“What Blood Unites, the Sea Shall Not Divide”: Bohemian Day at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893

Abstract

AUGUST 10, 1893, WAS AN UNUSUALLY BUSY DAY in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. From the early hours, crowds of local Czech immigrants congregated before garnished storefronts and decorated buildings in anticipation of the day's big event. All along 18th Street, Pilsen's main artery, flags were unfurled from the windows above, and onlookers continued to gather on the streets below. By the early afternoon, reported one local Czech-language daily, “18th Street was one endless throng from Brown to Blue Island Avenue. . . . The street resembled a sea of banners. There was not a single house where the American or Bohemian flag did not wave.”1 The sixty thousand residents of America's largest Czech enclave, joined by hundreds of fellow Czech immigrants from across the United States, eagerly waited to receive some several dozen visitors from the homeland. The first and last ceremonial pilgrimage to the Czech “colonies” in the New World was due to arrive at any moment.As hours passed, men returned from work and the crowd grew larger and more impatient. Tensions mounted until, shortly after 6 p.m., the marshal and first coach appeared on the corner of 18th and Halsted Streets. “The scenes that followed,” reported one observer, “are beyond description.”2 A procession of some thirty-five coaches traveled with the Bohemian guests from the train station to the heart of Pilsen. In the first coach sat the mayor of Chicago himself, Carter Harrison, alongside the leading representatives of the American and Bohemian Czechs. Excited onlookers tossed flowers to the coaches and from every window one heard loud cheers amid a mass of waving red and white banners. “Fireworks were ignited,” continued the report, “and the overall impression created by the magnificently decorated buildings was so splendid that the mayor and several guests grew teary-eyed.”3 According to a carefully orchestrated plan, groups of Czechs representing various organizations joined themselves one by one to the procession.4 The Czecho-Slavic Musical Union no. 1 marched at the head of the parade. Close behind followed the so-called Taborites, commemorators of Bohemia's fifteenth-century religious uprisings, along with representatives of the forester's union and members of a Czech Catholic fraternal order. As the coaches passed the Czech-English Freethinkers’ School, the so-called Bohemian Band joined cadres of the Czecho-Slavic Mutual Aid Society at the rear of the parade. Finally, as the procession neared the center of Pilsen, crowds of uniformed members of the gymnastic organization Sokol joined the ranks. Thousands more lined the streets, eager to take in the spectacle. It was a diverse entourage: militant Protestantism, workers, Catholics, freethinkers, musicians, and fraternal orders displaying themselves before the eyes of homeland visitors and local crowds.The scene impressed the Bohemian Czech visitors, who recalled in letters sent home the crowds of cheering countrymen waving kerchiefs and members of Czech associations marching in full regalia. Chicago's Bohemian Czech guests were thronged by American Czechs and overwhelmed by cries of “Welcome! Na zdar!” In one such letter, the writer František Herites reflected on the meaning of the day's events: “The picture was in all truth quite stirring and it would take a hard heart not to be moved. All the warm greetings, the affectionate embraces, the tears of joy and signs of fraternal love; it was not all for the sake of a chance handful of overseas visitors, though everyone accepted it as such. No, it was for the sake of the Czech nation, it belonged to the entire Czech family beyond the seas in the homeland.”5More than the simple recognition of familiar faces moved the thousands who cheered the arrival of some sixty Czech visitors, Herites correctly observed. The hundreds who rushed to shake hands with the arriving “pilgrims” did so in the name of half a million Czech Americans. Those whom they greeted, furthermore, represented some eight million Czechs residing in Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. According to Herites, this ceremony “belonged” not to the individuals directly involved but “to the entire Czech family beyond the seas in the homeland.” In other words, though they had emigrated years ago, the Czechs in America never forgot that their true homeland lies in the heart of Europe.The message that the Czech Americans sought to convey that August day was more subtle and multifaceted than Herites had realized, however. An article published in Chicago's Czech-language daily Svornost, titled “To the Guests from Bohemia,” complicates Herites's patriotic interpretation of the festivities.6 After being “torn from the embrace of our one dear mother by the wrath of our enemies” and “driven away into the wide world, in which we wandered for many a year,” the newspaper's