Solidarity or National Prejudice? Migrating Brewery Workers and the Troubles with Transferring Internationalist Ideologies from the Czech Lands to the United States, 1890–1914

1 Introduction

In the fall of 1911, Dr. František Soukup, an imposing and fiery Bohemian socialist orator traveled to the United States, hoping to gain support among Czech-identified immigrants for the Czech nationalist social democratic movement in the Habsburg Empire.^[1] On September 14, Soukup spoke to a group of brewery workers in Chicago. Coverage of this event in both the Czech Lands and the United States varied widely. The newspaper of the Czech separatist brewery workers’ union reported that Soukup “spoke to the souls” of nearly 200 brewery workers in attendance and that a new, “enduring association between the workers’ movement in the old country and the branch across the ocean would most certainly begin.”^[2] This depiction of a successful and harmonious event stood in direct opposition to the description of the event portrayed in the Czech-language newspaper of the centralist all-Austrian Austrian Union of Brewery Workers. “Dr. Soukup’s trip to the US should prove to Czech workers that they were made to look like idiots in front of” the United States National Union of Brewery Workmen when the tiny crowd of 15 attendees mocked Dr. Soukup and “showed real contempt for him.”^[3] Meanwhile, the officers of the United States’ National Union of brewery workers denied any hint of an enduring association with Dr. Soukup when they stated that they “have never seen that Dr. Soukup and we have no desire whatsoever to see an individual who, in his own country, is the enemy of the international labor movement” whose pronounced nationalism was “helping the brewery kings to make misery a permanent institution” among brewery workers.^[4] With his speech to Chicago’s brewery workers, Dr. František Soukup became a symbol of the tensions surrounding Czech nationalism that had its roots in Bohemia, and traveled across the globe with migrants from the Czech Lands.

The Czech nationalist movement was one of the numerous burgeoning nationalist movements that gained momentum over the duration of the 1800s. By the late nineteenth century, tensions between German and Czech nationalists in the Czech Lands of Bohemia and Moravia had reached a boiling point, resulting in violence that crossed from formal politics into the public realm. From the 1890s, sporadic violence in the name of nationalism rippled across Bohemia and Moravia.^[5] As will be discussed later in this article, the nationalist conflicts spilled over into labor unions despite the solidly anti-nationalist stances underpinning the ideological foundation upon which most unions were built, resulting in separatist unions based on ethnicity.^[6] Dr. Soukup represented the Czech separatist offshoot of the Social Democratic movement in the Habsburg Empire. He supported Czech separatist labor unions in Bohemia and Moravia, therefore his speech to a group of brewery workers in the United States became a controversial moment. And what does such a controversial moment tell us about the ways these migrating workers interacted with and were affected by the ideologies of labor activism and nationalism as they transferred back and forth across the ocean?

As we shall see, Dr. Soukup’s speech in 1911 and the following press coverage was a tipping point for the United States National Union of Brewery Workmen. From this point forward, the union changed its policies to strictly forbid any activities that even hinted at a nationalist separatism within their ranks. Additionally, through the conflicting reports of Dr. Soukup’s Chicago speech and the reaction of the United States brewery workers’ union, we can observe the persistence of competing claims on migrants’ loyalties in a tangled web of nationalism, social class, profession, and immigration status, as well as how these claims followed them as they migrated.

The controversy surrounding a speech with no published transcripts grew into an ideological flashpoint where the conflicts between nationalism and working-class activism in the Czech Lands came too close to the shores of the United States in a way that could no longer be ignored. The leadership of the brewery workers’ union in the United States feared that a transfer of Czech nationalist loyalties among migrating brewery workers would weaken their union, since Czech-identified workers made up the second largest minority in the union. The fear of separatism in the United States meant that brewery workers who migrated from Bohemia and Moravia faced greater scrutiny from their peers and from union leadership. As we will see, however, Czech-identified brewery workers were neither consistently loyal to their ethnic affiliation in their Bohemian homeland nor consistently patriotic Americans. Rather, their ethnic and political attachments ebbed and flowed, and were often more associated with social class than with cultural affinity.

This article examines communications between brewery workers’ unions in the Czech Lands and the United States in order to understand the ways in which nationalist ideologies traveled across the ocean with workers, and the effects of these ideologies on the experiences of brewery workers who migrated to the United States from the Czech Lands in the period between 1890 and 1914. The importance of union publications cannot be understated, especially in industries with large numbers of workers migrating to work in other locations both within the empire as well as around the globe. These publications, most of which were weekly newspapers, were the primary conduit of knowledge for brewery workers about their profession and about the situation of brewery workers worldwide. Workers who considered migration to work in other locations relied upon the knowledge relayed by their organization’s publications. But, as seen in the coverage of Dr. Soukup’s speech in Chicago, brewery workers’ union publications varied widely in their reporting, often presenting inconsistent information to their readers on both sides of the ocean. In turn, the conflicting and confusing information in the papers affected workers who either migrated or hoped to migrate, occasionally in damaging ways.

