In the time of Austria-Hungary, thousands of Ruthenians (both Uhro-Rusyns, i.e. Rusyns from the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy, and Galician Rusyns from its Austrian part) left for America on a job search. Many of them never returned to their homeland, paving the way for the Rusyn and Ukrainian diaspora in the USA. On the other hand, many of these guest workers later came back home – either when they made some money, or for some other reason. My Granny used to recount that her father had three times left for America, but every time he had to come back, because in the US he had lost his sight, but as soon as he came back he would recover it. For a long while, we had not known how to trust this story, until several years ago I found the name of my great-grandfather in the passenger list of a ship arriving at Ellis Island in 1903. Everything coincided – the first and the family names, and the native village. It was then that we learned that he had been invited and his ticket had been paid by his brother who had by then settled in New Jersey.
This article will be in a way a brief overview of an academic work written by Béla Zselicky, a Moscow-based scholar and a Subcarpathian Hungarian by origin, who studied the official Austrian-Hungarian statistics, or, saying more precisely, its part pertaining to the multiethnic Hungarian Kingdom.
According to the statistics, in 1899–1913 ethnic Magyars (Hungarians) constituted the most numerous part of the workforce emigrating from Hungary (28.9% of all emigrants), followed by Slovaks (21.6%), Germans (16.7%), Romanians (13.3%), Croats (9.9%), Ruthenians (3.9%) and Serbs (2.6%). At the same time, the 1900 census showed the following ethnic composition of the Hungarian Kingdom: Magyars – 45.4%, Romanians – 14.5%, Germans – 11.1%, Slovaks – 10.5%, Croats – 8.7%, Serbs – 5.5%, and Ruthenians – 2.2%. From these figures, it can be seen that although among the emigrants ethnic Magyars prevailed both in numbers and by share, the share of Rusyns among the migrant workers was nearly twice as high as their aggregate share in Hungary. Emigration losses of Rusyns made up 10% of their total population; by the way, losses of Slovaks were even higher – 25% of them had left for the US (cf. emigration losses of Magyars – 6–7%).
The data of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for the same period showed a bit different picture. Here is the breakdown of the subjects of the Hungarian Kingdom that came to the USA during the same period (1899–1913): Slovaks – 26.5%; Magyars – 26.2%; Croats – 16.4%; Germans – 14.9%; Romanians – 6.7%; Jews – 3.7%; Ruthenians – 2.9%; Serbs – 2.4%. The difference was explained by the fact that the non-Magyars would more often arrive illegally, bypassing the official agencies. Slovaks were known to have been the first ethnic group from the Hungarian Kingdom to ‘have discovered America.’ Ruthenians constituted the most numerous part of the immigrants coming from the eastern regions of Hungary: say, 62% of the immigrants from Máramaros Province of 1900–1906 were Rusyns.
Another figure worth mentioning is the literacy of the immigrants. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 27.5% of all adult (aged 14+) immigrants arriving in 1901–1910 were illiterate. Among the incomers from Hungary, Germans had the highest percentage of literacy (93%), followed by Magyars (88.6%), Slovaks (76%), and Romanians (65%). Among Rusyns, the percentage of literate immigrants (46.6%) was lower than that of illiterate ones (53.4%). It is worth noting that although the literacy index of Rusyns was the lowest among all immigrants from Hungary, the share of literate persons among Rusyn immigrants was 3.5 times higher than the aggregate share of literate Rusyns in Hungary (only 14.4% – cf. 86.7% of Germans, 81% of Magyars, 71.2% of Slovaks, and 29% of Romanians).
Observing the emigration trends among representatives of various ethnic groups, contemporaries of the time drew a certain behavioral typology for them. It was said that Germans manifested perseverance so that they would not come back to their homeland until they had earned some good money, they also preferred to go overseas together with their families; Magyars would rarely go to America for the second time; Serbs insisted that ‘home is best;’ and Romanians would not go to America at all (Transylvanian Romanians preferred to go to Romania as seasonal workers, and they would begin to leave for America en masse only starting from 1911).
