History’s First Edition: Public Relations and the Newspaper Record of the Hungarian Refugee Crisis in 1956-57

Type of Abstract (select): Individual Presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
This is an excursion into a news environment different than our own. Governments and aid agencies knew well that the initial willingness of countries and voters to support the reception of Hungarian refugees was fragile and likely to decline with the passage of time. Therefore they took public relations seriously, issuing frequent press releases in an effort to inform and influence the news media. Many of the newspapers recounting the crisis are now available online, either freely or in licensed databases, but others can only be found in scarce library holdings as microfilm or yellowing print collections, while still others have not survived at all. Organizations assembled files of newspaper clippings that enabled their offices to keep track of press coverage and follow trends in public opinion. These clippings files and the articles preserved in personal papers reveal their collectors’ concern about the news and include newspapers now no longer available anywhere else. My paper will trace the media efforts of selected organizations in Europe and the US on the basis of their surviving records as well as the availability for study of the most important newspapers. Finally, I will examine the public relations of the Kilmer Reception Center in New Jersey and the significance of the guest book recently acquired by the American Hungarian Foundation that contains the names of government officials, representatives of aid agencies and churches, and correspondents who visited the Center and shared their impressions with colleagues and the public during the camp’s months of operation.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
James P. (Jim) Niessen earned his Ph.D at Indiana University with a dissertation on religion and politics in nineteenth century Transylvania and has published many studies on the Romanian and Hungarian national movements. Since 2001 he is a subject librarian at Rutgers University, where he supervised the digitization of its papers about the Hungarian refugees at Camp Kilmer. His recent research has focused on Hungarians in the Cold War and the biography of Zoltán Béky. His article about the Hungarian Heritage Center of the American Hungarian Foundation appeared in the journal Slavic & East European Information Resources in 2025.