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Magyars in America, Part One: Early Immigrants to the New World
| Article
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12755 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1987 |
6,595 Words |
| Author
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Steven Bela Vardy
Steven Bela Vardy is professor of East European history and
chairman of the department of history at Duquesne University.
He was born in Hungary and educated in Hungary, Germany,
Austria, and the United States. He is the author of numerous
articles and books, including History of the Hungarian Nation
(coauthored, 1969), Hungarian Historiography and the Geistes-
geschichte School (1974), Modern Hungarian Historiography
(1976), Clio's Art in Hungary(1985), and The Hungarian-
Americans (1985). Part two of this article, on the Hungarian
intellectual migration, will appear in an upcoming issue. |
Magyar lore, like the traditions of a number of other nationalities, speaks of an alleged pre-Columbian Hungarian in America, a certain Tyrker who came with Eric the Red around A.D. 1000. Yet, not until the middle of the nineteenth century did Hungarians begin to come in significant numbers to make their mark in American history.
From the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, Hungarian presence in the New World was limited to a few explorers, missionaries, world travelers, and various adventurers driven by wanderlust. Perhaps the most significant of the latter was Col. Michael de Kovats (1724-1779), a member of the Pulaski Legion during the Revolutionary War, who is generally credited with being one of the founders of the American cavalry.
Kovats was preceded, accompanied, and followed by many others, but they all came as individuals. They did not represent any kind of collective Hungarian effort to settle in this country, as was the case with the English, French, Scotch-Irish, and the Germans of that period.
The situation did not change until the mid-nineteenth century, when perhaps as many as 4,000 Hungarians came to the American shores. They were political immigrants who fled from the persecutions following the failed Hungarian Revolution between 1848 and 1849.
These Forty-Niners were followed a quarter of a century later by the first and greatest mass immigration to America from Hungary. The "new immigration" lasted from the 1870s until World War I and transferred about 1.7 million Hungarian citizens - among them 650,000 to 700,000 Magyars or real Hungarians - to the American shores. These immigrants migrated for economic reasons, with hundreds of thousands of immigrant coming largely from the lowest and poorest segments of Hungarian society. The great majority were landless peasants.
This mass immigration slowed down in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I and them came to a halt in 1917 when the United States entered the war. Following World War I, there was a slight revival of immigration but only until the early 1920s. The exclusionary immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 reduced the Hungarian quota to below 1,000 per year. The situation did not change officially until the mid-1960s, when the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 eliminated the national quotas and set a ceiling on total annual immigration.
From the 1920s to the
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