editor wrote in the name of America's Czechs, “We were received in the arms of a new mother, this country of freedom, whose sacred ground you now tread.” The first lines of this epistle portray the migration experience as one of exile. Expelled years before and forced to wander the earth, these self-declared diasporic nationals were received by a “new mother,” a land of freedom resacralized and made a second homeland. “We welcome you to the heart of this country,” the author continued with his salutation, “which is probably to us American Czechs what golden Prague is to all of you who inhabit the enchanting leas of Bohemia, Moravia and other European lands. As you look to Prague, so do all American Czechs look toward Chicago, where a new dawn portends a bright future.” What this declaration of a distinct Czech American national identity showed is that the Czechs in America, contrary to Herites's assertion, did not conceive of Prague as the exclusive heart of the nation. Strikingly, the nation was presented as an organism with two hearts, one on either side of the Atlantic, and the American Czech as the impossible offspring of two mothers. The visitors from Bohemia, then, were not greeted as envoys traveling from the nation's center to its peripheral colonies but as guests entering a second and equally sacred homeland with its own center in Chicago.This article explores a fractured vision of national belonging among Chicago's “Bohemians.”7 The week following the celebrated arrival of Czechs from the homeland culminated in Bohemian Day at the World's Columbian Exposition. That day at the fair, tens of thousands of boisterous Czechs paraded through the streets of downtown Chicago, hosted a grand concert, and carried out a triumphant Sokol gymnastics meet. Rich in symbolism, each of these events conveyed a complex message about ethnic and national community to a diverse audience. What was the meaning of Bohemian Day for the Czech American immigrants, their Bohemian guests, and non-Czech observers of the celebrations? How did this immigrant community employ Czech and American national imagery to give voice to a unique Czech American ethnic identity? How did nationally minded Bohemian Czechs, the “pilgrims” attending the events of Bohemian Day, interpret this display of Czech American ethnic identity? In Chicago, the nation was made strange, as historical materials and nationalist imagery were put to startling new uses. This is the story of a confrontation between a Central European nationalist and American ethnic conception of Czechness at the World's Columbian Exposition.To understand the significance of Bohemian Day, it is first necessary to describe the political context from which the idea for a Czech pilgrimage to the New World emerged.8 During the mid-1880s, lines of fracture began to appear upon the facade of the Czech national movement. Many Czech patriots began to grow uneasy with their representation in Vienna. For twenty-five years, the Czech National Party (the so-called Old Czechs) and the more radical National Liberal Party (the Young Czechs) had represented the interests of Bohemia's Czech population in Vienna as members of the so-called Czech Club coalition. Tensions, however, periodically troubled the relationship between the moderate Old Czechs and the more explicitly nationalistic Young Czechs. Since the days of political exclusion during the 1850s, the Old Czechs had pursued a politics of piecemeal reforms in the Austrian parliament. Over the years, the more radical wing of the Czech Club, emboldened by several decades of open political activity, began to demand more dramatic reforms, including autonomy for the province of Bohemia (called the “state right” program). Young Czech dissatisfaction came to a head in May 1887, when a purported statement by the National Party leader František Ladislav Rieger seemed to confirm the Old Czech's commitment to a weak politics of compromise. The reforms sought by the Czech Club, Rieger allegedly declared at a meeting of the Czech Club in Vienna, cannot be achieved all at once. Instead, he continued, reforms must be gathered one-by-one, even if it comes at the cost of “gathering crumbs that have fallen under the table.” The unfortunate analogy proved too much for the Young Czech leaders, who in January of the following year proclaimed themselves a separate national faction—the Club of Independent Czech Delegates—in the Austrian parliament. From that point on, two separate parties claimed to represent the interests of the entire Czech people.More than any other single issue, it was the question of linguistic boundaries in Bohemia that divided the region's two national communities, Czechs and Austrian Germans. The end of the 1880s had brought both the federal parliament and provincial Bohemian diet to a standstill over the question of language rights. Germans vehemently objected to the use of the Czech language in education, government, and business in the predominantly German-speaking