Fraternity-Testvériség, 1949 (27. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1949-05-01 / 5. szám

TESTVÉRISÉG

5

AMERICA'S INTERESTS IN HUNGARIAN STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE

By Leslie C. Tihanyi

This meritorious study which we intend to publish in four installments is reprinted from the “Documents and State Papers”, (Vol. I., No. 5), a monthly periodical prepared and edited in the Division of Publication, Office of Public Affairs, as a complement to the Department of State Bulletin. The author, Leslie C. Tihanyi, is an official at the Department of State, born in Győr, Hungary, who was a student of the Franklin-Marshall College in Lancaster, Penna. We are glad to introduce this young scholar to our readers and the Hungarian public at large.

(Editor)

KOSSUTH’S RECEPTION IN AMERICA, 1851—52

(Last instalment)

Kossuth arrived in America on December 4, 1851, and left on July 14, 1852. During the intervening seven and one-half months he traversed the length and breadth of the eastern United States, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi and from Boston to New Orleans. His presence in the country awakened unprecedented enthusiasm, although the reception accorded him in the South was considerably cooler than his welcome in the North. The explanation of this differing behavior lies in the fact that Kossuth, by the time of his arrival in America, had become a symbol of anti status quo forces generally and in the 1850’s the South was beginning to look with increasing apprehension at all strivings to alter the traditionally existing order.

Kossuth was quite explicit in stating the motives which promted him to accept the invitation of the United States Government to come to America. He was not crossing the Atlantic as an immigrant, he declared, but rather as a European political leader free to agitate for his principles. During the first days of his visit he announced that he had come to seek the active support of the United States for the European democracies and that, should he fail in his attempt to obtain help from the American Government, he would appeal directly to the American people. His avowed immediate objective was to prepare for a new Hungarian war of independence, for which purpose he was issuing bonds and taking up popular collections.

On his way to America, and especially during his brief sojourn in England, Kossuth had formulated a program designed to insure the the triumph of republican self-determination in Hungary and indeed throughout the European Continent. This program of liberation rested upon two cardinal principles: (1) the necessity of an Anglo-American alliance; and (2) the enforcement by the two English-speaking powers

of a doctrine of nonintervention in regard to European political struggles. This latter concept was in Kossuth’s thinking actually identical with intervention. He demanded nothing less than that the two strongest democracies of the Western World should encourage the spread of democracy on the Continent by serving notice on the absolutistic empires of Austria and Russia that any further intervention on their part against European freedom and democracy would be followed by intervention on the part of the Anglo-American allies on behalf of these same principles.

The history of the second half of the nineteenth century does not record either the contraction of an Anglo-American alliance or the enunciation by the United States of such a doctrine of nonintervention. Consequently, as far as Kossuth’s attempt to exert an influence on American foreign policy is concerned, his visit to the United States must be regarded as a failure. On the other hand, the impact of his principles and oratory on his vast audiences probably made a considerable contribution to the gradual growth of American popular acceptance of the privileges and obligations of great- power status.

To any impartial observer of the American scene in 1852 it must have been clear that the times were not propitious for a realization of Kossuth’s political plans. These plans rested on the assumption that the subsiding of the European revolutionary wave in 1848—49 was but a temporary setback and that a resumption of the struggle would lead to success if carried out under the aegis of any Anglo-American alliance ready to throw its weight against Austro-Russian intervention. L o uis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s successful coup d’état in December 1851 laid low the hopes of the revolutionaries and served notice that at least the immediate future on the Continent belonged to dictators and not to democrats. The idea of an Anglo- American alliance was, to say the least, premature: the Oregon boundary dispute of 1844- 1846 and the Mosquito Coast controversy of 1848—50 between the United States and Great Britain were still rankling in American minds, and, in spite of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty of 1850, a rapprochement between the English- speaking powers was not to be looked for. As for American intervention in Europe, the counsels of the founding fathers served as the lodestar of American foreign policy. It was to be another half century before the United States would commit itself to intervention on behalf of national self-determination in Cuba; and