The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

In October 1956, Hungarian citizens of various education levels, social classes, and political affiliations united to overthrow their Soviet rulers. Ultimately failing, these same people were then forced to flee in search of political or physical freedom. By 1957, over thirty thousand Hungarian refugees had arrived in the United States in an operation often depicted as the most rapid and successful integration of refugees into the country to date. Numerous works have detailed the processes of integrating these refugees into the economic structure of the United States, but few have formed distinctions between those Hungarian refugees who fled due to their revolutionary participation and those who left for other social, political, or economic reasons. This paper seeks to make this distinction, focusing on those Hungarian refugees who fought in the 1956 revolution as a group with distinct ideological and cultural beliefs both before and after their resettlement to the United States. Doing so highlights the ways that the 1956 Hungarian revolutionaries were able to reconcile their Hungarian nationalist and Western-averse sympathies with the reality of having to form a new life within the United States. Instead of fully melting into the country’s social and cultural systems, these “freedom fighters” formed a distinct Hungarian American dual identity. This response to relocation contests the generalized idea that the 1956 Hungarian refugees readily and easily assimilated to life in the U.S and illuminates how countries often offered humanitarian relief during the Cold War in hopes of bettering their global image.