Letter to a Grandfather I Never Knew
Address by ERIC SEVAREID at Carnegie Hall Norwegian Sesquicentennial Celebration
October 7, 1975
This is the picture, the memory you must have nourished all the rest of your years on earth. The boyhood home and the sea, the forest and mountains, the mist, the rock, the days of sun like brief, bright flowers.
You were less than twenty in that year of eighteen fifty-four and you never saw it again. Your children, including Alfred, my father, saw it only in imagination as you talked of it at the kitchen table in the new homestead. You left the solitude of the mountains for the solitude of the prairie where the soil was rich, and a hundred and sixty acres was kingdom for a man.
You were not alone. In your century half the farmers from your region of the old country walked aboard the west-bound ships and faced the revolution in their lives.
Some were babies, carried aboard, too young for the memory. My other grandfather was one of these; from Fjellhaugen, his people came, a croft of unpainted boards and logs, just across that narrow fiord you looked upon each day, high up in the naked rock and the winds.
I cannot say just why you did it, you and all the others. The hunger for soil, yes, but there must have been deeper hungers- the eternal craving of man for re-birth, for the second chance. It may be you thought you were bringing Europe with you, but it did not turn out that way. You did not bring, you built, and what you built was the only new thing in all time in the relationships of man to man. Europe became only your history and for your fourteen children and forty-two grandchildren only their pre-history.
At some indefinable point you became what your children and grandchildren were born- American. Not in your speech, not in the way you prepared your food, not in certain customs and rituals. But at some point, a cog was slipped in the mechanism of your spirit, and the imperatives of the future commanded you.
America commanded you as you watched your children grow— and three of them die. They were the change, the second chance. They were Erik Erikson Sevareid re-born. All of you, pilgrims and seekers and sufferers, were caught by what has been called the “terrible faith”, the secret of the westering movement, the inner knowledge that it was for the children.
There are now those who say you were wrong, that the new reality became a mockery of the old dream.
And there must have been times in the middle of the night when doubt crept into your heart. When the heat — no such heat had burned upon Norway — scorched the crops; when the cold — no such cold had paralyzed Norway — killed the cattle and made the children cry in pain.
Doubt when you saw, so close at hand, the savage murdering of other farm families by the rebellious Indians and the savage retaliation by authority. Doubt — when the young men walked away from the farms bearing their rifles, on the chance that the new union might be held together.
Let me speak across this span of a hundred years and more and say: rest easily in your grave beneath the Minnesota prairie. You were not wrong.
But it is true that the old faiths are shaken now and the old measurements of life.
You believed that hard work was what a man and woman did, in order to matter. Some speak of this now as the “work ethic”, as if it were some curious, irrelevant quirk or cult. You were at ease with the word “duty.” You knew there could be no rights and privileges without responsibility. You found it natural to teach probity to your children, and self-denial, so that others, too, could have elbow room in which to live. You blamed yourself for misfortune, not others, not the government, not society itself.
You knew what was known by ancient philosophers you never read — that civilized life cannot hold together without these values. Now, some speak of them as the “puritan ethic”, as a curious, outmoded, illusion. But you were not wrong.
There has come about a kind of celebration of alienation. A confusion of strength with oppressiveness; a confusion of weakness with sensitivity. You did not glory in your strength, but you knew because every day experience told you, that it is the strong who make life possible for everyone else.
You knew your values were right because you carried to the new land no evil cargo of hatred or guilt. You and your contemporaries were free men born, not slaves or serfs. You had much to learn, but little to forget.
I do not imagine that you and those like you saw yourselves as personae in a saga. But you came to be so regarded. As helpless victims of fate, to some; as heroes, giants, larger than life to others.
From the story of that migration Norwegians have fashioned great books, and Swedes have fashioned great motion pictures.
But now there are some who believe these dramas are telling us that it was in vain. That you and the others came seeking freedom and equality and found neither.
You knew such things are not found but created. This grandson believes that is what you did. I have seen much of the world. Were I now asked to name some region on earth where men and women live in a surer climate of freedom and equality than that northwest region where you settled — were I so asked I could not answer. I know of none. What you built still stands upon that prairie.
We are not entirely sure, anymore, that it will stand forever. You thought of democracy as natural; but it is far from certain that any law of nature will preserve it always.
Americans have believed that it would spread by the very force of its desirability throughout the world. But it contracts. In nation after nation the people find it too difficult. They cannot manage justice with order; they cannot combine free thought and speech with life in unity.
The capacity to do this developed, in modern times, among the men and women who lived in the rocks and forests from which you came, and in other, not far distant lands, that are washed by the same waters of the North Sea.
The secret of democracy was made manifest there. It was nurtured in the wooden churches, propagated in the small, clustering towns and the growing cities, passed on through the school rooms and the books. The secret was the knowledge that each man is his brother’s keeper.
The secret knowledge is still manifest in those North Sea lands. It is still manifest in this new land, now growing old. But it is in danger. We have been careless of what you bequeathed us. We have allowed self-interest to sicken the American idea. We have rotted some of it away by surfeit and indifference, and wounded it by violence.
We know that this society remains the central experimental laboratory in human relations.
Success moved with you in this direction. There is a fear that failure here would spread eastward, back to the origins of success.
But not all the dangers have their origin here. Great wealth can poison life as we here have learned. And great wealth from beneath your native sea threatens the ways of life that have held so steady, so long, in your native land. The people see the danger. They know from our heedlessness here what could happen to them. A test of foresight and common sense is in the making. Norway, now, will become a critical experiment, testing man’s capacity to live the life of reason under enormous contrary pressures. We and the world will watch and perhaps we will learn.
Change is the nature of life. But the changes have come too rapidly, for our perception and our common fund of wisdom. We are obliged to pause now and consider what we wish to be. We cannot continue complicating our lives.
It is the great grandchildren who see this most clearly. We must look to them for help.
We have, somehow, to find simplicities again. There is a yearning to find our way back to something of what you were and did and felt. We ask the third chance.
And so you live on. You were the first ones — the Pedersons and Olsons and Jensons and Eriksons and Haugens and Olafsons, and the hundred other ancient family names, born out of the high rock and the waters, the wood, the drifting fog and the bright, brief flowers of the summer sun.
You were among those who made a vast, new thing upon the earth.
We pray to your memory and your judging God that we may yet preserve it, and build again.