East Central European Perceptions of Early America [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9783112327968, 9783112327951

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BROOKLYN COLLEGE of The City University of New York School of Social Science Department of History

STUDIES ON SOCIETY IN CHANGE, No.5

© Copyright 1977 reserved

No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the author. ISBN 90 316 0146 2

Photoset in Holland by Interset Printed in T h e Netherlands by Intercontinental Graphics, Dordrecht

EAST CENTRAL EUROPEAN PERCEPTIONS OF EARLY AMERICA Edited by BÉLA K. KIRÂLY, GEORGE BARANY

LISSE

THE PETER DE RIDDER PRESS 1977

To commemorate the United States Bicentennial

PREFACE This small volume is one of Brooklyn College's contributions to the celebration of our nation's bicentennial. It deals with the question of how America has been understood by Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles - peoples of East Central Europe - and their rulers. We hope that it will help to explain why, of the 27 million European immigrants who entered the United States between 1880 and 1930, most came from that area. The findings of the authors indicate that the image of America has been extremely attractive to many statesmen, intellectuals, and ordinary people of East Central Europe. Not unexpectedly, many were fascinated by the American way of life and impressed by the potential or actual riches of the land. However, what struck them the most, was the way in which the ideals of the freedom, dignity, and equality of men were integrated into American life. In a very real sense, we are also saying something about why the residents of the Greater New York area, our borough included, now reside here, since so many of their forebears who arrived on these shores came from East Central Europe and were drawn by the visions which are described here. The contributors approach their subjects from several academic points of view: history, political science, and comparative literature. They are George Barany, Denver; Paula S. Fichtner and Béla K. Kiraly, Brooklyn ; Eugene Kusielewicz, St. John's ; Alfred A. Reisch, Library of Congress; Joseph Rothschild, Columbia; Irene M. Sokol, Fairleigh Dickinson; and Frantisek Svejkovsky, formerly of the University of Prague, now of the University of Chicago. Part of the book contains the proceedings of a panel discussion cosponsored by the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference, an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and the East European Section of the Center for European Studies at the Graduate School and University Center, CUNY. Other portions developed within the framework of advanced classroom research and discussions at Brooklyn College. Thus the volume is closely tied to academic activities at our college and university. As in the case of previous volumes in this series, it is a pleasure to express our appreciation to the Graduate School and University Cen-

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PREFACE

ter, C U N Y , for supporting the conference which inspired this book. W e are also deeply grateful to the Kosciuszko Foundation of N e w York for a generous contribution to our publication costs. That one of Brooklyn College's contributions to the American bicentennial is a work of serious scholarship is a testimonial to the abiding commitment of this college to academic research—current difficulties, among the greatest that our university has had to face, notwithstanding. July 4,1976 JOHN W . KNELLER President

CONTENTS

J O H N W. K N E L L E R

Preface JOSEPH

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ROTHSCHILD

Introduction

11

I. AUSTRIA P A U L A S. F I C H T N E R

Viennese Perspectives on the American War of Independence

19

II. BOHEMIA FRANTISEK

SVEJKOVSKY

Three Centuries of America in Czech Literature, 1508-1818

33

III. HUNGARY A L F R E D A. R E I S C H

Sândor Bôloni Farkas's Reflections on American Political and Social Institutions

59

BÊLA K. K I R Â L Y

Béla Széchenyi's American Tour

73

10

CONTENTS

IV. POLAND I R E N E M. S O K O L

Eighteenth-Century Polish Views on American Republican Government EUGENE

89

KUSIELEWICZ

Poland's Changing Attitudes Toward the American Revolution

97

GEORGE BARANY

The Appeal and the Echo Biographies of the Contributors

107 143

INTRODUCTION JOSEPH ROTHSCHILD

The social history of the United States can be written largely in terms of the themes of immigration and frontier. These two themes are, indeed, twinned, for the concept of frontier can and should be extended from its conventional reference to the westward, agricultural expansion of American society across the continent, to encompass as well the phenomenon of the urban, industrial frontier. And it is on this latter frontier that the vast majority of the immigrants from East Central Europe made their original contribution to American society and were, in turn, first acculturated into that society. Though there is a tradition claiming that two of Columbus's sailors on his first voyage of discovery to America were Ragusans, though it is indeed a fact that Poles were members of the original English colony at Jamestown in the first decade of the seventeenth century and that Czechs came to New Amsterdam during the second quarter of that same century, and though occasional other Slav, Hungarian or Rumanian immigrants from the realms of the Habsburgs came to settle in pre-Revolutionary or pre-Civil War America, yet the overwhelming bulk of the imigration from East Central Europe is "new," that is, it dates from after the Civil War and particularly from the half-century 1880-1930 during which the United States received 27 million immigrants - many from East Central Europe. This East Central European immigration into America was but a part - though probably the largest part - of a more general East Central European flight from overcrowded villages and out of peasant agriculture into urban existence. This demographic movement, in turn, was generated by the extended and expanding impact of the industrial revolution from Britain and France eastward across Europe. Warsaw and Budapest, for example, became immigrant cities for surplus East Central European peasants extruded out of their hinterland villages just as did Pittsburgh and Chicago. But America, with its high living

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standards, its political freedom, and its reputation as a land of open opportunity, beckoned and magnetized the most enterprising and venturesome and hopeful of these redundant villagers and provincial artisans and peddlers. The Jews, though often emigrating out of Tsarist Russia, should here be included as part of the East Central European immigration into the United States, since their Pale of Settlement in the Tsarist empire, as well as the Habsburg provinces of Galicia and Bukovina from which many others of them came, can legitimately be regarded as belonging within East Central (rather than Russian) Europe. Whereas the gentile peasants were squeezed out of agriculture by economic and demographic trends, the Jews left the Old World not only for these, but also for additional political reasons - to escape pogromist violence, educational and occupational prohibitions and restrictions, and extended terms of brutalizing conscription. Though 80 percent of the immigrants from East Central Europe settled in the northeastern quadrant of the United States, that is, the area north of an imaginary line running from Baltimore to St. Louis and east of the Mississippi River, yet no region of this country failed to attract some of them. Thus there are Czechs in Nebraska, Poles in Colorado, Hungarians in Florida, Jews in Arizona, and so on. Though the waves of "new" immigrants from East Central Europe were initially met with coolness at best and, more often, with vehement hostility and sharply prejudicial ethnic stereotyping at the hands of "native" (pre-Revolutionary) Americans and Americanized "old" immigrants stemming from Western Europe, and though the conditions of their work-places and living-places (usually on the urban frontier) were harsh and primitive, they nevertheless kept coming. One should not misinterpret here the significance of the seemingly high proportion of immigrants who returned to East Central Europe (about 30 percent) in the first two decades of the twentieth century since these returnees were usually the single men, who', upon finding a bride in the old country, were as likely as not to immigrate a second time into the United States. Among those who arrived here as families or as married men preceding the rest of their families, the reemigration rate was low. For one thing, the negative conditions propelling them out of the Old World did not attenuate. For another, the chronic labour shortage of the expanding American industrial economy rendered it well-nigh impossible to deny jobs to the immigrants in the long run (or even in the intermediate run). Finally, initial rebuffs and

INTRODUCTION

13

disappointments notwithstanding, the United States did, after all, confirm the East Central European immigrant's visions and expectations. These visions and expectations were not - contrary to conventional assumptions - exclusively economic and privatistic. True, the immigrant came to escape grinding poverty, overpopulation, underconsumption, disease, and economic despair. But it would be an oversimplification and hence a distortion to define his image of America exclusively in the coarse metaphor of the land whose streets were supposedly "paved with gold." America also projected itself to East Central Europeans in terms of a distinct political and public-value image or, rather, series of images. The United States was to them the land of freedom - not freedom in the abstract or the rhetorical, but freedom in meaningful historical terms, for instance freedom from the heritage of neoserfdom, freedom from religious establishments and their repression of dissent, and freedom from legalized hereditary privilege. America, in other words, was unencumbered by, hence free of, the onerous and oppressive historical ballast of East Central Europe. This freedom from history, in turn, meant that the United States was free to be an innovative, inventive society - both in the direct technological sense and also in the sense that it had the freedom rationally to construct, to test, and to rebuild its institutions to achieve optimal functionality. There is hardly an East Central European visitor or immigrant to America whose diaries or correspondence fail to reflect the profound, positive and, indeed, exhilarating impression made by America's perceived capacity for innovation. And this vivid impression, conveyed back to East Central Europe, in turn shaped the expectations which each subsequent wave of immigrants and visitors would bring with it. In effect, therefore, the East Central European immigrant - perhaps without being capable of fully articulating his perception - saw the United States in terms very similar to those which had animated the Founding Fathers. America was felt to be a product and an expression of the rationalistic temper of the Enlightenment, not of the historicist nostalgia of the Romantic era. The American experiment was committed to the sequential propositions that men may rationally and deliberately construct their institutions which, in turn, shape the kind of citizens that the society wishes to cultivate. Furthermore, political institutions were presumed to have normative if not historical priority over social institutions, that is to say the former do and should shape

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the latter. Hence the political institutions must and do remain democratically available to redesign and reshape the country's social and economic institutions when these require change in order that the society might remain optimally free, rational and innovative. Virtually all the succeeding chapters of this book illustrate by example and by analysis the impact of this vision of America on East Central European observers and immigrants. The immigrants chose to live and, where possible, even to work among their compatriots from the old country. Hence the adult generation of immigrants often did not learn English nor otherwise acculturate. But the children did, and this process often led to intergenerational strain, especially when acculturation in the second generation was followed by assimilation and denial or repression of ethnic heritage in the third. The 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, have witnessed a vivid and emphatic revival of the " e t h n i c s ' " emotional commitment to their ancestors' cultures and to the group identities steming therefrom. Triggered by the assertion of Black pride and selfawareness, and both reacting to and emulating this unexpected phenomenon, the hyphenated American descedants of immigrants from East Central Europe now insist on treasuring and recultivating their particular historical, cultural and even political identities. Perhaps the general crisis which has afflicted American society during these two decades of the 1960s and 1970s has also frightened people into a return to familiar and hence reassuring ancestral identities. This revived ethnic assertiveness, while today almost universally applauded and, indeed, commendable (as are historical consciousness and self-consciousness in general), is not without its potential dangers: separatism, parochialism and provincialism threaten to undermine and to replace integration, universalism and cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, for the individuals asserting - or, rather, occasionally overasserting - their ethnic pride, the psychological danger of premature identity-foreclosure may be quite real. A tight and closed commitment is asserted while exposure to wider, more open and more mobile choices and identities is shunned. It is surely a pity when college students with the talent for productive and possibly even creative careers in medicine, law or science succumb instead to pressures - emanating from peer groups or from their own selves - to major in "ethnic studies" of one another particularity, be it Black, or Chicano, or Jewish, or Polish, or whatever, as their way of exploiting (misappropriating would be more accurate) the opportunity to obtain a liberal education.

INTRODUCTION

15

It would be an oversimplification and an error to assume that America was perceived in specific hues only by potential immigrants in East Central Europe. Quite the contrary. Its image also impacted powerfully on those who had no intention or expectation of leaving the Old World but instead were searching for helpful models by which to reshape and redesign their several countries' institutions. Here, of course, the would-be American model competed with those of France, Britain and Belgium. As most nations of East Central Europe won or recovered independent statehood during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these three European models were usually preferred to the American one for purposes of the formal design of constitutions, but the American one was evaluated as most advanced, most enlightened, most innovative and most promising at the level of such institutional issues and design - problems as pedagogy, philanthropy, penology areas i a which the United States had supposedly demonstrated the practical viability of such ideals as equality, brotherhood and justice. American socioeconomic institutions and values were also perceived as demonstrating the compatibility of democracy with security of property and even with the celebration of the business ethos, thereby giving the lie to the scare tactics with which European conservatives sought to panic the classes of property and order by identifying democracy with Jacobinism, socialism and anarchism. Indeed, in nineteenth-century Poland and Hungary even the gentry came to consider the Southern planter aristocracy or the New England merchant oligarchy of early America as appropriate models for the kind of liberal-conservative societies into which they hoped to coax their own countries. The early United States, in other words, appeared to confirm the feasibility of a conservative revolution, securing national political independence but without "degenerating" into a social revolution over which the traditional ruling and propertied elements would lose control. Cautious East Central Europeans were, of course, also concerned lest America carry some of its democratic and liberal values to disfunctional excess. For example, its reputation for assertive individualism was on occasion suspected - particularly from the close of the nineteenth century - of threatening to transform it into a rampant gangster society or, at any rate, into a society without effective communal bonds; its egalitarianism was held responsible for alleged Philistinism ; excessive emphasis on organized private power, such as the corporation, the trade union, the interest group, provoked concern as

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threats to effective state authority. America, in short, seemed unstable in both its structures and its policies, a country lacking the security and order of status and rank - other than the superficial and insubstantial rank conveyed by the glitter of money and gluttonous consumerism. Nevertheless, for the masses in East Central Europe such elitist reservations took, and continue to take, emphatic second place to their admiration for the United States. For them, the materialism and individualism of America were, and are, not disdained as allegedly "crass" and "wild" but rather valued as a promise of wellbeing and self-advancement. America, in other words, remains today what it has always been in the eyes of the peoples of East Central Europe - a state of mind as well as a geographical entity.

VIENNESE PERSPECTIVES ON THE AMERICAN WAR OF I N D E P E N D E N C E PAULA S. FICHTNER

Far removed from the basic concerns of the Habsburg Empire, the British settlements in North America were of limited interest to the Austrian dynasty and the people it ruled before 1776. Austria and the thirteen colonies regularly exchanged goods under English supervision through ports in the Austrian Netherlands which were then Habsburg possessions. However, immigration to America from the Habsburg territories was relatively rare, though those who left did so for the same reason as many had quit England - religious persecution and intolerance. Some remnants of the Bohemian Brethren and the evangelical "Hernhutter" arrived in New England in the seventeenth century. A large colony of Protestants banished in 1731 from neighbouring Salzburg went to Georgia and played a significant part in the life of that colony throughout the eighteenth century. 1 It took the better part of a year before "the shot heard round the world" 2 began to resonate in Vienna. There seems to have been little talk, either official or private, of events in America; the diary of Count Johann Joseph Khevenhiiller-Metsch, Maria Theresa's senior court marshal and a painstaking recorder of what was being discussed at court, made no mention of American troubles before 1776.3 After that, however, the Habsburgs were forced to take account of the uprising in the colonies from both an ideological and diplomatic point of view. The way in which they did so tells something therefore about the presumptions upon which their monarchy rested and about Austria's position in eighteenth-century international relations. 1 Anna Benna, Contemporary Austrian Views of American Independence: A Documentary on the Occasion of the Bicentennial, trans. Cheryl Benard (Vienna, 1976), pp.

8, 28. 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument." 3 Maria Breunlich-Pawlik and Hans Wagner, eds., A us der Zeit Mario Theresas.'

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The general public in Vienna learned of the early stages of the American Revolution through English and French sources. Given the heavy censorship of the time, it is not surprising to find that the court knew of the Declaration of Independence by July 9, but that the daily Wienerisches Diarium did not publish a German translation of the document until August 31.4 Though hardly inimical to reform, both the Empress, Maria Theresa and her son and coregent, Joseph II, took a dim view of popular uprisings of any kind, as did the imperial chancellor, Prince Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz. Maria Theresa thoroughly endorsed the efforts of her fellow sovereign, George III, to check the rebellion, saying that she had "a hearty desire to see the restoration of obedience and tranquillity in every quarter of his dominions." 5 She was outraged by an article in the Wienerisches Diarium on December 20, 1777, which explained the revolution as a clash of two political principles - monarchy and popular sovereignity - despite an editorial which accompanied the piece to show how misguided the latter notion was. 6 Joseph II echoed similar sentiments with equal vigor to the British ambassador to Vienna, Sir Robert Murray Keith: The cause in which England is engaged ... is the cause of all sovereigns, who have a joint interest in the maintenance of due subordination and obedience to law in all the surrounding monarchies. I observe with pleasure... the vigorous exertions of the national strength which the king is employing to bring his rebellious subjects to submission, and I sincerely wish success to the measure. 7

Perhaps the most sympathetic of all to events in America was Joseph's brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscanny and later Emperor from 1790 to 1792. Leopold had ambitions to write a constitution for his Italian principality, and, at some time most likely between 1779 and 1782, he wrote a commentary to the Pennsylvania state constitution of 1776 which served as a kind advance study for his larger project. He observed that in order to construct a good law code in all states, Tagebuch des Fürsten Johann Josef Khevenhiiller-Meisch, Kaiserlichen Oberhofmeisters 1742-1776, (Vienna, 1972). 4 Ibid., pp. 153-154; Benna, op.cit., pp. 33, 36. 5 William Coxe, History of the House of Austria, 3 vols. (3rd. ed.: London, 1847), III, 473. 6 Benna, op.cit., p. 36. 7 Quoted in Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence (Sew York, 1965), p. 153. See also Hanns Schiitter, Die Beziehungen Österreichs zu den Vereinigten Staaten von America (Innsbruck, 1885), pp. 3-4.

VIENNESE PERSPECTIVES ON THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

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including monarchies, it was necessary to base the constitution as did the Pennsylvanians, on the idea of equality. This principle, in turn, had to have as its foundation a concern for the general welfare in both individual and collective senses of the term. But Leopold too saw all of this only within a monarchial framework. He approved of equality only as long as it was understood to be operative in a civil rather than a political sense, that is, as a question of equality under the law rather than equality of political status. And though he believed in popular consultation, he saw it only as a means of informing a ruler about the "common interests" of his peoples, not as an instrument of sovereignty.8 Of more immediate concern for the Habsburgs were the potential diplomatic repercussions of the American uprising. Allied with France since 1756, Maria Theresa had not given up on resuscitating her earlier friendship with England. She therefore wished to avoid an open confrontation between the two western powers in which she would have had to take sides. At the beginning of 1777, the Empress agonized in a letter to her daughter, Marie-Antoinette, in France that the "war in America" was one of the trouble spots abroad that might force her into such a situation despite her wishes. She forbade American or British recruiting in the Habsburg lands of mercenaries to fight in America and officially prohibited the sale of weapons to the revolutionaries, although a lively contraband traffic in arms existed from Austria by way of the French Antilles. Kaunitz, the architect of the alliance between Vienna and Versailles, had also become increasingly disenchanted with French military and naval weakness, and Joseph II was no enthusiast of his sister's court. 9 Franco-American initiative itself, however, forced the Empress and Kaunitz to deal with the colonists at far closer range than they cared to in their efforts to remain aloof from French-English conflict. With the outbreak of hostilities between England and its American colonists in 1775, many patriots realized that they would need foreign help in order to prosecute a war successfully. In general, those members of the Second Continental Congress who sought European aid were split • Gerald H. Davis, "Observations of Leopold of Habsburg on the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776," Pennsylvania History, XXIX (1962), 375, 377, 379. ' Maria Theresa to Marie-Antoinette, Feb. 3,1777 in Alfred de Arneth and Mathieu Auguste Geffroy, eds., Marie Antoinette: Correspondance Secrète entre Marie-Thérèse et le Cte de Mercy-Argenteau, 3 vols. (Paris, 1875), III, 17; Schiitter, op.cit., pp. 3-4; Benna, op.cit., pp. 8, 30-31; Morris, op.cit., p. 154.

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into two groups. These have been styled the "school of impulse" and the "school of system." 10 The latter, led by Benjamin Franklin, wished to carry on American diplomacy according to traditional European models, which required that no envoy be pressed upon one state by another unless that government was willing to receive him. The former side favored discontinuing observation of all traditional rules in financial, military and diplomatic affairs, since, as John Adams asserted: Militia d i p l o m a t i s t s s o m e t i m e s gain victories o v e r regular troops, e v e n by departing from t h e rules! ...I h a v e l o n g s i n c e learned that a m a n m i g h t g i v e o f f e n s e t o a court to w h i c h h e is sent and yet s u c c e e d . N o m a n . . . will e v e r be pleasing at a court in general w h o is not depraved in h i s morals or warped f r o m your i n t e r e s t s . "

These more radical opinions prevailed at the beginning of the war. A series of foreign missions was established in haphazard fashion for the purpose of obtaining diplomatic recognition and financial assistance for the rebels. There was little reason to extend feelers of this sort to Vienna. True, Silas Deane, one of the Americans sent to negotiate a treaty with the French, reported in November of 1776 that Leopold had taken all duties off American commerce in his ports and that ships of war might be purchased there. 12 An initial mission to Berlin and Vienna by Arthur Lee of Virginia was dispatched in 1777 to try to stem the flow of German mercenaries into English armies. In return the Congress was offering free trade rights for Prussian and Austrian subjects in America. Kaunitz, however, would have no part of such an agreement, leaving Lee to speak of a "cold tranquillity" which he found in Vienna. He despaired of getting any aid from that quarter, though he did think that the mercenary traffic was self-limiting. 13 But despite the apparent superfluity of any mission to the Habsburg capital, the Continental Congress again resolved in 1777 to send yet 10 Francis Wharton, ed., The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States,6 vols. (Washington, 1889), I, 14. 11 Ibid., 289-290. 12 Silas Deane to the Committee of Secret Correspondence, Nov. 26, 1776 in Jared Sparks, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, 12 vols. (Boston, 1829), I, 64-65. " Arthur Lee to American Commissioners in Paris, May 27, 1777, ibid., II 64; Arthur Lee to the Committee of Foreign Affairs, June 11, 1777, ibid., 71.

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another envoy there. This time it was William Lee, Arthur's brother, then a London merchant and an alderman of that city.14 A blustery man whose temperament has been described as "bettersuited to the role of prosecuting attorney rather than peacemaker," Lee reacted optimistically to the news of his appointment. He felt good commercial relations could be arranged with either Prussia or Austria since both powers were interested in improving their international economic position. 15And the instructions sent him by John Hancock gave no indication that Vienna might not wish to see the American: You will lose no time in announcing in form to those courts [Vienna and Berlin] the Declaration of Independence made in Congress on the fourth day of July, 1776. The reasons of this act of independence are so strongly adduced in the declaration itself, that further argument is unnecessary."

No effort was to be spared to secure recognition both of American independence and of Lee as a representative of sovereign states. Lee did not get to Vienna before May 1778. He had to wait for conclusion of the Franco-American treaty which came into being on February 6,1778, as well as to straighten out the finances for his mission and his credentials. Apparently not sharing Adam's fears of moral corruption in the diplomatic social whirl, Lee hoped that Congress would give him the same financial support that it gave its commissioners in Paris "especially," as he said, "when 'tis considered that Vienna is as gay and expensive a court as any in Europe." 17 The problem of his credentials reflected clearly the general lack of awareness of diplomatic niceties which characterized militia diplomacy and to which, as shall be seen, Vienna would react adversely. Upon presenting his papers to Count Mercy-d'Argenteau, Maria Theresa's ambassador to France, early in 1778, Lee was startled to find that they were incomplete. Writing to Congress on January 22, Lee told his superiors that they had empowered him to deal only with Joseph II, the German Emperor, and not his mother who, in fact, was sovereign over all the Austrian dominions, Germany, Flanders and "elsewhere." 14

Morris, op. cit., p. 151. Breunlich-Pawlik and Wagner have confused William with Arthur Lee. Op.cit., p. 381. 15 William Lee to Richard Henry Lee in Letters of William Lee, ed. Worthington C. Ford, 3 vols, (rprt.: New York, 1968), I, 245. 16 John Hancock to William Lee, July 1, 1777 in Sparks, op.cit., II, 289-290. 17 William Lee to Richard Henry Lee, op. cit., I, 272.

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She [Maria Theresa] is extremely jealous of her power and authority, not permitting her son to interfere in any manner in the government of her dominions. Her title is "the Most Serene and Most Potent, Princess Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduchess of Austria,' &c., &c. The Emperor, her son ... is ... Commander-in-Chief of his mother's army, and, as Emperor, is the head of the German Empire. I therefore beg leave to submit to Congress whether it may not be proper to send another commission to treat with the Queen of Hungary, &c., since, in fact there are two courts to negotiate with, though they both reside in the same city, viz: with the Emperor, so far as relates to the German Empire, such as obstructing Great Britain from procuring the German troops to send to America; and with his mother for the purpose of commerce with the Austrian dominions. 18

Nor did the international outlook in 1778 favor the purpose of Lee's mission. The electoral line of the Bavarian Wittelsbachs was extinguished with the death of Elector Maximilian Joseph in 1777, and, prompted by Joseph II, Habsburg forces occupied Lower Bavaria and part of the Palatinate early in 1778. Frederick the Great of Prussia threatened action against this move, and writing to Congress in April of 1778, Arthur Lee predicted that it would be impossible for his brother to gain much either. All of Germany would be embroiled, and he was certain that America would have little to fear from that area, probably meaning that mercenary traffic would cease." For all this, however, William Lee was relatively hopeful at his chances for success. He was enthusiastic at the prospects for trade, especially in arms and ammunition from the powers of northern and central Europe. He saw rice, tabacco, indigo or furs as the American items in the exchange. While recognizing that war over Bavaria might hinder his purpose, he thought that the situation was negotiable and resolved to be on the watch for advantageous openings. 20 Thus, outfitted with half a commission, guarded optimism and a Declaration of Independence, William Lee set out for the august court of the Habsburgs. He arrived in Vienna sometime toward the end of May 1778 and, despite his defective credentials, attempted to obtain some sort of audience with Maria Theresa. He followed a two-pronged line of attack, persuading the French ambassador, Breteuil, who was not unsympathetic to his methods, to introduce him to court officials 18

William Lee to the President of Congress, Jan. 22, 1778, ibid., pp. 345-346. " Sparks, op.cit., II, 149. 20 William Lee to Richard Henry Lee, N o v . 24, 1777 in Lee, op.cit.. I, 276; William Lee to Francis Lightfoot Lee, Feb. 28,1778, ibid., II, 379-380; William Lee to President of Congress, March 23, 1778, ibid., p. 412.

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and secondly, ingratiating himself with influential members of Viennese society. He had enough foresight not to represent himself as an official emissary of the American Congress since he saw that a quick Austrian decision for the colonists might speed British backing to Frederick in the Bavarian question. He therefore resolved to ask Breteuil that he be introduced only as an "American traveler." 21 His strategy was not wholly misguided. At least one contemporary observer found Viennese society quite hospitable to well-born strangers, unlike Paris or London where one could spend much time alone without receiving appropriate social invitations. Both Kaunitz, whose goodwill was essential if one were to reach to ear of Maria Theresa, and imperial Vice-chancellor Prince Rudolf Colloredo, held nightly receptions in their town houses which were open to foreigners of any importance. Though Kaunitz himself spent most of the time at these affairs standing in one corner playing billiards, he was still obviously accessible for introductions. Lee was also fortunate to have the French ambassador as his patron, since the latter had substantial wherewithal at his disposal which permitted him to entertain lavishly. 22 Lee's letters corroborate this impression of the ease with which one could gain entrance into the circles of the important. By May 30, about six days after his arrival in the Habsburg capital, he claimed to have met the "Minister" (probably Kaunitz), various state dignitaries, as well as court ladies and all the foreign ministers and ambassadors except those of Great Britain and Hanover. Despite strong pro-British feeling which he detected, he continued to hold out hope for success. By June 10, he reported with a great deal of pleasure that the Viennese seemed to be talking more of the American war than of their own international difficulties. 23 And indeed, Lee quickly won a certain renown throughout Viennese society. Breteuil invited leading families of the capital to French embassy gatherings where he introduced the American, and Lee was received by the Viennese in their salons. He was plied with questions about life in the colonies and the progress and conduct of the war. 24 21 Morris, op.cii.,p. 152; William Lee to Congress (?), May 30,1778 in Lee, op.cit., II, 438-439. 22 N.William Wraxall, Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw and Vienna, 2 vols. (London, 1806), II 243,224,248. 23 William Lee to Congress (?), May 30, 1778 in Lee, op. eil., II, 438-439; William Lee to Arthur Lee, June 10, 1778, ibid., 444-445. 24 Benna, op.cit., pp.41-42.

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His answers, however, must have been less than informative, if only because he was apparently almost inarticulate in French, the language of international communication in the eighteenth century. One example will suffice. On May 28 at a dinner at Breteuil's residence, Lee was asked by an Austrian who was an American sympathizer, whether there were many stags (cerfs) in North America. Lee replied that his countrymen not only had "cherries" (cerises) but "strawberries" (/raises) as well. Undaunted, his interrogator pressed on to inquire about the number of wild boars (sangliers) in the New World. Lee simply did not understand the word which his questioner then explained to mean "cauchons [sic] sauvages". The whole table exploded into laughter. Lee was deemed not at all unintelligent, but in great need of expressing himself better, a judgment which Europeans would continue to pass on Americans long after. 25 But Lee and Breteuil were faced with stubborn competition from the English in their efforts to win both nobility and Habsburg officialdom to the American side. Keith, the gregarious British ambassador, was also well connected in the circles of the elite and claimed to have been working on both Maria Theresa and Joseph II for a year in order to forestall Habsburg support of the American side.26 Maria Theresa herself commented occasionally on the Anglophile tendencies.of her nobility, and Count Franz Xaver Roller, chief of her Ho/deputation in Illyricis testified that the English were acknowledged as "fort aimables".11 Given the fragility of the diplomatic structure with which Maria Theresa and Kaunitz were operating in dealing with the English and French belligerents and the Bavarian problem, it is doubtful that the Empress and her chancellor would have encouraged Lee. But the techniques of "militia diplomacy," as unconventional and therefore as full of surprises as they were, did nothing to advance the American cause. If anything, all this only hardened the resolve of the Habsburgs and their advisors to do nothing for the colonies. Much to her annoy-

25

Schlitter, op.cit., pp. 6-7, note. Robert Keith to Andrew Drummond, June 3, 1778 in Memoirs and Correspondence of Sir Robert Murray Keith, ed. Mrs.Gillespie Smyth, 2 vols. (London, 1849), II, 70-72, 83-84, 101. 27 Maria Theresa to Mercy-Argenteau, July 31, 1779 in Arneth & Geffrey, op.cit., Ill, 336; Maria Theresato Mercy-Argenteau, Aug. 4, 1779, ibid., 338; Maria Theresa to Marie-Antoinette, Jan. 1, 1780 in Alfred von Arneth, ed., Maria Theresa und Marie A ntoinette: IhrBrieJwechsei(Leipzig, 1886), p. 311; Schlitter, op. cit., pp. 6 - 7 , note. 26

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27

ance, Maria Theresa was not informed of Lee's imminent arrival in Vienna by her ambassador in Paris who was himself apparently unaware of it. She indicated that if the French had approached her on the American matter in a more open manner, her position might have been different, but to take her completely unawares at such a time was completely inappropriate. She did not like the way in which Breteuil's parading of Lee around Vienna was creating a situation where American affairs had become "an object of partisanship, in which even some roughness had appeared." As if to underscore her irritation, she issued a proclamation forbidding all trade between her Netherlands subjects and the Americans. 28 She saw no reason to offend England, since that power had done nothing to hinder commercial activity in the Austrian Netherlands. Nor did she wish to abandon her hopes of restoring her former alliance with the British. Though she did not pretend that her rejection of Lee would mean all that much to the English, she was convinced that it was the only correct policy for her to follow. She was delighted to hear that, in Tuscany, Leopold had not granted any loans to the Americans and excluded the rebels' vessels from the harbor of Livorno, which depended heavily on English trade. 29 Both Colloredo and Kaunitz found Lee's presence equally trying. Breteuil's first effort to launch the American in Viennese society was at Colloredo's home where he and Lee appeared just at the moment the vice-chancellor was being introduced to some English visitors by the British ambassador. Kaunitz's initial encounter was equally embarrassing. Breteuil had begged the steely-eyed chancellor to meet with the American, but Kaunitz was anxious to be spared the interview "for reasons easily imaginable." Breteuil insisted that his government had ordered him to introduce Lee to the Austrian minister, if only in the role of a foreign traveler. A meeting took place on May 26, and Kaunitz made no effort to hide his displeasure with the French in his report of it to the Empress. To compound the chancellor's annoyance, Breteuil had tried to procure a meeting for Lee with Maria Theresa through another minister and royal confidant, Count Franz Xaver Rosenberg. Kaunitz resolved to give Lee only the iciest recep28 Maria Theresa to Mercy-Argenteau, May 31, 1778 in Ameth & Geffroy, op. eil., III, 209-210. Cf. Alfred von Ameth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, 10 vols. (Vienna, 1879), X, 261. See also Morris, op.cil., p.152. " Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, X, 259-260, 262; Benna, op.cit., p. 42.

