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Volume 10: Annemarie Steidl/Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier/James W. Oberly From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations

From a Multiethnic Empire
to a Nation of Nations

Disintegrated, Unbalanced and Supplanted:
The History of Austro-Hungarians in the US

3. From Austria-Hungary to the United States.
A Short Trans-National History of Ethno-Nationalism

4. Gender, Generations, Languages: Who Were the Migrants from Austria-Hungary?

6. To Marry Out or Not. Marriage Patterns of US-Migrants from Austria-Hungary

7. Earning, Saving and Remitting Money. The Economic Behavior of Austro-Hungarian Migrants

The Human Capital of the Migrants:
Basic Literacy and the Seeking of Information

Preface

Bernard Bailyn, the great historian of American colonial immigration, taught a course at Harvard University with Stephan Thernstrom on “The Peopling of America.”¹ In his lectures Bailyn used the metaphor of acting as an observer of Central European migration trends in the 17^th and 18^th centuries from a satellite hovering over the German lands. He noted that such a distant observer would see lots of Germans on the move – some between territories of the Holy Roman Empire, some moving to the Eastern frontiers, some migrating to Western Europe, and others moving across the Atlantic Ocean to America.

The Austrian Annemarie Steidl, the German Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and the American James Oberly, the three authors of this study on migration from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, make a similar observation without using the satellite bird’s eye perspective. The peoples of the Habsburg Monarchy often first migrated within the empire to find better job opportunities and seeking a better life. Many, however, made the bold step and crossed the Atlantic, too. In fact, some 3,7 million migrants from the Habsburg Monarchy came across the Atlantic between 1880 and 1914 (altogether 4 million from 1819–1910); in the first decade of the 20^th century, migrants from Austria-Hungary were the largest group among immigrants to the U.S., with some 1,7 million migrants from the Habsburg Monarchy coming to the United States; constituting almost 28 percent of the immigrant population during this decade, this was the largest cohort of immigrants. Based on careful demographic studies both of Austrian and Hungarian sources, as well as American immigration and extensive shipping records, these numbers are the best approximations we are ever bound to get.

The “new immigrants” coming after 1880 were mostly Slavs (South Slavs, Poles, Slovaks, Ukrainians), and Hungarians and settled in the booming big industrial cities of the East and Midwest, providing cheap labor for industrializing America; before that time, most migrants to America from the Habsburg lands had been Bohemians going to the agricultural frontiers in the West, Germans (from Vorarlberg and Tyrol), and Jews.

The trio of authors quickly insist, however, that they are not writing a traditional history of e/immigration to the United States. Their focus is the transatlantic migration of these masses of people, which often included multiple crossings of the Atlantic, almost like seasonal laborers. A considerable number of these “transnational people” were interested in return migration – 40 percent of return migrants make this number much higher than one would expect. In other words, they did not conceive of their migration to America as a move to the “promised land,” as American exceptionalism would have it. Rather, these migrants came to work for a few years in back-breaking yet well-paying industrial jobs, only to return to the olden country, buy a piece of land, and live happily ever after.

Our three authors are not so much interested in the assimilation and acculturation of these migrants but rather how “identity managers” within their communities tried to help them maintain their traditional old world identities in the new world. The “Americanization” process of these migrants, then, was slow and twisted and took three generations to accomplish, if they stayed in the U.S. While our authors are interested in upward mobility, there is no talk about making it into the “middle class” (traditionally the end point of immigrants in achieving the “American dream”).

The mass of these diverse migrants from the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy were “sojourner workers” and changed jobs often, when working for the gigantic American steel and car corporations. They were thinking humans and did not want to do the work of mindless “oxen” as American managers had envisioned for them. They lost jobs often during economic slumps in the boom-and-bust American economy. The second generation might make it “from-rags-to-respectability” but few advanced “from-rags-to-riches.” Most sent much of the money earned in the U.S. back to their families as remittances.

Our authors utilize the massive data of modern quantitative research methods to follow marriage patterns among migrants from the Habsburg Monarchy. They find that in the first and even second generation (“cohort”) few married outside their traditional ethnic and religious groups. Only in the third generation did half of them marry Americans and people outside their group. Jews married Jews, Czechs married Czechs, etc. – you get the idea.

