Michael R. Cude, a historian at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas, has written a much-needed history of the efforts of American Slovaks on behalf of their countrymen in Europe. He shows that Slovaks in the United States “carried concepts and mentalities of American democracy back to their homeland,” and they helped “Slovak national identity formation” (3). He wrote this book to give American Slovaks full credit for their efforts to gain autonomy for their people in interwar Czechoslovakia, and independence after World War II.

Cude based his book on careful research in key American archives. These included such government repositories as the Calvin Coolidge Papers, the Congressional Record, Documents on German Foreign Policy, the Lewis Einstein Papers, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Harry S. Truman Library, the Hoover Institution Archives, the OSS/State Department Intelligence and Research Reports, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, the U.S. Department of State Decimal files, and non-governmental archives such as the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. However, unlike most American professional historians of Czechoslovakia, he also consulted sources that are often ignored by American historians, such as the archives of the Slovak Institute in Cleveland as well as the writings of Slovak-American journalists and amateur historians such as Ján Pankuch and Slovak émigré journalists and historians such as Jozef Paučo and Konštantín Čulen. He also consulted the papers and pamphlets published by past presidents of the Slovak League of America, such as Jozef Hušek, Ivan Bielek, and Peter P. Hletko, which have often been ignored by professional historians. Finally, he read virtually all the books and articles published by historians and Slovak-American activists on the subject of Czechoslovakia and the role of American Slovaks in its history. In looking at this wide variety of sources, Cude discovered that, while the majority of Slovak-Americans favored autonomy or federation in the newly created Czechoslovakia after 1918, and independence after 1945, the United States Department of State, from the beginning, favored the official policy of “Czechoslovakism” as propagated T. G. Masaryk, its founding president, and by various subsequent Czechoslovak governments in Prague. Cude concludes that “this was a lost opportunity” (199) for the U.S. government, because, if the State Department had supported Slovak-American calls for federation, Czechoslovakia might not have fallen apart.

As in most books that grew out of dissertations, this one has a few shortcomings. On page 125, Cude mixes up pastor Jaroslav Pelikán with his son, the renowned scholar Jaroslav Pelikán, Jr. On page 194, he erroneously identifies Alexander Dubček as the president of Czechoslovakia, whereas the latter was the first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1968–69. Also on page 194, he lists Paul Hacker as the first U.S. ambassador to Slovakia in 1993 when, in fact, he was the first chargé d'affaires. Unfortunately, his notes appear at the back of the book, which makes it difficult to follow his sources; and, inexplicably, the book has no bibliography. The last two can be blamed on his publisher.

Despite the above shortcomings, Cude's book is a good corrective to the numerous histories of the ill-fated Czechoslovak Republic written by leading scholars in the West. Starting with R.W. Seton-Watson in England and with Louis Leger and Ernest Denis in France, and continuing with Robert J. Kerner and S. Harrison Thompson in the USA, most western scholars, and the students they educated, supported Prague's centralistic policies from the creation to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia (Carol Skalnik Leff's National Conflict in Czechoslovakia [Princeton, 1988] was the rare exception). And so did the United States Department of State. In choosing to support the “enlightened Czechs” versus the “backward” Slovaks, such scholars and diplomats distorted Czechoslovakia's history, and they misunderstood and lamented its demise. Cude, on the other hand, understands the situation very well and has set the record straight. Current and future scholars of Czechoslovakia will greatly benefit by reading his book, which won the Best Book Award of the Slovak Studies Association in 2022.