Confusion

Both academic and popular sources sometimes give a date one day before the date when the Pittsburgh Agreement was actually adopted.

Pittsburgh Agreement

A main source of the confusion is the extant calligraphic lithograph titled the "Czecho-Slovak Agreement concluded in Pittsburgh..." with the full text of its six articles and with the signatures of all the participants. The lithograph carries the erroneous earlier date.

Location

The Pittsburgh Agreement was concluded at the Loyal Order of Moose Hall in downtown Pittsburgh on Penn Avenue at and west of the current parking lot enclosed by Penn, 7th, and Liberty. It was torn down in 1984 to give way to the construction of Dominion Tower. Some of the ornamental rubble from the Moose Hall was arranged as an original exhibit across the street.

Depository

The signed lithograph with the calligraphic text of the Pittsburgh Agreement is stored at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh.

Controversy

The Pittsburgh Agreement became controversial in the newly created Czecho-Slovakia.

Masaryk and some others dismissed the Pittsburgh Agreement as an inconsequential act of convenience among American immigrant groups and pointed to its paragraph that left the details of Czecho-Slovakia's internal makeup to its citizens.

Some parties in Slovakia and many Slovak-American activists drew attention to President Masaryk's signature on the Pittsburgh Agreement. They pointed to its article that stipulated the creation of Slovakia's regional judiciary and parliament, which Prague did not do until 1938.

The Pittsburgh Agreement's remaining four articles did not become controversial.

The two of them that concerned Czecho-Slovakia's makeup were met from the start. The new country was a republic, and Slovak and Czech were both its official languages and used, respectively, as the primary languages in Slovakia's and the Czech-speaking territories' schools.

Pittsburgh Agreement

Q: When exactly was it signed?

The Pittsburgh Agreement (sometimes Pact) was the result of a meeting of Slovak-American and Czech-American activists toward the end of World War I. It played a role in the Allies' goal to carve new countries out of the ethnic German- and Hungarian-dominated Habsburg monarchy after its capitulation.

The Pittsburgh Agreement approved of one of the countries to be set up jointly for the Slovaks and Czechs, and stipulated aspects of its future makeup. The activists agreed, voted on, and unanimously approved its wording in Pittsburgh, PA, on Friday, 31 May 1918.

Memorial Day 1918

The three groups represented at the negotiations were the Slovak-Americans' umbrella organization the Slovak League of America, the Czech National Association, and the Union of Czech Catholics (the Czech-Americans were unable to bridge their secular–religious split). A key person in the negotiations was Prof. Tomáš Garrigue-Masaryk, the future country's president.

The festivities around his and other activists' arrival and the first day of negotiations were scheduled on Memorial Day (Thursday, 30 May), which was still celebrated on a fixed date in 1918. The holiday was chosen in order to give people a chance to attend – downtown Pittsburgh was indeed flooded with up to 20,000 Slovak-Americans and some Czechs (not a significant immigrant community in Pittsburgh at that time).

Work day, Friday, 31 May

While the 28 activists (16 Slovaks, 11 Czechs, and Masaryk of Slovak and Czech parentage) briefly met and Masaryk drafted an early version of the agreement on Thursday afternoon, the main negotiations took place and an agreement on the final text was reached on Friday, 31 May. The minutes from the meeting contain its text and the names of those who voted for it (a unanimous vote). The Agreement was subsequently reported on and published in Slovak- and Czech-American press.

There is no indication, however, that, in addition to the recorded vote, the participants actually signed any document on that occasion, and at least one participant recalled later that no document was signed then.

Calligraphic document

The Slovak League later commissioned a calligraphic lithograph with the text of the Pittsburgh Agreement and collected the participants' signatures on it. Masaryk signed it in Washington, D.C., on14 November 1918, the day after the new country's Provisional Constitution was adopted in Prague and defined the role of the emerging country's President.

Pittsburgh Agreement

There is no record of why the lithograph contains a wrong date, Thursday.

It could have been a simple mistake, the Memorial Day festivities probably loomed on people's minds (Masaryk, for instance, made the same mistake in his work from 1927). Many may not have known about the main negotiations taking place on Friday.

Or it may have been the Slovak League's deliberate decision.

Entering the date of the massive Slovak-American festivities in Pittsburgh may have been seen as a symbolic link between the activists' agreement and the will of the people.

It may also have been a gesture towards the immigrants' new home. Especially during World War I when the Habsburg monarchy was the United States' enemy, immigrant groups from there often wanted to display their allegiance to the U.S. along with the maintenance of their heritage. Linking a key Europe-oriented document to an American national holiday may have seemed appropriate.