Stephen Sisa : The Spirit of Hungary

That Day in November...

According to one view:

"It was a dreary November morning in Budapest in 1919. That morning, anyone who thought about Hungary's fate would probably have' shuddered with despair.

"Hungary and her allies had lost the Great War. The very frame and foundation of old, historical Hungary was shattered by the social revolution which at first disguised itself as social democracy, but soon turned out to be Communism. Hungary was proclaimed a Soviet State. For months the nation had lived under the ghastly rule of the lowest of the mob. It was a time when peaceable village priests were dragged to the gallows, and civil servants were shot in the streets and thrown into the Danube.

"Afterwards, the country was occupied by the Rumanians; their patrols marauded the streets of Budapest. By that time it was impossible to get flour, bread, lard or fuel. The postal,. telegraphic and telephone services were shockingly bad, goods traffic had ceased. Women stood in lines in front of the bakeries weeping. Families shivered in the unused freight cars at the railway stations; these people were former civil servants from Transylvania, Upper Hungary, and the South, who had fled before the Rumanian, Czech and Yugoslav invaders. The number of these fugitives was by that time up to about 40,000, a number that would later swell to 200,000. The man in the street looked about in bewilderment, seeing his thousand year-old country slip from under his feet; nobody commanded and nobody obeyed.

"On that November morning, the citizen was stopped by a poster which announced that the national army would that day enter the capital. This declaration was signed by a former Austro-Hungarian admiral, Miklós Horthy. Many people had never heard the name before. Above the signature was the following sentence: 'My troops observe and maintain order everywhere.' 'My troops?' A Hungarian army? Where had the admiral found such a thing? The Rumanians, who had left the city only on the previous day, had kept every kind of news from the people. Nobody in Budapest knew that in far-off Szeged, under the orderly conditions insured by the military representatives of the Allied Powers and undisturbed by the Rumanians, this admiral had been able to organize an army from the relics of the troops. And that morning, at half past eight, the little troop actually marched into the city to the great surprise of its citizens. It was an independent army in a Hungary free from Austria for the first time in many centuries.

"At the head of that army, which sprang up from nowhere as if by magic, rode the admiral who had signed the poster. News of him spread about the city like lightning. By the end of the day everyone knew at least the outlines of his life. He came from an old gentry family, and had been in the Navy. Afterwards he had been Emperor-King Franz Joseph's favorite aide-de-camp. During the war he was released from active service at his own request to later become one of the younger admirals and the commander of the Austro-Hungarian fleet. At the end of the war, he had retired to his family estate in the country at Kenderes. But when the time to act had come he appeared in Szeged and organized the defeated country's new 'national army,' numbering a few thousand men. He had come to Budapest to restore order and he seemed powerful enough to do so.

"For the time being, he was called commander-in-chief and within a few weeks, he restored law and order in the capital. Shortly thereafter, the parliament decided that Hungary should remain a kingdom, but in the absence of a king, Horthy was elected head of state, and received the title of Regent." (Zsolt Harsányi in the Hungarian Quarterly, No. 1, 1937.)

"A Raid on the Reds"

Much to the consternation of the terror regime of Béla Kun, the money needed to equip Horthy's national army in Szeged had been provided - involuntarily - from the vast funds the Reds kept in the Hungarian Embassy in Vienna.

On May 2, 1919, the Hungarian Legation had been raided by anti-Communist Magyar officers. There they found 135 million Hungarian crowns, 98,000 Swiss francs and 330,000 French francs, which were destined to support foreign revolutionary movements. The larger part of the amount reached the Szeged counter-revolutionary government in early June.

Horthy recalled in his memoirs: "Couriers from Vienna brought us money, appropriated from the Communist Hungarian Legation in a bold coup de main by a group of Hungarian officers under the blind eye of the friendly Viennese Chief of Police. and with the aid of the Vienna correspondent of the Daily Telegraph."

Independence with Drawbacks

True, Hungary was fully independent now but at what price and in what a paradoxical situation. Although the country remained a kingdom, she had no king, since Charles IV had resigned in 1918 and was living in exile. (In the coming years. Charles made two feeble attempts to return, but both times was turned back by Horthy's forces.) Hungary also finally had a "national army,'' but the terms of the Treaty of Trianon limited its strength to 35,000 troops, as opposed to the combined forces of 542,000 maintained by the successor states ringing Hungary. Even this "mini-army" was forbidden to have heavy weapons, tanks and airplanes.

While Hungarians in Hungary no longer had to struggle with the nationalities over language problems, millions of their brethren who had become minorities themselves, were now being deprived of their human rights in the neighboring states.

The most urgent problem Horthy and his associates faced was to extricate Hungary from under the economic ruins caused by war, Marxist terror and chaos, Rumanian plundering and by the Treaty of Trianon itself. With Hungary's economic unity destroyed, this seemed to be an almost superhuman task. Besides her enormous losses in territory and population, Hungary had also lost 62.2% of its railways and 64.5% of its roads as the new frontiers cut across valleys, waterways, roads and railway lines. The country also lost most of its timber, coal, iron ore, water power and all of its salt, gold and silver mines. With the loss of Fiume she was cut off from the sea and her 134 merchant vessels were taken over by her enemies.

