Külpolitika - A Magyar Külügyi Intézet folyóirata - 1998 (4. évfolyam)
1998 / 1. szám - ESEMÉNYNAPTÁR - Resumé
Resumé precision. The history of the image of Hungary in America is a tragic palimpsest of the perception of the most dramatic turns of events, mostly volatile, sometimes lasting. It was at the time of the Revolution and War of Independence of 1848-49 that Hungary emerged as a political reality, no longer simply an exotic curiosity, in the United States. When A. Dudley Mann was appointed U.S. Minister to Hungary on June 18,1849, recognition came too late. In 1850, in the aftermath of the Hungarian surrender at Világos (today Siria in Romania), American legislators attacked the administration for providing insufficient support to the Hungarians and for not recognizing Hungarian independence in due time. There was an obvious parallel with the absence of U.S political and military assistance for the 1956 Revolution and the welcome given to the Hungarian freedom fighters who had left the country. Neither before nor afterwards was any public figure so completely identified with his country as Kossuth was in the U.S. in the six mouths he spent there in 1851-52. The large number of former Hungarian Honved officers fighting for the North, their personal courage and devotion a bare fifteen years after 1848, conformed to the romantic American vision of the heroic Hungarian nation ever ready to fight for liberty and social equality. An odd feature of the American image of Hungary is the basically unfriendly reception given in the U.S., even in Kossuth's own lifetime, to Hungarian immigrants or, rather, migrant workers. Seen from an "Anglo-Saxon" angle, the Hungarian "race", hastening to American shores within a single generation lost all those much appreciated qualities: love of freedom, ready to lay down their lives for the independence of their country, nobility and chivalry, and turned into poor immigrant "hunkies". It was, however, the Great War that became ultimately responsible for the extreme deterioration of Hungary's image in America. As Secretary of State Robert Lansing stated in June 1918, "The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was organized on the principle of conquest and not on the principle of 'self-determination'." Admiral Horthy's new Kingdom of Hungary was conceived and kept alive to just about its demise partly with American help. The American image of Miklós Horthy looked of course favorable only in comparison with that of the Habsburgs. In the interwar years Hungary started to have a double image in the United States. The image of Hungarians in Hungary and Hungarian Americans began to differ greatly. Americans began to think of Hungarians as extraordinarily talented, with unique minds, who always fell on their feet. This was when the legend of Hollywood Hungarians started, the age of film moguls Adolph Zukor and William Fox, film directors Michael Curtiz, Alexander Korda, and Joe Pasternak, film stars such as Bela Lugosi, Victor Varconi, Lya di Putti, and Vilma Bánky, or film composer Miklós Rózsa. The mathematicians, physicists and chemists, whose genius so impressed the world, and who were described as Martians by their colleagues, such as John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, 1998. tavasz 149
