Where "Minnesota Nice" actually came from

A short history of being polite and unavailable at the same time.

By Michael McIntosh, MilkHat Media · Shakopee, MN
Published September 1, 2026

Nobody coined it. The phrase turned up in the Star Tribune in 1986 and the writer didn't bother defining it, which tells you the behavior was already old and only the label was new. The habits underneath — the politeness, the reserve, the refusal to make a scene — trace back to farm immigrants, Lutheran churches, and winters where your neighbor was your insurance policy.

So who actually said it first?

Nobody knows, and the people who've gone looking say that's sort of the point. Rachel Hutton dug into this for the Star Tribune's Curious Minnesota project in 2019, and the paper's answer was that the term first appeared in its own pages in 1986, used without explanation, the way you'd use "rush hour."

Annette Atkins has the most interesting theory about the timing. She's professor emerita at the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University and wrote Creating Minnesota: A History From the Inside Out, and she suspects the phrase came out of a stretch when Minnesota was busy deciding it was special. That's the era of Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion, which ran from 1974 to 2016, and Howard Mohr's How to Talk Minnesotan in 1987. Two guys telling stories about a place. Then the place starts believing them.

Atkins pointed out something I can't stop thinking about. Before Keillor and Mohr, Minnesotans mostly established their identity through Iowa jokes. Idiots Out Walking Around. That was the whole self-concept: at least we're not them. Which is a pretty thin thing to build a state personality on, and it makes sense that when somebody handed us a better story we took it and ran. Anyway, the point is that the label is a whole lot younger than the thing it names.

What was already here before anybody named it

A state that was mostly not from here. In the 1890s, 40 percent of Minnesota's population was foreign-born, compared with 11 percent nationally, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. By 1900, more than 60 percent of those foreign-born residents had come from Germany, Norway, or Sweden.

The state demographer's office puts it another way: by 1900, roughly 13 percent of everybody living in Minnesota had personally been born in Norway or Sweden. Not descended from. Born there. And they mostly weren't in the cities. Giang Nguyen-Dien, writing in The Conversation in 2024, cites figures showing 72 percent of Norwegian immigrants and 62 percent of Swedish immigrants in Minnesota living in rural areas at the turn of the century.

Here's the wrinkle nobody expects. German ancestry is actually the bigger share today, somewhere around 35 percent against roughly 30 percent Scandinavian, per the Star Tribune's reporting. The Scandinavians just got louder credit. They were more active in early state politics, their surnames announced themselves, and the football team got named after them.

The Law of Jante, and why it sounds so familiar

In 1933, a Danish-Norwegian novelist named Aksel Sandemose published En flyktning krysser sitt spor, translated as A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. It's set in a fictional small town called Jante, modeled on his real hometown of Nykøbing Mors. Somewhere in it he lays out ten rules the townspeople use to keep each other in line:

You're not to think you are anything special.

You're not to think you are as good as we are.

You're not to think you are smarter than we are.

You're not to think you know more than we do.

You're not to think you are good at anything.

Sandemose wrote that as an accusation. He hated the place. He meant the ten rules as a portrait of small-town cruelty, and the joke of history is that Scandinavia adopted the name as a more or less neutral description of itself.

Kari Lie Dorer, who heads Norwegian and Nordic studies at St. Olaf, made a point to the Star Tribune that unlocked this for me. Norwegian leans on passive constructions — "it would be an idea to" instead of "you should" — and in Norwegian that's just courtesy. Move the same sentence structure into English in Minnesota and it lands as somebody visibly biting their tongue. The sentence structure survived the boat. What didn't survive was the context that made it read as courtesy instead of gritted teeth.

The other explanation: it's about farming, not Norway

Corey Bonnema, who co-wrote Minnesota Nice? A Transplant's Guide to Surviving and Thriving in Minnesota, makes the case that the agrarian economy did most of the work. If your plow breaks in October and your neighbor is the only person nearby with a working one, being on decent terms with him isn't a personality trait. It's a plan.

Stephen Gross, a history professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, adds the part I find most convincing. Minnesota settled into ethnic pockets that stayed pockets. Swedes in Isanti and Chisago counties. Norwegians out toward the Red River Valley. Germans down the river valleys. People lived near each other without really mixing, which Gross calls a reluctant pluralism — everybody gets along, and the boundaries stay exactly where they were.