The conflicting information contained within the pages of brewery workers’ periodicals reflects the contestation and confusion about ethnic and national identification that transferred with brewery workers in the process of migration. Scholars of European immigration to the United States have tended to assume that ethnic or national identities transferred in a recognizable and fairly predictable manner.^[7] In the pages of the sources for this article, it becomes clear that there was significantly less uniformity in the ways migrants self-identified than is typically considered by scholars who only focus on the receiving destination. The confusion, contestation, and even manipulation of information presented in brewery workers’ periodicals mirrored the experiences of migrating brewery workers. Czech-identified brewery workers needed to have a great deal of flexibility and the ability to perform different combinations of national and class identity in different contexts in order to maintain their positions as unionized brewery workers.

Through an analysis of several brewery workers’ union periodicals and records from the National Union of Brewery Workmen archival collection, each of which included coverage of Dr. Soukup’s speech, we observe the complexities of transnational communication among labor unions. The different, often conflicting presentations of information, especially regarding the intersection of class and national or ethnic affiliation, highlights the necessity of Czech-identified brewery workers to at least maintain a façade of national indifference.^[8] Despite wildly successful campaigns for Czechoslovak independence in the United States at the time, it could be detrimental for workers to openly claim their Czechness or to even hint at a belief in the nationalist ideologies so prevalent in their homeland.

A focus on migrating brewery workers is important in this study for three primary reasons. First and foremost, the nationalist divisions between Czech-identified and German- or Austrian-identified brewery workers in the Czech Lands were often cited as a reason for the comparatively slow process of unionization in the brewing industry in the Czech Lands, especially Bohemia.^[9] Therefore, the brewery workers’ union in the United States was very reluctant to accept workers who had identified with a separatist labor union or any remotely Czech nationalist organization or ideology before migrating to the United States. At the same time, the union in the U.S. required union membership for brewery workers migrating from the Habsburg Empire, which occasionally caused confusion. The U.S. union checked the unionization status of hopeful members through frequent correspondence with overseas unions as well as through the circulation of worker lists to unions across the United States.^[10] Second, this fear that Czech separatism might transfer across the ocean with brewery workers led to a number of migrating workers who were unable to find unionized brewery employment in the United States, forcing many to return to the Czech Lands. And thirdly, given the ethnic composition of the brewing industry in the United States, which was predominantly German, migrating brewery workers found themselves dealing with similar tensions and hierarchies surrounding nationalism and ethnicity as they had in their homeland. Instead of escaping the tensions that weakened the unionization of brewery workers in their homeland, they found that the tensions transferred with them.

2 Brewery Workers Unionization in the Czech Lands

By the end of the nineteenth century, brewery workers of all ethnicities in the Czech Lands spoke and wrote openly about the need to unionize in order to improve wages and working conditions in the region’s breweries. Conditions were notoriously bad, and because of Pilsen’s global fame, breweries there received the most attention. Stories circulated around the globe, especially in labor movement periodicals, describing a grim environment within Pilsen’s breweries. One even finds comparisons to the conditions in Chicago’s meat packing industry as described by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. “Upton Sinclair woke people up with his work The Jungle […] dealing with the terrible scenes in the lives of workers employed in Chicago slaughterhouses. The world-famous city of Pilsen is a similar Jungle.”^[11] Samuel Gompers, the well-known U.S. labor activist, toured Pilsen’s breweries in 1909 and wrote in his memoirs that beer drinkers around the world should boycott beer made in Pilsen until working conditions improved.^[12]

During peak seasons, brewery workers worked 16 hours per day, seven days a week with only four-hour breaks between shifts. In Pilsen, workers lived in bunk rooms that housed rotations of 14 workers by shift. These rooms were rarely unoccupied for more than a few hours at a time. Hallways connected the bunk rooms to the brewery and because of the damp conditions necessary for the brewing process, the bunkrooms were described as constantly wet, moldy, and unbearably smelly with no ventilation. Workers had no place to dry their clothes effectively and wore the same wet clothes and shoes after their brief four hours of rest. The prolonged exposure to the damp conditions and the alternating work within steaming hot and ice-cold sections of the brewery resulted in health issues, especially respiratory and joint problems.^[13]

Slippery floors also contributed to brewery injuries. When a cooper for the Citizen’s Brewery in Pilsen, Šimon Štilip, slipped through a grate in the brewery floor and landed in the vast cellar system under the brewery, his body was only found two days later. He had been working alone and he was not reported missing for two days. According to doctors, he died slowly from his injuries, but he might have survived if he had been found immediately. Among the reports about this incident was one which grimly surmised that in contrast to the attention paid to a missing worker, if a barrel of beer had gone missing for even two hours, much less two days, everyone in the brewery would have had to stop work and search the entire property for the missing barrel.^[14]