Despite the terrible pressures exerted by short - and long - range problems, Hungary still performed an act of assistance which was nothing short of remarkable. When in 1920 the Poles were fighting the Russian Bolshevik army and called for help, it was Hungary - mutilated and economically ruined - that alone lent Poland a helping hand. Horthy's government was ready to send Poland all the military forces and supplies it could muster via the shortest route - through Czechoslovakia. Benes, however, categori-

cally refused to allow the Hungarian troops' passage through Czechoslovakia and held up the shipment of war supplies at Kassa (presently Kosice). The troops and supplies were subsequently diverted through Rumania and reached the Polish forces just in time to help them decisively defeat the Bolsheviks at the Visztula River.

Hungary, the "Unforgiven"

This gesture may have been popular among Poles and Hungarians, but whether it helped Hungary's image in the West was another matter. The thousands of former Bolsheviks and Marxists who had fled Hungary after the collapse of the Red terror regime of Béla Kun had camouflaged themselves as social reformers and were now engaged in anti-Hungarian propaganda. This propaganda was amplified in reaction to a year-long anti-Communist crackdown that involved illegal executions carried out by roving detachments. As it happened, a great percentage of the victims were Jews due to their participation - real or alleged - in the Bolshevik dictatorship. This period of the so called "White Terror" turned out to be a self-administered blow to Hungary's reputation in general and to Horthy's regime in particular. In this respect, however, a note of qualification seems to be in order: While both the Red Terror and the White Terror had claimed many innocent victims, the crimes' of the Red Terror found little publicity in newspapers and history books abroad. The White Terror, on the other hand, was internationally condemned. Hungary's exceptionally liberal attitude toward the Jews, who for many decades considered this country as the "Magyar Israel," was simply overlooked and the Magyars have remained "unforgiven."

As a result, Hungary became the victim of a double standard, its reputation suffering a lasting damage. As a consequence, the Horthy regime was often branded a "fascist," "semi-fascist" and anti-Semitic dictatorship. It was neither. It was a semi-feudal regime.

Much of the widespread unfavorable press about the Horthy era can be attributed to the regime's preoccupation with "solving the Jewish problem." To non-Magyar readers, especially Americans, this smacks of anti-Semitism. In reality, it was the result of enormous social pressure. Professor Oscar Jászi, a renowned Jewish professor, who bitterly opposed Horthy, offered this explanation:

The Hungarian Jews played a leading part... in every economic and intellectual movement, and also in spheres which had been closed to them for centuries. They had begun, for instance, to take leading places in agriculture as great landowners and directors of large-scale agricultural enterprises, and similarly in the press, in politics, in art, literature, and in every walk of life, so that it might have been supposed that 90 percent of the population was Jewish, instead of a tiny minority...

Both economically and morally it was a very unhealthy situation... (Jászi: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary, Howard Fertig. N.Y. 1969. pp. 123-124 and 189)

Another authority, Professor C.A. Macartney, wrote:

The infiltration of the Jewish element into Hungarian society was in reality one of the most important legacies bequeathed by the Compromise Era to that of Horthy...

According to the 1920 census, among the self employed persons engaged in commerce, 53% were Jewish; of those in finance, 80%; of the advocates, 50.6%; of doctors in private practice, 59,9%. Of the salaried employees in industry, 39.1% were Jewish; in commerce, 48.2%; in finance, 43.7%. Among persons renting landed properties of over 1000 holds,. 53.7% were Jewish. (C.A. Macartney: October Fifteenth, Vol. I. p. 19. Edinburgh University Press.)

Lopsided as these proportions were in 1920, in the following decades they became even more so, resulting in an "intellectual invasion" of the job market with which Hungarian society simply could not cope. Non-Jewish graduates might have been a match intellectually for their Jewish compatriots, but not in dynamism, resourcefulness - and in their international connections. While the Jewish graduates usually managed to find decent jobs, tens of thousands of their gentile counterparts found themselves out in the cold - literally - shoveling snow in winter and doing odd jobs in the warmer months, if they could find any. These jobless youths increased the membership of the ADOB, an organization of unemployed degree holders, who resented their plight. Seeing themselves outclassed by a minority, many became anti-Semitic.

A quota system called numerus clausus introduced to limit the number of Jewish students at Hungarian universities, brought loud. condemning cries from abroad. Looking back on this period, however, Péter Meyer a well-known Jewish author wrote:

"...all that remained of the original anti-Jewish program of the Horthy regime was the policy of keeping Jews out of public service, and a second and more discreet version of the educational numerus clausus law. In practice, however there was unlimited admission of Jewish students to the three provincial universities: only in the case of Budapest's university and polytechnicum was the law rigidly enforced. Poor Jewish students who failed to obtain admittance to Hungarian universities were sent to study abroad by a special Jewish fund established for

this purpose by Dr. Simon Hevesi, chief rabbi of Budapest... Hungarian Jewry was able, almost miraculously. to preserve its economic substance and social position until the downfall of neighboring Austria in the crucial year of 1938." (The Jews in the Soviet Satellites, Syracuse University Press, 1953, pp. .379-385)

When the years of vengeful retribution were over and law restored, Hungarian society remained much the same as it had been before and during the war. The big landowner aristocrats, although diminished in numbers and political influence, retained their huge estates, while the gentry, although impoverished, continued to dominate in the civil service and in the army. The military now had a completely Hungarian character - but was without arms. Jews continued to control commerce and industry, and still owned many estates. But industrial workers were reeling under the after-effects of the bloody fiasco of Béla Kun's "dictatorship of the proletariat," and peasants continued to be the most neglected segment of the population,. especially the truly poor landless masses.