You get very good at being cordial that way. You get almost no practice at being in an actual disagreement with someone and coming out the other side still friends. Former Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak described riding the elevator in the IDS Tower like it's a town meeting, where you'd be rude not to say something about the Twins. That's a small town's habit running loose downtown.

Three explanations, side by side

My read is that these aren't competing. The farm economy built the behavior, the Scandinavian and Lutheran inheritance gave it a vocabulary, and the 1980s gave it a brand.

Why plenty of people hear it as an insult

Because for a lot of people it's been used as one. Syl Jones, a playwright and communications consultant, argued in a 2009 MPR essay that Minnesota Nice isn't really about kindness at all. He reads it as a way of keeping up appearances, maintaining the social order, and keeping people — newcomers especially — in their assigned place.

Gross put the same tension more gently: Minnesotans like to present as gracious and hospitable while carrying a real reputation for keeping their distance. If you want the unflattering version dramatized, the Coen brothers already did it in Fargo in 1996, where the pleasantness never once cracks and something considerably worse is happening the whole time.

The transplant complaint I hear most often is not that people are cold. It's that they're warm for six months and you still haven't been invited over. You'll get a wave, a chat about the snow, a sincere offer to help you move a couch. You won't get past the front hall.

Who it was never really extended to

The niceness has always come with conditions, and the clearest test of that is what happened when refugees arrived in numbers.

Minnesota's Hmong population went from about 2,000 in 1980 to 8,000 by the end of 1981, according to a State Department report from that period cited by Nguyen-Dien. A resettlement official quoted in it said some people were already complaining the state was "too nice" and had provided too many services. Another local official floated "Hmong-nesota" as a joke about where things were heading. In 1985, the Star Tribune ran a special report called "Hmong in Minnesota: Lost in the Promised Land" — Nguyen-Dien points to it as documentation of how many Hmong families in the Twin Cities had become targets of harassment and violence.

Nguyen-Dien, who studies Vietnamese refugee resettlement here, describes a version of Minnesota Nice that depends on the newcomer staying not too visible and not too inconvenient, with gratitude as the unspoken price of admission. And the economist Samuel Myers has a name for the harder fact underneath all of it — the Minnesota Paradox, his finding that Black Minnesotans are worse off here than in nearly any other state. After George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis in 2020, the journalist Michele Norris, who grew up here, wrote in the Washington Post that the phrase had picked up undertones of irony and despair. As someone that lived through this, our hearts ached for the Floyd family and for Minnesota.

I don't think that voids the whole thing. I do think you can't tell the origin story honestly without it.

So is any of it real?

I don't know, and I want to be straight about that. Atkins is blunt that there's no solid data proving Minnesotans are measurably nicer than anybody else. Nobody's run that study in a way that would settle it, and I'm not sure what it would even measure.

What I'd defend is narrower. There's a real regional style here: warm on contact, slow to open, allergic to confrontation, deeply uncomfortable with anyone announcing they're good at something. That style has causes you can point to in the census records. Whether it adds up to "nice" depends entirely on whether you're the one being kept at arm's length. You can watch that last trait operate in the wild: the lawyer who wouldn't post about her own work because saying it out loud felt like bragging.

The part I'd hang onto is the part that came off the farm. Not the politeness. The reliability. Somebody's plow is broken and you go.

The rest of what I write lives over in Your Milk Delivery.

Questions people actually ask

Is Minnesota Nice a compliment or a dig?

Depends who's saying it. Somebody wearing it on a T-shirt means genuine kindness — pushing your car out of a snowbank, not honking at you. Somebody who moved here from Chicago usually means the other thing: everyone's pleasant, nobody's honest, and you'll never find out what they actually think of you. Both readings are old.

Did Garrison Keillor invent it?

No, but Atkins thinks he helped create the conditions for it. A Prairie Home Companion ran from 1974 to 2016, and Howard Mohr's How to Talk Minnesotan came out in 1987. The phrase showed up in print in the Star Tribune in 1986. So the storytelling and the label arrived together, whatever the causation.

