FROM 1914 TO 1939
As we have seen, Slavic studies were in their infancy when World War I
broke out. The American reaction to the War was, as we might have
expected, a plain paradox.
American public opinion concentrated on the Western Front and the
campaign in France and only slowly did it begin to react to the enormous
forces that were working in the central and eastern parts of Europe. As
in most countries of Europe, the only persons who took a deep interest
in these areas were the immigrants and the few persons who had already
been awakened to the great problems which the Slavic world of the time
presented.
The clash of Great Britain, France and Russia against Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Italy, the Triple Entente versus the Triple
Alliance, seemed real only in its relations to the Western Front. The
Eastern Front and the titanic passions released in the Slavic lands
under both Russia and Austria-Hungary seemed fantastic to public opinion
and even to the opinion of the educated and intelligent classes. At the
same time, it did have a message for the Slavic communities in the
United States which sought every opportunity to raise their voice in
hope of national liberation. The average American was more moved by the
Armenian massacres than he was by the astounding Russian advances and
retreats in the East. The causes which led the United States into the
War were almost wholly connected with the respective influences of Great
Britain, France and Germany and it was the armistice with Germany on
November 11, 1918 that convinced the American people that the War was
over and that the whole of Europe would very soon return to normalcy.
Consistent with American preoccupation with the developments in Germany,
the agitation for the disintegration of Austria-Hungary vigorously
sponsored by the Slavic colonies in the United States and the various
national committees in Europe found a hearing chiefly as a means of
curtailing German influence. Furthermore, as a result of propaganda
diligently spread during the War, the Russian Revolution seemed to the
majority of the American people another step in the development of
democracy and the break up of the control of Russia by a Germanized
royal family and a Germanized bureaucracy. It might even be said that
the initial distrust of Lenin came because the German General Staff
allowed him to cross to Russia from Switzerland. The disintegration of
the Russian front was laid entirely to German propaganda and the most
ridiculous stories were advanced in order to justify this point of view.
This attitude prompted the American reaction to the efforts of
liberation of the various peoples of the old Russian empire and nearly
all the nationalist movements were laid to German influences.
We may see this in the phrasing of the sixth of Wilson’s Fourteen Points
touching Russia:
The evacuation of all Russian territory, and such a settlement of
all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest
cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her
an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent
determination of her own political development and national policy,
and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations
under institutions of her own choosing and more than a welcome,
assistance of every kind that she may need and may herself desire.
On the other hand the non-Russian peoples of the old empire paid no
attention to these remarks by President Wilson. They saw rather the
general principles enunciated in the Fifth Point, “A free, open-minded
and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims based upon a
strict observance of the principle that in determining all such
questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must
have equal weight with the equitable claims of the Government whose
title is to be determined.” In fact he went further and on July 4, 1918
he declared in the “Four Ends” speech: “The settlement of every
question, whether of territory or sovereignty, of economic arrangement,
or of political relationship, upon the basis of the free acceptance of
that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the
basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or
people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its
exterior influence or mastery.”
Thus the doctrine of self-determination definitely pronounced by
President Wilson was carried still further by the people of the old
Russian empire than he had himself intended. He only provided for
independence for Finland, Poland and Armenia, three peoples who had won
the special sympathy of the American people. In the case of all others,
he was prepared to rest upon his Sixth Point and neglect careful and
accurate study of the conditions prevailing in Eastern Europe.
If space permitted, we could trace this idea in the American attitude to
the Peace of Brest Litovsk, the actions of the American Expeditionary
Forces in Archangel and Vladivostok, the attitude toward the Russian
White armies, the refusal to grant an Eastern border to Poland under the
Treaties of Versailles and Saint Germain, the refusal to recognize the
cession of Bessarabia by Russia to Romania and many other questions. It
insured high favor from those entirely removed from Austria-Hungary and
Germany and relative disfavor from all peoples trying to separate
themselves from Russia.
