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The Czechoslovak History Conference na začátku [1]
Owen V. Johnson
The beginnings of what was originally called the Czechoslovak History Conference are connected with the entry into the field of a younger generation with a homegrown interest in Czech and Slovak history. I was fortunate to be a part of that group, and now the last of the founders to be active in the organization, although others might still be members. We were part of a growth of East European studies generally that followed the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which at the time seemed to indicate that there was little prospect for an end of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. The founding of the Czechoslovak History Conference is very much a part of the Cold War with all its suspicions, militant anti-communism, and behind-the-back machinations.
In this essay, I summarize the history of the founding of the organization and discuss how my editorship of the newsletter reflected some of the issues related to the study of Czech and Slovak history in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.
The paucity of research in the field was reflected in the program for the 1970 AAASS convention in Columbus, Ohio, which I attended since it was so close to the University of Michigan, my graduate institution. At that time the convention was held only once every two years. Still, the program had only fifteen panels (including plenaries). Not a single presentation dealt with Czechs or Slovaks.
Two years later, with the encouragement of Roman Szporluk, my dissertation adviser, I attended the biennial meeting of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (Československá společnost pro vědy a umění) in Washington, D.C.[2] I did not give a paper. Instead, my purpose was to network, to meet the members of the ČSVU, some of whom had participated in government and other public life in Czechoslovakia before 1948. As a student, I was invited to stay in the home of one of the members.
In March 1974, Prof. Josef Anderle of the University of North Carolina sent a letter to about sixty people he had identified as interested in Czech and Slovak history.[3] He sought addresses for another 27 individuals.[4] He reported that the ČSVU president and program chair had asked him to help organize historical sessions for the 1974 Congress of the organization in New York City. (For many years the Congress alternated between New York City and Washington, the two largest centers of membership.) “The idea is to leave the matter to professional historians and thus secure a more professional nature of these sessions than it has been the case at other times,” he wrote, reflecting his belief that the ČSVU approach to history heretofore had been too publicistic and political. He made a special point of inviting advanced graduate students, although he observed, “Naturally, an impressive contribution can be expected only from those who have completed their dissertations, or are very close to it.” A follow-up letter was sent in July to those who had indicated an interest in participating. Anderle emphasized again the importance of scholarly contribution.
“We will give priority to [professional historians], i.e. to persons who have acquired a doctorate in history, or are about to receive one briefly [sic]; are professionally active, or about to become, as historians; and have published books or articles in respected publishing houses and professional journals, or have materials accepted by them,” he wrote.
Anderle’s persistence resulted in ten panels. Many of the names will be familiar to scholars today, including Joseph F. Zacek, Stanley B. Winters, Lawrence D. Orton, John F. Bradley, Dagmar Perman, Johann W. Brügel, Paul R. Magocsi, Victor S. Mamatey, Wilma A. Iggers, Anderle, and myself. Forty years later, ten panels on Czech and Slovak history at an ASEEES convention would be impressive.
Included in the program was a luncheon meeting at the Minetta Tavern in Greenwich Village, featuring an address by Anderle on “Czechoslovak History in the United States and Canada: Achievements and Prospects.” The some twenty-five people who attended the luncheon (the meal included svíčková pečeně and plzenský prazdroj) decided to organize a Czechoslovak History Conference. The word “Czechoslovak” was understood to refer to the territory of Czechoslovakia prior to the Munich Agreement, not to a “Czechoslovak nation”. It was understood that a focus on history, rather than Czechoslovak studies generally, would both minimize political influence and not offend the ČSVU leadership.
A Steering Committee consisting of Victory Mamatey, Stanley B. Winters, Radomír Luža, Vera Laska, and Stanley D. Kimball was asked to draft a constitution and nominate a slate of officers. Kimball, the acting secretary-treasurer, arranged for an informal meeting of the organization at the AAASS convention in Atlanta in October 1975. That meeting approved a constitution and a slate of officers. That constitution and nomination list were sent to interested persons for approval. The some seventy-five recipients of the letter were asked to return a ballot on those two issues along with two dollars for their annual membership.