The first guest workers arriving at the USA from Hungary were petty traders, artisans, German burghers from Transylvania and Transdanubia, and miners who – when the mines they had worked for were closed – went to Galicia where recruiting agents would send them to America. It is interesting that landless peasants and the urban proletariat had not made up a significant part of the first work emigrants – they would start going to America later when tickets of transatlantic ships got much cheaper and their better-off compatriots or relatives would offer to cover their travel expenses (wasn’t it also the case of my great-grandfather?). Only when the ship and recruiting agents began to promise them guaranteed employment, sign labor contracts and pay for their trip, the unskilled agricultural and casual laborers would be able to take hold of an opportunity to go overseas. Eventually, the agricultural proletariat became the dominant part of the immigrants: 52.2% in 1911–1913, followed by industrial laborers (8.3%), day workers (11.8%), independent farmers (14.3%), household servants (5.8%), independent industrial producers (3.2%), miners (1.1%), intellectuals (0.6%) and merchants (0.5%). The dominating character of agricultural immigration was also emphasized by its seasonal cyclicality: the inflow of immigrants rose in autumn when the fieldworks had ended and remained high throughout winter, whereas it was low in May – June.
Immigrants usually had a very small amount of money on hand – in fact, the minimum required by the US authorities to enter the country. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, in 1899–1902 an average incomer from Hungary had $11.7, compared with $8.7 for an immigrant from Italy but $38.3 for an incomer from Germany.
According to official Hungarian statistics, 24.3% of the subjects of the Hungarian Crown that had emigrated to the USA returned home in 1899–1913. The level of repatriation differed in different years; say, in 1908 lots of immigrants went back to Hungary due to the economic crisis in the USA. On the other hand, poor harvests and floods calling forth mass famine provoked outbreaks of emigration from Hungary. The other good reasons for leaving for America were better wages offered there to industrial workers, and trying to avoid the conscription into the army. The főispán (sheriff) of Bereg Province reported in April 1904 that “substantial debts of peasant households” were an important reason for the growing emigration to the USA; “most emigrants are setting forward to America to save the money needed to pay off their debts in the native villages,” and “not lack of the land but [the problem] how to preserve it and release it from tax burden” must be considered an important issue for emigration.
Upon coming back home, returnees would build new stone houses and churches in their native villages. On the other hand, many villages affected by mass emigration stayed abandoned.
Initially, work emigrants had not meant to resettle – they wanted to earn money enough to be able to pay off a bank loan, buy a land parcel, build a house and agricultural implements, start own business, etc. in their home country. Nonetheless, a certain part of them held off in America for good. Before making a final decision whether to go back or to stay, many immigrants went to Hungary to visit their relatives; some understood that they would not be able to find any in-demand job in their old homeland and decided in favor of emigration; others for the sake of money went several times to America and back.
In Hungary, the major ‘suppliers’ of the workforce to the USA were the northern and north-eastern provinces (Sáros, Szepes, Zemplén, Abaúj, Bereg, Borsod, Gömör-Kishont, and Ung provided about 30% of all emigrants from Hungary), i.e. inhabited mostly by Slovaks and Rusyns. Slovaks formed the first teams of work emigrants, but soon the trend was followed by Magyars and Rusyns. What was more, these regions together with the neighboring Galicia formed the biggest ‘hotbed’ of emigration in Austria-Hungary on the whole. In total, nearly 500,000 persons left for the USA from Upper Hungary (Felvidék, present-day Slovakia and Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region) in 1899–1913.
It is said that it was Rusyn returnees from the US who brought into our language such words as шіфа (pronounced sheefa, from ship, though it may also have been borrowed from the German Schiff), and амбрела (umbrella, used collaterally with the Hungarian-borrowed ешерньовка (esherniovka), from esernyő = umbrella). No wonder that the word шіфа is used in a popular Rusyn song about a woman bidding farewell to her drunkard husband before leaving for the Transdanubia (not America, but still):
| А як на шіфу сідала, Хустечков білов махала… | When she was getting on the ship, She streamed her white handkerchief… |