It is true that from the very beginning of the conflict the leading
intelligence officers like Colonels Ralph Van Deman and Marlborough
Churchill, the real moving spirits of the military intelligence branch
of the General Staff, recognized the importance of the Slavic languages,
and Colonel Graham D. Fitch included the Slavic languages among those
handled in the Translation Section of which he was the chief. Yet on the
whole, the Corps of Interpreters and other concerned branches and units
paid little attention to them and nearly all the American agents in the
Slavic territories were persons who had already known the languages.
Even in the case of the Siberian and Archangel expeditions, the problem
of interpreters was not placed on a firm basis. For some years after the
War, almost all the officers and men in the State Department were
persons who had served in these forces and had attained a certain amount
of Russian or some other language without any formal training.
The situation was the same in the committee formed by Colonel Edward
House to study the peace settlement. It is true that most of the
professors of Slavic were connected with this but it was very soon
discovered that much of the available material could not be used unless
it was in one of the Western languages or, in some cases, in Russian
(and, of course, with a Russian bias).
Thus the World War, and American participation in it, did not result in
any marked increase in interest and there was for some years a strong
feeling that a knowledge of the languages was secondary. The old
divisions between language and the historical sciences were still
perpetuated, gradually breaking down between the wars.
It is true that after the War, the War Department made a half-hearted
attempt to train certain regular officers in various subjects with a
possible eye for making them instructors in West Point. These included
two men who had been on the Siberian Expedition. Lt. Col. Benjamin B.
McCroskey and Captain William Gent were sent to study in the Department
of Slavonic Languages at Columbia University. With the growth of
isolationism the experiment was not pressed, and step by step all of the
government services lost interest except for a few young men in the
State Department who were often sent in some indefinite capacity to the
Baltic republics with the intent of learning Russian.
Thus, at the end of the War, there had come no important change in the
general picture. The departments of language in Harvard, California and
Columbia continued, perhaps with increased staffs, and Professor Harper
in Chicago went on with his work also. On the other hand, there were a
number of universities and colleges, chiefly in the Middle West, where
one or more Slavic languages were taught, often under the pressure of
local Slavic groups. These included Nebraska where Orin Stepanek was
teaching. Czech was also added to the curriculum of Creighton University
in Omaha and the University of Texas in Austin. There were energetic
stirrings among the Poles to introduce their language at the University
of Wisconsin. There were men in various other institutions such as
Professor Leon Zelenka Lerando in Lafayette College who, in at least
part of their work, handled one or another language. Yet in the course
of the years many of those institutions which had included Russian
during the War abandoned it.[35]
A rather unique case occurred at Dartmouth College. Professor R. W.
Jones, who was in the German department, knew some Russian. But, one of
the professors of the English department was Eric P. Kelly, who had been
in Poland with the YMCA during the War and had become vitally interested
in the country and its culture. In 1928 he published a very successful
boy’s story on medieval Poland, _The Trumpeter of Krakow_, which won the
Newberry Prize for Juvenile Books. Later he wrote two more on Polish
themes, _The Blacksmith of Wilno_ and _The Golden Star of Halich_.
Through their influence, William J. Rose, a Canadian and later the
Director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in the
University of London, was brought to Dartmouth for a few years. At one
time it looked as if Dartmouth would establish a full department with
Kelly attracting large classes to courses in Polish in translation.
Kelly became important in Polish intellectual work but for some reason,
despite his popularity, reverted to work in journalism, although he
continued his interest in things Polish outside the institution.[36]
All this was at a time when the bulk of the work on East European
history was still being carried on in the small institutions by men who
had no language training. In far too many places we still can find
traces of this habit.
Another important event of the period, following the Bolshevik
Revolution, was the arrival in the United States of a number of Russian
emigres, on all intellectual levels. Some of them like Professors M.