A Gentleman with Political Shortcomings

Horthy, who had burst onto the Hungarian scene from a glamorous past to lead his country to law and order, was an upright person, "a gentlemen's gentleman," who selected his appointees exclusively from the "gentry" class. The father of two sons, he led an impeccable family life, and during his rule made no attempt to enrich himself at the public's expense. Devoted to sports since his early days, he was no intellectual and knew little of literature and history. However he had healthy common sense in political matters.

Horthy's opinions about Hungary's neighbors varied. The Slovaks were sympathetic but misguided little brothers; the Croats were "a decent people and good sailors;" and the manly Serbs were first-rate. On the other hand. he disdained the "born turn-coats," the Rumanians, whom he regarded as "pimps and cocottes." (It was common knowledge that Rumanian Army officers wore girdles and used cosmetics.) Horthy further regarded Bolsheviks as a power of evil and the Socialists as dupes of Marxism.

According to Nicholas Roosevelt, a former American Ambassador to Hungary, Horthy "was a

conservator rather than a conservative, a traditionalist rather than a fascist, a practical man rather than an idealist. Men might disagree with him, but even his enemies respected him. They might question his judgement, but none questioned his integrity and uprightness.

Horthy's gravest political shortcomings stemmed from his background. His happy and prosperous youth and later his glamorous profession - first as aide-de-camp to King-Emperor Franz Joseph, then as commander-in-chief of the monarchy's fleet - prevented him from understanding the poverty and social backwardness of his people. Thus, the crying necessity for radical land reform never penetrated his conscience.

Horthy ruled a kingless kingdom with many prerogatives of a king. It is to his credit that he allowed the development of a multi-party system in which the government (but not his own person) could be attacked by the opposition. The press enjoyed wide-ranging freedom without censorship in peacetime.

Still, Horthy's Hungary was never a true democracy because the strength of the opposition was controlled by an open franchise, which intimidated the voters through administrative and police pressure, and excluded poor people from the election process through a very restrictive voting law. Nationwide secret balloting was to be introduced only in 1939, on a restricted basis. As a result of these practices, the governing party was always able to win elections by comfortable margins.

Economic Reconstruction and Political Stabilization

In 1920 Horthy appointed as premier Count István Bethlen, a haughty Transylvanian aristocrat, and put him in charge of reconstructing Hungary. Although intellectually superior to the regent, Bethlen shared Horthy's insensitivity to social problems and his aversion to radical land reform. Neither man would admit workers into a governing partnership.

A master politician and brilliant statesman, Bethlen began by putting first things first: He applied for membership in the League of Nations. As a member, Hungary was able to obtain a reconstruction loan of fifty million dollars, which helped put an end to the rampant inflation that had depressed the Hungarian korona, to 1/19,500th of its original value. A new currency, the pen g, was also introduced. After this monetary reform, foreign money started pouring into the country.

Next to economic reconstruction, Bethlen's other main objective was political consolidation. This he achieved with a two-pronged master-stroke: Even before assuming his post, Bethlen successfully persuaded the leader of the Smallholders, István Szabó Nagyatádi, to enter the Smallholders into an alliance with the Christian Nationals. This alliance would then work as a unified government party. As a reward for this merger, Count Bethlen promised the Smallholders phased land reform. Szabó, an unsophisticated peasant, accepted Bethlen's warning that a radical land reform would create social and economic upheaval and should be postponed in the best interest of the country. No match for the Count, and being a patriot, he swallowed this reasoning hook, line and sinker. Appointed Minister of Agriculture, Szabó unwittingly became a tool in Bethlen's cabinet. A victim of his own good faith and Bethlen's trickery, Szabó died in 1924, a broken and disillusioned man. Of the promised multi-stage land reform only the first installment was carried out, but by then the Smallholders were in the premiers pocket.

Bethlen's second master-stroke was to secure labor peace through a "'secret" pact with the Social Democrats. He succeeded in satisfying labor leaders by giving them enough latitude to operate in the cities and in urban councils - but not in the villages where the poorest of the poor lived. These and other concessions, mostly social, created a quiet, productive atmosphere on the labor front. In the following years, gradual improvements in working and living conditions brought Hungarian workers up to the level of their Central European counterparts.

However the industrial labor forces, and even more the agrarian masses, still lacked adequate political influence. The restrictive voting system nearly petrified the political subjugation of these groups, especially the dispossessed agrarian classes.

To be sure, Horthy did create a class of new landowners by establishing the so-called Vitézi Rend (a military order of merit), but this gesture was more symbolic than efficient. Under the Rend, Magyars who had displayed great military bravery and were of unblemished character, became entitled to a "hero's estate of approximately 16 holds (1 hold being 1.42 acres or 0.57 hectares), including a house, a stable, two horses and a cow, with the estate and title inheritable by the eldest son. A total of about 3000 of these titles were bestowed amidst great fanfare. The regent himself inducted the new members into the Rend in an elaborate ceremony during which he placed his sword on the shoulder of each recipient who knelt before him. From then on, each honoree was entitled to use the title vitéz before his family name.

Another modest reform, born from the Bethlen-Szabó pact, distributed 495,000 holds to 298,000 landless people, who each received an average of 1.6 holds. This was, however only a social band-aid applied to a malady which really needed major surgery. The distribution had little practical effect in most cases, since the landlords from whom the land

was taken usually parted with their worst land. These lands were of little use to the poor recipients who lacked the proper equipment and live stock to cultivate the soil.

By 1935, estates of 100 holds or more still comprised 48.1% of the total, and estates of over 1,000 holds, 29.9%. Thus, nearly one-third of the total cultivable land was owned by 0.1% of the population.