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tions if they should meet again and to invite him to no dinners. Austria, he said, had no reason to irritate London, and a cordial welcome to Lee would give the Habsburg government an air of dependence upon France, a predicament to be avoided at all costs.30 By June 20, noting that the Empress showed strong pro-British feelings, Lee had begun to sense the hopelessness of his mission. The long-awaited outbreak of hostilities between Austria and Prussia began with the latter's invasion of Bohemia in July, and Lee felt it best that he leave Vienna. Once the Bavarian issue had been resolved, he hoped to resume negotiations with one or the other power. In October he was still begging Congress for credentials which would enable him to deal with Maria Theresa as well as Joseph II.31 He was finally recalled on July 17, 1779, though he was not required to go back to America.32 In consoling himself over the failure of his mission, Lee put his finger squarely on the problem which he and his young nation had encountered in their attempt to gain something for America from the lineup of continental politics. He found the conduct of Vienna to be "infinitely more insulting to France than America, because the thick heads [meaning the Austrians] look on the business as a matter entirely between England and France, leaving the other [meaning America] totally out of the question." 33 Austrian refusal to recognize the United States was an index both of its desire to maintain some trace of good relations with England and of its distaste for rebellion. It was also a measure of the Habsburgs' unwillingness to position their empire too deeply within the diplomatic orbit of France, an ally about which Maria Theresa, Joseph II and Kaunitz had varying degrees of reservation. Indeed, the French brought the court of Vienna into American affairs once more in 1779-1780. Lukewarm about the Bavarian war to begin with, France was in part responsible for persuading Joseph II and his mother to halt their drive there, thus placing them in a position where they had to accept a treaty which brought them very little for this humiliation. Maria Theresa offered to mediate the French-English strife in the colonies, hoping thereby to thwart a comJ0

Ibid., p.41; Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias X , 793 n. 431. " William Lee to Arthur Lee, June 20, 1778 in Lee, op.cit., II, 446; William Lee to C o m m i t t e e of Foreign Affairs, Sept. 12, 1778, ibid., 474-475; William Lee to C o m m i t tee of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 15, 1778, ibid., 502-503. " James Lovell to William Lee, July 17, 1779 in Sparks, op.cit., II, 350. " Quoted in Morris, op.cit., p.152. Italics in text.

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plete French triumph over the English. This thrust came to nothing however, as both the English and the French refused to accept the Austrian gesture. 34 Thus, John Adam's confidence in the efficacy of "militia diplomacy" and Lee's belief in the tempting nature of American trade were shattered against the realities of continental politics, at least in the case of the Habsburg Empire. Though not uninterested in the colonies, the Austrians did not stand to benefit as directly as did their French allies from the dissolution of Britain's American empire, something which both Congress and the French somewhat naively did not grasp. In the delicate balancing act which Kaunitz and Maria Theresa were performing between England and France, the intrusion of an American representative in Vienna, traveling freely in the most prestigious circles of the capital, was one more vexatious complication in an already labyrinthine game. And finally, as Joseph II had said, English suppression of the rebellious colonies was "the cause of all sovereigns," whether they knew it or not. Revolution from below was thoroughly incompatible with monarchial principles, and the eighteenth-century Habsburgs and their advisors were quick to close ranks against it.

» Ibid.

THREE CENTURIES OF AMERICA IN CZECH LITERATURE, 1508-1818 f r a n t i S e k svejkovsky

In the mid-nineteenth century, as the flow of migrants from the former Kingdom of Bohemia to the United States was reaching its first peak, the French-born American scholar Henry Harrisse was compiling his monumental Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima. Among the earliest European documents bearing on the "New World" from the first decades following Christopher Columbus's landfall, he cited one dating from 1508 (or 1518) relating directly to Bohemia. It was a Latin translation of the Situs orbis of the Alexandrian Dionysius Periegetes.1 In its dedication to Stanislav Thurzo, Bishop of Olomouc in Moravia,2 the publisher, the Viennese humanist Johannes Cuspinianus, made what Harrisse called "slight allusions to the Oceanic discoveries": "Tamen plurima seculo nostro sunt & inventa loca prius ignota & a scriptoribus vetustissimis neglecta: quae prope diem tuae R.P. mittam." 3 What Harrisse did not know about at that time was another document from the Czech lands, which had been going around in scholarly Czech literature since the beginning of the nineteenth century but which was authenticated only fifty years ago.4 It was a Czech version of Amerigo Vespucci's renowned letter to Lorenzo Piero Francesco de' Medici, generally known in Europe by its Latin title Mundus novus. The Czech text dated from around the same time as Situs orbis ' Henry Harrisse, Bibliotheca americana vetustissima: A Description of Works Relating to A merica Published between the Years 1492 and 1551 (New York, 1866), Document No. 93, p. 162. 2 Christian d'Elvert, Zur Geschichte des Erzbisthums Olmiitz (Brünn [Brno],1895), pp. 21 ff. - Josef Truhlär, Humanismus a humaniste v Cehäch za kräle Vladislava II. [Humanism and the Humanists in Bohemia in the Reign of Vladislav II]. Praha [Prague], 1894, 183. ' "However, in our century there have been discovered regions, which were previously unknown and neglected by writers, about which, Venerable Father, I will send you a message." 4 Spis o novych zemich a novem svete [Account of the New Lands and the New World], ed. Cyril Straka (Prague, 1926).

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was published, about 1508. It was added to the Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima in a 1958 supplement by Carlos Sanz.5 The precise dating of both documents is still problematical but not so uncertain as to prevent us from assuming that they represent some of the earliest, though indirect, "contacts with America" and contain some of the first mentions of the "New World" and "newfound lands" heard in Central Europe, especially Bohemia. The purpose here is to examine the form and the impact of the early informations. It is not to exhaust all the documents, which still have not in fact been systematically assembled from this point of view but to analyze the function and significance of "America" in Czech literature and in a general social context. The time span in the title of this essay is not entirely fortuitous. It reflects the marked difference between the image of America up to the early nineteenth century and the one thereafter. In the earlier period it was based at first exclusively on indirect sources, that is, on information, descriptions and commentaries derived from literature then circulating in Europe. Then in the seventeenth century to these indirect sources were added the notes of individuals who were in touch with those who knew at close hand what was going on in America, and finally the observations of the first travelers to the newly discovered lands. Yet even these later, more direct contacts did not mean that there was any substantial alteration in the function of the concept of America in literature or life in general. That change began to take place only in the middle of the nineteenth century in the wake of several major waves of migration to the Americas and individual journeys for reasons other than exploration and early settlement. Parallel to it was a considerable increase in general knowledge on all practical and professional levels, including in the experience of those making their first transatlantic voyages. All this transformed attitudes to faraway lands and gave them a very different place in European social and cultural consciousness. And literature, too, began to reflect these changes in its own manner. In the early period the notion of America encompassed a whole series of themes and associations that grew up around the first reports 5 Carlos Sanz, Henry Harrisse (1829-1910) «Príncipe de los Americanistas» Su vida su obra, con nuevas adiciones a la Bibliotheca americana vetustissima (Madrid, 1958), pp. 251-268.

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and became a new element in Czech literary tradition. They were the outcome of widely differing views of the new facts seen from standpoints ranging from geographical to political or religious, from sober observation of reality to fantastic speculation or interpretations of the unknown. Even the naming of discovered territory has a changing history of its own. The story of discovery offers ample evidence of the rapidity with which the image of the world was changing and with it the names that were used. Czech literature thus contains such typical toponymic variants as "Mundus Novus," "Orbis Novus," " T h e West Indies," "the fourth continent," "America" and "America also known as Brazil." This historically determined uncertainty in names and knowledge has to be borne in mind in any consideration of the old literature. So, too, does the special situation of a Central European country far removed from the expeditions themselves and from immediate interest in them. It has no seaboard and had no direct link, whether political, economic or religious, with the first voyage. The chances of direct contact with these events were extremely limited for a long time and even in the seventeenth century had not significantly improved. For the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Bohemia the new lands were a phenomenon that made an impression above all on their spiritual life, on their outlook on how the life and the world were ordered - and it was in this spirit that the theme primarily occurred in literature. In literature, it should be noted, no sharp lines had been drawn at this time between different types of expression: no clear distinction was then seen between what would today be called belles lettres or imaginative, artistic fiction and any other genre. It was thought of as one single, great (though internally subdivided) sphere of creativity in which esthetic considerations were closely intertwined scholarly, practical and entertainment considerations. Renaissance humanism in fact emphasized and updated the ideal of the unity of artistic principles and moral, cultural and educational values. It stressed that the verity of a work was founded on the factuality of reality and experience and on the soundness of its religious and philosophical groundwork. This was the dominant attitude in the development of Czech literature from the sixteenth century until the eve of the nineteenth century, that is, until the Czech National Revival. Other concepts had an influence, of course, but this was the fundamental one. The reason lay in Bohemia's historical circumstances. From the fifteenth century until the beginning of the seventeenth, the focus of Czech literature

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was on its scholarly and didactic functions, on what theories originating in the ideas of Reformation saw as the close ties between life and literature. The commitment of literature to the real life became even more pronounced after the Habsburg accession to the Bohemian throne when there took shape two cardinal drives based on religious and political issues, in the struggle between which "the religious matters at stake were even more fateful than the political demands," as the Czech historian Otakar Odlozilik wrote. 6 Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation great stress was still being put on the extraneous concerns of literature. This historical framework cannot be overlooked in an appraisal of Czech literary themes that reflect the discoveries of the "New World." These themes became a specific ingredient of the contemporary outlook on the world and the order of things. They formed a new element in views of reality and life at that time and so came to be an important component then of the "world of literature." The significance of the discoveries for literature was therefore far greater than simply as topics of information or exotic appeal. At the same time account must still be taken of the attraction of curiosity, which was inevitably by news about the way of life in the "New World" and the characteristics of its people and lands. It naturally kindled readers' interest by exposing them to exotic themes and events that verged on incredible and fantastic. In this sense the groundwork was being laid from the outset for a literary tradition that soon underscored these qualities (especially in lyric poetry and narrative) and associated America specifically with themes of exoticism and adventure. Nor could it really have been otherwise, for the earliest reflections of the "New World" were to be found in literature that was intended to inform and instruct the reader, to tell him something about events that a man of that day could not efford to ignore because they were leading to profound changes in contemporary views of the world and life on earth. Scholarly and didactic literature served this purpose. The Renaissance period and its concept of culture reinforced such interest and the inspiration and effect of the Renaissance in various areas of knowledge introduced into the life and thinking of the age an element 6 "Pobélohorskà emigrace" [Emigration after the Battle of the White Mountain] in Vilém Mathesius (ed.), Co daly nase zeme Evropè a lidstvu [What Our Lands Have Given to Europe and Mankind] (Praha [Prague], 1940), pp. 170-176.

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of dynamism and rapid change. This dynamism made people accustomed far more rapidly than in the past to acquiring and accepting new information: ever since then empiricism and scientific theory have not ceased to ruffle the surface of certainty and accepted answers. It became necessary to get used to the new speed of development and to adapt life and thinking at the same pace. The new discoveries thus quickly and naturally became part of the new image of the world. There was at the same time an increase in the tempo and number of social and cultural contacts between countries. The world was beginning to shrink. Literature played a basic role in this process as a vehicle for information and accounts of experience. In this respect there was no difference between people in other parts of Europe and those in the Kingdom of Bohemia. Only attitudes to the discoveries and their impact on life differed from country to country. In the Czech lands, that is, Bohemia and Moravia, the basic reaction to the discovery of the new lands was one of interest in acquiring news and a clearer picture of the world. Not long before, the image of the world had comprised the trio of Europe, Africa and Asia and, to a country far from the sea and contacts with remote corners of the world, this was already enough to arouse wonder, admiration and incredulity about information coming from foreign lands. Then suddenly there were tidings that shattered what had thitherto been certain about the extent and shape of the world. The areas that were already known soon became the "Old World" alongside which the " N e w World" was emerging. It is easy today to imagine how deep the effect of this knowledge went: it was not merely a matter of new facts but also of an image that fleshed out new contours for the world and posed new questions about views of the universe and man in it. After all, as the new continents were being discovered, Magellan was circumnavigating the globe. To literature was now allotted the important task of acting not only as a bridge between the " N e w and Old Worlds" but also as one over the special gap to a Central European country which could not know first hand the bustle of preparations, the bruiting of plans, the atmosphere of ports, of comings and goings to and from lands known and unknown. Only literature, and above all the literature of foreign authors, brought these things nearer. The first echoes therefore were heard in scholarly and didactic literature, or more precisely, in travels and broader cosmographic writings. In the context of Czech culture, travels already had a history back to the Middle Ages. Besides Latin works there had been Old Czech

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translations of Sir John Mandeville's Travels and Marco Polo's. In the second half of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth there appeared accounts by indigenous writers who had traveled the traditional routes of that time through Europe or to the Holy Land and Africa. 7 In many ways these newer works signaled the birth of new concepts in travel writing. Medieval literature also included other sources of information about foreign lands. Besides religious commentaries, there were above all epics (courtly romances, tales) as well as typical medieval lapidary and physiologus' writings. This was the tradition with which the news about the new lands came into contact, especially on the level of works written in Czech and designed for wider circles of readers (or listeners). These were the circles that clung most determinedly to traditionalism and conservatism in their views - and their literary tastes, which were assailed by the Renaissance humanistic concept of the world and life in the name of a modern approach to reality and to man. Real descriptions and first-hand experience surpassed fantasy and any other kind of literary convention, and changed the whole tenor of geographical and travel writing.8 Such was the environment in which literature about the "New World" was written. Letters, diaries, descriptions of experiences on expeditions were the basic means of communicating men's impressions of the world, of the unknown world. One of the oldest known documents in Czech was of this type, Spis o nowych zemiech a o nowen swietie, o niemzto jsme prwe zadne znamosti nemeli, ani kdy co slychali (An Account of the New Lands and the New World of Which We Had No Knowledge Before nor Had Anyone Heard). This account, published by MikulaS Bakalar of Plzen around 1508, was an adaption of Amerigo Vespucci's very popular Mundus novus.lt was one of the first translations of Vespucci's work into another European language - or more accurately, one of the first adaptions of it, because it includes not only Vespucci's text but also other facts, showing that the author also drew on other sources related to Columbus's

7 Survey and bibliography in Jan Mukarovsky (éd.), Dèjiny ceské literatury [History of Czech Literature] (Praha [Prague], 1959), 1,260,300. See also Bohuslav Horâk, Dèjiny zem'episu [History of Geography] (Praha [Prague]), I (1954) & II (1958). 8 The tradition of fantastic elements did not disappear completely even in later writings and some Czech adaptations also preserved it, e.g., Sebastian Miinster, Cosmographia ; J. Boemus Aubanus, Omnium gentium mores, leges, ritus... and the ever popular medieval Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight.

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voyages, even though the latter's name is not mentioned. 9 As other versions did elsewhere in Europe, this Czech version helped to establish the belief in Bohemia that the real discoverer of the "New World" was Amerigo Vespucci. Its presentation and the timeliness of its subject matter made it a truly popular work that may be classed with the kind of literature then called "newsletters," the genre that was the forerunner of today's newspapers. It contained not only an array of up-to-date news about the world but it also responded to the readers' taste for sensational and exotic items, which were in the tradition of the reports in medieval travels. As in the Latin text of Mundus novus, the Czech version calls Vespucci Alberykus Wespucius, so that it did not pave the way toward the later use of the name America. It was in the spirit of the age that the impact of the new discoveries not only was felt in educated circles and among those with special interests but, to the benefit of the development of culture, it percolated to wider circles, too. Literature and culture were having their status strengthened at this time by the intensive development of schooling in the Kingdom of Bohemia. Based on humanistic ideals, education shared the two traits typical of contemporary culture: on the one hand it was connected with the Latin tradition and on the other, it was creating a specific national style with wider popular impact. This is why there were two types of literary expression in which the theme of the "New World" occurred. There was foreign literature on this theme which reached the educated circles of the humanists and there was a trend to popularizing the new knowledge in accordance with contemporary ideals of education and culture, so that writings dealing directly with the discoveries have to be considered along with other means by which the new knowledge was affecting the contemporary outlook on life and the world. There is no doubt that the educated humanists and their connections played a special role. They were among the first to receive news through correspondence and books that reached them from various parts of Europe. They collected foreign sources, especially the most important ones, in their libraries and on their desks were to be found the first maps and globes showing the

9 Horâk lays emphasis on Alessandro Zorzi, Itinerarium Portugallensium a Lusitania in Indiam et inde in occidentem et demum ad aquilonem of 1508. Op. cit., II, 119. The author believes account should be taken rather of the German version (Harrisse, op. cit., Document No. 58, pp. 113-115) and, in general, the German tradition of the oldest publications on the discoveries.

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new and constantly changing shape of the world. The image of the world and, in particular, the "New World" was developed by means of their excellent opportunities to obtain information or versions. They were the first step in spreading the new knowledge further afield. The list of European publications known to have been in Czech collections at that time would be long. To mention only a few of the older ones, there were the works of Bartolomé de las Casas, Simon Grynaeus, José de Acosta and Jean de Léry. To them should be added the synthetic works that mentioned the "New World", such as those of Johann Honter, Sebastian Münster, Sebastian Franck, Pavel Ebert and Abraham Buchholzer. Available sources show that the tradition of this type of information and writing came into being around the beginning of the sixteenth century: Czech cultural history documents the European contacts of two eminent Czech humanists, Bishop Thurzo of Olomouc and Bohuslav Hasistejnsky of Lobkovic. Probably as early as 1507 Hasistejnsky was tracing the findings of the first discoveries on a small globe (apparently made by Martin Waldseemüller) that could be turned according to his interest toward the East Indies for the Portuguese discoveries or in the opposite direction for the other voyages.10 Turning from these European connections to domestic works that spread the image and ideas of the "New World" in Czech during this earliest period brings into focus another literary genre, encyclopedically based historiographical and geographical cosmographic works. Both these types of literature were usually multifarious: cosmographic works often combined historiographical and geographical viewpoints and included astronomical data in their wider view of the universe. At other times they offered commentaries on topography, ethnography and natural science. Besides a tendency to synthesize cosmography, a conspicuous characteristic of these works was the attempt to include everything new, so that different editions frequently included changes and their publishers and editors would reserve the right to make amendments and to supplement them from other sources. This was usual practice in the Czech lands and was equally true for histor-

10 Bohuslav Horak, "Globus Bohuslava HasiStejnskeho z Lobkoviv" [The Globe of Bohuslav Hasistejnsky of Lobkovic], Sbornik Ceskoslovenske spolecnosti zeme pisne [Journal of the Czechoslovak Geographical Society], LX (1955), 194-198; Josef Truhlar, Listar Bohuslava Hasistejnskeho z Lobkovic [The Papers of Bohuslav Hasistejnsky of Lobkovic] (Praha [Prague], 1893), Documents Nos. 24, 25, 120, 121, 155 & 164.

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ical works in which reports on new discoveries were systematically and purposely inserted. The tendency was to include in them not only the widest possible range of history from the past to the present but also the dynamic happenings of the whole contemporary world. This tendency is evident in various "calendaría histórica," chronologies and Weltbiicher. Czech versions of them followed this tradition. 11 They contained descriptions of the voyages of discovery and notes on their achievements and tried at the same time to integrate these experiences into a new concept of the world. The Czech author Zikmund of Púchov prepared a version of Miinster's Cosmographia universalis under the title Kosmografia Ceská (Czech Cosmography) (1554). The parts of it dealing with the newly discovered lands show an effort was made to supplement Münster's information from other, richer sources, in this case from Franck and perhaps Grynaeus. 12 The same process is even more obvious in the second edition of the Kalendar historicky (Historical Calendar) (1590) of Daniel Adam Veleslavin. Adam, who used the term America, gave May 20,1497, as the date of the start of the voyage that led to the discovery of America, which he ascribed to one, Amerigo Vespuccius. These details confirm again that information was drawn from various sources that found their way into the Czech lands. The culmination of these Czech encyclopedic efforts can be seen in John Amos Comenius's "Theatrum universitatis rerum," which he began in the years 1616-1618 and never completed. The plan of the work indicates that special attention was to have been paid to an exposition on America, which by then had fully established itself in the image and history of the world.13 Further evidence of Czech scholars' wish to write more about their contemporary world is to be found, again only as a project, in the Calendarium perpetuum astronomicum (1618) of Simon Partlic of Spicberk; he considered the calendar to be only a part of "a true image of the world, my future work." 14 11 Basic data on all books printed in Czech from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Frantisele Horàk and Zdenék Tobolka (eds.), Knihopis ceskoslovenskych tiskù: Tisky z let 1500-1800 [Bibliography of Czechoslovak Printed Books : Printed Books of 1500-1800] (Praha [Prague], 1925 et post). 12 FrantiSek Cerny, "(Cosmografie cèskà" [Czech Cosmography], Listy filologické [Philological Gazette], XX (1893), pp. xxx-xxx [sic]; Bohuslav Horàk, D'ejiny zem'episu, II, 151-152. 13 Jan Àmos Komensky, Ve'skeré spisy J.A. Komenského [Complete Works of J.A. Comenius], ed. Jan V. Novak and Josef Reber, I (Brno, 1913), 48-129. 14 J. Smolik, "Simon Partlic za Spicberka a jeho literàni òinnost" [Simon Partlic of

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All this time information about the "New World" was finding its way into the schools of the Kingdom of Bohemia, for matters of fact were a major element in humanistic education. 15 There was, for example, the Czech version of Johann Honter's popular textbook Rudimenta cosmographies, which contributed to the accumulation of information about America. It was prepared for publication in Prague by Master Martin Bachacek who added Czech names to the Latin text. The tradition of Czech textbooks of that time cannot be finished without again turning to the works of Comenius. One example was his Cosmographies compendium (1632) but more significant was his famous Orbis sensualium pictus (1658), in which the division in his basic concept of the world harks back to the beginning of his literary and scientific work in "Theatrum universitatis rerum." The Latin-German version of Orbis sensualium pictus contains the following brief lesson : "[Sphaera terrestrial ceterum divisa est in tres continentes: nostram (quae subdivitur in Europam, Asiam et Africam), in Americam, cujus incolae nobis sunt antipodes, et in terram Australem adhuc incognitam." 16 Details elsewhere in Comenius's work show how deeply the new concept of the world had rooted itself in contemporary consciousness. In Via lucis, for instance, Comenius in one place expanded the Lord's Prayer in the following way: "Per totam, o Domine, Europam, per totam Asiam, per totam Africam, per totam Americam, per totam Magellanicam perque omnes insulae maris sanctificetur nomen tuum, adveniat regnum tuum, fiat voluntas tua!'" 7 It is also worthy of note that Americans ("Americani") are included in the frontispiece of Comenius's Lux e tenebris,18 where mankind is divided into Spicberk and His Literary Activity], Casopis Ceskeho musea [Magazine of the Czech Museum], XLV (1871), 325. 15 Antonin Truhlar, Rukovet k pisemnictvi humanistickemu [Manual of Humanistic Literature] (Praha [Prague], 1908), p. 81. 16 "[The terrestrial globe], however, is divided into three continents: ours (which is subdivided into Europe, Asia and Africa), the American, whose inhabitants dwell on the other side of the globe from us, and the hitherto unknown Australian land." Jan Amos Komensky, JohannisAmos Comenii Opera omnia (Prague) XVII (1970), 204-205. Further bibliography in Jin KyraSek and V.T. MySkovska (eds.), "Cosmographiae compendium," Archivpro badanio zivote a dile J.A. Komenskeho[Archive for Research into the Life and Work of J.A. Comenius], XXII (1963), 210-222. 17 "O Lord, by all Europe, by all Asia, by all Africa, by all America, by all Magellanic land and by all the islands of the sea, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done!" Jan Amos Komensky, Johannis Amos Comenii Opera omnia (Pragae), XIV (1974), 96. 18 Reproduced in Dmitrij Cizevskij, Aus zwei Welten ('s Gravenhage, 1956), Plate No. V.

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"Aquilonares," "Orientales," "Meridionales" and "Occidentales." 19 The "Occidentales" comprise thp Dutch, the English, the French, the Spanish and, on either side of the group, an American, one apparently an Indian and the other apparently a Negro. The last word on America in science and learning perhaps should be to note that at the very end of the sixteenth century, in 1599, an original terrestrial globe was made apparently in a Czech environment and that its maker had to cope with a mass of new information stemming from the continual voyages of discovery. His name was Jiíí Ramhovsky (Ramhauphius) and he was in touch about it with Emperor Rudolf II.20 The repercussions of the discovery of America were not limited to literature that related the new realities through European eyes. As already noted, its universal significance went beyond mere facts and figures to touch the very foundations of the contemporary Weltanschauung. This is why the theme of the "New World" figured in the most diverse writings. This was as true in the Czech cultural environment as elsewhere in Europe. In no time efforts were being made not simply to accept the new facts but also to square them with all sorts of viewpoints. The new knowledge and the new questions it prompted brought new activities to the fore. The very discovery of the new lands, the circumnavigation of the world, the encounter with another civilization, not to mention other stages and forms of life - all these amounted to a keen incentive to reflection since they affected the most fundamental aspects of reality and existence. These experiences were incorporated into the dynamics of Renaissance life. No wonder that the discoveries played an important part in the formation of scientific and philosophical opinion and, as writings show, also made themselves felt in solutions to various problems of the time, especially religious and political ones. Thus it was not only a matter of understanding the new facts but also one of topicalizing them. A typical process started was to contrast the "Old World" with the "New", the European with the Indian, a "heathen" and a "savage". In so many ways were these oppositions interpreted that they often led to contradictory results and not always favorable to Europe. Witness the writing of Bartolomé de las Casas and Jean de Léry. In consequence the self-confident man of the "Old World" frequently forfeited his self-arrogated superiority, whether it was assessed in terms " "Northerners," "Easterners," "Southerners," "Westerners." Bibliography in B. Horák, D'ejiny zemépisu, II, 144.

20

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of contemporary ethical ideals or of actual happenings in the territories that were being occupied or administered. By contrast, the situation of the "savages and heathens" swung inclinations towards the natives in view of their conditions of life under the new rule over them. There came into being the tradition of the literary symbol of the Indian, a savage, who finally symbolizes man in general, man whose right to exist goes unrecognized, man subjugated by social and cultural forces. These were not simple comparisons. They were the wellspring of concepts that weighed problems of European society against a new background. Criticism, which in literature often resorted to allegory or to utopies that created ideal new worlds, now found new possibilities: there was no need to take refuge in a world created by literature. There was the opportunity of transferring the real world into literature and, through its peculiarities and by analogy, to evaluate traditional values from standpoints of the simplest problems of everyday life to the most fundamental aspects, such as faith, humaness, freedom, culture and concepts of the state and the individual. The "New World" became a kind of great metaphor in the context of humanistic literature, or a metonym at other times, which helped to open new ways to depict certain orders, styles and attitudes of life and made it possible to compare and weigh relationships and find new ones. Accounts of foreign lands were at the same time stories, models and examples which met the basic requirement of the genre: to set an example, to stimulate thought. From this point of view what came to the fore in the Czech environment were mainly religious-political matters and social criticism. It a broader relationship to the problem of their time, since that was where their authors' interpretations led. The diversity of attitudes and approaches to the issues of the time led to diversity in the way this theme was used in European literature. From this point of view what came to the fore in the Czech environment were mainly religious-political matters and social criticism. It is hardly surprising that religious and social problems were the reason why the attention of the Unity of Czech Brethren, a religious group, was drawn to the Latin version of Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, autrement dite Amérique (1578). It was trans-

lated in 1590 by Pavel Slovak and Matéj Cyrus under the Czech title "Historié o plaveni se do Ameriky, kterâz i Brasilia slove, od Jana Lérya z Burgundie, nejprv francouzsky sepsanâ, potom od ného do latinského jazyku vylozenâ, nyni pak ted léta 1590 z latinského jazyku do céského prelozenâ" (History of a Voyage to America, Which Is

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Also Called Brazil, by Jean Lery of Burgundy, First Written in French, Then Translated by Him into the Latin Language, and now in This Year of 1590 Rendered from the Latin Language into Czech). 21 The translation never appeared in print but there is evidence that transcriptions of it circulated. Why exactly Lery elicted attention in the Czech lands was not only because of the wider range of contacts between the representatives of the Czech Reformation and the rest of Europe but also primarily because of the concept of the work which by rich description of the land and life in faraway countries held up a critical mirror to Europe and the Europeans in general, and European colonists in particular. Moreover, Czech scholars were attracted by the Calvinist religious ideas that were emerging then. At a time of religious and political controversy in the Czech lands, which was becoming particularly sharp in relations with the Habsburg dynasty in its religious struggle with Protestantism, Lery's pronounced ideas had a very timely air in the translators' eyes. After all, it was not so long before the seventeenth century when, following the Habsburg victory over the Czech rebels at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, these same Czech Protestant circles began looking to America as the land where it was possible to preserve the religious ideals of the Reformation - and some of them in fact migrated there. As early as the seventeenth century the names of Bohemian and Morevian immigrants were to be found in places still called New Holland, New England and New Sweden after the countries from which the first immigrants came to America from Europe. In the eighteenth century another organized migration, arranged by the Saxon nobleman Nikolaus Ludwig, Graf von Zinzendorf, reached Georgia and established the tradition of the Moravian Church there. 22 From about the time of the Battle of the White Mountain, the "New World" theme was taking on a new shape among the Czechs and in Czech literature under the influence of the conditions created by the religious and political struggle in Europe and of criticism of contemporary life in general. This shape was directly related to the journeys 21 Jean de Léry, Historie o plaveníse do Ameriky, kteraz i Brasilia slove [History of a Voyage to America, Which Is Also Called Brazil], ed. Quido Hodura and Bohuslav Horák (Praha[Prague], 1957). 22 Cf. Jan Habenicht, Dejiny Cechiiv americkych [History of the Americans Czechs] (St. Louis, 1904); Tomás Capek, The Czechs(Bohemians) in America (Boston, 1920); Francis Dvornik, Czech Contributions to the Growth of the United States (Chicago, 1959). These works contain references to sources and a detailed bibliography.

