CHAPTER 5

SLAVIC EFFORTS BEFORE WORLD WAR I

In the preceding chapters, dealing with the gradual development of an intellectual interest in Slavic questions, we have largely ignored the activity of Slavic groups in the United States. This was deliberate, for the early stages of Slavic study were almost completely apart from the work of the Slavs themselves and involved only those persons who had come to the United States and achieved prominence or success outside of their own communities and background.

These early Slavic efforts could make little imprint upon the American public, for the first steps were taken under most adverse conditions. The Slavic masses were composed for the most part of the underprivileged groups who had come to America in the hope of working for a few years and then returning. Later they became American citizens, but until 1914 a surprising percentage of the Slavs had not taken out citizenship papers.

For their self-protection and mutual advantage these masses had formed their own churches and fraternal organizations. There were in the nineteenth century many difficulties to be encountered by each and the communities lived apart with relatively little social or political contact with the rest of the population.

As entire families began to settle, their children were compelled to attend the American public schools where instruction was given only in English. It was not long before the preservation of their native languages became a burning question, to be acted on by the establishment of language schools held outside of regular school hours, in the late afternoons, evenings and on Saturdays. For example, the first Czech school was founded in 1862 by the _Slovanska Lipa_ Society of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1864, the first Czech schools were established in Chicago and, in 1866, in New York. The example of the Czechs was followed later by the Poles, the Slovaks, the Croatians, the Serbs and the Ukrainians.

These schools were conducted by the best educated men or women in the community, though this did not of necessity mean much. Classes were usually held in the building of a church or other organization, but sometimes in private homes or in public school buildings, the use of which was given free by the American school authorities. The textbooks were inadequate, often being those which the teacher had studied years before in the home country. Sometimes they were heavily laden with political propaganda, as were the books prepared for the Carpathian population by the Hungarian government which exercised a considerable influence through the Greek Catholic priests who were Magyaron in tendency as a result of their early upbringing. The situation was made worse by the fact that the schools in the homelands were themselves unsatisfactory, either in the hands of the alien rulers or the products of the vague stirrings of the population to secure their own more or less illegal schools.[28]

Despite all this, these schools did achieve some success but not enough to be regarded as a satisfactory solution of the problem. Life in America, even with its lack of legal barriers or restraints, was unfavorable to active continuation of a foreign tongue. The contrast between these impromptu courses and the developing American school system was too striking to escape the attention of the pupils in the two types of schools as well as the more intelligent leaders of the community. In addition to this, these schools failed to give the students an adequate picture of the progress that their relatives at home were making.

The Roman Catholic schools were gradually remodelled on the normal parochial school system. The teachers were, for the most part, nuns and brothers from orders working among a particular national group. Their quality of teaching was often quite low but the Church schools did enjoy the possibility of incorporating the innovations which were coming into the parochial schools. Thus as the parochial schools were improved, so were the foreign schools under Church auspices.

In the Orthodox and Catholic Uniat Churches, such instruction was usually given by the dyak or cantor, a layman who superintended the choirs and took a part in the services. These men had some education but little training in teaching and their efforts were largely directed along the same lines as in their homelands.

The Protestant and anti-clerical groups endeavored to find competent laymen. These stressed the holding of classes in some lay building or on the property of some secular organization.

As early as 1881, a journal in Johnson County, Iowa, the _Slovan Americky_, started a campaign to raise money for a Czech college in America. The newspaper believed that it could accomplish its purpose if it succeeded in raising $20,000. The proposal, being launched by a single newspaper, did not secure the support of rival papers and the entire enterprise was dropped as a failure.[29]

Out of this chaotic and thoroughly unsatisfactory situation two tendencies became evident just before World War I. Those Catholic schools which had acquired some stability and organization began to take the shape of the other parochial schools and where there was sufficient demand and a sufficient concentration of worshippers, they began to approximate the parochial high schools and then to pass over to be two or three year colleges. The work of these was still not of high calibre but the leaders were constantly striving to make them so. Thus, the Czech Benedictines founded a school in Chicago in 1887. This passed through the usual changes and after its removal to Lisle, Illinois, in 1901 it was reorganized as St. Procopius College, now a duly accredited Catholic institution. St. Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, with a marked emphasis on Slovak, is another of these institutions.