Poor working conditions spurred union-organizing efforts among brewery workers, especially after the Habsburg Empire loosened the prior restrictions on labor organizing in 1890.^[15] Across the industrial centers of the Empire, labor organizers experienced significant success in forming labor unions, and the most successful unions operated under the umbrella of the Social Democratic Party.^[16] By the mid-1890s, however, the growing nationalist movements across the Empire created divisions in the working class solidarity cultivated by the Social Democrats and other parties that promoted the interests of laborers. In Bohemia and Moravia, rifts between those who identified as Czech and those who identified as German split union membership in ways that significantly weakened the effectiveness of organized labor in the brewing industry. It was not until the period after World War I that brewery workers finally gained significant ground with their unionization efforts.^[17]

The structure of labor unions in the Czech Lands reflected the complex tapestry of political and social circumstances in the late-Habsburg Empire. Prior to 1890, unions, as well as some political parties, including the Social Democrats were illegal. In 1890, the Austrian government cautiously loosened restrictions that prevented unionization. Trade unions began forming almost immediately and gained popularity in most industries. This article discusses the unions connected to the Social Democratic party.^[18] The brewing industry, however, lagged behind other industries, especially in Bohemia. It was possible to join a brewery workers’ union, but if members attempted to organize their fellow worker or to use the union’s backing to negotiate with their employer, they were blacklisted within the industry itself. These blacklists tended to be Empire-wide so any brewery worker on the lists would have trouble finding work throughout the Habsburg Monarchy.^[19]

In the mid-1890s, an all-Austrian brewery workers’ union called the Austrian Union of Brewery Workers [AUBW] began operation in association with the Social Democratic Party. Members of this union called themselves centralists. The union’s primary operating language was German, and its base was Vienna. However, local meetings and publications were multi-lingual, reflecting the population of each region. As Czech nationalism surged in the 1890s and into the early 1900s, so too did a movement for a separate Czech-speaking brewery worker’s union. For a few years, a semi-autonomous Czech union operated under the umbrella of the larger Vienna-based Austrian Union of Brewery Workers. And this semi-autonomous union published a Czech Language newspaper called Svazový list: Orgán dělníků pivovarských, bednářů a jich příbuzných odvětví Rakouska, which ran many parallel articles to the German-language paper of the organization, Verbandsblatt: Organ der Brauereiarbeiter, Faßbinder und verwandter Berufe Österreichs.

Increasing nationalist tensions eventually led to a complete split away from the Vienna-based union. The exact timing of the split remains elusive, but by 1908, a Czech nationalist brewery workers’ union was in full operation with its own newspaper, Rozhledy pivovarského dělnictva: Ústředni Orgán Českoslo-vanského svazu sladovníků, bednářů a spolupracovníků v Rakousku. The union was called the Union of Czechoslavic Brewery Workers, Coopers, and Related Trades [UCBW]. The UCBW aligned with separatists like Dr. Soukup and championed his cause. The exodus was not absolute, however. Many Czech speaking members of the Austrian Union opted to remain within the folds of the centralist statewide organization.^[20] The AUBW continued to publish Svazový list for the Czech speaking members, who became known as Czech Centralists.

Within the brewing industry in the Czech Lands, employers easily squashed union organizing efforts and blacklisted workers identified with union activity. This blacklisting of brewery workers was one impetus driving those who hoped to continue working in breweries to migrate outside of the Empire. The United States was a common destination, and brewery workers interested in worker solidarity viewed the successful unionization of the U.S. brewing industry as an appealing factor until World War I and the adoption of Prohibition.^[21] However, many migrant brewers only reluctantly left their homeland. One pro-union migrant, Karel Groušl, who was fired and blacklisted by the Měšt’anský Pivovar in Pilsen, migrated to Chicago to look for work. Groušl wrote an open letter to Pilsen’s brewers in which he laid the blame on the shoulders of Pilsen’s brewery owners and management. “You removed me from the place where I worked for 16 years. You forced me to leave our homeland and go abroad. You chase legions of workers from our homeland.”^[22] Groušl’s sentiment echoed in migrant brewery workers’ stories published in labor publications.^[23]

3 Knowledge Transfer in Union Newspapers

As mentioned earlier, unionized brewery workers relied on their union newspapers as a source of information about topics ranging from advances in brewing technology, to the philosophy behind their movement, and even advice, should they want to migrate to other parts of the world. It is in the pages of these papers that the impact of the centralist versus separatist ideological war on union members becomes obvious. In Bohemia and Moravia, written battles between the centralist Svazový list and the separatist Rozhledy raged constantly. As the public face of each union, the newspapers were the primary outlet for each organization’s news, activities, and ideologies. Union members relied upon their union’s newspapers for industry updates, political information, and even for a dose of culture. Additionally, in this era of heavy migration from and to Austria-Hungary, union members hoping to migrate out of the Empire looked to their union newspaper as the primary source of information about how best to navigate the migration process and find work in their new location.

