One Hundred and
Sixty Five Years Ago, Hungarian leader Lajos Kossuth led a revolution that drew
the admiration of the Western world. Under the slogans of liberty and equality,
Kossuth sought a democratic republic for the Hungarian-administered sections of
the Hapsburg Empire, run from Vienna, and the Hungarian struggle was the
front-page topic of the international press, including, notably, the journal
run by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Few
countries were so taken with Kossuth and his revolution as the United States of
America. The pro-Hungarian bias in America was profound, and almost completely
unrelated to ethnicity. They were democrats like us, and they sought to create
a republic, as had we. Of course, to the extent that America was an immigrant
country and ethnic Hungarians made up some of its population, they were also
“us” in fact, but the same could be said for virtually every ethnicity in
Europe.
This
identification of the USA with Kossuth and the Hungarian cause was strongly
reinforced by America’s sense of vulnerability. Barely seventy years old in
1848, American democracy was among the very few republics in an international
system still populated largely by Kingdoms and Empires, and knew itself to be
so. Indeed, US President Zachary Taylor saw in Kossuth and Hungary the
opportunity both to shore up his domestic support and to mark America’s grand
entry onto the stage of international politics. The US President even sent an
emissary to Europe to recognize Kossuth’s Hungary, which only a combination of
natural caution, Austrian espionage, and the rapid collapse of the revolution managed
to prevent.
Thus, with the
help of official American intervention, Kossuth arrived in New York at the
beginning of December 1851, riding high on a wave popularity that few foreign
leaders have ever enjoyed, before or since. The Kossuth phenomenon was greatly
aided by the coincidental launching of a new daily newspaper, the New York Times, which made of Kossuth’s visit the platform for its debut before
the American public. The New York Times
followed Kossuth’s every step and every word, describing or repeating all of
them in over 600 articles, including detailed description of each plate on the menu
of the many multi-course meals in the dizzying number of speaking engagements
held for him throughout the country to raise money for the Hungarian cause.
The
extent of the commitment of Washington elites is illustrated by the case of Francis
Bowen. The extraordinary Professor Bowen held the Chair of History at Harvard College
and ran the most influential American literary journal at the time, the North American Review. Bowen wrote three
powerful articles on an aspect of Kossuth’s revolution of which no one else dared
speak, entitled The War between the Races
in Hungary, The Politics of Europe
and The Rebellion of the Slavonic,
Wallachian and German Hungarians against the Magyars. Along with the campaign to discredit Bowen as
a “falsifier” of history and “slanderer of Hungary,” and to deny any Hungarian abuse
of other ethnic groups, the political pressure from Washington was so great
that Harvard was compelled to deprive Bowen of his chair, although he was enthusiastically
rehired as Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity on
the condition that he no longer write about the unspeakable. According to the
head of the Massachusetts Senate at the time, “a man who is not sympathetic to
the Hungarian cause was unfit to teach history.”
All of this was
possible because, along with democratic and republican aims, America and its
Hungarian visitor shared yet one more thing – a canker at the heart of their
revolutionary projects. Kossuth sought liberty and equality only for the
privileged Hungarian and German ethnic groups (a third group, the Szeklers
becoming assimilated with the Hungarian), while the Romanians and Southern
Slavs were denied both. Although America was fervently dedicated to liberty and
equality it is impossible to ignore the fact that, through the mid-19th
century, those boons were granted only to European Americans.
Native Americans –
“Red Indians” – were viewed as dangerous barbarians to be eliminated while “Negroes”
were viewed as beasts of burden and consigned to slavery (indeed, President
Taylor, who served until July 1850, owned slaves himself). The extent to which
American liberalism co-existed with extraordinary racial chauvinism, even
amongst the most convinced of liberal democrats, is strikingly illustrated in
the 1876 call by the editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, which replaced the North
American Review as the molder of US intellectual attitudes. America’s
leading man of letters at the time, William Dean Howells, advocated the “extermination of the red savages
of the plains,” and characterized the “red man” as “a hideous demon, whose
malign traits can hardly inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence.”
The sharing of
both genuinely democratic and deeply chauvinist attitudes by 19th
century US elites and Hungarian revolutionaries explains something of the
failure of disenfranchised Romanian majorities to gain a hearing for their
plight in the United States. Over the following decades the immigrant-based
American republic would find itself compelled to excise this canker, if not all
of its consequences. In the aftermath of its failed revolutionary experiment,
Hungary would be led down a different path.
