From Praha to Prague

by Philip D. Smith

Overview

Around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Czechs left their homelands in Bohemia and Moravia and came to the United States. While many settled in major American cities, others headed to rural areas out west where they could claim their own land for farming. In From Praha to Prague, Philip D. Smith examines how the Czechs who founded and settled in Prague, Oklahoma, embraced the economic and cultural activities of their American hometown while maintaining their ethnic identity.

According to Smith, the Czechs of Prague began as a clannish group of farmers who participated in the 1891 land run and settled in east-central Oklahoma. After the town’s incorporation in 1902, settlers from other ethnic backgrounds swiftly joined the fledgling community, and soon the original Czech immigrants found themselves in the minority. By 1930, the Prague Czechs had reached a unique cultural, social, and economic duality in their community. They strove to become reliable, patriotic citizens of their adopted country—joining churches, playing sports, and supporting the Allied effort in World War II—but they also maintained their identity as Czechs through local traditions such as participating in the Bohemian Hall society, burying their dead in the town’s Czech National Cemetery, and holding the annual Kolache Festival, a lively celebration that still draws visitors from around the world. As a result, Smith notes, succeeding generations of Prague Czechs have proudly considered themselves Czech Americans: firmly assimilated to mainstream American culture but holding to an equally strong sense of belonging to a singular ethnic group.

As he analyzes the Czech experience in farm-town Oklahoma, Smith explores several intriguing questions: Was it easier or more difficult for Czechs living in a rural town to sustain their ethnic identity and culture than for Czechs living in large urban areas such as Chicago? How did the tactics used by Prague Czechs to preserve their group identity differ from those used in rural areas where immigrant populations were the majority? In addressing these and other questions, From Praha to Prague reveals the unique path that Prague Czechs took toward Americanization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806157467
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	10/12/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	218
Sales rank:	803,917
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 10.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Philip D. Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Tulsa Community College in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Czech Immigration to the United States to 1930

THE YOUNG MOTHER, DRESSED IN A SIMPLE PEASANT SKIRT and blouse, ushered her children into the small, badly lit room to see their grandmother one last time. The children hugged and kissed the tearful lady, who valiantly forced a smile as she lovingly ran her fingers through their straw-colored locks and told her grandchildren how much she loved them. When the children finally pulled free, their grandmother rose from her wooden rocker and stretched out her arms to her daughter. The younger woman bounded across the plank floor and squeezed her mother fervently. Knowing it might be the last time they ever touched, they embraced for well over a minute. Although neither sobbed openly, both felt the warm trickle of tears down their cheeks. When at last they separated, the young mother promised to write often and then, with children in tow, marched toward the waiting wagon that would take them to the steamship and on to America to join their husband and father.

This nineteenth-century vignette depicts the heartache many emigrants felt when leaving the village of their birth. The emotional state expressed by many emigrants included a mixture of enthusiasm, apprehension, and sorrow. The sorrow of leaving one's home, one's extended family, and one's lifelong friends must have been traumatic. For many emigrants, this resulted in not only personal discomfort but disillusionment over the move. This disillusionment did not end once the emigrants set sail. Indeed, soon after their arrival, immigrants faced fresh obstacles: an unfamiliar language, a new culture, and an energetic, highly competitive economy where jobs went to those willing to work long hours in dirty and dangerous occupations. This early phase of immigration and its sudden and drastic changes caused many to become disheartened to the point of returning to their homeland. Although all immigrants faced this dilemma, it proved especially true for single, male immigrants arriving for purely economic reasons. Many emigrated to work, saved their money, and then returned home. These "birds of passage" lived a frugal existence in company dormitories or row houses close to the mill or refinery with their goal of returning home always foremost in their minds.

Why did Czechs leave Bohemia and Moravia? Why did they uproot their families — often including grandparents — and come to a foreign land? What caused them to take such drastic action? Was it the lure of the New World and its promise of prosperity? Or did things become so bad in their own country that they lost hope for a better future. In many early accounts of the immigrant experience, scholars held that the traditional pull of the American economy and the vast opportunities it offered were the prime motives underlying immigration. The idea of the United States as a beacon of hope and liberty and the opportunity to obtain prosperity attracted millions, causing them to leave everything behind and cross oceans to realize their dreams.