A "Spiritual Revolution"

These lopsided conditions led to a "spiritual revolution" that drew on the well-springs of the Magyars' cultural heritage. Among those who contributed to this revolution were Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, who created a "new style" of Hungarian music based on almost forgotten folk melodies; Endre Ady, whose visionary poems made him the greatest Hungarian poet of this century; Zsigmond Móricz and Dezs Szabó, outstanding novelists of the era; and Ottokár Prohászka, a Catholic Bishop, who advocated "Christian socialism."

Such voices professed that the nation's basic strength lay in the peasantry, the most valuable and still most neglected segment of society. Society could not be reborn, they said, without ending the impoverishment of the villages through radical land reform.

The backbone of this "revolution" was a populist movement whose main weapon was populist literature (népi irodalom). The most prominent proponents of this trend were the falukutatók (village explorers). Writers belonging to this group were almost exclusively of peasant origin. Their works often featured such dramatic titles as Cifra nyomoruság (Fancy Misery) by Zoltán Szabó; Az elsodort falu (A Village Swept Away) by Dezs Szabó; Futóhomok (Shifting Sand) by Ferenc Erdei; Néma forradalom (Mute Revolution) by Imre Kovács; and Viharsarok (Stormy Corner) by Géza Féja.

A detailed description of the falukutató writers is contained in the chapter on Modern Hungarian Literature. All rang the bells of alarm over the misery or the Hungarian agrarian proletariat, the "three million beggars." (Három millió koldus)

Interestingly, this dramatic, though overblown, phrase was coined by one who stood separate from the falukutatók: György Oláh, a highly talented journalist of a philosophical bent, and a distant descendant of Lajos Kossuth.

In his book titled Három millió koldus Oláh focused attention on the fundamental illness of Hungarian society: the distress of the peasantry. The Wesselényi Circle, an organization which had been founded earlier by Oláh to fight this condition, was banned by the government. Although Oláh, an ardent nationalist, later strayed to the extreme right, the three words of his book's title were to become a biting political slogan used against the regime by the entire opposition, including the Marxists.

The spiritual godfather of the falukutatók was Dezs Szabó, whose main work, As elsodort falu (A Village Swept Away), published in 1919, hit Hungarian society like a literary bombshell and remained a bestseller for decades. (During World War II Szabó shifted his activity to warn about the dangers of the growing Nazi influence in Hungary, and drafted a program for a modern Hungarian democracy.)

The greatest falukutató of all was Gyula Illyés, whose best known work, Puszták népe (People of the Puszta) drew a brutally accurate portrayal of the misery of agrarian laborers. The book was a shocking indictment of the feudal system. Illyés regarded himself as Hungary's national conscience to his dying day.

It must be noted that while the falukutatók were populists, not all populists were falukutatók. Some populists took part in the spiritual "revolution" on a higher, broader and more enduring level, focusing their sights on the fate of the Hungarian nation as a whole.

The foremost representative of this group was László Németh, an exceptionally cultured visionary, who searched for a new Hungarian road, a third way between capitalism and socialism. Németh advocated a remodeling of the country through a "revolution of quality" into a "Garden Hungary." The central figures in his literary works dealing with peasants depict not only Hungarian but human fate on a universal level. (See also the chapter on Modern Hungarian Literature.)

The fermentation within Hungarian society was not restricted to literature. In fact, the populists' efforts were surpassed by far in scope and importance by a cluster of nationwide organizations that had sprung up one after the other to work for national revival. While populist activists numbered but a few hundred at best, these mass organizations attracted hundreds of thousands of Hungarian youth. The groups included the KALOT, an organization of Catholic Peasant Youth; the Soli Dea Gloria (SDG), a Protestant Youth Organization; the Prohászka Community; the Pál Teleki Community; the Peasant Alliance (Parasztszövetség), and the Rovers (for older scouts). All worked on various levels of society to push for reforms. Some performed works of charity; others promoted the education of peasants and workers; still others, notably the Green Cross movement, devoted themselves to health care in the villages. Even a college (Bólyai Kollégium) which specialized in providing higher education for gifted peasant youth was founded.

One man who exerted a profound influence upon

the youth in these organizations was Sándor Sik. A poet, priest and teacher of the Piarist Order, he was also one of the founders of the Hungarian Scout Movement. His motto, Emberebb ember és magyarabb magyar ("A more humane man, a more Magyar Magyar"). is still used by Hungarian Scouts. Sik defined his own place in Horthy's Hungary thus: "This world is not mine. I am a revolutionary in the sacred sense of the word."

It was in the early 1920's that Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, a member of an impoverished gentry family, started his political career. Known as a fire-brand, he first joined MOVE, a far right organization with anti-Semitic tendencies. Under the influence of his friend Dezs Szabó, however, Bajcsy gradually became a protagonist of radical land reform, advocating the transformation of Hungary into a true democracy. Bajcsy attributed to the peasantry a mythical force which could revitalize the nation with its biological reserves. Bajcsy, as a member of Parliament, stood in sharp opposition to Nazism. He was to become the leader of the resistance movement during World War II, and president of the illegal Committee of Liberation founded after the Nazi takeover in Hungary in 1944. Bajcsy paid for this with his life.

A Neo-baroque Society

Such interwar developments were being carefully - and critically - observed by Gyula Szekfü, the country's most prominent historian. Nowhere did Szekfü criticize the Horthy era more sharply than in his book Három nemzedék és ami utána következik (Three Generations and What Comes After). Szekfü derided interwar Hungary as a "neo-baroque society," alluding to the many neo-baroque public buildings erected by the regime, and to the Hungarian dignitaries with their ladies. They wore ceremonial garments that recalled the pomp and over-embellishments of the baroque era - this at a time when village children going to school barefoot were a common sight. The era also witnessed a mania for titles, with families of the gentry zealously adding predicates of nobility to their names. Addressing people according to their rank on the social ladder with distinctive titles became obligatory.

