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Politics Among Danish Americans In The Midwest, Ca. 1890-1914, Jorn Brondal

The Bridge

During the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, ethnicity and religion played a vital role in shaping the political culture of the Midwest. Indeed, historians like Samuel P. Hays, Lee Benson, Richard Jensen (of part Danish origins), and Paul Kleppner argued that ethnoreligious factors to a higher degree than socioeconomic circumstances informed the party affiliation of ordinary voters.1 It is definitely true that some ethnoreligious groups like, say, the Irish Catholics and the German Lutherans boasted fullfledged political subcultures complete with their own press, their own political leadership and to some extent, at least, their own …