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of the religious and political emigrants. America was envisioned as the land of hopes for establishing a better social and spiritual order. No less a man than Comenius, bishop of the Czech Brethren, gave important and manifold meaning to the concept. After the Habsburg victory in 1620, he was forced to go into hiding in his own country before leaving it for good. During this time, in an atmosphere of fear and despair, besides his barbed criticism of the contemporary world order in Labyrint sveta a raj srdce (The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart), he also wrote a pamphlet called Truchlivy (The Sorrowful), a dialog depicting the conflict of reason and faith in man. It also contained the idea of main interest here. Comenius formulated his philosophy of the history and culture of man in the following apothegm : "What people do or cause to be done is just as lamentable as they themselves... Once the eastern parts, Assyria, Egypt, the Jewish lands, flourished; they excelled in the arts of war and letters. Both [arts] then passed to Europe; barbarians overran everything there. Now again in Europe everything is rebelling, crumbling, raving, approaching a general downfall. The New World by contrast is beginning to flower." 23 There was in this some of the hopes of the Czech Brethren, who, as already noted, were turning to America. Another document in which the "New World" theme was applied to critically and polemically oriented literature was the work of an notable Czech politician and scholar, the nobleman Vaclav Budovec of Budov, who was executed in 1621 for his part in the rebellion against the Habsburgs. He began work in the 1590s on a polemical religious treatise, Antialkoran (The Anti-Koran), which he published in 1614. The title bears witness to the tendency to compose works directed against the Muhammadan religion but the scope of the whole thing is much broader. Religious and political problems are interwoven in it (the Turkish menace was threatening Europe at the time) and Budovec went deeply into the theological issues of the whole contemporary world as well as into history. The traditional typological method of comparing the Old and New Testaments led him to take into account the living present and hence America. In the sources of his work he found evidence op awareness of the existence of American in Solomon already and he connected its present discovery with the appearance of religious reformers (John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Martin Luther) as symptoms of the last stages of the world of man before the 23

. Jan

Amos Komensky Ve'skere spisy J.A. Komenskeho,

XV (Brno, 1910,) 151.

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coming of the new age of the Kingdom of Christ. His deliberations and arguments were based not only on his own experience during a stay in the Turkish lands and his journeying through Europe but also on his familiarity with a great deal of literature, so that he could refer expressly to the work of the Jesuit José de Acosta in relation to the newfound lands. 24 Budovec's polemical religious zeal led him sometimes to statements in which the "New World" figured as a place to which he would like to exile all enemies of Christ's teachings, as is evident in his exhortations in a conventionalized literary letter to his son. Based on Acosta's accounts, he remarked that even in America "quidam Americanus pseudoapostolus" 25 was at work. This is an illustration of how the "New World" theme was used in different and, indeed, contradictory ways. Another kind of writing in which the motive occasionally appeared is autobiographical literature. Because of his political interest in the European situation and the relations between England and Spain, the Czech poet Mikulàs Dacicky of Heslov in 1581 recorded with admiration in his Pamèti (Memoirs) what he knew about Sir Francis Drake's voyage. He also made a note that Drake "did no little damage to the Spanish king" 26 and sighed that it would be better if the European rulers would join together against the common ennemy, the Turks, instead of fighting among themselves. With the seventeenth century the echoes of the new lands beyond the ocean began to acquire yet new forms and functions in Czech lit— 24 Budovec's thinking in Antialkoran is similar to that in his Latin work, Circulus horologii lunaris et solaris, hoc est brevissima synopsis historica, typica et mystica variis figuris et embìematis illustrata, representans ex Vetere et Novo Testamento.. .(1616), which elicited polemical reactions in Europe. Cf. J. Hejnic and J. Martinek, Rukovèi humanistického basnictvi[Manual of Humanistic Poetry] (Praha [Prague], 1966),I, 238-239. 25 "Some American pseudoapostle." "...qui omnes procul ad ultimos Indos vel anthropophagos relegandi" [all of these should be sent to the most remote Indians or cannibals]. - Similarly he wrote elsewhere: "Illosque nebulones e consortio fidelium ad Sarmatas vel Transsylvanos vel Transmarinos, imo ad ultimos Indos vel ad ipsa Tartara potius releget, ne non modo ecclesia Christi, set etiam ne rerum natura iis coniquinetur"... [the Church... should send those good-for-nothing fellows away to the Sarmats, Transsylvanians (the people beyond the forest) or Transmarinians (the people beyond the sea) or rather to the most remote Indians or directly to hell, so that neither the Cristian Church nor the natural environment would be polluted by them]. In : Julius Glùcklich, Vàdava Budovce z Budova korespondence z let 1579-1619 [Vaclav Budovec's Correspondence from the years 1579 to 1619] Praha [Prague], 1908, No. 67 and 69. 26 Pamèti Mikulase Dacického z Heslova [Memoirs of Mikulàs Dacicky of Heslov] (Praha [Prague], 1878), I, 154-155.

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erature. By then the knowledge and characteristics of America had become a fixed part of European culture and thought. The emphasis of the attitudes toward these lands began to change from a predominantly receptive interest in information about t h e m into an effort to take part in cultivating the spiritual life of the new lands and transforming them into an area where European traditions could be continued and realized anew. It goes without saying that contemporary observers and later historians may have seperated the chaff from the grain of these trends, but what is significant in the present context is that a change of current was evolving in which, rather than reports reaching Europe from America, projects from Europe were being made for America. Above all, efforts were made to instill humanistic ideals of civilization and religious education among the native inhabitants of America. At the same time the opportunity appeared for transplanting to that area the ideas and ideals of European society, which ranged from the Catholic missionaries' and Protestant thinkers' ideals of the unity of the Christian world to ideas of world dominion that grew in the rich soil of the European powers and their policies. This phase affected the Czech lands during the seventeenth century and left its traces in writings. It could not have been directed at anything but the cultural plane, questions of spiritual life. Such preoccupations were, of course, limited to individuals but even in these limited circumstances it is possible to perceive traits common to the whole of Europe and its Baroque ideas: foremost was courage, the spiritual strength of the individual who wishes to confront the world, the whole world, with his thoughts, his ideals, and not only to confront but also to take a direct part in putting them into practice. The expression of this attitude was found mainly in the writings of Comenius and the Catholic missionaries. (After all, in relation to the "New World". Comenius was in the position of a missionary who included broad cultural and political involvements in his social mission.) Not simply the ideas but the actual work of these persons acquired a literally universal scale because they were the first Bohemians and Moravians to keep contact between the trends of the "Old World" and developments in the "New World", either because they were actually living there or through personal and literary contacts. The first appearance was in the works of Comenius (1592-1670). There is not room here to characterize every facet of his work. For the present purpose it is important to realize how problems of culture, education and social life met in Comenius's concepts, how he saw faith

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indissolubly bound up with science and the praxis of life, how he synthesized problems of the state and the individual. He reached the point of putting these ideas into practice at the very moment when fate made him an émigré in the forum of the world. Then he began to write works that linked the courage of Utopia with the reality of the contemporary world. He drafted plans for ordering the whole world while simultaneously thinking about practical problems of education from the lowest level up. And in the broad scope of his ideas he also included knowledge of the "New World" and the problems he deduced from it or learned about from contacts mainly with English friends. Much of value has already been written about his relations with America. Here it should be stressed that his relations with the new lands across the Atlantic were not purely incidental. They were a source of inspiration and by their special qualities they enlarged the problems of the world, life and man. They were often recalled in Comenius's works. Facts he acquired from there gave new dimensions to his concepts - and finally verified and confirmed the aims of his daring plans, as was made clear in a letter to Samuel Hartlib on June 12,1647: "Ego vehementerconfirmor(ab istaetiam de Americanis relatione) tria ilia, quae in magnœ consultationis excitatorio posui, [unitatem, simplicitatem, spontaneitatem] clavos esse, quibus reserari possint sensus omnium hominum in omnia et obtineri assensufc universalis veritati expugnarique quicquid tenebrarum est sive purae ignorationis, qualis in istis gentibus est, sive etiam pravae cujuscunque dispositionis, qualis nos Christianos tam misere dilacerat." 27 Precisely as a result of this attitude, indead of his interest in the whole world's problems, Comenius's thinking attracted attention in America and led both to his invitation to Harvard College and to his being seen as an authority on the subject of the Indians' spiritual education. 28 Even

27 "I am strongly encouraged (even after the reports about the Americans), that (the principles) I refered to in the introduction to the Great Deliberation (unity, simplicity, spontaneity) are keys by means of which the senses of all people can be opened to all things, and the univeral assent of the truth be maintained, so that everything which comes from darkness can be overcome, whether it originates from the absolute ignorance that prevails amoung the said people, or from the dishonest which tears us Christians so sadly to pieces." In Jana Amosa Komenskeho korespondence [The Correspondence of J. A. Comenius], ed. Adolf Patera (Praha [Prague], 1892), pp. 134-135. 28 Robert F. Young, Comenius and the Indians of New England (London, 1929); Robert F. Young, Comenius in England (London, 1932 ;9 Robert F. Young, "Comenius

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though his trip to America did not materialize, his thoughts and suggestions were put to use through his books and his textbooks were employed in the schools, so that at least in this way Comenius "lived in the New World." Catholic missionaries of the Jesuit order began arriving on American soil during the second half of the seventeenth century because only in the 1660s did King Philip of Spain permit subjects of the Viennese Habsburg state to engage in activities in the Spanish sphere. These missionaries' activities gave rise to a large number of reports and letters which did not reach wide circles of readers because they remained in the keeping of the houses of the order or of the individual addressees but which doubtless had repercussions because they contained a wealth of information as well as the forcefulness and depth of human experiences. Only later research has brought some publications to light and thus recalled the names of individuals who were often completely forgotten. Frantisek Boryne of Lhota, Jindrich Vaclav Richter, Frantisek Simon Boruhradsky, Vaclav Eymer, Ondfej Suppetius and Antonin X. Malinsky are only a few of the names of persons who appear in the sources that have come down and they are representatives of a far longer list.29 Their reports and letters sent home from abroad in fact contained some of the first recorded experiences of Bohemians, Moravians and Silesians in encounters with the lands over the ocean. Their observations reflected not only the concerns of their mission but also the experiences of a Central European scanning a world unknown to him. When they made comparisons, their point of departure was the situation in their own country, their own towns, villages, forests and fields. When conveying their impressions, the flood of experiences and observations led them to set minute details alongside great facts, to jump constantly from descriptions of their mission-

and the Invisible College" in Joseph Needham (ed.), The Teacher of Nations (Cambridge, 1942), pp. 35-40; Otakar Odlozilik, Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius) (Chicago, 1942) (in particular, the survey in the chapter "The American Echo," pp. 22-29); G.W. Schulte-Nordholt, "Comenius and America," Acta Comeniana 2 XXVI (1970), 195200. 29 A detailed bibliography of Czech and other literature on this topic is in Josef VraStil, "Mezinärodnivyznam eské Provincie Tovarysstva Jezisova" [International Significance of the Czech Province of the Society of Jesus] in Mathesius, op. cit., pp. 191-194. See also Zdenék Kalista, Cesty ve znameni knie [Journeys in the Sign of the Cross] (Praha [Prague], 1941). Basic data on certain persons are also in Francisco Carlos Sterba, Cesi a Sloväci v Latinské Americe[Czechs and Slovaks in Latin America] (Washington, D. C„ 1962).

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ary work to what caught their attention in the life of the people and in the character of the place. So widely did their subjects range that they cannot be summed up into detailed categories. They touched on the most varied aspects of the life and features of areas from California to Peru, Brazil and Chile and the more distant parts and islands of the South American region to which the sphere of interest of their missions extended. They wrote about the most divers features of life, they characterized individual tribes and localities, and they referred constantly to the methods of their own work and their travels so that they are rich sources for the broadest variety of historical disciplines. Their communications showed not only the methods of their spiritual work but also their role in the life of these places general, for example, in construction work and in the introduction of changes in work methods and in stockbreeding. In general the purpose of their reports was not material affairs or the ordering of scientific work. Their communications often revealed their subjectiveness, the expression of their satisfaction that they had the chance to take part in extending Christ's realm and giving a new look to the world, that it was given to them to work in these regions with a devotion whose reward was self-sacrifice and a martyr's death. This attitude governed their lives and left an imprint typical of the age on their literary endeavours. The echo of differences with the laymen governing these lands could frequently be heard in their writings and then their voices changed into criticism and expressed sympathy and understanding for the native population, a continuation of the voice that had been raised at the very beginning of the Europeans' arrival in the area by a son of one of the members of Columbus's second expedition, the later Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas, in his work Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias

(1542). Before modern history and science altered the nature of contacts with America and knowledge about it, there was a period in Czech literature that deserves special attention: the so-called Czech National Revival from the last decade of the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth. The present topic had an impact on two levels: on an increasingly separate sphere of specialized literature based on the traditions of Enlightenment science and its European setting and on the newly created Czech literature that aimed to reach the widest possible circles of the Czech public. The latter was part of the formative trends of Czech national society. The old ideal to "teach

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and please" was revived for the specific social purpose of popularizing literature in the Czech language. The theme of America reappeared in connection with this, and it can be understood only in relation to this concept of Czech literature, that is, as a part of a new type of Czech literature that pointed in various directions and at the same time was laying the foundation of a modern tradition of literary creativity in the vernacular. The variety of the aims of Czech literature was reflected in the approaches to themes linked with the "New World". The trend to create literature for a wider readership is tied to its popularized impact with which assessment of the role of these themes must be taken into account. Interest in knowing about the world was a powerful factor in the Czech environment, especially among the wider circle of readers, so it is scarecely surprising that Czech authors often composed popular versions of foreign literary sources or of texts from old Czech literature. America occupied an important place because of the lively interest in it. For this reason magazine articles included adaptations of accounts of the expeditions of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro as well as more recent works, such as a text based on Juan-Bernard Bossu's Nouveaux voyages faits dans l'Amérique septentrionale (1777). A major role in this work was taken by the writer and publisher Vaclav Matëj Kramerius and his Ceská expedice (Czech Dispatch) publishing house. Kramerius published a whole collection of travel works related to various parts of the world. Among them were two of interest here: The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captaine John Smith, which was published in a Czech version in 1798 under the title Jana Smitha, kapitána anglického pravdivé príhody po cestách, které vykonal ve ctyrech dílech svèta (The True Events of John Smith, an English Captain, on a Voyage He Made to the Four Continents of the World), and a work by Kramerius, Historické vypsání, kterak ctvrty dit svèta Amerika odKolumbusa vynalezena by la (An Historical Account of How the Fourth Continent of the World, America, Was Discovered by Columbus) (1803). By their style these works, especially the magazine articles, recall the similar process by which in the sixteenth century, as already noted, attempts were made to collect and summarize basic data from literature from all over the world, except that then they were often included in the cosmography or historical-calender type of writings whereas now they were being published in magazines or as small booklets. An article published in 1808 in one of the oldest Czech magazines, Hlasatel cesky (The Czech Herald), for instance, was just such

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a summary from various sources, which were not even cited. Entitled "Hlavni povaha a vypsâni prvnich Amerykânû" (The Main Characteristics and an Account of the First Americans), it was an attempt at a comprehensive collection of information about North and South America and their inhabitants. Ethnographic and geographic details were condensed into the most basic data which were then reformulated as ideas for the general public. They were presented with the typical contemporary admiration for the personal qualities of the Indians, their ideals of equality and the natural social order that governs their lives, themes that the European romantic era taught should be sought out and admired. On the basis of the popularizing tendencies of such Czech literature, the first echoes of American literature are found in the Czech lands. An important figure in the Czech National Revival, Josef Jungmann, published in Hlasatel cesky in 1807 the story "Stary, chudy Rychard, aneb prostredek bohatym byti" (The Old Poor Richard, or How He Grew Rich), thus introducing Benjamin Franklin into Czech literature, or rather, part of the Poor Richard's Almanack series he published from 1732 to 1757. The then popular literary form of a tale was also used in a belletristic version of an American theme : the writer Prokop Sedivy had a little book published by Ceskâ expedice in 1791, Maran a Onyra: Amerikânsky pribëh, kteryz se stal, kdyz ctvrty dil svèta Amerika nalezena byla a Spanèlé a Artglicané z zâdosti nabytî velikého bohatstvi Indidny na krestanskou viru obraceli (Maran and Onyra: An American Story That Happened When the Fourth Continent of the World, America, Was Discovered and out of Greed to Amass Great Wealth the Spaniards and the English Converted the Indians to the Christian Faith). The same theme recurred in 1805 in belles lettres of a "higher" order, that is, in the beginning of modern literature with artistic goals that correspond to contemporary European literary ideals. This time it was through a free translation of François-René de Chateaubriand's Atala. Once more the Indian theme emerged as a contemporary expression of the cult of natural life and religion - about the land and its inhabitants seen through the prism of Romantic literary form ("pre-Romantic" in the concepts of Philippe van Tieghem and others). A little later, in 1818, a translation of Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian's "nouvelle américaine" Camire offered further evidence of the increasing weight given to American motifs in contemporary Czech belles lettres. It was published by Jan Nejedly in Hlasatel cesky. It showed how the theme and the literary value then assigned to it responded to the growing efforts to

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develop prose in Czech belles lettres and give them a broader social function. The fashionable sentimental story like Florian's Camire gave the reader an experience through its subject matter and its treatment of it and in addition had the function of instructively, ethically and socially evoking the original America based on sources and views concerning the consequences of the Europeans' arrival there, both positive and negative: religion, culture versus worldly government. The harmonization of relationships through the marriage of a native with a Spanish girl in the story is characteristic. The varying incidence and treatment of the theme of America in Czech National Revival literature are indicative of how its function was diversified and how at the same time the echo of it reached various types of readers. On the whole, however, the image of America until the first decades of the nineteenth century consisted mostly of the original America as it was discovered and of the America of the Indians and their life contrasted with the life of Europeans. The inclination toward the theme of America was reinforced by instructive considerations and interest in travels just as Romantically oriented belles lettres were, with their "backward" look at original, natural, native man in the person of the American Indian. If anything appeared about contemporary America, it was mainly the America in which European influence clashed with various aspects of native life. This confrontation, this clash, was the prerequisite for critical views - and they became ever more frequent indeed (cf. the views of the missionaries and later authors with their critical reflections on the influence of Europe on America; belles lettres later took the same route). The view of America as the land of the future and of hope from the Europeans' standpoint appeared only in isolated instances linked with religious or political motives. Ethical and social aspects emerged closely connected around the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, in accordance with the spirit of the time, referring to the theme of America to emphasize the values of human freedom and the new social order. Such were the ways in which ideas about America took shape through literary expression and in which the perceptions of a Central European from the Czech lands of a faraway world beyond the Atlantic Ocean were reflected before richer direct experience and livelier contacts changed the view of America in several ways; new facts also influenced it. All sorts of things then also changed in literature and

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above all made contemporary America more perspicuous. It must be admitted, of course, that in popular literature and folkloric tradition the older ideas and themes that have been considered were already fading away.30 But also in other types of literature the theme of the Indian, his original natural life and his land reappeared again and again and was made above all the bearer, nay, the direct symbol, of ideas of freedom, free will and personal heroism, whose timeliness has become a particularly vivid theme and value in the history of the Czech lands.

30 A solitary attempt to interpret the popular song "Píseft o králi marokánském' [Song of the Moroccan King], of which there is evidence of the existence at the end of the eighteenth century, as an echo of the American Revolution, has gained no acceptance. Cf. bibliography and commentary in Jan B. Capek, Ceskoslovenská literatura tolerancni 1781 -1861 [Czechoslovak Literature of Tolerance, 1781-1861] (Praha [Prague], 1933), I, 103-120.

S A N D O R BOLONI FARKAS'S REFLECTIONS ON A M E R I C A N P O L I T I C A L A N D S O C I A L INSTITUTIONS ALFRED A. REISCH

The Hungarian Age of Reform immediately preceding the Revolution of 1848 was a period of transition from a traditional feudal structure toward a more modern and more democratic state. The changes in political, economic and social institutions, accomplished in about two decades against many odds, had a decisive impact on the nation's fabric. The Hungarian reformers were aware of their country's retarded political, social and economic conditions, ruled as it was by a dynasty whose western domains were under strict absolutist control while its eastern realm (the Kingdom of Hungary) had retained much of its original constitutional system. In their efforts to modernize Hungary, the reformers looked for suitable foreign models. The origins of many of the foreign influences on them could be traced back to the ideas and principles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, followed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, precipitated momentous political changes in the West from which the Hungarian reformers drew inspiration. British political institutions and constitutional history were carefully studied in the final years of the eighteenth century and again some decades later by Count Istvan Szechenyi, the first great Hungarian reformer. The French Revolution and the Declaration of Human Rights gave a fillip to the Hungarian Jacobins of the 1790s and to the young nationalists of the 1840s who sought the complete democratization of Hungarian society and politics. The political system of the young American republic and its social, economic and cultural institutions, many of them untried anywhere else, fascinated and intrigued Hungary's reformers. The American Declaration of Independence and the ideals of the French Revolution had had only limited institutional impact on Hungary initially. The freemasons and intellectuals of Vienna, Buda and Pest had paid with their lives in the late eighteenth century for their

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Jacobin sympathies. Thereafter the Habsburgs' policy had been to insulate their subjects culturally, so that most Hungarians knew little of what was happening in the United States. It was against this background that Sandor Boloni Farkas, a reform-minded Transylvanian nobleman, journeyed through France and England to the United States in 1831. Not only was he the first Hungarian reformer to visit the United States but the memoir1 he published on his return made Hungarian readers aware for the first time of the political system of the United States and introduced the American model into Hungarian reform politics. Farkas had no important public career himself and died rather young and obscure, unlike his contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville who was visiting the United States at the same time as he, but through his book Farkas made a significant contribution to Hungary's Age of Reform. 2 Utazas Eszak-Amerikaban (Travels in North America), first published in 1834, was hardly a balanced evaluation of Jacksonian America. Farkas's account was enthusiastic and generally uncritical but then his purpose was political. His aim was to give Hungarian readers a first-hand picture of American democracy and freedom and by implication to condemn the state of affairs at home. To escape the Habsburg censors' vigilance, his message was often cloaked in purple prose 1

Utazas Eszak-Amerikaban (Kolozsvar [modern Cluj], 1834). Five later editions of the book have been published: Kolozsvar, 1835; Cluj, 1935; Budapest, 1943; Bucharest, 1966; and Bucharest 1972. All the quotations in the text have been translated from the second edition. The original manuscript is deposited in the library of the Cluj branch of the Academy of the Socialist Republic of Rumania. 2 The best modern biography of Farkas is Elemer Jancso, Boloni Farkas Sandor elete es munkdssaga, 1795-1842 [Life and Work of Sandor Boloni Farkas] (Kolozsvar, 1942), an abbreviated version of which is included in Jancso,y4 felvilagosoddstol a romantikaig [From the Enlightenment to Romanticism] (Bucharest, 1966). The best interpretation of Farkas's social and political significance is probably Lajos Hatvany, Egy szekely nemes, aki fel/edezte a demokraciat [A Szekler Nobleman who Discovered Democracy] (Budapest, 1934), later reprinted in Hatvany, Otevtized[Five decades] (Budapest, 1961), pp. 398-507. See also Elek Jakab, "Boloni Farkas Sandor es kora [Sandor Boloni Farkas and His Time]," Kereszteny Magvetd[Chnslim Sower], V(1870), Erno Kiss, "Boloni Farkas Sandor, a demokrata es a republikanus" [Sandor Boloni Farkas, the Democrat and Republican], Korunk[OuT Era], XXIV (1965), 1672-1678; Samu Benko's introduction to Farkas, op.cit. (5th ed.); and Imre Miko, "Terjesztettem minden demokratiai elvet" [I Propagated Every Democratic Principle] in Honpnlgarok es vilagpolgarok [Citizens of the Country and the World] (Bucharest, 1967). Valuable biographic data are in Farkas's own diary, Az uj Erdely hajnalan: Naplotdredek 1835-1836-bol [The Dawn of the New Transylvania: Diary Fragments from 1835-1836] (Kolozsvar, 1944), republished as Boloni Farkas Sandor naploja [Diary of Sandor Boloni Farkas] (Bucharest, 1971), hereinafter cited as Farkas, Naplo.

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lyrically celebrating the American scene. Farkas's journey took him from New York City to Albany and Boston, through New Hampshire and Vermont, on a sortie into Canada to Montreal, Quebec, Kingston and York (modern Toronto), to Niagara Falls, Buffalo and Erie, down the Ohio Valley, through Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia, and so back to New York. New York he had reached after thirty-nine days at sea on September 3, 1831, when he at once made his first exhilarated political pitch: T h e foreigner looks in vain for high-ranking people, powerful magistrates, illustrious officials. Here they are all c o m m o n citizens! H e asks in vain for the better families, high and lesser nobility. T h e y , t o o , are c o m m o n citizens! T h e clergy and the military, the police and the j u d g e s , the scientists and the bankers are c o m m o n citizens with equal rights. 3

This initial, simplistic impression later mellowed as his travels brought home to him that America did indeed have its wealthy and powerful. The first such instance was his visit to General Stephen van Rensselaer, the patron of Albany, in his sumptuous home in upstate New York. "I could hardly reconcile," Farkas conceded, "this splendor with republican simplicity. But later, after seeing several such examples, I came to the conclusion that wealth and mind have their aristocracies everywhere - if it can be called aristocracy when well-to-do and intelligent people want to live in comfort and make everything available to those around them." 4 After being entertained by a rich Bostonian, Farkas continued to rationalize the existence of great wealth in the United States. "One could indeed be concerned for this people if this wealth were the fruits of feudalism, of the seat of oppressed serfs, or of the rights due to monopolies, discriminatory laws and inheritance. But in America wealth and enrichment are the true revenues of the daughter of Freedom, Diligence and Endeavor." 5 He reassured his readers: "If any man of renown, wealth and merit dared to stand up among his fellow citizens to demand personal privileges pr showed any sign of despotic power, he would certainly expose himself to great contempt and dishonor." 6 1 4 5 6

Farkas, Utazäs..., Ibid., pp. 59 f. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 128.

p. 42.

