Introduction
Preparing an adequate history of Slavic and East European studies in the United States is not an easy task. Much of the pertinent material has never been collected. Where it has been brought together, it has never been adequately evaluated or put in its proper setting against the general American cultural and educational development. Any attempt at a synthesis of the situation must then be highly tentative, subject to correction and amplification.
In the formal sense, studies and courses in the Slavic languages, cultures and history began to appear in American colleges and universities at the end of the nineteenth century, largely through individual interest and effort. Until World War I, these courses developed slowly and aroused little interest. We can say the same of the formation of libraries and of collections of other materials. If then we should treat the history of Slavic studies in this narrow sense, we would secure a creditable but small list of courses and publications multiplying on a large scale only since World War II began.
Yet, this picture would be incomplete. It fails to consider certain factors which have greatly influenced American life and thinking and which will in the future exert still more influence. It likewise ignores significant achievements of earlier periods. It ignores certain individuals who, though only tenuously connected with universities and colleges, influenced the course of events. It ignores also that one phenomenon that sharply differentiates the scope of Slavic and East European studies in the United States from such studies anywhere else in the world. That is the presence in the United States of millions of Slavic immigrants and their descendants. These have played a hitherto unrecognized part in the country’s development and at the same time have given it some unusual aspects.
Slavic studies in the United States can never be as important as in those countries where the dominant language is Slavic, and where a knowledge of the language is a necessity for daily life. There the Slavic tradition, even under external pressure, is still alive. It expresses itself in every form of culture, every study of the local environment, natural or artificial. Thus, from late in the eighteenth century, the universities of Austria-Hungary, especially the University of Vienna, and those in such Slavic centers as Prague, Krakow, Lwow and Zagreb developed flourishing centers of Slavic studies. The universities in the Russian Empire also concentrated not only on Russian, but on all the other tongues. It was in these countries that Slavic languages came earliest and most completely into their own, as they later did in the independent Slavic countries.
Yet Slavic and East European studies are not in the same position as they were in past decades in Germany, France and the British Isles. There, they were definitely intellectual disciplines which might find practical use in certain governmental and educational posts but which were of interest only to a small number of specialists. In those countries there were learned professors of Slavic. This is especially true of Germany and France where relatively large groups of outstanding Slavs, chiefly of the educated, professional and political classes, were able to influence higher level thought in those countries. Few ordinary Slavs appeared in either country. Those who did were mostly migratory workers who did not take root in their new environment, and exercised little influence.
That is not true in the United States. There were before World War I a small number of outstanding representatives of the Slavic nations, free or not. But the United States was also brought face to face with the immigration of millions of Slavic workmen and peasants. These brought little material or consciously intellectual baggage to the country but took root here and, under the leadership which they developed in the United States, have played a steadily increasing role in American life. They and their descendants of the second and third generations are not a negligible force. Their children and grandchildren may have lost a certain facility in the use of their mother tongues but they have retained qualities, knowledge and traditions which are vital to the United States today and which cannot fail to have a far-reaching effect upon the entire world in the future.
We cannot then speak of Slavic studies merely in the narrow sense of the word. We must take into account these other factors which are rapidly becoming tangible elements in all of American life. In this sense we must consider Slavic and East European studies to include those means other than political propaganda which have led to the present American knowledge of the Slavic world, a knowledge with some striking insights and some equally amazing gaps.
The present survey is an attempt to handle all aspects of the growing awareness of the Slavs by the American people and the American educational system. Yet we can hardly do this without a brief survey of the way in which the Slavs appeared on the American scene and the methods by which they have come to assume their present position. The complete history of this has never been written though we do have a fair outline of the various stages of the movement.