Nándor Dreisziger

Spying on "Mr. Bartok" in Wartime America

 

Few people can imagine Béla Bartók, the shy and elderly concert pianist, ethnomusicologist and composer of very modern music, as a plausible subversive - in today's parlance, a "potential terrorist" - who had to be spied on by the intelligence agencies of the United States during the Second World War. Yet, that is precisely what happened. No, he was not really considered a threat to America's national security - and that was certainly the opinion of spymaster Allan W. Dulles, the future boss of the CIA - yet he was commented on more than once by various members of Washington's intelligence bureaucracy during his stay in the United States. This paper will try to make public these hitherto unknown reports and explain why Bartók of all people was deemed worthy of the attention of American intelligence officials.
Spying on foreign nationals is a practice that all nations involved in the wars of the 20th century have followed. The United States was no exception, even though in America from 1941 to 1945, wartime paranoia about potential "fifth columnists" was focused on the Japanese, and to a lesser extent, German Americans.1 Other enemy alien groups were not singled out for wholesale loss of civic freedoms. Hungarian Americans and even recent Hungarian arrivals from Europe were dealt with leniently. Nevertheless, Hungarian organizations and a few prominent émigrés from Hungary were watched by Washington's intelligence agencies.
America possessed an apparatus for observing the activities of alien nationals in its territory even before the Second World War. The European Section of the State Department was involved in such endeavours, as were some branches of the Justice Department. Their work was unsystematic and underfunded. The matter did not have a high priority in a country that was isolationist in its foreign policies and cared little about the comings and goings of newcomers. As conflict kept widening in Europe and in Asia, it became obvious to the Roosevelt administration that the existing apparatus of intelligence gathering was insufficient and that new agencies - in fact, a centralised agency - had to be established in Washington to handle the collection and analysis of intelligence, the dissemination of propaganda and related activities, both abroad and in the United States. The result was, after a painful process of bureaucratic experimentation, the establishment of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and within that agency, of the Foreign Nationalities Branch (FNB) that was tasked with keeping an eye on émigré groups, especially émigrés from Axis countries.
The FNB was established originally as a branch within the predecessor of the OSS, the Office of Coordinator of Information or OCI. To run this branch, the Roosevelt administration recruited John C. Wiley, a former diplomat with service in the Baltic countries. He, in turn, hired DeWitt C. Poole, another American exdiplomat, to supervise the branch's day-to-day activities. These two men maintained liaisons with other government bureaus and recruited staff in command of various foreign languages. The branch cultivated contacts with certain exiles and monitored the foreign-language press in the United States. Some of this work was done by volunteers, mostly academics at American institutions of higher learning. There were also "consultants" who gathered information from behind enemy lines. In July of 1942, President Roosevelt replaced the OCI with another, better funded agency: the already mentioned Office of Strategic Services. After some acrimony, the FNB was transferred to the OSS, and Poole became its director. By early 1943, the number of people employed full-time by the branch had reached about fifty, with some hundred others working as part-time volunteers.