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Farkas did not mention or failed to perceive the political power of the moneyed or the influence they could exercise through business and family connections. He did not comment on the unrest stirred by the plenty of the very rich, which led to the establishment of the Workingmen's Party, the Mechanic's Union and similar organizations. He did not come to Tocqueville's conclusion that democracy lowered and corrupted the working man and enabled a new class of masters to rise whose aim was to direct and use but not govern the populace. The idea of freedom was uppermost in Farkas's mind. Freedom alone could liberate men from oppression and Farkas thoroughly believed in United States liberalism and democracy. He never ceased to see these concepts as a panacea for Hungary's ills. He noted that the Declaration of Independence was to be found everywhere on the walls of public buildings, schools, inns.and private homes. "The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are the political Bible of the Americans," he concluded. 7 Utazas Eszak-Amerikaban included the first translation into Hungarian of the American Declaration of Independence. At the end of his version of it, Farkas commented that the Declaration was "the simple document on which the entire existence of America is based." "It attributes all rights to the people and the people yields only some of them to the administration." 8 Farkas was well aware that the struggle for reform in Hungary and Transylvania against Habsburg rule was being fought primarily on constitutional grounds. Simply by translating and publishing the Declaration of Independence, Farkas was carrying into the absolutist realm of Emperor Francis I and Prince Metternich the spirit of republicanism and democracy, topics it was safer not to discuss in Hungary and Transylvania. Simply by quoting it, he brought home the right of the oppressed to rise up, if necessary, against tyranny.' Farkas praised the drafters of the American Constitution for incorporating in it the four measures by which they sought to safeguard the republic: the absence of a state religion, the exclusion of life tenures of office, the lack of a standing army, and the separation of executive, 7

Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 98. ' According to Hatvany, Farkas had in mind the Hungarian populace's right to revolt against their feudal lords. Hatvany, Egy szekely nemes, pp. 79 f. This is arguable, for Farkas may well have been referring to the jus resistendi, the nobles' right to resist the king should he infringe their prerogatives. 8

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legislative and judicial powers. He emphasized that the President was elected by all citizens, but omitted that some states restricted suffrage through property qualifications and some had very complicated procedures for selecting their members of the Electoral College. Nor did he mention slavery in this context. Farkas, coming from Transylvania where even the electoral privilege of the nobility to choose the highest legislative officials was subject to Vienna's veto, noted that the American electoral law gave equal rights to every citizen and enabled him to take an active part in government. Referring to this, he commented: For those who did not like republican principles, who know the dignitaries of a country from birth and for whom officials are always created by secret decisions of the supreme power, this method is unimaginable. They believe the electors must live in constant turmoil and predict the collapse of the whole system. Nevertheless, nobody fears this in America for the very simple reason that here the government is the creation of the people, not the people the creatures of the government. 10

Farkas described the United States Congress in detail. In contrast to the Hungarian Diet, Congress convened annually and each house elected its speaker by secret ballot. Moreover, not only were their sessions public but also their agenda and debates were made public - a practice Vienna tried constantly to forbid the Hungarian and Transylvanian Diets. Farkas noted that the first weeks of every session were taken up with debate of the receipts and expenditures of public money and that detailed accounts were published every year. "Economy is the main principle of the republic, so that few burdens should fall on the citizen." 11 America disliked war and sought no conquests, only peace, Farkas claimed. This and its favorable geographical position gave it no need to maintain a large army. Farkas's boundless enthusiasm for everything American blinded him to the fact that the United States' noninvolvement in Europe's wars was a function only of geography, not the "republican system" itself.12 10

Farkas, Utazds, p. 223. Ibid ., p. 294. 12 The United States' acquisition of Louisana and Florida early in the nineteenth century only temporarily quieted the American urge for expansion, which stirred again in the Southwest in the 1840. And during the 1820s and 1830s, there was constant warring with the Indians for territory in Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois, as Farkas himself recognized. 11

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By direct quotation and paraphrase, Farkas enumerated the sanctions of the American Constitution in implicit criticism of Habsburg absolutism and Hungarian backwardness. The Constitution, he was at pains to point out, stipulated every man's freedom to move from state to state, the need for legislative appropriation to draw funds from the treasury, the nonexistence of titles of nobility, the freedom of speech and of the press, the right of peaceful assembly and to petition the government for redress of grievance, and the free exercise of religion. On his arrival in New York, Farkas had been struck that no one asked for his passport or even inquired his name and that the customs had accepted travelers' words about the contents of their baggage. The American police, he stated, assumed most travelers were honest and "to subject all of them to rules introduced to check a few dishonest men would amount to a violation of their personal freedom. Anyone is free to enter or leave America. He may go, stay and live where he wishes without anybody officially asking him for his name. This is the great difference between the Old and New Worlds' way of thinking!'" 3 He put great stress on the freedom of speech and the press in America. "As the free exchange of thought and opinion is one of man's most priceless rights, every citizen may speak, write and print freely on any subject." 14 He was particularly impressed by what he saw as the role of the press in informing and educating the Americans. Every American, he told his readers, was fully entitled to set up a press anywhere and "to print, without need for a permit or censorship, any writing that does not violate the equal rights of other citizens. This simple means results in the publication of many scholarly newspapers in America. This is how scientific knowledge, intelligence and education are spread so easily and cheaply in America." 15 In Springfield, Pennsylvania, Farkas witnessed a county election and took the opportunity to remind his readers: "To eliminate all plays of human weakness, every election takes place by secret ballot." 16 He conceded that even in the United States elections could in theory be subverted, "just as they are twisted in many places in Eu-

13

Farkas, Utazàs ..., pp. 32 f. Ibid., p. 147. " Ibid., pp. 47. See also Alfred M. Lees, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument [New York, 1937). 16 Farkas, Utazàs ..., p. 224. 14

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rope despite flawless laws," but that this was prevented by the existence of a free press. "A giant guardian of all civil liberties and laws, the freedom of the press, is on the lookout here, ready with its keen weapons to cut down the lawbreaker as soon as he makes his first illegal move." 17 Americans, Farkas reported, were great readers and even the smallest town had a library. "Books are popular even with the commonest citizens. If nothing else, the Constitution, the Bible, the history of the United States and its geography can be found in any humble home ... In addition, at least one newspaper is considered among the essential necessities of the house." 18 Farkas was much interested by Americans' religious observance and church attendance, despite the fact they were under no legal obligation to go to service and received no material benefits from it. He was also struck by the wide variety of denominations and was apparently unaware of any anti-Catholic or anticlerical tendencies. In Erie, Pennsylvania, he noted "the large number of different and completely independent denominations here, while in any country in Europe even two denominations are enough to embitter each other's lives." 19 He journeyed to New Libanon, New York, to observe a Shaker ceremony and described their religious dancing, and attended a nearby Methodist camp meeting. In Philadelphia he attended a meeting of Quakers, by whose simplicity and reputation for uprightness he had been impressed in England before he came to America. In Philadelphia, where he reported that twenty-three different denominations had churches and lived together, Farkas speculated: "Perhaps it is this great variety that is the main reason for their being at peace." 20 He concluded that the diversity of sects was not deleterious to the unity or development of the state and that in a democracy where freedom of conscience prevailed the clergy was in the service of freedom rather than of the state. After visiting the Unitarian Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Farkas marveled that the institution was open to everybody without regard to his religious persuasion. He explained: "To have young people from so many religions study together with-

17

Ibid. See also Hatvany, Egy szekely nemes, pp. 95 ff. Farkas, Utazas ..., pp. 262 f. " Ibid., pp. 215 ff. :o Ibid., p. 335. 18

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out any obstacle, reprobation or even religious frictions is achieved in America once more by a very simple means. According to the Constitution, the matter of religion is the private affair of every citizen and to educate one's children in the religion in which he believes is solely the concern and task of the parents and ministers involved." 21 Throughout his American travels, Farkas had nothing but praise and admiration for American schools and the educational system. He took note in New York of the activities of the Public School Society and refined his interpretation of American education: The Americans know very well that just as the individual may develop through education, the development of the people depends on education, and just as the individual may become superior to others through education and knowledge, so does a people rise above others through knowledge and education of the mind and may remain superior forever. They know that where knowledge of science and law is restricted to certain classes and the few, the more learned may easily rule the ignorant masses, so they do everything possible to ensure that even the poorest person acquires a certain amount of learning. 22

He said that the reason American schooling was successful was that the less the government intervened in religion and private matters, "the more importance it attaches to the problem of education. The administration takes care with extraordinary diligence to expand schools throughout the state and the states endeavor to have even the poorest complete at least the lower grades." 23 He noted that West Point Military Academy was the only educational establishment dependent completely on the government and maintained with federal funds. All other schools were run and funded locally out of school taxes. 24 He visited Harvard College and reported with surprise that, though no American colleges were surrounded by high walls, students "are under the strictest discipline." 25 The successful development of education and culture in the United

21

Ibid., pp. 124 f. Ibid., pp. 37 f. Count Istvân Széchenyi, the preeminent reformer of the day, took over the idea of comparing a nation's development to that of an individual from Mme. de Staël. Farkas, who had also read her, was here probably under Széchenyi's influence. He was one of the first Hungarians to advocate universal public education on the American model. 23 Ibid., p. 39. 24 Ibid., pp. 54 f. 25 Ibid., p. 124. 22

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States, according to Farkas, was due above all to the freedom people enjoyed, and to this, too, he ascribed the nation's enormous growth in population since the Declaration of Independence. This was the "magic force" that attracted European immigrants, "a magic force more valuable to man than any low-princed land and any wealth." 26 Farkas also turned his attention to the American penal system which he described in glowing terms: "Nowhere in Europe can prisons similar to the American ones be found, either from the point of view of construction or their internal system. This system of treatment and correction of men who have gone astray is the exclusive invention of the Americans. It differs considerably from ours and is based on completely opposite philosophies." 27 He apparently overlooked the fact that contemporary humanitarianism was changing prison methods as much in Europe as in America. Farkas devoted almost one whole chapter to the American penal system and its history, and described at length the Pennsylvania and Auburn penitentiary systems. Both these were based mainly on the principle of solitary confinement, but in the former the prisoners were kept isolated from each other all the time while in the latter, though complete silence was enforced, they worked together during the day and were sent back to their individuals cells only at night. 28 The purpose, Farkas said, was not judicial retribution but reform of offenders. On September 16,1831, Farkas visited Charlestown Prison, Massachusetts, which was run according to the Auburn model. "Mr. Gray, the prison director, was already waiting for us," Farkas wrote in Utazás Észak-Amerikában. "We met two commissioners from France who had been sent here by their government to examine the American prisons and penal system for the possible introduction of the American system into France." Although Farkas did not name the two commissioners, they were in fact Alexis de Tocqueville and his companion Beaumont. Farkas recorded no conversation with Tocqueville but, for a few hours at least, the two men who were soon to write a book each about the United States together pondered a problem to which no satisfactory solution had yet been found in either of their countries. Unlike his French companions, Farkas did not notice any defects in the management of America's penitentiaries but was con" Ibid., p. 228. " Ibid., pp. 45 f. 28 Ibid., pp. 108 ff.

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vinced of the beneficent effect of solitary confinement in rehabilitating criminals. It was while in Maryland that Farkas saw more Blacks than he had seen in any other state he had visited and expressed his misgivings about the institution of slavery. "I felt as though an icy hand were on my heart... So we have arrived in the country of the slaves. I sighed in my sorrow." 29 For the first time since his arrival in America Farkas was openly distressed by the gap between democratic theory and practice, by the fact that, in spite of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, in an ostensibly perfect society the strong could still exploit the weak. He took some comfort, however, in the "glorious" efforts made toward securing abolition. I believe and feel that it pains the people of the United States when they are reproached because of slavery. It is a generally widespread belief in the countries of western Europe that slavery is still in fashion in Europe only in Russia and Hungary, and this latter belief always hurt me, too, deeply. 30

He also foresaw the great social problem that was to plague the United States in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth when discussing the fate of liberated slaves. He noted that "the white, even when the Negro is already free and recognized as having equal natural rights, shows a certain reserve toward him. Is this the result of the color game played by nature? Or perhaps and very plausibly, is this because the white considers it humilating to socialize with someone he had formerly treated like cattle and held in servitude with boundless power over him?... Naturally, in view of this contempt, the Negro, too, hates and does not willingly associate with this previously absolute tyrant." 31 Farkas's journey took him to the Lowell textile plant near Boston, the rolling mills of Pittsburgh, which reminded him of Birmingham and Manchester in England, and to factories in Philadelphia. The rapid growth of American industry he attributed to the free-enterprise system. The American government, he wrote, leaves to each citizen the right to choose what seems best to him to make and improve his own situation. "The administration gives each citizen the wident possible scope for his activities; it protects only the fruits of his labor and » Ibid., p. 253. 10 Ibid., p. 260. 11 Ibid., p. 258.

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allows him to use them as he pleases." 32 He recognized no dangers in laissez-faire and, when he saw women and children at work in Lowell, viewed it as their opportunity to better their lot. With high wages due to the scarcity of labor, the United States appeared to have escaped the penury and misery of England's factory towns and must have seemed celestial in comparison with the backward conditions in Hungary and Transylvania. Farkas was much taken by the economic and social experiments of George Rapp and Robert Owen and visited the Pennsylvania settlement of Economy (now Ambridge) founded by Rapp's Harmony Society. "The Shakers and the Rapp and Owen societies are three peculiar, new manifestations in the history of mankind. If they maintain themselves for another half-century they can offer great lessons in philosophy and refute many political principles. The honor for what may follow will belong in any case to the American Constitution." 33 Such Utopian experiments and America's burgeoning industry made Farkas acutely aware how far the United States was ahead of Hungary. He was often unhappy that so little was known about Hungary and embarrassed when questioned about it, since he wished neither to appear ignorant nor to tell untruths about his homeland. Leaving a tea party in Boston thoroughly dejected because of the hesitancy with which he had had to answer questions, Farkas commented: "Many such bitter sorrows worry the Hungarian traveler if he has the misfortune to carry with him the memory of his country and if he wants to mention it with pride, not simply in its fertility but also in its culture." 34 It particularly distressed him that, after half a year away from home, the first news item he should have read about Hungary was a report in the Pennsylvania Inquirer of atrocities that had taken place in Upper Hungary during a peasant revolt in the wake of a cholera epidemic. "How unpleasant it was to be surprised by such news!" he wrote. "The name of our country seldom appears in the foreign newspapers and now it comes before the Americans in such an unfavorable light." 35

" Ibid., pp. 328 ff. " Ibid., pp. 245 f. See also Hatvany, Egy székely nemes, pp. 102-106. Hatvany reproached Farkas for failing to recognize the revolutionary character of the Rapp and Owen societies and the threat posed to them by bourgeois society and freedom. 34 Farkas, Utazâs, pp. 120 f. " Ibid., p. 237.

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One of Farkas final acts before leaving the United States was to go to Mount Vernon, the final resting place of the man he most admired. Since the fall of the Greek and Roman republics, he effused, there had been no "more eminent and more democratic figures" than Washington, Lafayette and Simón Bolivar. "They brought a completely new way of thinking to the world. Past revolutions were not interested in the people but extended only to court circles and to changes of personalities. The American Revolution was not fought in the interest of specific persons but to regain human rights." 36 Once at Mount Vernon, Farkas admitted, "only in the Pantheon and at Westminster had I felt the respect that overcame me before this grave... Had the cold judgment of reason not restrained me, I would have prostrated myself before this grave!" 37 As his ship headed out to sea on November 23,1831, Farkas looked back at America with great emotion. "Once more, farewell to you, glorious land!" he wrote. "Remain the eternal defender and refuge of the rights of man!" Stand forever to terrify despots! Stand forever to inspire the soul of the oppressed!" 38 Farkas's book laid the foundation of the image of America in Hungary at the very outset of the Age of Reform. That image was the product of Farkas's own observations and intelligence, colored by a certain youthfiil romanticism and eagerness. Farkas had boundless optimism in the principles of the American Constitution, to which he attributed all the United States' progress and success, and was overenthusiastic about many American achievements in politics, education, culture and the economy. In spite of Farkas's Transylvanian personal background, many of his views reflected those of the Jacksonian generation, which was perhaps naively determined to uphold and develop the beliefs of its ancestors. Like many Americans, Farkas believed the United States was a pioneer forging a new era for mankind. Farkas failed to register that Jacksonian America was mainly absorbed in the strenuous pursuit of material gain and that its idealistic fervor was tinged with a restless urge for quick material achievement. He noted the outward signs of the rise of the comman man, of industrialism and of the revolution in transportation, but he did not pause 16 37 18

Ibid., p. 205. Ibid., 3rd ed„ p. 146. Ibid., pp. 341 f.

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to analyse in depth their full social and economic implications. The problems of labor escaped him completely. Coming from a backward and stagnant Hungary, Farkas was primarily fascinated by the existence of equal rights and freedoms in America and by the laws and institutions that protected them. He perceived but was not alarmed by the inequities he saw developing in American society. Only on the issue of slavery was he forced to admit that the theory of the Constitution and practice were irreconcilable. Besides Farkas's declared aim of acquainting the Hungarians with the American political system and American institutions, Utazas Eszak-Amerikaban was also intended to be a club with which to belabor Habsburg absolutism by drawing readers' attention to rights and freedoms they lacked. It was the first account of the most advanced political and social system of its day available to most Hungarians. The United States was a model Hungary's progressive reformers were eager to know. Farkas's analysis had to be quite different from the philosophical construction of Tocqueville, whose background and purpose were quite unlike Farkas's. The Frenchman was a citizen of a country where the bourgeois revolution had already triumphed and was well acquainted with the advances of democracy and capitalism. Farkas saw the New World with the eyes of a man still living in a feudal state who believed freedom and oppression were timeless principles. Tocqueville knew there was no unchangeable social order and that democracy was the end of a long historical process. Farkas brought to Hungary a vibrant message of freedom and progress in the guise of a travel memoir. What was amazing was that the book could be published at all in the political climate of Hungary then. By the time the government had proscribed it, well over a thousand copies had been sold. Of that proscription, Farkas wrote in his personal diary: "This is a great honor for my work. It thus contains something important. But I think this action came too late. The poison has taken effect and prohibition will only stimulate i t . " " The influence of American democracy on the Age of Reform through Farkas's and Tocqueville's works has to be measured in terms of ideology rather than political models and programs. By the 1840s, liberalism was dominant in Hungary and, while pushing Istvan Szechenyi into the background, was gradually undermining the feu-

" Farkas, Naplo, pp. 89 f.

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dalism under attack in the previous decade. In this ideological atmosphere, "provincial" Jacksonian democracy was well suited to the temperament of Hungary's liberal middle nobility, their fear of radicalism and faith in evolution. This was why Utazas Eszak-Amerikaban was so successful. Farkas's book was not only the first of its kind to penetrate Hungary but it also had a tangible and durable impact on the political perspectives of the A g e of Reform.

BÉLA SZÉCHENYI'S AMERICAN TOUR BÉLA K. KIRÁLY

The American Revolution and the United States' free institutions very early caught the imagination of the most progressive elements of Hungarian society. On May 27,1789, Magyar Kurir (Hungarian Courier) published an article by its editor Sándor Szacsvai in which he said : "Since America threw off the English yoke and became a free association, every nation has been longing for that same golden opportunity. Even the French have been affected by [George] Washington's philosophy."1 The Hungarian Jacobin movement of 1792-1793, which included members of Hungary's intellectual elite and hoped to effect the country's democratic transformation, found inspiration in the American and French revolutionary upheavals.2 The leader of the movement, Ignácz Martinovics, was fascinated by the freedom of America and considered Washington a giant among men, comparable to Immanuel Kant. He said he knew of only four free countries in the world : revolutionary France, Switzerland, Poland under its new, shortlived May Constitution of 1791 and the United States.3 Ferenc Abaffy, a member of the gentry and a freemason but a true son of the Enlightenment and supporter of the Jacobin cause, wrote and lectured in favor of the democratic reform of Hungary. He composed a poem to the tune of the Marseillaise in which he referred to Thomas Paine as a champion of liberty equal in stature to JeanJacques Rousseau and François Voltaire.4 In his study of the impact 1 Quoted in Sändor Eckhardt, A /rancia forradalom eszméi Magyarorszàgon [The Ideas of the French Revolution in Hungary] (Budapest, 1924), p. 105. 2 For the historical background, see Béla K. Kiräly, Hungary in the Late Eighteenth Century: The Decline of Enlightened Despotism (New York, 1969), pp. 148-152. 3 Kälmän Benda (ed.), A magyar jakobinus mozgalom iratai [The Papers of the Hungarian Jacobin Movement] (Budapest, 1957), I, xlix n. 4,119,125,126,130-133,762 ff. ' Eckhardt, op. eil., p.59

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of the French Revolution on Hungary, Sandor Eckhardt claimed the second writer with the most influence on Hungarian thought in the late eighteenth century was Paine, especially his response to Edmund Burke's critical Reflections on the Revolution in France.5 The most influential of all Paine's works, which were widely read in French and German translation, was, however, The Rights of Man.6 During the era of absolutism from the suppression of the Jacobin movement in 17957 to the beginning of the 1830s, censorship, imprisonment and the secret police combined to crush free thought ever more thoroughly. Then dawned the Age of Reform which aspired to modernize and democratize the Hungarian state and society. Once more America was on the minds of many and the long Reform Diet (December 16, 1832-May 2, 1836) reechoed with enthusiastic references to the American Revolution and institutions. 8 It was during this Diet that Lajos Kossuth as a young vice-deputy began publishing his Diet Records, which contained a wealth of information on the course of the debates. Reform deputies invoked the "free American Constitution," referred to Washington and Benjamin Franklin as "shining lights of history," cited "that happy new continent" of the United States as a model of "religious tolerance" and argued for trial by jury, that "remarkable institution of America and England." The conservative Habsburg party countered that "America is still too young to be taken as an example to follow." 9 Despite conservatives' negativism, progressive Hungarian interest in America continued to grow. Sandor Boloni Farkas's account of his visit to the United States, published in Kolozsvar (Cluj) in 1834, came out while the Reform Diet's debates were in full swing. Many of the deputies envied Farkas's good fortune to have toured "the young giant of human rights." 10 A couple of years later readers of Figyeld (Observer) were able to con extensive reviews of Alexis de Tocque5 Thomas Paine, En réponse à l'attaque de M. Burke sur la révolution française (Paris, 1791). 6 Eckhardt, op.cit., pp. 112-115. 7 For the suppression of the movement, see Ernst Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials: Government Policy and Public Opinion in the Habsburg Dominions in the Period of the French Revolution (London, 1959). 8 Béla K. Kirâly, Ferenc Deâk (Boston, 1975), pp. 37-53. ' Lajos Kossuth, Orszâggyiïlési Tudôsitàsok [Diet Records], ed. Istvân Barta (Budapest, 1948-1961), II, 663; III, 337; IV, 316; I, 193, 397; III, 7J9-721. 10 Lajos Hatvany, Egy székely nemes, aki felfedezte a demokraciat [A Szekler Nobleman Who Discovered Democracy] (Budapest, 1934), p.118.

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ville's De la démocratie en Amérique a bare eighteen months after it had first appeared in Paris, and by the early 1840s the whole monumental work had been published in Hungarian. 11 So it was that the United States was quite well known to the men of the Age of Reform (1830-1848). They cited it time and again and tried as much as they could to adapt American principles and practices to Hungarian circumstances. Ferenc Deâk, the leader of the liberals since the early 1830s, dwelt repeatedly on Amarican democracy. A typical case of how the United States was reflected in Hungary was the Hungarian liberals' efforts toward the end of 1844 to promote Hungarian industrial development in response to the colonialistic policy the Habsburgs were pursuing. Vienna had erected a tough tariff wall between Austria and Hungary, reducing Hungary to the status of a raw-material supplier to the Cis-Leithanian provinces and a market for the finished goods of the Austrian and Bohemian manufacturing industries. The Hungarian liberals believed the only effective way to thwart the system was to boycott all imported goods, as the Americans had spurned British merchandise on the eve of their revolution. So Protection Associations were set up under Kossuth's leadership to organize the boycott and subsidize Hungarian manufacturing out of membership dues and donations. 12 Deâk was convinced the Hungarians would never achieve their objectives by this means. In America, Deâk wrote, "the Protective Tariff Association was set up not so much to subsidize industry as with the political objective of defying the British." He pointed out that the colonists boycotted only British goods and let in those from elsewhere, and though they were "stable, persevering, highly moral people" who "already had a free press and complete equality among all citizens," they still looked for ways around their pledge. When in 1770 Britain repealed all the objectionable revenue acts except the duty on tea, the colonists were quick to restrict theirboy cott to that commodity alone. 13 . Deâk' s study of American institutions and their effects could also be been in his efforts to introduce trial by jury into the Hungarian judicial system, to establish

11 Elek Tocqueville, A demokràcia Amerikàban [Democracy in America], trans. Fabian Gàbor (Buda, 1841-1843). 12 Some aspects of Hungary's economic status in Ivan T. Berend and Gyòrgy Rànki, Economic Development in East Central Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1974). 13 Ferenc Deàk, Deàk Ferenc beszédei [The Speeches of Ferenc Deàk], ed. Mano Kónyi (Budapest, 1903), II, 63.

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a firm division of governmental powers and to strengthen the legislative branch - in short, to create a liberal form of government. The best-known Hungarian liberal who had the greatest familiarity (mostly gained, unfortunately, after he had left Hungary and gone into exile) with American institutions was Lajos Kossuth. 14 In 18511852 Kossuth made a grand tour of the United States, where he was received with tumultuous acclaim and laden with the highest honors, which he repaid with praise for the American system throughout his life. In Hungary, meanwhile, Kossuth was a living legend. His speeches, articles and essays were read and discussed everywhere, despite the efforts of Habsburg censors and secret agents. His enthusiasm for America was infectious and contributed immensely to the prestige enjoyed in Hungary by the United States when another Hungarian traveler set out on a visit. Count Béla Széchenyi 15 and his traveling companion Count Gyula Kàrolyi began their two-month journey to the United States and Canada in 1862. They visited New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Albany, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and, like Bòlòni Farkas before them, made a trip into Canada to Quebec, Montreal and Toronto. Széchenyi was the scientifically minded scion of one of Hungary's most distinguished aristrocratic families, whose members through several generations had offered their best services to their nation with a true sense of noblesse oblige.16 Like his 14 Gyòrgy Szabad, "Kossuth az Amerikai Egyesult Àllamok politikai berendezkedésérol" [Kossuth on the Political Arrangements of the United States of America], Szàzadok [Centuries], CIX (1975), Nos. 3-4, 551-573. 15 Count Béla Széchenyi (Feb. 3,1837-Dec. 2,1918), son of the great Hungarian liberal reformer Count Istvàn, studied at the universities of Berlin and Bonn. In 1855 he made a two-year tour of Western Europe to study political and social institutions and economic systems. He traveled to the Balkans in 1858 and to the United States and Canada in 1862. He made four journeys to Africa in 1865-1870. He set out in November 1877 with a geologist, a linguist and a topographer on the greatest of his travels, an Asian expedition. Together they explored Sikkim and Bhutan up to the Tibetan border, then they penetrated the central areas of Java. They sailed 1,500 miles up the Yangtze Kiang, then crossed the mountains on the Tibetan border above its headwaters and descended into the plains of the Irrawaddy. The scientific results of the expedition were published in three volumes, Gr. Széchenyi Béla keletàzsiaì ùijànak tudomànyos eredménye 1877-1880 [The Scientific Results of Count Béla Széchenyi's East Asian Voyage 1877-1880](Budapest, 1880-1897). Béla Széchenyi received high academic and political recognition for his achievements. He became a member of the Hungarian Geographical Society, and in 1901 was named Keeper of the Crown, a high constitutional office in the Kingdom of Hungary. " Béla's father, Count Istvàn Széchenyi (1791-1860), the founder of Hungarian liberalism, was a Minister in the government of 1848. At the opening of the Diet of 1825

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father Istvàn, Béla considered a substantial, m o d e m , industrialized economy the foundation of an advanced civilization. Both men had traveled extensively in the West, gathering data on free political and social institutions and on patterns of economic and technological development that applied to their own country, they believed, would lay the foundations for Hungary's rapid transformation into a more just and happier society. This was the main reason for Széchenyi's voyage to America. Széchenyi had read Bòlòni Farkas and the original French edition of Tocqueville, by which he had been deeply impressed. In the United States he carefully recorded his own experiences and impressions, and immediately after his return to Hungary published them in his book Amerikai utam (My American Journey). 17 He forewarned his readers that, despite his best intentions to be as accurate as possible, his book might contain some "misconstrued or incorrectly recounted" information. But, he added, "if I achieve nothing else but to make the active and thinking part of our nation aware of our economic backwardness, I shall be amply rewarded, because I know the virility of my nation and I am sure it will do its utmost to raise itself out of this sad state of affairs." 18 Széchenyi's purpose, then, was to educate the Hungarians by limning a happy, prosperous, just, free and advanced society, his own image of America adapted to conform with the Hungarian environment. His style, like his purpose, was didactic. Before analyzing anything, he explained all the background and details so that his readers should understand clearly. 19 His book is not without humor, though. This he put up the equivalent of a year's income to found the Hungarian A c a d e m y of Sciences. Béla's grandfather, Count Ferenc Széchenyi (1754-1820), donated his imm e n s e library and d o c u m e n t , map and art collections as the nucleus of the new Hungarian National M u s e u m . See George Barany, Stephen Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, 1791-1841 (Princeton, N e w Jersey, 1968). 11 Béla Széchenyi, Amerikai utam: Kivonatok 1862-ki naplómból[My American Journey: Extracts from My 1862 Diary] (Pest, 1863), cited hereinafter as SzAU. 18 SzAU, pp. vii, 59. " Statistical tables in the book give the area and population of the slave states and the free states. Using the s a m e basis of comparison, tables also illustrate annual production, annual exports and imports, length of navigable rivers and railroads, number of schools and libraries, newspapers and periodicals, senators and representatives, salaries of federal officials, the wealth of the churches, number of patents issued, the value of slaves, the number of deaf mutes and inmates of lunatic asylums and blind pers o n s , comparative mortality for Europe and the United States, the foundation and original ethnic stock of the former colonies, literacy, and projected population increase up to 1900.

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was evident, for instance, in his account of his first meeting with an American. Before setting sail for America, he stayed in Holland to inspect Dutch waterworks, dam building and reclamation of land from the sea. One morning at breakfast in a restaurant in Rotterdam, while he was sipping his tea, a tall man entered whom he took for an Englishman. He sat at a table next to Széchenyi's and ordered a glass of seltzer. As soon as it was served, the newcomer, without a word or even a glance at Széchenyi, reached over to the dumbfounded Hungarian's table and helped himself to several lumps from the sugar bowl. Somewhat irritated, Széchenyi told the waiter to give the stranger some sugar, which he apparently needed for his seltzer water. "Later," Széchenyi wrote, "I became aware that the gentleman was a fullblooded Yankee. This small incident, in itself ridiculous, served me as a warning how to behave and how not to be carried away by haste if I should be faced with similar behavior on the other side of the ocean." 20 As a well-bred European brought up in the etiquette of the mansions of the aristocracy, he was often surprised and disappointed by the rather coarse manners he found in America. His intellectual level, inquiring mind and genuine intention to learn what was essential in the United States, however, easily rose above his occasional discomposure before habits so different from the formal, ordered life of an aristocrat and enabled him to assess America objectively. His final assessment was: "Be this as it may, the harm [of the Civil War] has been done, but we have reason to hope that the United States, being mature, will again hoist high the banner of progress that it has carried aloft throughout the years for the benefit of civilization and mankind." 2 1 America the free, the progressive, the advanced, a kind of promised land, was what Széchenyi found and described for his countrymen, an image that has not faded to the present day. It is no accident that by the early twentieth century an enormous number of East Central Europeans, including more than a million from Hungary, had migrated to the United States. 22 To this day his book makes fascinating reading; in 1863 it was an eyeopener that made a lasting contribution to the image of the United States in Hungary. Széchenyi's most interesting observations concerned the American character; the status of women, Indians and

20 21

SzAU, p. 49. Ibid., p. 28.

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Blacks; the question of slavery; and the Civil War. On the basis of them, Szechenyi concluded with detailed proposals for reforms, especially in Pest and Buda. In his efforts to discover and define the American character, Szechenyi's aim was to make the way of life of an essentially commercial breed of men understandable to his basically agrarian compatriots. He wanted to teach the Hungarians how to enter a new world of urbanization, industry and commerce and, in trying to be specific, he tended at times to oversimplification, to the false notion that all Americans were alike. He believed he had found in the Americans the antithesis of the Hungarians and that, by describing the character of the former, he could help the latter develop character that would combine the best of both. "The Yankee is a sober-minded, coolly calculating man, who has endurance and tolerance, and does not despair easily," Szechenyi declared. "He is clever in trade, a genius in innovation, an expert who knows about everything. He is brave of person and has a very high degree of intellect. ... A more advanced general level of learning could not be found anywhere else in the world." 23 22 N u m b e r of Immigrants to the U.S.A. from Hungary (excluding Croatia and Slavonia)

Year

Total number immigrants

1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1899-1913

32,998 34,712 47,498 53,085 55,380 65,640 129,719 144,476 167,489 47,897 99,874 80,220 55,842 88,684 82,722 1,195,236

of

Emigrants per inhabitants of Hungary 2.0 2.1 2.8 3.1 3.2 3.8 7.9 8.1 9.3 2.6 5.4 4.4 3.0 4.8 4.4 4.5

1,000

Reimmigrants

4,739 6,169 7,465 9,834 17,030 14,022 14,850 23,622 43,528 46,106 14,913 21,403 28,071 20,245 18,148 290,145

Somewhat different data are given in Julia Puskäs, "Kivändorläs Magyarorszägröl az Egyesült Allamokba 1914 elöt" [Migration from Hungary to the United States Prior to 1914], Törtenelmi Szemle [Historical Review], XVII (1974), pp. 32-67. 23 SzAU, p.50.

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The Americans' unprecedented general knowledgeability was due to the extensiveness of their school system. "No other system can be compared to it.... Their education is pragmatic. ... From an early age the young person is made to depend on his own intellect and seek its counsel alone." Szechenyi perceived that American schooling taught pupils to think for themselves, so that they matured earlier than youngsters elsewhere. "The American education system shortens the period of adolescence," he observed. Szechenyi was much impressed by American striving. "There is no other country where one can see more activeness, more competitiveness for everything, an endless rivalry. ... Here the idle cannot live: one progresses or he is lost.... Their sunburned, ungloved hands command respect." 24 As soon as Americans amassed a little money, they set themselves up in business. Szechenyi agreed with Tocqueville that Americans desired wealth rather than happiness. Their urge for enrichment made them extremely mobile, moving from place to place in search of profit, so that even the stability of owning property was unknown to them. The intensity of Americans' lives caused many nervous breakdowns but suicide was very rare in the United States, according to Szechenyi's account. These were among what Szechenyi judged to be the Americans' positive qualities but he did not neglect to mention the negative ones. "I would not be truthful if I passed over their shortcomings in silence." 25 Szechenyi found most Americans rude and selfish and was sickened to hear them praising their own property to the heavens day in and day out: "Nowhere in the world can you find the like of this or better." 26 Mammon was god in America, he claimed, and everything was looked on as a way to make more money. Sentiment was eclipsed by the eternal urge to turn a profit and this led to lying, cheating, selfishness and crime. Whenever an American speaks about things European, "he demonstrates arrogance and insolence," Szechenyi said. Americans were contemptuous about anything that came from Europe and took pride in doing things differently from Europeans.27 This, however, was about the sum total of what Szechenyi disliked. His accounts of larger issues than the American character betray a virtually unalloyed pleasure. » Ibid., p. 53. 25 Ibid., p. 54. 26 Ibid., p. 54 n. 27 Ibid., p. 57.

