The Slovak literary language and Slovak political nationalism are closely intertwined in their history, and the prospects of both ideas were greatly affected by a chance event on the other side of the Atlantic. In May 1889, a new column of smoke briefly rose alongside those of the sprawling steel rolling mills of Pittsburgh. Its source was a fire that broke out at the offices of a newspaper in the city, which published in the language used by newly arrived, Slav migrant workers from northern or “Upper” Hungary. The blaze destroyed the expensive printing presses and seemed to have brought an end to a commercial venture that had yielded modest profits for its two migrant owners since beginning publication three years earlier (Stolárik Reference Stolárik1974, 141; Korbaš Reference Korbaš, Bajaník and Dunďúrová-Tapalagová2010, 115). Searching for a means of continuing their newspaper, they contacted a twenty-one-year-old Slovak who had lapsed in his seminary studies and become drawn into the world of journalism instead, contributing regular articles to the Pittsburgh migrant paper prior to the catastrophe (Rovnianek [Reference Rovnianek1924] 2004, 48). This young man, Peter Rovnianek, provided some funds to restore the newspaper’s printing office in exchange for being appointed as a co-editor of the organ (Korbaš Reference Korbaš, Bajaník and Dunďúrová-Tapalagová2010, 115). During the following two decades, Rovnianek established himself as the preeminent publishing and commercial oligarch within the Slovak American community; his actions at this critical moment in May 1889 helped to create this sense of common, Slovak nationality, among Slav migrants from Upper Hungary. For upon resuming publication of the newspaper after the fire, Rovnianek changed its language script from a regional or “dialect” form that was more recognizable to the bulk of Slav migrants with the “national” form of script adopted by a mere handful of Slovak nationalist intellectuals in Upper Hungary at this time (NSS 1940, 159; Stolárik Reference Stolárik1974, 143). A convinced nationalist himself, Rovnianek used his role as editor of the leading migrant newspaper in the United States to impart this vision of a unifying, Slovak literary language as the national print language of the emerging migrant colony.
This idea of a common Slovak nationhood soon brought together leaders of the emerging Slovak American migrant colony and the struggling national movement of the “old country” in a common political cause. In 1906, under the slogan of “for our Slovak language!” (Za tu našu slovenčinu!), Slovak nationalists won an unprecedented number of seats in the Hungarian Parliament (“The Non-Magyar Races Of Hungary,” The Times, November 28, 1906, 5; Tajták Reference Tajták, Bajaník and Dunďúrová-Tapalagová2008, 27). Their election success was funded by a Central Slovak National Committee in New York, which sent money raised among Slovak American fraternal benefit societies and other migrant organizations on the other side of the Atlantic (Špiesz and Čaplovič Reference Špiesz and Čaplovič2006, 162; Tajták Reference Tajták, Bajaník and Dunďúrová-Tapalagová2008, 27). During the First World War, Slovak nationalists in the United States took the initiative by agreeing to the dissolution of Hungary and the creation of an independent Czecho-Slovak state as their desired political goal of the conflict: forming the only significant body of Slovak opinion that declared in favor of this project in wartime (“Prihlas ku slovenskému národu v Amerike,” Jednota [Middletown, Pennsylvania], November 24, 1915, 4–5). With the creation of Czechoslovakia in October 1918, an ethnically defined homeland for Slovak speakers—Slovakia—was formed from the multi-ethnic territory comprising the bulk of Upper Hungary; the Slovak national or “Hattala” script was also used in the administration of the new state as a recognized dialect of the so-called “Czechoslovak language” (Koetzl and Joachim Reference Koetzl and Joachim1920, 47, 49; Johnson Reference Johnson1985, 91). This was a highly improbable outcome for the Slovak national leaders of a previous generation and owed much to the influence exerted by the Slovak American community at the beginning of the 20th century. Yet the emergence of this migrant colony as a decisive factor that shaped Slovak nationalism—as well as the state borders of central Europe—cannot be taken for granted. In the words of the most prominent historian of the Slovak American community (Stolárik Reference Stolárik1974, 141), migrants from Upper Hungary first had to be “converted to Slovak nationalism” in the United States: without this process taking place, transatlantic political support for the Slovak national movement in Hungary was not a likely outcome. Propagating the “national” Slovak literary script among migrants was the first and most critical step in this process and that task was begun by Rovnianek as soon as the embers of the Pittsburgh newspaper office had cooled in May 1889. Rather than being a fixed or lasting category of nationality, this article will show how the Slovak literary language only belatedly won out at the expense of dialect forms of written script that were used by Upper Hungarian migrants in the United States. Language use within the Slovak American colony was determined by the conscious activity of a small group of nationalist leaders, whose efforts subsequently changed the course of Slovak political nationalism in the 20th century.
