To Reap A Bountiful Harvest

Excerpts from the book written by

I have a book new to me that I think you all will find as informative and useful. Mark Pustka of this list brought it to my attention. The book is: "To Reap a Bountiful Harvest: Czech Immigration Beyond the Mississippi, 150 - 1900," written by Štepáka Korztová-Magstadt, and published Rudi Publishing, Iowa, copyright 1993 (ISBN 0-945213-09-3).

Following are excerpted sections representative of the content of the book:

"This work is the first comprehensive analysis of the Czech migration to the United States, looking at both sides of the migration equation. No previous students of Czech migration to the United States in the nineteenth century used primary sources from both the departing and receiving country. After World War II, the Communist rulers who came into power in 1948 but scholarship in Czechoslovakia into an ideological straitjacket. The topic of migration was considered a dangerous because the post-1948 political leaders associated emigration with political dissent (many writers, artists, and intellectuals voted with their feet in the years immediately before and after the Communist takeover). Further more, scholarly work on nineteenth-century emigration would have required authors to write objectively about the "enemy" -- The United States. Thus, Czech historians who wished to do research on the history of Czech emigration to the United States had no choice but to focus on the Czech-American urban "proletariat" --and any other topic was politically taboo.

This analysis attempts to go beyond existing works, to shed a new light on Czech migration abroad, and to take an objective look at the transitional experience of Czech who decided to leave their homeland..."

Within the wave of immigrants from Europe to the United States were emigrants from Bohemia and Moravia (Czechs and Moravians) who left in large numbers between 1860 and 1900, many of whom settled in the Midwest * [*Author's Note: The Modern country of Czechoslovakia consisted until December 31, 1992, of four main parts: Bohemia, Silesia, Moravia (the Czech crown lands) and Slovakia. After January 01, 1993, the country was divided between the Czech Republic consisting of Bohemia, Moravia, Czech Silesia, and the new Republic of Slovakia occupying the territory of the traditional Slovak lands. Bohemians and Moravians came from the Czech lands. Only a small number of Slovaks settled west of the Mississippi River. This work, therefore, focuses only on the emigrants from Bohemia and Moravia.] Nebraska, in particular, had a high concentration of Czech farmers, second only to Illinois (in 1910 Nebraska had 50,680 immigrants whose mother tongue was Czech) (3).

Generally, Czechs emigrated because they wanted to farm a large piece of land. They also wanted to secure a better future for their children..."

Two points, this book does include information on the Texas Czechs and Moravians. I will include some of that information in additional messages. And, the second point, although there is no arguing with the author's statements concerning the reasons why the Czech and Moravians emigrated to the United States, I think she fails to address additional factors such as the increasing drive for total Germanization in the Czech lands and the continued civil yoke of taxes, robot labor, and civic restrictions placed on peasants in certain areas such is Wallachia where the deep-seated and tireless resistance to the Habsburgs by the Valachs was never forgotten. Remember the Lachs and Valachs are our people.

"Based on his study of Texas Czech tombstone inscriptions, Robert Janak found the following distribution of geographic origin by birth:

40.8% from Lachia (northeastern Moravia, including Frenstat);

40.8% from Wallachia (also northeastern Moravian, south of Lachia, including Vsetin and Zaderice);

9.9% from Lanskroun (northeastern Bohemia);

2.4 % from southern Bohemia; and,

6.7% from unidentified or from other areas."

Information source as follows: Robert Janak as quoted in "Journeys into Czech-Moravian Texas," by Sean N. Gallup, and published by Texas A & M University Press,, College Station, Copyright 1998, ISBN 0-89096-751-2.

The first wave of Czech emigration, starting in the 1850's, went to New York City, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Texas. One decade later the second wave settled in Illinois and the upper Mississippi Valley.

In the 1890's, the only cities that continued to attract Czech immigrants were Chicago, Cleveland, and Omaha. Rural Iowa, Kansan, Oklahoma, California, and Nebraska became the new magnets.

