This Week In Pittsburgh History: The Pittsburgh Agreement Is Signed
On May 31, 1918, Czech and Slovak immigrant representatives in Pittsburgh came together to sign The Pittsburgh Agreement, which formed the basis for the new nation of Czechoslovakia following World War I.
A GROUP OF KENNYWOOD’S SLOVAK DAY ORGANIZERS CA. 1938-1948 | COURTESY OF THE DETRE LIBRARY & ARCHIVES AT THE HEINZ HISTORY CENTER
From 1526 to 1918, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were considered part of the Habsburg Monarchy, which eventually became Austria-Hungary.
When World War I ended and Austria-Hungary was no more, Czechs and Slovaks were free to form their own democratic nation of Czechoslovakia — and they did so in Pittsburgh.
Nearly 1 million Czech and Slovak immigrants had come to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and on May 31, 1918, a group of them came together in Pittsburgh’s East End to sign the agreement stating they’d be forming their own nation: The Pittsburgh Agreement.
The agreement was signed by numerous dignitaries, among them Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who would become the first president of the new nation, at the Loyal Order of Moose Building at 628-634 Penn Ave.
Masaryk is depicted prominently in the Czechoslovak Room, one of 31 Nationality and Heritage Rooms in the Cathedral of Learning on Pitt’s campus; it was one of the first Nationality Rooms and opened in 1938, making it an anomaly among the rooms as it was built just 20 years after the country itself was formed.
COURTESY OF THE DETRE LIBRARY & ARCHIVES AT THE HEINZ HISTORY CENTER
The city of Pittsburgh owes the creation of the Nationality Rooms in part to the Masaryk family; Ruth Crawford Mitchell, who was asked by Pitt Chancellor John Bowman to coordinate the rooms’ creation beginning in 1926, had spent a summer in Czechoslovakia with Masaryk’s daughter, Alice, conducting a social survey of women’s conditions in the country after the First World War.
“These ideas and her experience over there informed her when she came to Pitt,” says Michael Walter, manager of education programs, Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Program. “If it wasn’t for her, the room program would not have been thought of.”
A blanket that Alice gave to Ruth is displayed in the Nationality Room, as is a photograph of Tomáš Masaryk and other immigrants taken in Philadelphia as he toured to drum up support for the new nation.
