No Harmony in the Heartland
IN THE SUMMER OF 1893, the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák took his wife and six children to the frontier town of Spillville, Iowa, for a three-month stay. This was not a random choice. Having arrived in America the year before, Dvořák had been living near Gramercy Park in New York City and working as the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America. Though he had managed to compose his Symphony No. 9, From the New World—a grand triumph at its New York Philharmonic premiere and to this day his most popular work—the babble and chaos of the city grated on his nerves.
The composer’s secretary, Josef Kovařik, who had accompanied him to America, offered a suggestion: Why not take a vacation in Spillville, a prairie town populated almost exclusively by immigrant Czechs? This was where Kovařik’s father lived and worked as a schoolmaster. It was an idyllic place where Dvořák could speak Bohemian on the dirt streets, drink pilsner, play the card game darda with his countrymen, perhaps find some further inspiration for his music.
Upon his arrival there, Dvořák did all of that and more. He took early-morning walks along the Turkey River and found a stump of a white oak on which to sit and listen to songbirds. He played the organ in the loft of St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church during morning Mass and strolled the brick sidewalks in the evening under kerosene lamps. People in town began to call him “the master.” He would later describe the summer as among the happiest of his life.
He wrote in a letter home: “These people—all the poorest of the poor—came about forty years ago, mostly from the neighborhood of Pisek, Tabor, and Budejovice. And after great hardships and struggle, they are very well off here. I like to hear stories about the harshness of the early winters and the building of the railroad.” The residents of nearby frontier towns expressed a grudging admiration for the industriousness of the Bohemians in Spillville but also frowned on their drinking, their ineptitude with English, their Catholicism, and their clannishness. In larger cities such as Chicago, the Czechs picked up an unflattering nickname: bohunks, or hunkies, the likely antecedent of the slur honky.
This past Independence Day weekend, 125 years after that Dvořák summer, I went to Spillville, to a city park not far from the white oak stump upon which the composer had sat. The town has a population of approximately 350—almost exactly what it was in 1893—some of whom are the great-great-grandchildren of those who heard Dvořák play the organ at St. Wenceslaus. Most still have Czech names. Their neighbors no longer consider them suspicious. On the day of my visit, hundreds of people from the region had descended upon the town,