A thorough analysis of the backgrounds of around 2,000 Czechs in Nebraska permitted the author to delineate the boundaries of the region in Bohemia-Moravia which had been swept by the emigration fever--a wide belt stretching from southwestern Bohemia to eastern Moravia. More specifically, emigration swept the following regions of Bohemia: the south (to Vienna), the north (to Germany), and the center from the towns of Domažlice to Plzen' across to the mountains of the Šumava, to the Písek vicinity and on to the Tábor vicinity, and continuing on to the western side of the Czech-Moravian Highlands. Despite some differences in the geographical character of this belt, village-based agriculture was a common denominator... (page xviii)"

Politics and migration: 1848--1948

In 1848 politics and migration were two sides of the same coin--many intellectuals left in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, when rising liberal and nationalistic aspirations were suppressed by the conservative Austrian monarchy. The monarchs of Europe were determined to prevent the ideas associates with the rise of Napoleonic France (and the youthful United States of America) from undermining the established order... (page xix)"

 Chapter One: Background of Emigration in Bohemia

The emigration from the Czech lands to the United States began in the 1840’s and reached its peak in the 1880’s and 1890’s…The “classical” conditions that were part of the complex picture that gave rise to the great exodus of Czechs to American between the 1860’s and 1880’s were generally associated with disruptive effects of modernization and mechanization on the traditional patterns of life and work in the rural Czech society.

The Setting; Czech Lands in Transition

The emigrants left Bohemia and Moravia at a time when this region was becoming the industrial base of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: by the end of the nineteenth century the Czech lands boasted a developed agri-industrial economy on a par with the most developed countries in the world. For example. In the 1860’s this region employed 60 percent of the industrial workforce in the Austrian Empire. Indeed, the pace of industrialization in the Czech lands was comparable to that of France, and was close to that of Germany. Why did the Czechs leave a country that was undergoing rapid economic growth? And why were some areas within Bohemia-Moravia more emigration prone than others?

Economic growth and population explosion have long been discarded as the sole reason for emigration. The factors influencing the decision to emigrate are complex. The intensity of any one or combination of factors varies greatly from case to case. Within the large set of “push” factors there existed both general and individual reasons that brought people to the decision to leave…

Socio-Economic Stratification

…The Industrial Revolution affected different parts of rural Bohemia-Moravia quite differently. The fertile areas in eastern Bohemia along the river Elbe could withstand the fluctuation of cereal prices; the peasants in this prosperous agriculture region fared well. Thanks to this bountiful harvest, Bohemia and Moravia were the main producers of grain in Austria. In places where land ownership was highly concentrated, the dislocations accompanying the Industrial Revolution polarized the rural society, as large “agribusinesses” dictated domestic prices which were increasingly linked to competitive world-market prices. The falling price of agricultural commodities split Czech farmers into a large underclass of poor peasants living at a sustenance level and having to supplement their income as day laborers, on the one hand, and a small group of large landowners dominating the market, mechanizing to some extent, and gradually organizing their farms into rudimentary agro-industries, on the other.

Many poor peasants were forced to give up their small plots and seek employment on the large estates. Frequently they had to “moonlight” by engaging in crafts or working part-time in construction. Full-time farm work was not easy to find, as some rich landowners looked to machinery rather than hired hands for help.

…The lower class, one step higher than the landless underclass…, also emerged. It comprised the numerous agricultural producers who tilled the land either owned or rented) not exceeding five acres. These small farmsteads were too tiny to support a family, which meant that family members had to work for other farmers to supplement the family income. As agricultural producers, they contributed little to the marketplace, consuming most of what they grew.

Above the lower class there were two intermediate classes: the cottagers (malorolník) and the farmer (strědní rolník or sedlák). The first group owned ten to twelve acres of land, had skills, and the more wealthy cottagers could afford hired laborers. Unlike those in the class immediately below them, most cottagers produced for the grain market.

The sedlák was the symbol of the Czech village, although these individuals made up a relatively small but confident group that was slowly transforming into a rural bourgeoisie. Their land holdings were extremely modest by American standards. They owned twelve to fifty acres of land, usually had a modest additional income from an enterprise in the village such as a workshop, wanted to be economically independent, used hired workers, and grew most of the produce for the market...The emergence of a national agricultural economy threatened the prosperous sedlák because he could not compete with the largest landowners who increasingly dominated the market. Already in the waning years of the nineteenth century, the "get big or get out" principle was taking its toll on the smallholder.

The large landowners--German-speaking squires--were numerically a small, internally stratified group. In general, they owned more than fifty acres of land, but the richest of the group in this category were aristocrats whose landholdings typically exceeded 250 acres and who had also industrial and banking interests.