The Value of the Slovak American Community as a Case Study in Linguistic Nation-Building
The promotion of a standardized literary language was a key feature of nationalist movements in central and eastern Europe. Such political movements placed the idea of a distinct and “national” language at the core of their demands for largely cultural recognition by the central authorities in the 19th century. In the case of the Slovak national movement, its leadership looked to the Hungarian government in Budapest as well as the overarching Habsburg dynastic authorities in Vienna to satisfy this goal. As categorized by Miroslav Hroch (Reference Hroch1985, 99), Slovak nationalists remained in this “Phase B” of nationalist agitation into the 20th century: their agitation centered as much on encouraging the Slavic population of Upper Hungary “to love and defend their own language” as much as gaining external political recognition as a nation (Hroch Reference Hroch and Hroch2007, 75). Slovak (while also defining themselves as Slav) intellectuals in Upper Hungary created a standardized, literary language for communication during the middle decades of the 19th century. By the 1870s, this form, known as the Hattala script, had gained broad recognition as the language on which Slovak national claims were subsequently based (Maxwell Reference Maxwell2009, 137, 157–158). The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 established Hungary as an internally autonomous half of the Habsburg Empire, and from this event Slovak nationalists sought three chief goals from the new Budapest regime: (1) legal recognition of Slovak language rights within a multinational Kingdom of Hungary; (2) financial support from the Hungarian state for promoting the Slovak literary language and associated “national” culture in Upper Hungary; and (3) intermittently for a Slovak national homeland to be established in Upper Hungary with limited political autonomy (Seton-Watson Reference Seton-Watson1908, 149–154; Bokeš Reference Bokeš1972, 500; Cartledge Reference Cartledge2006, 277–278).
The attempts of the Slovak National Party to achieve these objectives were entirely unsuccessful. Instead, an opposing stance known as Magyarization—the attempted assimilation of all Hungarian citizens in the Magyar language—prevailed in the nationalities’ policy of successive administrations in Budapest until the outbreak of the First World War. The Magyar language was already the dominant language of elite political debate in Hungary (within its new and elaborately constructed Parliament): it was progressively imposed as the language of state administration and, most contentiously of all, in public and religious schools at the expense of the “mother tongue” of children from Slovak and other non-Magyar speaking families (Janos Reference Janos1982, 111; Johnson Reference Johnson1985, 34; Kontler Reference Kontler2002, 283). Knowledge of the Magyar tongue and other cultural adaptations (such as changing names to the surname-forename order commonly used in Magyar) became important qualities for obtaining employment and advancement in these administrative and teaching professions (Seton-Watson Reference Seton-Watson1908, 398). Language use and nationalist politics therefore became tied to a contest for white-collar jobs within an expanding Hungarian state bureaucracy at the end of the 19th century: a socio-economic cause that Eric Hobsbawm (1990, 113) has identified as invigorating many such nationalist political conflicts during that time period. The threat of Magyarization formed a chief basis for Slovak nationalist political agitation in Upper Hungary until 1914: with assimilation into the Magyar language being viewed as an immediate threat to the prospects of the Slovak nation in Hungary.
This familiar account of political conflict between competing, national languages in the multilingual Kingdom of Hungary formed however only one aspect of Slovak nationalist activity in the late 19th century. Theorists of nationalism in recent decades have largely focused on this conflict between self-declared national groups that, as Benedict Anderson’s work described it (1991, 133), formed “imagined communities” on the basis of common language use. Under the conditions of “print capitalism,” in the form of books and the published newspaper press that prevailed in the Habsburg Empire and the United States in the 19th century, Anderson (Reference Anderson1991, 134) understood standardized language as a form that “invents nationalism” within a linguistically based and imagined community. Yet as historians of Slovak linguistic nationalism such as Alexander Maxwell (Reference Maxwell2003, 143) have more recently argued, the idea of a commonly used literary language was “a polemical concept and a patriots’ dream, not an existing object” throughout the 19th century. The objective of the Slovak nationalist intelligentsia was to establish a common, written script and national language among a population of two million or so Slavs living throughout Upper Hungary, whose various spoken idioms could only be broadly categorized as Slovak. For the sake of clarity, the term “Slovak-speaker” will henceforth be used to describe this population and the hundreds of thousands of transatlantic, Slav migrants from Upper Hungary, rather than using the term “Slovaks” to imply a self-identifying national group (see Judson Reference Judson2016, ix): though even the term Slovak-speaker glosses over the countless dialect forms that existed within this group (Maxwell Reference Maxwell2009, 74–76, 143). Among these forms, the Hattala script—the orthography that has become the standardized, Slovak written language of the present day—held prestige only among a tiny elite of Slovak nationalist intellectuals: a group that contemporaries estimated as numbering less than 1,000 individuals in Upper Hungary before 1918 (Čapek Reference Čapek1906, 92; Seton-Watson Reference Seton-Watson1924, 14; Šrobár Reference Šrobár1928, 183). Using the term frequently employed by Slovak nationalist leaders, the bulk of Slovak-speakers lacked sufficient “national consciousness” (národné povedomie): a state of mind that they also identified among the Slavs of Upper Hungary and migrants who left for the United States in the second half of the 19th century (“Reč poslanca Ferdiša Jurigu, ktorº povedal na uhorskom sneme dňa 11. marca 1914,” SlovenskÕ LudovÕ Noviny [Pressburg, Hungary], March 27, 1914, 4–5; Slovak League of America 1909, 3–4). The development of Slovak nationalism into a force that repeatedly shaped the political structure of central Europe in the 20th century therefore depended first and foremost on the ability of Slovak nationalists to promote their idea of a national language among the Slavs of Upper Hungary. As much as Slovak nationalists sought to defend their imagined, linguistic community from the threat of Magyarization within the Hungarian state, its leaders also sought to “Slovakize” Upper Hungarian Slavs—a mission that took place among both those who migrated to the United States and those who stayed behind.