We find the same activity among the Poles. St. Mary’s Seminary, Orchard Lake, Michigan, early included Polish in its curriculum, as did St. Francis Seminary, Milwaukee. Various religious orders have long conducted courses in the Polish language on the high school level in various centers of population. The Polish Roman Catholic Union, with its library, was highly developed by Mieczyslaw Haiman, especially in publishing studies of the career of such Polish soldiers in the United States as Tadeusz Kosciuszko and the other Poles who fought in the American Revolution. The Polish Historical Society also has done outstanding work. All these represent the natural development of the Poles and their descendants in America, and deserve more than passing mention.

At the turn of the century, the fraternal organizations also began to give the question of schools due consideration. Almost all appointed committees on education and they too decided that the primary need was the foundation of special colleges where instruction could be given in the language of the homeland. Thus, in 1902 there was formed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, an institution, _Matice Vyssoho Vzdelani_, a center of higher studies, by Bohumil Simek and G. F. Severa to work for the establishment of a Czech college, but it also met with no success.

In 1903, the Polish National Alliance also created a committee on education and schools, which worked for ten years and then in 1912, at Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, opened the Polish National Alliance College which was incorporated in 1914. Although it was rather on the level of a high school, it profited by the opportunity to establish a branch of the Student Army Training Corps during World War I. Its first rector was Professor Romuald Piatkowski. In 1915, the work of the high school or academy was augmented by the foundation of a Technical Institute. It was in this status that the institution passed into the next general period.[30]

Other forces were at work, however, to preserve the native languages by introducing the Slavic languages into the already established American institutions. While the motives were varied the efforts were made first by the less clerical and the more Protestant parts of the population. Thus, in 1887, the Congregational Church in Ohio persuaded the authorities of Oberlin College at Oberlin, Ohio[31] to introduce a course in Czech for candidates to the Congregational ministry who would minister to the Czech communities. Professor Louis F. Miskovsky was appointed instructor, and his became the first chair of Slavic studies in an American institution. Oberlin’s program differed from the later attempts at Harvard and elsewhere in that it was frankly intended only to teach the language. Any Slavic cultural work in a broader sense was insignificant. It is small wonder then that on Professor Miskovsky’s death in the 1920’s, the chair was quickly abandoned and the money used for a course of lectures on Central European affairs given by Professor Oskar Jaszy, a liberal Hungarian who opposed both Communism and the regime of Admiral Horthy.

In somewhat the same way, and for the same purpose, instruction in the Polish language was introduced into Notre Dame University in 1909.

Efforts to include a Slavic language, usually Czech, in the curricula of state and private colleges were particularly intense in Nebraska and Iowa.[32] In these states, the Czech population had been among the earliest settlers; many had prospered and secured appointive and elective posts in the state governments, which gave them the opportunity to work for the introduction of their native language into various institutions.

In 1903, Professor Bohumil Simek of the University of Iowa and F. J. Pipal, a student of the University of Nebraska, established at Lincoln the first of the Komensky Educational Clubs. These clubs were intended to unite the Czech-Americans who had some education. The movement, which included plans for building a monument to the Czech educator Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius), spread extensively and finally included twenty-nine societies, chiefly in the states of Nebraska and Iowa, although there were some in Texas, Chicago and New York. For a while this loosely knit organization was even able to publish a periodical bulletin.[33]

These clubs petitioned at once for the establishment of Czech language courses at the University of Nebraska. Although the request was turned down on the ground that there was a lack of interest in such a project among the Czechs, a new attempt was made during the winter of 1906–07. John Rosicky, an outstanding publisher of Czech newspapers in Nebraska, and Vaclav Bures, both of Omaha, met the Regents of the state university along with Frank Rejcha, a member of the Nebraska legislature. The Chancellor of the university, in refusing the request, proposed a political deal whereby a tax of one mill would be laid on certain railroad properties and earmarked for the university. By clever lobbying, the Czechs secured passage for the bill. Then the Governor of the state cut the grants to the university and the Chancellor again declined to set up a Slavonic department. Later the same summer, however, another request was more successful and courses were started in the fall of 1907.

