Slovene Americans

Historical Background

The Slovene territory of indigenous settlement is today divided among five nations. Most Slovenes live in the Republic of Slovenia, which was part of Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1991, but has been an independent state since 1991. As members of indigenous minorities, Slovenes live also in frontier regions of neighboring Italy (in Friuli-Venezia Giulia), Austria (in southern Carinthia and some neighboring parts of the frontier region of Styria), and in border regions of Hungary and Croatia. From the Middle Ages until 1918, most of the Slovene ethnic territory was part of the Habsburg monarchy.

Slovene emigration began in the 17th century. The first Slovene immigrants to the United States were missionaries (e.g., Marcus Antonius Kappus). At the end of the 17th century, as a result of the Counter-Reformation in Slovene lands, some Slovene Protestants emigrated and together with German Protestants established Ebenezer, Georgia, which was destroyed during the Civil War. These immigrants were followed by some adventurers and Catholic missionaries (Bishop Friderik Baraga, Rev. Franc Pirc, Bishop Ignacij Mrak, among them), who labored among North American Indians in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Later some political émigrés also settled in the United States; especially worth mentioning are “utopian socialists,” including Andrej Bernard [Page 1242]Smolnikar and participants in the March Revolution of 1848 in Austria (e.g., Anton Fister). After the U.S. Civil War ended, the first larger groups of farmers from Gorenjska followed the calls of the Rev. Pirc to Minnesota.

Mass emigration of Slovenes started in the 1870s. According to the U.S. Census of 1910, 183,431 inhabitants with Slovene as their mother tongue lived in the United States; in 1920, their number had increased to 208,552. After the U.S. Congress passed restrictive immigration laws in the 1920s, the only large group of Slovene immigrants to the United States was a group of about 3,000 political émigrés who fled the communist dictatorship in the 1950s. Later, they were joined by relatives, after the government of communist Yugoslavia gave them permission to leave. Since the mid-1950s, only individual adventurers and scholars, scientists, and artists have emigrated, as part of a “brain drain.”

Most of the early immigrants found work in the mines and industries around the Great Lakes (Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin); in New York and Pennsylvania; in the West in California, Oregon, and Washington; and in mountain regions in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. There has recently been a large increase in the number of Slovenes in Florida because of the migration of retirees, from 1,500 in 1980 to 5,300 in 2000.

Contemporary Community

The 2000 U.S. Census recorded 176,691 persons of Slovene ancestry. Most of them are second, third, or fourth generation. Most of the Slovene immigrants to the United States settled in cities, where they founded Slovene ethnic settlements; some are still vital today. A Slovene ethnic settlement is defined as part of a city or town with a large enough concentration or nucleus of a Slovene community that at least one ethnic organizational structure exists: a lodge of a Slovene fraternal benefit society, a Slovene national home, a Slovene or mixed Catholic or evangelical ethnic parish, or the editorial offices or publisher of a Slovene ethnic newspaper.

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