Bruce Bendinger has sold everything from Popeye’s Chicken to Gerald Ford. John Iltis sold the movie Hoop Dreams to Fine Line Cinema. Now the two veteran marketing professionals have teamed up on a campaign of their own. “We want to give a country back its history,” Bendinger says.
The Chicago connection goes back to 1902, when local plumbing magnate Charles Crane recruited Tomáš Masaryk, a philosophy professor and Czech nationalist who’d served in the Austro-Hungarian parliament, to lecture at the University of Chicago. (A memorial to Masaryk and the Czechoslovak Legion now stands on campus, at the east end of the Midway Plaisance.) The Slavs of Central Europe had no state of their own at the time: most Czechs and Slovaks were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while a sizable minority lived in Russia. Nearly 100,000 Czechs had immigrated to Chicago, giving the city the world’s second-highest Czech population after Prague.
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(Standing before a statue of Masaryk in Prague on April 5, President Obama said, “Masaryk spoke to a crowd in Chicago that was estimated to be over 100,000. I don’t think I can match Masaryk’s record, but I’m honored to follow his footsteps from Chicago to Prague.”)
Germany swallowed most of the republic after the Munich Agreement of 1938. Recognized as a threat by the occupying forces despite their advancing age, many legionnaires were persecuted, arrested, and killed by the Nazis—and later by the Soviets, who systematically tried to erase the legion’s legacy. “If you were a legionnaire, you were on the Nazi hit list,” says Bendinger. “To the Soviets, these guys were the running dogs of capitalism. They took away their pensions, and they died in poverty and disgrace.”
The Czech Consulate sponsored a screening of Accidental Army at the Chicago History Museum in October, and it’s been shown to a handful of private audiences in the States. Iltis and the Bendingers are raising the estimated $50,000 to subtitle the film in Czech, after which they’ll pursue a Slovak version.
Sat 6/20, 8:15 PM, Mon 6/22, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-849-2600, czechlegion.com, $9.
