Rasmus B. Anderson

• 1. Introduction

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  Rasmus Bjørn Anderson was born on the 12th of January 1846 in the Town of Albion, Dane County, Wisconsin, to Norwegian immigrant parents who had crossed the Atlantic as part of a small band of Quaker sympathizers. His father died of cholera when Anderson was just four years old. From that uncertain beginning, Anderson would go on to reshape how Americans understood their own continent's history. He was a professor, a diplomat, an editor, a publisher, and a tireless advocate for a single idea: that Norse explorers, not Columbus, were the first Europeans to reach the New World. He did not simply write about that idea. He organized around it, lobbied for it, and set in motion the recognition that would eventually become a federal holiday. How did a Wisconsin academic from a Norwegian immigrant household become the man who gave Leif Erikson a day on the American calendar?

• 2. A Norwegian Family in Wisconsin

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  Bjørn Anderson Kvelve and Abel Cathrine von Krogh came to America from Sandeid and Vikedal in the Ryfylke district of Rogaland, Norway. Abel brought with her a notably mixed heritage: Danish, Swedish, German, Dutch, and Flemish ancestry ran alongside her Norwegian roots. The family settled in Dane County, and young Rasmus grew up in Koshkoning. The cholera death of his father in 1850 left the household without its patriarch before Anderson turned five. His mother, who lived until 1885, carried the family forward. Anderson eventually pursued formal education, graduating from Luther College and then the University of Wisconsin. It was an educational path that would take him far from the rural Wisconsin township where he spent his childhood.

• 3. Building Scandinavian Studies

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  In 1867, Anderson joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he would remain there until 1883. During those years he founded the Department of Scandinavian Studies, the oldest such department at any American university. His ambitions for the program extended beyond the classroom. Anderson persuaded the celebrated Norwegian violinist Ole Bull to perform a concert whose proceeds would fund a projected Norwegian-language library at the university. Bull was moved enough by the cause that he also covered Anderson's travel expenses for a research trip to Norway, where Anderson purchased books for the collection. That personal relationship with Bull illustrated something consistent in Anderson's character: he could draw prominent figures into his projects. Anderson translated the writings of Norwegian novelist Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, and he authored a substantial list of books on Scandinavian themes, including Norse Mythology in 1875 and Viking Tales of the North in 1877.

• 4. Ambassador and Editor

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  From 1885 to 1889, Anderson served as the United States Ambassador to Denmark, a post that placed him at the center of the very transatlantic world he had spent years studying. After returning to the United States in 1889, he did not retreat from public life. He became editor of Amerika, a Norwegian-language weekly newspaper, a role he held from 1898 to 1922. During overlapping years, from 1905 to 1907, he also served as editor-in-chief of the Norrœna Library, a publication series he had founded through his company the Norrœna Society. The Norrœna Society's explicit focus was republishing translations of texts devoted to what Anderson called "the History and Romance of Northern Europe". He simultaneously served as president of the Wisconsin Life Insurance Company from 1895 to 1922. The breadth of those roles, spanning diplomacy, journalism, publishing, and business, makes Anderson difficult to place in any single category.

• 5. The Columbus Question

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  Anderson published America Not Discovered by Columbus in 1874, and the book's title announced its argument plainly. He was not the first to make the case for Norse priority, but his version reached a popular audience in a way that earlier scholarly treatments had not. The book drew on his knowledge of Old Norse sources and his long engagement with Scandinavian history. He later returned to the topic with The Norse Discovery of America in 1907, extending and updating his argument across more than three decades of writing on the subject. Anderson saw the Norse case not as a niche academic dispute but as a correction to a foundational American misconception. He believed the story of Leif Erikson deserved a formal place in American civic life, and he began organizing to make that happen.

• 6. The Holiday He Started

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  Anderson was the originator of the movement to honor Leif Erikson with an American holiday. Through efforts he led, Leif Erikson Day became an official observance in Wisconsin and eventually in other states as well. Anderson died on the 2nd of March 1936, buried at Lake Ripley Cemetery in Cambridge, Wisconsin, and did not live to see the full reach of what he had started. Decades after his death, a presidential proclamation in 1964 established Leif Erikson Day as a federal observance, bringing the recognition he had campaigned for to a national scale. His wife Bertha Karina Olson, whom he married in 1868, had died in 1922; Anderson spent his final years at their home in Madison. The 1915 memoir Life Story of Rasmus B. Anderson, co-written with Albert O. Barton, recorded his account of a life spent arguing that the New World's European story began centuries before Columbus sailed.