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He was moved, for instance, by the status enjoyed by American women and by the solidity of American family life. He was astonished at the virtuousness of American women regardless of their emancipated ways and broad education. Szechenyi was of a generation that still believed such qualities incompatible. He maintained, however, that the Ottoman Empire was in decline because half its population, the women, were excluded from creative public life, while "in the United States women enjoy great respect, move about freely and their whole upbringing prepares them to be independent." 28 This, he thought, was a major contribution to American progress. Szechenyi deplored the fate of the Indians and the Blacks, but differentiated between the two. The Indians, he felt, were partially to blame for their condition while the Blacks were the innocent victims of social, political and economic circumstances in America. "Who as a child has not read [James Fenimore] Cooper's novels? Who has not become engrossed in the American wilderness through them ? Who could not picture the redskin at a powwow smoking the pipe with dignity, and then in plumes and war paint pursuing his enemy, brandishing the tomahawk that he would bury in time of peace? ... Where are these natives? Do they still exist?" 29 Such was Szechenyi's idealized notion of the Indians' past and the questions it led him to ask about their present. The Indians, he recalled, had welcomed the first Spaniards in 1492 with open arms and in goodwill. "They did not suspect then that the white man would chase them out of their homelands and that, before four centujjes had elapsed, the descendants of the few tribes left would be telling their children of the demise of the Indian nation that had been so strong not so long before." 30 Szechenyi was dissatisfied at the inadequacy of the information available about the Indians, but he held them in part responsible for their situation. "Nothing on earth could save the redskin race in America. They will either melt into the world of civilization and progress or they will resist it and be destroyed," he opined. 31 Szechenyi thought many tribes had chosen the second alternative, destruction, rather than abandon their costums, language and beliefs, and only a few had opted for integration into the

» Ibid., p. 52. » Ibid., p. 38. J0 Ibid. 31 Ibid., pp. 42-43.

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modem world. Almost rhapsodically, but with no trace of pity or compassion, he envisaged their end: "When the wilderness beyond the Mississippi and Missouri has been leveled under the stroke of the ax of men of European extraction, ... when the virgin soil of the prairie has been turned by the plowshare, ... when distances have been dwarfed by steam power and the wire, the time will come that the place of an unhappy race will be lost. ... The world that was for so long the empire of the redskin will change masters." 32 Like his reformist father, Béla Széchenyi believed so intensely in intellectual, social and technological progress that he considered resistance mortal sin. He thought the Indians' opposition to such advances retrograde and an invitation to their own doom, and so he could muster neither interest nor sympathy for them. The Black question was quite a different matter. Széchenyi looked at America's Blacks with affection and felt they were the innocent victims of the white man. Rather than fated and retrogressive, he found them amiable, loyal, cheerful, talented and musical, and ingenuous and primitive only because they had been denied education. He was sure that education was the key. In 1862 the Black question was inescapably tied up with the Civil War and slavery. Széchenyi condemned slavery but he also accused the North of hypocrisy in the matter on several grounds. Northern financiers had made loans to Southern slaveholders and collected interest earned by their slaves' labor. Because Southerners had a vested interest in their slaves' productivity, they took care of their health and gave them adequate food, clothing and lodging, while Northerners left them to fend for themselves. Blacks in the North were only tolerated and were not allowed to join in the whites' work or pleasures. Blacks in the North had the same rights as whites but did not exercise most of them for fear of being harmed. New York streetcars had signs warning Blacks away. Even in the North Blacks were generally excluded from voting. A violent demonstration of Northern hostility toward Blacks had occurred in Cincinnati shortly before Széchenyi's arrival, when Irish laborers' refusal to work in an excavation alongside Blacks had erupted into a bloody clash. A Black could approach a white Northerner's table only as a servant. In view of all this, Széchenyi wrote, the only true difference between the North and the South was

» Ibid., p. 47.

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that Blacks "in the South know their status while in the North they see they are not what they were said to be." 33 Szechenyi took note that the American Colonization Society was buying the freedom of Black slaves and shipping them to Africa to settle in the American-style Republic of Liberia. He also noted that, while in 1847, the year the society began operation, 39 freed slaves had been resettled, by 1856, the latest year for which he could obtain data, the number was still only 544. Resettlement was obviously not the solution when, all told, only 4,280 former slaves had been transported to Liberia and the annual Black population increase was 100,000 persons. 34 Szechenyi applauded Abraham Lincoln's statement that Blacks should be taught high moral standards, knowledge and skills. As emancipation of Hungary's serfs in 1848 had shown, freedom alone was meaningless without proper popular education. 35 "A progressive age cannot tolerate such a stigma" as slavery, the Hungarian declared. Emancipation should be realized, however, in a manner that would not ruin Southern planters, and he suggested that the United States might be able to benefit from Hungary's experiences in 1848. The Hungarian serfs had been freed of all their obligations to their lords and given full title to the land they had tilled in servile tenure. The landlords, in turn, had been compensated for their losses out of the general tax revenues paid by all. Thus the lords were not out of pocket and the serfs were not burdened with paying for their redemption themselves. 36 Szechenyi believed that, if the South's slaves were freed without compensation for their former owners, the latter would lose an enormous fortune that they had invested in buying slaves. The emancipation of four million slaves would then ruin the South's six million whites, of whom only 347,000 had owned slaves. He believed the states beyond the Mason-Dixon Line should be left alone because he was sure "the South is obliged to proclaim abolition for the sake of mankind." 37 53

¡bid., p. 32. » Ibid., p. 34. 35 Ibid., p. 32. 36 Kirély, Ferenc Deak, pp. 117-137. See also Béla K. Kiraly, "The Emancipation of the Serfs of East Central Europe," Antemurale (Rome), XV (1971), 63-85. 37 Szechenyi recorded that the first Black slave was sold on the St. James River, Va., on August 20, 1620. He cited the following figures for the Black population increase in the United States: 1820, 1,538,000; 1830, 2,009,043; 1840, 2,487,356; 1850, 3,638,762; 1860, 4,441,730. SzAU, p. 29.

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What impressed Szechenyi above all was American freedom and the American form of government. Between 1774 and July 4, 1776, America had thrown off the British yoke and attained independence, he commented. "There was no other nation that could have progressed so rapidly or achieved its freedom in a shorter space of time." The unprecedented success of this free society was due to the nature of American institutions ; to the extraordinary American mind that put science, experience and inventions to immediate use, while Europeans would take years; to the fact that the American colonists were quite civilized when they arrived in the New World and had been constantly raising their level of civilization ever since; and to the American ability to benefit from past experience and face the future with curious anticipation. These were essential elements, he said, quoting Tocqueville, in the portrait of the "Americans living in the wilderness ... with an ax, the Bible and a newspaper in their hands." 38 Szechenyi considered American society superior to European in almost all vital areas: concepts of freedom, religious tolerance, political and social institutions, and technical creativity. "The major advantage of American government and institutions is that they assure the maximum benefit for the greatest number of people. ... This is the reason for the exceptionally rapid progress America has made in this century, which is the source of general civic contentment and the envy of European nations." 39 Americans were equal not only in private life but also before the law, which they therefore respected. They cringed before nobody in official positions. Wealth was more evenly distributed than in Europe, even though a money aristocracy existed. Szechenyi was amazed at the number and quality of American newspapers, the like of which, he believed, existed nowhere else.40 However impassioned Szechenyi was by America, he did not believe institutions and laws that secured the commonweal and happiness in one place could be slavishly copied with necessarily the same results elsewhere. "There is no such thing as one best form of government," he observed. In any one country a government could be 38

Ibid., p. 10. " Ibid., p. 12. 40 Szechenyi reported that in the United States there were 2,494 newspapers, 300 publishing companies (exclusive of newspaper publishers) more than 3,000 bookstores, and 750 paper mills using 2,000 steam engines and producing 270,000,000 pounds of paper a year. Harper's Magazine had a distribution of 175,000 copies a month in 1862 and the newer Harper's Weekly had a printing of 70,000 copies. Ibid., p. 60.

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judged to be good or bad on the basis of what it cost, whether it galled the people and whether the majority was content with its conduct of affairs. A good government appointed the right man to the right place, as the American government did. The Habsburg government, on the other hand, filled offices with men unfit to serve, who were "born to their duties and live in their bureaux buried in papers," so it could not be worse than it was.41 These observations point to another reason why Szechenyi wrote his book: to criticize the Habsburg government by unfavorable comparison with the advantages conferred by a good administration like the American. In 1862 when Szechenyi made his voyage to North America and in 1863 when Amerikai utam was published, the Habsburgs' territories were restless. After the Hungarian liberal government of 1848 had been smashed the following year by the combined forces of the emperor and the tsar, it had been succeeded by a decade of the most oppressive neoabsolutism introduced by Vienna. In 1859 Austria's armies were bloodily defeated by an alliance of the French and Sardinians at the battles of Magenta on June 4 and Solferino on June 24. The ignominy of these defeats and the ensuing mass desertions of Hungarian troops from the Austrian armies bore witness to the decay of the absolutist Habsburg regime. Emperor Francis Joseph I acted with dispatch to dismiss his absolutist ministers and install a quasi-constitutional government, and to begin negotiations with the Hungarians demanding restoration of their 1848 constitution. By 1862-1863 this bargaining seemed to have reached deadlook, for the Hungarians would settle for nothing less than autonomy. It was only another defeat, this time at the hands of Otto von Bismarck's Prussia in 1866, that brought the negotiations to a successful conclusion with the Compromise of 1867, reestablishing Hungary's self-government and the laws of 1848.42 These laws emancipating the serfs, abolishing feudalism and establishing a liberal form of government were the organic basis of a modern Hungary and remained in force till 1918. In 1862 and 1863 the outcome of the bargaining had still not been decided : it could have gone either way, back toward Habsburg absolutism or forward toward a liberal government for Hungary. It was hardly surprising, then, that restoration of the 1848 laws was uppermost in the minds of political Hungarians. 41

¡bid., p. 12. Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918 (Berkeley, Cal., 1974), pp. 318-366. Kiraly, Ferenc Deak, pp. 151-72 42

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Thus it was that Széchenyi reminded his readers that studying the United States Constitution 43 had convinced him of "the great extent of its effect on the laws and institutions introduced in Hungary in 1848. Those patriots who established them knew and indeed had studied American institutions and had recourse to many of them, no doubt well aware that they would make the country more prosperous thereby." 44 Széchenyi was in a position to make this statement with authority, for his father Istvan was one of the architects of the enactments of 1848. The laws that guided Hungarian life in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth were built on these fundamental laws of 1848. The assertion must have come as a revelation to many contemporary Hungarians, in whose hearts and minds Béla Széchenyi did much to reinforce the image of the United States as an exemplar of a free and prosperous society that deserved to be examined at close quarters and copied as far as was feasible. Széchenyi made a lasting contribution to America's reputation among his countrymen.

43 For his readers' edification, Széchenyi included in his book Hungarian translations of the United States Declaration oflndependence, the Constitution of the United States and the first thirteen Amendments, and the Constitution of the Confederate States of America. 44 SzAU, pp. 10-11.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLISH VIEWS ON AMERICAN REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT

IRENE M. SOKOL

In the first half of the eighteenth century the stark realities of Poland's political life - the paralysis occasioned by the liberum veto and the total inability to prevent the movement of foreign troops through its territory - demanded a réévaluation of Polish constitutional development and the effects of that development on the state's relations with neighboring powers. The Enlightenment in Poland became predominantly a vehicle for introducing political reform that might lead eventually to an ordered, harmonious and happy society. The shock of the First Partition dealt a near fatal blow to the so called Sarmatian approach to Poland as a unique entity in the world. This approach regarded all constitutional and social developments elsewhere as unsuitable for Poland and considered the freedoms of the Polish gentry and the much lauded "golden liberty" which they supposedly represented as God-ordained ad inviolable. What was essential, then, was a change of attitude which could come about only through education. The first opportunity for some of the more reflective gentry to expand the limited horizons of their usual Jesuit-scholastic upbringing was provided outside Poland at the court of former King Stanislaw Leszczynski in Lorraine. The immediate, tangible result of this contact with the Enlightenment was the establishment in 1740 of the Collegium Nobilium, a school specifically for the "sons of gentlemen" designed to prepare the social elite for responsible participation in government. Later, the Cadet School, although ostensibly a college to train army officers, encouraged its students to enter any profession useful to the community. 1 By the time of the dissolution of the Jesuit

1

See Kamila Mrozowska, Szko\n rycerska Stanislawa Augusta Poniatowskiego, 1765-1794 [The Cadet School of Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, 1765-1794] (Warsaw, 1961). The educated Pole traveled widely, spoke several languages (there is no doubt

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Order in 1773, the groundwork had been laid for the secularization of Polish education. The newly established National Education Commission not only introduced new disciplines but also concerned itself with pedagogy as a science and stressed inculcation of civic virtue as the prime purpose of study. It is significant that the majority of the reform writers of the 1780s and the political activists of the 1790s either were educated at these schools or took an active part in reforming all levels of education under the commission's auspices. 2 As in education so in political thought stimulus came at first from abroad with the publication of Leszczynski's cautious treatise, A Free Voice to Make Freedom Safe (1734). A far more probing critique of Poland's constitutional defects was then made by the founder of the Collegium Nobilium, Stanisl-aw Konarski, in his Treatise on Effective Councels (1760-1763). But above all it was the politically quiet decade 1778-1788 when the gentry in general was prepared for the responsible civic role it was to play in the 1790s. One form of this educational process was a flood of tracts about every aspect of Polish life together with their rebuttals and counterrebuttals. During the last decades of the eighteenth century the publishing media expanded greatly. In 1774, for instance, only one daily newspaper was printed in Warsaw: Gazeta Warszawska (The Warsaw Gazette); by the Insurrection of 1794 there were fourteen; and during those intervening twenty years there appeared a number of weeklies and monthlies, many of them concentrating on such specific topics as politics, literature or economics. This growth of the media made it possible to give wide coverage to international events by which the reader could draw parallels to conditions peculiar to Poland. And whatever the point, it was regularly brought home by the liberal use of editorial comment. 3 During this period the American Revolution provided the basis for that a number at least read English) and was an avid book collector. The king, Stanislas Augustus Pontianowski, had spent many years in England and was known to be an Anglophile. At the Cadet School English was part of the required program of study. 2 See Stanislaw Tync, ed., Komisja Edukacji Narodowej [The National Education Commission] (Wroclaw, 1954). 3 See Jerzy Lojek, Dziennikarze i prasa w Warszaaie w XVIII wieku [Journalists and the Press in Warsaw in the 18th Century] (Warsaw, 1960). For example: Magazyn Warszawski, Monitor, Pismo peryodyczne korrespondent, Polak patryota, Roku prawodawczego Tydzien II, Zabawy przyiemne y pozyteczne. Cf. Zofia Libiszowska, Opirtia polska wobec rewolucji amerykanskiej H> XVIII wieku [Polish Opinion and the American Revolution in the XVIII Century] (Lodz, 1962).

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a wealth of analyses of the role of government, the structure of society and the needs of the merchant and farmer, and later offered a veritable primer on the writing of constitutions. The quality and type of information printed in Poland about the events in North America indicates an interest that was both unflagging and profound. Polish editors, making use of European newspapers, supplied a constant stream of news about transatlantic events. Printing excerpts from books on America that reached Poland, they furnished the reading public with a wide range of views on a multitude of topics: politics, social customs, economics and government. The articles ranged from enthusiastic acclaim to complete disapproval and their forecasts of the course of events ran from extreme optimism to thoroughgoing cynicism.4 This information and these views found their way into the purely political writings of the day about affairs in Poland and the necessity and nature of internal reform. 5 In debate in the Diet, these same views were offered as concrete arguments for or against the different policies of the various political factions. In Polish political life interest in America was universal and was coupled with the most divergent programs and beliefs. To lend authority to their arguments, the American experiment was cited by theTadical Hugo KoUfctaj and Catherine the Great's reactionary collaborator Seweryn Rzewuski, by the conservative Stefan Luskina and his liberal rival Piotr Switkowski and by the politically opposed newspapers, Gazeta Warszawska and Gazeta narodowa i obca (The National and Foreign Gazette). 4 For example: Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, De la France et des Etats Unis, ou De /'importance de I'Amerique, pour le bonheur de la France, etc. (London, 1787);Franfois Jean Marquis de Chastellux, Voyage de Newport a Philadelphie, Albany, etc. (Newport, Rhode Island, 1781); J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, Lettres d'un cultivateur americain (Paris, 1784); Pere Kalm, Beschreibung derReise nach dem NordlichenAmerika, (3 vols., (Gottingen, 1754-1763); Thomas Pownall.,4 Memorial Addressed to the Sovereigns of America (London, 1783); Thomas Raynal, Historya polityczna rewolucji amerykanskiey teraz nieyszey przez stewnego Rainala wfrancuzkim napisana iezyku, a teraz na Polski przelozona, [A Political History of the Present American Revolution Translated from the French] (Warsaw, 1783). 5 For example, Hugo KoHataj quoted John Dickinson, Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies, 1768 :"If Great Britain can order us... we are as abject slaves as France and Poland can shew in wooden shoes, and with uncombed hair" (co na nogach chodaki, a na glowach nosza koltony, a wlosow nigdy nie czesanych."), Hugo Kotfetaj, Uwagi nadpismem... Seweryna Rzewuskiego Hetmana Polnego Koronnego o sukcessyi Tronu w Polszcze rzecz kro tka [Observations on Crown Hetman Seweryn Rzewuski's Work, "A Short Study on the Succession to the Throne in Poland"] (Warsaw, 1790), p. 70.

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The information that was printed was not superficial. In the years 1774-1776 Gazeta Warszawska gave accurate accounts of the American position in the revolutionary struggle and alongside regular newscommuniques printed faithful translations of important documents. 6 Adopting a neutral stance at first, its editor, Stefan Luskina, gradually came to support the colonist's demands. Time and again he gave the reader to understand that Great Britain was mistaken if it thought the colonists would not persevere in their struggle. Polish historiography assesses Luskina's overall role as an editor harshly, emphasizing his negative posture toward the reforms of the Four-Year Diet. 7 Be that as it may, it must be conceded that in these early years Luskina played a major role in disseminating in Poland the political and philosophical arguments with which Americans justified their right to revolt, their right to overthrow an existing government and establish a new one. Despite a news monopoly that was in the hands of a conservative who vehemently denounced Voltaire, the philosophes and anything new, post-partition Poland was made familiar with a revolutionary stand that defeated Britain and led to the establishment of republican government. Interestingly enough, once the colonies had declared themselves independent of Britain, there was a marked change in the type of information disseminated in Poland. The continuous stream of war news went on, of course, and discussion revolved around the change in the international situation and its political and economic consequences for Europe. 8 What now took precedence, however, was the analytical article or book which, instead of simply reporting factually the steps leading up to the revolution, probed deeply into its social, economic and political causes. 9 Close at6

See, for example, Gazeta Warszawska, September 6, 1775, and October 14, 1775: "Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking p Arms," July 6 , 1 7 7 5 ; August 3, 1776: 'Recommendation by the Congress to Establish Governments in the Several Colonies,' May 15, 1776; also May 25, 1776: an excerpt from Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Authorship was attributed to an "Adams." 7 See Jerzy Lojek,'Gazeta Warszawska' ksifdza Luskiny 1774-1793 [Father Luskina's "Warsaw Gazette"] (Warsaw, 1959), pp. 5-8. 8 E.g., Pamietnik historyczno-polityczny [The Historical-Political Memoir], March, 1783: "Jaki skutek wolnosc Ameryki sprawi wzgledem handlu y stanu Europy politycznego ?" [What Effect Will American Freedom Have on the Commerce and Political State of Europe], pp. 269-286. 9 E.g., ibid., February, 1884: "Kanady nowe opisanie, przez iednego officerà ztamtad powracaiacego" [A New Account of Canada by an Officer Who Has Returned from There]. The article analyzes why the colonists could organize a revolution while the Canadians could not.

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tention was paid to the observations of European travelers and attempts were made to extract from them insights into the internal structure of American society. Beside insatiable curiosity about the everyday aspects of American life10 there was intense interest in the type of government established in the United States. On the whole the republican government set up by the Articles of Confederation was assessed critically: the Congress was too weak, thirteen "nations" could not act in concert, independence had come fifty years too soon. In 1788, Piotr Switkowski, editor of Pamigtnik historyczno-polityczny (Historical-Political Memoir), on the very eve of the Four-Year Diet, reflected the European and particularly the Polish view that the American experiment was a Utopian failure. "All our hopes," he wrote, "were mere dreams." 1 1 From the first session of the Four-Year Diet, the numerous interpretations of American republicanism and the American way of life, formulated in the 1780s, served as concrete and viable arguments in debate. It is precisely the period of the Great Diet that most clearly illustrates how carefully the Poles had been watching events in America and to what degree they attempted to apply their observations to specific local political ends. Speeches in the Diet, recorded in the Diariusz Sejmowy (The Diet Record), underscore the fact that whatever was under discussion - serfdom, the state of the cities, the army, trade, immigration, forms of government - included at one point or another a reference to America. Source material attests to a pervasive preoccupation with the progress of affairs in the United States and with the significance of the new nation's very existence. At times, the word "America" symbolizes civil unrest and revolt; at others, it is used in allusion to national expansion, improved standards of living, broader trade, guaranteed freedoms and prospering cities. At no point in the debates, however, was it ever sugested that Poles should follow in America's footsteps completely. Contemporary events in the United States were treated rather as a treasury of experience from which more than one lesson could be learned. Delegates to the Diet, reformists as well as their opponents, cited those elements from the American scene that bolstered their own positions, ignoring,

10 Maggazyn Warszawski printed excerpts from the Marquis de Chastellux's Voyage throughout the years 1784-1785; likewise Pami&nik historyczno-polityczny, May, 1784, pp. 466-474. " Pa m ie tnik historyczno-polity czny, August, 1788, p. 720.

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minimizing, even condemning what weakened them. Hugo KoHfitaj and Piotr Switkowski, for example, could elaborate on the evils implicit in an elective presidency.12 At the same time, they could enthuse over the principles of good government embodied in the Virginia Declaration of Rights; 13 over the ability of a farmer to earn an income commensurate with his needs; over the social mobility of a society based upon talent, rather than hereditary privilege. The attitude to America was decidedly eclectic and utilitarian. The Constitution of 1787, for instance, was not considered a perfect document. The Poles drew from the constitution what suited their purposes, and what particularly interested them was the model of a functioning legislative body. Advocates of internal reform ignored almost completely the executive body created by the American constitution, for the executive was to be elective and, in the context of Poland in the eighteenth century, the term of office was inconceivably short. Hereditary monarchy was, after all, an assurance of continuity and permanence for Poland. Poland had been plagued by interregna accompanied by destruction, internal chaos and foreign intervention. An interregnum every thirty years was already too often; one every for years would have been intolerable. While the American model coincided nicely with the program of the reformers, it was a distinct embarrassment for one of their basic aims: the establishment of a stable hereditary monarchy modeled on that of Great Britain. If Britain under a hereditary monarchy was so free, why did the Americans want independence and why did they seek it in the name of liberty? Why should Poles see hereditary monarchy as a guarantee of national sovereignty such as the British enjoyed when American sovereignty seemed to be thriving without royal trappings? In attempting to 12 Ibid., August, 1791: "Dalsze mysli i uwagi wzglgdem Konstytucyi dnia 3 Maia: Powierzenie wykonawczey wl-adzy na iaki czas i przez elekcya" [Further Thoughts and Observations on the Constitution of May 3 : Delegating Executive Power for a Limited Time and by Election], pp. 737-745. 13 Pamigtnik printed the committee version of the Virginia Declaration of Rights published in The Pennsylvania Gazette on June 12, 1776. Filipo Mazzei in his Recherces historiques et politiques sur les États- Unis de l'Amérique Septentrionale (Paris, 1788), I, 158-163, also included the committee version giving the date of enactment as June 1, 1776. The final version of the Declaration was unknown outside Virginia for half a century. See William T. Hutchinson and William M.E. Rachat (eds.), The Papers of James Madison (Chicago, 1962), I, 170-175. The Declaration was printed in the Pamietnik in January, 1790, without editorial comment and entitled, "Zasady Nowey Konstytucyi i formy Rz?du ziednoczoney Ameryki Pôlnocney" [The Principles of the New Constitution and Form of Government of united North America].

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strengthen the executive branch of government, Poland could have no recourse to the American example, for it simply did not solve problems peculiarly Polish. That does not mean, however, that contemporary Poles were unaware of the hidden powers implicit in the American presidency, despite their misgivings about the elective nature of the office. The divergent, often diametrically opposed views of the significance of events in America are typified by a comment on Poland's Constitution of May 3. In a pamphlet, Tadeusz Czacki, the historian and economist, lamenting what he considered the constitution's strong provisions on royal power, implied disapproval of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In a wry comment in the margin of his copy, Ignacy Potocki, one of the authors of the Constitution of May 3, wrote: "There is no point in calling upon Washington and the shades of Franklin and Rousseau, the American President has more power than the King of Poland." 14 As proponents of change, the reformers had the burden of proving their case, while their opponents, preferring the status quo, could content themselves with asking " W h y ? " The reformers might draw on the examples of the United States, France and Switzerland, but in the final analysis they had to develop compelling arguments clearly applicable to the Polish situation. Thus, when Seweryn Rzewuski, Grand Hetman of the Army, expounded on the uselessness of monarchy and pointed to kingless America, KoHataj replied at length on the virtues stemming from Britain's constitutional (and hereditary) monarchy: majority rule, continuity of administration, general confidence in elected officials and the government they comprised. Similar arguments were developed on the basis of American experiences. 15 The fact is that the reformers never advocated simple imitation of any existing system but rather change synthesizing Polish needs and foreign experience. As Stanisl-aw Makchowski, Speaker of the Diet, put it in introducing the Constitution to the Diet on May: We have two famous republican governments in this century, that is, the English and the American, the latter improving on the faults of the former. But what will be enacted today will be better, for it takes from both what is best and most suitable to our needs." 14

Tadeusz Czacki, 0 konstytucyi Trzeciego Maia roku 1791 [On the Constitution of May 3, 1791] (Warsaw, 1791), p. 4. 15 Seweryn Rzewuski, O sukcessyi tronu w Polszcze rzecz krôtka [A Short Study on the Succession to the Throne in Poland] (Amsterdam, 1789); Kottfitaj, op. cit.

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During the one year the Constitution of May 3, 1791, was in effect, the most important problem facing Poland was the threat of foreign intervention and the possibility of ensuing war. During this struggle with Imperial Russia, America served again as an example and source of information. How did the Americans achieve independence? How did they win military success over Imperial Britain? During the Confederation of Targowice and especially during the Uprising of 1794, these questions assumed greater urgency 17 for, to those Poles who had committed their energies, their prestige and very often their fortunes to the struggle for reform, it was no longer a matter of finding the most advantageous form of government for the Polish people but of preserving their very national existence. As it turned out, the twenty years permitted the reforming gentry to overhaul Poland's political structure in accordance with the ideas of the Enlightenment were insufficient. The work had been accomplished on paper and confirmed in the thinking of those Poles concerned with their country's plight. What was needed was time to expand and improve educational facilities, to shore up the national defenses, and rationally to persuade disaffected members of the gentry not to view the political revolution of May 3, 1791 as an assault on their age-old liberties. Most needed and, tragically, most lacking was the foreign goodwill toward Poland's efforts at reform that the Polish intellectuals had counted on. The one enduring feature was that the original direction and development that had marked the Enlightenment in Poland continued into the nineteenth century in the persist ment in Poland continued into the nineteenth century in the persistent emphasis on education and education's role in ordering a harmonious society.

16

Dyaryusz Seymowy, AGAD, Vol. XIX; Franciszek Siarczynski, Dzien Trzeciego Maia, Roku 1791 [The Third of May 1791] (Warsaw, 1791), pp. 62-63. 17 Pamigtnik historyczno-polityczny, April, 1792: 'Obraz polityczny röznych Kraiöw, Polska" [A Political View of Various Countries: Poland]; Piotr Aigner, Krötka nauka opikach i kosach [A Brief Study of Pikes and Scythes] (Warsaw, 1794), p. 6; Gazeta wolna warszawska, October 21, 1794, p. 675; Gazeta rz^dowa, October 18, 1794, pp. 431432. See also Jerzy Kowecki, Pospolite ruszenie w insurekcji 1794 r. [Levee en Masse in the Insurrection of 1794] (Warsaw, 1963).

POLAND'S C H A N G I N G ATTITUDES TOWARD THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

EUGENE KUSIELEWICZ

From the time the discovery of America first became known in Poland, there was keen interest in those newfound lands. As early as 1506 Joannes Glogoviensis, a professor at the University of Krakow, commented on the Novus Mondus in Joannes Sacrobosco's Introductorium compendiosum in tractatum sphere materialis, the first printed reference to America in Poland. Great attention was paid to the geography of the area, the flora and fauna, and particularly the natives and the fantastic stories of their customs and manners. To Poles the Americas were the "Happy Isles," the "heroic lands of bliss," to use the words of Sebastian Klonowicz, a sixteenth-century Polish poet. Though far distant from the Americas, Poles were quite familiar with developments in the New World. Lively contacts with England, which Poland supplied with large quantities of wood and naval stores, and with Holland, where Polish Protestant groups maintained close ties, were not merely responsible for facilitating the exchange of information about the New World but also served as channels for Poles to join in the exploration and settlement of those lands. In 1608 Captain John Smith brought a group of Poles and Dutchmen to Jamestown to develop the first industries there. In 1619 they and later Polish arrivals organized the first strike for civil liberties in America when they left their jobs to obtain the right to participate in elections for the Virginia House of Burgesses. Admiral Krzysztof Arciszewski commanded a Dutch fleet that harassed the Spaniards and later captured Northeast Brazil from the Portuguese for the United Netherlands. Polish explorers of the New World included the Zaborowskis, better known in America as the Zabriskis, in New Jersey, and the Sadowskis in Kentucky and Ohio. They were also with the Dutch who settled in New Amsterdam. One of them, Daniel Litscho, was an important aide to Governor Peter Stuyvesant. Another, Alexander Curtius, established the first academy in New York. There were also Poles among

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the Moravians in Pennsylvania. 1 From the time the first news of the American Revolution reached Poland by way of London and Paris, the sympathy of the greater part of Poland's intellectual leaders was on the side of the colonists. The Gazeta Warszawska [The Warsaw Gazette] reacted enthusiastically to the news of the Declaration of Independence and carried an extensive summary of the text. King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, however, had ambivalent attitudes toward the war. Though an admirer of the leaders of the Revolution - he even ordered a bust of George Washington for his summer palace - he hoped for British support against his neighbors and that support could be weakened by the Revolution. The National Education Commission nonetheless ruled that information on the American Revolution should be published in the books to be used in Polish schools. Stanislaw Staszic, a pioneer of Polish industrialization and a promotorof the Enlightenment in Poland,looked on the Revolution as the outcome of British restrictions on colonial trade. A great admirer of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, and generally sympathetic toward the colonists, he was nonetheless highly critical of the treatment of Negro slaves, and he condemned the British for how they had dealt with the Indians. Hugo KoHiitaj, another member of the Polish Enlightenment, compared the partition of Poland to the conquest of America. His often repeated expressions of sympathy for the Indians came not only from his belief in the ideals of the Enlightenment but also from his conviction that a similar fate awaited his compatriots.2 The noted poet, Kajetan Wggierski, shared these views on Blacks and Indians but noted that "under a good and reasonable master" Blacks were less to be pitied than peasants in Poland. In a letter to John Dickenson, a contemporary American politician, he wrote: "It fills me with shame to think that three million of your countrymen succeeded in throwing off the yoke of a great power like England ... while in 1772 Poland watched passively while five million of her citizens ... passed under foreign dominion." 3 Polish attitudes towards 1 One of the besfcaccounts of the early years of the Polish-American experience is Miecislaus Haiman, Polish Past in America 1618-1865 (Chicago, 1974). 2 Stanislaw Staszic, Pisma filozoficzne i spoleczne (Philosophical and Social Essays] (Warsaw, 1954), pp. 211, 155.156. 3 Janusz Tazbir, Rzeczpospolita szlachecka wobec wielkich odkryc [The Gentry's Republic and the Great Discoveries] (Warsaw, 1973), p. 163.

