Kansas Immigrants; Birger Sandzen

The Kansas Immigrants Program No. 26 The Kansas Immigrants To every settler, Kansas offered a challenge, a challenge to tame the land, to brave the weather, to build a home, to buy a farm. Immigrants faced a more difficult task. They were joining a society with a different language, culture and institutions. And for one, the sweet Vieira-Sanzaine, Kansas posed a particular challenge, an artistic one. In 1915, he wrote, When I came to this part of the country 20 years ago, I had much to learn over again. The atmosphere here is different from the atmosphere in Sweden. There, everything is enveloped in a soft, clinging atmosphere with colors in greens and blues. But here, the air is so thin that the

colors become more vivid in the shadows lighter. The colors here are purples and greens and yellows with everything bright in this clear, ringing atmosphere of the west. When I started to paint here, I had to pitch everything in a higher key. The sweeping landscapes of Kansas were quite different from the intimate forest scenes Sanzaine remembered from Sweden. But he was not discouraged. He found inspiration in his adopted land. He embarked on a dual artistic crusade to capture the spirit of the country in his art and to bring art into the lives of its people. Sanzaine was 23 years old when he arrived at Linsborg, Kansas in 1894 to take a teaching job at Bethany College. But his youth belied his artistic training and talent. His father was a pastor and art literature and music were part of family life. As a child, Sanzaine recalled, he listened to classical music, one day Beethoven and Bach and the next day Bach and Beethoven. He was encouraged to draw by one

of his father's assistants and when at the age of 10 he went to school, he took painting and drawing lessons and studied prints. Although he went on to university, he was not content with traditional academic studies. He left for Stockholm where he became a student of the celebrated artist Anders Zorn. He continued his training in Paris at the studio of Amajan. There he met several American students and his interest in the United States grew when he read a book by Carl Svenson, the founder of Bethany College in Linsborg. Sanzaine was excited by the promise of America. A free new country, it should be heaven for a young painter, out there in your west and artist could develop a style of his own to fit the country. After correspondence in the spring of 1894, Svenson offered Sanzaine a teaching job at Bethany. Sanzaine was to find artistic inspiration in his new home and his reputation lent prestige to the town and college. If Sanzaine was an artist at heart, he was a teacher by choice. Besides drawing and painting,

he taught art history and romance languages. Like his former teacher, Anders Zorn, Sanzaine taught and painted with his students. He did not believe art could be created in a vacuum. He would be failing in his duty if he sat alone in the studio with his brush and palette. Artistic inspiration came from the world outside the studio and the artist should share that vision, not only with those interested in art, but with those who knew or cared little about it. Sanzaine's view of art was democratic. He believed that art in some form, no matter how unpretentious, should enter every home. Art should not be for the rich alone. Everyone should be able to afford it. Sanzaine set a personal example by selling his own art cheaply. Sometimes he would give it away. He was tireless in his efforts to promote interest in art. He toured schools, churches and clubs, giving talks, helped to organize exhibitions, and was a popular guest lecturer at universities in the West and Midwest. Years before art appreciation classes became popular, he began an aesthetics class for liberal art students. He welcomed visitors to his studio and became

excited when indifference to art gave way to interest. Leila Meclan, the executive secretary of the American Foundation of Art, in paying tribute to Sanzaine's work in popularizing art said, Biaire Sanzaine has lit little candles of art knowledge and appreciation all through the Middle West. Sanzaine's devotion to teaching and his crusade for art appreciation involves some personal sacrifice. His ambitions were for art, not for himself. He turned down offers of prestigious jobs at universities and art institutes. He preferred to teach and work in Lindsborg. When his first one-man exhibition was held in New York City in 1922, he was urged to attend. The public would want to meet the artist. Sanzaine declined, saying he had to teach his classes at Bethany. But despite his commitments, he was a prolific artist. In the next program, we'll examine some of the themes of his work.

The Kansas Immigrants is narrated by Glenn Price and produced by KENU at the University of Kansas. The series is made possible by a grant from the Kansas Committee for the Humanities. For a free script, write immigrants, continuing education, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 66045. The Kansas Immigrants Program Number 27 The Kansas Immigrants Bierre Sanzaine was excited by the landscape of the west. The plains and the mountains,

the rocks and the trees, they had a rugged grandeur quite unlike his native Sweden. He was determined to capture the spirit of the land in his art. But like other immigrants, Sanzaine had much to learn. He did not face the hardships of the farmer. He did not have to master a new language for he had learned English. But for the artist, life in Kansas represented a challenge. If his art was to evoke his new homeland, he had to develop a fresh style. Sanzaine's promise as an artist was recognized early in his life. He took drawing and painting lessons at school and studied under famous artists in Stockholm and Paris. He was influenced by post-impressionist trends, the colors were subdued, the moods understated. When Sanzaine arrived at Linsborg in 1894 to teach at Bethany College, he had to adapt his skills to a new series of subjects. The bright sunlight called for vivid colors, the broad prairie for bold brush strokes.