The transformation from labor- to capital -intensive farming was not a smooth process, as old traditions and customs stood in the way of efficiency. The most modern minded farmers realized that it was necessary to mechanize in order to survive. Nature played a role too: farmers in flat regions--for example, along the river Elbe--were at an advantage compared with farmers from the hills because they could more easily use machinery.

Ironically, the emancipation of the serfs in 1848 created an incentive to mechanize (and thus push small holders off the farm.) After 1848, the sudden, short-term shortage of labor caused large landowners to turn to technology out of necessity. By the end of the 1870's and 1880's. Czech industry was producing farm machinery (prior to this time Czech farmers had to import such implements from England.) Further advances in mechanization came in the 1890's, when better ploughs, mowers, and threshing machines were introduced. The mechanization of Czech agriculture shortened the period of time needed for labor-intensive work such as sowing and threshing. Also, the first chemical fertilizers date from this period--another sign of the times.

The use of machinery, however, can easily be overstated; by the end of the nineteenth century Czech agriculture was still far from being fully mechanized. One of the characteristic by-products of the transformation in agriculture was the use of hired laborers. In the medium-sized farmsteads--twelve to twenty-five acres--at least one-third of the farmers used hired workers; farmers with fifty to one hundred acres were even more likely to use such workers. All farms larger than 100 acres used them. Small farmers, on the other hand, could not afford to pay hired workers. With the exception of specialized agricultural units such as gardening, vegetable growing, or hops growing farms, employment of a non-relative of a farmer who owned less than twelve acres of land was rare.

...Regionalism was an important factor in these changes. Four main economic regions emerged during the gestation of the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century: the region with traditional textile production, the new industrial region, the fertile agricultural region with intensive forms of cash-crop production and a food-processing industry growing up along-side it, and an infertile region with no industries.

The last category (the poorest regions), characteristically swept by the emigration fever, covered more than one-third of the Czech lands and was the largest of them all. Southwest Bohemia, northwestern and southeastern portions of the Bohemian Forest, and mid-portion of southern Bohemia, the České Budějovice region, the Trěboń region, an area immediately east of Prague, the central and the southern parts of the Czech-Moravian Highlands, and the Znojmo region had no industrial base to balance off the economic deficit caused by the low agricultural productivity. This geographic area was not homogeneously poor, of course, there were pockets of prosperity in a landscape of economic stagnation.

Population Transitions

Population pressure combined with economic frustration was another factor at play in the emigration-prone areas. The population of the Czech lands grew by nearly 45 percent in the second half of the nineteenth century, from 6.6 million in 1846 to more than 10 million in 1920...

...The migration within the empire from rural areas to the cities brought about a demographic transformation during this period. Regions with outmoded industry or inefficient agriculture suffered depopulation, while new industrial centers grew rapidly. The coal-mining areas around Praha, Brno, Ostrava, and Plzen' were the magnets that drew misplaced peasants and landless laborers from the villages to the cities.

While Czech industry benefited from free trade, agricultural producers looked to the government for protective measures against cheap American wheat. Czech farmers from less fertile regions began to see the handwriting on the wall and started leaving villages for towns, industrial regions, or other countries.

The exodus from the villages, which began in 1850, affected only certain areas. The agricultural crisis of the 1870's--a crisis induced by competition from foreign (mainly American) producers--intensified the rates of immigration. The climax came in in the 1880's when over 17,000 people left Austria-Hungary (most were probably Bohemians and Moravians), as the flooding of Europe by cheap American wheat drove many farmers to the brink of destitution. Ironically, then, it was American agriculture that spurred many Czech farmers to depart for the United States.

Generally speaking, industrial centers experienced the highest population growth rates. On the other had, only in a few rural areas, such as the valleys of southern Moravia and the fertile strip along the river Elbe did the population not decline. These two areas, specializing in certain cash crops. weathered the agricultural crisis of the 1880's without depopulation due to urbanization and emigration... (page 10)."

Emigration to Bohemia-Moravia: A Closer Look

...A High-Impact Area: The Czech-Moravian Highlands

A statistical analysis of the data on Nebraska's Czech settlers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century reveals that an overwhelming majority of immigrants came from the foothills of the Czech-Moravian Highlands. These immigrants were probably the last major wave of Czechs from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The reasons for leaving were varied, but social and economic changes seem to be particularly pronounced. A paucity of capital, a shortage of water, and an unenterprising spirit were deficiencies common throughout the region. During the recurring economic crises that began in the 1870's work-for-wages became increasingly scarce.

