One response to poverty was ‘going to America’ (‘amerikázás’), that is, emigrating overseas. In 1921, six thousand Hungarians emigrated across the ocean, and during the first half of the 1920s nearly 20,000 in total.
This was by no means a low number: in that year the number of Hungarian emigrants exceeded the Austrian, French, and even Romanian figures. It is worth adding that, from earlier waves of emigration, there already existed Hungarian diasporas numbering in the tens of thousands in South America and half a million in North America.[1]
For some people, emigration inspired hopes similar to those attached to land redistribution. In his book America, the moderate left-wing politician Győző Drozdy wrote that on an early autumn morning in 1921, a broad-shouldered, muscular peasant man sought him out in Zalaegerszeg. Returning from captivity in the East, the man had found his family in rags, the pantry empty, and his wife living with another man.
‘So I came to see the honourable representative, because I heard that you are a different kind of man; that you stand up for the poor.’ ‘But I cannot give you land either, my friend,’ Drozdy replied sadly. ‘I know you cannot give me land. That is not what I wanted to ask for, but rather that you obtain a passport for me to America.’[2] A year earlier, poor smallholders in Veszprém County had even ‘threatened’ the Ministry of Agriculture that if they did not receive land, they would go to America.[3]
In the summer of 1921, the Social Democrat daily Népszava published a report on emigrants at Keleti Railway Station. ‘A young man was saying goodbye to his fiancée. “Will you come back?” the girl asked through tears. The young man held the girl’s hand, remained silent for a moment, then spoke. “No,” he said firmly. “I’ll bring you over too”…Handkerchiefs flutter, women cry, and in 30 working families the breadwinner departs to seek bread.’[4]
‘Handkerchiefs flutter, women cry, and in 30 working families the breadwinner departs to seek bread’
Emigration was not necessarily only about realizing dreams: according to a report from the late 1920s, Hungarians in Brazil were essentially subjected to slave labour on coffee plantations, where malaria and typhus claimed victims.[5]
The British embassy maintained contacts with the shipping companies that handled much of the emigration business, and the complicated emigration paperwork listed the documents required for relocation: 14 documents in total, marvelled a report by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, from birth certificates to ‘certificates of good conduct’ and—for some reason—baptismal certificates. Official documents are as much a part of the Hungarian as ‘his brain is in his head,’ the report concluded.[6] The military also took notice of the phenomenon of ‘going to America’, concluding at the end of 1920 that antisemitic agitation was urgently needed among Hungarian emigrants so that they will remain loyal to the nationalist Hungarian regime.[7]
It is worth emphasizing that virtually every prominent conservative visitor to the United States recorded how disturbed they were by Jews, Blacks, and sometimes Chinese people. The famous Catholic bishop Ottokár Prohászka visited the United States in 1904, where, according to his notes, he was terribly bothered by Blacks and Jews.[8]
Geographer Jenő Cholnoky travelled to the United States in 1912 with the future PM Pál Teleki. According to his recollections, he found the custom of chewing gum ridiculous, especially as people chewed it on the subway while ‘staring out at the world with rather witless expressions.’ The geographer also marvelled at the height of skyscrapers: to convey their scale, he placed the Pyramid of Cheops and Gellért Hill side by side in an illustration. Together, they were exactly as tall as Rockefeller Center.[9]
The aforementioned Győző Drozdy, visiting the United States, met the one-time firebrand of the right-wing Catholic press, the priest Béla Túri in New York, who was forced to admit that ‘our Christian campaign could not take root in America’—apparently, he attributed this to the fact that Hungarian Jews were represented in significant numbers among the leaders of the Hungarian–American community.[10]
The renowned—and no less controversial—Jesuit friar Béla Bangha similarly visited the United States at the end of 1921. He called it an ‘unfamiliar country’, where luxury was immense, everything was controlled by Jews, and Hungarians were assimilating into the Anglo-Saxons. When he asked a girl named ‘Özshi Pepp’ (Erzsébet Papp, with an English pronunciation) whether she was Hungarian, the child answered without hesitation: ‘I’m a Yankee!’[11]
In the 1930s, Bangha also visited Hungarian communities in South America. In the middle of the Brazilian jungle he found Hungarian villages, for example Boldogasszonyfalva, founded by the csángó Hungarians. The settlers were plagued by venomous spiders and ants that carried away the crops; they could fight the latter with fire, but there was no solution for the corn-stealing monkeys.
In the rainforest, Bangha also heard the confession of a Slovak emigrant, which he called ‘the proudest linguistic achievement of my life.’ As in the United States, he concluded that Hungarians quickly became ‘Spanish’.[12]
‘Drozdy praised American democracy, but found anti-Black laws “unbelievably degrading”’
Others, of course, were a bit more tolerant of the ‘new world’. Drozdy praised American democracy, but found anti-Black laws ‘unbelievably degrading’; for example, he saw that in some places people of colour were not allowed to walk on the sidewalk.
He compared the Ku Klux Klan to the Hungarian ébredő far-right movement, and also made the observation that the idea of a ‘pure American race’ was meaningless, since the original Americans were the ‘redskins’. Drozdy also visited a Hungarian synagogue in Detroit, where at the end of the service they sang the Hungarian national anthem.[13]
For some Hungarians, America promised bread, freedom, and a new beginning; for others, it revealed exploitation, prejudice, and the unsettling realization that far from home, even identity itself could slowly dissolve.
[1] Ilona Varga, ‘A kivándorlás irányváltozása és a magyar kivándorlók beilleszkedése Latin-Amerikában a két világháború között’, In: Acta Historica, 1976, pp. 9, 29.
[2] Győző Drozdy, Amerika, Bp, 1924, pp. 3, ff.
[3] Parasztsors – parasztgond, Ed Kiss Dezső, Bp, 1960, p. 32.
[4] Népszava, 19 Aug 1921, p. 3.
[5] Iratok az ellenforradalom történetéhez, vol. V. Ed Nemes Dezső, Bp, 1976, pp. 47–48.
[6] National Archives (Kew), FO 371/6140, 19 Dec 1921.
[7] Hadtörténeti Levéltár (Military Archives), HM ELN C 1920 100282.
[8] Prohászka Ottokár összegyűjtött munkái, vol XVI Bp, 1928, p. 280.
[9] Jenő Cholnoky, Utazásom Amerikába Teleki Pál gróffal, Bp, Vajda, pp. 30, 32–33.
[10] A magyar zsidóság almanachja. Numerus clausus, Ed Bethlen Pál, Bp, 1925, p. 21.
[11] Béla Bangha, Amerikai missziós körutam, Bp, 1923, pp. 11–12, 24–25.
[12] Bála Bangha, Dél keresztje alatt. Feljegyzések egy délamerikai missiós körútról, Bp, 1934, pp. 199, 212–213.
[13] Drozdy, Amerika, pp. 57, 60–61, 78.
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