areas of Bohemia. Even where a sizeable minority of Czechs resided, Germans objected to giving any sort of official status to the Czech language, to say nothing of being forced to speak Czech in public or learn it in schools. Nationally minded Czechs, on the other hand, sought to secure official recognition of their language throughout the lands of the Bohemian Crown where Czech had once been the language of state. To curtail the use of Czech anywhere within the borders of Bohemia, they insisted, represented an intolerable encroachment on national sovereignty. The passionate and often violent partisanship over the issue dominated politics not only in Bohemia but in Vienna as well. To address any other issues of importance to the empire, it would first be necessary to remove the roadblock of linguistic strife.It was precisely for this reason that leaders of the Czech and German factions of Bohemia were summoned to Vienna to hammer out a compromise in January 1890. Here occurred the second, and more significant political blunder that would eventually lead to the political fracturing of the Czech national movement. In addition to the nobility and Bohemian German liberals, only representatives of the Czech National Party had been invited to participate in the talks. The Young Czechs, representing the more nationalistically minded of Bohemia's Czechs, were left conspicuously absent. The resulting edict—the so-called punktace, or “points”—proved to be a debacle for the Old Czechs. At the time of the agreement, the Old Czechs had believed that a successful compromise had been reached. Bohemia, according to the agreement, was to be divided into two linguistic zones: one exclusively German area and another area of mixed linguistic usage. In the former areas, mostly along Bohemia's northwestern borders, German was to be the exclusive language of state administration and schooling. Elsewhere, Czech and German would be given equal status. When news of the agreement became public, Bohemian Germans took to the streets in Prague and proclaimed the agreement a major victory for the German national cause. Czech nationalists, of course, were humiliated. The Old Czechs, it was quickly claimed, had handed over historical lands of the Bohemian Kingdom to the enemy. Amid cries of treachery, the Young Czechs seemed to many the genuine and unblemished representatives of the national cause. Of course, having not been invited to the talks, the Young Czechs were freed from responsibility for a compromise that, in the end, may very well of been necessary. By excluding representatives of the more radical wing of the nation, the party of F. L. Rieger had suffered a major defeat and was supplanted by the Young Czechs.9The political face of the Czech nation had thus adopted two very different profiles. On one side was the defeated party of compromise, the Old Czechs, representing the interests of the patriotic Bohemian aristocracy and led by a suppliant F. L. Rieger. Opposite stood the vociferous Young Czechs, supported by the growing Czech-speaking middle and upper- middle class. The latter won the 1891 elections to the federal parliament, potentially blocking any legislative progress with their uncompromising demands for state rights within the context of the Habsburg Empire. Stalemate appeared insurmountable as the demands of Young Czech delegates froze political debate in Vienna and rapprochement between the two political parties in the Bohemian provincial diet seemed unlikely.It was in this context of political defeat and a looming political crisis that Czech nationals abroad, and the United States as the most important home of overseas Czechs, gained significance in the eyes of some political leaders. Loss on the political stage for the Old Czechs and, it must be added, the growing pressure of mass political movements bearing on the Young Czechs led the nation's elite to seek avenues of national rejuvenation and unity beyond parliamentary politics. Their status as leaders of the national movement was no longer to be defended in the realm of politics alone; the defense of national existence abroad would provide another avenue through which Czech liberals could assert their leadership role. The image of a free Bohemia in the United States would come to play an important role as a signifier of an uncorrupted national unity that national elites could hold before the Czech masses.Reflecting the desire to remain spokesmen of the nation, Czech liberals partook in the burgeoning interest in fold culture that swept the Czech middle classes during the 1890s.10 The emerging sciences of ethnography and anthropology provided the opportunity to redraw national discourse along cultural lines. A series of ethnographic exhibitions took place in every region of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia in anticipation of a major ethnographic fair to happen in Prague in 1895.11 At each of these events, and especially at the exhibition of 1895, documentation of diasporic