Page:The Czechoslovaks in the United States.djvu/3

 gary and lived under the sway of Magyar landholders.



The bloodless revolution of October 28, 1918, united them in the Czechoslovak Republic. The new state has a population of thirteen and a half million, of whom roughly seven million are Czechs, two million Slovaks, half a million Rusins (also a Slavic people), three million Germans, seven hundred thousand Magyars, a few Poles and many Jews.

According to the United States census of 1920 there lived in this country 234,564 Czechs born abroad and 388,232 persons born in the United States of Czech parents, a total of 622,796. Slovaks born abroad numbered 274,948 and their children 344,918, a total of 619,866.



The Czechs, or Bohemians, as they are still known in America, belong to the older immigration. A few came in the colonial days, but the modern immigration wave started in 1849, when democratic revolutions on the continent of Europe were suppressed by autocratic monarchies. The first comers were political refugees. There have always been among the immigrants many young men with an adventurous spirit, but the mass of the Czechoslovak immigrants crossed the ocean because of the economic opportunity which America presented to the poor peasant. Slovak immigration on a larger scale began about forty years ago and was especially strong in the ten years preceding the war.

The Czech immigrants of the third quarter of the nineteenth century settled for the most part on farms. They took up homesteads in the Central West, and there are now prosperous Bohemian farming settlements in