Book reviews -- Charles Jonas (1840-1896): Czech National Liberal, Wisconsin Bourbon Democrat by C. Winston Chrislock

Abstract

Review.

Charles Jonas (1840-1896): Czech National Liberal, Wisconsin Bourbon Democrat. By C. Winston Chrislock. (Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press, 1993. 209 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-944190-11-1.)

The new study by C. Winston Chrislock, Charles Jonas, is a rare and very important book. It is not common for an American author to take an interest in a Czech or Czech-American topic and make it available and attractive for general American readers. Chrislock has done it in a wonderful and very successful way. The study of Charles Jonas, an important political and cultural figure in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, is a rare and deep probe into the difficult and strained circumstances of central European life, into the depressed conditions in which the Czech intelligentsia and the whole nation lived and worked, often emigrating or migrating during the second half of the nineteenth century.

This theme has made it possible for Americans to open new geographic, social, political, intellectual, psychological, and historical horizons, especially because of the great mobility of the main hero. Charles Jonas, a Czech-American politician, journalist, and diplomat, was a freedom seeker who had to move from place to place in Europe and to the United States. The story takes us to Malesov, Kutna Hora, Prague, London, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Racine, New York, St. Petersburg, and Krefeld.

Through this very picturesque microlife, one is able to get deep insights into many different milieux in Europe and the United States and to feel the psychological consequences of "forced" migration in general. On top of it, Charles Jonas, though an American citizen, was persecuted by the Austro-Hungarian authorities in Vienna until the very end of his life in 1896. That happened to an immigrant who on the surface had adapted himself well to the English language and American life and became an American political representative.

Chrislock's very vivid and sometimes even dramatic picture of the deep psychological stress every immigrant to the United States faces reminds us very much of another famous book--that of Professor Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1951)--and demonstrates the high personal price paid for freedom in both central Europe and the United States.

But that does not exhaust the merits of this lovely little book. This study is a rare pioneering effort on several academic levels at once.

First, the book covers the field of American and Czech political state-based history in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Wisconsin and Bohemia, because Charles Jonas not only was an influential Czech emigrant but also became a prominent American political and cultural personality--among other things, a journalist and lieutenant governor of the state of Wisconsin.

Second, the Chrislock book is a superb study of Czech-American and American-Czech consular and diplomatic relations. Here we have the amazing story of the very first Czech-American consul in Prague in great detail, the beginning of a long pro-Czech historical tradition sustained by excellent American consuls, ministers, and officials. The relationship was kept alive after Jonas by Woodrow Wilson, Charles and Richard Crane, Lewis Einstein, Herbert Hoover, John Butler Wright, Laurence Steinhardt, and William Luers on the American side, and Vojtech Naprstek, Tomas Garigue Masaryk, Karel Pergler, Dr. Bedrich Stepanek, and Jan Masaryk on the Czech side.

Third, this is a rich pioneering work in a the sphere of general American immigration n history.

Fourth, the last but not the least contribution of this book may be found in the history of the field of American studies, because Jonas became close to Vojtech Naprstek-Fingerhut in Prague and joined his legendary "American Circle." Naprstek himself should be seen as the founding father of American studies in a Prague.

The study is exceptionally well executed. The primary source base is exhaustive and excellent, using Czech and American records alike--not commonly the case. These "both-sides" materials were complemented with a very good specialized bibliography of secondary works. The wonderful literary style, crowning the whole undertaking and keeping the interest of the reader alive until the very end, could serve as an example for similar projects in historical biography in the future.

This model book should be appreciated properly not only in the United States but in the Czech Republic as well. It should be read widely by the academic and general public on both sides of the Atlantic. It should be translated into Czech, too, and thus made available to the general Czech public.