MARQUETTE SLAVIC STUDIES
III
A History of Slavic Studies
in the United States
A History of Slavic Studies in the United States
Clarence A. Manning
_Associate Professor of Slavic Languages Columbia University_
THE MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS
MILWAUKEE 1957 WISCONSIN
MARQUETTE SLAVIC STUDIES are published under the direction of the Slavic
Institute of Marquette University.
_Edited by_ ROMAN SMAL-STOCKI
_Advisory Board_ CYRIL E. SMITH
ALFRED SOKOLNICKI
CHRISTOPHER SPALATIN
The views expressed in the MARQUETTE SLAVIC STUDIES are those of their
authors, and are not to be construed as representing the point of view
of the Slavic Institute.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57–11742
©Copyright, 1957, Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, Wis.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Contents
INTRODUCTION vii
_Chapter 1_ THE SLAVS IN AMERICA 1
_Chapter 2_ MASS IMMIGRATION 9
_Chapter 3_ SLAVIC STUDIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 17
_Chapter 4_ THE BEGINNING OF FORMAL STUDY 25
_Chapter 5_ SLAVIC EFFORTS BEFORE WORLD WAR I 36
_Chapter 6_ FROM 1914 TO 1939 44
_Chapter 7_ SLAVIC STUDIES SINCE 1939 62
_Chapter 8_ THE FUTURE TASKS OF SLAVIC AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES 83
Integration in American consciousness. The divisions of
the area. Undergraduate courses. Language
instruction. Graduate work. Area studies. Summary.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 109
INDEX 114
Introduction
Preparing an adequate history of Slavic and East European studies in the
United States is not an easy task. Much of the pertinent material has
never been collected. Where it has been brought together, it has never
been adequately evaluated or put in its proper setting against the
general American cultural and educational development. Any attempt at a
synthesis of the situation must then be highly tentative, subject to
correction and amplification.
In the formal sense, studies and courses in the Slavic languages,
cultures and history began to appear in American colleges and
universities at the end of the nineteenth century, largely through
individual interest and effort. Until World War I, these courses
developed slowly and aroused little interest. We can say the same of the
formation of libraries and of collections of other materials. If then we
should treat the history of Slavic studies in this narrow sense, we
would secure a creditable but small list of courses and publications
multiplying on a large scale only since World War II began.
Yet, this picture would be incomplete. It fails to consider certain
factors which have greatly influenced American life and thinking and
which will in the future exert still more influence. It likewise ignores
significant achievements of earlier periods. It ignores certain
individuals who, though only tenuously connected with universities and
colleges, influenced the course of events. It ignores also that one
phenomenon that sharply differentiates the scope of Slavic and East
European studies in the United States from such studies anywhere else in
the world. That is the presence in the United States of millions of
Slavic immigrants and their descendants. These have played a hitherto
unrecognized part in the country’s development and at the same time have
given it some unusual aspects.
Slavic studies in the United States can never be as important as in
those countries where the dominant language is Slavic, and where a
knowledge of the language is a necessity for daily life. There the
Slavic tradition, even under external pressure, is still alive. It
expresses itself in every form of culture, every study of the local
environment, natural or artificial. Thus, from late in the eighteenth
century, the universities of Austria-Hungary, especially the University
of Vienna, and those in such Slavic centers as Prague, Krakow, Lwow and
Zagreb developed flourishing centers of Slavic studies. The universities
in the Russian Empire also concentrated not only on Russian, but on all
the other tongues. It was in these countries that Slavic languages came
earliest and most completely into their own, as they later did in the
independent Slavic countries.
Yet Slavic and East European studies are not in the same position as
they were in past decades in Germany, France and the British Isles.
There, they were definitely intellectual disciplines which might find
practical use in certain governmental and educational posts but which
were of interest only to a small number of specialists. In those
countries there were learned professors of Slavic. This is especially
true of Germany and France where relatively large groups of outstanding
Slavs, chiefly of the educated, professional and political classes, were
able to influence higher level thought in those countries. Few ordinary
Slavs appeared in either country. Those who did were mostly migratory
workers who did not take root in their new environment, and exercised
little influence.