Szekfü pointed out that this neo-baroque system was instrumental in disenchanting young people with the semi-feudal, reactionary regime. It was their desire for change that gradually brought about the "spiritual revolution," a revolution that would certainly have transformed Hungarian society into a true democracy had not World War II intervened.

Positive Achievements

But there was also a brighter side of the coin.

Despite the crippling economic losses caused by Trianon, Horthy's governments succeeded in consolidating the country's economy to a remarkable degree.

Starting with 2127 industrial enterprises in 1920, Horthy's Hungary registered 427! industrial undertakings by 1939,

The number of industrial workers, just 173,000 in 1919, increased to 430,000 by 1939. Reconstruction was gravely hampered by a lack of rail units. The Rumanian occupation army had commandeered 37,160 railroad units, leaving behind only 27,930 units, including only 410 locomotives. It took twenty years and heroic efforts to rebuild the nation's rolling stock to 51,963 units, including 1750 locomotives.

Freight traffic on the Danube had never amounted to much. In 1928 it was a mere 91,000 tons. But that was before the freeport of Csepel at Budapest was opened. This produced a dramatic turnaround. By 1938 the tonnage had skyrocketed to 938,000 tons, and Budapest had replaced Vienna as the hub of traffic on the Danube. Meanwhile, Hungarian engineering ingenuity revolutionized water transportation. Ocean-going vessels now could navigate the Danube, thus turning Budapest into an internationally registered seaport. These ships helped the import-export trade tremendously. Unfortunately, after World War II, such advances also allowed hundreds of cargo vessels to ply a route between Hungary and the Soviet Union, helping the latter to fleece Hungary under the disguise of "socialist trade."

Hungary's industry, insignificant before World War I, also made giant strides. Hungarian rail motor cars were introduced to South America; tractors were exported to the Balkan countries, Egypt and the Near East; the famous Kandó locomotives appeared in countries worldwide, including Manchuria and China, and the Hungarian chemical industry became competitive with its world-famous German counterpart. The country's textile industry also exported its large surplus to the Balkans, another feat in Hungary's remarkable economic ascent.

The Horthy era saw social achievements as well.

As early as 1927, Act XXI established obligatory health and accident insurance for a large segment of the population by founding the National Health Insurance Institute (OTI).

Another law the following year introduced insurance for the aged, the handicapped, widows and orphans.

In 1937 Parliament began regulating minimum wages, maximum working hours and paid vacations in industry - ahead of many countries in the West. In the next year another act introduced the family allowance system for industrial workers, a benefit which is still being sought by trade unions in many countries.

In Horthy's Hungary workers' satisfaction became

so remarkable that during World War II they kept producing without acts of sabotage, even when the thunder of big Soviet guns could be clearly heard in the distance. (Conversely. in 1956, the industrial workers in Csepel were among the first groups to rebel against Soviet occupation and exploitation.)

Social benefits for the villages were slower to come, despite the widening clamor of the falukutatók. Nevertheless, a countrywide network of village cooperatives called Hangya (Ant) had been developed to help the peasants sell their products, while the Zöld Kereszt (Green Cross) organization did much to improve their health care. A building cooperative helped build homes for 41,854 families until the year 1938. It was only in 1939, however that old age insurance was introduced for agricultural workers; another measure which granted modest social security for widows of agricultural workers followed.

On the cultural level, the greatest accomplishment of the Horthy regime was the building of 5217 schools under the stewardship of Kuno Klebelsberg, Minister of Culture. These helped reduce illiteracy to four percent within two decades. The quality of Hungarian education was excellent, and at its higher level produced a multitude of engineers, scientists, and scholars, many of whom received international recognition. Literature, practically free from censorship, flourished, along with the performing and fine arts. The era saw the flowering of some of the giants of Hungarian literature.

Last but not least, the practice of religion, Christian and Jewish alike, was encouraged and this helped establish high moral standards despite widespread material poverty. Since the crime rate was very low, public safety was exemplary. Corruption and subornation were practically unknown in Horthy's Hungary.

Considering these achievements and the spiritual fermentation which went along with them, Hungary under Horthy's rule made giant strides, indeed, to recuperate from the devastating conditions caused by its mutilation under Trianon The country was regaining her place in the sun, while incessantly clamoring for peaceful revision of the Trianon Treaty.

Hungarian Minorities in the Successor States

While Hungary struggled with domestic problems, she also had to watch out for the fate of about 3.5 million Magyars who now were living as minorities in the successor states. In 1920, these states formed an alliance called the Little Entente, whose main purpose was to keep the Hungarians down, something they were already doing with the Magyar minorities within their own borders in violation of the Minority Treaty they had signed.

An anecdote from that time recounts how once in Geneva, during the thirties, the foreign ministers of Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia met behind closed doors at the League of Nations to discuss a diplomatic move against their common adversary, Hungary. Their conference bogged down because none of the foreign ministers seemed to know a language the other could understand. The impasse was ended when Milan Hodza, a Slovak and the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, asked his colleagues: "Why don't we hold this conference in Hungarian?"

No sooner said than done. Hungarian was the only foreign language each of them spoke fluently because they used to be Hungarians before the Treaty or Trianon made them a Czechoslovak, a Rumanian and a Yugoslav. respectively.