Previous scholarship on immigrants to the United States from the late Habsburg Monarchy and post-World War I Austria, had been methodologically less sophisticated. In 1968 the American cultural diplomat E. Wilder Spaulding, who worked in the U.S. Embassy in Vienna for many years, presented a broad analysis of (German-)Austrian immigration to the United States from the first Salzburgers who came to Georgia in the 1730s to the large Jewish exodus in the World War II era. He was mainly interested in the “pull factors” – what brought Austrians to the U.S.? Spaulding was very interested in the rapid assimilation into American society of these Austrians. He argued that in general they were educated and learned English quickly and therefore became Americans easily. Austrians tended not to associate in fraternal societies and never formed a strong ethnic lobby to pressure Congress on behalf of Austrian issues. He concluded: “they constituted – quite unlike so many other peoples who came here to shout the achievements of their homelands and of their compatriots from the housetop – the quiet immigration.”² Based on Austrian records and shipping records, Johann Chmelar has studied the emigration from Austria-Hungary from 1900 to the eve of World War I. His is a traditional study of statistical/demographic analysis, isolating especially the “push” factors that made poor people from agricultural Galicia and Dalmatia look for better opportunities in the new world.³ Such scholarship is often comparative with various ethnic groups from the late Danubian Monarchy being juxtaposed in their experiences in America.⁴

We have studies characterizing the local factors that contributed to the emigration to the U.S. of people from individual states (Bundesländer), like the Vorarlbergers, Carinthians, or Burgenländers.⁵ Particularly the cohort of Burgenländers leaving their impoverished province newly attached to Austria after World War I has attracted considerable scholarly attention.⁶ The most vigorous scholarship on Austrian “migrants” to the United States has been the field of Jewish refugees that left Austria or were expelled from Austria during the Nazi period/the World War II era. This scholarship is often very detailed in terms of the specific groups of refugees that were kicked out of Austria after the March 1938 “Anschluss” and the scholarly and artistic contributions they made to the American society.⁷ The Vienna historian of science Friedrich Stadler has made rich contributions in this field as a scholar and scholarly manager of research and organizer of conferences.⁸ The scholarship on the ”scientific emigration” is also very sophisticated in its methodologies. The Graz sociologist Christian Fleck has authored two major monographs on the exodus of well-known social scientists and economists from Austria, as well as the international aid societies that often helped these scholars find new places “to establish” themselves in new work places in Great Britain and the United States.⁹ In his latest book he has also touched upon individual life stories to map out the difficult terrain for refugee scholars to find a footing in the new world. Such individual biographies of well-known Austrian immigrants present a more complex and diffuse picture of the migration process – some failed, while others succeeded.¹⁰ Individual immigrant lives have even generated major full-fledged biographies.¹¹

Nicole M. Phelps recently has penned a major study of U.S. relations with the Habsburg Empire from 1815 to 1918. While her study focusses on diplomatic relations, her two chapters on consular relations frequently deal with migration issues. As migration from the Habsburg crown lands increased to the U.S. in the late 19^th century, so did return migration. American consuls in Austria soon had to deal with the protection of American citizens who returned to their native lands. Some were arrested for crimes they had committed before their emigration, many others were pressed by Habsburg authorities into military service, especially on the eve of, and during, World War I. American consuls often grappled with citizenship issues, especially the problems of dual citizenship. As travelling became cheaper and more comfortable, thousands of emigrants from the Monarchy returned to their native lands for business or personal reasons. She concludes her study with a devastating critique of Woodrow Wilson’s diplomacy towards the Dual Monarchy during World War I and calls the Wilson administration the “gravediggers of the Habsburg Monarchy.”¹² World War I indeed was the turning point in Austrian(-Hungarian) migration to the U.S. as new American quota laws passed by Congress after the war ended the era of mass migration to the United States as this study suggests too. We note that considerable scholarly attention has been given to Austrian migrant cohorts and individuals coming to the U.S. Yet this scholarship is often in far flung places and never has been fully integrated into a major study like this one.

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1 Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction, New York 1986; idem, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution, New York 1986.

2 E. Wilder Spaulding, The Quiet Invaders: The Story of the Austrian Impact upon America, Vienna 1968, 1.

3 Johann Chmelar, The Austrian Emigration, 1900–1914, in: Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., Dislocation and Emigration: The Social Background of American Immigration (Perspectives in American History 7), Cambridge, MA 1973, 275–378. This is a version of his 1972 University of Vienna dissertation “Die Auswanderung aus dem im Reichrsrat vertreteten Königreichen und Ländern in den Jahren 1905–1914.”

4 Walter Hölbling and Reinhold Wagnleitner, eds., The European Emigrant Experience in the U.S.A. (Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 5), Tübingen 1992.

5 Meinrad Pichler, Auswanderer: Von Vorarlberg in die USA 1800–1938, Bregenz 1993. In the case of Carinthians and Burgenländers, the publications were exhibition catalogues, see Werner Koroschitz, ed., Der Onkel aus Amerika – Aufbruch in eine neue Welt, Villach 2006, and … nach Amerika (Burgenländische Forschungen IX), Eisenstadt 1992.