That is not true in the United States. There were before World War I a
small number of outstanding representatives of the Slavic nations, free
or not. But the United States was also brought face to face with the
immigration of millions of Slavic workmen and peasants. These brought
little material or consciously intellectual baggage to the country but
took root here and, under the leadership which they developed in the
United States, have played a steadily increasing role in American life.
They and their descendants of the second and third generations are not a
negligible force. Their children and grandchildren may have lost a
certain facility in the use of their mother tongues but they have
retained qualities, knowledge and traditions which are vital to the
United States today and which cannot fail to have a far-reaching effect
upon the entire world in the future.
We cannot then speak of Slavic studies merely in the narrow sense of the
word. We must take into account these other factors which are rapidly
becoming tangible elements in all of American life. In this sense we
must consider Slavic and East European studies to include those means
other than political propaganda which have led to the present American
knowledge of the Slavic world, a knowledge with some striking insights
and some equally amazing gaps.
The present survey is an attempt to handle all aspects of the growing
awareness of the Slavs by the American people and the American
educational system. Yet we can hardly do this without a brief survey of
the way in which the Slavs appeared on the American scene and the
methods by which they have come to assume their present position. The
complete history of this has never been written though we do have a fair
outline of the various stages of the movement.
CHAPTER 1
THE SLAVS IN AMERICA
We have no records of the arrival in what is now the United States of
the first Slavic nationals. We don’t know from where they came or where
they settled. But it seems certain that at an early date Slavs appeared
in all of the various streams of colonization though primarily as
individuals. We must remember that it was not until the nineteenth
century that the world became seriously interested in the nationality
and language of a person. The medieval period had thought only in terms
of allegiance to a given monarch or to some supernational state which
embraced persons of many tongues and origins, united in a common
loyalty.
This held true for the first two centuries of American settlement and we
always have to take it into account. It may be well to glance briefly,
then, at the political situation in the Slavic lands, from the discovery
of America through the next century.
Christopher Columbus discovered the New World less than a half century
after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks and the liberation of
Moscow from the Tatar yoke. Europe was filled then as now with homeless
people, the Christians of the Byzantine Empire and of the Balkan
Christian states, preferring the hardships of a wandering life to
existence under the Mohammedan Turks. The armed forces of all countries
were filled with adventurers who had been driven from their homes and
were glad to fight as mercenaries.
For example, there were Greek soldiers in the armies of Francisco de
Pizarro in his conquest of Peru in 1532. Later these same men took sides
with Diego de Almagro in his revolt against Pizarro and made for him the
first cannon cast in the New World.[1] This intermixture of
nationalities continued throughout the era of the discovery and the
ensuing decades. This was the height of the Spanish power and it was
under the flag of Spain that men of all nationalities, especially from
the Mediterranean area, went to serve.
At this time, the most powerful Slavic state was the Polish Republic,
the _Rzeczpospolita Polska_. Yet this was far more than ethnographic
Poland. It took in almost all Ukrainian and Byelorussian lands as well
as ethnographic Lithuania and Latvia and a considerable part of eastern
Germany. It maintained the closest connections with the Danubian
principalities and even Hungary. Thus, a person known as a Pole could
very easily have been one of several Slavic and even non-Slavic
nationalities.
The Czechs formed the nucleus of the Kingdom of Bohemia, itself a
subsidiary of the Hapsburg domains, the Holy Roman Empire (which, to use
the words of Voltaire, was already ceasing to be either Holy, Roman or
an Empire). The Slovaks and the Carpathian Ukrainians were under the
Crown of St. Stephen of Hungary as were the Croats, while the Slovenes
were more particularly connected with Austria. Yet again, the lands of
the Crown of St. Stephen were also part of the Empire.
Thus the only Slavs not included either in the Ottoman and Hapsburg
empires or in Poland were the Muscovite Russians. At this period few of
them thought of crossing the boundaries of their western neighbors.
