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The 'Mystery of the Hungarian Talent,' Part Two: Hungarian Intellectual and Political Immigration to America
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11753 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1987 |
7,204 Words |
| Author
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Steven Bela Vardy
Steven Bela Vardy is professor of East European history and
chairman of the department of history at Duquesne University.
He was born in Hungary and educated in Hungary, Germany,
Austria, and the United States. He is the author of numerous
articles and books, including History of the Hungarian Nation
(coauthored, 1969), Hungarian Historiography and the Geistes-
geschichte School (1974), Modern Hungarian Historiography
(1976), Clio's Art in Hungary(1985), and The Hungarian-
Americans (1985). Part two of this article, on the Hungarian
intellectual migration, will appear in an upcoming issue. |
Since the middle of the nineteenth century about 850,000 Hungarians have made the United States their permanent home, of whom approximately 80-85 percent (650-700,000) came in the period between the 1870s and World War I. These turn-of-the-century immigrants were part of the so-called new immigration, and they were driven almost exclusively by the lack of economic opportunities at home, and by the enticement of possible enrichment in America. Being mostly peasants and unskilled workers of peasant background, they brought with them only their "brawn power." Fueled by the desire to make it in this new world, their contributions to American society were largely limited to hard work and the transplantation of some of their social customs.
Most of the other Hungarians who preceded or followed this mass immigration came from another stratum of Hungary and thus provided other contributions. The combined number of these nonpeasant immigrants was much smaller (15-20 percent of the total), and they were not driven to this country by economic privation, but almost exclusively by political considerations. Moreover, although - like the peasant immigrants - initially they did not intend to make the United States their permanent home, they brought with them an education and a body of knowledge that ultimately benefited their new country. Their intellectual contributions to American society not only exceeded those of the peasant immigrants, but in proportion to their numbers, those intellectual immigrants from many other nationalities.
The first group of these educated immigrants from Hungary (about 4,000 strong) were the "Forty-Niners," who came in the middle of the nineteenth century, following the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-1849. They came as
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