The proposed bylaws stated that the aims of the organization were “To express a common interest in the history of Czechoslovakia and all its lands and peoples, whether at home or abroad; to encourage scholarship and interest therein; to represent such scholarly interest in relations to other organizations, and to further collaboration with scholars and institutions with similar interests in the United States or abroad. The CHC was to be an affiliate of the ČSVU, but it was understood that the organization would also seek affiliation with the AHA and the AAASS. Much of the language for the bylaws was borrowed from the American Association for the Study of Hungarian History, which had actually been copied from the AAASS bylaws. Three recipients of the bylaws asked that changes be made in them. H. Gordon Skilling was elected as the first president of the organization
As part of his organizational activities, Anderle collected information on the scholarly activities of those interested in Czech and Slovak history for inclusion in a newsletter. The first issue of the Newsletter was completed in December 1976 but was not distributed until later.
“Well, it was a long road,” Anderle wrote in the cover article.
The new Czechoslovak History Conference made plans to meet again at the ČSVU Congress in Washington in 1976. Zacek organized a major symposium at the Congress on the life and work of František Palacký in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of his death. The list of participants included eight historians from Czechoslovakia. It was clearly understood that they would not be able to be present, but that their papers would be presented.
According to Anderle, three days before the ČSVU Congress, President Miloslav Rechcígl phoned Anderle to inform him that members of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia (a kind of “government-in-exile”) and the Czechoslovak National Council of America objected to the presentation of papers sent from Czechoslovakia, advised their members to withdraw from the Congress if they would be presented, and asked Anderle to come to the members’ meeting to help him respond to these pressures. No formal complaints were made at the Congress business meeting, but as Anderle noted in a letter to me several years later, “Objections were raised only in the afternoon in the couloirs and pissoirs by members of these organizations.” Anderle described at length behind-the-back political activities of the ČSVU.
“[T]he SVU Board…instructed [Secretary-General John G.] Lexa to interrogate Zacek who the Czechoslovak authors were, politically… and some cowards, hiding in anonymity, unsatisfied with his response, asked the CIA to investigate him as a possible tool of the Czechoslovak government ‘to infiltrate SVU,’ which the FBI did with all thoroughness, including an examination of his bank accounts.”
Anderle and some of the other leaders had never been completely comfortable as an affiliate of the ČSVU. The controversy over the Palacký symposium brought the issue to a head. Anderle proposed that the CHC disassociate itself from the ČSVU “because of strong exile political influences, occasionally using FBI services and CIA money.” The ČSVU, of course, was not the only academic or cultural organization in early Cold War days that accepted CIA money.
At the Congress, H. Gordon Skilling of the University of Toronto invited members of the CHC to contribute funds to help publicize the work and challenges of independent Czech and Slovak historians who were either working underground in Czechoslovak or had been pressured to emigrate. The American Historical Association, partly on its own initiative and partly at Anderle’s suggestion, requested a meeting at the 1976 ČSVU Congress to discuss the situation of historians in Czechoslovakia. A private meeting was arranged with Mack Thompson, the Executive Director of the AHA.
“It will be a small and closed meeting and confidentiality of information exchanged there will be safeguarded, which—I am certain—is everyone’s wish, for well-known reasons,” Anderle reported in a memorandum of Aug. 4.
The first membership list of 64 members was distributed in December 1977.[5]
Meanwhile, the Slovak Studies Association was formed in 1976 with the strong support of Michael Novak, a public intellectual, who had originally worked in the Robert F. Kennedy campaign but eventually wound up in the American Enterprise Institute. Mark Stolarik, who now holds the Slovak Studies Chair at the University of Ottawa, was the driving force behind it. He appeared to bend over backward to avoid becoming involved in political controversy. For instance, he did not solicit membership from Joseph Kirschbaum, who was connected with the Slovak State during World War II. By attempting to stress a scholarly approach, he tried to eliminate the amateur, more politically involved element of the Slovak community. There was never any doubt, however, that he understood the underlying theme of Slovak history to be the continuing search for a distinct Slovak nation. (According to the late Tom Marzik, when my critical review of Kirschbaum’s Slovak Language and Literature appeared in Slovakia an outcry arose in the Slovak ethnic community in the United States.) With so few scholars working on Slovak topics in the early days, the organization relied for its financial existence on the membership dues from a number of non-academics. The active scholarly work of the SSA was about evenly divided between historians and linguistic and literary researchers.[6] Some members of the CHC were wary of the SSA because they feared that a focus on Slovakia would suggest a lack of commitment to the continued existence of Czechoslovakia. This would become evident in the naming controversy of the CHC Newsletter.