The creation of the Slovak American community is an excellent case study for understanding how Slovak “national consciousness” developed among the Slovak-speakers of Upper Hungary for two reasons. Firstly, the arrival of Slovak-speakers was a novel phenomenon in the United States in the late 19th century. The Slovak-speaking population in the United States grew from a handful of individual, “pioneer migrants” before 1870 to over 600,000 people some 50 years later (Stolárik Reference Stolárik1974, 6). Slovak immigration to the United States peaked in 1905: a year in which more than 52,000 Slovak-speakers—roughly 2% of all Slovak-speakers in Upper Hungary—left Hungary for the United States (RIC 1910, 46). The key institutions that defined the emerging Slovak American community—a flourishing migrant press, fraternal benefit societies, and Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches—were all founded in the final two decades of the 19th century. The linguistic as well as nationalistic forms that these Slovak American institutions took on can therefore be traced by historians from their foundations, with ample source materials held in both modern-day Slovakia and in immigrant history archives in the United States to do so. By studying Slovak nationalist political practices in the novel environment experienced by Slovak-speaking migrants in the United States, it is possible to remove from the analysis nationalist claims such as an inherent attachment of Slovak-speakers to a national homeland or ethnoterritory (Smith Reference Smith1986, 12). While historians of a Slovak nationalist persuasion have stressed the continuity between contemporary Slovak nationalism and a primordial Slovak nation, which existed in Upper Hungary since the early medieval period (Agnew Reference Agnew2000, 624; Findor Reference Findor2002, 197; Špiesz and Čaplovič Reference Špiesz and Čaplovič2006, 29; Burzová Reference Burzová2012, 883), investigating how Upper Hungarian Slavs had to be consciously Slovakized on the other side of the Atlantic provides an important critique of this mode of thinking. The efforts of nationalist leaders to generate national consciousness among an indifferent colony of Slavs living in the United States in the late 19th century underline the historically contingent basis by which Slovak and other national identities gained purpose among the masses of central and eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century.
The second reason why Slovak Americans represent a good study of linguistic nation-building rests on the geographical origin of these migrants from Upper Hungary. Of the roughly 13 historical counties that formed part of both Upper Hungary and modern-day Slovakia, roughly two-thirds of transatlantic migrants came from four counties located in the north-east of that territory: Spiš/Szepes/Zips, Šariš/Sáros, Zemplín/Zemplén, and Abov-Turňa/Abaúj-Torna (Seton-Watson Reference Seton-Watson1908, 11; Puskás Reference Puskás, Bales and Pálmai1982, 58; Stolárik Reference Stolárik2010, 57). As well as forming the chief source of migrants, these four counties were also the place where mass Slovak-speaking migration to the United States began in the early 1870s (Bodnar Reference Bodnar1987, 10; Zecker Reference Zecker1998, 44, 75–80; Majeriková-Molitoris Reference Majeriková-Molitoris, Zemančík and Pavelcová2012, 96). The early community of transatlantic migrants was therefore numerically dominated by those who had come from this region of the “old country”: a demographic fact that made their Slovakization a far from certain outcome. The north-eastern counties of Upper Hungary were detached from the political center of Slovak nationalist activism in the nineteenth century, which was located in the county of Turiec/Turóc and the town of Turčianský Svätý Martin/Turócszentmárton (hereafter “Martin”) in central Upper Hungary. The Slovak National Party barely existed as a political force in eastern counties such as Šariš: it was not until 1906 that a Slovak nationalist candidate stood for parliamentary election there, and lost convincingly to his Hungarian opponent (Johnson Reference Johnson1985, 44).
Slovak nationalists were also unsuccessful in establishing the Hattala script as the uncontested literary language of Slovak-speakers in this region of north-eastern Upper Hungary at the expense of local and regional forms of language. One such group of idioms, known widely as the Šariš dialect—though the more politically neutral term “Šariš script forms” is preferred in this study—competed with the Hattala script as a viable literary language. As well as being more closely aligned to the local written traditions than Hattala, which was influenced chiefly by the norms of the central counties surrounding the nationalist center of Martin, Šariš script forms also benefited from the external support of the Hungarian state, which funded the publication of school textbooks and other materials in this regional idiom (Špiesz and Čaplovič Reference Špiesz and Čaplovič2006, 151). Successive Hungarian administrations after 1867 promoted the idea that the Slavic population of Upper Hungary consisted of distinct nationality groups—distinguishing the Slovaks of western and central Upper Hungary from the Slovjaks of the eastern counties like Spiš, Šariš, and Zemplín (counties that further held a substantial Ruthenian/Rusyn/Ukrainian nationality following the Greek Catholic rite). Advocates for this Slovjak identity held that both differences in custom and the use of Šariš script forms distinguished them from the Slovak population of western Upper Hungary and formed the basis of a separate nationality (Johnson Reference Johnson1985, 331; Neumi Reference Neumi1999, 109). One of the key goals of Slovak nationalists was to combat this interpretation of the nationality question, which they considered as an attempt by the Hungarian state to artificially divide their “Slovak nation” to weaken their political cause. The contest between supporters of the national, Hattala script and those of alternatives such as the Šariš script forms for supremacy as the chief, literary language of Slovak-speakers in eastern Upper Hungary was central to this political struggle, demonstrating the role of print language in the minority nationalist politics of late-19th-century Hungary.