Those who left their original homes traveled eastward and by the middle
of the seventeenth century had reached the Pacific ocean and were poised
to cross the north Pacific at its narrowest point.
We must keep these facts in mind when we think of the early Slavic
immigration to the United States. This jumble of nationalities and
states was still more confused by the fact that the overwhelming
majority of the educated Slavic population used one of the three
international languages of the day. The Roman Catholics used Latin, the
Orthodox employed either Church Slavic or Greek, and these “higher”
tongues supplemented and in large part replaced the vernaculars in legal
and historical records. This was a period of religious turmoil as well,
beginning with the Hussite wars in Bohemia. These were continued by the
Protestant Reformation touched off by Martin Luther and the
Counter-Reformation under the leadership of the Jesuits. At the same
time, the new Protestantism and the older Latin Rite were spreading
among the Orthodox Slavs and the situation was still further complicated
by the Union of Brest in 1594 which formed the so-called Uniat Church or
Catholic Church of the Eastern Rite.
Each of these religious disputes, with the political consequences that
they involved, added to the number of displaced persons. The adherents
of every religion found shelter with their friends in any of the
countries of Western Europe—England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and
Holland. These were added to the number willing to risk anything to
secure a new home. This was the background of the early colonization
efforts in America.
The Spanish settlements in the southwest are less easily discussed.
There can be no doubt that the leaders of the great religious orders
that spread through California and New Mexico were of Spanish birth but
there is considerable evidence to show that some of their subordinates
were probably of Slavic origin. At least they seemed familiar with the
peculiarities of Orthodox iconography. The Spanish mission in Santa
Barbara, California, displays the Eastern form crucifix. Many of the
wood paintings of saints in New Mexico superficially resemble crude
icons. Yet little has been done to trace the early lives of the monks
who worked in these missions. It would certainly not be surprising to
find that some had made their way to the Spanish centers of the
Franciscans and Dominicans from the disturbed area of Eastern Europe.[2]
We are on far surer ground when we come to the colonies established by
the English along the Atlantic coast. In 1610, the Virginia Company sent
to Jamestown, with Lord de la Warr, a group of Polish gentlemen as
workmen. These were apparently refugees in England from one of the many
upheavals in the _Rzeczpospolita_. Their names appear in Anglicized
forms and since we have no information about their experiences before
they reached England, many of them have been claimed by the Poles,
Ukrainians, and the other peoples included in the Polish state.[3]
The same situation prevailed in New Netherlands. There can be no doubt
that some of the settlers in the new Dutch colony were Slavs. Thus for a
long while, the name of the Zeboroski[4] family, one of the early
settlers, was written in Jersey Dutch. The family is proud of its Polish
origin but again like so many, it also has been claimed by the
Ukrainians. Another Slav of this period is Augustine Herrman, a skilled
surveyor from Prague. He apparently went first to Virginia, then moved
northward to New Amsterdam and later founded Bohemia Manor in Maryland.
Efforts have been made by both the Czechs and the Germans to prove that
he was of their origin but what proof there is favors the Czechs.[5]
Many other families, such as the Roosevelts, can trace their origin to
the Baltic states but leave us to decide from which particular group the
original ancestor came.