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the American Revolution thus reflected the bitter experience of the partitions. Following the suppression of the heroic Kosciuszko Insurrection, Polish interest turned to the military aspects of the American Revolution. Typical of this approach was Jozef Pawlikowski's Can the Poles Win Independence? (Czy Polacy moga sip wybicna niepodleglosc?). In this work, this associate of Kosciuszko offered the Poles a catechism of patriotism. It was published after the outbreak of the November 1830 Insurrection by Jan Nepomucen Leszczynsky and attributed to General Kniaziewicz, one of the leaders of this insurrection. To Pawlikowski the American Revolution was a first-rate example of what a popular uprising could achieve, despite the lack of adequate military preparations. "At the outbreak of the Revolution," Pawlikowski wrote, "America had less than two million inhabitants, divided in their opinions, with no military stores and little idea of the ways and means of conducting a war. They were a people who conquered by sheer courage and so won their independence." He noted that the American experience showed the importance of taking advantage of international conflicts, as the colonists had exploited the rivalry between France and England. Most important, however, was "the youth and courage of a people fighting for their independence." 4 Another contemporary of Kosciuszko, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, likewise did much to popularize the American Revolution in Poland. An aide to Kosciuszko during the Insurrection of 1794, he suffered imprisonment with him and accompanied him on his voyage to the United States. There he married into one of the most influential families in New Jersey, traveled widely, visited leading members of American society and has left perhaps the best account of George Washington's everyday life as a Southern planter. He was fascinated by the democratic nature of American society, the absence of medieval traditions and the youthfulness of the culture. Recalling a visit to Jonathan Trumball, governor of the State of Connecticut at that time, he wrote: "This visit gave me to understand the genuine simplicity of the customs, the real equality that exists in that free country. The governor, the highest official in the state, tills his land himself. Would that our contemporary democrats followed his example." 5 4 Karol Kniaziewicz, Czy Polacy moga s/'e wybic na niepodleglosc [Can the Poles Win Independence?] (Warsaw, 1831), pp. 12-13. 5 Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Pamigtniki czasow moich [Memoirs of My Times] (Warsaw, 1957), IV, 236.

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Such writings contributed greatly to the development of a romantic view of the American Revolution, a highly idealized picture that would generally degenerate into disillusionment. In his earlier works Joachim Lelewel emphasized the ideals of freedom and equality that had triumphed in the American Revolution. Like many Poles, he had hoped that America would assist Poland during the heroic November Insurrection of 1830. No help came. Lelewel concluded : "A people accustomed to value good work and ability saw no further reason to supply funds to a country where work had stopped." 6 He appealed to President Andrew Jackson to help any émigrés who might make their way to asylum in America. Though his letter went unanswered, many prominent Americans, including Samuel F.B. Morse, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel Gridley Howe, did what they could to assist the insurrectionists. It was correspondence from these exiles that did much to destroy the romantic illusion.7 In his early works, Adam Mickiewicz, the celebrated Polish poet, expressed the the allure of the American Revolution. According to the "Prophesies of the Archangel Raphael," part of his poem Kartofle (Potatoes), written in 1809, the United States was a mighty bastion of freedom from which the fires of revolution would spread to all Europe. The destiny of America was to lead a victorious struggle that would overthrow the European tyrants, a view that he was also to set out in a later work, his Books of the Nation and of the Pilgrimage (Ksiegi narodu i pielgrzymstwa). However, after corresponding with Jôzef Hordynski, one of the November insurrectionists in exile in America, he lost his enchantment. In his Polish Pilgrim (Pielgrzym Polski), Mickiewicz wrote: "Whence comest thou, friend?" asked Maciek of the Lithuanian from America. Came the answer, "I traveled there but the Americans have thought only of trade. They have no thought of war for peoples' freedom, so back I came to Europe. Perhaps I'll earn some gold to buy myself a brace of pistols. Once home with them I'll go to fight the Muscovite." Cyprian Norwid, the poet, reacted even more strongly. Norwid actually spent some time in America, helping to organize the World's Èxposition of 1853. The contrast between the ideals of American democracy and the conditions he witnessed so disappointed him that in a letter to a friend, Michal'Kleczkowski, he wrote: "I simply had to 6

Joachim Lelewel, Cahroczne trudy Komitetu Narodowego Polskiego [The Years Efforts of the Polish National Committee] (Paris, 1831-1833), p. 131. 1 Joachim Lelewel, Listy emigracyjne [Letters on the Emigration] (Wroclaw, 1959), IV, 40, 63, 188, 207, 209 & 346.

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leave. I fell into such black melancholy that it nearly drove me out of my mind." 8 His personal experiences undermined the traditional myths of the romantics. The execution of John Brown was a particular shock to him and moved him to write To Citizen John Brown, which reads in part: "So the ghosts of Washington and Kosciuszko are set atremble. Hear this song begin, good John, for ere the song can ripen, many a man may die, but sooner than the song shall die, the nation shall arise." 9 He admired the Americans' capacity for work, their great energy and productiveness, but he criticized their materialism which deprived man of the joy of unhampered creativity that work should provide. The letters of many émigrés attest to this disillusionment. In a letter to Stanislaw Kozmian, writer, politician and director of the Krakow Theater, written on June 25, 1850, Julian Fontana notes: "It's this loathsome business-all-the-time that has made this nation what it has become, a human herd. True, they enjoy a prosperity elsewhere unknown, but at the same time their manners are atrociously bad, their rudeness, selfishness and hypocrisy are simply insupportable. I would rather Poland remained in its grave than see it resurrected to the sort of life they lead here." 10 In a letter to his friend, General Jôzef Wysocki, dated September 8, 1863, Walery Sulakowski stressed: "Life here is boring to a degree. One gets the impression that all people live for is money... It's hard to imagine that this is Washington's own country... " " Yet not all the émigrés were quite so bitter, especially those who managed to adapt and to attain some measure of sources. The sculptor Henryk Dmochowski Saunders wrote of Americans as "intelligent, practical, unassuming and reticent... people who like to have dollars, amass them in bank accounts and spend them carefully.'" 2 The centenary of American Independence was celebrated by the Poles in exile as well as those in Galicia. In Krakôw Stefan Buszczynski published a commemorative work entitled America and Europe. 8 Wiktor Weintraub, "Czy Ameryka byla dla Norwida i n f e r n e m " [Was America an Inferno for Norwid?], Kultura, [Culture] IV, (1963), 44. 9 Cyprian Norwid, Poeci polscy [Polish Poets] (Warsaw, 1961), p. 49-50. 10 Julian Fontana to Stanislaw Kozmian, J u n e 25,1850, Polish Academy of Science Collections, Krakow, MS 2210, Vol. IV, col. 70 11 Florian Stasiak, Polska emigracja polityczna w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki 1831-1861 [The Polish Political Emigration to the United States of America, 1831-1861] (Warsaw, 1973), p. 190. 12 Ibid, p. 191.

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"Let us have the courage to admit," Buszczynski wrote in his foreword, "that, compared with the people of North America, we Europeans are miserable slaves and barbarians. Let us have the courage to discard our proud conceit and vanity. That would be a first step toward real progress." He stated that the American Declaration of Independence had "opened a new chapter in the history of man." He held that such events as the establishment of the Republic of Haiti and the successful national liberation movements of Latin America were consequences of the American Revolution. He was unmoved by the fate of the Indian and considered slavery a transplant from Europe contrary to the spirit of the Constitution. Buszczynski serves as something of a bridge between the romantics and the positivists who succeeded them. To the Polish positivists, insurrections were wasteful of Polish blood and treasure. For them Poland would be restored primarily through the nation's economic and cultural development. Where interest was shown in the American Revolution, it more often than not concentrated on the social structure of American society and American industrial development. It was with an awareness of the positivist movement that Henryk Sienkiewicz set out for the United States. His letters from America, written between 1876 and 1878, contain many references to the American Revolution and the ideals it stood for. To him, the merit of the Revolution was that it had established not merely a democratic state but also democratic customs, based on respect for all forms of socially useful work. Though he held that the fate of the Indians cast a tragic shadow on the American Revolution, his opinion was both affirmative and optimistic. "I believe," he wrote, "that a great deal can be learned from America, its institutions and customs. This is a country where a social problem has been settled: forty million people from different nations, many of them hostile to each other in Europe, are living here according to the country's laws in friendship and liberty. Since everything in this world has a good side and a bad side, it may well be that this liberty has its black spots too, just as there are spots on the sun. But despite the black spots, the sun is the sun. It gives us warmth and sustains life on earth." 13 To Tadeusz Korzon, a leading representative of Warsaw Positivism, the American Revolution opened up a new world for Kosciuszko: new 13 Henryk Sienkiewicz, Listy z podroiy do A meryki [Letters From a Journey to America] (Warsaw, 1950), I. 236-237.

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principles governing the relations between men. According to Korzon the cause of the Revolution was the democratic character of the settlers, free of the aristocratic and feudal complexes that plagued Europe. It was this egalitarian atmosphere and the noble principles of the Declaration of Independence that drew Kosciuszko to America. He saw Kosciuszko as a Polish Columbus, who discovered not a new land, but the principles of American democracy. 14 In 1917, on the hundredth anniversary of Kosciuszko's death, Korzon spoke at a celebration in honor of Kosciuszko organized as a token of gratitude to President Woodrow Wilson, who had declared his support for the cause of Polish independence. In the speech, Korzon stressed the idealism of the leaders and soldiers of the Revolution, people imbued with the spirit of the humanist principles advanced by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. He was convinced that, if the principles of the American Revolution were not espoused generally the causes of the tragedy of World War I would never be eliminated. Not all historians shared Korzon's optimistic outlook on America. The Marxist historian, Ludwik Krzywicki, who looked at the Revolution in terms of the struggle between classes, was particularly critical of the situation of the Indians, Negroes and many European immigrants. 15 In resurrected Poland, between 1919 and 1939, it was difficult for Polish historians not to idealize the American Revolution. In the third edition of his Modern History Adam Szel&gowski wrote of the contest between British colonialism and the spirit of freedom and democracy of the colonists, enlightened, religious, industrious men open to every innovation. 16 It was difficult to do otherwise. There was the thirteenth of Wilson's Fourteen Points. There was the tremendous assistance the Hoover Relief Commission rendered to the devastated pieces of the now independent Polish state. There was the Blue Army, organized and recruited in the United States. And there were the millions of Poles in America, many of whom sent help and money to Poland. On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution, at a ceremony in Warsaw City Hall, Henryk Moscicki delivered the principal address, in which he stressed the links between

14 Wielka Encyktopedia Powszechna Ilustrowana [The great Universal Illustrated Encyclopedia] (Warsaw, 1905) XXXVIII, 290-295. 15 Ludwik Krzywicki, Za Atlantykiem [Beyond the Atlantic] (Warsaw, 1895). 16 Adam Szelagowski, Historia nowoiytna [Modern History] (Warsaw, 1923).

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the American Revolution and President Wilson's policy for the restoration of Polish independence. He noted the effects of the Revolution on the writings of Staszic and KoHftaj. He underscored the part played by Poles in the War of Independence and the impact of that experience on the Kosciuszko Insurrection, which for the first time attracted the peasant masses into the army, in much the same way as America's yeoman farmers had joined Washington's forces. The 1926 coup d'etat brought another change in Polish attitudes toward the Revolutionary War. Though continuing to idealize its significance, many historians now emphasized the "hierarchically organized" nation, rather echoing the slogans of the Stronnictwo Narodowe (National Party). In their joint article on the American Revolution in the Wielka Historia Powszechna (The Great Universal History) Kazimierz Piwarski and WkdySl-aw Konopczynski contended: "It was only because the [Federal Constitutional] Convention was held be-: hind closed doors, away from the influence of the street, that it managed to free itself of anarchy, avoided despotism and gave the American people a strong and wise system of government". They saw the American Constitution as a model of "how freedom of the citizens can be reconciled with state power and national unity with respect for local liberties.!' It was only during the interwar period that Kazimierz Pulaski at long last found an able biographer in Konopczynski. Konopczynski remarked how Pulaski was constantly forced to modify the experience he had gained in the Confederation of Bar, when he opposed the proRussian tendencies of Poland's last king. In Pulaski, Konopczynski saw the founder of American partisan units, yet a man whom America taught disillusion and bitterness. But to his countrymen in slumbering lethargy floundering under the burden of disaster, he was an example of heroism. 17 The first accounts of the American Revolution published after the conclusion of World War II continued in the same vein as the interwar histories. Little differentiates the works of Wladyslaw Dzwonkowski or Jozef Chalasinski from their prewar colleagues. In the works of Konstanty Grzybowski, however, there appear the first signs of a marxist view. According to him, the Revolution reflected the antagonism between town and country, between aristocracy and landed

17

Wl-adyslaw Konopczynski, Kazimierz Pulaski [Casimir Pulaski] (Krakow, 1931).

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gentry on the one hand and democratic townsmen on the other - but not between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.18 One question that has preoccupied post-World-War-II historians is how "revolutionary" the Revolutionary War was. Wladyslaw Rusiñski, for example, claimed that the American War of Independence wrought no change in the existing economic and social structure of the country. 19 In his biographical sketch of George Washington, Slawomir Sierecki asked whether Washington was the leader of an American revolution or merely of an anticolonial war of independence. He notes that Washington was brought up in a house full of servants and slaves, enjoyed the life of a country gentleman, and loved horses and hunting. Though he introduced partisan warfare, which Sierecki felt obliged to note had elicted Engels's approval, Washington had voted at the Constitutional Convention for autocratic rights for the President, the introduction of property, education and residence qualifications, and the retention of slavery. 20 Henryk Katz, however, disagreed. He held that the term "revolution" applied to the American War of Independence, that it was justified by the upheaval in political, economic and social relations occasioned by the war. The political revolution was expressed in the victory of the democratic republican principles. He stressed that the separation of church and civil authority and equal rights for all religious denominations also had considerable significance. Thanks to these changes, the lower and middle classes in the United States were freed from the insupportable burden of lay and spiritual feudal authority. 21 . An interesting account is Zofia Libiszowska's Opinio polska wobec rewolucji amerykañskiej w XVIII w. (Polish Opinions on the American Revolution in the 18th Century), published in 1962. Her interpretation is that the Revolution meant different things to different segments of Polish society. Conservatives saw it as a confirmation of the nobility's privileged position; former members of the Confederation of Bar saw it as a struggle by colonists in defense of their liberty; moderates, who sought a hereditary monarchy, saw it as support for their program; and republican democrats saw it as a victory for their principles. 19 Konstanty Grzybowski, Demokracja Stanów Zjednoczonych [United States Democracy] (Krakow, 1947). " Wl-adyslaw Rusinski, Zarys historii gospodarczej powszechnej [Outline of General Economic History] (Warsaw, 1970). 20 Slawomir Sierecki, George Washington (Warsaw, 1970). 21 Henryk Katz, Historia Stanów Zjednoczonych Ameryki [A History of the United States of America] (Wroclaw, 1974), pp.122-157.

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In a more recent work, written after the fall of Stalin and the temporary triumph of collective leadership, Konstanty Grzybowski reinterpreted the revolutionary era and emphasized the division of power and the affirmation of the sovereignty of the people as two of its principal results. 22 Polish attitudes towards the American revolution have varied quite considerably. Usually they reflected Poland's current situation and at each moment views were as diverse as the contemporary composition of the Polish nation. On the whole, they have been fairly favorable, even in the writings of Marxist historians. But then, this would be expected in a country where Americans are still treated as friends, by the people at least, and where America is still looked upon as a land of milk and honey, wheat and dollars, even by its ruling elite.

22 Konstanty Grzybowski, Historia doktrinow politycznych i prawnych [A History of Political and Legal Doctrines] (Warsaw, 1967), p. 403.

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At a session devoted to the subject of human rights held under the auspices of the Fourteenth International Congress of the Historical Sciences (CISH), in San Francisco in August 1975, Professor Jacques Godechot contended that whereas the French declarations on the Rights of Man aspired for universality, their American counterparts concerned themselves chiefly with the rights of Americans. In the ensuing discussion, R.R. Palmer agreed with Godechot that the French Declaration of 1789 was more universal and also more abstract hence more applicable to many other peoples and situations than the American Declaration of Independence. Yet according to the Yale historian, his French colleague overstated the parochialism and ethnocentricity of the American declarations several of which like the ones issued by the states of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts contained a universal and abstract statement on human rights and were, in this respect, rather similar to the French Declaration. The significance of the Pennsylvania state constitution in Grand Duke Leopold's plans for constitutional reform in Tuscany mentioned by Professor Fichtner in a previous chapter tends to support Palmer's argument. 1 Indeed, the universal appeal of the American Declaration of Independence and Revolution can be illustrated by their echo in Central and East Europe, an area controlled by Prussia, Austria, Russia, and the *I am indebted to Professor John Livingston, my colleague and friend in the Department of History, for his helpful criticism based on the reading of this chapter. For the views expressed in the paper, and its many shortcomings, I alone am responsible. 1 J. Godechot, "Les Droits de l'homme et la Révolution Française," in "Les Droits de l'Homme," report presented by Roland Mousnier in behalf of the French Committee of the Historical Sciences to the XIV International Congress of the Historical Sciences (CISH), San Francisco, August 24,1975, p. 52. In his oral summary, Professor Godechot further belabored the point. Referring to the "great difference" between the French Declaration of 1789, which claims to be universal ("qui se veut universel"), and the American declarations of human rights such as the Declaration of the State of Vir-

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Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Repercussions of liberal let alone democratic revolutionary movements could not but have a direct bearing on the interest of these protectors of the conservative political and social order in Europe and the world at large. Conversely, opponents and would-be reformers of the surviving old regimes were susceptible to the ideas of the American and French revolutions, apparent twins of the same Age of Enlightenment, and had an understandable desire to study them from the point of view of their practical applicability in their own struggles for national independence and/or the modernization of feudal or otherwise backward conditions. While having international implications not necessarily inherent in their original purpose and momentum, the French and American revolutions thus presented patriots and potential revolutionaries in Central and East Europe with opportunities and challenges that made either of the two and occasionally both Western revolutions seem to be vehicles of concepts and trends which were at best incipient on the domestic scene but had proved their validity, progressive nature and hence usefulness in more advanced societies. The fascinating complexity of the universal appeal and recurrent echo of the American Revolution had both internal and external causes. In a sophisticated and admirably detached survey of the rich crop of contentious writings of the internal British-American aspects of the American Revolution during the last fifteen years or so, Professor Bernard Bailyn stresses, inter alia, the fundamental looseness ginia, the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, and, "even more, the Bill of Rights, the first amendments to the American Constitution," Professor Godechot said: "Toutes ces déclarations américaines sont faites pour le peuple de Virginie, ou pour le peuple des Etats Unis, tandis que dans la déclaration française, il n'est mentionné, il n'est fait allusion aux rédacteurs de cette déclaration que dans le préambule 'les représentants du peuple français assemblés' mais ils proclament les droits de l'homme pour le monde entier, pour tout l'univers. Ce sont des droits qui doivent s'appliquer à tous les hommes et ainsi dans la déclaration de 1789 on ne mentionne pas un pays, on ne mentionne pas un régime, cette déclaration s'applique aussi bien aux monarchies qu'aux républiques, il n'est pas question de régime et il en est de même d'ailleurs dans la déclaration de 1793 et même dans la déclaration de 1795. C'est ce qui explique l'expansion tout à fait remarquable de la déclaration française de 1789 qui a eu un retentissement considérable." For this, as well as R.R. Palmer's comments, see tapes no. 11A side two and 1 IB side one, respectively, prepared by the Minute-Tape Company. Part of what follows in the text has been first tested in my interlocution at the afternoon session on human rights, and in my comments made at the CISH on "Revolution," August 25, 1975. The morning session on "Revolution" is available on tapes no. 13A and 13B of the Minute-Tape Company.

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of the relationship between England and her American colonies which enabled the implementation of a national revolution in an already reformed society without the destruction of the existing social order. 2 Paradoxically, then, a substantial part of the British colonial empire in North America was transformed into an independent and republican nation state at the very moment when the British imperial system was on the verge of its greatest expansion and global consolidation in the nineteenth century. The lesson was not lost on articulate Polish or Hungarian conservative admirers of the United States who assumed that reform without social revolution was feasible and perhaps even mandatory given the balance of great powers and conditions of incipient but competitive nationalism within multinational empires. Professor Bailyn also mentions another "basic condition" that shaped " t h e pecularities of the American Revolution." It reflected the influence of that libertarian ideology which, although itself inspired by manifold stimuli such as the Enlightenment, religious pluralism, and British legal-constitutional traditions, nevertheless found its first and hence unique nationwide practical application on the North American scene. Thomas Jefferson's Statute on Religious Freedom is an example of the aspiration to put into effect the ideal of not only the freedom of religion but also that of speech, thought and belief despite some limitations on the very American scene of which Bailyn talks. In this context, he underlines the fervent belief of the leaders of the American Revolution that their endeavors dealt creatively and succesfully with perennial problems of mankind and were to influence in a positive manner the future of the h u m a n race. 3 This American idealism geared to the possibility of shaping the future regardless of the historical past, in turn, inspired many a radical revolutionary, and not only in Central and East Europe. The categorization of the impact of the American Revolution according to liberal or conservative principles should not be carried too far. Habsburg reaction to the American War of Independence was, as Professor Fichtner correctly says it, motivated by the desire to defend the monarchic order against rebels. But even though, as Hans Kohn points out, " T h e war of the thirteen colonies against Britain was not a war of natives against alien rulers but a British civil war for the ,in2 Bernard Bailyn, "Lines of Force in Recent Writings on the American Revolution," report presented at the session on "Revolution," CISH, San Francisco, A u g u s t 25, 1975, pp. 29-30. 3 Ibid., pp. 31-34.

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terpretation, the maintenance, the broadening of the British constitution," the victory of the newly born nation was achieved, ironically, with the assistance of the absolute monarchies of France and Spain, and was not founded on the common attributes of nationhood but on an idea expressed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights derived from natural law and the consent of the people governed. To identify with this idea, rooted in the English tradition of liberty as represented by the political philosophy of John Locke and the Puritan conception of individual h u m a n rights meant to become, in Kohn's words, an American. 4 Indeed, emphasis on the individual citizen's autonomy and the application of individualism to a rational political and social order in Descartes's spirit was according to him the joint attribute of the intertwining American and French revolutions. 5 Similarly synoptic is the view of another prominent student of nationalism, Boyd C. Shafer. In his most recent work, he underlines the significance of the example of self-determination set by the American and the first Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen brought forth by the French revolutions both of which had a universal and simultaneous appeal to the peoples of the world for centuries to come. 6 The interlocking of the legacies of great revolutions is also stressed in Palmer's The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Accordingly, it was the Americans who had first given the example of a succesful revolution in the modern era, "proclaimed the rights of man and the sovereignty of the people, and established a new public authority in their state constitutions by recognizing a constituent power in bodies calle conventions." 7 Yet Palmer adds that after 1789 the United States too felt the strong influence of the French Revolution and experienced a period of ambivalence regarding its own revolutionary heritage. Moreover, he clearly sees the interaction of the late eighteenth century American, French, and Polish revolutions just as Georges Lefebvre has duly stressed the interrelationship of revolutionary events in France and Poland. 8 In the concluding section of his magnum opus, Palmer analyzes the crisis faced by the forces of revolution in France at the 4

Hans Kohn, American Nationalism, Collier edition, 1961, pp. 19-22. Hans Kohn, The Twentieth Century (New York, 1957), pp. 45-46, 187-91, 253-54. 6 Boyd C. Shafer, Faces of Nationalism (New York, 1972), pp. 268-69. 7 R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols, Princeton, N.J., 1959, II, 509. 8 Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution, 2 vols. (London-New York, 1962-64), passim. s

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close of the century by quoting a contemporary reference to the precedents of fallen Poland and the United States. "Let this contrast awaken your courage! - says a patriotic address to the French recruits of 1799 - If victors, we shall have the good fortune of the United Americans ; if vanquished, the fate of Poland will be ours." 9 The essential oneness of this new spirit of the era of democratic revolutions, so diversified by geographic, political, and socio-economic conditions, is manifest in the at times deceptive usage of certain magic names. Professor Kiraly quotes one of the first Magyar papers, published in Vienna, which in May, 1789, predicted that " T h e French, too, are being touched by the philosophy of W a s h i n g t o n . . . " Even earlier, in 1782, a Hungarian-German Professor at the College of Law in Kaschau (Kosice, Kassa) published a collection of documents in German which contained the writings and biographic data of prominent personalities of the War of American Independence including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Lafayette. 10 In the next generation, young Stephen Szechenyi's diaries reveal a thorough familiarity with the activities and work of especially Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, and a fascination with Latin American revolutionaries such as Bolivar and Iturbide besides the Italian carbonieris and Alexander Ypsilanti. The list has expanded as has the horizon, at least in certain parts of East Central Europe: in September, 1831, just before the arrival of Alexis de Tocqueville in the United States, a young Hungarian nobleman from Transylvania visiting the military Academy at West Point is deeply moved by a white marble m o n u m e n t with an inscription of one single word - "Kosciuszko." 1 1 The traveller drawing inspiration from the joint legacy of the American and Polish wars of independence, the former successful and the latter not, was Sandor Boloni Farkas to whom the contribution by Professor Reisch is devoted. First published in Hungary in 1834, the year before the appearance of the first volume of Tocqueville's work, the ' Cited, after Isser W o l o c h and G. B o n n e f o y , in Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, II, 563-64. 10 Istvân Gâl, "Zinner Jânos kassai professor, Benjamin Franklin barâtja és amerikai függet lenségi d o k u m e n t u m - g y i i j t e m é n y e 1782-böl" (John Zinner, Professor of Kassa and Friend of Benjamin Franklin, and His Collection of D o c u m e n t s Relevant to American Independence [Published] in 1782, ¡rodalmi Szemle (Bratislava, 1970), pp. 938-42. 11 Sândor Bölöni Farkas, Utazas Eszak-Amerikàban (Journey in North America), ed. by Samu Benkö (Bucharest, 1966), p. 110; George Barany, Stephan Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism (Princeton, 1968), pp. 63, 86, 103, 109, 176 and passim .

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eleven hundred copies of Boloni's book which printed for the first time in a Hungarian translation almost the entire Declaration of Independence and other American documents, were soon sold out to make room for a second edition of a thousand copies, which appeared in 1835, still during the session of the Hungarian "long" Diet of 183236. The by Hungarian standards extraordinary success of the work showed the interest of liberal public opinion in what Szechenyi called the "Land of the Future" (das werdende Land) but which he was never able to visit due to Metternich's refusal to grant him a passport to the United States. All this brings us to periods which followed the "Age of Democratic Revolutions," to use Palmer's tarminology. From the point of view of the echo of the American Revolution in Central and East Europe, these periods deserve great attention as intimated by Professor Rothschild's introductory remarks. From the Hungarian Jacobins and Thaddeus Kosciuszko through the Greek Adamantios Koraes12 and the Russian Colonel Paul Pestel, from Szechenyi and Louis Kossuth to the father of modern Czechoslovakia, Thomas G. Masaryk, a colorful and diverse group of champions of liberty attempted, despite adversities and many a discouraging circumstance, to rekindle the flame solemnly lit by the American pioneers of a New World. To be sure, in the first period of the impact of the American Revolution on East Europe which ended with the third partition of Poland and the execution of Ignac Martinovics and six other leaders of Hungarian Jacobinism in 1795, there were Polish reformers prior Kosciuszko such as Szczesnyi Potocki, Jan Suchorzewski or Sewerin Rzewuski who advocated the establishment of a federal republic without a king invoking the example of the United States. 13 As shown by Professor Sokol's chapter, "interest in America was a universal phenomenon" permeating the most divergent programs and beliefs in the Polish polity of the 1770's and 1780's: arguments based on the presumed or real "lessons" of the American Revolution were liberally used by both proponents and opponents of reform in the Diet and in what was perhaps the only free press in Central and East Europe at the time. It is clear, as indicated also by the contribution of Professor Kusielewicz,

12 Stephan G. Xydis, "Modern Greek Nationalism," in Peter F. Sugar and Ivo J. Lederer, eds., Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle and London, 1969), p. 230. 13 Aleksander Gieysztor, Stefan Kienewicz, et al., History of Poland (Warsaw, 1968), p. 370.