Slovak nationalist efforts to quell competing nationality forms in eastern Upper Hungary were however undermined by the lack of any form of coherent national consciousness among the peasantry, who made up the bulk of the population in this agrarian region. As Carol Leff has noted (Reference Leff1988, 18), even the compilers of the first Czechoslovak state census in 1920 still had to confront this fact, for respondents in the new territory of Slovakia “were still prone to offer regionally, or religiously defined self-identifications to the census-takers, or even such politically unappetizing monstrosities as ‘Magyar-Slovak.’” As the vast majority of transatlantic, Slovak-speaking migrants came from north-eastern Upper Hungary, where Slovak nationalists had no discernible influence, this degree of national ambiguity and indifference was readily transferred to the migrant colony in the United States. Historians of the Slovak American community such as Robert Zecker (Reference Zecker1998, 18–19) and June Alexander (Reference Alexander1980, 202–205) have shown how migrants typically retained distinct, regional identities in the United States rather than a sense of overarching “Slovakness” as a national identity. Migrants were far more likely to identify themselves as Hricovats, Hutoroks, Šarišans, and countless other local and county affiliations, which were bound up with the economic and personal links forged between rural settlements as well as Catholic parish boundaries (Zecker Reference Zecker1998, 18–19).
The political, linguistic, and social context of north-eastern Upper Hungary lends crucial significance to the migrant colony in the United States as a center of Slovak linguistic nation-building. For in terms of both language use and self-identification, there were very few nationally conscious Slovaks among transatlantic migrants from Upper Hungary. Most Slovak-speaking migrants came from eastern counties in which Slovak nationalist ideas and organizations had almost no influence, even on the eve of the First World War. The Hattala script, on which Slovak nationalist claims were typically made in the 19th century, did not dominate in this region but was rather opposed as a print language by viable regional idioms such as the Šariš script forms. Above all, attachment to any coherent form of national consciousness was rarely found in this predominantly rural and peasant-based society. Rather than being chiefly transported to the United States, the closely linked ideas of a common, Slovak literary language and common Slovak nationhood therefore had to be introduced to most Slovak-speaking migrants within their colony in the United States. The Slovak-speaking migrant colony was a key space for linguistic nation-building, whose protagonists helped to form a powerful Slovak American community that shaped the course of Slovak nationalist politics in the old country from 1900.
Language Use and the Creation of Slovak National Consciousness in the Slovak American Migrant Community
The Slovak-language press in the United States was a key institution that generated a wider, Slovak national consciousness within migrant communities. Yet the first Slovak-language newspaper was not created with that or any other political purpose in mind. The perceived need for a Slovak-language newssheet was first taken up by the Austro-Hungarian consulate in Pittsburgh, which sought to curb a torrent of inquiries for information that it was receiving from the rapidly increasing migrant population in the United States (NSS 1940, 157). The consulate duly subsidized the publication of a weekly Bulletin from 1885 to inform migrants of major events in Hungary, to counter rumors that immigration was to be restricted by the United States’ government, and to provide a forum for family members and friends from the old country to reunite in the United States (NSS 1940, 157; Korbaš Reference Korbaš, Bajaník and Dunďúrová-Tapalagová2010, 115). The content of this early newssheet was produced by Ján Slovenský and Július Wolf, two migrants who left Upper Hungary for the state of Pennsylvania in 1879 (NSS 1940, 157; Kormaš 2010, 114). Both Slovenský and Wolf were raised in the town of Krompachy/Korompa/Krompach in Spiš County. Slovenský, despite possessing a surname that translates as “Slovak,” had in fact a German-speaking mother and spoke German from childhood; Wolf’s father was similarly a German-speaking elder of the town council and its Lutheran church (Čulen Reference Čulen1954, 12–15). The everyday language used by Slovenský and Wolf however was likely a combination of Slovak and German phrases, which formed an idiom known as Hutorok that was commonly used in the mixed German and Slovak-speaking county of Spiš (Čulen Reference Čulen1954, 14–15). Both Slovenský and Wolf were sent to the high school (gymnazium) at Klaštor nad Znievom, which was meant to prepare the young men for a teaching career in Upper Hungary (NSS 1940, 157). The Hattala Slovak script was used as a language of education and instruction at the Klaštor gymnazium, and the institution proved a prolific contributor of intellectual leaders to the Slovak national movement prior to being closed by the Hungarian government in 1874 (Johnson Reference Johnson1985, 30). As the historian Konštantín Čulen has put it, Klaštor “made Slovaks of these two German boys” before they departed for the United States (Čulen Reference Čulen1954, 18). Wolf and Slovenský initially worked as laborers upon their arrival in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1879, but were then recruited by the Austro-Hungarian consulate in neighboring Pittsburgh to respond to inquiries from the rapidly growing colony of Slovak-speaking migrants in the area (NSS 1940, 157). Their subsequent Bulletin, published on the Consulate’s behalf, was launched at a cost of ten cents per copy and was expanded after 20 issues into an eight-page newspaper (NSS 1940, 158; Čulen Reference Čulen and Necas2007, 161).
