I recall two caricatures of the Kingsburg Swedes — “dour” and “dumb.” But I think both pejoratives, in truth, were not really so pejorative. “Dour” is perhaps shorthand for “the tragic view.” The Kingsburg Swedes understood that no one gets out alive, and that we must brace and endure with dignity the premature death of the good, the unforeseen hail at harvest that ruins the ingenious farmer and misses his less adept counterpart, the market collapse that ensures failure for the otherwise perfect harvest. This is not fatalism, but rather a gallantry in accepting our all too brief existences, rather than raging against the unfairness of it all and expecting “them” to “make it better — or else.”
“Dumb” also was a misnomer. So was “naïve.” Mostly, I heard that Swedes did not go into packing, brokerage, real estate, buying and selling. They sold their crops when they could have gotten more with tougher bargaining, and bought too high when they might have worn down the seller. They paid their taxes, when write offs were to be had. In other words, they never got rich, and assumed that their own amazing capability for hard work might give them leeway, some margin in which they might not otherwise have to be so brutal to others to survive. (-Victor Davis Hanson)
Works and Days » Reflections on Small Town America
(Victor Hanson has captured qualities that have puzzled me all my life about father and his thinking. The tragic view, indeed! And why keep us so poor by doing work and then charging the lowest rate? I was angry for this so many times in my growing up years. Dr. Hanson has proposed a positive spin and my heart says that this tragic view is true to my father, and perhaps to myself too. Why does it take so long to understand? Grrrrrr! - Linda)
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