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that in spite of the vast differences between the political and geographic realities of the newly formed United States and those of Poland, a generation of politically articulate Poles of the Age of Enlightenment sought to forge, in the words of Zofia Libiszowska, "weapons to achieve specific political ends." 14 Yet it was in the towering figure of Kosciuszko that all three revolutions, the American, the French and the Polish, reached, in a sense, a tragic - because unfulfilled - culmination. An honorary citizen of both France and the United States, this self-styled "only true Pole" was imbued with American and French revolutionary ideals as indicated by his famous Act of Insurrection, wanted to create a popular militia and give full citizenship to the peasant in the interest of a strong Poland, and also advocated the education and liberation of the Black man in his adoptive country. 15 Less well known and conspicuous but perhaps no less interwined were the impulses received from the American and French revolutions in Hungary, a country whose social structure resembled that of Poland very much, and whose ruling nobility had always reacted with great sensitivity to events that took place on the premises of the neighbor to the North. The foremost legal scholar, Joseph Hajnoczy, executed along with Martinovics, championed complete religious freedom and equal civil rights even for Jews in 1790, citing as his example the Virginia statute of 1786. The author of another Latin pamphlet, also written on the occasion of the convening of a reformminded Diet in 1790, the historian George A. Belnay, contrasted with the "monstrous" feudal system the equal civil rights of every member of society by referring to both Rousseau and "the thirteen American provinces liberated by the advice and work of Franklin from under the harsh English rule." 16 Likewise, the noble Hungarian translator of 14 Zofia Libiszowska, "American Influence on Polish Political Thought," paper presented at the August 21-23,1975, session of the International Commission for Slavic Studies, Berkeley-San Francisco, California, p. 1 passim of typescript. I am grateful to Professor Libiszowska for having kindly provided me with a copy of her paper. 15 Miecislaus Haiman, Kosciuszko, New York, 1946, pp. 18-22, 73-76, 112-13, 197, passim; M. K. Dziewanowski, "Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Kazimiers Pulaski and the American War of Independence: A Study in National Symbolism and Mythology," paper presented at the August 21-23,1975, session of the International Commission for Slavic Studies, Berkeley-San Francisco, pp. 5-7, typescript. I am in Professor Dziewanowski's debt for having permitted me to see an advance copy of his paper. " For references, see George Barany, "Magyar Jew or: Jewish Magyar"? (To the Question of Jewish Assimilation in Hungary)", Canadian-American Slavic Studies, VIII, 3-4, and George Barany, "Hoping against Hope: The Enlightened Age in Hungary," The American Historical Review, LXXVI (1971), 354.

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Rousseau's Contrat Social into Latin would send a handwritten copy of the American Declaration of Independence to a learned friend, the economic reformer Gregory Berzeviczy, in 1792, 17 while about the same time, free masons belonging to the lodge American-FrenchGerman Union in the imperial city Vienna would oblige themselves "to defend with all my strength, in writing, orally, and also with sword in hand the present condition of France and America against all despots." 18 The third partition of Poland and the nipping in the bud of the socalled Jacobin conspiracy which never became a mass movement in the Habsburg lands meant that dreams of national independence and radical political and social change were taken off the agenda in East Central Europe for several decades. Yet the last mentioned examples suggest that in underdeveloped areas revolutionary ideas may operate on the basis of a Doppler effect in reverse, namely, that instead of cancelling out one another, they tend to jointly stimulate people's minds. The testimonies and plans of some of the leading Decembrists such as P. I. Pestel or N. M. Muraviev bear witness to the influence of American constitutional ideas aside from the stimuli received from France or the German Tugendbund. 19 The relevance of the Decembrist movement to our topic stems not so much from the fact that it served as a point of departure for the Russian revolutionary tradition in the nineteenth century but rather that its origins can be traced back through the anti-Napoleonic wars to Catherine the Great's permission to publish sympathetic and abundant accounts in the press about the American colonists' political, military, and diplomatic struggle against England, especially prior to the French Revolution. Far from consistent or without hesitation, Catherine's attitude toward the newly born United States reveals the limitations of ideology: for if the Austrian Habsburgs did not wish to pick a bone with Great Britain, the weakening of British power was not against Russian interests at a time when the Semiramis of the North decided to pursue an active foreign policy not only vis-a-vis Poland but the Ottoman Empire, too. Sympathy toward the American Dec17

Ibid., p. 351. Ibid., p. 331, n. 9. " Anatole G. Mazour, The First Russian Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1937), pp. 78 passim ;Marc RaefT, The Decembrist Movement (Englewood Cliff, N.J. 1966), pp. 53-55, 59-60, 100-107; George Vernadsky and Ralph T. Fisher, Jr., eds., A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, 3 vols.(New Haven, 1972), II, 519-25. 18

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laration of Independence and other resolutions conceived in the spirit of the brotherhood of men was also promoted through masonic contacts in Russia: the editors of the most important journals in St. Petersburg and Moscow such as Nicholas I. Novikov were free masons and Catherine herself appears to have been favorably disposed toward masonry at least until 1782-83. Alexander Radishchev's Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow and other writings which aroused the wrath of the empress (as did Novikov) and even the program of the Society of United Slavs reflected, besides the influence of the French Revolution, the libertarian and egalitarian ideas of American constitutional documents which stimulated Russian political thinking in the same manner, according to French historian Eeckaute, as the American Declaration of Independence "prefigured" the French Declaration of 1789.20 The contamination or intermingling of revolutionary and, in due time, counterrevolutionary, symbols and names of charismatic leaders in the mind of the unsophisticated trying to assimilate the propaganda aimed at them from different quarters has not been confined to the nineteenth century or Russian society. In the Cattaro mutiny of the Austro-Hungarian navy, the sailors raised the red flag to the tunes of the Marseillaise on February 1, 1918, formed their council, demanded the democratization of the government, and called for a "loyal" reply to Wilson as well as national self-determination and peace without annexations in accordance with the Russian proposals; obviously, they did not see a fundamental difference between the message of the Marseillaise, Wilson's concept of Central Europe, and revolutionary Leninism. 21 The event just referred to belongs to the era which followed the breakdown of the old order in monarchic Central and Eastern Europe. The same holds true for Masaryk's Washington Declaration in October of the same year which wished to frustrate the plans of the Dual Monarchy's last ruler to federalize his realm by emphasizing the prin20 Denise Eeckaute, "Echo de la Révolution américaine dans la presse russe de 1776 à 1783," paper presented at the August 21-23,1975, session of the International Commission for Slavic Studies, Berkeley-San Francisco, California, pp. 8-10, typescript. I am thankful to Professor Eeckaute for having kindly given me a copy of her paper. See also Richard B. Morris, The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution (New YorkLondon, 1970), pp. 99-103. 21 Richard G. Plaschka, Cattaro - Prag (Graz-Cologne, 1966), pp. 58-64; Dragan R. Zivojinovic, America, Italy and the Birth of Yugoslavia (Boulder, Colo., 1972), pp. 13158.

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tiples of the American Declaration of Independence and Lincoln as well as Wilson in an effort to justify the formation of a new Czechoslovak Republic.22 Idealistic and somewhat propagandistic Polish interpretations of Wilson's role in the reorganization of Central Europe in the wake of World War I aimed at conveying a similar impression, as demonstrated by Professor Kusielewicz. In a sense, then, the creation of a so-called Wilsonian Central Europe of independent nation-states was a belated implementation of the ideology of the American and French revolutions effectuated under the auspices of the victorious Allied and Associated Powers at the end of World War I. Russia was absent from the negotiating table, but fear of a third, a communist, revolution 23 overshadowed whatever reminiscences, if any, the hard nosed statesmen at Versailles may have had of the two major revolutions of the eighteenth century. The delayed effort to apply the principles of the latter to Central and East Europe was bound to be distorted, as implied in the incident involving the sailors at Cattaro: instead of stressing the rights of the individual against overbearing executive power represented by the state, henceforth revolutionary trends tended to emphasize the collective rights of the masses as incarnated in state power to the detriment of the individual citizen. Moreover, the forces of ethnocentrism, alien to the spirit of the American Revolution although never totally absent from the American scene, increased rather than diminished in East Central Europe in the aftermath of World War I. Yet the belated validation of certain principles in relatively backward areas of the world does not absolve the historian from the duty to investigate both the causes of the delay and the conditions which ultimately helped these principles, albeit in a modified form, to prevail. Just as the history of the French Revolution should not be isolated from that of Europe as Albert Soboul said in a provocative essay, the history of the American Revolution, too, ought to be studied in its broader, international context in the United States as well as in the rest of the world including Central

22 G. Masaryk, A világforradalom, (World Revolution; Prague, 1928), pp. 396-97; Ferdinand Peroutka, Budováni Státu (The Birth of A State), 4 vols., Prague, 1934-36, 1,68-71 (courtesy of Professor Josef Korbel); Hans-Erich Volkmann, ed., Die Krise des Parlamentarismus in Ost-mitteleuropa, pp. 87-88. 21 Victor S. Mamatey, The United States and East Central Europe (Princeton, 1957), passim\ George Barany, "Wilsonian Central Europe: Lansing's Contribution," The Historian, XXVIII (1966), 224-51; Morris, The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution, pp. 120-26.

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and Eastern Europe if there is to be a détente in the realm of the intellect. Such an approach is mandatory due to the universalism inherent in the American Revolution which the French historian recognizes ; he is also right in pointing to the manifold violation of the principle of universalism in the United States, 2 4 and, one may add, elsewhere. For, regrettably, there have been no revolutions as yet whose humanistic goals should have been put into practice in their classic chastity. Honny soit qui mal y pense. But again, the historian should not despair of the retarded and occasionally elusive appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of American revolutionary and emancipatory ideas in Central and Eastern Europe. This area whose development has been, for many a historic reason, "¿synchronic" in the word of a Czechoslovak historian, 25 has had a tradition of receiving and absorbing enlightened impulses in a distance of one or two generations in recent times. Nevertheless, even in Russia Alexander Radishchev was followed by the Decembrists and others such as Alexander Herzen, Michael Bakunin, Nicholas Chernyshevsky and Peter Lavrov who could be quite critical at times of the deterioration of American revolutionary ideals. Still, as pointed out by Richard B. Morris, Lenin eulogized America's revolutionary tradition, especially the anticolonial war against Britain, and admitted the federal principle and other aspects of American constitutionalism, however irrelevant they may be to the peculiar concentration of power in the Communist party, into the organizational structure of the Soviet state. 26 The father of the Soviet state also seems to have had a healthy respect for American technological know-how, a main force behind the revolutionary transformation of our twentieth century world. Even Stalin chose to ridicule, come to think of it, a hero of Michael Saltykov-Shchedrin, one Iudushka Goloviov who wanted to shut down the United States of America. One of the difficulties of studying the "incarnation" of the American Revolution abroad appears to be, as Walker Connor has suggest24 Albert M. Soboul, "La Révolution française dans l'histoire du monde" in Manfred Kossok, éd., Studien iiber die Revolution, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1971), pp. 62, 72-74. " For the term, and its broader application, see Valentin Al. Georgesco, "Le processus de modernisation pendant les XVIII et XIX siècles dans les sociétés de l'Europe de l'Est," paper presented to the session "Aspects Economiques des Sociétés en Développement," CISH, August 27, 1975, San Francisco, pp. 3, 6 and notes 9, 23, passim. 26 Morris, The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution, pp. 103-108.

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ed recently (in accordance with Hans Kohn's opinion quoted earlier), that the American Revolution, "an evident illustration for the world of popular sovereignty in practice, was probably not viewed, even by the revolutionaries, as an exercise in national self-determination" due to the absence of a clear-cut ethnic issue i.e. resentment of alien rule.27 Moreover, Thomas Paine may not have been typical of the mainstream of the revolution in America, as Professor Bailyn's report to the XIV International Congress of the Historical Sciences suggested, and yet his writings may have been among the most effective vehicles of American libertarian thought at least among radical reformers in late eighteenth century Hungary or other parts of Central Europe e.g. Germany. 28 Such phenomena require a certain transposition of our own system of coordinates if we wish to evaluate the American Revolution against the historical background of other societies. Likewise, the phase delays between the pulsation of the American Revolution in the United States and its absorption in foreign countries may cause a complex set of problems for the analysis of which American scholars need the assistance of their confreres abroad. The remarkable recent work by Professor Morris which gives a synopsis of the impact of the American Revolution on emerging nations has many virtues such as its global scope and the attempt to synthesize important trends and events on which the monographic literature is uneven if not outright missing. The book contains a warning about the often unorthodox approaches of American revolutionary policy ("militia diplomacy") which may have set the pattern, in some instances, for methods and attitudes resented in the practice of other regimes today. Still, there is room for viewing the struggle of the American colonial settlers against their mother country, in the broader context of general diplomatic history, as a function of the balance of power that shifted in England's favor at the end of the Seven Years' War and was being redressed at her expense by France, Russia, and other European countries. One may agree or disagree with the somewhat sweeping statement according to which "mankind must make up its mind either for the July '76 Revolution in America or the Oc-

27 Walker Connor, "The Politics of Ethnonationalism," Journal of International Affairs, XXVII (1973), 6. 28 Alfred Körner, Die Wiener Jakobiner, vol. Ill of Walter Grab, ed., Deutsche Revolutionäre Demokraten (Stuttgart, 1972), pp. XXII-XXIV. See also Professor Kiraly's chapter.

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tober '17 Revolution in Russia" 29 : more often than not, Lady Clio appears to abhor taking clearcut stands and prefers, for good or bad, intermediary alternatives. Yet the challenge posed by Professor Morris will hopefully be taken up by scholars of many nations, especially in East Central Europe where there is an urgent need for more research on the subject. Indeed a laudable example has been set by scholars with studies on the unfolding of the "image" of the United States from the anti-Napoleonic "wars of liberation" to the discussions of the Frankfurt Assembly in 1848/49 in the German lands where the issues of federalism and constitutional life were particularly acute until Bismarck put an end to the debate for two generations. 30 The contributions in the present volume, and the reference literature on which they are based, prove that substantial beginnings have been made in the historiography of the non-German peoples of East Central Europe, too, toward a better understanding of the multiple links that tie them to the United States of America. These ties, as shown in connection with Bohemia in the literary essay by Professor Svejkovsky, and a similar case could be made for Austria, Poland and Hungary, antedated the American Revolution by well over two centuries and were to continue into our lifetime. Indeed the multidimensional aspects of our theme make it more difficult to do justice to it. During the period of partitions and attempted reforms Poles had many reasons to look to America, even to the point of identifying with the Indians: a recent article quotes Frederick II, who tried "to teach European civilization to these hapless Iroquois," namely the Poles, and the Prussian king's sarcastic remarks were recalled again after the defeat of the anti-Russian Polish uprising of 1863.31 Thus, even after the loss of Polish independent statehood, the United States continued to attract the attention of Polish patriots throughout the nineteenth century as suggested by the powerful pen of Henryk Sienkiewicz or another important author mentioned by Professor Kusielewicz, Stefan 29

Morris, The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution, p. 128. Eckhart G. Franz, Das Amerikabild der deutschen Revolution von 1848/49 (Heidelberg, 1958); Gunter Moltman, Atlantische Blockpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert (Dusseldorf, 1949). See also E. Angermann, "Early German Constitutionalism and the American Model" and K. Obermann, "Beziehungen zwischen den europäischen Fortschrittskräften und den U.S.A. im 19. Jahrhundert," presented at the two sessions "L'Europe et les Etats-Unis d'Amérique," CISH, San Francisco, August 23 and 25,1975, respectively. 31 Jerzy Jedlicki, "Images of America," Polish Perspectives, XVIII/11 (1975),pp. 2829. 30

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Buszczynski. A liberal member of the Cracow Academy of Learning, Buszczynski anticipated the decline of Europe in contrast to the rise of the United States and advocated a supranational federation of European states to resuscitate on the decadent continent the spirit of liberty which according to him had departed for the New World. 32 To evaluate the encounter of a sensitive great writer such as Sienkiewicz with America against the background of his creative work, which is the decisive criterion, is a difficult task in any event. Even when the original stimulus is political, as was the case with the Hungarian Béla Bartók's emigration to the United States at the beginning of World War II in protest against the spread of Fascism, statements and gestures alone, however significant they may be, do not reveal the total resonance of the artist's inner world. Nor does the apparent absence of overt political factors from Anton Dvorak's decision to take up residence in the United States at a certain point in his career exonerate the researcher from noting that the patriotic Czech composer of the hymn, "The Heirs of the White Mountain", also wrote an opera called The Jacobin besides his famous Symphony from the New World; in fact, Slav folk tunes alternate with those of the American Negro and Indian in some of Dvorak's most mature late compositions. Apart from the highly individualistic realm of art and literature which reaches into the domain of symbols and emotions, there are certain patterns that should not be ignored. As example, one may refer to the phase delay with which the ideas of the American Revolution were assimilated by the in many ways comparable Polish and Hungarian élites, while some parts of East Central Europe may have been hardly affected by them even later, if at all. In the free Polish press and Diet, the pros and cons of the American Revolution were vigorously debated almost simultaneously with the unfolding of events: for obvious reasons, there could be no sequel to this concentrated discussion in partitioned Poland during the nineteenth century. In Hungary, where no Diets were held in the later period of Maria Theresa's reign and that of Joseph II, the French Revolution was in the focus of political excitement during the Diets of the early 1790's until first the prevalence of extreme trends in France, then the crackdown on the circle of Viennese and Hungarian Jacobins, and finally the revolutionary imperialism of Napoleon intimidated and alienated most of those 32 Piotr S. Wandycz, "The Polish Precursors of Federalism," Journal of Central European Affairs, XII (1953), 353-54.

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initially sympathetic to the cause of radical change. Yet during the political reaction that set in at the end of the eighteenth century, there was a revival of interest in North America. The frequent designation of the United States as "Free American States" or "North American Free Republic" in Hungarian geographies and dictionaries prior to 1820, when neither the epithet "free" nor the noun "republic" was part of the official English name, seems to suggest, according to Professor Laszlo Orszagh, a continued subtle association of the concept of freedom with the newborn state. Anxious to preserve their feudal privileges, most members of the nobility, those opposed to the dynasty's absolutism included, feared the French who were dangerously close as "L'Empereur" was to find out when he tried to arouse the Hungarians against Habsburg rule during the campaign of 1809: it was safer to explore the constitutional possibilities of the apparently more peaceful and conservative American Revolution. 33 An occasional exception like the former associate of .the Hungarian Jacobins, Berzeviczy, who drafted a new constitution for Hungary which he submitted to Napoleon, 34 was imbued with the ideas of both the American and French revolution, as said earlier: in a treatise on world trade, written after Tilsit in the year before the French-Austrian war, Berzeviczy, who drafted a new constitution for Hungary which he submitted to Napoleon, 34 was imbued with the ideas of both the American and French revolution, as said earlier: in a treatise on world appeal of the American Revolution. Ironically, even Napoleon's proclamation to the Hungarians, published upon his entrance in Vienna in Latin, French, and Hungarian, attempted to convey at least one important point by resorting to an argument reminiscent of the American rather than the French Declaration: Hungarians no longer owed loyalty to the Habsburgs because "no nation owes allegiance to a false prince who has broken his word..." 36 It is true that among the Hun-

33 Làszló Orszagh, "Egy orszàgnév geneziséròl. Amerikai Egyesiilt Àllamok" (About the Genesis of the Name of A Country : The United States of America), Magyar Nyelv, 1974/3, pp. 4-5. 34 Béla K. Kiraly, "Napoleon's Proclamation of 1809 and Its Hungarian Echo", in Stanley B. Winters and Joseph Held, eds., Intellectual and Social Developments in the Habsburg Empire from Maria Theresa to World War I (New York-London, 1975), pp. 43-44. 35 Domokos Kosàry, "Napóleon és Magyarorszàg" (Napoleon and Hungary), Szàzadok, CV (1971), 592-93. 36 Cited by Kiraly, "Napoleon's Proclamation of 1809 and Its Hungarian Echo," p. 31.

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garians who made their views known to Napoleon with the purpose of achieving Hungary's independence from Austria, there was Berzeviczy who in two earlier works written in 1789 and 1790, respectively, described, in detail, why Hungarians had the right to rid themselves of the Habsburgs who broke their contract with the nation. But again, besides relying on Montesquieu and Rousseau, Berzeviczy also listed America among his foreign examples. 37 Not all of those familiar with the theory of the social contract were, of course, revolutionary hotheads. Samuel Kòteles, the foremost philosopher-educator of the early nineteenth century, was a follower of Immanuel Kant and admirer of constitutional monarchy. Critical of the democratic form of government, he insisted that there had never been a pure democracy in the strict sense of the word conceding, however, that the possibility of administering a country via a representative democracy "has been demonstrated by the North American Republic." 38 The leaders and teachers of Hungary's great generation of reform, Stephen Széchenyi and Nicholas Wesselényi, were less restrained in their enthusiasm for the United States. While the "Anglomania" of the "Greatest among the Magyar" had been duly stressed in the older literature, more recent works shed new light on his respect for Washington and Jefferson, incorporation of Franklin's ideas into his own system of ethical values, and efforts to learn about American technological know-how to promote the modernization of the Hungarian economy. Dubbed as "Der Amerikaner" by members of the Viennese aristocratic "jet set" in his youth, Széchenyi, as vice-president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences founded by him, was instrumental in establishing cultural exchange with the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia in 1833, sending the fledgling Academy's greetings "to the learned Societies of that Country where the divine residence of Sacred Liberty stands in hitherto unknown purity amidst the miracles of great nature." 39 For many years, entries in Széchenyi's pri" The two works by Berzeviczy are: Über Österreichs Grundsätze in der Regierung Ungarns (1789) and De dominio Austriae in Hungaria (About Austria's Rule in Hungary, 1790). See H. Èva Baläzs, Berzeviczy Gergely, a reformpolitikus (Gregory Berzeviczy, the Reform Politician) (Budapest, 1967), pp. 145-55, 3:7-26; Käroly Ballai, ed., A magyar fùggetlenségi nyilatkozatok torténete (History of the Hungarian Declarations of Independence), I (Budapest, 1935), 37-56. " Gyula Barla, Kemény Zsigmond fóbb eszméi 1849 elött (The Main Ideas of Sigismund Kemény prior to 1849) (Budapest, 1970), pp. 11-12. " Barany, Stephen Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, pp. 329-

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vate diaries show his desire to make a trip or even emigrate to the "land of freedom." Similarly, the best friend of his youth, Wesselényi, dreamed of "the liberty breathing soil of America" which he intended to visit in Széchenyi's company in 1821.40 The two champions of Hungarian liberalism never got beyond England. It was only Széchenyi's first-born son and confidant of his last years, Béla, who two years after his father's death fulfilled the latter's wish by gathering first-hand impressions in an America torn by civil war. As to Wesselényi, his dreams came true, too, in proxy, so to speak, through the journey of Bòlòni Farkas, who was his onetime tutor and friend. 41 But whereas Béla Széchenyi's trip followed the defeat of the anti-Habsburg Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49 at a time when the chances of a compromise with the dynasty were far from certain, Bòlòni Farkas's travel occurred in the more optimistic opening phase of the Age of Reforms, initiated by Széchenyi and Wesselényi both of whom considered the enterprise, in Széchenyi's words written after the publication of Bòlòni's travelogue, "an incalculably useful one for our compatriots." 42 The awakening of Hungarian liberal nationalism in the pre-March thus generated a second, and most important wave of interest in American institutions. An encyclopedic journal which for the censor's sake condemned democracy as a form of government at the opening of the Diet of 1832, nevertheless published an article about the United States where "there are no hereditary power, no nobility, no state religion, no permanent army, no knightly order, no guilds, no high and secret police, and no constables," where "only individual merit was taken into consideration," where "there were no socages, tithes, monopolies and dispensations from taxes, no hereditary offices tied to rights of birth, but only common civic rights," and where the constitution guaranteed the separation of legislative, administrative, and judicial powers "at a time when in the first French National Assembly

31 passim; Istvan Gal, "Szechenyi and the U.S.A.," Angol Filologiai Tanulmanyok (Hungarian Studies in Englishj, V (1971), 95-119. 40 Bard Wesselenyi Miklos utinaploja (The Travelogue of Baron Nicholas Wesseleny i) (Cluj - Kolozsvar, 1925), pp. 18-26, 35-36. 41 Zsolt Trocsanyi, Wesselenyi Miklos (Nicholas Wesselenyi) (Budapest, 1965), pp. 39, 41, 90; Gal, "Szechenyi and the U.S.A.", p. 104. 42 Szechenyi toBoloni Farkas, Sept. 10,1834. BelaMajlath,ed., Grof Szechenyi Istvan levelei (Letters of Stephen Szechenyi) 3 vols. (Budapest, 1889-91), I, 498-99.

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this point had not even been raised." 43 Progressive Hungarians chafing under a feudal system and Austrian absolutism, naturally deemed it their patriotic duty to gain knowledge about a country which offered such a sharp contrast to their own. The great nineteenth century Hungarian historian, Michael Horváth, quotes the radical deputy to the Diet, John Balogh, who is said to have taught his seven-year-old son the following "catechism": "Who was the first man? Washington. Which is the best system of government? A republic. What are you? A democrat." 43 " Small wonder that when Boloni Farkas confirmed the existence of a working democracy in America, his book won the grand prize of the Academy and he himself was elected to membership in that scholarly body. The recognition was not undeserved. For Farkas, as Professor Reisch observed, did not conceal his disappointment with slavery and snobbishness he saw in the theoretically free and egalitarian American society; but despite its shortcomings, the United States seemed to hold out the promise of a future which defied the old regimes of Europe, both East and West. This was the essential truth which Farkas grasped and made his compatriots perceive. He was a product and propagandist of that romantic "America fever" which, far from unique to Hungary, spread through Chateaubriand's novel Atala, Nikolaus Lenau's lyrics, and Dickens' American Notes all over Europe first among intellectuals and, during the second half of the century, among the masses of the continent. Two examples mentioned by Professor Reisch and Király may show the perimeters of the supranational forces detected by Farkas on the American scene. Whereas the objective description of the way of life of religious sects such as the Rappites and Shakers was in itself a revelation in view of the fact that the Hungarian reform diets were still in the process of debating the equal rights of Protestants, the account about the Owenite community introduced a new strain, that of socialism, into the political spectrum of feudal Hungary to the delight of

43 Kôzhasznu Esméretek Tara (Magazine of Useful Tidings), IV (Pest, 1832), 47-50, cited by Imre Lukinich, "American Democracy As Seen By the Hungarians of the Age of Reform (1830-1848)," Journal of Central European Affairs, VIII (1948), 270-71. 4ja Cited in Gyôrgy Szabad, "Kossuth on the Political System of the United States of America," Etudes Historiques Hongroises 1975 publiées à l'occasion du XlVe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques par la Commission Nationale des Historiens Hongrois, 2 vols. (Budapest, 1975), I, 504.

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the pioneer of the yet unborn Hungarian working class movement, Michael Tancsics.44 Boloni's notion that religious as well as secular experiments in communal living were secured by constitutional freedom, was true. Moreover, the newly discovered truth of the need for social justice stimulated interest in penal reform and this movement, too, was international in scope. The detailed report by Boloni Farkas on the American prison system, and the reading of Tocqueville, inspired Joseph Eotvos in his treatise on prison reform and other writings ;45 subsequently, a dietal commission preparing a new Hungarian penal code during the 1840's undertook a study of the work of the American legal scholar, Edward Livingston, and also resorted to the good offices of Heidelberg Professor A. Mittermaier, a German authority on criminal law well acquainted with American constitutional ideas. And even though Francis Pulszky, the secretary of the dietal commission was required to survey more than a dozen foreign criminal codes, including the one prepared by Livingston for Louisiana, when submitting his own suggestions, the point is that American legal literature was incorporated into Hungary's hitherto unprecedented institutional opening to the modern world: more than three decades later, in the 1870's, the codifier of Hungarian penal law, Charles Csemegi, still included references to Livingston in support of his own proposals.46 Coincidentally, it was the same Edward Livingston who, as President Jackson's Secretary of State attempted to reorganize the American foreign service and issued a set of overdue unified instructions to consular officers, 47 advised the first United States envoy to Belgium to regard Brussels as

44 Pal Pandi, "Kisértetjóràs" Magyarorszàgon ("Visitation By G h o s t s " in Hungary), 2 vols. (Budapest, 1972), I, 90-92, 100-102, 128, 131, 148, 151, 277, 294, 375 396 520 n.47, 558; II, 9, 15, 391. 45 Paul Body, Joseph Eötvös and the Modernization of Hungary, 1840-1870 (Philadelphia, 1972), p. 27. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, vol 62, pt. 2. 46 Béla K. Kiràly, Ferenc Deàk (Boston, 1975), pp. 87, 206 n.27; Franz, Das Amerikabild der deutschen Revolution, passim; Torvényalkotàsunk höskora (The Heroic Age of Our Legislative Work) (Budapest, 1935), pp. 143-50,158-69; Ferenc Pulszky, Életem és korom (My life and Age), 2d ed., 2 vols. (Budapest, 1884), 1, 141-49; Dezsö Markus, ed., Magyar jogi lexikon (Hungarian Legal Lexicon), 6 vols. (Budapest, 1898-1907), V 281. 47 John W. Rooney, Jr., Belgian-American Diplomatic and Consular Relations 18301850 (Louvain, 1969), pp. 16-19, 230-33.

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a listening post for Central and Eastern Europe and that the State Department would like for him to report, also, about all political and economic developments from that area which might effect the welfare of the United States, its citizens, or specifically its commercial policy. 48

In asking a hesitant Senate to confirm his appointment of H.S. Legaré as chargé d'affaires to the King of the Belgians, Livingston argued, that he acted In conformity with the settled policy of our country to consider all Governments as rightful, which were established, de facto, with the choice or acquiescence of the nation, and because it was thought advisable to have such agents in every country to which an advantageous trade may be carried on... 49

Indicating that the independence of Belgium which came about as a result of the July Revolution in France and the Belgian national upheaval had already been accepted-by the four principal powers of Europe and the Netherlands, Livingston's statement was less radical than would seem at first glance. For despite American condemnation of the partition of Poland, hostility toward the Holy Alliance, support of the struggle of the Latin American Spanish colonies for independence, and admiration for the Greek war of liberation, 50 United States foreign policy was pragmatically cautious, especially vis-à-vis Central and Eastern Europe. Aside from its single most important principle of "non-entanglement," its conduct was influenced primarily by the commercial interests of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Austria was the last among the great powers with which diplomatic relations were formally established in 1819; but the first Treaty of Commerce and Navigation was signed only ten years later while the appointment of the first American minister plenipotentiary to Vienna had to wait for almost another decade. Moreover, the first two American envoys, Henry A. Muhlenberg and Daniel Jenifer found it difficult to fulfill their main task i.e. to increase the export of American tobacco because tobacco monopoly was an indispensable source of revenue to the Austrian treasury. In addition, American diplomatic 48

Ibid., pp.252; 58-59. Cited ibid., pp. 52-54. 50 For further references, see Dan Berindei and Frederick Kellogg, "The Opening of Diplomatic Relations Between the United States of America and the States of Europe," paper presented at the session "L'Europe et les Etats-Unis d'Amérique," CISH, San Francisco, August 23, 1975, p. 2 passim. 49

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and consular agents were suspected of subversive political motives in spite of the fact that they were inclined to interpret rather narrowly what John Adams called the propagation of "the Ideas of the Liberty of Navigation and Commerce." According to a report sent by the American chargé to Brussels in 1832, monarchic Europe was still "filled with hope and joy" at the appearance of signs of danger over the "république modèle," and seven years later, Muhlenberg, too, noted T h e prejudices e v i d e n t l y e x i s t i n g against u s as R e p u b l i c a n s , I will not say w i t h t h e Imperial F a m i l y or t h e Prince M e t t e r n i c h , but w i t h t h e d i p l o m a t i c corps generally and t h e great m a s s c o n n e c t e d w i t h and d e p e n d a n t u p o n t h e Court and w h o s e i n f l u e n c e is o v e r p o w e r i n g . . . 51

Yet although the first two rather conservative ministers plenipotentiary to Vienna "labored to counteract" such "prejudices," Metternich and the Austrian authorities did not permit the contemplated extension of consular and commercial representation in the Habsburg lands despite the somewhat precipitate appointment of a prominent Hungarian businessman by the Department of State as first American consul to Pest in 1840. Preventing the strengthening of official ties with Hungary for political reasons, naturally, could not bloc the spread of ideas. Limited as though the realistic possibilities for increase in trade with the United States may have been, the doctrines of Frederick List, along with his impressions of America spread among Hungarians through the German-American author's writings as well as live personal contacts with him. 52 More significant perhaps than intended tariff protection and boycott of Austrian goods that were bound to fail was the continued appearance of travel accounts about Western Europe as well as America in the wake of Bôlôni's work, and an outpouring of publicistic and belletristic literature focusing on the United States. Undoubtedly, a sizable portion of this literature was Utopian; critical reviews of the more extreme pieces, however, reminded the reader that America was not only a Canaan but also a land of hard la51 John Adams to Robert Livingston, July 14, 1783. Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774-89 (Numbered Series, M247), Roll 112, "Item" 84, Vol. 4, p. 468. Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Rooney, Belgian American Diplomatic and Consular Relations, p. 62; George Barany, "The Interest of the United States in Central Europe: Appointment of the First American Consul to Hungary," Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, XLVII (1962), 282 passim . See also the same author's "The Opening of the Hungarian Diet in 1843: A Contemporary American Account," Journal of Central European Affairs, XXII (1962), 153-60. 52 Pulszky, Eletem es korom, I, 142; PandT; Kisertetjaras Magyarorszagon, I, 164-66 passim.