The early migrant press developed in the United States as a modestly successful commercial venture that provided a source of valuable information to itinerant, Slovak-speaking migrants. With this commercial ambition in mind, Jan Slovenský discontinued the consulate’s Bulletin and in October 1886 began publishing an independent newspaper titled Amerikánszko-Szlovenszké Noviny [American-Slovak News] from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Bartl Reference Bartl, Dušan, Viliam, Mária, Róbert, VladimÚr and Daniel2002, 111). Within two years, it had an estimated 6,000 subscribers among the rapidly growing Slovak-speaking colony in the United States (NSS 1940, 157). In subsequent decades, the newspaper developed a weekly circulation figure of more than 30,000, making it the most widely read, Slovak-language newspaper in the world before the First World War (Čulen Reference Čulen1970, 19). Slovak-language newspapers as well as the kalendár, a news and general interest almanac, flourished in the New World to a far greater extent than in the Kingdom of Hungary. Six daily Slovak-language newspapers were in publication in the United States in 1914; in contrast, only one daily newspaper, published in Budapest, circulated in Upper Hungary (Johnson Reference Johnson1985, 61). Historians such as Owen Johnson (Reference Johnson1985, 16) have judged that the consumption of Slovak-language printed material gradually increased in Upper Hungary before 1914; but any such increase was dwarfed by the circulation figures of Slovak newspapers in the United States. The estimated circulation of the weekly Slovak-language press in Hungary was 48,300 in 1910, in contrast to 112,500 among the weekly Slovak press in the United States (Stolárik Reference Stolárik1968, 17). The phenomenon of a widely consumed Slovak-American press was not lost on contemporaries. In a letter written to Pavol Blaho, a Slovak nationalist politician holding a seat in the Hungarian Parliament, a Slovak pastor in the United States reported in 1910 that “at the moment we have here a full journalistic revolution.… Slovaks mind the newspapers and abuse each other [in them] like children.… We can do this after all, when we are in a land of freedom, and it is pretty splendid for newspapers” (Moravek Reference Moravek1910).
The politically significant form that the Slovak-language press took up in the United States owed little to the underlying demand of migrants for homeland news; rather, it stemmed from the consciously nationalist objectives of the migrant colony’s largely self-selected leadership. Their efforts extended beyond merely promoting newspaper readership among Slovak-speaking migrants to determining the written language in which this migrant press and other migrant institutions communicated in the United States. This process can be directly observed in the history of the first Slovak-language newspaper in the United States. Ján Slovenský’s Amerikánszko-Szlovenszké Noviny aimed to communicate to the bulk of Slovak migrants who came to the United States from the north-eastern counties of Upper Hungary. The newspaper was therefore printed in the Šariš script forms of that region, whose orthography was more familiar to its migrant readership than the Hattala script of the central counties of Upper Hungary (Bartl Reference Bartl, Dušan, Viliam, Mária, Róbert, VladimÚr and Daniel2002, 111). This decision was reflected by the initial title of the newspaper, which used the digraph “sz” to spell the words “American” and “Slovak” (Amerikánszko and Szlovenszké) rather than the letter “s,” which is used in Hattala Slovak to denote the same sound and meaning (Amerikánsko and Slovenské, respectively). The use of the “sz” digraph in this manner is found in Šariš script forms as well as the standardized Magyar language—a feature that suggests Magyar writing practices influenced the development of Slavic written scripts in eastern Upper Hungary. The decision to publish the first migrant newspaper in a Šariš script was later justified by Ján Slovenský in a letter to the editor of his former newspaper in 1897, in which he claimed that:
Of every thousand letters that we received from our countrymen [at the Austro-Hungarian consulate in Pittsburgh], perhaps one was written with accents [letters with carons such as č, š, ž, as found in Hattala Slovak as well as Czech] and the other 999 were written in the Šariš dialect (šarištine). It followed that any newspaper published in literary [Hattala] Slovak could hardly prevail (by sotva ostáli). The plan of the founders was to introduce literary Slovak gradually and step by step—which took place in spite of protests from all sides that the public were not in a condition to understand the new script. (Slovenský [Reference Slovenský1897] [1924] 2004, 71)
His successor as newspaper editor, Peter Rovnianek, who was an eyewitness to the newspaper’s management from the late 1880s, provided in his memoirs a competing explanation for the use of the eastern dialect in its early years of publication. Rovnianek argued that:
Only from sheer illiteracy did Jánko Slovenský print the ‘Bulletin’ and Amerikánszko-Szlovenszké Novini [sic] in this way. If Jánko Slovenský had mastered the literary Slovak language then I have no doubts that he would have published in it, but he never acquired the correct Slovak grammar. [His counterpart] Wolf was more adept in Slovak … but he did not have the decisive word and in the editorship of the newspaper only followed Slovenský’s steps. When they had already begun using the dialect form it was justified as a matter of commercial prudence, but this argument lagged behind [events] enormously. (Rovnianek [Reference Rovnianek1924] 2004, 67)
Writing this account in 1924, however, Rovnianek took for granted the triumph of Hattala Slovak as the dominant print language of the now maturely formed, Slovak American community. His claim that Slovenský’s relatively poor grasp of the Hattala Slovak script determined the newspaper’s print form may well be accurate, but it cannot account for the decisions of other editors of the migrant press to publish in Šariš script forms at that time. Slovenský’s decision to use a Šariš script in his migrant newspaper was followed by Anton Ambrose, who began publishing his Szlovák v Amerike [The Slovak in America] newspaper in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, from 1889 (Čulen Reference Čulen and Necas2007, 162). Ambrose became a close business partner of Rovnianek from the 1890s, a prominent Slovak nationalist agitator, and later a major voice in support of Czechoslovak statehood within the migrant colony, but his first publication still used a Šariš script that was familiar to the bulk of migrants rather than the Hattala form (Paučo Reference Paučo1972, 1). The first newspaper to publish in Hattala Slovak, entitled Nová vlasť [The New Homeland] was produced in Streator, Illinois, in 1888, but only lasted a few months before ceasing publication (Čulen Reference Čulen and Necas2007, 162). In short, early Slovak American publishers like Slovenský and Ambrose preferred to publish newspapers in a regional script that was accessible to the bulk of the migrants who had come from the eastern counties of Upper Hungary. Slovenský’s goal was after all to produce—in a commercially successful form—an informative periodical that would cater to the Slovak migrant community along similar lines to the Austro-Hungarian consulate’s original Bulletin (Stolárik Reference Stolárik1974, 141; Čulen Reference Čulen and Necas2007, 162). It was not at all clear whether Hattala Slovak or a form of Šariš script would become the dominant print language of the migrant colony during the 1880s, more than a decade after mass migration to United States had begun.