The FNB's staff and volunteers used various open and covert means to collect information relating to the activities of European exile groups in the United States and elsewhere in the New World. Intelligence that the FNB was not in a position to obtain through its staff (such as information from postal intercepts) was acquired from other US and Allied agencies. The information obtained was "analysed and processed" and was disseminated throughout the appropriate agencies in Washington - and, on occasion, even in London and Ottawa. Among the groups monitored by the FNB was the Hungarian-American. Of special interest to the branch's staff were recent émigrés from Hungary. There is no evidence that would suggest that the Roosevelt administration was particularly suspicious of Hungarians in the United States - or, for that matter, Hungarians in their own country. Roosevelt himself had taken the view that the people of Hungary had little to do with Budapest's declaration of war on the United States in December of 1941. Furthermore, Roosevelt repeatedly granted personal interviews to Archduke Otto, the Habsburg claimant to the Hungarian throne. In the State Department, too, there were influential officials who were sympathetic to Hungarians - especially to some Hungarian-American leaders and to the members of the Hungarian legation who defected to the United States in the fall of 1940, when Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact, an alliance of the Third Reich, Japan and Italy.2Among members of the intelligence establishment in Washington, however, very different attitudes prevailed towards Hungarians and Hungary. The official who paid the most attention to Hungarian matters - first as a member of the Foreign Agents Registration Section of the War Division of the Department of Justice and then as an employee of the FNB - was Spencer L. Taggart. He became an "expert" on Central Europe mainly as a result of his stay in Czechoslovakia from 1931 to 1934, and his knowledge of the Czech language. From his reports on Hungarian affairs in the United States and Hungary, it seems evident that he had high regard for the contemporary Czech leadership and that his information on many issues probably derived from Czech sources.3Not very different were the opinions of Taggart's superior in the FNB, D.C. Poole. This diplomat-turned-academic had written a lengthy monograph on the history of the pre-1914 Habsburg Empire in which he endorsed the view, popular among Austrian historians of the times, that most problems of the Dual Monarchy had been caused by Hungary's feudal elite.4The "feudal" elite, to use the terminology employed by enemies of the Horthy regime, that ruled Hungary during the interwar period and much of the Second World War, did not impress Poole either. In his view the most progressive country in Central Europe was Czechoslovakia. He went as far as to deplore, in a 1943 internal memorandum, the "dalliance" of President Roosevelt with "Otto von Hapsburg", and there can be little doubt that he had comparable opinions about anyone else in Washington who showed a similar attitude to any exiled leader or agent of any conservative regime from Central Europe. Poole believed that cavorting with such individuals could "jeopardize" America's "moral leadership in the Western World."5
It is most unlikely that anyone in Washington, not even such Hungarophobes as Taggart and Poole, would have considered Béla Bartók an unsavoury individual, a representative of "reactionary forces" in Central Europe - as Poole no doubt considered Archduke Otto to be. Furthermore, it is also highly unlikely that anyone in the American capital would have seen this reserved artist, with no legacy of involvement in the politics of his homeland, as a potential source of political mischief in the Hungarian-American community. The reason Bartók became a target of attention for America's wartime intelligence establishment was the plain fact that he, in a manner most uncharacteristic for him, became involved for a brief time in American-Hungarian émigré politics.

