THEY THAT RESIST SHALL RECEIVE TO THEMSELVES DAMNATION
On the evening of October 7, 1914, long plagued by heart problems, Gottfried Bergenheim died. Fredrik Lundgren wrote the obituary in the Varberg newspaper. He wished Bergenheim “God’s peace” and thanked him for his friendship and help. “You shall be missed not just by your family and your friends but also by all those to whom you offered work and a better life.”
The new director at the mill was Hugo Kjellstedt, who does not appear to have had any previous ties with Kungsäter. One villager recalls him mainly for his motorcar, one of the first in the village, driven by a uniformed chauffeur who put the outside horn to frequent use.
With Kjellstedt, conditions changed. Under Bergenheim, workers had come to expect a certain latitude. Many kept a cow or a pig, and many grew their own potatoes. It was difficult for them to subject themselves to the discipline of industrial production, and chores at home were often given priority. Kjellstedt, however, was less lenient with workers who did not show up for work on time and began hiring people from the outside to replace those who did not “perform.”
He also wanted to replace Brodin as his chairman of the board. At a board meeting he proposed to build an open-air dance floor by the mill, “for the amusement of the people.” A majority voted yes. Brodin, however, could not back such a measure. He had long tried to warn his parishioners about the danger of the dance, not so much the dancing itself, but the attending “embracement,” which had such “devastating consequences.” Brodin had no choice but to resign.
The same day Gottfried Bergenheim died, it so happened, Carl Börjesson’s sister Mina wrote a letter to her son in America: “These are difficult times, for all we buy is expensive, and if we sell, we have to take what they offer, cows bring only half of what they’re worth, and the crop has been poor.”
Conditions would worsen yet. With the expansion of its agriculture, Sweden had shifted the emphasis of its domestic production from grain to cattle, hogs, and poultry. Before the war, the country imported one third of its bread grains, while exporting 21,000 tons of butter, 8,000 tons of beef, 8,000 tons of pork, and 31,000 head of cattle annually. During the war, particularly after Germany began its unrestricted submarine attacks and the United States limited its export of foodstuffs to the allies, Sweden was isolated. Its dependency on the outside world became obvious. Artificial fertilizers were almost impossible to come by. Only bone meal and nitrogen were rationed out, and the harvests shrank. Concentrated cattle feed was hard to find, and the milk yield went down. When the government introduced fixed maximum prices for grains, farmers began to use more and more of their bread grains for cattle food. A law against it proved almost impossible to enforce.
Early in 1917 the government seized existing supplies of grains, allowing the farmers to keep only what they needed for their own use. Flour and bread were then rationed to the public, who complained of exorbitant prices and too small rations. Shortly rumors circulated about farmers making sudden trips into cities on business, disposing of their products to thousands of private marketeers who bought low, waited, and sold high. In turn, people from the cities traveled by train out into the countryside where they begged and bargained for anything edible (some said they changed into much better clothes before boarding the trains back home).
According to the records, Kungsäter too had its share of rule benders. Several farmers were caught keeping more than their share of wheat, rye, and oats. The mill had initially been allotted enough oats for the three horses used to transport wares from Kungsäter to the railway station in Horred. However, when the allotment was cut back to feed only two horses, a board member persuaded one of the farmers to sell close to 7,000 pounds of oats to the mill. The authorities found out, and the farmer incurred heavy fines. Kjellstedt defended the transaction, claiming that the mill could not function with only two horses. If the rationing continued, he would be forced to make more secret purchases, illegal or not.
With the hard times, the Swedish labor movement gained ground, spreading from the cities to the countryside. Throughout Mark, strangers arrived on their bicycles, their hats pushed down in front, their coat tails flapping, their entire bodies braced against the wind. Meetings were first staged at the outskirts of the villages, at crossroads, and in forest clearings. Many old workers kept a safe distance, knowing their jobs would be at stake should their names appear on the list of participants. Within only a few years, however, labor unions were established in most parts of the region, in some cases encouraged by the mill owners themselves.