6 Walter Dumjovits, Die Amerikawanderung der Burgenländer, Stegersbach 1975 (3^rd rev. ed.), Güssing 2012; Philipp L. Strobl, ‘Too Little to Live and too Much to Die’: The Burgenländers’ Immigration to the United States during the Interwar Period (MA thesis), University of New Orleans 2010, now published in an expanded German edition, idem, “… um der Notlage dieser Tage zu entfliehen”: Amerikawanderung der Zwischenkriegszeit, Wien 2015.

7 Günter Bischof, Austria’s Loss – America’s Gain: Finis Austriae – The “Anschluss” and the Expulsion/ Migration of Jewish Austrians to the U.S., in: idem, Relationships/Beziehungsgeschichten: Austria and the United States in the Twentieth Century (TRANSATLANTICA 4), Innsbruck 2014, 57–82.

8 Friedrich Stadler, ed., Vertriebene Vernunft I: Emigration und Exil österreichischer Wissenschaft 1930–1940, Vienna 1987; idem, ed., Vertriebene Vernunft II: Emigration und Exil österreichischer Wissenschaft, Vienna 1988; see also Peter Weibel and Friedrich Stadler, eds., Vertreibung der Vernunft: The Cultural Exodus from Austria, Vienna 1993.

9 Christian Fleck, Transatlantische Bereicherungen: Zur Erfindung der empirischen Sozialforschung, Frankfurt 2007; idem, Etablierung in der Fremde: Vertriebene Wissenschaftler in den USA nach 1933, Frankfurt 2015.

10 While the case studies of Edgar Zilsel and Gustav Ichheiser ended in failure and suicide, Paul Lazarsfeld and Josef Schumpeter had spectacular academic careers at Columbia and Harvard Universities, see Fleck, Etablierung in der Fremde, 251–400.

11 Thomas McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, Cambridge, MA 2007.

12 Nicole M. Phelps, U.S. Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sovereignty Transformed, Cambridge 2013, 219–220.

Foreword

This book presents the findings of an ambitious research project undertaken by a team of three historians from Central Europe and the United States to examine the demographic, social, and cultural consequences of migration – both within the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy and in the United States, where many settled – during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is already a large scholarly literature of great value on European migration in that era and on its impact, but most studies have employed research strategies which compartmentalized migrants either by language, religion or culture or by migration strategies, such as permanent settlement, asylum-seeking or temporary labor migration. Often, too, historians, have treated the social and economic impacts of migration apart from its cultural and political consequences or examined change only in the sending or the receiving society. Similarly, evidence of individual migrant life experiences has been analyzed apart from the demographic record. Inevitably, discussions of individual lives have privileged politically or intellectually prominent migrants, whose relation to the much larger group of labor migrants is assumed to have existed but still poorly described or understood. The separation of studies of internal migrations within Europe, emigration from Europe and immigration into the United States has been particularly pronounced. While scholars have long recognized the phenomenon of return migration, few have attempted to compare the social and cultural impacts of migration for those who returned with the experiences of those who stayed in their new locales. Because this book follows so many of the migratory pathways of the diverse and mobile peoples who lived within the Habsburg Empire and because it consciously utilizes a mix of methodologies – from collective biography and cultural studies to demography – it can offer both new insights and a more holistic model for the study of migration.

The authors acknowledge the importance of national histories in the Central European successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy and of the migration experience of the respective national groups such as Austro-German, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, or Jewish while refusing to analyze the migration of these groups in isolation from each other. By drawing all groups into their analysis the authors are able to break a strong prevailing assumption that anyone who spoke a particular Central European language or dialect thereof or who conformed to the majority religion for that language group belonged ipso facto to the corresponding national group. This book instead shows how individuals’ regional, ethnic, and national identifications and their sense of patriotism or loyalty to any state remained changeable, even when national states attempted to fix their identities with stable categories, for example through national censuses. The authors also provide some powerful examples of how particular leaders sought, often in their own interests, to stabilize migrants’ identifications into fixed national, ethnic or religious categories.

Compartmentalization within research and historiography of the diverse migrations within and out of Habsburg Central Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has encouraged the writing of national – indeed, often nationalist – histories that have in turn led to fundamental misreadings or ignorance of key dimensions of migrants’ experiences. This volume goes a long way to correcting and supplementing nationalist histories of nation-building and essentialist readings of immigrant ethnicity in the United States. Differences in the migration experiences of people with the same native language, religion, and regional origin are at the center of the authors’ analysis in this book, allowing readers to appreciate both the fragility of national and ethnic identifications and the considerable ideological and material labor required to construct nations and ethnic groups and to make them appear as natural or primordial.

Conducting research on migration in a way that could surpass the limitations of fragmented historiographies was no easy undertaking but required collaborative research and team work even in writing this book. The authors were themselves a diverse group: Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier is a native of Bavaria settled in Austria, James Oberly is an American and Annemarie Steidl an Austrian.

