The term Slav covers a welter of nationalities whose common ethnic
heritage has long been concealed under religious, geographical, and
political diversities and feuds. They may be divided into North Slavs,
including Bohemians, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovaks, and "Russians," and
South Slavs, including Bulgarians, Serbians and Montenegrins,
Croatians, Slovenians, and Dalmatians. As one writer on these races
says, "It is often impossible in America to distinguish these national
groups.... Yet the differences are there.... In American communities
they have their different churches societies, newspapers, and a
separate social life.... The Pole wastes no love on the Russian, nor
the Ruthenian on the Pole, and a person who acts in ignorance of these
facts, a missionary for instance, or a political boss, or a trade
union organizer, may find himself in the position of a host who
should innocently invite a Fenian from Cork County to hobnob with an
Ulster Orangeman on the ground that both were Irish."[35]
The Bohemians (including the Moravians) are the most venturesome and
the most enlightened of the great Slav family. Many of them came to
America in the seventeenth century as religious pilgrims; more came as
political refugees after 1848; and since 1870, they have come in
larger numbers, seeking better economic conditions.
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