Rostovtseff and A. A. Vasilieff, were among the most distinguished
Russian scholars. They easily found outstanding positions for themselves
in the leading universities and were able to exert a considerable
influence. They brought with them, in various capacities, men like
Professor George Vernadsky who were to become the heads of their
subjects during the next decades. It would take too long to list all of
these men but among them was Professor Leonid Strakhovsky, Rostovtseff’s
nephew, who taught history at Georgetown University and later moved to
the University of Maryland, then to Harvard and is now at the University
of Toronto. Professor Serge Eliseeff of Harvard was also in the field of
Far Eastern languages. For a while, Nicholas Martinovitch, formerly of
the University of Petersburg, was at Columbia in the field of Turkic
studies. Many more of the younger group have gradually secured good
positions and worked themselves up in the American university system,
sometimes with a change of their names.
The same period saw the arrival in the United States of such outstanding
Ukrainian scholars as the architect and engineer, Professor Stephen
Timoshenko of Stanford University, and his brother the economist
Volodymyr Timoshenko of the same institution, and Professor Alexander
Granovsky, an entomologist, of the University of Minnesota. Professor
Dmytro Doroshenko of the Ukrainian Free University in Prague paid
several visits to Canada. All of these men were very active in arousing
interests in Ukrainian culture as were the choral leader, Alexander
Koshits, and the sculptor, Alexander Archipenko.
There were also a few young men of Slavic origin, born and educated in
the United States, who devoted themselves to Russian fields. Among them
was Leo Pasvolsky who worked for many years at the Brookings Institute
in Washington and was the son of one of the foremost Russian editors in
the pre-war United States. Yet the situation was so discouraging that
relatively few of the really young emigres who came to the United States
after 1918 and secured an education went into Slavic studies. They
usually chose some other field and gradually lost all practical
influence in the extension of Slavic culture, though in a few cases they
did some unofficial work in their own languages.
The situation in the languages and cultures of the liberated Slavic
countries was very different. The restoration of the independence of
Czechoslovakia and Poland and the formation of the Kingdom of the Serbs,
Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) involved the “Slavonization” of
many institutions that formerly had been under German and Austrian
control. As a result, there was a strong call for professors in those
lands and very few of the outstanding men came to America during the
early years. When they did, it was usually for a limited time, a
semester or perhaps a full year, and the funds for this purpose were
often supplied by the Slavic community in the neighborhood. Thus the
Poles of Detroit brought Professor Thaddeus Mitana to the University of
Michigan. This had been intended as the beginning of a Polish chair, but
the attempt broke down and Professor Mitana remained at Alliance
College, the institution of the Polish National Association. Professor
Roman Dyboski of the University of Krakow was likewise brought to the
University of Chicago for a period, but his lectures were not connected
in any sense with the work of Professor Harper. In 1928, Professor
Otakar Vocadlo of the University of Bratislava spent almost a full year
lecturing throughout the United States. All this did much to promote an
appreciation of Slavic scholarship, but since most of the visitors were
in technical and scientific fields they did not increase interest in
distinctively Slavic subjects.
Many of these visits were arranged through the Institute of
International Education which, as part of an international policy,
brought to the United States not only professors on lecture tours but
many students from the Slavic lands. The same institute also
administered a series of fellowships, usually for advanced study, which
were chiefly offered to Americans of Czech and Slovak parentage by the
Czechoslovak Ministry of Education. A similar program among the Poles
was carried on by the distinctively Polish-American Kosciuszko
Foundation begun in 1926. It was able to take many American Polish
students to Poland by offering them not only free tuition but also
greatly reduced rates on the Polish-American line steamships.
During the 1920’s those American universities most interested in Slavic
subjects developed rather independently. In the field of history, there
were few real innovations. During the twenties, and especially during
the period of the New Economic Policy in the USSR, a few young men were
able, on fellowships from various institutions, to study in the Soviet
universities and familiarize themselves with conditions there. Among
these men we may mention two important scholars of the present time:
Professor Philip Mosely of the American Council of Foreign Relations,
formerly of Columbia University, and Professor Geroid T. Robinson of
Columbia. Other men similarly visited other Slavic lands for varying
periods. Their studies have been an application of the accepted method
of historical research to the history of the Slavic countries by men who
were as well trained in Slavic as earlier generations had been in French
and German.