The technological changes of the nineteenth century wiped out the small industries. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution bypassed the region, and the strength of the feudal guild system was a deterrent to forces of change. As a result of the mechanization of the old textile areas of northern Bohemia, the weaver's trade, once the Czech-Moravian Highlands' most important industry, was on the decline. The production of starch for a time filled the gap, after a few enterprising individuals started a cottage starch industry in Polná in 1850. The farmers in the vicinity of the towns of Polná, Německý Brod, and Přbyslav grew potatoes and supplied towns with manufactured starch. Poor potato harvests and price competition eventually defeated this nascent industry.

Only a few industries, all employing small numbers of workers, existed in the cities. Jihlava, the hub of the region, had a cotton factory built in the eighteenth century, a brewery, a sugar factory, tannery, and a small-scale production mustard, vinegar, fats and oils and chicory. Most industries were dependent on agricultural production in the region but employed fee laborers. (A distillery in Hrotovice, for example, employed forty workers.) Thus the region's economy could not siphon off the surplus rural population that had to remain in rural areas and survive on tiny plots of land or try to find work on large estates.

The lack of raw material, good roads, and railroads in this area was an added barrier standing in the way of industrialization that was in progress in most of the Czech lands. The railroad network designed during the first half of the nineteenth century missed the whole region. The poor-quality roads could not make up for the lack or railroads (Page 15).

Farming in this area required a greater investment than, for example, in Eastern Bohemia around the River Elbe. (the region along the banks of the Elbe is blessed with fertile soil which supported the local peasants rather comfortably; not surprisingly, only a few left the area in search of a better livelihood.) Two-thirds of the land in the Žd'ár nad Sázvou and the Jihlava region is arable but the quality of the soil is poor, shallow and infertile, and the land has to be plowed three or four times every year.

The unfavorable soil conditions made intensive farming necessary. Under such circumstances, most peasants diversified in order to sustain themselves and perhaps have some produce for the market. In other words, they grew vegetables as well as cereals. According to the geographic classification, the soil was most suitable for wheat or potatoes.

The climate was also unfavorable for farming, with long winters and a short growing season. In most of the area the average temperature is about 46 degrees Fahrenheit. Strong cold winds come in spring with frequent frosts. Hail is common and heavy rain often erodes the soil which is otherwise quite dry. In the nineteenth century, one-fourth of the region needed an irrigation system and crop rotation.

The main crops were wheat, oats, rye, legumes, potatoes, chicory, hemp, and fodder. Flax was a profitable crop for a time; with the decline of the weaver's trade, however, flax growing all but disappeared by 1900. Specialization in one crop often ended with a disaster; still, some peasants took the risk and grew only potatoes. Following the bad potato harvest of 1881 in Bohemia, many peasants became destitute, took whatever belongings they could. and left without even selling the piece of ground they owned.

Several parts of the region specialized in fruit growing. There was plum and cherry orchards in almost every village, and fruit trees lined the roads and paths--a pattern still visible throughout much of this region. In the gardens protected by a fence from animals, people grew cabbage and other vegetables for sale. Farmers raised horses, cattle, and swine.

Most of the landholdings were small in this part of the country. As a consequence of the liberal law of 1867, which allowed landowners to dispose of land at will, parents unable to buy more land parceled the small piece of land they had, dividing little "handkerchief plots" among their children or selling them to landless peasants. This practice, in time, made farming highly inefficient. It is noteworthy that stringent inheritance laws caused sons and daughters in some European countries to emigrate, and that the liberal inheritance laws of the Austro-Hungarian Empire produced the same result--rural exodus-though for different reasons. It was especially the young people who left because parcelization meant that most people could hope to inherit more than a small fragment of land insufficient to support a family.

The cottagers, unable to run a large-size agricultural enterprise that would require mechanization and modern technology, struggled in vain against the threat of loss of land due to insolvency, a common "disease." Each member of a peasant family had to work the land to make ends meet. If a father wanted to send his children to high school he often had to sell part of his property.

In an effort to survive, the cottagers braided brooms and mats, repaired shoes in the winter, or worked in the forests. The second income helped to sustain the family but it was not enough to modernize, to buy new equipment, or to purchase more lands.

Although small plots of land dotted the countryside, there were a few large estate owners who typically owned the best land. These estate expanded as their owners bought up the smaller landholdings of financially hard-pressed peasants...