Over the next 20 years, he developed a distinctive style, applying the formal lessons of his artistic training to the new environment. The images of nature in Sanzaine's work are both intimate and dramatic. In Kansas, he preferred to paint the countryside he knew best, the hills, trees and farms of the Smoky Valley, and Wild Horse Creek in Graham County. But outside the state, he liked nature at its most majestic, the Colorado Rockies, the painted desert of Arizona, the California coast. His style was as forceful as his subject matter, as William Allen White remarked in 1925. Beer Sanzaine knows that mood of nature. He goes to it unafraid and comes back triumphant, capturing it, subduing it, translating it into human terms. He grapples with its joy. He translates its terror and dread without compromise, without understatement. He has come from the plains where things grow rank and strong, from Kansas where he has

interpreted ugliness, disharmony, monotony, in terms of beauty and yet faithfully with affectionate wisdom. Sanzaine did not believe that the artist should try to copy nature. The task was impossible, he said, because the artist was compelled to select, arrange and organize, to bring order to confusion. To him, art should not duplicate nature, but convey its grandeur and energy. He stressed the abstract elements of composition, color and texture. Color, he said, should not be a mere supplement to drawing, it should have a life of its own, and be used to develop the form of an object. He was not concerned with small details, he emphasized the essentials of form through accents of light. The brush strokes were bold, his favorite tool was the short flat bristle brush, sometimes literally worn to the metal. Although most of his early work was in oils or watercolors, Sanzaine was prepared to try new techniques. In 1916 he was persuaded to work

on lithographs and woodcuts. Sanzaine's approach was typically direct. He often hammered out the light areas in a woodcut with a carpenter's nail and wooden paddle, a quick method that gave the effect of shimmering light. By any standard, Sanzaine was a prolific artist. More than 2,000 oil paintings, many watercolors and over 200 lithographs, a test to the energy of a man who carried a heavy teaching load and rarely refused invitations to give talks and organize art shows. He took part in more than 400 art exhibitions, founded the Smoky Hill Art Club, organized the prairie watercolor painters and was a charter member of the prairie print makers. In 1954, 60 years after he arrived in Linsborg, Sanzaine died there. An art gallery at Bethany College is dedicated to his memory, and his work is on display and collections throughout the United States. Mark Clutter, the editor of the Wichita beacon, wrote of the art gallery at Bethany as a wonderful memorial to the gentle artist who for more than half a century proclaimed the glories of art to Kansas, a state that in

earlier years must have seemed somewhat indifferent. In our final programs we'll examine some of the issues raised by immigration to Kansas. What was the appeal of the state? How have immigrants adapted to the society they found here? Has the desire to become true Americans eroded ethnic identity? How strong is ethnic feeling in Kansas today? Some forthright opinions on these and other questions when the Kansas Immigrants returns. The Kansas Immigrants is narrated by Glenn Price and produced by KENU at the University of Kansas. The series is made possible by a grant from the Kansas Committee for the Humanities. For a free script, write immigrants, continuing

education, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 66045. The Kansas Immigrants, program number 28 The Kansas Immigrants This was the image of Kansas in the 1870s and 1880s. A paradise on the prayer where all

would prosper. It was an image shouted by land speculators touted by railroad immigration agents and celebrated in folk songs like this one. Kansas, fully of the west sung by Bill Cook, a professor of English and folklore at Kansas State University. But European immigrants would not have come to Kansas or any other state but for problems in their home countries. As Anne Skowfield of the University of Kansas History Department explains, there was certainly far less land available for people to work for peasants or an agricultural people to work on. Factors pulling people to America were the new jobs, the enormous

amount of new jobs created by a burgeoning industrial society by larger amounts of land. By the fact that people in Europe understood this to be the case, that the whole legend of the streets being paid with gold in America has a certain grain of truth in it in that European peoples did know that there was some degree of economic opportunity available in America. Kansas was one of the states to attract Swedish immigrants. Emory Linquist, professor emeritus at Wichita State University, and a former president of Bethany College at Linxborg says economic opportunities were a strong incentive. I think that the availability of virtually free land, the consequences of the homestead

act, and the prospect that a poor person in Sweden who never saw the possibility of opening land could at some time own 160 acres was a very attractive factor. And as far as the Swedish immigrants were concerned to think of 160 acres of land unencumbered by stones and forests and trees seemed almost unbelievable. How did people in the old country hear about Kansas? Immigration agents were active in Europe, but many took the word of earlier settlers. Emory Linquist, again. We have a large collection of what we call America Breve, America Letters, which portrayed life in America in rather glowing terms. These letters would be printed in regional newspapers. They might be read on the church lawn after a church service, and they tended to stimulate immigration. They wrote about life in America, and used the good, solid, Swedish word from