The situation was different in the field of language, literature and
culture, in the general sense of the word, for these subjects had been
very largely ignored in the earlier periods except in those institutions
where Slavic departments had been established. Even the masterpieces of
Russian literature had been handled purely on the basis of translations,
with few efforts to equate them with the general life of Russia. This
had produced the jaundiced view of Russian literature satirized by
Stephen Leacock of McGill University. In fact during a large part of the
period between the wars, one of the largest groups of students of Slavic
literature were persons who had no desire to learn the language or to
read Slavic literature in the original. They were merely interested in
including Russian in courses of comparative literature, or they were
instructors obliged to treat some of the Russian masterpieces in
translation.
This broad cultural need was met in different ways by the various Slavic
departments. Thus, during these years, the department at the University
of California, under Professor George Rapall Noyes, decidedly stressed
the development of translation, and courses in which a knowledge of
Russian was not primarily required. The department grew steadily but
largely maintained its original staff supplemented by visiting
lecturers. This policy continued until the eve of World War II. During
most of this time Professor Noyes did not make any special effort to
establish contacts with the Slavic groups on the Pacific coast.
The situation at Columbia University was different. Professor Clarence
A. Manning, who was acting department head during the twelve years which
Professor Prince spent in the American diplomatic service, tried to
continue the policy of Professor Prince in fostering a study of all the
Slavic languages and in establishing contacts with the Slavic
communities in the New York area. In terms of administration, the chief
development was the transfer of most instruction in the Slavic languages
from the faculty of philosophy, where it had originated, to the Columbia
Extension Teaching, later revamped as the School of General Studies.
This school had been planned originally for adult education but as it
acquired a special form it furnished a convenient vehicle for many
years, for giving language instruction. For some years it conducted a
series of extramural courses, especially in Polish, as far away as
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
The first addition to what eventually became a full time staff was Mrs.
Elena T. Mogilat who, from 1922 until the eve of World War II, conducted
practically all the courses in the Russian language. In 1927, Arthur P.
Coleman, the first American of non-Slavic origin to receive a doctorate
in Slavic languages in the United States, was appointed Lecturer and
devoted himself chiefly to courses in Polish.
The rest of the staff, some of whom served for many years, was composed
chiefly of educated journalists employed on the Slavic papers in New
York or persons occupying responsible positions in various institutions
of learning and business. Almost without interruption, yearly courses
were given in Polish, Czechoslovak and Serbo-Croatian or Slovene. We
must specifically mention the courses in Albanian given by Nelo Drizari
who published, at this period, an Albanian-English grammar and a small
Albanian-English dictionary. Most of the students in these non-Russian
courses were second generation Slavs. Few of these ever worked toward
higher degrees.
During the twenties, most students for the doctorate were Russians or
persons of Russian descent who had come to the United States after the
Revolution seeking positions in the American educational world. Those
who took the master’s degree were largely of the second generation or of
non-Slavic origin.
The department made its most extensive efforts in 1929 in providing a
summer course on the history of all Slavic literatures. The lectures on
Russian were given by Prince D. S. Mirsky of the University of London;
on Czech, by Professor Otakar Vocadlo; on Polish, by Professor Kelly of
Dartmouth; and, on Yugoslav, by Dr. D. Subotic of the University of
London. One lecture on Bulgarian was prepared by Dimitar Shishmanov, the
son of the distinguished professor of Slavic philology at the University
of Sofia and a well-known Bulgarian author who was executed by the
Communists after World War II. The response of students was not
sufficient to justify the repetition of the experiment in the next
years, although the numbers exceeded anything achieved in England at
that time for similar programs.
At the time it was the idea of Professor Manning that the future of
Slavic studies, especially in those languages spoken by considerable
communities in the United States, lay in the development of interest and
support from those communities. This notion was, at the time, warmly
supported by Columbia’s President Nicholas Murray Butler and led to the
formation of an Institute of Polish Culture and an Institute of
Czechoslovak Studies. Both met with initial success but the depression
with its pressure upon the Slavic population of the United States, led
to a practical suspension of the institutes after the publication of a
Polish number of the American archaeological journal, _Art and
Archaeology_, and a translated _Anthology of Czechoslovak Poetry_
compiled in the United States and Canada.
