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National Identities for Export: East European Cultural Diplomacy in Inter-War Pittsburgh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2011

ZSOLT NAGY
ZSOLT NAGY*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Hamilton Hall, CB #3195 Chapel Hill, NC, USA; [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines inter-war east-central European cultural diplomacy as played out in one apparently remote locale: the Nationality Rooms of the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. Here, a local project originally intended to pay homage to the various immigrants of the Steel City was transformed into a transatlantic project in which the Czechoslovak, Hungarian and Romanian governments (among others) each aimed to construct and propagate a national image abroad. A close looks at this particular ‘transnational construction site’ reveals a surprisingly complex entanglement of cultural production, the construction of national identities, and foreign policy. Battles over space and artistic content also lay bare the sense of competition, urgency and anxiety that, this article argues, characterised inter-war cultural diplomacy in east-central Europe.

Identités nationales exportées: la diplomatie culturelle de l'europe de l'est à pittsburgh pendant l'entre-guerre

L'article examine la diplomatie culturelle en Europe centrale de l'est par le biais d'un lieu apparemment éloigné: les ‘salles nationales’ dans la cathédrale du savoir à l'université de Pittsburgh. Un projet initialement d'ordre local, qui cherchait à honorer les immigrants venus habiter ‘Steel City’, a pris une dimension transatlantique incorporant les gouvernements de la Czechoslovakie, de la Hongrie et de la Roumanie (entre autres) et visant à établir puis à étendre l'image de la nation à l'étranger. Un regard détaillé porté sur ce ‘site de construction transnational’ révèle un enchevêtrement étonnant et complexe de production culturelle, de construction d'identités nationales, et de politique étrangère. Les conflits au sujet d'espace et de contenu artistique démontrent l'esprit de competition, d'urgence et d'inquiétude qui, selon cet article, ont marqué la diplomatie culturelle d'entre-guerre en Europe est-centrale.

Nationale identitäten im export: osteuropäische kulturdiplomatie im pittsburgh der zwischenkriegszeit

Dieser Artikel untersucht die Wirkung osteuropäischer Kulturdiplomatie an einem scheinbar abgelegenen Ort: den Nationalitätenzimmern der Kathedrale des Lernens an der Universität Pittsburgh in den Vereinigten Staaten in der Zwischenkriegszeit. Dort wandelte sich eine Ausstellung, welche ursprünglich den verschiedenen Einwanderergruppen der Stahlstadt Pittsburgh die Ehre erweisen sollte, zu einem transatlantischen Projekt, durch das unter anderem die tschechoslowakische, ungarische und die rumänische Regierung versuchten, ihre nationale Identität im Ausland zu vermitteln. Ein genauerer Blick auf diese ‘transnationale Baustelle’ öffnet den Blick für das komplexe Wechselspiel zwischen Kultur, die Konstruktion nationaler Identitäten und Außenpolitik. Debatten über den Ort und den künstlerischen Gehalt des Projekts zeigen außerdem Elemente von Wettbewerb, Dringlichkeit und Statusangst, welche, wie dieser Artikel argumentiert, die Kulturdiplomatie osteuropäischer Regierungen während der Zwischenkriegszeit prägte.

Type
Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , November 2011 , pp. 435 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Constance Humphrey, ‘Nationality Rooms at Pitt Portray Culture of Foreign Lands but Omit Political Credos’, The Pittsburgh Press, 17 Sept. 1939, Society section 5, 51.

2 Ibid.

3 In 1937, Hungarian János Hankiss defined cultural diplomacy as an action that ‘bring[s] about foreign policy goals with the use of cultural instruments’. See Hankiss, János, A kultúrdiplomácia alapvetése (Budapest: Magyar Külügyi Társaság, 1937), 1Google Scholar. As for today's explanation of cultural diplomacy, I find Manuela Aguilar's definition the most compelling. She understands it as ‘the way a government portrays its country to another country's people in order to achieve certain foreign policy goals . . . to instill sympathy and understanding for the goals of a country's domestic and foreign political action’. Aguilar, Manuela, Cultural Diplomacy and Foreign Policy: German American Relations, 1955–1968 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1996), 9Google Scholar.