Nonetheless, the political and economic situations in their homeland emerged as the primary reasons for Czechs coming to the United States and explained why they overwhelmingly came in family groups. Both push and pull factors are important, and neither should be discounted. However, before anyone would even consider leaving their village, they must conclude that things were not going to get better. People normally do not simply up and leave the country of their birth. Their situation has to become desperate and discouraging; there has to be a push. What was the push? Why did hundreds and later thousands of families sell everything, board a ship, and set sail for a new land? Early on it appears that religious reasons caused many Bohemians and Moravians to cross the Atlantic and settle in the United States. However, in the nineteenth century, the impetus for emigration shifted to economic factors as the industrialization of Europe spread from west to east.

The first known Czech to settle permanently in America was Augustine Herman, who came to the New World sometime during the 1650s. He settled in New Amsterdam, present-day New York, but eventually migrated to Maryland, where, after Herman had published a detailed map of the colony, Lord Baltimore awarded him 20,000 acres. Herman established his home on this tract of land and christened it Bohemia Manor. Though living in a British colony, Herman proudly acknowledged his heritage. He dubbed the two rivers running through his property the "Big Bohemia River" and the "Little Bohemia River." When the well-to-do farmer died in 1692, the inscription on his tombstone read, "Augustine Hermen, Bohemian."

The vicious Thirty Years' War, then ravaging Bohemia, prompted other Czechs to follow Herman. Approximately 500 Czechs fled Bohemia searching for a more tolerant place to live. These small numbers of Protestants settled mainly in Pennsylvania alongside the more numerous German immigrants and quickly lost their cultural identity and native tongue. Early immigrants from Bohemia seeking religious and political freedom continued to trickle into North America, usually settling near German communities until around 1850 when a new type of Czech immigrant began arriving — one leaving the homeland primarily because of economic factors. Because Bohemia and Moravia contained rich natural resources, the Habsburg rulers of Austria-Hungary rapidly industrialized the areas, resulting in a deterioration of the way of life in many villages. By 1914, 70 percent of Habsburg industrial capacity was in the Czech lands with Bohemia alone containing about one-third of all the industrial workers in the empire. Agriculture changed from self-sufficiency to an emphasis on the market, which forever changed many European communities. Although unintended by the imperial government, this disruption of village life destabilized peasant culture and caused a rural-to-urban migration and ultimately an exodus. The first to leave were usually craftsmen, artisans, and small independent farmers (cottagers) who felt threatened by the new, market-based economic order that emphasized large estates and the production of cash crops. The industrializing forces specifically hurt the middle level of the Czech peasantry in southern Bohemia and eastern Moravia. It is chiefly these areas that supplied most of the mid-nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States. Thus, despite Bohemia being the chief industrial center of Austria, the future appeared bleak, as thousands left to seek a better life. When asked by U.S. Immigration Commission agents sent to Bohemia in the early twentieth century as to why so many desired to leave their motherland, "In practically every instance ... was ... the answer 'to earn greater wages in America.'"

Another motive that added to the economic woes emerged in the form of a European population explosion. Between 1800 and 1910, Austria-Hungary more than doubled its population. Increased family size and the new economic order many times led to hunger and want, resulting in an almost fanatical effort to relieve the misery. In a study of the Nebraska town of Milligan, immigrants were asked why they left Bohemia. Of the 117 questioned, 92 gave "poverty and large families" as the primary reason for emigrating.

In addition, in the 1840s, Central Europe experienced terrible droughts that decimated harvests and all but destroyed potato crops. As a result, many Czechs decided that it simply had to be better in the United States. Thus the loss of hope in the land of their birth catapulted Czechs across the ocean. Many were of the cottager class from small villages in Bohemia and Moravia. Once in the United States, they sought a similar lifestyle. Therefore, when they arrived, rather than migrating to the established German-Czech communities of Pennsylvania, many sought out inexpensive land in the West, thus becoming the only Slavic group to farm extensively. These Czech families established themselves in Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota, and despite battling a harsher climate than they were accustomed to in Bohemia and Moravia, they became successful husbandmen growing wheat, rye, oats, and corn. The cooperation and community-mindedness of these farming areas closely resembled the European villages the Czechs had recently left. In these north-central states, many Czechs broke away from the German American influence and flourished on their own. This pattern proved especially true in the rural states of Nebraska and Iowa.