Béla Bartók and his concert-pianist wife Ditta Pásztory arrived in the United States in October of 1940. They came for a variety of reasons. Bartók had been unhappy with political developments in Central Europe since the mid-1930s.6 He probably also feared that the war that had broken out in 1939, and had spread to Western Europe by the summer of 1940, would envelope Hungary. Just as his fears about the future were growing by the day, he received an attractive offer from the United States. The offer came from Columbia University's School of Music and called on Bartók to complete a project in ethnomusicology that had been started by Millman Parry of Harvard University. Parry and his co-researchers had spent years in the Croatian and Serbian countryside recording folk-songs and traditional epic songs sung by village elders. Parry had intended to transcribe the recordings into musical scores, but he died before he could undertake this difficult task. The project's sponsors wanted Bartók to complete the work and offered him an annual salary of $3,000, a substantial sum in those days.7 Bartók was familiar with the United States. He had been on concert tours there twice. His decision to leave Hungary was made easier by the fact that his mother had passed away several months earlier. Repelled by the growth of Nazi influence throughout East Central Europe and attracted by the prospect of interesting work and a suitable income in America, Bartók and his wife decided to go into exile for the duration of the war. They no doubt hoped that their son Péter could join them before the war would spread to Hungary and Péter would be called up for military service. During the first year of his stay in New York, Bartók worked on the Parry collection. At this time most of his contacts were members of New York's Hungarian artistic community. In the fall of 1941, this situation changed as a result of the arrival in America of the Hungarian politician Tibor Eckhardt and his launching of the Movement for an Independent Hungary (MIH).
Eckhardt had come to America with a secret mission, to prepare the ground for the establishment of a Hungarian government-in-exile should Nazi Germany occupy Hungary or otherwise reduce her status to that of a Nazi satellite.8 Soon after his arrival, Eckhardt began to approach prominent Hungarians living in the United States and ask them to join his movement. To the surprise of people who knew Bartók's reticence about politics, he joined Eckhardt's organization. At first he agreed to serve only on a committee composed of artists, known later as the Scientific and Artistic Committee. He even asked that his involvement be kept secret lest it would prejudice the chances of Péter getting out of Hungary.9
The Movement for an Independent Hungary encountered strong opposition from its very inception. The criticism it evoked was directed above all against Eckhardt. His enemies - mainly Czech and Yugoslav émigrés, as well as refugees of the post-World War I leftist revolutions in Hungary - reminded the world that, in the wake of the First World War, he had been involved in radical right movements. 10 Eckhardt's position further deteriorated in December, when Hungary declared war on the United States. The next crisis came in the early summer of 1942, when a few prominent members of MIH resigned. The most important of these was Anthony Balasy, one of the Hungarian diplomats who had defected to the United States in the fall of 1940. At the time of his resignation he made it clear to Eckhardt that the Movement could not be successful unless it attracted wider support in the Hungarian and the wider East-Central European émigré communities. Balasy promised to rejoin MIH if the organization succeeded in meeting this condition.11 Balasy's move seems to have convinced Eckhardt that his undertaking could not succeed with him as leader. Accordingly, in early July of 1942, he decided to step aside as the organization's principal officer. He announced his decision on 9 July, at the meeting of the MIH's Executive Committee in New York.
Those in attendance decided to ask Bartók to take over.12 Evidently, they regarded Bartók as "a sort of [a] Paderewski" - to use the words of Balasy - who could rally Hungarians in support of Hungary's freedom, very much as Ignacy Jan Paderewski had rallied Polish Americans in support of a free Poland during the First World War.13Reactions among American intelligence officials to the change in MIH leadership ranged from the lukewarm to the sceptical. Spencer Taggart simply noted in a massive memorandum which he produced later that, after the resignation of Eckhardt, the MIH's Scientific and Artistic Committee planned to continue functioning under Bartók's leadership.14 Two days after Bartók's assumption of MIH's command, Poole explained to Assistant Director Wiley of the OSS that Bartók had "no political quality at all..." He admitted, however, that this "distinguished... musician" was "a most respectable figure."15 Considering the fact that both Taggart and Poole had very negative views of non-leftist Hungarian émigrés in general - and Eckhardt in particular - their response to the change in the MIH's leadership was restrained. Allan W. Dulles' reaction to Bartók's elevation to the MIH's top position was definitely more sceptical. At the time Dulles, the future director of the CIA, was a mid-ranking bureaucrat in the OSS. Dulles reported to his superiors that Bartók was of "no political significance" and that he was "put in" as the new leader of MIH "as a front man for Eckhardt".16 Dulles' opinion about Bartók being a "front man" suggests that people who counted in Washington's intelligence community were not convinced that the change in the MIH's leadership could have any positive impact on the dynamics of Hungarian-American political affairs.

