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Transcription
Morgan List discusses her family's immigration story, focusing on her great-great-grandfather Bohemil Oldrich Haroza. She explores how he may have been perceived as non-white as an Eastern European immigrant and how being Catholic may have affected his experience in America. She references an article discussing the racial position of European immigrants during that time. Morgan's sister Molly adds that many Czech immigrants settled in the Midwest, particularly in South Dakota, where they formed their own communities. Despite potential adversity, they were able to create a support system. ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] All right, for those of you who don't know, that was the Czech National Anthem. Hello, everyone. My name is Morgan List, and welcome to my podcast, Family and the Czech Republic. Today's topic, family immigration stories. I have a special guest who will be joining us later, but for now, I'd like to talk about a portion of my family and their immigration story. The narrative for today's podcast will be focusing on my great-great-grandpa, Bohemil Oldrich Haroza, and we'll be, you know, considering where he immigrated from and if he was considered white when he moved here, the anti-Catholic rhetoric. That was a big narrative back in the early 1900s, and, you know, the freedom to worship, that clouded portions of American history. So to talk about our main guy, Bohemil Haroza, he was born in 1895 in what is the present-day Czech Republic. According to historical records, the territory at the time was considered Austria, Hungary as well. The reason being, you know, those territories and lands were changing all the time. We continue to see this in modern-day history where certain countries, the lines shift. But based on records and family lore, we will say he was born in the Czech Republic and was a Czech citizen. Based on records that I could find, Bohemil was a United States citizen by 1910. So within the first 25 years of his life, he immigrated to America. He was initially a part of the census down in Parker, Texas, before moving to Tabor, South Dakota, where he lived out the rest of his life and died and buried. His wife, Louisa, married and moved with him to America. There is little documented on her, so I don't even know when she married Bohemil, when they immigrated to America, when she died. So for context, let's work this backwards. So Bohemil and Louisa were married, and they had a lot of children. They had Lillian, Georgina, Bohemil, Barney, Beatrice, Rosie, Geraldine, and Elsie. Lillian and Louisa married Edwin Liss in October of 1938. Edwin was also from South Dakota, and that's where they remained for their lives. Lillian and Edwin had a son named Dennis, who married Lois. Dennis and Lois had three children, Jason, Erica, and Ryan. Jason married Stacy, and those are my parents. And then here I am. So in order of succession, it goes Bohemil, Lillian, Dennis, Jason, me. Easy peasy. So how does Bohemil's immigration story go? Well, there's not much documented on it, right? I could only really find birth records, marriage certificates, and death certificates, right? But we can kind of dive into the thesis about how he maybe was not perceived as white as an Eastern European immigrant, and how he may have been excluded from this prestigious whiteness, and that could have affected his experience in America. This kind of reminded me of looking back on Columbus Day, the article, how Columbus Day fell victim to its own success. You know, we learned about how Italian Americans were viewed as nonwhite, even though later on we heard perspectives changed and they were seen as white. Many Eastern slash Central European countries, like the Czech Republic, their citizens were seen as nonwhite or inferior whites. This was especially prominent when Bohemil, you know, moved to the United States from the Czech Republic. I found an outside research, you know, I found this article titled The Racial Position of Urine Immigrants, 1883 to 1941, Evidence of Lynching in the Midwest. You know, this was right about the time, too, that Bohemil was moving to the United States, that time frame. This article was written by David Rigby and Charles Seguin, and they discussed the, you know, precarious position of being a naturalized white citizen versus a European immigrant versus a black American in this time. The article also discusses how most Europeans that were immigrating, you know, were afforded the legal protections of whiteness due to the fact that they just appeared white, but they were often excluded from some of these informal privileges of whiteness. And what I mean by that is there was, you know, a lynching situation in the Midwest. They were generally accepted as part of the white population, but then oftentimes these European immigrants were lynched themselves, which is really fascinating because that's not something we talk about, especially in the Midwest. For Bohemil to move to the Midwest during that time as a native Czech citizen, you know, we can conclude that he might have been perceived as white initially, but then, you know, as he spoke to others and they picked up on his Czechoslovakian roots, he could have been seen as that non-white or inferior white. Along with that, Bohemil and the Haroza family, they're all Catholic. We're still Catholic today, actually. Catholics at the time were not viewed very favorably in America just because America was a rather Protestant community still. And Catholics were seen as a racial threat. In an article published by Politico titled, When America Hated Catholics written by Josh Zietz, he discusses the misconception that Catholics, you know, were only loyal to Rome. Along with that, in the article, it discusses how Eastern and Southern Europeans were often a darker hue of skin and therefore just not as white as their neighbors who were Protestant Northern European, right? Something that we discussed in the lectures when it surrounded black bodies and slavery was the discrimination based on biology. And what's interesting is in this article, it actually discusses how whites were even broken down into specific categories based on their own biology, right? So to quote this article, it says, Quote, Whiteness, it now seemed, was a matter of degree, and Europeans fell