Teeds London. They looked upon America as the land of the future. Many immigrants spent their savings on the passage, and arrived in America with little but their dreams. But the state offered the chance for self-improvement, as Homer Sokolovsky, professor of history at Kansas State University, points out. Now when they came to Kansas, they might occupy the bottom level of a social structure, but it was not rigid. There was the possibility of moving up, and one of the marks of moving up was very quickly realized by most settlers on farmland in Kansas, and that was being an owner of land. But was America an open, classless society where all could succeed? And the schoolfield thinks not. The stereotype of the immigrant coming from a class bound Europe into a free and open America I think is a very erroneous stereotype. Certainly America had a class or at least

a status system as well as did Europe. It was different in that it wasn't based on inherited status, but it was based on wealth. So that when European peoples, peasant peoples, came to the United States, they had some hopes, some expectations of bettering themselves economically, but few of them believed the Horatio Algermits that they would someday be president. The ambition of many immigrants was to own land, not just for economic security, but for the status it conferred. Homer Sokolowski explains, Freedom to many meant land ownership because in Europe, land ownership really meant political position. You didn't have political position without land ownership. But material success was only part of the process of becoming an American. There were other changes to make

as we'll learn in the next program. The Kansas Immigrants is narrated by Glenn Price and produced by KENU at the University of Kansas. The series is made possible by a grant from the Kansas Committee for the Humanities, for a free script, write immigrants, continuing education, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 6645. The Kansas Immigrants program number 29. The Kansas Immigrants.

The lament of Kansas land sung by Bill Cook, professor of English and folklore at Kansas State University, was shared by all settlers on the frontier, regardless of race, color, or ethnic origin. For every success, there was a failure. But one group began with this advantages. Norman Yetman, professor of American studies at the University of Kansas, says hostility to blacks was common in Kansas. They came with many of the same kinds of virtues, the same kinds of values, the emphasis upon education, the concern for thrift, hard works, sobriety, industriousness. However, the realities for blacks were that the caste

system, the perception of blacks as being an inferior people, of not being fully American, of not being equal to white people, was a perception that was widely shared among whites, own liberal whites, and was a very pervasive phenomenon throughout the entire history of black-white relations in the state. Kansas held a special place in the minds of the freed slaves. It was a free state, the land of John Brown. But it fell short of their hopes, as Tom Abril of the University of Kansas' English department points out. They found the abolitionist tradition of Kansas was not such a powerful force that they suddenly did not encounter prejudice in the state of Kansas. In fact, in Langston Hughes novel, not without laughter, that one chapter finally ends with a little boy saying, gee, I guess, Kansas is not so much different from the South, is it?

European immigrants faced different problems in gaining acceptance. The most immediate was the language barrier. Patrick O'Brien, director of the Center of Great Plains Studies at Emporia State University, recalls his family's experience. My family had almost no attachment to the society that they had left. Their only interest was in becoming Americans as soon as possible, and therefore my great grandparents would not permit their children to use German in the home. And my grandfather's told me often of the injunction of his grandfather, that you are not to learn German. You are not to use German. You're an American now. Some historians believe that each generation of immigrants takes a different attitude to its ethnic heritage. Here's Homer Sokolowski of Kansas State University and Jim Junke of Bethel College in North Newton. The first generation settlers from the old country would

usually preserve the language that they'd grown up with. Their children are generally caught between the old tradition and the new. They would go to public schools and they would learn English because that was the language of instruction. And their children, the grandchildren of the original settlers, might not know the old language. In that first generation there are a lot of letters back and forth with the people who stayed back in the old country and attempt to duplicate in the new world exactly what they had in the old. The second generation perhaps wants to begin to forget what the fathers were trying to establish. The second generation is more interested in learning the English language and in adapting to American culture. A third or fourth generation discover that they want to recover something that is rapidly slipping away.