Czechs played a major role. Newspapers speculated about the lives of their distant compatriots, and a Czech America in miniature was constructed on the Prague fairgrounds in 1895.12 The sixty or so middle-class and upper-middle-class Czechs who visited to the “colonies” in America set out to observe, collect, and establish contact with this overseas branch of the nation.Whereas the fabric of Czech political unity was steadily unraveling in Bohemia, the Czechs of the United States had woven historical materials from the homeland with New World experiences to create a coherent Czech American ethnic identity. It was precisely this consolidation of ethnic identity that Czech American leaders wished display before their Bohemian guests. According to the vision of its organizers, Bohemian Day was to showcase a united Czech America capable of overcoming internal divisions of class, politics and, above all, religion—if only for a single day. Before elaborating on the celebration, however, it is necessary first to summarize how an Old World national identity became the New World ethnicity put on display at the World's Fair.Czechs began arriving in small numbers to the United States during the 1850s and 1860s, settling mostly in rural Texas and Wisconsin.13 During the last quarter of the century, Czechs established themselves in larger numbers as an urban American subculture, founding colonies in New York, St. Louis and, especially, Chicago.14 In 1870, there were 40,289 Czech immigrants in the United States. By 1880, the number had more than doubled to eighty-five thousand. The 1890 census reports a total of 215,514 first- and second-generation Bohemians in the United States.15 Over the following decade, an additional 141,316 immigrants joined the American Czech community, to make a total of 356,830 by the century's end. The 1910 census reports a Czech American population of 538,784. After World War I, in 1920, that number rose to 622,796. Following the passage of the Johnson Naturalization Act in 1924, which placed strict quotas on immigration from eastern and southern Europe, the age of mass migration of Czechs from the Bohemian lands came to an end.As the number of Czech Americans grew, so did their need for communication and information relevant to the community. In the years leading up to 1890, thirteen dailies, seventy weeklies, ten semi-weeklies, and twenty-two semi-monthlies had been launched.16 The years between 1890 and 1911 saw the publication of a further seventeen Czech-language daily newspapers, ninety new weeklies as well as eight semi-weeklies and seventy-four semi-monthlies. A selection of newspapers published in Czech America's greatest metropolis, Chicago, includes the dailies Denní hlasatel (Daily herald) and Svornost (Concord), satirical weeklies such as Diblík (The imp) and Šotek (The sprite), the children's monthlies Svobodná škola (Free school) and Noviny pro Maličky (News for little ones), the home journal Domácnost (Household), and several Catholic and professional journals as well as countless almanacs. Some of the many periodicals survived only a few months, while others successfully published well into the twentieth century.Chicago had long been the capital of Czech America both in terms of numbers and culture.17 Czechs began to appear in the lumber mills and on the docks of Lake Michigan during the 1850s and during the following two decades grew to a population of 6,277. At this point, the Chicago Czech community rapidly expanded, as did the city of Chicago itself. In 1881, a barkeeper named Matĕj Škudera opened a tavern outside of the city center, just off 18th Street and Blue Island Avenue, and gave it the name U mĕsta Plznĕ (At the town of Pilsen). Chicago Czechs followed Škudera's lead and dubbed their new neighborhood Pilsen, after the industrial center in western Bohemia. By 1890, the majority of Chicago's seventy thousand Czechs resided in this neighborhood. One Bohemian Czech visitor to the city reported on social life in Chicago's Pilsen: The Czechs are very active. They have six theaters, one of which was recently built at the expense of 80,000 dollars. Weekly plays are given in the Czech language. They also have six large gyms and other public establishments, seven churches and the same number of parochial schools, six private non-denominational schools. They have about 150 lodges belonging to various charitable organizations that give out thousands of dollars every year to support widows and orphans and other charitable causes. Four daily papers are published in Chicago, and many of them provide more news than any periodical published in Bohemia. Besides those, many weeklies and illustrated papers are published in Chicago. . . . They have three bank firms, two breweries, hundreds of various shops, they have factories and other large wholesalers, they have here artists, teachers at the public schools, professors, lawyers, doctors, and more public notaries than they need.18At the turn of the century, Chicago