On the return of Professor Prince in 1933, the name of the department
was changed to East European Languages and Professor Prince made a new
effort to realize his dream of founding something that would include all
of the peoples of Eastern Europe. It proved premature, once again. The
department underwent further change after the retirement of Professor
Prince. Then in the fall of 1938, Professor Max Vasmer of the University
of Berlin lectured for one semester; he was followed by Professor Boris
Unbegaun of the University of Strassburg. Still later Professor Karl
Menges was added to the faculty to give courses in Slavic and Altaic
philology.
In still a different field, Professor Manning and Dean Hawkes, of
Columbia College, were both active in the establishment of St.
Vladimir’s Russian Orthodox Seminary in New York, to train candidates
for the priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church of North America. This
developed later into St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary and Theological
Academy. To this were invited many of the leading emigrant Russian
theologians from Paris and elsewhere.
The development at Harvard was somewhat different. Few changes were made
in the situation which existed prior to World War I, until the
retirement of Professor Wiener. Then in 1927 Professor Samuel Hazzard
Cross (born in 1891, A.B. and Ph.D. at Harvard before 1917), rejoined
his alma mater and after some years of service in the German department
was made, in 1930, Professor of Slavic Languages. With the appointment
of Professor Cross, Slavic work at Harvard went through a new period of
development and expansion. Into the revised department Cross brought
Professor Ernest J. Simmons who had taken his doctorate in 1928 with a
study of English influence on Russian literature of the eighteenth
century. A larger staff of Russian assistants was also engaged.
Professor Cross, who had translated the _Russian Primary Chronicle_,
stressed the older period of Russian literature, perhaps because of his
Germanic interests. He also became the managing editor of _Speculum_,
the organ of the Mediaeval Academy of America. In his interest in the
medieval period, Professor Cross was not alone in Harvard for from the
School of Architecture came the work of Professor Kenneth J. Conant on
St. Sofia Cathedral in Kiev and from the English department the work by
Francis P. Magoun, Jr. on the spreading in East Slavic lands of the
medieval _gestes_ of Alexander.
During the following years, Professor Cross became the center of the
developing Slavic activity, which was not limited to Harvard, but which
was responsible for the publication of various works in connection with
the Pushkin Centennial in 1937. The death of Cross in 1946 was a great
loss to American-Russian scholarship.
Still another attempt to promote Slavic studies was made at the
University of Pittsburgh by the establishment of national rooms in the
Cathedral of Learning to serve as centers for the national interests of
the students. The Slavic communities, in and around the city, were urged
to provide funds to furnish these rooms in native style and appeals were
frequently made to the governments of the Slavic countries to help in
the work.
In 1927 also, Professor Michael Karpovich, joined the faculty at Harvard
as Professor of Russian History. Professor Karpovich had been trained as
a lawyer and diplomat in Russia before the Revolution of 1917 and he
soon became a leading spokesman for the Russian liberal groups in the
United States and in America’s scholarly communities.
At the end of World War I, it was proposed that a scientific society be
established to unite Slavic scholars. The constitution and practice of
existing organizations in history seemed sufficiently broad to include
the professors of those subjects but a more complicated situation
prevailed in the fields of language and literature.
Consequently, in 1919, there was organized the Society for the
Advancement of Slavonic Study. The nucleus of this group was Slavs from
various organizations, especially Czechs and Yugoslavs. The first
president was Miss Sarka B. Hrbkova who had come to New York from
Nebraska after the dissolution of the department at the state university
there. The secretary was Leon Zelenka Lerando of Lafayette College. A
few meetings were held in 1922 with the final one at Columbia. The
society did not prove to be a success, however, largely because of the
inability of the founders to realize the aims of the society. It
published a few numbers of a bulletin but the addresses at the meetings
were made largely under the mistaken impression that the “findings” of
the society would pass for final pronunciamentos on many of the most
disputed subjects of Slavic scholarship. It must be confessed, also,
that many of these “findings” were based upon the political decisions
made at Versailles and previously advanced by movements such as the
Czechoslovak National Committee. As a result, the organization rapidly
lost standing and it very soon ceased to exist.