Interestingly, there was also a significant amount of cross-subscription among union newspapers. For example, the subscription base for the NUBW’s Brauerei Arbeiter Zeitung included numerous individuals and organizations in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Switzerland.^[24] Svazový list and Rozhledy often published letters sent from their subscribers in the United States. Rozhledy even included a weekly report from its subscribers in Chicago. The amount of cross subscription, communication, and even shared articles between the United States and the Czech Lands demonstrates the deep interest that union members had in their homeland and in the United States as a potential migration destination. The transfer of information in both directions was intended to keep union members on both sides of the ocean informed, especially given the dominance of and reliance on immigrants in the United States brewing industry. Flaws in the communication did exist, as we see within the coverage of Dr. Soukup’s speech. Potential migrants found themselves at the mercy of what information about migration that their unions chose to publish. Occasionally this left migrants with only partial information or misinformation about their chances of finding work in union shops in the United States, as will be demonstrated shortly.

4 Migration to the United States

For brewery workers, one’s unionization status in their homeland emerged as a key factor in a migrant’s experience finding work in United States breweries. In the United States, brewery workers organized into a nation-wide union in 1885, called the National Union of Brewery Workmen [NUBW].^[25] Their primary operating language was German because the US brewing industry was operated and run predominantly by German immigrants or people of German descent. Within ten years, 93 percent of brewery workers in the United States had contracts negotiated by the NUBW, and it was known as one of the most successful unions in the country.^[26] The National Union of Brewery Workmen published the Brauerei Arbeiter Zeitung, initially exclusively in German. But by 1910 each four-page edition included two pages in German and two in English, often with only a small overlap in content between the languages.^[27]

In order for an immigrant to join the National Union of Brewery Workmen, the new arrival was required to have been a member of a union in their homeland that had an agreement, or reciprocity with the United States union. In the case of migrants from Bohemia and Moravia, the only union with reciprocity was the original centralist Austrian Union of Brewery Workers. Upon arrival in the United States, migrants were to report to their local NUBW office with a letter or travel cared from their home union. They then received work in a nearby brewery. When there were no available positions, the migrant was directed to union branches that could provide work. Migrants who had either joined the UCBW or not joined a union at all were not admitted to the union.^[28] Some sought non-union brewery work, some changed occupations, and some returned to Europe. Local branches of the NUBW recorded the names of migrants who attempted to join the union without proof of prior unionization and published them in various union publications to ensure that they would not be accepted into any location of the union.^[29]

Immigrant workers who had been members of the AUBW encountered a hierarchical structure within the United States NUBW that bore a strong resemblance to the one they had left behind. Of the NUBW’s approximately 50,000 members in 1910, at least 70 percent of union membership spoke German as a first language. English speakers were approximately 16 percent and Czech speakers were the third largest group, with close to 10 percent.^[30] German speakers comprised the vast majority of union leadership across the country. Additionally, most owners and management of the largest breweries in the United States identified as German, which also echoed the situation in the Czech Lands.^[31] Predictably, the ideology behind most large-scale labor unions like the United States’ National Union of Brewery Workmen did not mesh well with nationalist movements, especially those versions of nationalism that called for separate labor organizations. The disagreement stemmed from competing definitions of nationalism espoused by the two unions. The AUBW and NUBW adhered to standard socialist interpretations of internationalism. But the unions like the Czechoslavic Brewery Workers adhered to an ideology where nationalism and internationalism coexisted. The UCBW promoted the idea that, even though class identity held greater importance than nationalism, separate organizations were necessary for each national group and these separate organizations could come together in international alliance when needed.^[32]

Nationalist unions were perceived as a threat to the solidarity of the US-based union, which positioned itself as a champion of workers’ rights regardless of the members’ ethnic, linguistic, and racial background.^[33] Therefore, the National Union of Brewery Workmen considered the UCBW illegitimate. By 1912, the Union’s bylaws explicitly forbade hiring former members of nationalist unions. The Chicago visit of Dr. Soukup, who had a reputation as a nationalist-separatist organizer, most likely influenced this decision.^[34]

5 Dr. Soukup’s Chicago Visit

Not only did Dr. Soukup’s talk cause policy changes in the NUBW, but coverage of Dr. Soukup’s talk also demonstrated the disconnects and miscommunication in the coverage of events in the United States in brewery workers’ union newspapers in the Czech Lands. These wildly different descriptions and interpretations of Dr. Soukup’s speech demonstrate how the contested claims on migrants’ loyalties pulled from both sides of the ocean in a complex mixture of nationalism, social class, profession, and immigrant status. While Rozhledy and Svazový list engaged in newsprint battles over the event and its importance, the NUBW made their anti-separatist stance crystal-clear following the event, creating a strange strategic war of words and omissions between the AUBW and the UCBW in the Czech Lands.