Bartók brought no political experience to his new position. He didn't even bring any aptitude for speech-making, "working the crowds" and so on, skills that are essential to a would-be politician, even an émigré lobbyist.17 Nevertheless, Bartók took his task seriously. He continued to lobby prominent Hungarian-American academics, artists, scientists, etc., as he had done after he had assumed the chairmanship of MIH's Scientific and Artistic Committee earlier. Bartók's letter to Hungarian-American literary historian Joseph Reményi is a good example of the type of lobbying in which he was engaged. In this letter Bartók explained, "We know" that in the struggle against the Third Reich, Hungary's "heart and interest" are with the Western democracies. "Regrettably, many of our enemies try to convince people that Hungary... joined the Nazi camp of its free will..." Bartók went on, "In this situation we, the representatives of Hungarian culture... must voice our conviction that the Hungarian people... stand on the side of those who are struggling for a free, decent and democratic world." Bartók then asked Reményi to join MIH's efforts aimed at the restoration of a free and democratic Hungary.18 Throughout the summer and early fall of 1942, Bartók sent out many such invitations and had received numerous positive responses. In an interview he gave at the time, however, he admitted that many of those whom he had invited declined to accept, saying that their involvement in MIH's work might bring trouble for their relatives and friends in Hungary.19
Bartók's efforts brought only limited success. Not surprisingly Balasy, whose resignation from MIH had been the catalyst of Bartók's rise to the movement's leadership, did not rejoin the organization. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the attitude of officials in Washington to MIH had improved in the months after Bartók's assumption of the movement's leadership. Under the circumstances, by the late autumn of 1942, it had become obvious that there was little chance of Bartók accomplishing much through his lobbying activities. He also suffered some personal setbacks. His contract with Columbia University was coming to an end, and his health started to decline. The fever and weakness that he had first experienced in the late winter of 1941-42 became worse.20
Confronted by poor response to his patriotic appeals, worrisome financial prospects and increasing health problems, it is not surprising that Bartók abandoned émigré organizational work. In the spring of 1943, he returned to composing, despite the fact that American orchestras that year shunned his music, preferring to play the compositions of modern Russian masters such as Stravinsky and Shostakovich - the Russians were America's allies, after all.21 First there was the Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by Russian-American conductor Serge Koussevitzky to honour the memory of his recently deceased wife. It was followed by the Solo Violin Sonata, the Piano Concerto No. 3, and the Viola Concerto. In the midst of this demanding work, Bartók hadn't forgotten his war-torn homeland and its suffering peoples. As late as the summer of 1945, he was still sending out letters calling on people to support a charity run by the American Hungarian Federation to collect aid for Hungary,22 but he never again took part in émigré political activities. Not surprisingly, he no longer attracted the attention of America's intelligence officials.
At this juncture we may ask if these people - in particular Allan Dulles - had been justified in the summer of 1942 in accusing Bartók of being installed as MIH's leader to act as Eckhardt's "front man". There is no evidence in the archival record of this being the truth. There is not even evidence that Eckhardt helped Bartók in his quest to create a lobby of Hungarian-American luminaries, even though Eckhardt remained active among Hungarian and other Central European émigrés after July 1942. He did so with a difference - from that time to the end of the war he kept a low profile. He didn't emerge into the limelight of émigré politics again until the Cold War, when he became the leader of a shadow government-in-exile that had far more support from the Washington political establishment than his wartime organization had ever dreamed of.
If we ask why Eckhardt handed MIH over to Bartók in 1942, we can only guess that he realised that the political climate of the time was not conducive to his venture being successful. Not willing to lose face before the large number of Hungarian-Americans who had supported him, he couldn't dissolve MIH; instead, he transferred it to someone with no political past. Perhaps he did hope that Bartók might be able to rally Hungarian Americans as Paderewski had rallied Polish Americans during the First World War. Perhaps he had no such hopes. Béla Bartók was not successful in his lobbying efforts. At this point we are tempted to ask what could have happened if he had been successful and if he had not come down with an incurable illness. Could a fate similar to Paderewski's have awaited him in the postwar era? The answer to this might-have-been of history is not easy. Even if Bartók had lived much longer than he did, we cannot know whether he would have wanted to play a public role in postwar Hungary. Had he returned there (which is highly likely) and accepted political office (which is very unlikely), we cannot begin to speculate how he would have reacted to communist efforts to dominate his homeland. We can suspect, however, that public life under such circumstances would have been profoundly distasteful to him. We can also assume that Soviet Russia's leaders and their Hungarian allies would not have tolerated for more than a brief time such an incorruptible patriot as Bartók in any position of influence.23
Though Bartók never became a statesman, he served his Hungarian nation well. He wished to teach his countrymen cultural pluralism and tolerance through his work as a composer. He also tried to promote the tolerance of Hungary's non-Magyar inhabitants through living the life of an open-minded citizen interested in the traditions and cultures of others. He maintained friendships with many non-Magyars among his compatriots and, in the Nazi-dominated late 1930s, protested against the discrimination of Jews.
Throughout his life, Bartók also sought to improve the reputation of Hungary and Hungarians. His intense concern about Hungary's unfavourable reputation during the Second World War is clearly evident from the letters he wrote to Hungarian-American luminaries in the summer of 1942. It also helps to explain why he joined an émigré lobby through which he hoped to convince Americans of the peace-loving nature of the Hungarian people.
Undoubtedly, Bartók was able to enhance the reputation of his homeland through his art. Because of this, the half-hearted interest of the American public in his work during 1943 must have been disappointing not only to him, but to all Hungarians. Nevertheless, in that year he embarked on composing one major work after another. His countrymen, both those living and members of future generations, should be glad he did. In a few years and especially after his death, the situation with respect to the reception of his work - both in America and elsewhere - changed dramatically. In less than five years after the premiere of the Concerto for Orchestra, for example, it received nearly fifty performances worldwide - and the recognition of Bartók's work continued thereafter. As the bicentennial of his death approached, he began to be counted among the "great five" composers of twentieth-century modern music.24 There can be little doubt that after Bartók had abandoned political activity, he served his beloved Hungarian nation more effectively by composing than he could have possibly served it by continuing as an émigré lobbyist.

