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Letter from Ruth Lima McMahon to Ole Rølvaag, 1925 December 6
- Title
- Letter from Ruth Lima McMahon to Ole Rølvaag, 1925 December 6
- Identifier
- p0584_07895
- p0584_07896
- p0584_07897
- p0584_07898
- p0584_07899
- p0584_07900
- Date
- 1925 December 6
- Creator
- Lima McMahon, Ruth, 1898-1981
- Description
- Ruth Lima's letter to Ole Rolvaag.
Transcription:Dear Rolvaag,
About your questions I have had very little time to think, and this answer is only tentative. As I look back over my Norwegian-American bringing up I am struck chiefly by my unconsciousness of any dilemma. It is only since I went to college and particularly since I was in Norway that I have become aware of a national dualism, the importance of which I think is overestimated when I first discovered it.
Nationally – I mean as to ?, national feeling, and governmental ideals, I have of course never been anything but American – both by virtue of home training and school training. Everything that
I can remember, from the patriotic songs and Lincoln program in the country school to the political debates of my Norwegian-speaking elders at home served always to increase a half-conscious devotion to American and to clarify my understanding of American principles of government. Never has it occurred to me possible. To feel any real thinking whatsoever with any other nation, spoken as a political entity. This is, of course, not strange, considering how completely my own father and all the Norse immigrants I know well, have given their hearts to the American governmental ideals.
– Dec. 31
With that I gave up the tired attempt of a school evening and I don’t know that I am more competent for the task now. When I have said that I was unconscious of any dilemma I have perhaps said that most important thing – The American patriotism of what i spoke, burst into passionate consciousness during my senior year of high school. The romance of war, and perhaps even more a vitalized understanding of the character of Abraham Lincoln, gave sudden life to all the Americanism i had inhibited and grew up.
Norway was a country my grandparents and cousins lived there. My father had been there. My auth told countless stories from there and, being a child, I demanded that the stores be repeated a countless number of times, so that they are now - and I think will always be - clear as colors in my memory. But if the stories had been of any other country they would have served equally will.
I was not conscious of any difference between relatives of Norwegian children and the children of the Englishman who were our neighbors. The fact that I knew Norwegian while they did not - never stuck me as peculiar. Nor did it strike me as peculiar that my great big newcomer Uncle went to school with us children. Everything was simple and natural, as things are as children of every land and age. The fact that my people had miraculously escaped death by hunger in frost, and the fact that they had planted the first few and plowed the first furrows homefronts, were not matters that excited either pride or pity. We had ? those things from babyhood, and we had never known anything else. The fact that my mother lay buried and terribly mourned in a prairie graveyard just started, never occasional any fear or wonder in my mind. It was as natural as everything else.
Of course I felt joy and sorrow as passionately as the children, and could morn for my mother as tearfully as if I had understood a good deal more – But I mean to say, that of the drama of immigration and pioneer life, as well as if any version of the future of the prairie. I was wholly unconscious as I think all my counterparts were. Our fathers experiences are not ours. To multiply incidents of childhood is, if I understood you question, beside the point. To disentangle the psychic influence that have made what I am, [worp0584_07895d] possible. They go back to remote ages in Norway and England, but have certainly been shaped and changed through the broad medium of American life and history.
I shall write no more this time, being somewhat uncertain whether I have hit up this line of thought you want. If you will ask more particularly, I may be able to say more.
Ruth
- Funding to digitize the O.E. Rølvaag Papers was provided to the Norwegian-American Historical Association through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, a component of the Minnesota Clean Water, Land and Legacy constitutional amendment, ratified by Minnesota voters in 2008.
- The Ruth Lima McMahon Papers (P0844) are housed at NAHA.
- Type
- Text
- Format
- Letters (correspondence)
- Contributor
- Rølvaag, O. E. (Ole Edvart), 1876-1931
- Rights
- In Copyright
- https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
- This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).
- Bibliographic Citation
- [Indicate the cited item here]. O.E. Rølvaag Papers. Norwegian American Historical Association, Northfield, Minnesota.