The Slovak-language press in the United States was transformed into a nationalistic form of media through the intervention of publishers and organizational leaders within the migrant community. The fate of the first migrant newspaper—owing in part to its dominant circulation figures—set the wider pattern that the bulk of the migrant press followed during the 1890s. This insertion of what the historian Konštantín Čulen described as “the spirit of the national movement” (Čulen Reference Čulen and Necas2007, 162) into the migrant press was first undertaken by Peter Rovnianek, Slovenský’s immediate successor as publisher and editor of Amerikánszko-Szlovenszké Noviny from 1889 (Korbaš Reference Korbaš, Bajaník and Dunďúrová-Tapalagová2010, 115). Rovnianek was born in the village of Dolný Hričov in Trenčín County, Upper Hungary, in 1867 (Rovnianek [Reference Rovnianek1924] 2004, 6–7). His father Štefan was described as a “nationally conscious” Slovak, who was a regular subscriber to the Slovak nationalist newspaper Národnie Noviny [National News] in Upper Hungary (Rovnianek [Reference Rovnianek1924] 2004, 7). Having undertaken high school education, Rovnianek was one of the few Slovak migrants of the period to have possessed a demonstrable political reason for leaving Upper Hungary, for he was expelled as a suspected Slovak nationalist from his Catholic theological studies in May 1887 (Rovnianek [Reference Rovnianek1924] 2004, 21; NSS 1940, 68). Rovnianek secured an offer to continue his seminary training in Cleveland, Ohio, where he completed his theological studies in the spring of 1889 (Rovnianek [Reference Rovnianek1924] 2004, 22, 42–45). He was however by this time more interested in journalism than seeking consecration as a priest, contributing articles regularly to both Amerikánszko-Szlovenszké Noviny and Nová Vlast (Čulen Reference Čulen and Necas2007, 162). Rovnianek’s rise to prominence within Slovak American journalism can be partly accounted for by his relatively high level of formal education compared to most Slovak-speaking migrants. A later biography noted that “not many Slovaks could write their language correctly in those days,” and so his proficient articles in the Hattala script were gladly published even by Amerikánszko-Szlovenszké Noviny, which nevertheless continued to print its own material in a Šariš script (NSS 1940, 68). When its newsroom burned down in a freak accident in May 1889, Rovnianek was encouraged to come to Pittsburgh, where he funded the newspaper’s publication once more as co-editor with Slovenský (Korbaš Reference Korbaš, Bajaník and Dunďúrová-Tapalagová2010, 115). Slovenský stood down from his position later that year, confirming Rovnianek’s editorial hold on the newspaper; he abandoned its use of a typeset borrowed from Magyar forms and, from 1891, permanently adopted the Hattala script in place of Šariš as the sole print language of the newspaper (NSS 1940, 159; Stolárik Reference Stolárik1974, 143). Under Rovnianek’s sway, Amerikánsko-Slovenské Noviny (as the newspaper’s title now appeared in its Hattala Slovak form) became a chief agitator for the cause of Slovak nationalism within the migrant colony and in the old country. A typical Rovnianek editorial in the newspaper, published in August 1895, called for other migrant newspapers to stand up for Slovak national rights in Hungary, rhetorically asking them to declare “that we are for the Slovak nation; that we are for its sacred rights; that we are all nationalists” (“Kde ste, nÃrodovci?” Amerikánsko-Slovenské Noviny [Connellsville, PA], August 17, 1895, 4). His contribution to the formation of an antagonistic and nationalist Slovak American press was not lost on the Hungarian government, who labeled Rovnianek “a pernicious and dangerous pan-Slav agitator” in the United States (Stolárik Reference Stolárik1974, 142).