The first instructor was Jeffrey Dolezal Hrbek, a graduate of Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, and, at the time, a student in the University of Iowa. He was appointed head of the new Department of Slavonic and instructor in the Germanic languages and literatures. Unfortunately Hrbek, a young man of great promise, became ill and died on December 4, 1907.

He was succeeded by his sister Sarka B. Hrbkova, who graduated from the University of Iowa in 1909 and received an M.A. from Nebraska in 1914. Under her period of teaching, the department flourished. In 1910 she was named adjunct professor; in 1914, an assistant professor; and in 1918, she became a full professor. She was also very active during the war in various aspects of Czech-American relations.

During World War I, the outburst against the use of German spread in Nebraska to all foreign languages. The courses in the university were dropped and the department was abolished, while Professor Hrbkova moved to New York and became the manager of the Czechoslovak Section of the Foreign Language Information Service, ancestor of the Common Council for American Unity. The outburst was even worse against Czech courses in the lower schools and in 1919 the so-called Siman Bill provided that “no person, individually or as a teacher, shall, in any private, denominational, parochial or public school, teach any subject to any person in any language other than the English language.” This was made more stringent in 1921 but in 1923, the measures were declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court.

In the meantime, the break in the university courses was less prolonged. In 1919–20, during the meeting of the State Constitutional Convention, two members of Czech origin raised the question of a renewal of the courses. After negotiations, the teaching of Czech was renewed in the autumn of 1920 under Professor Orin Stepanek. Stepanek, a native of Nebraska, received his A.B. from the University of Nebraska in 1913 and an A.M. from Harvard in 1914. After service in the U.S. Marine Corps he returned to Harvard and then went to serve under General Snejdarek on the Magyar frontier. After this, he returned to Nebraska and there became Assistant Professor of English. While there, he was also giving courses in Czech and Russian under the auspices of the Department of Modern Language and, later, of Romance Languages.

We have stressed the history of the establishment of Slavic work at the University of Nebraska because the Czechs were sufficiently numerous and influential to be able to reach the university authorities and the state legislature. More than that, they were persistent and finally succeeded in securing recognition. Yet in its way, the same type of politics, in addition to formal applications, was going on with various degrees of success in many different places.

At about the same time, Czech was included in the University of Iowa where Miss Anna Heyberger conducted the work. Still later she changed to Coe College at Cedar Rapids where she became Professor of French and took a doctorate, with a dissertation on the Czech educator Jan Amos Comenius, at the University of Paris. Alois Barta was then giving instructions at Dubuque College and Seminary. For a while before World War I, B. Prokosch gave courses in Czech at the University of Wisconsin and Leon Zelenka Lerando at Ohio State University but more lasting results were obtained by Mr. Charles Knizek at the University of Texas, where Czech has continued almost without a break since its introduction.[34] At this time, still other developments, largely connected with the various churches, were ensuing. For example, Reverend Andrew Slabey was appointed to the International Baptist Seminary in Montclair, New Jersey, an institution greatly concerned with training clergymen for missionary work among various non-English groups and extensively staffed for such foreign languages as Slovak, Ukrainian and Hungarian. On the other hand, the Russian Orthodox Archbishop of the Aleutian Islands and North America established a small Russian seminary at Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was later moved to Tenafly, New Jersey, and its head was Reverend Leonid Turkevich, the present Archbishop Leonty of the Russian Orthodox Church in North America.

We could extend this list even further, but the institutions at this period cared for little more than the giving of elementary instruction in a Slavic language, usually either Czech or Polish. The period witnessed the publication of a considerable number of elementary grammars, dictionaries and readers. Many of these were not of high quality but they did reflect the growing maturity of the various Slavic communities and their efforts to secure the introduction of their languages into the curricula of American institutions. Furthermore, at this period, it was rare that any person in one of these smaller state institutions could secure a post exclusively in Slavic studies. The best and most scholarly were compelled to carry almost a full load in some other subject. But the mere fact that this was possible accents the increasing number of young Slavs who were securing college and university educations. The situation was still not healthy but at the beginning of World War I it was by no means as hopeless as it had seemed earlier.