How Hungarians Got the Blame for America's Big Flood

While the Hungarian media generally sticks to things Hungarian, the calamity that has befallen New Orleans and other hurricane-stricken areas on Americas Gulf Coast is so profound that the local press has not only covered it extensively, but searched for appropriately "Hungarian" angles on the terrible story. There have been eyewitness reports from Hungarian citizens visiting or living in New Orleans, and discussions of the number of impacted Americans of Hungarian extraction. (One estimate I saw was 100,000-200,000.) But no one seems to have picked up on a relatively obscure but fascinating connection involving an American disaster of even greater magnitude, in which Hungarians played a prominent role - as villains, rather than victims.

The tragedy in question occurred on May 30, 1889, during the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On that evening, a dam burst in rural Pennsylvania, just upriver from the town of Johnstown. What has been known ever since as the "Johnstown Flood" killed as many as 3,000 people, and even after awful Katrina may still stand as the greatest water-related disaster in American history, at least in terms of lives lost.

The Hungarian connection is not due to the fact that a disproportionate number of the victims were Magyar émigrés; Johnstown and the villages surrounding it were a classic stew drawn from the "melting pot" of 19th-Century America. Instead, what happened was that many outsiders mistook this all-American chowder for an unadulterated and distasteful goulash of Hungarians. According to the seminal history of the disaster, by famed author and biographer David G. McCullough, those "Old American" Europeans who had settled the area first saw the newly-arriving "ethnic" Europeans as a undifferentiated mass of interlopers there to undercut their wages and living standards. "The idea did not please people much," McCullough wrote. "Nor did it matter whether the contract workers were Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Russians, or Swedes; they were all called Hungarians, "bohunks" or "hunkies."

The flood was nothing compared to the damn Hungarians

And when the levee literally broke, it was "the Hungarians" who took much of the blame for the resulting calamity. David Brooks, a columnist who serves as one of the token conservatives at the New York Times, explained (registration/fee required) what happened: "Prejudices were let loose. Hungarians then were akin to today's illegal Mexican immigrants - hard-working people who took jobs no one else wanted. Newspapers carried accounts of gangs of Hungarian men cutting off dead women's fingers to steal their rings. 'Drunken Hungarians, Dancing, Singing, Cursing and Fighting Amid the Ruins' a New York Herald headline blared."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this blood libel lived on long enough to cross the Atlantic, where it was picked up by famously bad Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall (there is actually a website dedicated to his unintentionally hilarious work):

The pillaging of the houses in Johnstown is fearful to describe,
By the Hungarians and ghouls, and woe betide
Any person or party that interfered with them,
Because they were mad with drink, and yelling like tigers in a den

Happily for the Hungarians, the public quickly identified other, more compelling villains, in the form of the rich layabouts who had built the dam to create a pond to lounge around. But no doubt the slander lived on long enough to make live very unpleasant for thousands of "bohunks," both Hungarian and otherwise.

Unfortunately, the spirit of scapegoating and conspiracy-mongering that led to Hungarians being cast as the ghouls of Johnstown remains, and I'm not just talking about the unnecessary and unseemly finger-pointing that is going on right now in the wake of Katrina. In Hungary today, it seems that whenever a problem pops us, big or small, there is a tendency to point fingers or to whisper darkly about treachery, rather than addressing the problem at hand. It's almost enough to make me wish that the flood-swollen Danube had inundated Budapest this year, so that everyone would have been forced to forget their differences, pull together and work as an undivided nation for once - if only to curse out the Slovaks and Austrians, and anyone else upriver.

On the other hand, there is nothing like a good conspiracy to get the blood flowing. My favorite conspiracy theory these days - it's my favorite because I dreamed it up all by my scheming self - involves the ongoing furor over the privatization of Budapest Airport Rt, the operator of Hungary's main repülőtér ("flying square").

As you may have also heard, the day after the "short-list" of five bidders eligible to make final offers was named, opposition leader (and former Prime Minister) Viktor Orbán stunned the business community by saying that, if returned to office in next spring's election, his government would likely seek to have the airport re-nationalized. Meanwhile, a minor court in Budapest ordered that the whole sell-off was void. (The government vows to press on despite the ruling, and Orbán's chilling vow.)

Now, I'm not going to run the risk of actually spelling it all out for you, but I can't help imagining that the sudden vehemence of the opposition's anti-privatization line and the first-round upset are in some way connected. With up to €2 billion in cash set to roll into the government kitty as a result of the sale, the stakes may be too high for the country's politicians to ward off the temptation to fudge the whole thing, either for political or personal benefit. Meanwhile, I find it hard to believe that the three undisputed giants of Hungarian business would have gone into this thing except to win.

But again, I'm not being paid enough to connect the dots. Let's just say that the progress of this tender and its aftermath offers a nice test of the hygiene of Hungarian political and business life. If one of the pre-approved bidders gets the airport, it will be a nice demonstration of the independence of the authorities from interference by powerful domestic business interests. Meanwhile, if Orbán and his team take back the airport, it will be a bearish but bearable indication than the country is still not comfortable with modern market economics. But if for some reason the tender is re-opened and the local bigs fly off with the airport (and especially if they get it on the cheap) it will be an unambiguous sign that Hungary's long journey from bolshevism to liberal capitalism has suffered a serious detour - and that maybe the whole place is being run by a pack of ghoulish bohunks.

UPDATE: Eagle-eyed reader M.C. writes in to remind us that Orbán may not be bluffing, as during his previous spell in power he actually did re-nationalize the airport, stranding the Canadian-owned firm that had won a tender to manage the airport authority.