Part Two--Into the New World

Chapter Four--Endless Horizons: Settlement and Occupational Patterns of Early Czechs in America

...All Roads to America Pass through Germany

...A ticket from Prague to Omaha via Chicago cost fifty-six dollars in 1881. The German ports of Bremen and Hamburg were the main train terminals and embarkation points for Czechs and Moravians making the voyage to America. The Kareš and Stocký firm representing the North-German Lloyd in Bremen, with agents in Bohemia outdistanced the British company operating from Liverpool in attracting passengers from the Czech lands...

...The influx of Czech mass migration in the early 1850's came out of western and south-western Bohemia and settled mainly in Cleveland, St. Louis, and Chicago. Czechs "discovered" Cleveland and St. Louis about the same time. St. Louis had the highest concentrations prior to the American Civil War. During the war all southern transportation routes were cut off, and Chicago became more attractive, particularly when rail transportation made it a major east-west link in the 1860'.

...The Czech population of Chicago grew even more rapidly than in Cleveland. The production of agricultural machines started in Chicago in 1841; the railroad and the meat packing houses provided employment opportunities starting in the 1860's. In 1863 there were seven thousand Czechs; two years later the number had grown to ten thousand. By the time the Dillingham Commission made its survey of immigrants in 1911, 40 percent of Czechs and Moravians had lived there for over twenty years. Chicago continued to be an attractive city for immigrants even after the turn of the century; 20 percent of the Czechs had been residing there for less than five years. In time Czechs became the fifth most numerous ethnic group living in the City.

The first Czechs came to Chicago in 1852. Most came from the old emigration areas of southwestern and southern Bohemia, from the villages of Písek, Vodn'y, and Tábor. A few came from the areas east of Prague. A later wave of Czech immigrants came predominately from small urban areas such as Turnov, northern Bohemia, and Vysoké Mýto and Pardubice in eastern Bohemia.

Chapter Nine--The Struggle for Cultural Survival

...Newspaper articles and letters reflected the level of political consciousness of the Czech settlers. Czechs in Nebraska published two daily newspapers, Pokrok Západu, published in Omaha since 1871, and Nová Doba (New Era) in Schuyler, Colfax County. Czechs were primarily concerned with one "lifestyle" issue: "Prohibition and other symbols of the clash between native and immigrant cultures" were the main items appearing in the Pokrok Západu. Having come from a county where the government restricted such "abstract" liberties as freedom of speech and assembly, Czech immigrants found that American society was, in one key area of great importance to their way of life, far more restrictive. What had been a natural element in social interactions of all kinds in the Old Country--i.e., consumption of alcohol--was stigmatized as the work of the devil by Bible-thumping "tee totallers" in the United States.

Most Czechs voted ethnically rather than ideologically. A majority of Czech-Moravians supported the Democratic Party, which they perceived as an anti-prohibition party. Basically, Czechs wanted to be free to think and do as they pleased, and the only real threat to their way of life in rural America was the anti-immigration, nativist, and prohibitionist Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) which dated from 1874, and the Anti-Saloon League after 1893. Both groups were associated with the Republican Party, which goes far in explaining why most Czechs in America were Democrats. After 1869, there was actually a Prohibition Party in the United States; this party ran candidates for public office beginning in1896. The Anti-Saloon League forced the prohibition issue into the forefront of state and local elections across the nation in the 1890's. It is noteworthy that the emergence of a powerful reformist movement--fueled above all by opposition to alcohol consumption in the United States (similar in some ways to the anti-drug movement today)--coincides with the most intense period of Czech immigration, 1870--1900.

The anti-"dry" faction within the Czech community became increasingly more vocal, particularly after the restrictions on the sales of alcohol came into effect in 1881. Only a few could afford to purchase the license to sell alcohol prior to 1880; the fee was five hundred dollars--an enormous restriction. Among other issues raise by the new alcohol regime was the sale of alcohol sale on Sundays; not surprisingly, many Czechs were anti-Sabbatarians.

While most Czechs (like the majority of Germans) were vehemently "wet," a few Czech temperance supporters originated in predominantly Catholic Butler County, Nebraska. Advocating moderation in drinking and tobacco chewing, they represented a conservative element in the Czech community...

Aside from prohibition, which was a national issue, Czechs were generally uninterested in high politics...

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