Alexandria Mayor Marvin E. Hansen declared April 7, 1965, as “Runestone Day,” and he hosted a “send-off celebration” for the departure of the rune stone to the World’s Fair. The civic event included a high-school band performance and speeches by local politicians and business leaders. Mayor Hansen, who was to accompany the sacred civic symbol to New York, vowed to “sell Alexandria to everyone I talk to from here to New York and back again.”45 For its trip east, the rune stone was mounted in a display case inside the Viking ship used during the 1962 pageant. The ship was loaded on a flatbed truck and traveled the 1,500-mile journey to New York, making several publicity stops along the way. One of the highlights was a visit to Washington, D.C., where the Viking ship was parked in front of the Smithsonian Institution. Over the course of two days, Mayor Hansen reported that more than sixty thousand people had walked by the Runestone.46 The display made additional stops in Atlantic City and Philadelphia before arriving in New York City on April 19.
The famous Viking statue “Big Ole” originally stood in the middle of the street near Third and Broadway in downtown Alexandria. It has since been relocated to a small lakeside park across from the Runestone Museum. Courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society.
Mayor Hansen became a media sensation on his pilgrimage to the World’s Fair. He was interviewed by dozens of media outlets along the way and was greeted by high-ranking civic officials. After delivering a speech in Chicago, Hansen claimed that Mayor Richard Daley had asked him to make campaign speeches for him in the next election.47 Upon arrival in New York, he was interviewed on NBC’s Today show and was later photographed standing next to Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the Minnesota Pavilion. In the mayor’s own assessment, the response to the rune stone display had been “more than terrific.” He joked that “if one-tenth of the people who told me they would actually come to Alexandria for a vacation—we will be really crowded!”48
Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey after viewing the Kensington Rune Stone in the Minnesota exhibit at the 1965 World’s Fair. Courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society.
In June, the Alexandria newspaper reprinted an article from the Minneapolis Star reporting that the presence of the controversial stone had increased attendance at the Minnesota Pavilion from the previous year. The Alexandria editor gleefully highlighted the Minneapolis article’s contrition for formerly opposing the rune stone’s inclusion in the Minnesota exhibit, but seemed to miss the subtle sarcasm implicit in the Minneapolis article. The article reported that the professional guides hired to tell the story of the rune stone expressed “no doubt that it is the real thing.” One guide, whom the article described as “a tall, fresh blonde from St. Petersburg, Florida,” said she had never heard of the rune stone until she started her job two weeks earlier. However, now “she spiels about it confidently from the platform where the stone is displayed” four times every hour. She was prepared, in her words, “to fancy the story up” with references to relevant aspects of medieval history if the audience pressed her with questions. The article went on to express skepticism over the interplay between historical pedagogy and civic boosterism in quoting Russell W. Fridley, director of the Minnesota Historical Society. Prior to the rune stone’s traveling to the World’s Fair, Russell said that the exhibit would be provocative, but that it should be presented as a controversial object: “Mixing history and commercialization can cause problems . . . if claims are made which exceed evidence supporting them.” He warned that the artifact had not been proved and care should be used in interpreting its place in history.49
Although the major media outlets based in the Twin Cities insistently declared the rune stone a hoax, non-Minnesota media simply portrayed the artifact as “controversial” but did not take a condemnatory stance.50 Mayor Hanson’s observations corroborate this: “except for Minneapolis, I have only had three who stated that the stone was not authentic. We must convert Minneapolis—Ha!”51 It is certainly the case that Minnesotans were more familiar with the scientific and historical evidence against the artifact and persons in Chicago and New York were likely enchanted by their first encounter with the storied stone, but urban Minnesota’s rejection of the rune stone was likely rooted in sensitivities about Midwestern identity. In a similar way that modern Norwegian Americans and modern Catholics rejected the Kensington Rune Stone in an effort to distance themselves from their filiopietistic and pseudoscientific peers, urban Minnesotans likely emphasized their condemnation of the dubious artifact and kitschy fair exhibit to portray themselves as culturally sophisticated before a New York audience and distinct from their rural and small-town cousins.
While rural, western Minnesotans had grown comfortable with outsiders viewing the rune stone as “controversial” and relished the sensation it caused out east, many expressed anxiety over the safety of their civic totem at the World’s Fair. In advance of the trip, the Chamber of Commerce purchased a $1-million insurance policy for the rune stone.52 However, the worth of the sacred artifact could not be calculated in monetary terms alone. Locals expressed fear that the stone could be subject to vandalism and desecration.53 Just ten weeks after the stone arrived at the World’s Fair, their anxiety intensified greatly. Exhibit officials reported that they would have to shut down the Minnesota Pavilion. Despite the uptick in attendance, funds had been drained to the point that they were not able to ship the rune stone back to Minnesota.54 The Alexandria Chamber of Commerce was warned that the civic symbol could possibly be subjected to “severe vandalism” if left unattended at the World’s Fair. In response, they dispatched Chamber president Harvey Hammergren to New York, this time to retrieve the two-hundred-pound stone, which he wrapped carefully in a blanket and carried home in the trunk of his Buick.55
Alexandria Chamber of Commerce President Harvey Hammergren rescued the Kensington Rune Stone from possible vandalism at the 1965 World’s Fair in New York. Courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society.