4 Gary, Brett, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from the First World War to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 23Google Scholar.

5 Quoted in Taylor, Philip M., The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For example, France's Alliance Française (1883); Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (1911), the Deutsche Akademie (1925); the Soviet Union's Soviet Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Nations (1925); Great Britain's British Council (1934); and Japan's Society for International Cultural Relations (1934). For more on this see Emily McMurry, Ruth and Lee, Muna, The Cultural Approach: Another Way in International Relations (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1947)Google Scholar; Arndt, Richard T., The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005)Google Scholar; Barghoorn, Frederick C., The Soviet Cultural Offensive: the Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Taylor, Philip M., ‘Cultural Diplomacy and the British Council:1934–1939’, British Journal of International Studies, 4, 3 (1978), pp. 244–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sang Mi Park, ‘Japan as a Cultural State (bunka kokka Nippon): Theater, Culture, and Politics’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2007).

7 Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain, 70.

8 Japan planned an Information Library. See ‘Japan in Amity Move’, The New York Times, 5 Sept. 1934, 10.

9 Ware, Edith E., ed., The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1937 (New York: published for American National Committee on International Intellectual Co-operation by Columbia University Press, 1938), 268, 270 and 422Google Scholar.

10 The definition of ‘West’, as a homogeneous entity, is of course problematic. This story will take place in the United States, but these countries targeted Germany, Italy, France, and Great Britain, as well as Holland and Sweden – and the list could go on. Naturally there were subtle differences in the way, for example, Hungary addressed Germany and the United States, but even if the means changed to a certain degree the goal remained the same.

11 Orzoff, Andrea, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I would like to thank Andrea Orzoff for allowing me to read her manuscript.

12 Case, Holly, ‘Being European: East and West’, in Checkel, Jeffrey T. and Katzenstein, Peter J., eds, European Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 115Google Scholar.

13 Also germane to the topic is Case, Holly, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during the Second World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), especially Ch. 1, 9–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Specific to the Hungarian case is Kovács–Bertrand, Anikó, Der ungarische Revisionismus nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Der publizistische Kampf gegen den Friedenvertrag von Trianon, 1918–1931 (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1997)Google Scholar.

14 One exception is Cornwall, Mark, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary (New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, for example, Ninkovich, Frank A., The Diplomacy of Ideas: U. S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Richmond, Yale, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

Some of the works that aspire to challenge the hegemonic nature of Cold War USA-USSR relations include Davidann, Jon Thares, Cultural Diplomacy in US – Japanese Relations, 1919–1941 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E., ed., Decentreing America (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007)Google Scholar; and Gienow-Hecht's latest work, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

15 Ruth Crawford Mitchell, a graduate of Vassar College, was a representative of the National Young Women's Christian Association between 1916 and 1918. In this capacity she travelled throughout Europe and conducted social surveys. In Prague she met and developed a friendship with Alice Masaryk (daughter of future Czechoslovak President, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk). Upon her return to the United States she eventually settled in Pittsburgh. See ‘Ruth Mitchell dies, founded Pitt rooms’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8 February 1984, 1.

16 ‘Ruth Mitchell dies, founded Pitt rooms’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8 Feb. 1984, 12.

17 University of Pittsburgh Archival Service Centre 2:10, Box 7, FF56 [hereafter UA].

18 Others in the same time period included Scottish, German, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Yugoslav and Polish Room committees. My selection of the Czechoslovakian, Hungarian and Romanian rooms is a result of analytical and practical considerations.