The Minority Treaty protected the cultural, linguistic and religious liberties of the national minorities, and the League of Nations was entrusted with supervising the observance of these obligations. Such protection, however turned out to be illusory. While Magyar nationalism had mellowed considerably through long experience with minorities, the newly created nations had just reached the peak of nationalist fever and intolerance.

Still, there was a difference in degree and style in their treatment of Magyar minorities.

Among the successor states Czechoslovakia was the one that behaved in the most civilized and democratic manner, though its discrimination, while subtle, was nevertheless efficient. This discrimination against the approximately one million Magyars in a nation which also included 3.5 million Sudeten Germans, 2.5 million Slovaks, 400,000 Ruthenians and l00.000 Poles was instituted mainly by the Czechs, who constituted about fifty percent of the population and were the real masters of the land.

The Czechs began their rule with a wide-ranging land reform, under which large estates were taken from their owners and redistributed among the landless peasants. The vast majority of the persons affected were Magyars and Magyarone (Hungarophile) Jews, whose estimated losses equalled approximately 3500 million Czech krones. Poor Hungarian peasants. however, were not excluded from the benefits of the land reform

In other respects, the Czech systematically built up the education of other nationality groups at the expense of the Magyars. No fewer than 1456 Magyar elementary schools, out of a total 2223, had been converted to other language institutions by the end of 1924.

The gerrymandering of judicial, electoral and school districts to the disadvantage of the Magyars also became a widespread practice. As Prof.

Macartney describes in Hungary and Her Successors:

Czechoslovakia's policy, like that of her allies, is one of national imperialism, which is even more successful than the more violent methods fashionable elsewhere, because its discretion and subtlety disguise the pertinacious and implacable nature of its pressure. For the same Austrian schooling which taught the Czechs mildness in method trained them also in an iron purposefulness and an unrivalled ingenuity in achieving their ends. The Czechs do not storm the gate: they seep under the walls, slowly but surely undermining the political, social, and economic strength of their adversaries..,

Rumania

While the Czechs practiced their discrimination against the Magyars subtly, the Rumanians made little pretense of treating their minorities fairly, especially when it came to the Magyars and the Jews.

As a report issued by the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress in New York pointed out:

Anti-Jewish discrimination was a long-standing policy in Rumania. As examples of this policy may be mentioned the 1924 citizenship law which rendered thousands of Jewish families stateless; the Bratianu decrees on retail store licenses, private school regulations, the law on high school examinations - measures which deprived Jews and their children of bread and education, respectively. Student-staged riots and pogroms in 1926 were the forerunners of bloody massacres in the years following 1940, just as the 1934 Law for the Protection of National Labor was the prototype of later Nazi schemes for the elimination of many Jews from economic positions...

The mentality of the Rumanian leaders toward the Magyars was revealed in a statement by Ion Bratianu to Dudley Heathcote, a reporter for the Saturday Review in 1937:

I can assure you that, if you return to Kolozsvár (presently Cluj) or Nagyvárad (presently Oradea) on a visit in ten years time, you will not find the Hungarian minorities who are living there today.

Thanks to Magyar tenaciousness, this prediction did not come true, though its spirit had already been manifested in 1920 when about 200,000 Magyars, mostly civil servants and teachers, were expelled from Rumania and sent to Hungary. This was followed by a special land reform aimed against Hungarians in which a total of 2,718,146 acres of land was taken from them and given to Rumanians. Totally landless Magyar peasants, however, as in the case of Czechoslovakia, benefited from the land reform in a minor way. Discrimination against Hungarians (and Jews) was practiced in many other forms: Magyar shopkeepers and professionals had to pay extra taxes for displaying non-Rumanian business signs and had to pay a 12% surtax if they kept their books in any language other than Rumanian. The introduction of the so-called Numerus Vallachicus provided that Rumanians were to be employed in minority regions according to their percentage in the whole country. Thus even purely Magyar localities were obliged to hire Rumanians in order to fulfill their "quota."

The discrimination practiced in the field of education was so severe that it amounted to repression. In 1913, under Hungarian rule, there were 5052 elementary schools in Transylvania. among them 2482 Hungarian, 2230 Rumanian, 282 Saxon and 58 other schools. In 1931, under Rumanian domination, the number of Rumanian schools had increased to 3978 while the number or Hungarian schools dropped to a mere 795.

In the field of political administration, the following facts speak for themselves:

In the Magyar-Jewish city of Arad,. the city council was composed of eight Rumanians, two Magyars, and one Jew, the mayor being a Rumanian. Marosvásárhely (Tirgu Mures), which was (and still is) 75% Magyar had only two Magyars against six Rumanians; in the County of Háromszék, 87.6% Magyar, five Rumanians and no Magyars were appointed. (Hungary and Her Successors)

As bad as the situation had been, it worsened with the advent of the Iron Guard, an ultra-racist Rumanian political movement under the leadership of Codreanu and Horia Sima. The series of anti-Magyar and anti-Semitic acts of violence the Iron Guard perpetrated have darkened the name of Rumania. The worst of these were at Nagyvárad (Oradea), Kolozsvár (Cluj) and Medgyes (Medias) and certain other towns in 1928. A full description of these is given in La situation de la minorité juive en Roumanie, presented to the League of Nations by various Jewish associations in March, 1928.

