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To reform-minded Hungarians, the United States was also significant as a model, inhibiting and attractive at the same time. Both of these attributes had something to do with the forbidding geographical distance at the time. America was so far away, so strange to most Europeans.
At the same time, its very remoteness, coupled with its remarkable achievements, challenged the imagination of progressive Europeans and fired up their hopes and expectations. America was like a giant canvas, the perfect place on which to project European dreams and desires. In Árpád Kadarkay's words, "Europeans wanted to see how this new republic translated the utopian idealism of the European Enlightenment into political reality."4 Political reality was only part of this appeal, as America was also elevated onto a transcendental plane as the best possible place on earth for spiritual fulfilment.
This excitement about America was not universally shared. Conservative defenders of the feudal status quo, or even proponents of modest reforms recoiled from what appeared to them as a coarse egalitarian society with no visible hierarchy and no sense of refinement and manners. Strong feelings about the United States existed everywhere, but they acquired a special edge in backward Hungary, where the success or failure in applying Western examples was linked to assumptions about the nation's ability to survive.

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The breakthrough in enhancing the impact that the United States made on Hungary came with the publication of Sándor Bölöni Farkas's book, Travel in North America, in 1834, with another edition the following year. This book recounted the personal impressions of Bölöni Farkas, who had travelled more than 2,500 miles in the United States in 1830–1831. Born in 1795 in Háromszék County in Transylvania, Bölöni Farkas was the scion of a Hungarian–Székely noble family of modest means. He eked out a meager living as a clerk in the Transylvanian Chancery, a government office.
His real love was literature. For a long time, he was in contact with Ferenc Kazinczy, one of the most prominent Hungarian men of letters at the time. The relationship between them eventually cooled, because Bölöni Farkas's poetry failed to measure up to Kazinczy's high standards. Unfortunately for Bölöni Farkas, the 1820s marked the beginning of a golden age for Hungarian poetry, and his talents lay elsewhere. In fact, he was a brilliant writer of prose, but this became apparent only when he published his book about America.
His literary disappointments notwithstanding, Bölöni Farkas was one of those "little Széchenyis" who, imbued with a deep sense of patriotism, were doing good deeds for their respective communities. Despite his modest means, he built up a library of nearly 500 volumes, including Tom Paine's Rights of Man, and he lent them out to friends or even acquaintances. He was instrumental in founding a savings bank in Kolozsvár, hoped to establish a museum, and supported the budding Hungarian theatre. Bölöni Farkas was also a founding member of the Hungarian Casino in Kolozsvár, a club whose purpose was to foster national consciousness and to disseminate knowledge about the West.
Still, he was a man filled with grievances, living a marginal existence. His chances for promotion in the royal bureaucracy were nil. After all, he was poor, he was a Hungarian, and, last but not least, he was a Unitarian, a denomination barely tolerated in official circles. Bölöni Farkas was frustrated not only in his literary ambitions, but also in his role as a Hungarian patriot, who felt crushed by the pettiness and meanness of his surroundings. He once wrote to Kazinczy that he wished to have been born two thousand years ago in ancient Greece, so that he could have enjoyed freedom, something for which he longed throughout his entire life.
Ironically, his lack of fame made it possible for him and his travelling companion, Count Ferenc Béldi, to receive permission to travel to the United States. After weeks of arduous travel on a British ship, Bölöni Farkas caught sight of New York harbour on September 3, 1830.
He felt overwhelmed by joy. "It has been sixty years," he wrote "that the eyes of mankind have been cast on America. Can this people be the masters of their destiny? Will I be able to find liberty here and the asylum for oppressed peoples, no matter where they come from?" He was amazed that nobody asked for his passport or hassled him at customs, something unheard of in his own European experience.

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In fact, the repudiation of the United States by Hungarian conservatives was a minority phenomenon. By the 1840s, the leaders of the conservatives were trying to become more flexible and politically more astute, and so they mostly recoiled from criticizing America.
Among many points which fostered America's popularity during the Hungarian Age of Reform, two things should be highlighted. One was the frequent reference to the youth of the United States. As we have seen, the debit side of youth—that is, immaturity—was picked up by the conservatives. However, this was a losing argument in Hungary, where enthusiastic young reformers constituted the source and vital center for positive changes.
Secondly, the vast panorama of the American scene allowed each reformer to choose what he liked and to frame it in his vocabulary according to his own preferences. For instance, Széchenyi, the moderate reformer and believer in a constitutional monarchy, ignored "republican theories," as he called them, and pictured the American approach to progress as sober and rational, rather than emotional. Széchenyi also emphasized the importance of linguistic, religious, and cultural tolerance in the United States. On the other hand, the radical liberal Lajos Kossuth liked the fact that English was the dominant language in the United States. Citing this example, he mistakenly found support in it for his determination to make Hungarian the dominant language in multiethnic Hungary.

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I still remember the darkest days of oppression during the Rákos era of the early 1950s. The official propaganda barrage portrayed the United States as the archvillain, as a power-hungry, greedy, imperialist super-power, a mean and cruel tyranny. I do not remember any person in my large circle of friends and acquaintances who believed one single word of this rubbish.
In our 1956 Revolution, just as in 1848, Hungarians wanted freedom and democracy in ways we knew that Americans had them. Although Radio Free Europe had irresponsibly raised false hopes of American support with ambiguous statements, it turned out that no concrete steps were taken to aid the Revolution. After the Revolution was crushed by Soviet tanks, close to two hundred thousand Hungarians arrived in Austria as refugees.
Almost all of them wanted to come to the United States, whatever their disappointment in American inaction. To those who made it, the generosity of the United States will never be forgotten. I did not have a penny in my pocket, spoke no English, and had no relatives anywhere in America. But a U.S. military transport plane brought me across the Atlantic Ocean, and the U.S. Government accepted responsibility for my room and board until other suitable arrangements could be found. During my first week in this country, I obtained a Social Security number and the 1957 equivalent of a green card, which not only allowed me to work, but also was a prelude to citizenship five years later.

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