19 There were three models of different sizes available ($10,000, $15,000 or $25,000 per room).

20 UA, Memorandum from the University Office of Interior Plans, Cathedral of Learning to J. B. Dragusanu.

21 The original quote is from H.A.L. Fisher. Quoted in Orzoff, Battle, 7.

22 Endre Moravek, ‘Cseh propaganda’, Magyar Szemle (June, 1930), 144–51.

23 Osuský, Stefan, ‘Why Czechoslovakia?’ Foreign Affairs, 15, 3 (1937), 455CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Orzoff, Battle, 54. See Zeman, Zbyněk, The Masaryks: The Making of Czechoslovakia (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976)Google Scholar; and Zeman, Zbyněk and Klímek, Antonín, The Life of Edvard Beneš 1884–1948: Czechoslovakia in Peace and War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Masaryk's salary was paid by an anonymous donor – some claim that it was actually Seton-Watson himself. See Roberts, I. W., History of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1915–1990 (London: SSEES University of London, 1991), 4–6Google Scholar.

26 ‘Mission Statement’ in The New Europe, 1, 1 (19 Oct. 1916–11 Jan. 1917), 1.

27 The Czechoslovak Government had delivered on its pledge by 1938. See Roberts, History, 25–39.

28 The Central European Observer (7 Jan., 1927), 20. For similar arguments see Krofta, Kamil, The Substance of Hungarian Revisionism (Prague: Orbis, 1934)Google Scholar; and Moravec, Emanuel, The Strategic Importance of Czechoslovakia for Western Europe (Prague: Orbis, 1936)Google Scholar.

29 While foreign and domestic propaganda is closely related, I will limit my discussion to the foreign component of the Third Section's efforts.

30 Orzoff, Battle, 11.

31 Ibid., 70–1.

32 Ibid., 145–47.

33 UA Committee of Czechoslovak Classroom, Running Memos, Committee Minutes, 7 Feb. 1927. It should be noted that the committee made it clear from the outset that there was no place to commemorate the history and culture of the 3.2 million Germans and nearly 700,000 Hungarians who also found themselves in Czechoslovakia after the First World War.

34 Ibid.

35 UA Committee of Czechoslovak Classroom, Running Memos, Committee Minutes, 18 Feb. 1927.

36 Ibid.

37 UA Committee of Czechoslovak Classroom, Running Memos, Committee Minutes, 4 May 1927.

38 UA Committee of Czechoslovak Classroom, Running Memos, Committee Minutes, 18 Feb. 1927.

39 As far as financial contribution goes, a letter from the Hungarian consul to the Foreign Ministry claimed that the Czechoslovak government paid $5000 towards the construction of the room.

See Magyar Országos Levéltár (Hungarian National Archive, hereafter: MOL) K66 164.cs. III-6/b #791/biz. (Cleveland: 29 Oct. 1929).

40 UA Committee of Czechoslovak Classroom, Foreign and Architectural Correspondence (n.d.).

41 UA Committee of Czechoslovak Classroom, Foreign and Architectural Correspondence, 21 May 1931.

42 UA Committee of Czechoslovak Classroom, Foreign and Architectural Correspondence, 25 Nov. 1930; 9 Dec. 1930.

43 Mitchell, Ruth Crawford, The Czechoslovak Classroom (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1940), 6–8Google Scholar.

44 MOL K66 331. cs III-6 #31.977 (5 May 1937).

45 UA Committee of Czechoslovak Classroom: ‘Address by Jan Masaryk’, 7 March 1939.

46 Quoted from Beneš's letter. UA 2:10, Box 7, FF 56 ‘Chancellor Bowman's Correspondence’, 13 May 1939.

47 Hungarian delegates signed the Treaty of Trianon on June 4, 1920. As a result the historic kingdom of Hungary lost 71.5% of its territory and 63.6% of its population. Trianon, as the treaty commonly became known, most seriously affected the mentality of the country. Revisionism became a civic religion and the leitmotif of Hungarian foreign policy. On Hungarian revisionism, see Zeidler, Miklós, A revíziós gondolat (Budapest: Osiris, 2001)Google Scholar and Romsics, Ignác ed., Trianon és a magyar politikai gondolkodás, 1920–1953 (Budapest: Osiris, 1998)Google Scholar.