Kungsäter, however, seemed impenetrable. Certainly its workers were as hard up as any others. Their days were just as long, their pay as low, their housing as cramped, their children as hungry. Yet, among socialist agitators, Kungsäter retained its reputation as one of the most “retarded” places in the country. Even the workers themselves were hostile to the new ideas. Like their parents, and their parents before them, they believed in the old order, where their duty was to carry out their earthly task, however difficult, without complaint. Time after time, at house examinations, they had repeated the words that were as much part of their identity as their Christian names: “For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained by God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” The notion that those words might be questioned was heresy. To join a labor union was to align oneself with Antichrist, to assume the sign of the beast, to choose eternal death.
In the spring of 1917 news of the Russian revolution — the arrest of the tsar and the creation of the workers’ councils — increased the militancy of the Swedish labor movement. In Stockholm, stores were stormed for food and mobs clashed with the police. Hjalmar Branting, the leader of the Social Democrats (and once the king’s schoolmate), demanded that the graduated suffrage scale be abolished at local elections. He also demanded that women be given the right to vote not just for local government but also for the Second Chamber of the Parliament.
On June 5, awaiting the response of the Conservative government, about 20,000 workers gathered at Gustaf Adolf square, across the water from the House of Parliament. The prime minister — Carl Swartz had now succeeded Hammarskjöld — announced that he wished to refrain from any immediate action but would await the outcome of the fall election.
Violence erupted on the square, and Branting was called out to calm the crowd. Fearless and elegant, with his familiar cane and walrus mustache, he walked between the workers and mounted police in pointed helmets encrusted with gold. The election that fall was won by the Liberals and the Social Democrats, who formed a coalition government under Nils Edén. The following year, in the fall of 1918, the graduated suffrage scale was abolished. In 1919 the vote for the Second Chamber was granted to all men and women over 23 years of age without respect to payment of taxes, or, in the case of men, fulfillment of their military service.
Shortly thereafter a meeting was staged in the hayloft of one of the farms in Kungsäter. The hayloft was full. Seated on long planks laid out on sawhorses were farmers, farmhands, and crofters. Fredrik was there, Carl Börjesson was not. The speaker was a member of the Agrarian Party, formed in 1914 on the premise that farmers should vote for farmers and fight for themselves as a class. The party had not advanced much in Kungsäter, where most of the farmers were still Conservatives, while the farm hands and the crofters were largely Liberals.
Thus the speaker found himself in hostile territory and was at once on the offensive. The farmers of Kungsäter, he began, were like the mountains around them: hard, immobile, and edgy (a comment some in the audience took as a compliment). He spoke of the importance of a united front. What solidarity had done for the Social Democrats, it could also do for the farmers (the mere mention of the Social Democrats was bound to raise a few hackles). The Conservatives, he continued, were too closely allied with the industrialists to look after the interests of the farmers, particularly those whose farms were small. Had the Conservatives stood firmly on the farmers’ side, they would never have allowed the abolishment of the graduated suffrage scale.
At that point Fredrik jumped up from his seat and interrupted the speaker, whose face turned a deep purple. Did the speaker have any idea how close to a revolution the country had been? A crofter’s wife, sitting behind Fredrik, pulled at the hem of his coat to make him sit down. Fredrik, however, was merely warming up. When the people of Stockholm starved, he said, some of their demands had to be met. Had the Conservatives not yielded, a civil war might have resulted, perhaps like the one in Russia, with terrible costs to property and human lives. The labor question must be solved by peaceful means. Good reforms for the workers were good reforms for the country. Uninformed gibberish, as offered by the speaker, was of no use to anyone, and certainly not to the people of Kungsäter.
The next day Fredrik Lundgren’s behavior was the talk of the village. Gunnar, once one of Fredrik’s crofters, still remembers. “Lundgren was all right,” he says, adjusting his hearing aid (he used to ring the church bells too). “He was a Conservative, but he listened to the others too. He respected the Liberals, said they had some great ideas. He even liked Branting, said he was a fine fellow but not always right.”
Most villagers, however, felt that Fredrik had been wrong to interrupt the speaker. Gunnar agrees. “He did have a pretty bad temper. When he felt something was unfair, he exploded. He just couldn’t wait. If it weren’t for that, he could’ve made it all the way to Parliament.”
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