World War II

World War II matters to the book chiefly as a historical force shaping its author’s project: wartime travel restrictions delayed Vilhelm Moberg’s work on Swedish emigration until 1947, and the conflict’s political climate sharpened the contrast between a troubled Europe and the freedom he hoped to find in the United States. In the novel’s nineteenth-century world, the same search for escape takes concrete form in households leaving scarce land and demanding labor for an unknown continent.

Historical Context and Moberg’s Project

America had occupied Moberg’s imagination since childhood. He grew up amid letters, dollar money orders, and Swedish-American newspapers sent into a family network in which, he recalled, more relatives lived in America than in Sweden. At eighteen he planned to emigrate, but his mother and grandmother’s grief at the railway station stopped him. He later conceived a literary monument to the relatives who had settled in the New World; the project, first imagined in the 1920s, remained unrealized for decades.

Moberg’s political conflicts contributed to the delay. During the 1930s he attacked the Social Democratic Party for sustaining bureaucracy and supporting the Swedish State Church. When World War II began, he criticized the Stockholm government for failing to take a firm stand against Nazism. His novel Ride This Night, though set in the seventeenth century, was widely read as an intervention in the politics of Nazi-era tyranny. He also challenged police and legal-system cover-ups and the continued existence of the monarchy, antagonizing influential figures through the 1940s and early 1950s.

Travel restrictions during World War II, combined with this political involvement, postponed Moberg’s work on emigration until 1947, when he was nearly fifty. By then he was celebrated in Sweden but disillusioned with its leadership. From a Europe ravaged by war, he regarded the United States as the last remaining bastion of freedom and democracy and wanted to record Swedish emigrants’ contribution to the country he considered the world’s only remaining hope. In 1968 he recalled his determination to cross the Atlantic and find unknown relatives whose fate had long occupied his thoughts.

From Research to the Emigrant Novels

Moberg began background research in 1945 and appears to have started writing the novels two years later. The Emigrants appeared in 1949, followed by Unto a Good Land in 1952, The Settlers in 1956, and The Last Letter Home in 1959. He treated the four volumes as a single work, the Emigrant Novels, and insisted that they be read as a documentary novel. World War II therefore belongs to the work’s production history rather than to the nineteenth-century events it narrates: it delayed the project and helped determine the political perspective from which Moberg approached migration.

The Novel’s Earlier World of Departure

The historical narrative begins amid a widening restlessness in rural communities. Families see their plots shrink as their children increase, while reports circulate of fertile land across the ocean, supposedly available to anyone willing to cultivate it. Rumor, pictures, and neighbor-to-neighbor information kindle the idea of departure, but the ocean remains unknown and home familiar. The decision divides the cautious from the daring, women from men, and younger people from older ones; the migration movement begins not as a settled certainty but as an unsettling possibility.

Material conditions make that possibility urgent. At Korpamoen, a winter famine forces Kristina to stretch rye flour with chaff, beechnuts, heather seed, and dried berries. After she bears Harald, her own meager nourishment cannot provide enough milk, and she fears that feeding the newborn means taking food from her other children. The household’s distress gives migration a domestic and physical scale: the question is not only what kind of future might exist overseas, but how a family can endure the present.

The novel also sets the promise of movement against forms of labor that restrict both time and authority. At Nybacken, Robert is woken at four in the morning and assigned chores by nearly everyone on the farm, including the care of four horses. A hired hand’s service year lasts 358 days, with only one free week. When Aron strikes Robert, the young servant accepts the punishment as a master’s lawful right, reinforced by the dean’s teaching that a lazy servant requires suitable chastisement. Robert nonetheless decides during his first week that he must escape his human and animal masters.

Migration as a Practical and Uneven Process

Departure depends on arrangements as well as desire. Karl Oskar explains that spring is preferable because winter storms have passed and newcomers can reach their settlement in time to sow and harvest before winter. He and Robert have secured passage for six aboard the merchant vessel Charlotta, paid a hundred daler in advance, and arranged to sail directly from Karlshamn to New York in April. Robert offers to secure passage for Danjel if the ship has room. The route is thus made through linked household decisions, money, information, and personal ties—not by an abstract longing for America alone.

Preparation exposes the work and losses migration demands of those who sustain a household. Kristina packs wool cards, knitting needles, sheep shears, and a red-flowered swingle given to her by Karl Oskar, while leaving behind the loom, spinning wheel, flax brake, and other implements once familiar to her hands. She bundles bedding and the bridal quilt, then provisions the family for the journey to the port and beyond: eight rye loaves, twenty barley loaves, salted butter, honey, cheese, smoked meat, and herrings. Household labor accompanies the emigrants in tools, food, clothing, and careful packing, even as much of the equipment and routine that shaped life at home must be abandoned.

The crossing does not immediately deliver the freedom imagined on land. Shipboard provisions are allotted weekly; passengers must take turns cooking, clean the hold each morning, economize on half a gallon of water per person, and obey the captain’s rules. Robert, after a week at sea, judges the seaman’s life more dangerous and confining than farm service: sailors climb the mast, remain bound to watches, and sleep packed together in the forecastle. The comparison complicates any simple opposition between oppressive Sweden and liberating America. For Robert, the farmhand still has more freedom than a sailor imprisoned within the ship’s narrow bounds.

War, Freedom, and the Meaning of Emigration

World War II sharpened Moberg’s political and moral frame, but the novel’s account of migration resists reducing departure to a national allegory. Its emigrants face specific pressures—small holdings, hunger, religious and social divisions, and labor governed by masters—while the United States initially reaches them as a mixture of reports, pictures, and hope. The gap between the imagined destination and the hazards of passage remains visible in the tightly rationed food, the rules below deck, and the sailors’ dangerous work.

That tension connects the author’s postwar search for freedom with the characters’ earlier decisions without making the two histories identical. Moberg turned to the emigrants after war had discredited political leadership in Europe; his nineteenth-century families leave because the old world offers too little land and too few means of sustaining their households. In both contexts, freedom is not an assured condition but a hope tested against material limits, authority, and risk.