48 MOL K 58 ‘A’ csoport. Reproduced in Pritz, Pál, Iratok a magyar külügyi szolgálat történetéhez, 1918–1945 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1994), 79–81Google Scholar.

49 Ibid.

50 To what degree this view was just a figment of the Hungarians’ imagination is debatable. For now, it is perhaps enough to say that during and after the war there were many publications representing Hungary in a negative light. For example, on war-guilt: ‘this is not only a German War, but also a Magyar War. Nay more, it is as much a Magyar War as it is a German War: for the Magyars have done more than any other people to create that electrical atmosphere in South-Eastern Europe which produced the fatal explosion’, wrote R.W. Seton-Watson about the origins of the First World War on the pages of the journal The New Europe in 1917. See Seton-Watson, R.W., ‘The Roumanians of Hungary’ The New Europe, 1, 1 (19 Oct. 1916–11 Jan. 1917), 20Google Scholar. Recalling his stance at the 1919 Peace Conference, Sir Harold Nicolson, member of the British delegation, wrote that while he thought of Austria as a ‘pathetic relic’, he ‘confess[ed]’ that he regarded Hungary – and still regards it, he adds in 1933 – as a ‘Turanian tribe with acute distaste’. He added: ‘Like their cousins the Turks, they [the Hungarians] destroyed much and created nothing’. See Péter, László, ‘British-Hungarian Relations since 1848: an Introduction’ in Péter, László and Martyn, Rady, eds, British-Hungarian Relations since 1848 (London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2004), 8Google Scholar.

51 Hankiss, 8; Klebelsberg, Kunó, Elnöki megnyitó beszéd a Magyar Történelmi Társulat 1920 évi május hó 14.-én tartott közgyülésen (Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat, 1920), 11Google Scholar.

52 Klebelsberg, Kunó, Neonacionalizmus (Budapest: Athenaeum Rt., 1928), 22Google Scholar.

53 Klebelsberg, Neonacionalizmus, 247.

54 Endre Moravek, ‘Cseh Propaganda’ in Magyar Szemle (June, 1930), 144–51.

55 Zeidler, A revíziós, 171.

56 See Ezer év törvényei 1927/XIII. See www.1000ev.hu/index.php?a=3&param=7697 (accessed 11 May 2010). Thanks to Miklós Zeidler for pointing out this site.

57 Paikert, G. C. (Géza Paikert), ‘Hungarian Foreign Policy in Intercultural Relations, 1919–1944’ in American Slavic and East European Review, 11, 1 (1952), 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Based on my own calculations the Ministry of Culture officially received circa four million pengő (c. £202.000) between 1927 and 1940 for the support of these institutions.

58 MOL K66 164.cs. III-6/b #30.350 (Cleveland: 27 Dec. 1929).

59 Ibid. The Yugoslav contribution was $5000 in cash and gifts. See also Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 27 Nov. 1929, Second News section, 17. For the Czechoslovak contribution ($5000): MOL K66 164.cs. III-6/b #791/biz. (Cleveland: 29 Oct. 1929).

60 UA 40:11, Box 2, FF 32.

61 MOL K66 164.cs. III-6/b #791/biz. (Cleveland: 29 Oct. 1929)

62 UA 40:11, Box 1, FF3.

63 It is difficult to gauge the exact amount of the financial contribution, for the Hungarian government generally made an effort to disguise its involvement with cultural projects in order to avoid the charge of conducting propaganda. For example, the Hungarian Reference Library in New York was established and maintained by the Foreign Ministry, but in the official sale the buyer was named as the Hungarian National Museum. However, in the case of the Hungarian Room in Pittsburgh the government promised a $5000 contribution, but I have not been able to verify the final amount.

64 Kornis's letter to Lajos Walko (Minister of Foreign Affairs) states that the Foreign Ministry was to pay the prize money for the best plan.

65 Mihály Kubinszky, Györgyi Dénes, http://mek.oszk.hu/01100/01196/html/index.htm#j18 (accessed 30 July 2009).

66 MOL K728. 1 cs., p.342. Györgyi wrote this in relation to the Hungarian Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair, but the message of the architect is more than applicable to the Pittsburgh project.