From 1850 to 1890, emigration from Bohemia and Moravia continued, and most of these newcomers to the United States bypassed the eastern destinations so dear to other Slavic groups and headed for the midwestern farming communities. As decades passed and the cheap western land filled up, Czechs were forced to look elsewhere for a new start. Some chose to settle in New York and Cleveland, but many continued west, settling in cities like Chicago, Omaha, and Racine. St. Louis, in 1854, was home to the first sizable urban Czech community. However, Chicago soon surpassed St. Louis in the number of Bohemian immigrants and by the turn of the century became the veritable, if unofficial, capital of America's Czechs.

By 1890, over 170,000 foreign-born Czechs lived in the United States. This number does not take into account second- and third-generation U.S.-born Czechs, many of whom lived in rural Czech colonies or in urban ethnic neighborhoods. The sparsely populated state of Nebraska alone contained over 50,000 people claiming Czech ancestry. The farming villages and midwestern metropolitan centers were not the only places Czechs chose to live. New York contained over 47,000 residents claiming a Czech background, and Texas, the destination for many Moravians, held over 41,000 ethnic Czechs. Nevertheless, Czechs increasingly chose to live in the northern states of Illinois, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas.

Czechs came with their families to stay. Americans considered them as part of the "new" immigration — those whose country of birth was in southern or eastern Europe, even though Czechs had been coming to North America since the seventeenth century.

Czechs differed from other "new" immigrants such as the Poles, Slovaks, Croats, and Hungarians in many areas. To begin with, Czechs had not culturally associated much in the past with their northern Slavic neighbors, the Poles, or their close linguistic relatives, the Slovaks. Historically the Hungarians dominated the Slovaks, resulting in Slovakia becoming a land of uneducated peasants rather than a western-oriented industrial society. To add to this separation, most Slovaks settled almost exclusively in the cities of the Northeast, particularly Pennsylvania, rather than traveling to the Midwest as many Czechs did. These Slovaks sweated long hours in the mines and mills, saving as much of their paychecks as possible with every intention of returning home. As previously mentioned, many were known as "birds of passage," and they rarely attempted to assimilate into the larger community. Instead, they were content living in company housing close to the workplace, unlike the Czechs, who came to stay. Nevertheless, those Slovaks who decided to remain in the United States established close-knit neighborhoods complete with churches, Slovak-speaking businesses, and community associations much like other immigrant groups.

However, due to centuries of interaction with the German-speaking peoples to their north and west, Czechs shared more in the areas of customs and mode of life with the non-Slavic Germans than they did with either the Poles or the Slovaks. Thomas Capek, a nineteenth-century Czech immigrant and writer of the Czech experience in America, summed it up well when he wrote that Czechs "felt pretty much at home among the Germans." Although Czechs felt somewhat at ease with western culture, they did not sail across the Atlantic Ocean, as the Germans had done, in appreciable numbers until after 1880. Thus, despite having a lot in common with their German neighbors, most Czechs definitely were part of the new immigration regarding when they came to America.

In general, these Czechs migrated west to the north-central region of the United States and joined their relatives. A more specific look at where Czechs in the United States lived in 1900 validates that many traveled to the ethnic communities of their forebears. The census further illustrates that north-central states like Illinois, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and Iowa contained comparatively large numbers of Czech immigrants (105,940). New York was the only north Atlantic state with any appreciable numbers of Czechs (16,347), and because it was the primary port of arrival, it is difficult to ascertain how many immigrants chose the state as their permanent home or were merely passing through at the time of the census. Maryland was the top south Atlantic state with 2,813 Czechs. However, its total was lower than most North Atlantic states. The state of Texas, which included the port of Galveston, contained a sizable Czech population with over 9,000 foreign-born, with Oklahoma Territory the only other south-central area hosting more than 1,000 Czech residents. The Oklahoma Czechs came primarily due to the land runs and, in most cases, represented a second migration.