From the outset, the research team committed themselves to studying the migration experience of people who moved within Central Europe together with those who moved away from Central Europe across the Atlantic and also those who returned again. They have examined social, and cultural outcomes of migration, such as migrants’ formation of social solidarities and the construction of community and national loyalties alongside occupational change and the demographic impacts of migration, be it the effects on marriage patterns, birthrates, family structures, or work responsibilities in families. All along the way, they consider the effects of gender and age differences among the migrants. In the process, the research team traces systematically the comparisons and contrasts in the experiences of migrants with differing native languages, religions, and regional origins.

The results of the study presented in this book offer important new understandings of the social, economic, and cultural impacts of migration both within and from Habsburg Central Europe during the era of massive movement between the 1870s and the era of World War I. Among the most interesting is the authors’ finding that migrants developed new solidarities and new cultural and political loyalties and identities through processes which were based on communication and relationships which often crossed both the Atlantic and conventional national dividing lines. The processes and their outcomes were thus transatlantic and transnational in the truest sense. The work of editors, writers, religious leaders, businessmen – and others whom the authors label as “identity managers” – reveals the construction of nations and of ethnic groups and the malleability of migrant identities and allows the authors to develop original, clear and grounded portraits of change in migrant identity.

Gary B. Cohen	Donna R. Gabaccia
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Former director, Center for Austrian Studies	University of Toronto Former director, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota

Acknowledgments

We need to thank those who have made possible the research, writing, and publication of this book. The Center for Austrian Studies (CAS) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, launched the project in collaboration with the University’s Immigration History Research Center (IHRC). Those centers, along with the Minnesota Population Center (MPC), provided the research team with access to critical research materials and specialized expertise as well as working space. Generous grant support from the Dietrich W. Botstiber Foundation funded research stays in North America for Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier and Annemarie Steidl and a research leave from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire for James Oberly. This grant also provided the publication support to the StudienVerlag. A Botstiber grant to Center Austria, the Austrian Marshall Plan Center of European Studies at the University of New Orleans (UNO), helped finance the final copy editing of the manuscript.

Gary Cohen, the former director of the Center for Austrian Studies in Minneapolis, served as project manager for the team’s research, writing, and revisions. Later on, interim director Klaas van der Sanden always had an open ear for the research group. Daniel Pinkerton, the Center’s editor, helped the project along the way. Our special thanks go to the staff of the Immigration History Research Center for their invaluable assistance; Donna Gabaccia, its director at the time, served as a mentor to the authors, and Haven Hawley, in particular, shared her expertise on archives and media production in general and in detail. We thank the curators Daniel Nečas and Sara Wakefield for many inspiring conversations and for assisting with our endless calls for archival boxes full of valuable material that went into this book. The Minnesota Population Center provided office and meeting space for the project, and the extremely helpful staff and experts there assisted the group in making use of the IPUMS-USA datasets that are such an important source for this book. Director Steve Ruggles and Associate Director Catherine Fitch welcomed the project team to the use of MPC resources. The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire provided leave time to co-author Oberly to work on the project.

The authors relied on the book, periodical, newspaper, and microform collections of the University of Minnesota Libraries for much of their primary and secondary research. We would also like to thank the archival and library staff of all the historical research institutions that provided documents for our use: the Minnesota State Archive and the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, the Senator John Heinz History Center, the University Library Archive and the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, and the staff at the Diocesan Archive in Chicago, Illinois. The people of the Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka in the St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Pennsylvania gave us a tour of this unique structure and provided us with childhood stories from its former community. Last but not least, we thank Burris P. Esplen at the Diocesan Archive in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Philip Deloria at the Iron Range Center in Chisholm, Minnesota, for welcoming us to the center and explaining the collection and the archives, and Father Kristin Petrovich of the St. George Serbian Orthodox Church in Duluth, Minnesota, for exploring the buildings and the history of this church with us. Joel Brady of the University of Pittsburgh shared his rich expertise on the Greek Catholics of the region, Rachel Batch at Widener University (Philadelphia) provided us with her insights on US labor history and on Louis Adamic, and Marina Antić (now at Indiana University) introduced us to Slavic Pittsburgh and to the national rooms in the University of Pittsburgh’s ‘Cathedral of Learning,’ which include Austrian and Hungarian rooms among others.

Parts of From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations have been presented at various forums on the campus at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, sponsored by CAS, by the IHRC, by MPC; at the Center Austria at the University of New Orleans; at North American meetings of the American Historical Association and the Social Science History Association; at the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison; at the World Economic History Congress in South Africa; and at European meetings held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the Vienna University of Economics and Business as well as Osnabrück University. At these public forums, comments and questions helped us form and sharpen this book’s arguments. A very special word of thanks goes to Suzanne Sinke for her most helpful comments on marriage and migration.