67 UA 40:11, Box1, FF 18.

68 Ibid.

69 Made in the Budapest School of Industrial Art. John Bencze, a Pittsburgh committee member, visited Budapest with his wife and personally oversaw the production of the cassettes. Reported in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1 Aug. 1937, Society section, 29.

70 Ruth Crawford Mitchell, The Hungarian Classroom (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1942), 9.

71 UA 40:11, Box1, FF 18.

72 MOL K30 2.cs. B/22 tétel. According to the same document the Romanian Ministry of Propaganda's overall budget for 1940/41 was nearly 317.95 million lei (c. £525.000); Case, Between States, 51.

73 Case, Between States, 49.

74 The Hungarians sought to reclaim Transylvania and the Banat; the Soviet Union had its eyes on Bessarabia; Bulgaria looked towards its lost territory of Dobrudja.

75 Hitchins, Keith, Rumania, 1866–1947 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 50–4, 426Google Scholar.

76 Lungu, Dov. B., Romania and the Great Powers (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), 1–13, 15Google Scholar.

77 Lungu, 15–16. R.W. Seton-Watson was among those who received regular payments from the Romanian government. See Case, Between States, 40.

78 Mitchell, Ruth Crawford, The Romanian Classroom (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1944), 9–10Google Scholar.

79 Ruth Crawford Mitchell, The Romanian Classroom, 10.

80 UA, Committee of the Romanian Classroom, General Correspondence, 1927–1943. The role of intermediary between Pittsburgh and Bucharest was played by George Anagnostache, a member of the Pittsburgh committee and an officer of the Romanian Royal Consulate in Cleveland. Ruth Crawford Mitchell, The Romanian Classroom, 19.

81 Mitchell, The Romanian Classroom, 12.

82 UA, Committee of the Romanian Classroom, Architectural Correspondence, 30 Oct. 1930.

83 Ibid.

84 UA, Committee of the Romanian Classroom, Architectural Correspondence, 18 March 1937.

85 Verdery, Katherine, ‘National Ideology and National Character in Inter-war Romania’ in Banac, Ivo and Verdery, Katherine, eds., National Character and Ideology in Inter-war Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale Centre for International and Area Studies, 1995), 103Google Scholar.

86 Verdery, National Character and Ideology, 111–13. For an especially interesting group of modernisers see Bucur, Maria, Eugenics and Modernization in Inter-war Romania (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Hitchins, Keith, ‘Gîndirea: Nationalism is Spiritual Guise’ in Jowitt, Kenneth, ed., Social Change in Romania, 1860–1940 (Berkeley: University of California, 1977) 141–142Google Scholar.

88 Hitchins, Gîndirea, 147.

89 Virgil Cândea, ‘Introduction’, Nicolae Iorga, Byzantium after Byzantium (Iaşi, Oxford, and Portland: The Centre for Romanian Studies in co-operation with the Romanian Institute of International Studies, 2000), 8; Iorga, Ibid., Ch. 6 and 7.

90 Iorga, Nicolae, My American Lectures (Bucharest: State Printing Office, 1932), 192Google Scholar.

91 Iorga, My American Lectures, 42–3.

92 Machedon, Luminiţa and Scoffham, Ernie, Romanian Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), xviiGoogle Scholar.

93 Quoted in Machedon and Scoffham, Modernism, 8–9.

94 The decree was the result of personal correspondence between Chancellor Bowman and ‘Conducător’ Ion Antonescu. UA, Committee of the Romanian Classroom, Architectural Correspondence, 25 Oct. 1940; and Mitchell, The Romanian Classroom, 16.

95 For example, an internal memo dated 25 Oct. 1939 argued that ‘while the defeat of Germany in the war is highly unlikely’ the continuation of the Hungarian Studies Centre in France is vital in order to cultivate the ground for the peace-negotiations that would come after the war. MOL K30 1.cs B/9/c tétel.