Yet the seed which it had sown was not entirely wasted. In 1922,
Professor Manning discussed with the Modern Language Association the
possibility of organizing the scholars of Slavic languages and
literatures under its auspices. From the very beginning, the attitude of
Professor Manning and the other founders was to avoid the difficulties
that had arisen earlier between the Association and the Society for the
Advancement of Slavonic Study. The first meeting, under the chairmanship
of Professor Manning, was poorly attended and some of the papers read
were decidedly amateurish; but the group continued. During the
intervening years, the original group has been developed into two: one
for Slavic literatures and one for Slavic philology. The attendance is
composed of members of the Association who are either actively or
passively interested in Slavic studies. This is very different from the
early years when it became necessary to do everything possible to secure
an audience for the few persons who ventured to submit papers. During
the early years, Professor Manning remained as chairman and the
secretary was usually chosen from one of the representatives of the
Slavic communities who had shown some interest in the undertaking. Now
the posts of chairman and secretary are rotated, more or less regularly,
and most professors of Slavic in the country have filled a position at
least once. Even so, the group has not sufficiently developed to apply
for recognition as a section parallel to those for English, Romance and
Germanic. Despite this, one of its members, Professor Ernest J. Simmons,
has been elected to the post of Director of the Modern Language
Association for one term.
A somewhat different development came in the foundation of the _Slavonic
Review_ by Professor Sir Bernard Pares and Professor R. W. Seton-Watson
at the University of London in 1922. From the beginning, this journal,
the first purely scholarly Slavic journal in English, had as American
co-editors, Professor Harper, Professor Noyes and Professor Kerner, then
at the University of Missouri. In 1923, once the journal was fairly
launched, Professor Seton-Watson came to the United States in the hope
of dissuading American Slavists from starting a competing journal. The
proposal was broached at a meeting of the American Historical
Association in Richmond, Virginia, but was decidedly disapproved by some
of those present, and the idea was tacitly dropped without prejudice to
the cooperation between the scholars of the two countries.
In a somewhat different vein, mention should be made of the monthly
magazine _Poland_. This was started in 1919 by the Polish Legation in
Washington at the suggestion of the Baldwin Locomotive Works which had
taken a prominent part in the rehabilitation of the Polish railroads
after World War I. The Baldwin company furnished the permanent staff, an
editor, Paul Le Tallec, a young Frenchman, and Eric Lord as business
manager. The journal received a subsidy from the Legation. It was
started purely as a trade journal, but Le Tallec had other views. Under
Clarence Dawson, who succeeded Paul Le Tallec as editor, it rapidly
developed into a general magazine covering all aspects of Polish life,
art and literature, as well as economics and business. The journal
proved successful for over ten years but when Dawson resigned as editor,
it began to fail. The magazine changed its character considerably and
finally, in the early thirties, was allowed to lapse.
It was during this same decade that energetic work was done in building
the libraries of various institutions. Even before the Russian
Revolution, the Library of Congress had acquired a large, uncatalogued
collection of Russian books and the New York Public Library developed a
very large and extensive Russian department. There were large Russian
collections at both Harvard and Yale. At Columbia, the Russian
collections prior to 1914 were negligible, while at the University of
California, Professor Noyes had specialized largely in translations of
Russian literature. Most of the institutions took advantage of the large
number of Russian books that were thrown upon the market after the
Soviet Revolution and purchased whole libraries from emigres and other
sources.
The Columbia collections were increased by the gift of a large library
on Russian literature, collected for many years by Dr. Samuel Abel, a
graduate of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. It numbered several
thousand volumes. The establishment of the Hoover War Library at
Stanford University brought to that institution a vast amount of
material, especially concerning Slavic countries, that had been
collected by American Relief workers, under the direction of Herbert
Hoover.