 

Nándor Dreisziger
went to Canada from Hungary in 1956. Since 1970, he has been teaching Canadian and European history at the Royal Military College of Canada. His research interests include the history of North America in wartime Hungary before and during World War II and Hungarians in North America.

---

1 This paragraph and the few that follow are highly abridged versions of the introduction to my paper "Keeping an Eye on Hungarians in Wartime America: The Spencer Taggart Memorandum (Part 1)," Hungarian Studies Review, 30, 1-2 (Spring-Fall 2003): 63-68.
2 The defectors included the then Hungarian Minister to Washington, János Pelényi. The most notable of State Department officials who was sympathetic to Hungarians was the Assistant Under- Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle. See the book, consisting of excerpts from his diaries, Navigating the Rapids, 1918-1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle, ed. Beatrice B. Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
3 A large part of Taggart's most voluminous report on Hungarian Americans and their ties to Hungary is reproduced as an appendix to my article "Keeping an Eye on Hungarians," pp. 72-112.
4 [DeWitt Clinton Poole], "The Habsburg Empire: Hegemony, Unbalance, and Federalism." N.d., but post-Jan. 1941; unpublished manuscript, Poole Papers, box 7, folder 34, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.
5 Poole's September, 1943, memorandum, quoted in R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York: University of California Press, 1972), p. 389, note 63.
6 Soon after the annexation of Austria by Hitler, Bartók received from his Viennese publisher an inquiry regarding his "Aryan status." Bartók did not respond to this query. He was one of the Hungarian Gentile intellectuals who protested against the passing, in the wake of the Austrian Anschluss, of the first "Jewish Law" by Hungary's Parliament. On this see Oszkár Róbert, "Látogatás Bartók Bélánál" [A Visit with Béla Bartók], Amerikai Magyar Népszava [American Hungarian People's Voice] 5 Nov. 1942, reprinted in Tibor Tallián, Bartók fogadtatása Amerikában, 1940-1945 [Bartók's Reception in America, 1940-1945] (Budapest: Zenemukiadó, 1988), pp. 189-92.
7 Béla Bartók Jr., Apám életének krónikája [The Chronicle of My Father's Life] (Budapest: Zenemukiadó, 1981), 440-44, in passim. Róbert, "Látogatás," p. 190f.
8 John Pelényi, "The Secret Plan for a Hungarian Government in the West at the Outbreak of World War II," Journal of Modern History, 34 (1964): 170-77; and, especially, N.F. Dreisziger, "Bridges to the West: The Horthy Regime's Reinsurance Policies in 1941," War & Society, 7 (May 1989): 1-7.
9 Minutes of the Organizing Meeting of the Executive Committee of the Movement for an Independent Hungary, 2 Oct. 1941, Washington, D.C. The Papers of Tibor Eckhardt, box. 5, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA.
10 Ignácz Schultz, "Budapest's Fake Mission," The Nation: America's Leading Liberal Weekly, 27 September 1941. Ignácz Schultz was a leftist radical and former member of the Czechoslovak parliament. Similar attacks appeared elsewhere and even in the North American ethnic press. Steven Béla Várdy, Magyarok az Újvilágban: Az észak-amerikai magyarság rendhagyó története [Hungarians in the New World: the irregular history of the Hungarians of North America] (Budapest: A Magyar Nyelv és Kultúra Nemzetközi Társasága, 2000), pp. 377-80.
11 An OSS memorandum entitled "Independent Hungary Movement in the United States," 17 July 1942, INT 32A-67; Records of the Foreign Nationalities Branch of the OSS, National Archives of the United States (NAUS), Washington, D.C. Reprinted in the appendix to this article.
12 Minutes of the meeting of the MIH's Executive Council, 9 July 1942, New York City; in the Eckhardt Papers, box. 5, loc. cit.
13 Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941) was a concert pianist, composer and, after the First World War, the newly independent Poland's first prime minister.
14 Spencer Taggart, "Activities of Hungarian Nationalists in the United States," secret intelligence report prepared for the Foreign Agents Registration Section (FARS), War Division, of the Department of Justice, 8 Dec. 1943, page 78. A copy of this memo was enclosed in James R. Sharp, Chief, FARS, to Cavendish Cannon of the State Department, 16 Dec. 1943. Records of the US State Department, 864.01 B 11/73, NAUS.
15 D. C. Poole (Head, FNB) to John C. Wiley (Assistant Director, OSS) 11 July 1942; Records of the FNB, loc. cit.
16 Memorandum from Allen W. Dulles to Hugh R. Wilson, 10 July 1942, enclosed in D. C. Poole to J. C. Wiley, 11 July 1942; Records of the FNB, loc. cit.
17 Kenneth Chalmers, Béla Bartók (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), p.128.
18 Bartók to Reményi, 27 June 1942, printed in 99 Bartók levél [99 Bartók Letters], ed. and comp. Ferenc László (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1974), letter no. 92 (pp. 180-82).
19 Róbert, "Látogatás," pp. 189-92.
20 Tibor Tallián, "Bartók's Reception in America, 1940-1945," in Bartók and His World, ed. Peter Laki (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.), 106f; Béla Bartók Jr., Apám, pp. 445-47; Malcolm Gillies, Bartók Remembered (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1990), 194-96; and Ernô Balogh's recollections (Peter Laki, transl.), published in Bartók and his World, pp. 257-63.
22 See Bartók's letter to Albert Szirmai, 25 June 1945, printed in Bartók Béla levelei [Béla Bartók's Correspondence] ed. János Demény (Budapest: Zenemukiadó, 1976), letter no. 1079 (p. 714).
23 These paragraphs represent an excerpted version of the conclusions of a much longer essay of mine about Bartók's patriotism and political attitudes which is slated to appear in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (Oxford University Press).