Rovnianek established key editorial principles that defined the Slovak press in the United States well into the 20th century. The Slovak American press took on an agitational role within the Slovak community in the United States and the Slovak national movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Rovnianek’s nationalist editorial stance in Amerikánsko-Slovenské Noviny, which kept the expelled theological student under continued surveillance in the United States by the Hungarian authorities, can be contrasted with the politically neutral, commercial, and information-led articles that had characterized the first Slovak American newspaper under its previous editor Ján Slovenský. Following Rovnianek’s lead, and often in direct response to his combative brand of journalism, the editors and chief writers of Slovak newspapers acted not only as journalists but also as political opinion-formers within the migrant community in the United States. His establishment of the Hattala Slovak script as the chief print language of the Slovak American community was of even greater significance to the history of Slovak nationalism. In 1895, Amerikánsko-Slovenské Noviny had nearly 8,000 subscribers to its newspaper; its nearest rival, Slovák v Amerike, had around 800, while other Slovak newspapers in the United States had a few hundred each (Čulen Reference Čulen1970, 19). The conversion of by far the most widely circulated migrant newspaper to the Hattala Slovak script under Rovnianek’s editorship was soon followed by the bulk of the Slovak press in the United States. Existing titles such as Slovák v Amerike soon undertook a similar transition, while Jednota [The Union], the official organ of the First Catholic Slovak Union fraternal organization, was published in Hattala Slovak from its first issue in 1891 (FCSU 1916, 34).
The use of Šariš script forms in the migrant press was not abandoned but rather became increasingly associated with an array of publications that promoted loyalty to the Hungarian state and opposed Slovak nationalist activism in the United States. Such newspapers such as Zásztava [The Banner], published by the Catholic priest Jozef Kossalko during 1889, and Šlebodni Orel [The Free Eagle], published by Ferenc Dénes from 1900 and subsidized by the Hungarian government, used the Šariš script to cultivate a distinct identity among migrants from the eastern counties of Upper Hungary (Čulen Reference Čulen1970, 177–78; Vassady Reference Vassady and Kivisto1989, 56–59). Editors like Kossalko promoted the idea that these migrants were Slovjaks and sought to maintain pro-Hungarian political loyalties among them (Čulen Reference Čulen1970, 60–61, 180; Vassady Reference Vassady and Kivisto1989, 58–59). In turn, such views were denounced as Magyarone—loosely translated as a “pro-Magyar” and “renegade”—by Slovak nationalist opponents like Rovnianek through polemic exchanges in the migrant press. By 1900, the form of print language used by the Slovak migrant press in the United States therefore largely reflected the nationalistic divide already present in Upper Hungary: nationally conscious, Slovak newspapers used the Hattala script, while Šariš script forms were found chiefly in publications that rejected a common Slovak identity among Slav migrants from Upper Hungary living in the United States.
The promotion of the Hattala script helped to establish a nationalist political element to print language choice in the migrant colony—an outcome that was not inevitable given the use of regional idioms in eastern Upper Hungary from which the bulk of migrants had come from. It is entirely plausible that Slovak-speaking migrants could have continued to publish chiefly in Šariš script forms in the United States, rather than adopting an unfamiliar literary language to do so. The conscious intervention of Rovnianek and subsequent Slovak newspaper editors in the United States worked against this possibility though. In the apt description of historian Marián Stolárik (Reference Stolárik1974, 141), Rovnianek used his editorship of the largest Slovak American newspaper to “convert eastern Slovaks to nationalism.” Rovnianek consciously opposed publication in the eastern Slovak dialects as a threat to what he perceived as Slovak national unity, as expressed through a shared literary language. He imported textbooks and literary works from Slovak publishers based in the town of Martin in Upper Hungary—the center of 19th-century Slovak nationalist activity—to further knowledge of the Hattala Slovak script within the migrant colony (Korbaš Reference Korbaš, Bajaník and Dunďúrová-Tapalagová2010, 117). Another prominent leader of the Slovak national movement in the United States, the Catholic priest Štefan Furdek, published a set of Hattala Slovak grammars to educate a second generation of Slovak American youth in the national literary language (Kopanic Reference Kopanic2009, 96). Their efforts to instill a sense of Slovakness among members of the migrant colony based on common language use were not lost on a later generation of Slovak American nationalist leaders. In his account of its collective effort to create the Czecho-Slovak state during the First World War, the Slovak American journalist and interwar Czecho-Slovak Consul in the United States Milan Getting observed that:
There often existed a deeper psychological chasm between the Western Slovaks and the Eastern Slovaks than existed between the Slovaks and the Czechs. It is to the perpetual honor of all the leaders who worked among the American Slovaks that … they single-mindedly held to the preservation of the unity of the written Slovak Tongue against all provocations and intrigues of various Magyar regimes to force a division between “Slovaks” and “Slovjaks.” (Getting [Reference Getting and Getting1933] 1990, 6)
Getting’s insistence on the “unity of the written Slovak Tongue” is of course a nationalistic argument rather than a realistic appraisal of how migrants from Upper Hungary in the 1870s perceived both their language and identity. Yet his emphasis on this point demonstrates how Slovak nationalists understood the issue of language use and the political stakes that they attached to establishing the “national” Hattala script as the chief print language of the Slovak American community—an outcome that was largely achieved by 1900. The Slovak American press was consciously built as an institution to voice Slovak nationalist views by Rovnianek and Furdek, as well as a subsequent generation of nationalist journalists like Getting, who sought to promote national consciousness among the mass of Slovak-speaking migrants in the United States through education of the Hattala Slovak form and nationalist political agitation in the migrant press.