Günter Bischof, the editor of the book series Transatlantica at StudienVerlag, and his colleagues at the press and CenterAustria at the University of New Orleans shepherded the book through the publication progress with careful attention. We would also like to thank the team of the StudienVerlag in Innsbruck for their help in publishing a complicated manuscript with numerous tables and graphs. Their stylistic and substantive suggestions assisted us greatly. The research team, together with Gary Cohen and Donna Gabaccia, are profoundly grateful to all of them. We owe a special thanks to Inge Fink of UNO’s English Department for rendering a particularly valuable service in bringing the prose of three different authors into readable form. At the Botstiber Foundation in Media, Pennsylvania, Terrance A. Kline, Carlie Numi, and Valerie Arapis have all been gracious in awarding and administering the grants to the Austrian Centers in Minneapolis and New Orleans. Siegfried Beer of Graz, Austria, now the director of the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, was instrumental in initially building bridges between the Bostiber Foundation and the two Austrian Centers in the United States. And, of course, the Botstiber Foundation would not exist without the extraordinary generosity of Dietrich W. Botstiber, a very successful Austrian immigrant to the US in the late 1930s, in establishing the Foundation as a tribute to the historic relationship between Austria and the United States.¹ Without such excellent support from all these persons and institutions, it would not have been possible to launch this project or to bring it to completion. We alone, of course, remain responsible for the factual details and the interpretations presented in our book.

Annemarie Steidl
Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier
James W. Oberly

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1 On Dietrich W. Botstiber, see his volume of memoirs Not on the Mayflower, Philadelphia 2010.

1. Introduction

In June 1884, a young migrant from Austria-Hungary reached Ellis Island. He would become the most illustrious migrant from Austria-Hungary in the United States ever. In 1894, he was called “our foremost electrician” and “greater even than Edison”.¹ Later in 1924, he was described as “the electrical wizard whose discoveries paved the way for this radio age”.² Present-day American narratives treat him as one of the most spectacular inventors.³ In Serb national narratives, he is known as a Serb genius beyond the Atlantic. He is remembered as the American Serb who has made one of the most important contributions to US history and to the American way of life. He has become a legendary figure in contemporary popular culture and conspiracy theories. His biographers use words like “wizard”, “Prometheus”, “giant” with “lightning in his hand”, a “prodigal genius”, “hero of technology”, a “man who changed the world” or even “the man who invented the 20^th century”.⁴ This is the story of Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), the inventor of an AC induction motor and an important innovator in the development of radio communication, who was notorious for his high-frequency and x-ray experiments and his pronouncements about wireless transmission. Why is he not remembered as the former citizen of Austria-Hungary that he was? Why is he not being seen in the context of the economic, social, political, and cultural environment from where he came? Did Tesla’s self-marketing strategies prevent his identification with his origins? Had he been an anti-Habsburg nationalist who wanted people to forget his background? Did US assimilationists, technical progressivists, Serb nationalists, new age obscurantists exploit him? All this might be true. However, one thing is for sure: Without the dismantlement of Austria-Hungary in 1918, all these narratives would have taken a different course.

In that respect, Nikola Tesla was a symptomatic figure for what happened to all migrants from Austria-Hungary in the United States. One can argue that the disappearance of this vast empire in 1919, did, in the long run, take something away from millions of migrants from these lands: their historical context. What happened to Nikola Tesla happened to all other ex-Habsburg migrants as well, regardless of whether they came from Smiljan in Dalmatia like Tesla, from Chernivtsi/ Czernowitz in Galicia, from Bludenz in Vorarlberg, from České Budějovice/Budweis in Moravia, from Maramureş/Máramaros County, Timiş/Tamiš/Temes County or Sopron/Ödenburg County in Hungary. All these migrants alike participated in narratives of Croatian national destiny, or Slovene national destiny, German national destiny, Polish national destiny, Jewish national destiny, and so forth, or of course again in the narrative of the American dream and the American way of life. Many overlooked that these migrants shared a cultural, political-historical, and socio-economic context.

