Call for singers for the Pageant of the Northman, 1925 May 28
1 2024-03-15T22:00:38+00:00 Kristina Warner c8c3eeb8fc534b4204fc4ece92574ef9ee4ab6bd 2 1 From the Norse-American Centennial papers (P0562). Identifier: p0562_02644 plain 2024-03-15T22:00:38+00:00 Kristina Warner c8c3eeb8fc534b4204fc4ece92574ef9ee4ab6bdThis page is referenced by:
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Pageant of the Northman
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The high point with a lavish “Pageant of the Northmen.” With a cast of 1,500, the melodramatic account of a thousand years of Norwegian history featured stories of heroic settlement, noteworthy individuals, and triumphs in the "new" world.
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The Pageant was the finale of the Norse-American Centennial and was touted as a celebration of Norwegians in America. The Pageant focuses on Hans Christian Heg, a kid born in Norway who comes to America and settles down in Wisconsin. He marries in America and begins work in public office, though it doesn’t last long. Soon the nation he now lives in is in the midst of the Civil War, and Heg signs up to fight for his nation against the instituition of slavery he despises.
He becomes a colonel and leader of the 15th Wisconsin volunteer regiment, a regiment made up almost entirely of Norwegian Americans, and leads his men bravely. In 1863, he was killed during the Battle of Chickamauga. Later in the Pageant, “Colonel Heg’s spirit inspired the volunteers who fought in the Spanish-American War, decades later. It remained with the thousands who enlisted as soldiers, sailors and marines in the vast world war. It was with the noble women who served in the Red Cross and as war workers” (p. 6).
However, a great deal of the Pageant helped to push and solidify the “empty land” myth, displaying the indigenous groups (who were also played by white Norwegian-Americans) as friendly with the Norwegian immigrants and giving the land to them. An early scene in the Pageant shows the Indigenous American people leaving of their own volition; this is not historically accurate, and in reality they were displaced by the settlers of the Muskego settlement when they took over the land.
Additionally, the Pageant also supported the notion of Nordic ethnic superiority in the keynote of the Pageant: “I believe that the Keynote of the pageant should be that men of Norse blood have those qualities that make for desirable American citizenship and that the earlier Norse immigrants not only conformed to American standards and ideals but were among the very people who created them”.