According to Soukup’s published description of his North American travels, he had been invited by Czech-American Socialists in order to build connections between Czech workers on both sides of the Atlantic.^[35] He also stated his hope to inform workers in the Czech Lands about the life of the working class in the United States. In his writing, Dr. Soukup urges Czech workers to avoid migration to the United States, calling it “a place where human life holds no value.”^[36] While he wrote his observations about the city of Chicago, Soukup did not mention his meeting with the city’s Czech brewery workers.

On the other hand, Dr. Soukup’s meeting with brewery workers in Chicago on September 14, 1911 received extensive treatment in both Rozhledy and Svazový list. According to Rozhledy, both Czech- and German-identified workers in Chicago eagerly awaited his lecture, and those covering the event for the paper predicted that Soukup’s tour would begin the “enduring association” between the UCBW and the NUBW.^[37] Soukup “spoke to the souls” of his audience of at least 200 attentive listeners, especially as he described the “cultural struggle of the Czech brewery workers” in Austria who the paper described as fighting to maintain their language and unionize at the same time.^[38] When asked by an audience member how national minority unions could succeed in a “German” state like Austria, Rozhledy reported that Soukup explained the “questionable Germanness” of Austria and “answered [the nationality question] to the full satisfaction of all.”^[39] The article concluded by claiming that “this lecture will be recorded in the history of the Czech unionized brewery workers as an event of the utmost importance” that ushered in “a new era of relations […] founded on a solid basis of working class solidarity.”^[40] In short, Rozhledy proclaimed Soukup’s visit an astounding success that would ease the tensions between the United States NUBW and the UCBW.

The language used in Rozhledy’s coverage did not explicitly state that the two unions would now have a reciprocal agreement akin to that between the NUBW and the AUBW. Yet acceptance and progress were implied by phrases like “the beginning of an enduring association” and “a new era of relations.”^[41] One of the articles covering Dr. Soukup’s talk to Chicago brewery workers also bled into extensive coverage of the NUBW’s semi-annual convention taking place in Chicago around the same time as his speech. The coverage merged in such a way that the reader could easily assume that Dr. Soukup attended the convention or even that his talk was a part of the convention.^[42] And, had he attended the congress, he would have most certainly met the NUBW leadership, reinforcing the implication of new cooperation between the Czechoslavic Brewery workers and the National Union of Brewery Workmen.

There was no press consensus, however, on Soukup’s visit or on its effectiveness. Svazový list, the newspaper of the AUBW, mocked early separatist descriptions of the event, even beating Rozhledy’s first descriptions of the event in their publication. They wrote that, Soukup who “has no idea about a real worker’s experience, has supposedly repaired the separatists’ labor relations in the United States.”^[43] The article “Maska odhalena” included an exchange between the AUBW secretary in Prague, Karel Světlík, and the Chicago NUBW secretary, Charles Gaude. Gaude reported that there were only fifteen attendees at Soukup’s speech and the attendees treated Soukup badly and “showed real contempt for him, which Soukup obviously did not expect.”^[44] So “sensing the wind in America, [he] pretended to be a centralist” and “betrayed his own ideology” by not mentioning separatism at all.^[45] A third report in Svazový list stated that Soukup presented himself as a “faithful son of the International” when he claimed that all workers’ organizations needed to work hand in hand to improve the fate of the working class.^[46] According to Gaude of the NUBW, Soukup’s visit did not usher in any new era of association between the NUBW and the UCBW. Instead, it caused the Chicago branch of the NUBW to clarify its anti-separatism stance. They became the first local NUBW branch to articulate that they refused to tolerate any similar speakers or guests who had ties to separatist ideologies in the Czech Lands or in any other location.^[47]

This statement perhaps explains why there was no mention of Soukup’s visit to the United States in the NUBW’s newspaper, Brauerei Arbeiter Zeitung until ten months after his lecture in Chicago. In an article called “The Czech Trade-Union Separatism,” the writer expresses concern that Soukup’s speaking tour gave separatism a foothold in Chicago and was “nothing but an intentional weakening of the working class, a weakening for national, political, and last but not least, for selfish reasons.”^[48] The general impression in the NUBW was that the Czech separatist union in Austria prevented brewery workers from improving their notoriously bad working conditions.^[49] With workers divided between different unions, their bargaining power decreased and those running breweries recognized this fact and used it to their advantage. For example, the brewing industry periodical Der Pilsner Bierbrauer published an article stating that because of nationalism “it can be said that the wages of brewery workers in the Sudetenland, especially in Bohemia are more favorable [for owners]” than in other regions in the Habsburg Empire.^[50] The NUBW described the effect of the “national prejudice” expressed by Czech separatist trade unions as “laming” and disruptive of any improvements in conditions or wages for brewery workers in the Czech Lands.^[51] Therefore, union leadership in the United States viewed Dr. Soukup’s visit as potentially harmful to union solidarity.