Disintegrated, Unbalanced and Supplanted:
The History of Austro-Hungarians in the US

Today, the history of Austro-Hungarian migrants in the United States seems to have disintegrated; links and connections of migrants from the same regions and the same state are lost in historiography. What happens when one puts these links together again? The historical memory seems to be unbalanced in the social sense. While certain prominent migrants are privileged, the larger mass, if they are visible at all, appears only in ethnically exclusive accounts or are mentioned as laudable exceptions. What happens if one includes the migrant masses from Austria-Hungary in the memory of Austro-Hungarian transatlantic migration? In addition, the memory of these migrants seems to have been supplanted by a nationalist and romantic self-perception on the one hand, and exotic and romantic stereotypes on the other. What happens if one looks behind the movie scenery of films like The Prisoner of Zenda or Luis Trenker’s Prodigal Son?⁵

Researchers are particularly troubled by the imbalances in the historical accounts. An emphasis on outstanding migrants before WWI, who were not representative of this migration, overshadowed the large numbers of Austro-Hungarian migrants who appear only episodically in US history. To be sure, this is true for migrants before World War I. After the war and during the Nazi era, the conditions and the social outlook of migrants from the former Austro-Hungarian lands were, of course, completely different. In our consideration of the imbalances in memory of the pre-WWI migrants, we could enumerate endless examples from the historical narratives of US Poles, Hungarians, Slovenes, Ruthenians and so on. Let us proceed from the Tesla case and take US-Serb self-representations as an example. There is for instance the narrative about Judge George Fisher (1795–1873), originally Djordje Šagić, who had been a Serb settler-pioneer in Mexico/Texas in the 1850s. Another popular narrative about American Serbs is the one on Mihajlo Pupin, born in Banat, Hungary in 1858, who made a career as a physicist and physical chemist and who was central in the development of the long-distance telephone system. A different kind of fame was that of Aleksa Mandušić or Jake Allex, born 1887 in Prizren, in the Ottoman Empire. He received the Medal of Honor because he alone killed five enemy soldiers in melée combat and took fifteen German prisoners in World War I. US Serbs also made their mark in sports history, for instance Bill Radovich, born in Chicago in 1915, who went down in football history as the first player to sue the National Football League.⁶ Other war heroes were Mihajlo Pejić or Mitchell Paige. Paige received the Medal of Honor in World War II for his bloody and spectacular combat actions at the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942. Serbs also contributed to the arts in the US, for instance the author Charles Dušan Simić, who was born in Belgrade in 1936. He arrived as a refugee after WWII and is still active as a writer of English essays and poems, and as translator of Serbian literature. All these narratives are clearly integration stories, integration into the American pioneer saga, the American pantheon of technical inventions and progress, stories of bravery and revenge in World War I and II, and in the annals of US sports history, popular cinema, and contemporary literature.⁷

We question the representativeness of these narratives for Serbs who came to the USA, and in a similar way we would question such narratives about other ethnicities. The people in all these examples were immigrants and settlers, not return migrants, not short-time migrants. At a closer look, the heroes of these narratives are very diverse, but nevertheless, they are indiscriminately put alongside each other. Judge Fisher is atypical because he arrived in the States at a time when transatlantic migration was not popular among other Serbs. Tesla, Pupin and Mandušić/ Alex are hardly comparable because the former two were from Austria-Hungary, while the latter originated in the Ottoman Empire. Most of these heroes belonged to the small number of highly-trained Serb career migrants, while only war and sports heroes such as Paige and Radovich were typical labor migrants.

Turning this argument around, most Serb migrants, like all other Austro-Hungarians did not fit into the immigrant-farmer-settler image: They hoped for industrial jobs, hard labor in mines and logging camps; they worked on fields and in factories, and often they stayed only temporarily. They can be characterized as rural-urban return migrants. When we look at the prominent Serbs mentioned above, we see some children of these second-wave labor migrants. WWII hero Mitchell Paige was born in 1918 in the small coal and steel town Charleroi, Pennsylvania. Mike Kreevich, born in 1910 in the small coal-mining town Mount Olive, Illinois, worked in the mines for five years before he began his baseball career. When we look at examples like these, it seems that their only chance to make a career in the US was to use their bodies to win victories in sports and for Uncle Sam. And wasn’t it also tough bodywork that brought forward actors such as Brad Dexter (The Magnificent Seven), born as Veljko Soso in Nevada in 1917, who initially earned his money as an amateur boxer?⁸

Most Austro-Hungarian migrants did hard and dangerous industrial work in the States, and many of their stories are narratives of migrants who got killed in the workplace. In the Smith Mine disaster of 1943 in Bear Creek, Montana, 77 people were buried under the rubble of the exploded coal mine. One of them was Sam Barovich, born in 1885 in ‘Yugoslavia’; the US census recorded his mother tongue as Slovenian. The same goes for Frank Mourich, born around 1901. Both were clearly from Carniola or another Slovene speaking province of Austria-Hungary. Frank Painich was born in Montana, but his parents were registered as Slovenian speakers, too. These are only three examples of Slovenes, along with the Czechs from Bohemia, Poles from Galicia, Serbs from Dalmatia who died in this disaster.⁹ Of course, mine disasters did not occur daily. However, the every-day history of mining was a catastrophe in itself. A look into a random Pennsylvanian coalmine reveals the price labor migrants had to pay. A memorial site for the coal miners who worked the Charleroi Mines No. 1 and 2, lists 53 names of injured or killed workers in alphabetical order, including 21 Hungarians, Slavonians,¹⁰ Croatians, and Austrians, such as “Armaskey, John (Slavonian Miner, […] Back injured by a fall of slate, […] Sept. 15, 1903” or “Yenovich, Mike (Slavonian Miner, […] Instantly killed by a fall of slate at the face of a pillar while knocking down coal, […] Jan. 12, 1917)”.¹¹