The contest between Hattala Slovak and Šariš script forms to be established as a chief print language was the most significant obstacle to Slovak nationalist agitation in the migrant colony, for the idea of a standardized, Slovak literary language formed the key basis for Slovak nationalist activism in the 19th century. The ambiguous practices of Slovak American institutions in terms of this language use question, particularly in the 1880s, has however been largely overlooked by the existing scholarship. For example, Marián Stolárik (Reference Stolárik1974, 134) claimed that Slovak nationalist leaders in Upper Hungary “took heart” from the news that migrants had begun publishing a newspaper in Pittsburgh: Amerikánszko-Szlovenszké Noviny. Yet this organ was being published in one of the Šariš script forms that Slovak nationalists were trying to replace with their national Hattala script in eastern Upper Hungary in the same period. Eric Hobsbawm (Reference Hobsbawm1987, 154) similarly viewed the Slovak American community as “the mass basis of an organized Slovak nationalism,” arguing that a collective identity was formed among migrants when “Slovak priests had to talk Slovak to them” alongside other leading figures within the Slovak American community to meet the daily social and pastoral needs of ordinary migrants. Yet a distinct section of the Catholic priesthood in the United States, led by the likes of Jozef Kossalko, instead told these migrants from eastern Upper Hungary that they were not Slovaks but rather a distinctive linguistic group of their own. Through their promotion of Šariš script forms as a competing print language to Hattala Slovak and in their calls for “Slovjaks” to remain loyal to the Hungarian state, this often-neglected group of migrant leaders sought to check the growth of Slovak national consciousness in the United States. Historians of Slovak nationalism have therefore taken for granted the crucial first step toward the emergence of a national movement within the migrant colony by assuming that the Slovak nationalist preference for the Hattala script language would have prevailed over the Sariš written scripts that initially prevailed as the print language of the migrant colony in the 1880s. As this case study has shown, there were few compelling reasons to expect that outcome. The weight of migration from the eastern counties of Upper Hungary led early publishers like Ján Slovenský to use a Šariš script rather than Hattala Slovak in the first commercial newspaper of this colony in the United States. But for a fateful fire that burned down his newsroom in 1889, Slovenský could well have helped to establish the Šariš script form used in Amerikánszko-Szlovenszké Noviny as the chief print language of this migrant community. A divergence between the Hattala script supported by the Slovak nationalist leadership in the old country and a Šariš script preferred by the migrant colony in the United States would have greatly undermined transatlantic cooperation between these centers of political life and was a realistic outcome as the institutions of the Slovak American migrant colony were being formed in the 1880s.
Conclusion
This case study has shown how migrants from Upper Hungary had to be turned into “nationally conscious” Slovaks in the United States by the deliberate intervention of a handful of nationalistically minded community leaders in the United States. Peter Rovnianek’s editorship of by far the largest Slovak American newspaper brought about a clearly discernible shift within the migrant press. Within months of gaining control in 1889, the newspaper was renamed and printed in the literary Slovak form, and its content shifted from an essentially informative bulletin of events toward an overtly nationalist editorial agenda. During subsequent years, Rovnianek, Štefan Furdek, and other leading Slovak nationalist leaders in the United States established Hattala Slovak as the chief, print language within the migrant colony and agitated in their flourishing press organs for the forging of Slovak national consciousness among their readership and mass membership fraternal societies. The forms that transatlantic nationalist agitation took among Slovak political leaders from the 1890s owed far more to this conscious attempt to “Slovakize” the masses, rather than being the predictable outcome of the mass migration of Slovak-speakers from Upper Hungary to the United States.
While theorists of nationalism such as Anderson have stressed the importance of an established print language for the development of nationalism, this study shows how a national print language could be consciously selected by nationalist actors in opposition to competing dialect and regional scripts. In the case of the Slovak American migrant colony, the Slovak national literary language won out in this contest chiefly due to the efforts of a tiny elite of influential and nationalistic leaders within the migrant colony, who promoted the standardized Slovak form at the expense of more familiar, dialect forms. Peter Rovnianek’s critical decision to rename and print the leading migrant newspaper in the standardized Slovak form in 1889 began a process by which Šariš script forms were deliberately marginalized and replaced as a print language within the migrant colony. Rovnianek and other migrant leaders such as Štefan Furdek succeeded in establishing the national Hattala script as the chief print language of the migrant press, as well as the language used within the mass membership fraternal societies that they founded in 1890—the National Slovak Society and the First Catholic Slovak Union, respectively—that served as the key economic and social institutions of the migrant colony (Pavelcová Reference Pavelcová and Pavelcová2015, 42). Through the conscious decisions made by these leaders and a tiny group of like-minded fraternal society officers, priests, and journalists, the institutions of the migrant colony were co-opted as vehicles that promoted a common tie of language between these transatlantic migrants and the Slovak nationalist leadership in Upper Hungary. This was a necessary precondition for Slovak American institutions to engage with the homeland nationalist movement, a process that gave new life to a moribund Slovak national movement in Hungary from the 1890s. The conscious adoption and fostering of the national print language within the Slovak American community shows how nationalist leaders played a critical role in establishing the basic claim to a common nationhood between this migrant colony and Slovak-speakers living in Upper Hungary. The emergence of a coherent, Slovak-American community, which served as a crucial base of activity for the Slovak national movement, was therefore a historically contingent outcome that depended on the effective leadership of a small group of dedicated nationalists, rather than being an inevitable expression of common, Slovak national consciousness among migrants living in the United States.
Financial Support.
This research was supported by funding provided by the Immigration History Research Center for the consultation of their archival collection located at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. It was also supported by the Historic Society of Pennsylvania, who awarded a HSP Balch Fellowship for one month’s study in their immigrant history archives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Disclosure.
Author has nothing to disclose.