While Dr. Soukup’s visit received no immediate attention in the NUBW newspaper, it was discussed at length at the union’s 1912 annual convention. In an address to the full union membership, NUBW’s general secretary Adam Huebner noted that union leadership had no intention of collaboration with Dr. Soukup who Huebner called “the enemy of the international labor movement, who is assisting capitalists to prevent the workingmen from gaining better conditions.”^[52] Huebner continued, “[…] separatist unions are helping the brewery kings to make misery a permanent institution” among brewery workers in the Czech Lands.^[53] To drive home Huebner’s point, the NUBW passed a resolution at their convention accusing members of separatist unions overseas of becoming “scabs and strike-breakers” as soon as they arrive in the United States, and all NUBW branches received orders to refuse membership to anyone who was a member of a separatist union.^[54] The resolution also required the circulation of names of any brewery workers who migrated to the United States and had been members of separatist unions before migration. With this resolution, the NUBW effectively ended the work prospects of hundreds of brewery workers who either had migrated or hoped to migrate to the United States and find unionized work in breweries.

Following the declaration of the NUBW, Rozhledy fell silent about Soukup’s visit in the United States. They also quietly discontinued the regular columns about brewery worker unionization in the United States. In contrast, the AUBW seemed to relish the announcement. Svazový list published articles with titles like “American Colleagues Against Separatism” and repeatedly announced that separatists were no longer welcome, even as visitors, by the NUBW.^[55] In these articles, they repeated Secretary Huebner’s words from the 1912 NUBW Congress and challenged Rozhledy to publish his remarks and the full resolution.^[56]

Not once in any coverage of Soukup’s Chicago speech were his actual words reported. Without a transcript, we cannot know if he truly did deviate from his usual support of separatism and sounded like “a faithful son of the international,” nor can we know how many people actually attended his talk or how he was received by his audience.^[57] Yet, the selective silences allowed each organization to use the event to promote its own narrative about working-class solidarity and the ideologies behind separatist unions in the Czech Lands. It was the readers, the workers themselves, who bore the effects of these imaginings as they used them to navigate the worlds of migration and labor.

6 Conflicting Information and Strategic Omissions

Written conflicts among the union periodicals began several years before Dr. Soukup’s speech in Chicago. As early as 1908, the Union of Czechoslavic Brewery Workers used any opportunity to try to gain the moral high ground in the separatism versus centralism debate. In one case, Rozhledy reported on a centralist organizer, Karel Kraušal, who openly worked against separatist brewery workers’ unions before migrating to the United States. Rozhledy relayed with some satisfaction that Kraušal ended up in court in Chicago for neglecting his wife and four children.^[58] The report asked “what kind of people […] worked against our efforts to give Czech workers the right to separate organizations that are recognized by the international?”, then continued by describing the charges against Kraušal and reminded readers that he had worked to discredit Czech separatist unions in Pilsen.^[59] As had been the pattern for several years, Rozhledy frequently suggested to its readers that any difficulty they had finding union work in the United States resulted from efforts of the centralist AUBW, and they did so by publishing accounts of workers who were unable to find work in the United States.^[60] For example, Edmund Pik, a member of the Czechoslavic Brewery Workers Union, attempted unsuccessfully to find work in the United States. Upon his return to Bohemia, he wrote a scathing letter about the AUBW to Rozhledy. “I can see the intentions of Vienna [AUBW headquarters] well: to shame independent social democratic Czech workers’ […] to make it more difficult for the Czechoslavic organization to establish reciprocity with Germany and overseas.”^[61] At no point did Rozhledy mention that the difficulties of these workers in the United States had, in fact, resulted from their membership in a union grounded in separatist ideology.

The UCBW certainly attempted to gain the favor of the NUBW in the United States. Despite the fact that the NUBW often publicly admonished the Czech separatist union for misleading its members, the latter called the NUBW a “model union” and the envy of brewery workers’ organizations around the globe.^[62] Yet, when the United States union sent reminders about its membership requirements for immigrant membership, the editors of Rozhledy consistently omitted one crucial detail as they relayed the information to their readers. Instructions for migrating to the United States tended to read: “Those who are determined to travel to America […] must simply take note that if they are not organized then they cannot be allowed to work [in the United States].”^[63] There was no mention of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Rozhledy’s readers, despite being organized union members, would be barred from union jobs in United States breweries because they were members of a separatist union. And there was no discussion that the differences between the centralist and separatist ideologies were at the root of its members’ difficulties upon migration to the United States. The afore-mentioned Edmund Pik was one of many who were barred from working in the United States because he had been a member of the separatist UCBW.^[64] All three unions published stories of workers from the Czech Lands and other parts of Europe who failed to find work in unionized United States breweries because they had been a member of a separatist union or not a union member at all before migrating.^[65] Given the number of examples of workers rejected from membership in the NUBW, we can assume that there were many whose names and stories were not recorded in these periodicals.