Newsletter
Anderle’s persistence and commitment to the CHC were crucial in the early years of the organization. In the days before the photocopying and digital documents that we are familiar with today, this took a great deal of time. He began a search to find a successor as editor of the Newsletter. “The completion of the third issue of our Newsletter awaits the appointment of a new editor,” he reported to the membership in March 1980.
Meanwhile, a number of younger members drifted away from the CHC because of the job crisis in the field of East European history. Not a single position was advertised in the field from 1976 to 1980. One individual became a lawyer. Another converted himself into a librarian. Because I had worked part-time as a journalist in college and graduate school, I wound up teaching in a School of Journalism, first at Southern Illinois University and then at Indiana University.
Anderle thought it made perfect sense for me to become the editor because of my journalistic skills. “Being married to a Slovak (or Czech?) wife is an additional recommendation,” he wrote in September 1979. “She could help you with all the háčky a čárky that you could not handle by yourself.” (My former wife, who is Czech, would have been terribly offended if she had ever seen that letter). “I am sorry I have not received any response to my past inquiries,” he wrote six months later, “but hope you are able to respond now.” One of Anderle’s letters mentioned he made five requests before I accepted.
The problem was that I was in a crash course to educate myself not only on the literature of journalism and journalism history but also on how to teach professional journalism courses. I had learned journalism on the job. Converting that to classroom instruction was not easy. In addition, my daughters were born in 1978 and 1981. During the 1979/80 school year, I was the primary child care provider because my then-wife was teaching at the University of Illinois and was gone during the week. At the end of the year, I accepted a position at Indiana, with a whole new set of courses to teach. So I kept resisting and Anderle published the 1979 issue of the Newsletter at the end of 1981.
Anderle kept pushing me. Finally, I could resist no more and in the summer of 1980, I was elected newsletter editor. Because of my other commitments, however, it was May 1982 before I published the first issue. I thought Anderle’s version of the Newsletter had been informative, but not very readable, so I changed the content, the design, and the name of the Newsletter. I sought out information on professional accomplishments from each member (which in those days had to be done by individual letters), added articles similar to those we’ve now grown familiar with, and included a bibliography of new publications, both in the West and in Czechoslovakia. The Indiana University library subscribed to an impressive range of journals from Czechoslovakia and I spent long hours in the library transcribing the authors and titles of publications. My department underwrote both the printing and mailing costs for the journal, an important contribution at the time. I used the still relatively new computer system at the student newspaper to produce the content.
“I was much surprised by the NL [Newsletter],” Anderle wrote me, “as must have been everybody who had no inkling what you had up in [cq] your sleeves…. So, sláva Tobě věrný Ameriky synu!”
Unfortunately, I had to enter the diacritics by hand, which meant occasional mistakes. When the late Jan Havránek from Charles University participated in a Bloomington conference I organized in fall 1983 (also attended by Madeleine Albright), I persuaded him to proofread the content.
The new title, “Czech Marks,” received a mixed response. Émigré historians were most strongly against it, believing that anything less than a serious purpose would be damaging to the cause of the free Czechoslovakia they remembered. The design had sketches of both the Charles Bridge and the Bratislava castle, with the castle having the higher position in order to balance the use of the name Czech. CHC President Ruben Weltsch wrote me that the new title was “cute,” but expressed concern because Radomír Luža, an influential figure in the early years of the organization and who had fled for his life from Czechoslovakia had stressed that “Czechoslovak in the title is an important word.”[7] Anderle was blunter. He said the new title was “totally wrong and totally unacceptable.” He found it incomprehensible that I, “who is so well acquainted with Slovak sensitivity,” would make such a decision.[8] As a trained librarian, he noted that the change of title would require each library to re-catalog the publication.[9] He argued that at the least I should have consulted with the executive committee of the organization. Finally, he suggested that the title of the issue could be changed back to the original by the production of gummed labels bearing the original title that could be mailed to the recipients of the issue who could paste them over the new title.
