Saga - 2012, Page 70

að sameina róttækar hugsjónir og íslenska menningu, og uppfylla
þannig félagslegar þarfir sínar og skapa sér sinn eigin sess í tilver-
unni.
Abstract
v i lhelm v i lhelms son
IDEOLOGY AND SOCIAL INTERACTION OF RADICAL ICELANDIC IMMI-
GRANTS TO MANITOBA DURING THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY
In the early years of the twentieth century, a small, diverse, very vocal group of
political radicals ignited bitter debates within the Icelandic immigrant communi-
ty in North America. The radicals’ insistence that Canadian political culture and
social structure were fundamentally flawed and in need of sweeping reform, if
not revolutionary change, upset the dominant discourse among Icelandic immi-
grant leaders, who keenly maintained a “model-immigrant” image of the Ice -
landers as morally pristine and politically moderate.
In part, this article analyses the ideas which the radicals proposed, as well as
their socio-political context. Their ideas ranged from anarchism and free love to
a moderate form of socialism and populist direct democracy. What bound these
radicals together — aside from an emphasis on moral, political and social reform
— was their Icelandic background and their status as immigrants in a polyglot,
highly inegalitarian country radically different from their country of origin. Their
status as immigrants with a specific cultural background and also as radicals at
odds with most of their Icelandic peers encouraged them to create their own
autonomous space, radical “havens” both culturally and politically specific to
their unique worldviews. To that end, they established journals and newspapers
as well as discussion clubs like the nominally apolitical Hagyrðingafélag (poets’
club). In addition, they found a haven within the Unitarian church, which thereby
functioned both as a platform for political and social (as well as religious) debates
and as a crucial hub of social life.
In addition, the article analyses the role which ideology played in the radicals
adapting to immigrant life in Canada / North America. Acculturation always
tends to cause contention, and the critical positions adopted by Icelandic immi-
grant radicals towards Canadian society and politics involved both resistance to
unconditional assimilation within Canadian laissez-faire liberal democracy and a
self-created form of “acculturation-through-participation”. These radicals repeat-
edly stated their desire to become “useful” citizens in their adopted homeland,
and by positioning themselves on the radical left of the political spectrum they
did so on their own terms.
These radicals have frequently been marginalized in historical writing on
Icelandic immigration to North America. They were either excluded or, perhaps
more commonly, co-opted and whitewashed in histories which have tended to
portray a “model-immigrant” version of Icelanders immigrating to Canada and
vilhelm vilhelmsson68
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