We must also mention the work that developed at Georgetown University
under the direction of Father Edmund Walsh who had served in Russia
after the Revolution. Work was done in the various schools but
especially in the School for Foreign Service of which Father Walsh was
the founder. Georgetown’s example was seconded by the continual
improvement in the standards of other institutions such as that of the
Czech Benedictines at Lisle, Illinois, and further, by the
establishment, in 1933, of such institutions as St. Basil’s College in
Stamford, Connecticut, by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Exarchate of
Philadelphia.
There was also a large number of Slavic books and translations from
Slavic in the public library in Cleveland, Ohio, where Mrs. Eleanor
Ledbetter had worked long and hard with the Slavic groups in that city.
Thus, by the outbreak of World War II, there were in the United States a
considerable number of libraries that were fairly adequate in nearly all
the centers where Slavic subjects were treated with the importance that
they deserved.
In 1931 work in Russian literature in English was also started at the
University of Washington, in Seattle, by Ivar Spector. In 1943, a course
in Russian history was added. In addition to these courses, Professor
Spector did considerable lecturing before various groups interested in
Russian affairs. The interest in Seattle is especially noticeable
because of the possible contacts with Siberia across the Pacific Ocean.
Whatever contact is had with the Soviet Union comes almost inevitably
through the seacoast cities on the Pacific Ocean. The same motives have
led to a strengthening of Russian work in the other California
universities, the University of California at Los Angeles and the
University of Southern California.
Strange to say, the recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 by the
United States did not produce a marked increase in interest in Russian
Slavic affairs. Student interest flagged and it was soon evident that
the need for Russian in the business world would not at all parallel the
situation which a few years earlier had sparked the great development in
Spanish studies.
The years of the depression, in many ways, produced another period of
marking time in Slavic studies. For the most part efforts of the Slavic
groups to introduce their languages into the American educational system
were retarded, while available finances were restricted to relief
purposes. In other cases, as among the Czechs, the hardships were
complicated by the death of such leaders as Reverend Vincent Pisek and
Professor Michael Pupin who had been active in stimulating cooperation
between the immigrant communities and the American educational system.
Their deaths at a critical period disrupted much of the work. Further,
the 1931 failure of the Bank of Europe Trust company in New York under
conditions which almost completely reimbursed the depositors,
nonetheless lessened the effectiveness of Thomas Capek, a leader in the
work. Similar disasters in other Slavic groups had similar nation-wide
effects and except for an effort to interest the Czech population in the
Chicago area to establish courses at the University of Illinois, the
period was destitute of that type of energetic development which, on the
eve of the depression, promised to bear such rich fruits.
In a lighter vein came the establishment of courses in Russian under the
NRA. It had been hoped by some that it might be possible to give relief
to at least some of the unemployed Russians by the establishment of free
courses in the language. The attempt was almost completely a failure.
The students lacked any serious desire to learn the language and the
instructors were no more anxious to teach it. One very well educated
Russian actually prepared a set of charts on Russian grammar which
purported to show that there were no exceptions to any syntactical rule
in Russian and he blandly presented to his class word forms that he knew
never existed even in the speech of the most illiterate. When he was
reprimanded, he calmly told the NRA supervisors that he knew that none
of his students intended to learn Russian, he wanted his money, and so
there was no reason to worry about what, or how he taught.
In 1934, a new development emerged which was to prove exceedingly
fruitful in later years. Largely under the influence of Professors Cross
and Patrick, a small sum of money was secured to establish an intensive
summer course in Russian for about 20 students. The course was held at
Harvard University the first year and was directly under the control of
Professor Patrick who had come from the University of California to
conduct it with the aid of some assistants. The experiment was
successful. In 1935, joint sessions were held at Columbia University and
were to a certain degree independent of the regular summer school
courses. Professor Patrick was assisted by Mrs. Mogilat of Columbia and
Dr. Jack A. Posin of the University of California. After 1935, the
course was held at the University of California, largely because of the
increasing illness of Professor Patrick.
