Czech Americans

I

Introduction

Czech Americans, residents of the United States who trace their ancestry to regions of Europe where the Czech language is spoken. Most of these areas, including the Czech heartlands of Bohemia and Moravia, were parts of the Habsburg Empire from 1526 to 1918. After World War I (1914-1918), Czechs joined with the Slovaks who lived to the east to found the nation of Czechoslovakia. In 1993 Czechoslovakia was divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the 2000 U.S. census, about 1.4 million Americans claimed Czech ancestry. Another 385,000 Americans claimed Czechoslovak ancestry.

II

History

Most Czech Americans are descended from Czechs who immigrated to the United States in family groups between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of World War I in 1914. The majority came to America to acquire inexpensive farmland or steady employment, and to enjoy greater personal freedom. Four smaller waves of Czech immigrants entered the United States at various times during the remainder of the 20th century. These waves occurred after World War I, before World War II (1939-1945), after the 1948 Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, and after the 1968 invasion of that country by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

During World War I, many Czech Americans and Slovak Americans raised funds to support the Czechoslovak independence movement organized in 1915 by Czech scholars Tomáš G. Masaryk and Edvard Beneš and the Slovak astronomer Milan R. Štefánik. In September 1918, the United States and its allies recognized Czechoslovakia as an allied power, thus making possible the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak Republic at the end of the war. Nonetheless, many Czechs and Slovaks displaced by the war resettled in the United States until the Immigration Act of 1924 severely restricted immigration.

In the 1920 U.S. census, over 600,000 Americans reported Czech as their native language. More than half of these Czech Americans were factory workers, merchants, and professional people living in the cities of Chicago, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; New York City; Omaha, Nebraska; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota; St. Louis, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The rest primarily worked as farmers or as owners of small businesses in rural areas of eight Midwestern states: Nebraska, Texas, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Kansas, North Dakota, and Oklahoma.

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In the late 1930s Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, threatened to invade Czechoslovakia to annex the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia with a large ethnic German population. In 1938 the Munich Pact, an agreement negotiated by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy in hopes of avoiding war, forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Alarmed by Nazi Germany’s aggressive expansion and its anti-democratic and anti-Jewish policies, large numbers of people fled Czechoslovakia (see Anti-Semitism). Many of them immigrated to the United States in 1938 and 1939, including tens of thousands of Czech and Slovak Jews. In March 1939 Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and supported the establishment of a separate Slovak Republic allied to Germany. Thereafter and during World War II, Czech and Slovak Americans organized to help reestablish an independent democratic Czechoslovakia.

Allied victory insured the restoration of Czechoslovak independence in 1945, but the Czechoslovak Communist Party, backed by the USSR, seized power in a coup d’etat in 1948. Following the coup, hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks fled the country before the Communists could effectively restrict immigration. In early 1968 the Czechoslovak communist government began to liberalize its policies and to embrace limited democratic reforms. The USSR invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to put a stop to the reforms. Following the invasion, many Czechs and Slovaks entered the United States as immigrants. Like those who came to the United States in 1948, they settled primarily in large cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. An almost equal number immigrated to Canada and West Germany.

III

Culture

Almost half of Czech immigrants were members of the Roman Catholic Church. Czech American Catholics established over 1,000 parishes in cities and rural townships. Half of all Czech immigrants were freethinkers who did not join churches. Nonetheless, they founded fraternal and benevolent associations that provided mutual financial assistance and opportunities to socialize and perform community service. Czech American fraternal and benevolent associations include the Sokol, the Czechoslavonic Benevolent Society (ČSPS), and the Western Bohemian Fraternal Association (ŽBJ). Less than 3 percent of Czech immigrants were Protestants, though many Czech freethinkers converted to liberal Protestant denominations in the United States. An even smaller percentage of Czech immigrants were Jews.

Typically, Czech immigrants acculturated fairly quickly and encouraged their children to master the English language. Although efforts to maintain the Czech language in the United States met with little success, Czech Americans did preserve Czech folk music, cuisine, folk arts, festivals, and holiday traditions. Along with German Americans, Czech Americans popularized the accordion in the United States. In Texas, the musical influence of these settlers can still be heard in the accordion-based conjunto music popular among Mexican Americans. Traditional Czech foods, such as goulash and potato dumplings, have remained popular among Czech Americans. So has the traditional Czech introduction of Christmas in early December when Saint Nicholas arrives in the company of an angel and a devil. The angel gives gifts to persons who have been good, while the devil hands lumps of coal to anyone who has misbehaved.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a revival of ethnic pride and consciousness prompted many Americans to reexamine their immigrant heritage. In the case of Czech Americans, this translated into the revival of ethnic festivals and a growing interest in genealogy and family history. Since the reestablishment of Czech democracy in 1989 and the peaceful division of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, many Czech Americans have established closer ties to their ancestral homeland.

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