Czech immigrants who settled in Oklahoma Territory were mainly farmers from Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa looking for a fresh start. Alongside these Czech newcomers, making their way to Oklahoma Territory, were American-born Czechs who had already spent many years in the United States, thus giving the new state a relatively significant number of Czech residents.

Of course, newcomers born in Bohemia or Moravia were not the only ingredients in Czech communities; ethnic Czechs were also important. Born in the United States, these second- and third-generation Czechs remained a vital component of many enclaves. These sons, daughters, and grandchildren of Czech immigrants would have learned much about their parents' birthplace, including knowledge of the language, customs, and folklore. In 1910, the census recorded 531,193 Czech ethnics throughout the United States. Their numbers swelled to 622,796 ten years later. Compared with other ethnic groups, such as the Poles, Italians, and Germans, this total number is minuscule. However, several north-central states contained relatively large numbers of Czechs. For example, the rural state of Nebraska held over 54,000 people claiming Czech heritage in 1920, and neighboring Wisconsin had over 46,000. Illinois counted the most with 140,000, and Ohio placed second with slightly under 60,000. Thus the Czech community's influence in certain states or regions within a state where they were heavily concentrated was greater than their overall numbers suggest.

This brings us to Oklahoma. Although the overall numbers are small, Czech influence in several towns such as Yukon, Kingfisher, and Prague proved important during their formative years. Probably the oldest Czech settlement in Oklahoma was a tiny community named Mishak, located in Boone Township, Oklahoma County. Established as a result of the land run of 1889, the town no longer exists because the government forced the inhabitants to sell their property when they expanded what became Tinker Air Force Base.

In the early years of statehood, the area in and around Oklahoma City attracted several pockets of Czech immigrants. Besides the foreign-born, Oklahoma's capital was home to over 1,100 ethnic Czechs by 1920. Yukon, Mustang, and El Reno in Canadian County also contained a sizable number of Czech immigrants and American-born Czechs. Czechs in Yukon Township built a Czech Hall housing their fraternal association and hosted many dances, weddings, and funerals, which continue today. The Czechs in Yukon proudly designated their town the Czech "capital" of Oklahoma, and they hold a yearly fall festival commemorating their Bohemian and Moravian ancestors.

North of Oklahoma City, scattered Czech farming enclaves sprang up in the counties of Garfield, Grant, and Noble. Although never a majority, these Czechs made an appreciable impact in the villages of Bison, Waukomis, Medford, and Perry. Besides these concentrations, Czech immigrants also settled in smaller numbers in the Grant County towns of Fairview, Hickory, and Jarvis and in Logan and Sherman Townships of Kingfisher County.

Early researchers concluded that Czech Oklahomans were farmers. For the great majority, this was true. Czechs tilled their fields and tended their livestock, coming into town only for supplies and entertainment and to worship. However, as the following chapters reveal, these immigrant newcomers did much more than farm, and their impact greatly exceeded their numbers.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3

1 Czech Immigration to the United States to 1930 10

2 Settlement of Lincoln County and the Formation of Prague, Oklahoma, 1891-1902 18

3 Religion, Freethought, and the Czech Community 29

4 Czech Fraternal Organizations in Prague 45

5 Economic Life in a Small Town 65

6 Family Ties and Everyday Life of Prague's Czechs 84

7 Education and the Czech Community 105

8 Politics and Community Life in Prague 121

Epilogue 135

Notes 141

Bibliography 171

Index 185

Editorial Reviews

“Philip D. Smith explores the economic, educational, and religious life of the Czechs in Prague, Oklahoma, from the town’s founding to the present. A model of ethnic history, From Praha to Prague is the most in-depth and insightful examination to date of the struggles, accomplishments, and pride of a group of immigrant settlers and the community they formed.”—Kenny L. Brown, author of The Italians in Oklahoma
 


“Philip D. Smith shows how the Czech immigrants who founded Prague, Oklahoma, and their descendants sought economic opportunity and democratic governance in their American home while preserving the language and other aspects of their culture. Driven by the stories of individuals and their families, this narrative will prove a useful source for genealogists and scholars and a lively read for anyone interested in a long view of the immigrant experience in the United States.”—Mila Saskova-Pierce, Associate Professor Emerita of Russian, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
 

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