The Men and Night Historian Jim Junke. If first generation immigrants could not adapt fully to the society they had joined, many believed their children would become true Americans. It's a common theme in immigrant literature according to Tom Averall. In all of the lip service for example that Avley's becker pays to being an American she never learns English. She never uses the telephone. But what she thinks of all the time is that her children will be Americans. Her children will be citizens. Her children will learn the language. But today the American melting pot is not the ideal it once was. That's the theme of our final program. But in Kansas land I'm going to stay for all these things. I'll pass away. Your pleasure follows after pain. Next spring it's going to rain again. Oh, Kansas land.

Kansas Immigrants is narrated by Glenn Price and produced by KENU at the University of Kansas. The series is made possible by a grant from the Kansas Committee for the Humanities. For free script, write immigrants, continuing education. University of Kansas, Lawrence Kansas, 66045. The Kansas Immigrants program number 30. The Kansas Immigrants. How did the Kansas Immigrants become true Americans? It was not enough to live and work here or to take citizenship.

Being an American implied a change in life and attitudes. As Norman Saul, a history professor at the University of Kansas, and an expert on Russell German migration points out. Especially clear I think in the 19th century was that being an American meant adapting. This was the message that came across. He ran across references to how these Germans from Russia or Minonites are becoming American. And that usually meant learning to speak English, dressing in an American fashion, adapting American ways. Some were prepared to sacrifice their ethnic heritage to leap willingly into the American melting pot. But adaptation to a new society poses a dilemma for every immigrant group. Tim Miller of the University of Kansas, Department of Religious Studies, explains. There's always been a tension between becoming an American, becoming melted in the great melting pot and maintaining one's particularistic ethnic background. I don't think we've resolved

that problem today. Some people in the last decade or two in fact have been championing and emphasizing the great resources of ethnic diversity in the United States. I think that we have to just understand this intention. We have to understand that on the one hand, there is a terrific pressure in America to melt into the population and by and large the Kansas immigrants have done that. But I think in many cases they have maintained some of their distinctive traditions even while joining the larger culture. Some groups succeeded in preserving the best of the old world in the new. According to the Mennonite historian, Jim Yonke, the founding of a college or historical library helps to keep the ethnic tradition alive. While partaking of the old, they are not simply a means of reproducing in America what we had in the old country. To some extent, an adaptation of our heritage to what we find in America so that the ethnic identity, the sense of being a group, is a distinctively

American phenomenon as well as a reaction over against or an attempt to maintain one's boundaries over against the general American dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. Should the ethnic diversity of Kansas be preserved, Patrick O'Brien, director of the Center of Great Plain Studies at Emporia State University, isn't convinced that it should. It does seem to be the more that ethnic consciousness, racial consciousness, is encouraged. The more this contributes to the judgment of human beings on grounds that they should not be judged, that is they become judged as members of a group. I think that we should as Martin Luther King said, judge persons only for the moral content of their character and for what they are personally.

Other humanists value the diversity of Kansas. Here are the views of Bill Cook, professor of English and folklore at Kansas State University, and Emory Linquist, professor emeritus at Wichita State University. I always say, this is sort of thing as a kind of validation of culture we read about it in books and see it in the movies and all that, but then when you go to these festivals and the people dress up and they sing their songs, dance or dance, and eat the food and all that sort of thing, then you see it for real. And so this is a wonderful thing to keep this validation of this ethnic pioneer period. I love it and I go to all of them I can in Kansas, the Swedes and the Czechs and the Germans and what not. Part of the genius of American life has been the fact of cultural pluralism. American culture is like a great symphony and a great symphony achieves its goals through the contribution of various instruments. The lasting contribution of immigrants to our American life came through the identification of the immigrant with his culture, maintaining it, adding it to the

treasury of American culture, enriching American culture and in turn having his own life enriched by the contact that he had with American culture. Tim Miller argues that without such diversity, America would be a poor place. I think that there's a great impetus in American culture for what we might call centrist blandness, a belief that we should all be the same and do the same things, we should go to the same recreation spots and watch the same television shows and read the same bland newspapers. I like to think that there are other alternatives in culture and that maintaining ethnic traditions is a very important part of finding a different way of living in America today. The ingredients in the melting pot may be ready to mix but they don't want to congeal. According to Norman Yetman, professor of American studies at the University of Kansas, ethnicity is a powerful source of personal identity.

There is a tendency it seems to me for people to reject the idea that they melt into a homogenous American culture. And I'm reminded of the quote by Munsenior Gino Baroni, an Italian-American founder of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, who said this, I'm afraid my nephews and nieces will grow up to be like wonderbread, no crust, no identity. The Kansas Immigrants is narrated by Glenn Price and produced by K&U at the University of Kansas. The series is made possible by a grant from the Kansas Committee for the Humanities. For a free script, write immigrants, continuing education, University of Kansas, Lawrence Kansas, 66045.