Is it the same as Midwest nice?

Related, not identical. The rest of the Midwest has the neighborliness. Minnesota gets singled out for the reserve underneath it.

Where does the passive-aggressive reputation come from?

Partly from grammar, per Kari Lie Dorer at St. Olaf. Norwegian uses indirect, passive phrasing as ordinary politeness. Rendered into English by people who no longer speak Norwegian, that same softness reads as somebody swallowing what they really wanted to say. Add a culture that treats open conflict as a failure and you get the reputation.

Is Fargo a fair portrayal?

It's a caricature, and it's the one outsiders reach for. Gross has noted that the movie became shorthand for the argument that the whole thing is a facade. Most Minnesotans will tell you the accent is overdone. Fewer will tell you the emotional part is wrong.

Why does saying goodbye take forty minutes?

Because leaving requires several rounds of signaling that nobody's rushing anyone. You announce you should get going, then talk for twenty minutes, then move to the entryway, then talk more, then continue in the driveway. It's the same instinct as everything else here: nobody wants to be the one who seemed abrupt.

I just moved here. How do I get past the surface?

Show up repeatedly in the same place. The friendship math here runs on accumulated exposure, not on any one great conversation, which means the person you had a fantastic two hours with at a party may well nod at you in the co-op next week and keep walking. That's not a rejection. It's just that the clock hasn't run long enough yet. Join the thing that meets weekly, whatever it is. It's slow, it's not personal, and it absolutely feels personal for the first two winters.

The version of this worth keeping isn't the politeness. It's the plow. Somebody's stuck and you go, and you don't make a production out of having gone. If you're new here and it feels like everyone's friendly and nobody's your friend yet, give it a couple of winters and pick one thing to keep showing up to. And fair warning, in R.T. Rybak's words: Minnesotans will give you directions to anywhere but their house.

We break that one. The address is right here on the site, Shakopee, real one, and there's always milk in the fridge. Chat over a glass? You betcha.

Sources

• Rachel Hutton, "What are the origins of Minnesota Nice?" Star Tribune, Curious Minnesota, April 2019. Source for the 1986 first appearance, Annette Atkins on the Keillor era, Kari Lie Dorer on Norwegian passive constructions, Corey Bonnema on the farm economy, Stephen Gross on reluctant pluralism, R.T. Rybak on the IDS elevator, and the German-versus-Scandinavian ancestry shares.
• Eric Roper, "Why did Scandinavian immigrants choose Minnesota?" Star Tribune, Curious Minnesota, May 2022. Source for the state demographer's office figure that about 13 percent of Minnesota's 1900 population was born in Norway or Sweden.
• "Immigrants and Refugees in Minnesota: Connecting Past and Present," MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society. Source for 40 percent foreign-born in the 1890s against 11 percent nationally, and for more than 60 percent of the foreign-born population arriving from Germany, Norway, and Sweden by 1900.
• Giang Nguyen-Dien, "The contradictions of Minnesota nice," The Conversation, 2024. Source for the rural settlement rates, the Hmong resettlement figures and the State Department report they come from, the 1985 Star Tribune special report, and gratitude as an unspoken condition of welcome.
• Syl Jones, "Tracing the origin of 'Minnesota Nice,'" MPR News, December 14, 2009.
• "Law of Jante," Wikipedia. Source for Sandemose's 1933 novel, the fictional town, and the ten rules.
• "Minnesota nice," Wikipedia. Source for Michele Norris on the phrase after 2020, citing her Washington Post op-ed "It's hard to hear 'Minnesota Nice' without undertones of irony and despair," June 4, 2020.
• Samuel L. Myers Jr., "The Minnesota Paradox," Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Source for the finding that Black Minnesotans are worse off here than in virtually every other state.

Not linkable:

• Aksel Sandemose, En flyktning krysser sitt spor (1933), published in English as A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks.
• Annette Atkins, Creating Minnesota: A History From the Inside Out (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007).
• Corey Bonnema and Jerilyn Veldof, Minnesota Nice? A Transplant's Guide to Surviving and Thriving in Minnesota (Twining Press, 2014).
• "Hmong in Minnesota: Lost in the Promised Land," Star Tribune special report, 1985. Print archive.