Consequently, the
lot of Romanians in Transylvania changed very little after the 1848 revolution.
In great contrast to the liberation of the serfs in the rest of Europe,
Romanians remained under a neo-serfdom barely discernible from their pre-1848
status. British travel author John Paget noted in 1850 that while “the rest of
the inhabitants” enjoyed “nearly equal rights” in Transylvania, the Romanians occupied
the same place there as did “the native Indians and negroes in America.” Fifteen
years later another British author, Charles Boner, who married into one of the
ruling Hungarian families in Transylvania, claimed the Romanians to be “a wild
horde, without a trace of civilization” that “pillaged, burned, and murdered”
and “were little or no better than a tribe of Red Indians.” Hungarian
officialdom was no less chauvinistic, shamelessly affirming that “you can yoke
[Romanians] like oxen, from whom they only differ in that they can speak.” (Kossuth Hirjlapja, literally, Kossuth’s
Newsletter, 24 October 1848)
When
Budapest finally gained greater freedom from Vienna through the transformation
of the Hapsburg Empire into the Dual Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the Ausgleich of 1867, their treatment
became harsher still as Hungarian elites attempted to eradicate the
Romanian/Wallach ethnicity and assimilate them through ever more forceful
measures, justified in the official media with the argument that it was “natural
that Hungarians should develop to the detriment of the other nationalities
which they conquered and assimilated [and] not at all in the interest of the
state that the nationalities’ social status should progress.” (Budapesti
HÃrlap, No. 345, 1891) The situation did not improve for the next fifty
years, on the contrary, which in large part explains the strength of the desire
for unification with the Romanian Kingdom, not only among Romanians but among
other non-Hungarian ethnic groups in the region (witness the stand of the
Saxon Pastors Stephan Ludwig Roth and Karl Obert).
This blog appeared in Romanian translation at Adevarul.ro
Saxon Pastors Stephan Ludwig Roth and Karl Obert).
This blog appeared in Romanian translation at Adevarul.ro
Friedrich Engels, “The Magyar
Stuggle,” Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung, no. 194, 19 January 1849, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm
John Paget, Hungary and Transylvania; With Remarks on Their Condition, Social,
Political, and Economical, volume II, London, John Murray, Albemarle
Street, 1850 http://depts.washington.edu/cartah/text_archive/boner/btoc.shtml.
Charles Boner, Transylvania; Its Products and Its People, London, Longmans, Green,
Reader, and Dyer, 1865 http://depts.washington.edu/cartah/text_archive/boner/btoc.shtml.
T. Mills Kelly, “America's First
Attempt at Intervention in East Central Europe,” East European Quarterly, no. 1, vol. 9 (Spring 1995), http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-17001976.html
Thomas Bender, A Nation Among
Nations: America’s Place in World History, NY, Hill and Wang, 2006
Augustus Maverick, Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press, for
Thirty Years: Progress of American Journalism from 1840 to 1870, Hartford,
Conn, A. S. Hale And Company, and Chicago, Geo. W. Rogers, 1870, http://archive.org/details/henryjraymondnew00inmave
Elmer Davis, History of the New York Times, 1851-1921, New York, The New York
Times, 1921, http://archive.org/details/historyofthenewy008449mbp
Francis Bowen, “The War of Races in
Hungary,” The North American Review, vol.
70, no. 146 (January 1850), http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/n/nora/nora.1850.html
“The Kossuth Dinner. Magnificent
Banquet. Kossuth’s Great Speech,” The New
York Times, 12 December 1851
Francis Bowen, “The Rebellion of the Slavonic, Wallachian
and German Hungarians against the Magyars,” The
North American Review, vol. 72, no. 150 (January 1851), http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/n/nora/nora.1851.html
Robert Carter, The Hungarian Controversy: An Exposure of the Falsifications and
Perversions of the Slanderers of Hungary, Boston, Redding & Company,
1852, http://archive.org/details/hungariancontro00cartgoog
Typo:
ReplyDelete(indeed, President Taylor, who served until July 1950, owned slaves himself)
...the year should be 1850