After the 1912 NUBW resolution calling Czech separatist migrant workers “scabs,” Rozhledy almost entirely stopped reporting about the United States union and migration. Whether their apparently deliberate gaps in reporting had been intended to win favor with the NUBW, or to retain legitimacy in their members’ eyes, the effects on migrating workers were evident. When it became clear that the NUBW would not change its policy about separatist unions, the UCBW chose not to criticize the stance of the NUBW. Perhaps this was because the union leadership knew that they would continue to have members who hoped to migrate and did not want to lose support from that segment of their membership, sensing that workers’ desire to find work would take precedence over their nationalist loyalty.

By 1910, the leadership of the Austrian Union of Brewery Workers recognized that support for the Czech separatist union was strong and would continue to grow, but they believed that their version of internationalism would eventually triumph. In their publications, they continued to argue against separatism, even when it meant mocking the separatists who were forced to return to the Czech Lands from the United States. In their telling, the failures of migrant brewery workers to succeed in the United States proved further that nationalism and separatism hurt labor solidarity.^[66] The AUBW also used Czech-identified Americans to support their anti-separatist stance. In 1912, they published a letter from an American-born Czech speaker, Henry Prokůpek, who wrote, “I have heard you have three organizations [unions] there. I do not think it is good for the organizing of brewery workers. As I read in the last issue of the Brewery Workers Journal report from your convention, I see that you are harmed because you stand against each other. I wonder if it would be possible to connect together and work in unity, collegial in one organization?”^[67] From blatant criticism of separatism to gentler statements like the one above, Svazový list published anti-separatist articles in virtually every issue of their paper at this time.^[68] The NUBW and the AUBW renewed statements of cooperation regularly, allowing any AUBW member with an appropriate travel card issued by the union to migrate and find work in unionized breweries across the United States.

Despite leaving the Habsburg Empire, where class concerns and nationalism existed in a tangled web, both Czech- and German-identified brewery workers found themselves unable to escape completely the unwieldy mosaic of competing class and national claims on their loyalty. Instead of finding a new home where trade unions were free of the same entanglements of Austria-Hungary, even those who had not been members of a separatist union found their loyalties under close scrutiny by the NUBW. For those who identified as German, the transition was perhaps easier, because they were more likely to have been members of the centralist Austrian Union prior to migration. Further, the NUBW’s operating language was German, and the majority of its members were either immigrants from German-speaking lands or they were the children of migrants from German-speaking lands and had grown up with the language.^[69] In contrast, Czech-identified workers found it necessary to remain outwardly indifferent, even if they only spoke Czech, or sympathized with the Czech nationalist movement.

Given the similarities in the power dynamics within the brewery workers’ unions in the Habsburg Empire and in the United States, it is no surprise that the NUBW feared that familiar patterns of activism could arise among brewery workers on both sides of the ocean. The fracturing of brewery workers’ unions in Bohemia and Moravia along nationalist lines not only raised the specter of a weakened workforce there through division of workers’ loyalties, but also signaled a potential transfer of separatist sentiment as workers migrated. The separatist UCBW assertion that Dr. Soukup made a strong showing in Chicago heightened the fears that separatism could weaken the NUBW. On its surface the United States NUBW was a shining example of a mostly immigrant, multi-ethnic union with little internal strife arising from its mixed membership. However, even as Huebner made it clear that nationalist and ethnic conflicts were not to transfer to the United States with migrating workers, ethnic strife quietly simmered among the union’s rank and file. While less overt than in the Habsburg Empire, nationalist tensions did transfer and at times the NUBW’s attempts to discourage these tensions created further strife.

Because of the heavily German majority of the NUBW and its leadership, as well as the United States brewing industry as a whole, Czech-identified union members found themselves having to advocate for their needs and even basic acknowledgement within the union. For example, the union donated to and extensively advertised its activities in German-language newspapers in the United States. Czech-speaking brewery workers, on the other hand, often had to remind the union to include Czech-language newspapers in their efforts.^[70]

It was not lost on Czech-identified immigrant brewery workers that they found themselves once again in a centralized power structure dominated by those who identified as German. And this similar power structure led to actions that the NUBW feared would create a split of unions as had happened in the Czech Lands, when in fact, those actions were most likely an attempt to make the union more inclusive of its large Czech-speaking minority. The NUBW’s leadership frequently denied requests for educational and union materials printed in Czech, claiming that if an exception were made for the union’s approximately 2000 monolingual Czech-speaking members, they would have to print in every native language used by union members.^[71] Union leadership even hinted at a belief in German superiority when they lamented that its English-speaking members “cannot master the German language” well enough to read union publications, so they reluctantly increased the number of English articles in the Brauerei Arbeiter Zeitung.^[72] In response, the UCBW issued a rare complaint about the NUBW, saying that “a little more understanding could be expected for the needs of workers of another nationality.”^[73] The article in Rozhledy added that the NUBW leadership told Czech-speaking members that they needed to focus on learning English, but no other records or periodicals support this statement.^[74] The NUBW’s strategy of denying Czech language materials seemed an odd strategy when dealing with a group that they viewed as potentially troublesome. Language barriers also served as knowledge barriers and monolingual Czech speakers would have to rely on outside sources for any information their union disseminated.