Under such conditions, the Jews sentimentally clung to memories of the Magyar era:

The older generation of the Magyarized Jews in Cluj, Oradea and Arad still clings to the memory of Hungary with remarkable loyalty... Several of them spoke to me touchingly regarding their kindly treatment by Hungary in the past, and the unbreakable spiritual bond which still unites them to the fatherland...

More than one Rumanian has told me that he can reach a sensible understanding with the local Magyars when they are represented by their own men, but he simply cannot deal with the limitless ingenuity and exaggerated patriotism of the Magyarized Jews. (Hungary and Her Successors).

On the positive side, Rumania displayed a rather

liberal attitude toward Magyar literature and cultural life. The newly founded Helikon, a literary society, became the rallying point of the Magyar cultural movement in Transylvania. Allowing these facets of the Hungarian spirit to flourish, the Rumanians gave Transylvanian writers the chance to produce some of the major works of Hungarian literature between the two wars.

Compared to Czech subtleness and Rumanian aggressiveness in holding the Magyars down, Yugoslavia's attitude toward her non-Serb minorities was simple and unequivocal: ruthless suppression. In local and central government, Serbian was the only official language, and practically all minorities were excluded from official careers. The minorities were given no chance for a cultural life of their own. Sometimes even Magyar reading circles were ordered to conduct their meetings in the Serb language. Magyar landless peasants in Yugoslavia were excluded from the benefits of land reform.

"No, No, Never!"

Such policies were bound to stimulate a revisionist movement in Hungary, that is, efforts to regain by peaceful means the territory that formerly belonged to the Magyars. Ferenc Deák, the Sage of Hungary, once compared the Magyars' determination to an egg: the longer you boil it the harder it gets. Indeed, as the 3.5 million Magyars living in the successor states grew more and more tenacious in clinging to their heritage, their motherland's efforts on their behalf also intensified. Besides sending innumerable protests to the League of Nations about the treatment of Magyar nationalities, Hungary also launched a movement for the revision of the Treaty of Trianon - a movement so widely supported that it engulfed all of Hungary's social classes. Their united clamor for the revision gave birth to the famous motto: Nem, nem, soha! ("No, no, never!"), words, that vowed the nation would never accept the dismemberment of historic Hungary as final. This creed soon became a national doctrine with an entire generation being raised in its spirit. In classrooms throughout Hungary the day typically began and ended with the common recitation of the new National Creed (Hiszekegy):

I believe in one God.

I believe in one country

I believe in a holy and eternal truth,

I believe in the resurrection of Hungary!

Amen.

Wall maps displayed in classrooms showed the boundaries of historic Hungary (Nagymagyarország) along with pictures of the "torn away territories," patriotic meetings became forums for related poems and songs, and every railroad station displayed the map of mutilated Hungary - often in the form of a bed of flowers - for all passing travelers to see, along with the words: "Nem, nem, soha!" June 4, the day the Treaty of Trianon was signed, became a day of national mourning and in Liberty Square in Budapest four statues - named North, South, East and West as symbols of the country's dismemberment in all directions - were erected after the model of the Strasbourg monument in Paris.

While all Hungarians cried out with one voice for revision of the Trianon frontiers, reactions outside Hungary were mixed. Masaryk in Czechoslovakia replied with a weak "may be," while the Rumanian reaction, especially among young pseudo-intellectuals, was often vituperative:

God help the Hungarians on that day when the Rumanians consent to revision; because they will kick up the frontiers with the points of their boots and will wipe from the face of the earth the dirt which a fly blew unto the map of Europe and which vitiates the air...

The Hungarians will get their land. not for the purpose of ruling over it but to be buried in it. (Quoted by Prof. Macartney in his Hungary arid Her Successors.)

A New Premier Enters the Scene

Italy under Mussolini was the first great power to openly support Hungary's demand for the revision of the Treaty of Trianon. This was followed by support from an unexpected quarter, Great Britain. There, it was Lord Rothermere, who in his paper The Daily Mail came out strongly for revision. However, the enthusiasm in Hungary over Rothermere's crusade, went well beyond reasonable limits, utterly overestimating Rothermere's influence on British politics. While the revisionist spirit could be kept at a high pitch even by make-believe successes, domestic enthusiasm did not translate into acceptance among governments abroad. All the more so, because Hungarian propaganda was a far cry from the sophisticated methods Benes and Masaryk had used.

In the meantime, important changes in Hungarian leadership occurred. Bethlen, who resigned in 1931, was succeeded by a more colorful but less able man, Gyula Gömbös, a former radical officer and one of Horthy's old cronies.

An ex-captain of the Austro-Hungarian army, Gömbös had been the leader of MOVE and other ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic organizations from 1920 to 1928, the year he became minister of defense. A man of high ambition not matched by talent, he dreamed of becoming a Mussolini-like dictator - a role suitable for an iron-fisted man, which Gömbös certainly was not. Gömbös openly courted the little man, declaring. "What matters is not where a man comes from, but where he is going." Conversely, he disliked the aristocrats and the Habsburgs.

Gömbös' ambitions, however, where thwarted by Horthy, who before appointing his premier, stipulated that he could introduce neither radical land reform nor anti-Semitic legislation. Further, he could not dissolve parliament, which held a pro-Bethlen majority.

While fuming over the restrictions imposed upon him, Gömbös managed to stir up the country's social atmosphere. This he accomplished by building up the radical right wing press which, in chorus with the falukutatók clamored ever louder for radical reforms.

A Colorful Oppositionist

During his four year premiership (1932-36), a great deal of Gömbös' energies went into a tug-of-war with the Bethlen faction, which obstructed the premier's policies. In this struggle, Gömbös found a valuable ally in Tibor Eckhardt, the leader of the Independent Smallholders Party of the opposition. Eckhardt helped him undermine Count Bethlen's position in Parliament.