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bor. On the whole, this eminently educational literature on America during the 1840's showed that the United States became an ideal for liberal politicians, economic reformers, and all those who wished to gain useful knowledge about a democratic way of life.53 The increased number of original and translated books on the United States and the teaching of the events of the American War of Independence, especially in Protestant schools, provided more information to a younger generation of noble and non-noble intellectuals whose political and socio-economic aspirations found guidance and inspiration in the model of an idealized democratic American republic.54 The idol of these younger liberals, willing to initiate more radical reforms than those contemplated by Széchenyi, was Kossuth, the leading publicist and politician of the 1840's. As a young county politician and editor of the Dietal and subsequently Municipal Reports, Kossuth belonged to those who thought that "it was not enough to praise Washington, Lafayette, Bolivar and the Poles with words they ought to be followed with deeds according to our abilities."55 As Gyôrgy Szabad says, "everything that appears in the reports about the U.S.A. characterizes not only the speakers of the Diet, but also Kossuth, who selectively included their arguments." This holds true for Wesselényi's recurrent reference to "the young giant of America," too, a phrase which Kossuth later often used in his speeches made in the United States.56 Kossuth's views on the criteria of economic autonomy and development also reflected appreciation of the American colonists' anti-British struggle for economic independence. 57 The second great wave of the "America fever" in East Central Europe crested in 1848-1849, during the Kossuth-led Hungarian War of Independence against the Habsburg Dynasty. To be sure, American constitutional ideas, taken from the constitution of Texas, were incorporated, along with passages from the French constitution of 1791 and 53 Ibid., 1,485 n.5,520 n.47 ; Lukinich, "American Democracy As Seen By the Hungarians of the Age of Reform," pp. 279-81. 54 Gál, "Széchenyi and the U.S.A.," pp. 97-98; Gyôrgy Szabad, "Kossuth on the Political System of the United States of America," Etudes Historiques Hongroises 1975 publiées à l'occasion du XlVe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques par la Commission Nationale des Historiens Hongrois, 2 vols. (Budapest, 1975), I, 503-504. 55 István Barta, A flatal Kossuth (The Young Kossuth) (Budapest, 1966), p. 102. 56 Szabad, "Kossuth on the Political System of the USA," pp. 505-508. 57 Ibid., pp. 510-11 ; Domokos Kosáry, "Kossuth Lajos harca a feudális és gyarmati elnyomás ellen" (Louis Kossuth's Struggle Against the Feudal and Colonial Oppression), Emlékkônyv Kossuth Lajos születésének 150. évfordulójára (Memorial on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of Louis Kossuth), 2 vols. (Budapest, 1952), I, 28.

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1793, into the draft of a Bill of Rights submitted by the Czech deputy Frantisek L.Rieger to the Imperial Parliament in Vienna. Rieger's proposal is significant because it extended the principle of equal individual rights to the safeguarding of national rights, 58 a characteristic feature of the adjustment of eighteenth century Western constitutionalism in the East European context, manifest perhaps in other underdeveloped areas as well. Yet the Czech Revolution of 1848 was crushed before long, and some of its reverberations attributable to the American "image" were felt only later. Vojta Naprstek, a Czech patriot, for instance, who emigrated to North America, returned to Bohemia after the fall of the neoabsolutistic regime of Alexander Bach to become the founder of an ethnographic museum in Prague and a champion of other progressive causes including the emancipation of women. Other Czech "forty-eighters" were active on the American scene: an example is the freethinking Augustinian poet-philosopher Frantisek M. Klacel, who became the editor of the Czech language paper Slovan Amerikansky (American Slav) in Iowa City, Iowa. Cultural contacts, too, developed. The Czech matica established an exchange program with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. in 1849 while its Slovenian counterpart in Ljubljana (Laibach) followed the example in the 1860's.59 In Hungary, events took a different turn. In March and April of 1848, upon the collapse of the old order in revolutionary Vienna and Pest, there were anti-Jewish mob actions fomented largely by German burghers in Pest and Pressburg (Pozsony, Bratislava), seat of the Diet, and other parts of the country. Some Jews intended to organize a mass exodus to the United States whose "most liberal constitution is world famous" and where "we shall escape humiliation and oppression even if we shall have to face a thousand natural hardships." But the excesses were soon brought under control by the liberal elite of politicians, students and, above all, writers and poets 60 : the annus mirabilis witnessed in Hungary, like in the German speaking areas of Europe where the American constitution was published in many German edi58 Stanley Z. Pech, The Czech Revolution of1848 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), pp. 21214, 340. " Ibid., pp. 324 and n.17,329; Stanley B. Kimball, TheAustro- Slav Revival: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Literary Foundations (Philadelphia, 1973), pp. 38 and n.20,34-35 and n.16, 47 n.16, 70 and n.17. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, vol. 63, pt. 4. 60 George Barany, "Magyar Jew or: Jewish Magyar"? (To the Question of Jewish Assimilation in Hungary)," Canadian-American Slavic Studies, VIII (1974), 21-26.

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tions, 61 an effort aimed at the "reception" of American revolutionary constitutionalism. In late May, 1848, three months before the final break with Austria, the full text of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States appeared in a new Hungarian translation, and less than a year later, Kossuth wrote his own Declaration which deprived the House of Habsburg from its right to rule over Hungary." This declaration, rooted in and adapted to Hungarian historic reality, also contained important elements of the American Declaration of Independence. Indeed contemporaries both during and after the Revolution of 1848-49 often cited the American example 63 : in submitting his proposal to dethrone the House of Habsburg-Lorraine on April 14, 1849, Kossuth himself referred to the "word with which other nations began their fight for freedom declaring their will not to remain slaves." 64 As early as November, 1848, Kossuth asked for the mediation of William H. Stiles, American Chargé d'Affaires at the imperial court ; indeed the United States which opened diplomatic relations with the Frankfurt Parliament was also ready to recognize Kossuth's revolutionary regime just before its defeat at the hand of the joint Russian-Austrian forces.65 Yet after the defeat of Hungary's war 61 In addition to works cited in note 30, see also Gunter Moltmann, "Amerikanische Beiträge zur deutschen Verfassungsdiskussion 1848," Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, XII (1967), 206-26; Berindei-Kellogg, " T h e Opening of Diplomatic Relations Between the United States of America and the States of Europe." p. 7, also stresses the strengthening of German-American economic ties. For Austrian and German interest in American railroad construction and other aspects of technological progress, cf. Adam Wandruszka, " A n Austrian Officer in the United States: Charles Moering and Elizabeth Carroll Tucker," in Winters and Held, eds., Intellectual and Social Developments in the Habsburg Empire, pp. 170-71. 62 M.J. Fraenkel, publisher, Az Amerikai Egyesiilt Stâtusoknak Fiiggetlenségi-Nyilatkozata és Alkotmânya (The Declaration of Independence and Constitution of The United States of America; Eger, 1848); Imre Révész, "Kossuth és a Függetlensegi Nyilatkozat" (Kossuth and the Declaration of Independence), Emlékkonyv Kossuth sziiletésének, I, 421, 435-40 and passim ; Kronstädter Zeitung , May 10, 14 and 17, lead articles on p. 1 "Der 4. Juli 1776 und der 14. April 1849"; for a contemporary English translation of the Hungarian Declaration of Independence, see William H. Stiles, Austria in 1848-49, 2 vols. (New York, 1952), II, 409-19. 63 Istvân Gâl, Magyarorszâg, Anglia és Amerika (Hungary, England, and America) (Budapest,n.b. [1944], p. 163. 64 Istvân Barta, ed., Kossuth Lajos as Orszâgos Honvédelmi Bizottmâny élén (Louis Kossuth At the Head of the National Committee for the Defense of the Fatherland), Pt. II (Budapest, 1953), 881 and n. 1. Kossuth Lajos Összes Munkâi (The Collected Works of Louis Kossuth), XIV. 65 Ibid., Pt. I, 566 and notes 1 and 2, Kossuth Lajos Összes Munkâi, XIII;Sândor SziIassy, "America and the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49," The Slavonic and East European Review, XLIV (1966), 180-96.

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for national independence when Kossuth tried to get a commitment from Washington during his visit to the United States to support another Hungarian uprising, his efforts were in vain. The caveat issued by him which Professor Morris quotes, 66 namely, that it was America's destiny "to become the cornerstone of Liberty on earth" and that should it ever "lose the consciousness of this destiny, that moment would be just so surely the beginning of America's decline," failed to convince Americans of the need to intervene in European affairs to maintain the principle of nonintervention. 67 Still, revolutionary myths die hard. Greatness in revolutions, and human achievements in general, is often in the eyes of both the uninitiated and trained beholder rather than inherent in the so-called laws of history as Marxist-Leninist writers would have it. Serious historians in the West do not attempt to "prove the 'superiority' of the American type of revolution" as a Soviet author has claimed recently,68 nor is there justification by any scholarly standards to attach the epithet "great" exclusively to the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian October Revolution of 1917. According to the Preface of the Hungarian publisher of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution written in the Vôlker/ruhling of 1848, "The French nation, destined by the power of both its ideas and material wealth to rule over the peoples of Europe, was the first to grasp the internal greatness of the American Constitution." But the work of the "champions of liberty, the noble Lafayette and heroic Kosciusko" was "cruelly trampled under foot by a vainglorious tyrant" who deprived the world of the "desired fruits nipped in the bud." Rejecting both the bloodbaths of the French revolutionary period and the tyranny of the "Corsican genius," republican democrats in Hungary published the text of the American Declaration and Constitution as a guideline for action69 because the balanced and yet democratic features of the American "model" appealed to their humanitarianism and because they assumed that by following the example of the United States their own revolution might achieve success. Popular resolutions such as the ones supported by Abraham Lincoln in September, 1849, and January, 1852, suggest that Hungarian admiration for America was reciprocat66 67

Morris, The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution, p.XI. John H. Komlos, Louis Kossuth in America, 1851-1852 (Buffalo, N.Y., 1973), pas-

sim. " A.A.Fursenko, "The American and French Revolutions Compared: The View from the U.S.S.R.," The William and Mary Quarterly, XXXIII (1976), 481 passim. " Fraenkel, Az Amerikai Egyesiilt Stâtusoknak, pp. 4-6, 9-10.

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ed by many Americans who felt that human freedom was indivisible and that the United States did have an interest in East Central Europe.70 The key to the understanding of the American appeal and echo in East Central Europe in the nineteenth century and our own is, of course, the appreciation of personal and national liberty, and admittedly, the two virtues seldom went hand in hand in that part of the world. Metternich knew what he was talking about when he proposed from his London exile that troublemakers should be banished from Austria to America; 71 this was the medicine Prussian authorities administered to Polish refugees who were deported during the 1830's to the United States as a punishment for their support of the November Insurrection against Russia. 72 But writing in his self-imposed banishment at the Dóbling asylum, Széchenyi, always conscious of the yet unfulfilled promise of the much admired American Revolution, compared his fatherland's fate with that of the Black man upon reading the novel of Harriet Beecher-Stowe: "The poor Hungarian is an outlaw even if he is given amnesty and is not persecuted and hunted as is so beautifully depicted in Uncle Tom's book ... because everything described there perfectly applies to Hungary." 73 Not unlike patriotic Poles such as Kollataj or Wegierski, Széchenyi, Boloni Farkas and other Hungarians refused to ignore that part of the American experience which troubled their conscience. Identifying with the oppressed in the United States and their own fatherland, they analyzed certain aspects of the human condition in accordance with the concrete historical situation in which they lived and which they desired to change. Thus sympathy with the misery of the American Negro and Indian reflected both sincere compassion and the pursuit of political ends. In the case of Széchenyi, his bitter sarcasm was directed against Bach's neoabsolutistic regime which in his view managed to reduce the status of Hungarians to that of slaves. It was an

70

Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. ( N e w Brunswick, N.J., 1953-55), II, 6, 115-16. See also Merle Curti, "Austria and the United States, 1848-1852," Smith College Studies in History, XI (1926), 139-206, and Arthur May, Contemporary American Opinion of the Mid-Century Revolutions in Central Europe (Philadelphia, 1927). 71 Komlos. Louis Kossuth in America, p. 47 n.72. 72 M. Kukiel, Czartoryski and European Unity 1770-1861 (Princeton, N.J., 1955), p. 210. 7J

Cited by Gäl, "Szechenyi and the U . S . A . , " p. 115.

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irony of history that his son, Béla, who smuggled Széchenyi's satirical writings to London where he arranged for their anonymus publication, should visit the land of his father's dreams in the midst of a Civil War which according to the older Széchenyi's opinion expressed in 1858 could not happen for many years due to "the golden freedom in America and the unprecedented progress of the states of the Union." 74 In this context, two remarks concerning Béla Széchenyi's journey in the United States may be appropriate. One is related to the influence exerted by the American Constitution on the Hungarian laws and institutions created in 1848 to which the passage cited at the end of Professor Kiràly's chapter refers. Béla Széchenyi may have slightly, perhaps even subconsciously, overstated the immediacy and magnitude of this impact because Hungary's confrontation with the dynasty was far from over, and he intended to forge political arguments his compatriots could use in the forthcoming contest of wills with Francis Joseph. This is also the reason for his warning according to which laws alone cannot guarantee good government, especially if office holders do not care about those whom they are supposed to govern: "The great advantage of American institutions consists undoubtedly of having placed a greater number of people into a more favorable position." Stressing that the crisis of the Civil War constituted an extraordinary situation which was not brought about by the issue of slavery alone but also by disagreement over economic issues such as tariff legislation, Béla Széchenyi intended to present an object lesson which would have to be carefully and continually studied as implied by the reference to the previous generation's study of American institutions. 75 Unfortunately, and this is the second remark that seems pertinent, there is little evidence to show that the younger Széchenyi's advice was taken to heart in the Era of Compromise which opened just four 74 Ein Blick auf den anonymen "Rückblick" (London, 1859), in Gröf Szechenyi Istvän döblingi irodalmi hagyateka (Count Stephen Szechenyi's Posthumus Papers of Döbling), eds. Ärpäd Kärolyi and Vilmos Tolnai, 3 vols. (Budapest, 1921-25), III, 489. Gröf Szechenyi Istvän Összes Munkäi (The Collected Works of Count Stephen Szechenyi), IX. 75 SzAU, pp. 8-16. It is not without interest that the planned multivolume history of the Hungarian declarations of independence of which only the first volume containing documents was published in 1935 opened with a new translation of the American Declaration of Independence. Ballai, A magyarfuggetlensegi nyilatkozatok törtenete, I, 1-9.

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years after the appearance of his book. While sophisticated Hungarian political propaganda was skillful at using American constitutional practices and even revolutionary ideas for promoting its own aims by the middle of the nineteenth century, the Rumanians of Transylvania who, as intimated by their Supplex Libellus Valachorum addressed to Leopold II in 1791, may also have been influenced by the precedent setting events in America, 76 continued to be discriminated against by the Magyars while in the Danubian Provinces the deeds of Washington and writings of Franklin still seemed to be useful weapons, at least in allegorical form, on the eve of the liberation from under Ottoman rule.77 If Hungarian statesmen of the nineteenth century such as Count Albert Apponyi, the first foreign dignitary after Kossuth who was invited to address the United States Congress (1911)78 remembered what they learned about American ideals as Apponyi must have, they failed to apply them to the non-Magyar nationalities or, for that matter, to Hungarian peasants. Rumanians and some other nations of East Central Europe, too, felt the strong impulse of the Enlightenment only toward the middle of the nineteenth century due to the peculiarities of the historic evolution of their society. In the initial phase of the process of modernization, they consequently had to assimilate "all at once the currents of Western thought that had accumulated untouched, so to speak, during decades of backwardness." 79 In the case of the Rumanians, the stimuli of the American Revolution and the Enlightenment were felt with an even greater phase delay than that experienced by the Magyars compared to the Poles; further differentiation may be necessary, in spite of multiple contacts, between Transylvanian Rumanians and 76

D.Prodan, Supplex Libellus Valachorum (Bucharest, 1971), pp.290-91, 295-96. Paul Cernovodeanu, "First Echoes of the War of Independence and of the Early History of the United States in the Romanian Countries," Nouvelles Etudes d'Histoire publiées à l'occasion du XlVe Congrès des Sciences Historiques, San Francisco, 1975 (Bucharest, 1975), pp. 231-39. For the significance of the opening of the first United States Consulate in Galatz in 1857 and of the 1859 draft of a Romanian-American treaty for trade and navigation never ratified but important as an indicator of efforts to bolster Romanian autonomy and economic emancipation from the Ottoman Empire by relying, indirectly, on the United States, see Sergiu Columbeanu, "The Romanian Principalities and World Sea Traffic after the Adrianople Treaty (1829). The Beginnings of Romanian-American Maritime Relations," ibid., pp. 241-46. 78 Komlos, Louis Kossuth in America, p. 105 n.43. 79 Keith Hitchins, "The Sacred Cult of Nationality : Rumanian Intellectuals and the Church in Transylvania, 1834-69," in Winters and Feld, eds., Intellectual and Social Developments in the Habsburg Empire from Maria Theresa to World War /, p. 137. 77

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their brethren under continued Ottoman rule. Moreover, the "telescoping" of political, economic, and cultural crosscurrents into a later but nevertheless single historic period does not make it any easier for those affected by them or the historian to disentangle them. This is particularly true in the age of masses when due to the spread of popular education, greater demographic mobility, and increased political participation often per se contradictory historic phenomena tend to merge. All this, naturally, brings us to the era of the "new immigration" in American history which, as has been pointed out, brought millions of people from Central and East Europe to the United States. What their perception of America was has also been often analyzed. For one, as Jerzy Jedlicki said recently, "the concept of America embraced all those things missing at home." He is right that the main function of this massive migration has been, in a sense, compensation, and that the torch of the New York Statue of Liberty was a powerful symbol in attracting "the huddled masses yearning to breathe free." 80 We also know, beyond the manifold reasons for emigration to the United States, that the new American citizens made substantial contributions to their adoptive country, although there is need for further research in both areas. But whereas the majority of these East Central Europeans ultimately became American citizens, the rate of repatriation among some groups such as the Magyars and Slovaks, was much higher than the European average which was around one third of all immigrants. Yet we know very little about the considerable investments and attitudes of those who returned to the old country except that they must have been very significant both in economic and sociological terms since most emigrants were peasants whose character, in the language used by a Congressional report, underwent important changes while in the United States. This change was bound to bring about a potentially revolutionizing impact on their outlook at domestic conditions upon their repeated visits or eventual return to their native country. 81 It is not sufficiently known to what an extent massive emigration from East Central Europe to the United States prior to World War I may have contributed to the revolutionizing of the

80

Jedlicki, "Images of America," pp. 27, 35. George Barany, "An Uncompromising Compromise," The Austrian History Yearbook, III Pt. 1 (1967), pp. 247-59; Emigration Conditions in Europe, Sen. Doc. no. 748, 61st Cong. 3d. Sess. (Washington, 1911), pp. 41, 388. 81

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masses in the old country, although we know of course about the respective roles played by American Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Southern Slavs in the formative years of an independent East Central Europe between the two world wars.82 The role of revolutionary and revolutionized masses in a multi-national area such as East Central Europe can be only touched upon because its discussion would lead us far beyond the scope of the present work. In a challenging paper, Eric Hobsbawn has been critical of the unsatisfactory stage of our relevant comparative studies since they are not based on comparable knowledge or satisfactory criteria of comparability.83 To this warning, one may add Cyril Black's, namely, that one of the difficulties "faced by students of Communist revolutions is to distinguish between spontaneous and imposed revolutions and between these two categories of succesful revolutions and those that have failed." 84 The "messages" of the revolutionary upheavals in Poland and Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, tend to indicate that these broader questions ought not to be neglected in our investigation of the perceptions of America and what it stands for in East Central Europe. From the revolutionizing impact of the discovery of the "New World" on travellers to the American continent, and through them, on European educational and scientific literature between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries of which Professor Svejkovsky writes, we have come a long way. The basic goal of the late eighteenth century American and French revolutions as originally conceived, as well as those revolutionary movements which prior to World War I attempted to follow the pattern initiated by them, was to secure the individual citizen's rights against state omnipotence, and the human dignity and improved economic and social wellbeing of an ever growing number of people through the democratization of the political process. In the liberal revolutions of East Central Europe, for instance in 1848, pursuite of this goal was parallelled by the endeavor to achieve independent nationhood; indeed, it was chiefly through the attain12

See the relevant chapters in Joseph O'Grady, ed., The Immigrants' Influence on Wilson's Peace Policies (Univ. of Kentucky, 1967) and Vasile Netea, "Romanians in America up to 1918," Nouvelles Etudes d'Histoire, pp. 262-67. " Eric Hobsbawm, "Revolution," report presented at the session "Revolution," CISH, August 25, 1975, San Francisco. ,4 Thomas T. Hammond, ed., The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers, Foreword by Cyril E. Black (New Haven, 1975), p. XIV.

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ment of the second aim that the first appeared to be feasible or even desirable to patriots inspired by the spirit of liberal nationalism. The American revolutionary appeal which preceded the French was subsequently overshadowed by it due to the latter's more radical social ramifications and the realities of geography; in the long run, however, the similarities of the two revolutions appear to have turned into a historic factor promoting, jointly, egalitarianism in traditional and hierarchically structured societies. Moreover, the anti-colonial aspects of the American Revolutionary War continued to fire the imagination of national leaders even while the French revolutionary legacy was overcast by the shadow of Napoleon, and discredited by his defeat. The success of the American Revolution, attributed primarily to its moderation, appealed to liberal reformers precisely because of the political stability to which it presumably led. The perception of the flexibility of the American system seemed to be reinforced, when economic prosperity attracted and absorbed a massive influx of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe by the turn of the century. Last but not least, the voice of Wilson, "appealing for a new Europe in terms of pure eighteenth century ideas," 85 was heard in East Central Europe, too: in fact, the American President helped Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Rumanians, and Southern Slavs realize the old dreams of national self-determination of the nineteenth century, often, to be sure, at the expense of the formerly dominating Germans and Magyars. But the Wilsonian appeal for a new democratic order in East Central Europe had to compete, at the very outset, with the new communist order advocated by Lenin, and to yield, in the course of the next twenty years, to the onslaught of fascist ideologies. Whether or not "Wilson's doctrines were first defeated by the superior convincing power of opposing philosophies" rather than a combination of numerous geopolitical circumstances and authoritarian traditions, it is true that the rise to power of totalitarian regimes in East Central Europe which was achieved by violence, found "sufficient support in every stratum of the population so that they could use violence effectively." 86 Still, the anti-liberal nihilistic mass revolutions and counter-revolutions that obtained since 1917 appear to have run their course, at least

85 86

Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago-London, 1975), p. 18. Ibid., p. 19.

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in East Central Europe. As Michael Polanyi says, "Writers in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia have been trying to find a place for the morally responsible individual within the Marxian conception of history." In the Soviet Union, too, the fight of Soviet intellectuals for truth signalizes that a historic change may be in the making. The rejection of political expediency as the only criterion of truth by dissident communist intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe is not a restoration of the belief in the so-called self-evident truths of the Enlightenment. But it intimates, significantly, a return to the moral value of the freedom of truth, so deeply embedded in the English, American, and French revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as the heritage of nineteenth-century continental liberalism.87 In view of the differential which has characterized the assimilation of American ideas in various parts of Central and Eastern Europe, it would be improper to look for any direct let alone causal connections between trends germinating in the Soviet "orbit" and the existence of an idealized American "model" representing some sort of a counterweight to corrupt Communist rule. As an East German Marxist historian has pointed out recently, it is difficult to apply generalizations derived from European revolutionary "models" or criteria of 1789 or 1848 to Latin American reality; Professor Kossok's references to revolutionary and counter-revolutionary guerillas, the uncertainties of the relationship between military might and revolutionary dictatorship, conservative revolutions and revolutions from above contain, mutatis mutandis, instructive lessons for the student of East Central European affairs. Reflecting both oversimplification and confusion, the very terminology we use to describe interlocking complex historic phenomena of the twentieth century may mislead rather than explain at a time when the Soviet brand of communism is decried as "revisionism" and "social imperialism" by its Chinese counterpart, and when peasant revolutionaries such as the followers of the Bulgarian Alexander Stamboliiskii, labelled as reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries in the 1920's, are "re-evaluated" as democratic agrarian revolutionaries in official party literature. 88 Likewise, the ambivalence 87 Ibid., pp. 14-18, 23-27; Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, edited by Marjorie Green (Chicago-London, 1969), pp. 12-39. For further references to the literature dealing with the problem of truth and history, see George Barany, "The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth," the 1976 University Lecture (Denver, Colo., 1976). 88 Manfred Kossok, ed., Studien iiber die Revolution, 2d ed; (Berlin, 1971), pp. 211, 222-25,229-30; Hristo Hristov el a!., ed.,Sotsialisticheskata Revolutsiia vB'lgariia (The Socialist Revolution in Bulgaria; Sofia, 1965), pp. 17-18.

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of shifting popular forces in Hungary during 1918-1919 or in Germany during the early 1930's defies the simplistic labelling of the political behavior of urban and rural masses in turmoil. The same holds true for the rebels of East Berlin in 1953, of Poland and Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Far from being counter-revolutionaries in the sense as had been the Fascists of the 1920's and 1930's, these revolutionary democrats if not socialists rose against the tyranny of authoritarian communism to restore political democracy and respect for the conscience of the individual. In doing so, they acted in harmony with the highest ideals of the American and French revolutionary tradition. To what an extent such action was conscious or subconscious, only further research can tell. Such further investigation may also have to ponder the effect exerted retroactively by the current crisis of the United States body politic on the American image and echo in our area of concern. The information contained in the present volume has attempted to show a great variety of penetration and surviving ability of the American revolutionary appeal in East Central Europe. If it has also demonstrated the desirability for explorations in additional directions, the endeavors of the authors will not have been in vain.

B I O G R A P H I E S OF T H E C O N T R I B U T O R S

B I O G R A P H I E S OF THE C O N T R I B U T O R S

GEORGE BARANY, Ph.D., is Professor of History and University Lecturer (1975-76), University of Denver. M.A., Ph.D. University of Colorado. Author: Stephen Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, 1791-1841 (Princeton, 1968); Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle, 1969); Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918 (Vienna, 1975).

PAULA SUTTER FICHTNER, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History,

Brooklyn College, City University of New York. B.A., Bryn Mawr College; M.A., Indiana University; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Author: "The Politics of Honor: Renaissance Chivalry and Habsburg Dynasticism," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 1967; "Dynasticism and Its Limitations : The Habsburgs in Hungary, 1542," East European Quarterly, 1971 ; "Dynastic Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Habsburg Diplomacy and Statecraft: An Interdisciplinary Approach," The American Historical Review, 1976. BÉLA K.KIRÂLY, Ph.D., is Professor of History, Brooklyn College and Graduate School, City University of New York. Ludovika Military Academy, Budapest; War Academy, Budapest; M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University. Author: Hungary's Army under the Soviet (Tokyo, 1958) ; Hungary in the Late Eighteenth Century : The Decline of Enlightened Despotism (New York, 1969); Ferenc Deâk (Boston, 1975). Editor: Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe (New York, 1975). EUGENE KUSIELEWICZ , Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History, St. John's University. B.A., St. John's College; M.A. Ph.D., Fordham University. Contributor to New Catholic Encyclopedia and Catholic Encyclopedia.

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ALFRED A. REISCH, Ph.D., is a Research Analyst at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. L. es Sc. Pol., University of Geneva; Ph.D., Columbia University. Author: The Influence of the American Political Model on the Hungarian Age of Reform, 1831-1848 (Boulder, Colo., forthcoming) and various area studies. JOSEPH ROTHSCHILD, D.Phil., is Professor of Government, Columbia University. A.B., A.M., Columbia University; D.Phil., Oxford University. Author: The Communist Party of Bulgaria: Origins and Development, 1883-1936 (New York, 1959); Communist Eastern Europe (New York, 1964); Pihudski's Coup d'Etat (New York, 1966); East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle, 1974). Co-Editor: Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, 3rd ed. (New York, 1960); Chapters in Western Civilization, 3rd ed. (New York, 1961). FRANTISEK SVEJKOVSKY, P h . D , is P r o f e s s o r o f C z e c h a n d S l o v a k L i t -

erature, University of Chicago. Ph.D., Slavic Literature and Aesthetics; formerly Professor of Older Czech Literature, Charles University, Prague. Author: History of the Humanistic Literature in Bohemia and Moravia (Prague, 1959), History of Old Czech Drama: Latin and Latin-Czech Plays about the Tree Maries (Prague, 1966); History of the Theatre in Bohemia: From the Beginning to the 16th Century (Prague, 1968); "Theoretical Poetics in the Twentieth Century", Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 12 (The Hague and Paris, 1974). IRENE M.SOKOL, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, N.J. B.A., Hunter College, City University of New York; M.A., Bryn Mawr College; Ph.D., Institute of History, University of Warsaw. Author: "The American Revolution and Poland: A Bibliographical Essay," The Polish Review, XII (1967), No. 3, 3-17; '"Gazeta Warszawska' a Rewolucja Amerykanska, 17741776" [The Warsaw Gazette and the American Revolution, 17741776], Archiwum Historii Filozofii i Mysli Spotecnej [Archives of the History of Philosophy and Social Thought], XVII (1971), 109-137.