Of the nearly 25 million people who attended the fair in 1965, only 187,471 were recorded as having visited the Minnesota Pavilion.56 This is a fraction of the 18 million predicted a few months earlier, but nonetheless Alexandria boosters seemed generally satisfied with the exposure that the rune stone and their town had received. Hammergren acknowledged “keen disappointment” that the Minnesota exhibit had closed early, but he attributed the higher number of tourists visiting Alexandria that summer to the appearance of the Kensington Rune Stone at the World’s Fair.57 In December of that year, the giant Viking statue was returned to Alexandria and installed in the middle of the city’s most prominent intersection, positioned to greet visitors as they entered the town.58 Given the popularity of the giant Paul Bunyan statue and his companion Babe the Blue Ox in Bemidji, Minnesota, Alexandrians hoped that their giant Viking attraction would draw scores of visitors and boost tourist revenue.59
The rune stone’s visit to the World’s Fair was clearly driven by economic benefit, but it would not be accurate to mark this development strictly as a secular turn for the artifact. As it had in other moments in the history of the region, the collective aspiration for economic progress served as a unifying thread in the sacred civic canopy. The choice to put economic language at the forefront may have been an effort to make rune stone enthusiasm appear to be more rational in the face of an increasingly skeptical audience. Disagreement over the stone’s origins need not contradict the fact that it could stimulate a fledging tourist economy. While the motives of civic boosters were certainly varied, the use of economic language provided cover for those who endeavored to use the exhibition as a platform to promote small-town, Christian values to a national audience.
The 1964–65 World’s Fair was a particularly hospitable environment for Minnesota’s claim that the nation had been founded by white, Christian missionaries who died at the hands of savage Indians. Under the powerful influence of the fair’s president, Robert Moses, the event had an overwhelmingly conservative tone, nostalgic for postwar opti
mism and notions of American innocence. Inspired by Walt Disney’s theme park in California, Moses aimed to create a “sanctuary from the cultural storm that was rapidly approaching in the mid-1960s.”60 Early in 1965, Malcolm X had been assassinated, civil-rights activists had been brutally beaten on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, and America’s involvement in Vietnam had significantly escalated with a “search-and-destroy” military strategy. As historian Lawrence R. Samuel notes, the fairgrounds were shielded from the emerging “cracks in the nation’s foundation” that “were dividing Americans along political, social, and economic lines, a growing sense of cynicism and disillusionment was palatable in the air.”61
Inside the walls of the World’s Fair was a blissful refuge from the raging social turmoil outside. There was no cynicism and disillusionment to be found at the Minnesota exhibit. According to one researcher, it is likely that the only promotional materials at the exhibit were Holand’s booklet A Holy Mission to Minnesota 600 Years Ago and Leuthner’s comic book Mystery of the Runestone.62 These two documents would affirm nostalgic depictions about the virtue of rural Americans and the sacredness of the nation’s origins. Christians from Scandinavia on a divine mission to save the church were likely embraced by East Coast fairgoers as suitable substitutes for New England Puritans who traveled to North America to build a “city on a hill.” The savage Indians in the rune stone narrative would have been easily recognized by exhibit attendees as symbolic of the various threats to God’s chosen and innocent nation—both past and present. The Viking statue towering over the exhibit boldly proclaimed the superiority of the Nordic male body and likely served to invoke in the fairgoers a sense of nostalgia for an imagined past that was whiter than the present. Although the facticity of the rune stone story was open to debate, the narrative contained enduring truths that resonated with a popular version of American history and culture under threat.