Thus far, US society has not always treated migrants from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as ‘respectable’ people. In most cases, the Habsburg Monarchy (and the Russian Empire) were regarded as the origin of the Slav Invasion.¹² Migrants from Austria-Hungary were described as Bohunks, Slavs, Huns, Hunyaks, or Hunkies, and sometimes even as Dagos. They ranked on the lowest social level in the US discourse on European migrants. The racial status of many of these migrants was debated as well.¹³ Native-born white Americans considered Austro-Hungarians as politically suspicious, along with other migrants from Italy and Russia. On the one hand, people from the Habsburg Monarchy were reputed to be troublemakers because of the disputed ethnic projects in their homeland. For instance, Russian-Hungarian quarrels over the Greek Catholic Church were acted out in Pittsburgh, and anti-Habsburg propaganda of Czech nationalists in Chicago put the US in an uncomfortable position in foreign relations.¹⁴ In contrast, thousands of Austrians and Hungarians who had not sought US citizenship turned into enemy aliens (even if they were anti-Austrian or anti-Hungarian in political orientation) when the US declared war on Austria-Hungary in December 1917. In addition, Austro-Hungarians were suspected to be potentially pro-socialist. The editor of the Amerikanski Srbobran (American Serb-Defender) told an American Federation of Labor commission in 1919 that the Serb workers he had met were pro-Bolshevik.¹⁵ Amelia Sablich (1908–1994) became known as ‘Flaming Milka’, the symbolic figure of the Columbine coal strike of 1927 and a national left-wing celebrity,¹⁶ Milka being a Slavic female nickname. It seems that whatever the Austro-Hungarian migrants did was wrong, at least in the eyes of the old-line US-born Americans. Whether they acted for or against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, whether they ignored the American dream, and saved money not to spend in America, but to finance families at home and a return home, or whether they engaged in the improvement of life in America, they were regarded with suspicion.

The memory of Austro-Hungarian migrants is unbalanced. Exceptional examples were overemphasized while the more typical labor migrants found entry into American history only as amorphous masses or as segregated nationalities. How can we create a more balanced account about migrants from Austria-Hungary? Our research team was fascinated with the multifaceted world of migrants, which differed much from images stored in our minds about Austrians and North America. These were images of Czech brass bands in Texas, Hedy Lamarr and Billy Wilder in Hollywood, as well as intellectual refugees from the Nazi regime. And let us not forget the von Trapp family and the famous movie The Sound of Music.¹⁷ Of course, we were suspicious of such images; nevertheless, visits in US archives changed these pictures and left us deeply impressed. Would these initial impressions about Austro-Hungarian migrants’ socioeconomic position prove right? Was this a phenomenon that affected only specific groups from the Monarchy? Were other ethnic groups better off than the Serbs? How did the migrants deal with these images? How did they organize? How did they respond to the negative stereotypes about them? What was the character of their cultural activities if they had such few resources? And did the migrants escape their apparently disadvantaged situation in the long run?

When the three authors of this book first met, it was clear that we did not want to construct a nostalgic multicultural counter-narrative to already existing national narratives. Our goal was to rediscover the links between those very migrants of the past. We wanted to take the stories of these migrants out of their ethno-national boxes and reevaluate them in the context of the historical period. Therefore, we opened up national narratives and used a comparative method. Our goal was to reintegrate historical perceptions of Austro-Hungarian migrants. The most striking discoveries of our detailed analysis were the impressive agency of many migrants, be they leading figures or not, and the force of the major transformations around and during WWI that was the historical watershed in the history of these migrants. In his memoirs, Andrew Devich, an eighty years old Minnesota miner from Dalmatia told his grandchildren in 1976:

Many of us immigrants didn’t want to enter the army [in 1917] as we would have to go and fight in Europe with the possibility of killing our own fathers and brothers. After a short time, the sheriff came to the mine and took eight of us to the Duluth jail for not joining the army. […] There we stayed in jail for three months. […] But once we got to Duluth there was no trial and all we did was sign papers to go to work back at the mines for the war effort.¹⁸

Apart from being in stark contrast to heroic WWI narratives like the one cited above on Aleksa Mandušić, such documents represent Austro-Hungarian migrants not as victims of economic misfortune, but rather as people with a clear goal in their minds. The resistance by Devich and his fellows to stay in jail for three months and not to yield, impressed us. We were also surprised by several fully functional non-English public spheres in the US with thousands of newspapers and magazines that existed for several decades. The enormous vitality of the foreign language press convinced us that the melting pot metaphor must have been rather a propaganda slogan in order to overcome exactly this kind of diversity than a fitting description of the situation.