A still more tangled situation arose in the early colony of Delaware,
while it was still New Sweden. The Swedes eliminated the first Dutch
settlement around Fort Casimir and then in 1641 founded their own Fort
Christina and sent over a population of Swedes, Germans and Finns, and
all this at a time when the Poles and the Swedes were conducting their
own warfare behind the shelter of the Thirty Years War. At the same time
the Swedes were trying to make the Baltic a Swedish lake and their
representatives were deeply involved in negotiations with the
_Zaporozhian Kozaks_ who were in an almost constant state of revolt
against Poland. The Swedes then ruled both Livonia and Estonia. In view
of all this it would have been surprising indeed if there had not been
Slavs in the colony of New Sweden, the area in which the traditionally
American form of the log cabin seems to have originated, a form
reminiscent of the architecture of the East Baltic Slavs. The evidence
for New England is less clear, though we know that the authorities of
the new Harvard College seriously thought of inviting the distinguished
Czech educator, Jan Amos Comenius (Komensky) to serve as the first
president, in 1630. However, nothing came of it.[6]
In the eighteenth century there is the same uncertainty. In 1741 a group
of the _Unitas Fratrum_ (the Bohemian Brethren) from Bohemia and
Moravia, were led by Count Zinzendorf to a settlement in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania. It is at least possible that some of these settlers spoke
Czech as well as German. If they did, it would explain more clearly the
interest in the community that was taken during the American Revolution
by General Kasimierz Pulaski, who seems to have made a point of
attending religious services there whenever he could. The architecture
of the older buildings further suggests Slavic influence.
The American Revolution brought to the New World another group of Slavs,
of whom the best known are the two Polish leaders, Generals Pulaski[7]
and Tadeusz Kosciuszko.[8] Pulaski, already a well-known figure in
Poland, brought with him a number of other East Europeans and Slavs who
formed a considerable portion of the famous Pulaski Legion. We have also
the names of others, such as Count Bienowski and Colonel Michael Kovach,
an Hungarian, a member of the Legion who was killed at Charleston, South
Carolina, in 1779. Most of the Legion’s survivors stayed in the new
country.
Another possible source for inspiring Slavs, and especially Poles, to
come to America was the career of Major General Charles Lee,[9] of the
American Army. He had once been in command of the Cadet School in Warsaw
founded by King Stanislaw Poniatowski. In addition to that, most of the
French troops who served in America had previously been on duty in
western Poland supporting the Saxon claims to the throne and helping the
Poles oppose Russian domination. There is no way of knowing whether or
not this force had received Slavic recruits during its term of duty
there. The services of both Pulaski and Kosciuszko, and the later return
of Kosciuszko to the United States in 1797, built up considerable
interest for Poland in the United States. This continued for nearly a
half century, leading to a fair amount of immigration from the former
Polish state, especially after the Polish Revolt of 1831.
Moreover, American newspapers of the time published long accounts of
events in Europe. Thus, in 1733 John Peter Zenger included in the New
York _Weekly Journal_ an account of the efforts of Stanislaw Leszczynski
to secure the throne of Poland. Numerous similar examples could be
cited. However, no organized interest in Slavic lands and peoples
developed.
Little is heard of Russians at this period, although American
representatives had appeared in St. Petersburg during the Revolution and
the Tsars, in the early 1800’s, began to send diplomatic representatives
to Washington. Prince Dimitry Golitsyn,[10] a member of a socially
prominent Russian family, was the first Roman Catholic priest to be
fully trained and ordained by Bishop Carroll in the United States. He
continued until the end of his life to be one of the leading Catholic
priests in Pennsylvania, and maintained contact with the Russian
Ministers in Washington. We also know that in 1800, Kutusoff mantles and
bonnets were very popular in New York society.[11]
Until 1848, the Slavs who came to the United States came either as
individual travelers or as individual immigrants, perhaps drawn in the
train of some more prominent compatriot. There are several interesting
accounts of this period, in Polish, such as those by Juljusz Ursin
Niemciewicz who came with Kosciuszko in 1797 and remained in the country
for several years. He visited Boston around 1799 and his diary mentions
a Polish Unitarian library, the _Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum_, in
Harvard of which nothing is now known.[12]
The situation was different in the Pacific northwest.[13] The Russians
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reached the Sea of
Okhotsk and Kamchatka in their eastward advance and began to push into
the north Pacific in quest for furs. Late in the century they started to
establish more or less temporary trading posts on the Aleutian Islands.
In 1783, Grigory Shelikov established a more permanent center at Kodiak.
This center of Russian influence was later transferred south to St.