The session at Columbia was attended by two regular officers of the
United States Army, Major Frank L. Hayne and Lieutenant (later Brigadier
General) Joseph A. Michela. Their attendance was made possible by the
efforts of Colonel Burnett, officer in charge of the Military Attache
Service, who, having served several terms as United States Military
Attache in Japan, insisted that officers assigned to such posts as
Moscow and Tokyo have a speaking and reading knowledge of the local
language. This had been the case of Colonel Philip Faymonville, the
first Army man to be sent to Moscow after the restoration of diplomatic
relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. In a sense, it
was almost the beginning of serious language work by the United States
Armed Services. Both Hayne and Michela later were military attaches in
Moscow, although Hayne was transferred to Finland during the
Soviet-Finnish War. Michela remained in Moscow during the greater part
of the War and participated in the removal of the capital to Kuybyshev
when the Germans approached Moscow in the summer of 1941. At Columbia,
these officers had special courses during a two year period. In the
second year they were joined by Captain Ivan Yeaton, who had previously
served during World War I in the Siberian Expedition under General
Graves. Other officers were later added to the group but as World War II
approached, the entire project was transferred to Harvard University.
The thirties also witnessed the beginning of a systematic interest in
Russian studies by the American Council of Learned Societies. This group
had previously considered the need for developing studies in specialized
fields and had approached foundations to secure money for limited
projects. It had been successful in fostering work in Chinese and in
completing at least a preliminary survey of American resources in the
field. It then turned its attention to Russian and established a
committee to study the general status of Russian studies. Professor
Cross was secretary of this important committee for several years.
Through the activities of the American Council, coordination of work by
the various universities and colleges, was accomplished. This was but
the beginning of a process which was to be greatly intensified during
the War.
In the thirties, the University of Wisconsin began to offer courses in
Polish. Elaborately planned, Professor Joseph Birkenmeyer from the
University of Krakow was invited to direct the work. Unfortunately, he
returned to Poland just on the eve of World War II, but the work was
continued successfully.[37] The department at Wisconsin was established
primarily through the influence of the Polish population of the state.
When we consider the state of affairs as a whole on the eve of World War
II it is apparent that no important university or college had
established an adequate course in Slavic languages and literatures other
than those which had done so by the end of World War I. This does not
mean that the period between the wars was lost. The departments at all
the major centers were better equipped than they had been twenty years
before; they had larger libraries, better trained instructors and what
is more, they were attracting more serious students. Further, there
were, in the United States, a considerable number of men who had had
personal experience and acquaintance with the Slavic and adjacent
countries. There were real experts in almost every field of Slavic
studies and there had been a large output of books on the languages,
literatures and histories of the Slavic nations.
Of course, Russian predominated. Yet it is noteworthy that during the
twenties and thirties when American institutions were overrun with
would-be Communists, the Slavic departments, which might have seemed the
most vulnerable, somehow escaped with the least amount of trouble. They
had not taken sides in the fervent polemics of the period that were
carried on with more heat than light, and while there were a number of
men who had studied or visited the Soviet Union, few, if any, had become
seriously infected with Communism.
They had, however, continued to repeat the old traditional formulas set
out by Russian scholarship before the Revolution, arbitrarily neglecting
all aspects of the nationality problem in the Soviets, treating Russia
as a single unified country, without regard for the mixed elements of
her population or the Soviet division of the republics by an official
policy of differentiation between the peoples.
The most unsatisfactory aspect of the period concerned the non-Russian
Slavic tongues and histories. This was unfortunate, for it tended to
give instruction in the major centers a Russian, if not Soviet,
orientation, a fact which would cause repercussions in the following
period.
Among the Slavic communities, some leaders were beginning to understand
better the peculiar problems of the American educational system, and
though they had not yet come to cooperate actively, they were rapidly
becoming aware that there was serious work being done. Their own
institutions were improving. They were securing more American-trained
teachers, even if they were members of the groups, and many second
generation Slavs were rising to prominence.
Thus, the period represented a marked deepening, rather than an
expansion, of efforts. Slavic languages and history were no longer
considered merely artificial and exotic; the way was cleared for a
period of rapid expansion.