The 1982 CHC business meeting, which was held at the AHA Convention in Washington in December, discussed the newsletter.
“The members expressed satisfaction with the substance and format of the Newsletter, but desired to have two points taken up with the Editor…on his return from Bratislava,” the minutes stated. “They are (1) the new title, Czech Marks, which for all its journalistic verve misses the broader Czechoslovak interests of CHC, and (2) the production of the Newsletter and its cost, which may at present be absorbed by Indiana University or some other agency, but which CHC may have to shoulder in the future.”
It was probably fortunate that I didn’t see Anderle’s letter until eight months later when I returned from my research leave in Czechoslovakia. I replied briefly to the membership in the next issue of “Czech Marks.” “Readers should note that the word Czechoslovak has been maintained in the subtitle of the newsletter,” I wrote. I pointed out that my own research record on Slovak history provided evidence that sensitivity in the selection of the new name. None of the people who complained, I noted, had noticed the visual aspect of placing Bratislava above Prague.
In retrospect, I probably did come across as a brash upstart who appeared not to understand the feelings and beliefs of the émigré community. As a still untenured faculty member, it perhaps was an unwise thing to change the name. On the other hand, historically it provides an interesting commentary on the views of the émigré community and on the complexities of the Czech-Slovak relationship. The emigrés disliked humor in the cause of scholarship for fear authorities at home would belittle their activity, and they feared anything less than full commitment to a Czechoslovak identity.
The name stayed during the five issues (103 pages) I edited but reverted to the original name when Paul Kubricht took over the editorship in the second half of 1984. I suspect he was told that he must do so.
After 1989, the Czechoslovak History Conference became a different organization.[10] A younger generation, excited by the Velvet Revolution and blessed with the opportunity to teach, work and do research in Czechoslovakia and its successor states moved past the old ethnic and political battles. Some members of the older émigré community returned to Czechoslovakia. Many of them have retired.[11] In 2008, in a move that reflected the changing nature of Czech and Slovak studies, the membership voted to change the name of the organization to the Czechoslovak Studies Association.
[1] Owen Johnson, “The Czechoslovak History Conference na začátku [at the beginning],” The Czech & Slovak History Newsletter 36, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 9-20.
[2] This organization was founded in 1958, originally designed to include only émigré scholars. Its membership was later broadened to include natives of other countries.
[3] Unofficially, the only people on that original list who are still active in historical research are Andrew Kubricht, Robert Magocsi, Piotr Wandycz, and myself. Magocsi has long concentrated on the Ruthenians and Wandycz on Polish history.
[4] Still active from this list, I believe, is only Gary Cohen.
[5] It prematurely listed me as Dr. Owen Johnson, a title I would not earn until October 1978.
[6] Just as I have been a member of the Czechoslovak History Conference (and its successor) from the beginning, I have also been a member of the Slovak Studies Association from the beginning. I even served a term (1988-90) as president.
[7] Luža’s political commitment is evident in his memoir, The Hitler Kiss: A Memoir of the Czech Resistance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U Press, 2002)
[8] I later received the Pech Prize for the best article on Czechoslovak history published in 1987-88, for my chapter, “Newspapers and Nation-building: The Slovak Press in Pre-1918 Slovakia,” in Hans Lemberg et al, eds., Bildungsgeschichte, Bevölkerungsgeschichte, Gesellschaftsgeschichte in den Böhmischen Ländern und Europa (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1988), pp. 160-78, reflecting this understanding of the particularities of Slovakia.
[9] According to OCLC WorldCat, nine libraries in the world have copies of “Czech Marks”.
[10] I served two terms (1988-92) on the organization’s Executive Committee during this change.
[11] A Czech-language history of the organization (http://www.public.iastate.edu/~zarecor/CSA/chchistory.htm) by Zdeněk V. David includes the names of all the presidents and vice-presidents and Pech Prize winners. (link to archived page).