[Chicks]

Whell and his hero Donny would surely have hated early Norwegian immigrants here, due to their social activism. Buncha lefties! Joe Hill!

The Scandinavian tradition of collective action also led many immigrants to take active roles in American social reform movements. From the 1840s on, Scandinavian immigrants were well represented in the movement for the abolition of slavery, and with the onset of the Civil War volunteered in great numbers to fight, overwhelmingly for the Union.

Many Union companies consisted entirely of Scandinavians, and one company, from the tiny Bishop Hill community in Illinois, was made up solely of Swedes. At the turn of the century, the writer and Danish immigrant Jacob Riis led a journalistic crusade to expose the horrific living conditions endured by the inhabitants of America's urban slums, which included many new immigrants. Riis' book How the Other Half Lives, a classic of muckracking literature, brought about a great wave of protest and led to major housing reform in the U.S.

Many Scandinavians also took an active role in the burgeoning U.S. labor movement. Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish miners and loggers participated in strikes throughout the Great Lakes states and the mountain West, sometimes as members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World union, also known as the Wobblies. The Swedish immigrant Joe Hill, born Joel Hägglund, was a prominent IWW member and wrote many of the union's rallying songs. After Hill was executed for murder in 1914, under what his sympathizers claimed were false pretenses, he became the subject of folk songs himself.