Migrants were not just sucked up by American popular culture. South Slav newspapers advertised Dalmatian wine and Croatian and Serbian novels next to American cigarettes and grocerije (groceries). In addition, they also provided weather reports from Dalmatia. This was a transatlantic public sphere embedded in an industry of transatlantic migration, communication, and money circulation. Even if those close ties loosened up in the years after WWI, community projects refused to follow President Wilson’s advice, “You can not become thorough Americans if you think yourselves in groups”.¹⁹ The remarkable amount of energy that migrants invested in keeping up transatlantic ties made us confident that this was going to be a book with a message. All this reassured us to document the agency and activities of these many individuals.

Of course, we had expected the First World War to be a turning point in the history of migrants from Austria-Hungary in the US. What was new to us was the sheer force of an all-encompassing systematic campaign that was unleashed to control any irregularity and specifically targeted the migrants. This system was installed in an amazingly short time and was strikingly efficient. Did such intimidation mark a new quality in the relations among migrants, especially the more recent ones, and other groups in the US? World War I turned out to be a major watershed for Austro-Hungarians in many respects since almost everything changed for them. First, they were no longer able to go back and forth and therefore could no longer return to their families. Then public pressure, stigma, and challenges to their ethnic and political identifications reached a level never seen before. In the US, the migrants were divided into traitors and patriots. In Europe, their home country was dismantled and divided into a number of new smaller states, most of them with insecure prospects with regard to democracy and economy. The migrants were thus also divided into members of victorious and defeated nationalities. So, it was clear that we had to answer many questions about this radical change. How did migrants respond to these pressures, divisions and transformations? Did they adapt their strategies of self-representation? What were their political answers to their new situation as migrant groups in the US? In private life, what was the impact of the virtual border closure? Did they change their mating and marriage strategies? Did this impact their ethnicity? How did the ethnic organizations react?

The memory of Austro-Hungarian migrants disintegrated; groups and individuals who had once been linked were disconnected, separated, and isolated on grounds of national ideology. The representation of their lives and activities has become unbalanced. The history of Austro-Hungarian migrants, if it was written at all, was subsumed either by labor history or nationalist history. Their history misses a strong lobby and includes many deviant and radical episodes that made its inclusion into mainstream US historical narratives difficult. Additionally, romantic stereotypes attracted historiographers and supplanted the rougher image of Austrians and Hungarians. The dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy had a deep impact on its migrants in the US. For one, it marginalized them in historical memory.

On the other hand, statistical material and archival sources promised to unveil a history of people who invested an incredible amount of energy into their migratory projects and into their self-representation. Its analysis showed an impressively vital scene of journalism and community activity, a surprisingly long-lasting effort to organize and live as distinct groups, and charmingly clever solutions to the challenges of peripheral and minority groups, as well as to the multiple choices of social belonging in modernizing America, be it gender, ethnicity, class, or consumerism. The stories that will be told in this book are not harmonious nor heroic, but they are full of conflicts of choice and vicious ideological struggles, not only with the ‘outside’ but also among the migrants.

Today, the history of Austro-Hungarian migrants is torn between US history and Central European histories; it is often removed from the European context and historiographical environment. It struggles between quantitative social history and community, and micro-history, as these are the classical approaches to capture the past of historical actors who did not produce a historiographical tradition of their own. Their history is also torn between ethnic and social history, since they are often treated in splendid ethno-national isolation or anachronistically lumped together with groups that did not exist at the time, such as ‘Yugoslavs’ or ‘Czechoslovaks’, or groups that never existed, such as ‘Eastern Europeans’ or ‘Southern Europeans’. Can this history be reintegrated without becoming mired in cultural essentialism?²⁰

Three Methodological Answers

A central goal of this book was to develop a systematically transatlantic perspective and to encompass all ethnicities from Austria-Hungary while critically evaluating the concept of ethnicity. Given the many different historical sub-fields that had produced separate narratives about diverse segments and combinations of Austro-Hungarian migrants, we had to base our analysis on mixed sources and mixed methods.

From a Multiethnic Empireto a Nation of Nations

Table of Contents

Preface

Foreword

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

Disintegrated, Unbalanced and Supplanted:The History of Austro-Hungarians in the US

Three Methodological Answers

From a Multiethnic Empire
to a Nation of Nations

Disintegrated, Unbalanced and Supplanted:
The History of Austro-Hungarians in the US