The True Believers
In the aftermath of the media spectacle at the World’s Fair, academics continued to be dismayed that scientific and historical arguments were not enough to extinguish public interest in the dubious artifact. In 1968, Theodore Blegen, a distinguished history professor at the University of Minnesota and unrivaled expert on the history of the state, wrote an extended treatise titled The Kensington Rune Stone: New Light on an Old Riddle to further strengthen the evidence against the stone’s authenticity.63 As noted in chapter 1, Blegen was instrumental in founding the Norwegian-American Historical Association in the 1920s and was an early critic of Holand’s pseudohistorical writings. In this latest volume, Blegen argued that Ohman and two of his neighbors, Andrew Anderson and Sven Fogelbad, were responsible for creating the hoax. Although Holand had portrayed Fogelblad as a lazy drunk incapable of perpetrating a hoax, Blegen showed that Fogelblad was an iconoclastic intellectual with knowledge of runic writing and an interest in Swedish history.64 In contrast to Holand’s depictions of Ohman as a simple, uneducated farmer, Blegen observed that he was described much differently by a Minnesota Historical Society researcher, who referred to him as an “intellectual man.” Blegen also mentioned the testimony of a local dentist who described Ohman as “one of the keenest and best informed men he had ever met.”65 Less is known about Andrew Anderson, but Blegen writes that Newton Winchell’s 1910 report had described him as “a political agitator” and that if a hoax had been perpetrated, it would have been by Ohman, Fogelblad, and Anderson working together.66
The true believers were undeterred by Blegen’s historical evidence and they turned to new and increasingly bizarre techniques to validate the rune stone. An entire subgenre of belief sought to identify secret messages embedded in the inscription. Ole G. Landsverk, a physicist from the University of Chicago, teamed up with a retired U.S. Army cryptographer, Alf Monge, to research a theory that runic inscriptions are actually cryptograms that “record secret calendrical data pertaining to the perpetual calendar of the Catholic Church.”67 Through his decoding method, Monge claimed he could pinpoint the exact date of the origin of runic inscriptions. He dates the rune stone inscription to April 24, 1362. Landsverk’s and Monge’s findings were published in a 1969 volume Ancient Norse Messages on American Stones.68 Monge’s method has been widely discredited: “his work was based on so many arbitrary assumptions and allowed so many exceptions to the rules that he could read messages into anything.”69 Even other rune stone enthusiasts agree that his cryptography theory was “unsupportable” and one laments that it has “created a credibility problem for advocates of the Stone.”70
Lay Catholic Margaret Barry Leuthner built on many of Landsverk’s arguments about the presence of codes in the runic inscription. She argued that she had a special ability to read codes embedded in the runes, unlike Holand, who she said could only offer a translation.71 This mystical gift enabled her to recognize that the inscription had multiple, layered meanings that revealed the names of all the members of the Norse expedition and even the author of the inscription, whom she referred to as “Ivar.”Leuthner asserts that Ivar has incorporated several maps into the inscription.72 One map is supposed to be of the site of discovery in which one of the letters points in the direction of “mooring stones” that were found nearby. Regarding the so-called grammatical mistakes on the inscription, Leuthner says:
[The Vikings] were not ignorant; their broken grammar was deliberate to clue us to codes and ciphers and acrostics that reveal the whole story of their stay. They were clever; they chose runes that were crosses so that the memorial they carved became a shrine for the lost colony they came to restore to the Christian faith.73
Perhaps the most bizarre claim she makes is that the name of the Minnesota state mascot, “GOPHER,” is hidden in an anagram of English letters found on the inscription.74 Despite her sometimes outlandish yet imaginative claims, she maintains that “the one thing she can’t stand is . . . an illogical argument.”75
Retaking Runestone Hill
By the 1970s, many local residents had grown weary of the increasingly desperate attempts to defend the authenticity of the stone. Wahlgren and other rune stone critics had largely succeeded in dismantling the notion of Christian crusader Vikings. The effect was to remove a core reason many Minnesotans used to suspend disbelief. Locals continued to embrace the significance of the artifact in bringing visitors to the area in addition to the area’s recreational attractions, but the rune stone never became a primary draw. Some residents seemed increasingly embarrassed by the discredited artifact, and especially by the garishly painted fiberglass Viking standing in the center of town. Over time, Big Ole the Viking migrated further and further from the city’s premier intersection at Third and Broadway. Its final resting place is a quiet lakeside park, where he is easily missed if a visitor is not looking for him.
Although most efforts to defend the rune stone had become unmoored from anything resembling scientific credibility, the die-hard enthusiasts struggled to keep the dream of pre-Columbian Vikings alive in the public imagination. At times, they were successful. During the 1970s, there was one moment in particular when rune stone enthusiasts successfully evoked the narrative of martyred Norsemen to address a civic need in the final days of America’s involvement in Vietnam.76
An unidentified researcher in a reflective moment with the Kensington Rune Stone. Courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society.
Marion Dahm, a farmer from Chokio, Minnesota, spent half his life collecting what he called Norse artifacts from throughout the upper Midwest. Sometimes referred to as the “outlaw archaeologist,” Dahm claimed that he had identified and “validated” more than three hundred mooring stones in the region, far more than the thirteen that had anchored Holand’s mythic map. Dahm employed a number of unconventional methods to prove that Vikings had not only visited Minnesota but had lived there in large numbers since the year 1000. Dahm used dowsing rods to locate what he hoped would be Viking graves, and local newspaper articles depicted him donning scuba gear while diving for Viking artifacts in
Minnesota lakes. Although his research methods have been criticized, he was revered by many rural Minnesotans as a folk hero.77
In 1971, Dahm used an infrared camera to photograph the landscape on Ohman’s farm. After viewing the results, he concluded that there were at least five Viking habitations dating to the fourteenth century buried just beneath the soil.78 The Ohman farm had recently been purchased by the county and was in the midst of being transformed into a park dedicated to the Kensington Rune Stone. Dahm said of the location, “We have a national heritage right here . . . It’s perhaps the most important site in the country . . . let’s dig it up and prove it.”79
Myths of the Rune Stone Page 16
