The Hungarian Government, the American Magyar Churches, and Immigrant Ties to the Homeland, 1903–1917

Abstract

Before the political and scholarly rediscovery of ethnicity during the past decade, American observers tended to overlook the lingering homeland influences in the lives of this country's immigrant ethnic groups. Scholars here were the world's experts on the consequences which follow international migration: alienation, acculturation, and assimilation. But like their dean, Oscar Handlin, they stressed not the “roots” but the uprootedness of their subjects. According to this tradition, the migrants, torn suddenly from Old World surroundings, had been able to bring with them only a few flimsy pieces of “cultural baggage,” the equivalent of the fragile-looking wicker hampers and precariously bulging cloth bundles with which the newcomers were photographed at Ellis Island but with which they rarely were seen again.