into categories like Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Hebrew. Importantly, this move toward racial classification drew heavily on emerging fields of modern biology and chemistry. In this sense, modern science and social science were contemporizes and close cousins of modern racism. So now that's interesting because oftentimes we only hear about it in terms of, you know, African Americans versus white individuals, but it's unique that even within white communities, they were being separated down based on, you know, what religion they were and if that degree of whiteness fell into a certain category. This article also discusses how during the early 1900s, the KKK was seeking more communities to retaliate against and that included Jewish and Catholic communities. The idea the KKK had in attacking these communities was they were destroying, you know, this nation of small Protestant communities. I think that was interesting because, you know, in lecture, we discussed a lot of times how these groups that were fighting for their basic rights were seen as destroying the American way of life. You know, when it came to African American communities fighting for their civil rights, they were asking for too much. When Italian immigrants fought for recognition in their discovery of America, it eventually turned very negative. And Native Americans, right, they just wanted basic rights. They just wanted their land back. They wanted to be seen as the original people here in this country. And every time these groups were met with a lot of resistance just because they were fighting this narrative of America that is often presented as very Protestant, Northern European, white America. Along with that, we can infer that since the early 1900s, being an immigrant from Eastern Europe and being Catholic, they did become widely accepted, right, especially in the years following both of those immigrations to the United States. For example, a good indicator of this was in 1943, we have the Norman Rockwell painting image that was titled Freedom to Worship, which clearly depicts a Catholic woman praying the rosary. And that just shows, you know, within a short few years, it was widely accepted to be Catholic, right? And again, I'm not saying Bohemo faced these struggles of discrimination or religious persecution. You know, where he settled in Texas and South Dakota were heavily dominated by Czech communities, but it's just one of those things where there's no documentation about what was going on in America at the time. So you can kind of see the correlation of what could have happened since he was Catholic and he was an immigrant from Eastern Europe and whatnot. Now, I took a rather unconventional approach to who I was going to interview for this. Most people probably talk to their parents or their grandparents, but I actually have a sibling who is very well versed in family knowledge and history herself, as she was the 2015 History Bowl Regional Champion. So I today will be interviewing my younger sister, Molly. And here she is, my sister Molly, the Regional History Bowl Champion and the avid volunteer at the Czech Museum in Cedar Rapids. Molly, how are you doing? I am just fantastic. And how are you doing? I am doing fairly well, fairly well. So, Molly, what can you tell us about Bohemil and the Czech community here in the Midwest? So Bohemil, like many Czech South Dakotans that arrived in the U.S., around the same time he did, many of them came to the U.S. through Weatherford, Texas, or Parker County, Texas, before traveling up to Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, where a pretty high density of Czech Americans live now. Awesome. And so with that, you know, coming from an Eastern European country, do you think he faced any adversity versus being that prominent Northern European that we saw? He might have. Luckily with, especially like Bohemil, going up to South Dakota and living in the Tabor, Tyndall area, where there was a really high density of Czech immigrants, they had the opportunity to kind of create their own community, especially in that area where our family is from. For example, the St. Wenceslas Catholic Church in Tabor was founded by Bohemian immigrants. Interesting. Which I just think the ability to have that community probably helped in the face of adversity since they were different from the Western and Northern Europeans that settled much of this area. That is interesting. And there is a community in Cedar Rapids as well, correct? There is, yes, which is kind of newer information to us because we're not from the area, but it's been really lovely to discover and kind of get back in touch with that part of our heritage, which we don't really know a whole lot about. And have you learned anything working at the Czech Museum? I've learned a lot about the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic today, a lot more about the history that maybe I didn't know before, especially kind of pre- and post-World War II, like with the Velvet Revolution, and how, honestly, a lot of Americans who have a Czech background, their family members left Czechoslovakia, usually due to some persecution, which is probably how Bohemil got here, because around the time that Czechs were fleeing the area, and a lot of Midwestern Czechs specifically were ousted because of the government, there was a lot of political persecution going on, especially towards more educated Czechs. Interesting. Interesting. Do you think him being Catholic had anything to do with his leaving? It could have, yeah. Do you think he faced any adversity here, being in a Protestant nation, coming as a Catholic? Like I said before, yeah. He may have faced some difficulties that he might not have faced if he weren't Catholic, but he was very fortunate to have that community. Yes, because the area in South Dakota is very Czech-dense, correct? It is, yeah. Like you said, that community was able to build its own little area almost. Awesome. Do you have any other knowledge of Bohemil and his family? Not off the top of my head, no. All right, well, bada-bing, bada-boom, that was Molly Lis. And she is very knowledgeable, like I said. She volunteers at the old Czech Museum. And I want to thank all of my listeners, Laurel, for listening in today on my podcast, and I hope you enjoyed learning about it. Have a good day. Goodbye.
