Besides this direct encouragement by the state “a similar canvass was maintained by counties and land companies, and at a later stage by railway companies, some of them sending agents to travel in Europe.” Of such solicitation at the very beginning of Bohemian immigration I found tradition still mindful in the old country. Thus immigrants have felt themselves directly and officially invited and urged to come, and it is not surprising that one often finds them aggrieved and hurt at the tone of too many current references making foreigners synonymous with everything that is unwelcome.
Many of the Bohemians were pioneers in the unbroken wilderness, and a very large part were farmers. A large proportion, however, had trades, and this is characteristic of Bohemian immigration in general. The common estimate is that one-half of the Bohemians in the country are living in country places, occupied either with farming or with some one of the various employments incident to rural life, from shoemaking to keeping store or acting as notary public. If the comparison be extended to all groups of foreign parentage, Bohemia shows a larger proportion engaged in agriculture than any foreign countries except Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway, surpassing even Germany and Sweden. It is interesting to note that Italy has a very low rank in this regard; even Poland and Russia surpass her, lowered as their place is by the large non-agricultural Jewish element, and only Hungary is below her.
As to the quality of Slavic farming, one naturally hears different reports. I suspect that the American often thinks the Pole or Bohemian a poor farmer because he works on a different plan, while the foreigner, used to small, intensive farming, thinks Yankees slovenly and wasteful. Especially when he takes up old, worn-out farm lands, he has small respect for the methods of his predecessor, who, he says, “robbed the soil.”
The American business agent of a Bohemian farming paper, already quoted, could not say enough in praise of the Bohemian farmers. They farmed better than the Americans. They invested freely in farm machinery. Nothing was too good or too big for them. In the eastern half of Butler County, Nebraska, there were seventeen big steam threshing outfits among Bohemians—something to which you could find nothing parallel in the same area anywhere in the United States. The Bohemian paper of which he was agent had seven times more advertising of farm implements than any other paper in the United States, he said.
While the above statements are those of an interested party, all the available evidence points the same way. It would seem, moreover, as though in certain lines, new to us and familiar in Europe, the immigrant should be able to supply very valuable skill. This seems to be especially the case in the sugar-beet industry, in which the labor of Bohemians, who understand beet culture well, is much sought.
Of Bohemian women at work, nearly a quarter were in 1900 servants and waitresses, and more than another quarter workers at tailoring or in tobacco. This corresponds to the fact that many Bohemians in the cities are engaged in the two latter branches; many too are mechanics or trades-people, often carrying on a small business of their own.
The Bohemians, like other Slavic groups in this country, are much given to organizing into societies. Many of their associations are small local affairs of the most various sorts. In a New York Bohemian paper I found a list of 95 local societies among this group of perhaps 45,000 people. Many were mere “pleasure clubs,” to use the current East Side phrase, while many were lodges of various of their great “national” societies. Of these large national societies the most remarkable is the society founded by the Bohemians at St. Louis in 1854, under the name of the Bohemian-Slavonic Benevolent Society, or as it is commonly called, by the initials of this name in the vernacular, the Č. S. P. S. In the religious controversies which soon divided American Bohemians into two camps, this came to represent the free-thinking, anti-Catholic side. It numbers about 25,000 members.
The Sokols, which correspond to the German “Turnerbunds” or gymnastic societies, are as popular and widespread as they are desirable. They give opportunity for exercise dignified by a sense of the relation between good physical condition and readiness for service to one’s country. Women and children, as well as the men, have their own divisions, classes, and uniforms, and the Sokol exhibitions are important and very pretty social events. In Prague, in the summer of 1906, the Bohemian Sokols had an anniversary international meet, at which the American societies were also represented, and performed evolutions, literally in their thousands, in the open air.
Theatricals, whether given in some local hall or in a regular theatre hired for the occasion, are, as in Europe, a favorite employment for Sunday afternoons or evenings. Classic pieces, both literary and operatic, are much enjoyed; for instance, among the Bohemians, Smetana’s opera, “The Bartered Bride,” is often given. On the other hand, one will see a very simple spontaneous little exhibition given with the greatest abandon and delight by a club of hard-worked, elderly women, whose triumphs are hugely enjoyed by their families and neighbors. It is an especial pleasure to them to reproduce the pretty costumes of their old-world youth. Worthy of especial mention are the club called Snaha (Endeavor), of Bohemian professional women in Chicago, and the clubs organized for reading and study among Socialists of different nationalities.
There are numerous Bohemian papers and periodicals, including the Bohemian “Hospodář” (“Farmer”) of Omaha and the “Ženské Listy” of Chicago, the latter being an organ of a woman’s society, printed as well as edited by women. It is not devoted to “beauty lessons” and “household hints,” but to efforts toward woman’s suffrage and the “uplifting of the mental attitude of working-women.” Its 6,000 subscribers include distinguished Bohemians all over the country, men as well as women.