hosted a population of 98,280 Czech speakers.19 Historian Joseph Chada provides a list of Czech voluntary associations active at the time: 236 progressive (svobodomyslní) benevolent societies, 119 parochial benevolent societies, twenty-two ethnic labor union locals, five drama clubs, eleven associations for the maintenance of weekend schools, fifteen singing societies, seven sections of the socialist party, thirty-one Sokol groups, thirteen professional associations, seven veterans associations, seventeen sports clubs and forty-five various cultural and social groups.20Numbers alone, however, fail to capture the contours of the immigrant experience. Recently arrived immigrants from Bohemia made sense of their new surroundings by building their ethnic identity into their physical surroundings. Several institutions, rituals, and monuments linked Czech Americans together as a community of commonly shared memories and values. This creative period is framed by two major symbolic manifestations of Czech American ethnicity: the founding of the Bohemian National Cemetery in 1877 and the successful staging of Bohemian Day itself at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The former event provided a space in which important figures of Czech America could be memorialized; the latter, as we shall see, presented an opportunity to communicate Czech American identity to the homeland visitors and American public. During the same period, four Czech American pilgrimages to the homeland provided instances of cultural contact between the old and new variations of the Czech nation. Consequently, Czechs on both sides of the ocean would begin speculating on the nature of Czech identity. In short, the last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of a Czech community in America into a self-conscious Czech American ethnicity.On the seventh of February 1877, the editor of Svornost, František Zdrůbek, addressed a large audience of Chicago Czechs in the newly built Sokol hall. A scandal had recently broken out over a Czech Catholic priest's refusal to allow the burial of a Czech atheist in the church's cemetery. Zdrůbek addressed the audience in the Sokol hall and called for the establishment of a national cemetery open to all tendencies. His idea quickly took root in the community and, the following February, the Bohemian National Cemetery Committee was set up to gather funds and buy land. A festive dedication of the new cemetery accompanied by a parade of four thousand Chicago Czechs took place soon thereafter, on September 8, 1877.21The cemetery proved to be as important a space for the spread of the ethnic idea as for the burial of the community's dead. Since its opening in 1877, the grounds of the Bohemian National Cemetery served as a stage for public commemoration of the Czech American past. The monument to the Czech American freethinker and journalist Ladimír Klácel provides a good example. Klácel, a former professor of philosophy at the University of Brno, migrated to New York in 1889.22 In Europe, he had been educated for the priesthood and had taken the monastic vows of the Augustinian friars. Eventually, however, the pedagogue embraced the teachings of Hegel, which he applied to his understanding of culture, politics, and religion. As a result, he was dismissed from his teaching position in Brno and subsequently decided to migrate to America at the age of sixty-one. In the US, he became (in)famous among American Czechs as a critic of religion, an advocate of rationalism, and a cult figure among the Czech freethinkers. Restless and financially incompetent, he traveled from one Czech community to another, eking out a living as a private tutor and serving as editor of various freethinking journals. Worried about poor health and bad finances, and bitterly disillusioned with the New World, Klácel became a mystic and visionary. As a social reformer, he propagated the ideas of Charles Fourier, advocating the establishment of Czech American communalist settlements. The so-called Osvojenci (adoptive sons), followers of Klácel's utopian ideas, founded a short-lived community in South Dakota, which they dubbed Klácelka in honor of their ideologue. The philosopher died in poverty in 1882. To many, Ladimír Klácel represented the unjust fate of the Czech intellect in an unrefined and unappreciative America. On July 27, 1884, the foundation stone was ceremoniously laid for a monument to the philosopher, which was unveiled a year later (see figure 2).A second instance of Czech American memorialization at the National Cemetery was the dedication of a second statue in 1889, this time a monument to the Czech soldiers who served during the American Civil War (see figure 3). At the dedication of this monument, Zdrůbek spoke to the occasion along with the author of a Czech work about the history of the Civil War and leading Sokol activist Josef Čermak. During the monument's unveiling in 1892, Chicago mayor Carter Harrison spoke of the contributions