Michael on the site of the present Sitka in 1800. (The ablest Russian
governor, Aleksander Baranov, went further. In 1811 he sent his most
trusted assistant, Ivan Kuskov, to establish a Russian trading post at
Fort Ross, not far from San Francisco). Shelikov had founded the
Russian-American Company to exploit these new lands, and his talented
successor, Nikolay Rezanov, visited the New World in 1805, dreaming of
controlling the entire Pacific coast, including the Spanish settlements
in California with San Francisco as their head. On his return across
Siberia he died at Irkutsk as the result of a fall from his horse and
his dreams largely perished with him, although later the Russians did
try to seize the Hawaiian Islands and make the north Pacific a Russian
lake.
Fortunately for the Americans, the Russian settlements were poorly
supported from St. Petersburg and the intricacies of Russian law left
Baranov and his successor without the necessary supplies and they were
compelled to indulge in illegal trade with the British. Boston merchants
also carried to Kodiak and Sitka the goods which the Russian-American
Company had neglected to send.
Strangely enough, the Russians failed to cross the coastal mountains
either in Alaska or further to the south. They contented themselves with
the hunting of marine animals, especially the sea otter, sending the
skins back to Siberia for Asiatic distribution. They apparently did not
realize that the American continent could be crossed by land, a peculiar
oversight when we remember their rapid crossing of the whole of Asia.
Rezanov had hoped to make Kodiak a center of Russian culture. He had
come to Russian America by sea from St. Petersburg and brought with him
a large library of books for an academy which he proposed to establish.
Apparently Shelikov had spread excessive stories of the Russian
achievements, for Kodiak was only a wretched frontier village and not an
embryonic metropolis, Slava Rossii, as he boasted. Rezanov’s collection
remained in Kodiak until its destruction by fire on July 18, 1943.
The Russian Orthodox Church also sent a mission to the colony. The
monks, largely from Valamo, were devoted men and at least one was a
martyr. The greatest of the Russian clergy was Ivan Venyaminov, later
Archbishop Innokenty, Metropolitan of Moscow and one of the great
figures of the Russian Church. This mission converted the majority of
the Aleuts and Eskimos in the neighborhood and the Russian language was
long the common speech on most of the Aleutian Islands.
Russian expansion thus had begun to take shape seriously at about the
same time the Americans began to push westward. After buying the
Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson sent
an expedition under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the
northwest. In 1806 the expedition reached the mouth of the Columbia
River. Then followed the settlement of Astoria by agents of the American
fur trader, John Jacob Astor. By the time the Russians were ready to
advance to the south, the Americans were established in the center of
the area and the Russian colonies never formed a solid belt on the west
coast. For some reason the Russians did not try to eliminate the
Americans and the southern settlements began to wither away from
inability to expand. In 1841, Fort Ross was sold to a group of Americans
and the Russians withdrew northward.
The lively trade between Sitka and Boston was interrupted by the War of
1812 and when peace came, commerce was further hindered by Russian
efforts to impose trade restrictions that were unacceptable to the
Americans. These came at the same time as the revolutions and
declarations of independence of the Spanish colonies and the adherence
of Tsar Alexander I to the Holy Alliance to aid Spain in recovering
them. The Russian efforts at controlling the north Pacific and the
American sympathy for the Spanish colonies led to the proclamation of
the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 which doomed European expansion in the New
World. Both President Monroe and his Secretary of State, John Quincy
Adams, had held diplomatic posts in Russia and were aware of the
differences between the Russian and American points of view.
The Monroe Doctrine and the settlement of the northwest determined the
fate of Russian America. It was blocked to the south by the United
States and the British settlements in the Canadian West. In 1867, Russia
realized the hopelessness of its position and sold the territory now
known as Alaska to the United States. The Russians then established
their bishopric in San Francisco but during the next years the Russian
colony in the far west remained an isolated group and it was only toward
the end of the century that it merged with the general Slavic
immigration.
This, then, is the first phase of Slavic contact with the New World.
Relatively little imprint was left on American life, although we must
not undervalue certain ideas that did pass into the young republic. They
were the result of individual effort rather than organized or mass
movements which came later.