GLOBALIZATION IS AMERICANIZATION:

It might seem odd to modern readers, but Americans did not always classify Scandinavians as precisely "white." [...]

In 1884, Montgomery traveled to Europe, seeking out potential immigrants who were religiously compatible with his own Congregationalism. Visiting like-minded Swedes, Montgomery was pleased to find much that reminded him of home. He was impressed with the height, appearance, and aesthetic taste of his hosts. He noted that one was "so strikingly like an American in personal appearance that he would pass even in Boston for a Beacon Street full-blood."

But, Gollner notes, local church leaders were not always so happy with the Scandinavian immigrants who actually arrived in the U.S. Some of the newcomers spent less energy on religion than on labor organizing. Others became Adventists, Buddhists, or Mormons. Many simply stuck with Lutheranism, a denomination that many U.S. Protestants dismissed as stuck in old-world traditions and lacking in missionary zeal.

"God has sent these people to our very doors for us to Christianize," one church leader wrote. "We must do it, or they will make Europeans of us."

Gollner writes that religious leaders worked to do just that, attempting to Americanize the Scandinavians while also expanding their fellow white Protestants' idea of who belonged in their number.

Over the decades that followed, the U.S. conception of who belonged to its "white" majority continued to expand, beyond tall, pale Protestant Swedes to encompass even Catholic Italians and Irish. Today the boundaries of whiteness in the U.S. include all European-descended people and exclude most people with ancestors from all other parts of the world. But only time will tell whether that definition will continue to change.

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