Czechs had made to their new homeland.In many ways, the Chicago cemetery can be compared to the construction of the Slavín in Prague. The Slavín, a section of the national cemetery on the ruins of the famed Prague castle Vyšehrad, was designated as the final resting place of the nation's greatest minds in 1889.23 But whereas the Prague Slavín was a site of memory and point of orientation for the entire nation, including those members of the nation living abroad, Chicago's Slavín constituted a uniquely Czech American memory set apart from the old world. One Czech historian's ode to the cemetery provides an example: “Compatriots, may your pious visit to our Czechoslav-American Slavín pay honor to the thousands of our dead pioneers who, through their blood and sweat, intellect and brawn, helped to build this metropolis of the American Midwest.”24 The Chicago Slavín commemorated the history of the Czech nation as well as Czech America. Neither the monuments to Klácel nor that dedicated to the Czech American Civil War veterans were Czech in the national sense. These were both monuments with which only the ethnic Czech American could identify. The festivities, speeches and parades were public celebrations of a nation with memories of Bohemia but a more recent history in the New World.The opening of the Bohemian National Cemetery in 1877 in many ways marks the birth of a Czech American community with its unique organizational structures, its own media of communication as well as a distinct public memory. As an American ethnic community, the Czechs shared a well-developed infrastructure of settlements, journals, values, and memories. Nevertheless, deep divides separated American Czechs from one another. The most significant gulf that Czechs in the United States failed to bridge concerned the issue of religion. According to official Habsburg statistics published before World War I, nearly every person in Bohemia belonged to the Catholic Church.25 The Catholic faith, however, does not seem to have survived the Atlantic crossing. The Czech American historian Tomáš Čapek estimated that half of Czech immigrants renounced their homeland faith on American shores.26 Lending some credibility to these estimates is the fact that Catholic periodicals at the peak of Czech American public life in the 1920s counted twenty-one, whereas those of the irreligious freethinkers (svobodomyslní) numbered in the hundreds.27 Catholic voluntary associations, furthermore, counted only 32,908 members at a time when the non-Catholic equivalents boasted 123,183.28What was the cause of this de-Catholicization in the New World? It seems that every public figure in Czech America at the end of the nineteenth century had an answer to this question, each according to his ideological convictions. In vitriolic editorials and heated libel suits, newspaper editors portrayed priests as domineering, greedy and resentful of former believers now “liberated” by rational thought. Adherents to the church, for their part, blamed reckless, loud-mouthed newspaper editors for the rupture. Both freethinkers and Catholics agreed that the split occurred at some point in the late 1860s. Some blamed (or boasted of) Karel Jonáš, the founder of the freethinking weekly Pokrok (Progress), for having “thrown a firebrand of discord among his countrymen,” as Tomáš Čapek paraphrases the critics. The exiled Klácel also came under fire (or, again, received praise) for pushing communalism and philosophical materialism in his journal Slován Amerikanský (American Slav). Others pointed to the lack of churches in America, or the corrupting influence of liberal American surroundings.In his account of the divide, Čapek dismissed each of these explanations.29 Neither Jonáš nor Klácel could have had any influence had they not found eyes and ears already willing to hear their anti-clerical message. So far as lack of churches or American culture is concerned, Čapek continued, why should not the Irish, Spanish, or Poles have experienced the same decline in church attendance? The cause, rather, was to be sought in the history and culture of the homeland. In Bohemia, the reformer Jan Hus had been preaching reform in the fourteenth century, Hussite armies marched across the region during the fifteenth century until religious dissent was finally quashed by the Habsburg victory at White Mountain outside of Prague in 1620. The following two hundred years of forceful re-Catholicization, according to Čapek, discredited the Catholic faith for many in Bohemia. The conflict between Czech American Catholics and rationalist freethinkers would never have occurred “had Czechs not first been pushed away from religion by an awareness of a history of injustices, by the anger of a nation never reconciled [to its fate] and pushed to defy the victors: Rome and Vienna.”30 During the period of the Czech National Revival and the subsequent national movement in the nineteenth century, therefore, liberalization of the Monarchy's political instit