served the East. Papers advancing the Democratic Party among Swedes, such as New York's Scandinavisk Post of 1863 to 1875, generally lived short lives in a community so heavily Republican.

What set Hemlandet apart was endurance and institutional weight. It had been founded before the Civil War, before the Augustana Synod itself, and it was carried across the continent by the subscription networks of the Lutheran congregations. For a Swedish family arriving in Illinois, Minnesota or Kansas, Hemlandet was often the first American institution whose name they knew.

The Paper's Religious and Moral Character

Even as it broadened, Hemlandet never entirely shed its founding character. Its advocacy of temperance, its hostility to secret societies and its early abolitionism belonged to a coherent moral politics that Swedish Lutheran immigrants carried with them and applied to American questions. The paper's pages instructed readers not only in what was happening but in how a Swedish Lutheran in America ought to live — a function modern newspapers had largely abandoned but which immigrant papers, acting as surrogate pastors and teachers, still performed.

That didactic role also explains the paper's attention to Sweden itself. News from the homeland — its church, its politics, its harvests and its emigration debates — was not foreign news to Hemlandet's readers but family news, and the paper's Swedish coverage kept the emotional geography of the "old and new homeland" intact for its audience.

The End: Purchase and Merger, 1910–1914

Enander's death in 1910 closed the paper's defining era. After his death Hemlandet was bought by C. S. Peterson, and it was then sold to its old rival Svenska Amerikanaren. From the fall of 1914 through the end of 1915 the merged paper appeared as Svenska Amerikanaren Hemlandet, after which the title reverted to Svenska Amerikanaren alone. Listings of Swedish-American newspapers date Gamla och nya hemlandet as a Chicago publication from 1870 to 1914 — the span of its independent life under that name.

The merged Svenska Amerikanaren continued for decades, itself eventually merging with the Svenska Amerikanska Posten in 1940 and publishing its last issue in 1985. Hemlandet's identity was thus absorbed step by step into the consolidating Swedish-American press, at a time when Swedish immigration had slowed and the community's reading was shifting decisively to English.

Legacy

Hemlandet's claim on history is threefold. It was the first Swedish-language newspaper in America, begun in 1855 when Swedish settlement was still in its pioneer phase. It served for nearly sixty years as the principal printed organ of the largest Swedish Lutheran community outside Sweden. And under Enander it demonstrated the characteristic evolution of the successful immigrant paper, from denominational gazette to general newspaper, without surrendering its founding moral voice.

Its surviving issues, catalogued by the Library of Congress's Chronicling America programme and held by Swedish-American archives, remain a foundational source for the history of Swedish immigration — the record of a community explaining America to itself, in its own language, from Galesburg and Chicago across three generations.