In larger cities, including Chicago and New York, Czech-speaking brewery workers followed a familiar pattern seen in the Czech lands and formed Czech educational societies that operated under the umbrella of the NUBW. These societies relied primarily upon individual union members for funding, as the organization was reluctant to promote any activities that hinted at the kind of separatism taking place in the Czech Lands. In Chicago, for instance, the educational society provided translations of the union newspaper and requested printed materials from the Czech Lands on topics ranging from socialism to Czech culture. These education societies also provided information about obtaining citizenship in the United States and taught about the country’s political structure because the union only provided this information in German and English. Ironically, it was Rozhledy that carried the most detailed reports of these activities.^[75]

Beginning in 1910, rumors circulated that Czech separatists from the Czech Lands attempted to promote separatist Czech unions in the United States, and actually succeeded at gaining a foothold.^[76] There is no proof of this claim in the sources used for this article. However, articles in the UCBW’s Rozhledy stoked fears within the NUBW by hinting that separatist unions might form.^[77] From the other side, Rozhledy also printed vehement denunciations of anyone who accused Czech separatists of trying to divide brewery workers in the United States, calling the accusations “slander” and an attempt to “ruin the good name” of Czech brewery workers in the United States.^[78]

The NUBW quickly condemned any activities that they felt could embolden the Czech education societies to split into a separate union. Leadership of the NUBW continually feared that what they called “the separatist evil” would take root among its Czech-identified members.^[79] Even seemingly harmless actions prompted quick and harsh responses. For instance, a few members of the Chicago Czech education society sent a public greeting to the Bohemian delegation at the 1910 International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen without permission from union leadership. The workers who penned the greeting were suspended from the union and threatened with expulsion.^[80] Indeed, it seemed that when Czech-identified brewery workers were mentioned by the NUBW leadership, it was often to portray them as scabs, strikebreakers, selfish separatists, or as rule-breakers in need of either censure or further education. In order to prevent separatism from taking hold among Czech brewery workers in the United States, the NUBW inadvertently recreated power dynamics that would have felt quite similar to those in the brewery workers’ homelands. However, for Czech workers in the United States, national indifference was required when it had been more of a personal choice in the Czech Lands.

The onset of World War I and the growing Prohibition movement caused a rapid but unsurprising shift in the NUBW. Migration into the United States from the Czech Lands slowed.^[81] As anti-German sentiment rose in the United States, the union gradually moved away from using German in their publications, the NUBW focused on the Americanness of the union and of the brewing industry as a whole.^[82] With the increase in anti-alcohol sentiment, the focus on preserving the brewing industry overrode further discussion of nationalist separatism. Within the union, efforts shifted to fighting anti-alcohol laws, as well as portraying the brewing industry and its workers as an integral part of the cultural, social, and economic fabric of the United States.

7 Conclusion

Periodicals such as the Brauerei Arbeiter Zeitung, Rozhledy, and Svazový list were the main conduit for disseminating knowledge among union members, as well as the primary means of transferring information to brewery workers’ unions in other locations around the globe. As the differing ideologies of worker solidarity and national separation transferred back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean with both the workers and the publications, so too did the tensions and conflicts surrounding those ideologies. In these tensions and conflicts within the pages of brewery workers’ periodicals, workers encountered contradictory and confusing information, reflecting the contextual and adaptable nature of national attachments and self-identification among Czech-identified brewery workers in the United States.

In these periodicals, the concepts of nationalist-separatism and internationalism occupied a central position in the debate over the legitimacy of separatist brewery workers’ unions and the dependability of the migrant workers themselves. Studying the communications and publications allows a glimpse of how both brewery workers and union leadership interpreted the transfer of these tensions and conflicts. Each newspaper presented the information that best supported their underlying ideology, even if it meant inaccuracies, omissions, or increased animosity between workers and union leadership. And it was the union members who were left to negotiate migration and union expectations, often without complete information, especially in the case of those belonging to separatist unions.

As the coverage of Dr. Soukup’s Chicago speech demonstrated, a significant fear of Czech nationalism existed among the leadership of the NUBW. They believed that nationalism would divide the workers within the union and destroy worker solidarity. This fear of division resulted in serious consequences for Czech-identified workers who migrated to the United States. Not only did they encounter hierarchies that resembled those in their homeland, but some found it impossible to find work in unionized breweries because of their national affiliation. In the case of unionized migrant brewery workers, in particular, the attachments to their homeland were reinforced when they encountered industry hierarchies similar to those they left in the Czech Lands, yet in the United States union, openly expressing Czechness carried serious consequences. Migrating brewery workers who identified as Czech found it beneficial to adapt their self-identification contextually, remaining outwardly nationally indifferent in their new home, no matter where their loyalties truly laid because of the fears of separatism that crossed the ocean with workers.