In parliamentary maneuvering, the haughty Bethlen met his match in Tibor Eckhardt, one of the most colorful figures of the Horthy era. An eloquent orator in four languages - Hungarian, French, English and German - Eckhardt hid the appearance and manners of a French marquis. His intellectual brilliance and sharp tongue made him a formidable debater whose verbal duels often led to real ones with the sword. But he could also be a social charmer and was reputed to be a ladies' man.

Despite his personal assets, Eckhardt was more of a fighter than a leader since he lacked steadfastness, quiet wisdom and the talent of organizing a strong following. Upon him political fortune seldom smiled.

Like Bajcsy-Zsilinszky and Gömbös, Eckhardt had also been a prominent member of MOVE in the 1920's. Curiously, while Bajcsy was forgiven for his membership, and later even lionized by Jews and liberals, Eckhardt's similar past was to be held against him all his life, although from 1935 he had been a prominent opponent of Nazism. He also was an intransigent anti-Communist. When Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact of the Axis in 1940, Eckhardt, supported by Bethlen, Bajcsy and the Social Democrats, sharply attacked the government in the Lower House "for linking Hungary's fate to one group of belligerents, whose victory was by no means certain." (Prof. Macartney: October 15. Vol. I. p. 175).

In 1941, at President Roosevelt's invitation, Eckhardt went into exile in the United States, where he founded a Committee for an Independent Hungary to help in the struggle against Nazism. The following year however, the combined forces of the Czecho-Slovak emigration and the Hungarian-born left in New York, succeeded in scuttling his organization with Moscow's blessing.

Eckhardt was persona non grata with the Kremlin, which never allowed him to return to Hungary. He died in New York in 1972. In retrospect, Eckhardt's political career was more interesting than of lasting importance.

Hungary's Isolation is Dissolved

While Gömbös was unable to realize the grandiose "95 points" program he had announced with great fanfare when he assumed the premiership, he was instrumental in completing a breakthrough in foreign policy - begun by Bethlen - which helped dissolve Hungary's isolation.

It was he who persuaded Mussolini to support Hungarian revisionism after Bethlen had prepared the way through a treaty of friendship between Hungary and Italy in 1927; it was he who helped create a Rome-Vienna-Budapest triangle for mutual

support and who coined the ill-fated phrase "Berlin-Rome Axis" - at a time when Hitler was not yet in power.

Gömbös died in October 1936, and was succeeded by Kálmán Darányi. a rather colorless politician under whose premiership the Hungarian Right, influenced by the rise of National Socialism in Germany, began to assert itself under the leadership of Ferenc Szálasi, the founder of the Arrow Cross Party. More significant than the party was its ideological underpinning, called Hungarism. Under Hungarism the name Hungary would be changed to a commonwealth-like "Carpathian Danubian Great Fatherland" (Kárpát-Duna Nagyhaza) and the country itself expanded to include a Magyar-Land, Slovak-Land, Ruthene-Land, Croat-Land, Slavonian-Land and a Western March, with the whole under Magyar leadership. As a social doctrine, Hungarism was obscure, but it had a certain appeal to the working classes who rejected Marxism. As Prof. Macartney points out in his book, October 15, there was no pathological anti-Semitism in Szálasi, like Hitler's or Streicher's. His "final solution" for the Jews of Hungary was to let them emigrate to Palestine.

Under right wing pressure, Darányi had Parliament pass a rather mild law restricting the employment of Jews, which a few years later was followed by stricter, but still bearable measures. Darányi's successor, Béla Imrédy (1938-39), took strong steps against rightist parties, even to the point of jailing Szálasi for three years. However when he saw the weakness of the Western allies, he abandoned his pro-Western liberal position, revealed authoritarian ambitions and initiated pro-German policies.

A Visit to Hitler

By this time, Hungary's position was becoming more and more precarious. In March, 1938, Hitler annexed Austria and preparations for the break-up of Czechoslovakia were under way. In August, Hitler invited Horthy to Germany where he and his entourage were accorded a lavish reception. It included a huge naval review at Kiel, the christening by Mrs. Horthy of a new cruiser, the Prinz Eugene, magnificent entertainment aboard Hitler's favorite yacht, the Grille, and a visit to Hamburg. In his memoirs, Horthy recalls an event on the journey from Hamburg to Berlin:

Hitler repeated the maneuver he had employed on the occasion of Mussolini's visit; He saw us off at the railway station in Hamburg, and, by some clever shunting, contrived to reach Berlin some three minutes before our train drew in, so that there he was on the platform,. welcoming us on our arrival...

The military parade in Horthy's honor was the largest ever held,. involving endless columns of troops, tanks, armored cars and motorized artillery. If Hitler wanted to impress his guests with all these grandiose spectacles, he succeeded, indeed.

Only in one matter did Hitler fail to impress Horthy and his ministers: They would not accede to the Führer's plan for Hungary's armed participation in the breakup of Czechoslovakia. "If you want to share the meal, you'll have to help to cook it," was the refrain Hitler's associates repeated to his guests. As much as they wanted their territories back from

Czechoslovakia, they would have them only through peaceful means. It was from that point on that Hitler began to look with disfavor at the Magyars in general, and Horthy in particular. The practical Regent already suspected that sooner or later Germany would be engulfed in war and eventually be defeated by sea powers.

Stephen Sisa : The Spirit of Hungary