Original "Pittsburgh Agreement" of 1918 Presented to Slovak Public in New Exhibit

Texts of Exhibit

Panel 1

During the First World War, representatives of expatriate organisations in the U.S. contemplated future arrangement of the relations between Czechs and Slovaks in their new joint state. In order to reinforce co-operation with the insurgent movement, they decided to declare their intentions for the future in a written agreement. The first such agreement was concluded on 22 and 23 October 1915 in Cleveland between representatives of the Slovak League and the Czech National Association, the leading organisations of Slovaks and Czechs in the United States. The agreement set the objective of reaching independence for the Czech Lands and Slovakia in a joint state with a federal arrangement and full national autonomy of Slovakia, i.e. with its own assembly, political, financial and cultural administration and Slovak as an official language.

Panel 2

In the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of people, including more than half a million of Slovaks, emigrated to work in the United States. In America, Slovaks were able to find jobs, improve their financial situation and help their families back home. They were able to organise freely in various organisations, publish magazines in Slovak and support the national movement in their homeland. After the outbreak of the First World War, the organisations of Slovaks and Czechs in America as well as in other countries, such as Russia, realised that the conflagration of a world war provides an opportunity for achieving national independence if the German Reich and Austria-Hungary are defeated. At the same time, they realised that the best way to assure national independence was a joint Czech and Slovak state. They supported the achievement of independence for their old homeland by raising funds to assist the Czecho-Slovak resistance movement. After the United States joined the war, thousands of expatriates signed up to the American army and, following the recruitment campaign of then Major M. R. Štefánik, many others signed up to Czechoslovak Legions to fight for the liberation of the Czech Lands and Slovakia by the side of the Allied armies.

Panel 3

On 31 May 1918, representatives of the Slovak League of America, the Czech National Association and the Union of Czech Catholics signed an agreement in Pittsburgh with T. G. Masaryk, a respected leader of the resistance. The agreement confirms that “Slovakia shall have its own administration, its own assembly and its own courts. Slovak shall be the official language in schools, in public offices and in public life in general.” According to the last sentence, detailed regulations concerning the establishment of the Czecho-Slovak state were left to the liberated Czechs and Slovaks and their legitimate representatives. Nevertheless, it is apparent from the nature of the document that the points preceding the last sentence of the agreement should have been respected in the new state. As the political developments showed, however, the basic articles of the Pittsburgh (and, obviously, also the Cleveland) Agreement were ignored in reality. The Czechoslovak Republic was established as a democratic but unitary state of a fictional “Czechoslovak nation” with an equally fictional “Czechoslovak language.” In 1920, T. G. Masaryk himself, already the President of the Republic, shortly before the state’s constitution was adopted by the temporary National Assembly, described the Pittsburgh Agreement as a document of only historical value.

PhDr. Milan Zemko, CSc., Institute of Historical Studies of the Slovak Academy of Sciences