Polish Americans

Polish Americans. A few Poles settled in Jamestown and other colonies, and the Revolutionary War enlisted democratically inclined Polish nobles like the generals Kazimierz Pulaski and Tadeuz Kościuszko, a military engineer whose fortifications helped win the Battle of Saratoga. Polish immigration grew after the 1830s, when veterans of several failed Polish insurrections against foreign rule (by Prussia, Austria, and Russia) fled to America. Numbering only a thousand or so, these early immigrants of the “Great Emigration” organized the first Polish‐American periodicals, literary societies, and nationalist political groups and, by their presence, helped establish later Polish immigrants' claims to authenticity as Americans. Only after the 1850s, however, with economic upheavals in Poland, did Polish immigration to America reach major proportions. The mass migration “for bread” of economically motivated immigrants (1850–1920) brought about 2.5 million ethnic Poles, including a variety of regional subgroups like the Kashubes and Górali, or Tatra highlanders. Though Polish immigrants came from all classes, most had rural backgrounds and tended to be young, male, and unmarried. Immigrant Poles entered many occupations, including farming, shopkeeping, the professions, skilled labor, and the arts, but 80 percent took unskilled jobs in heavy industry.

Rural Panna Maria, Texas, is recognized as this era's first Polish settlement (1854), but most Poles settled in northeastern and midwestern towns and cities (Chicago became the second largest “Polish” city, after Warsaw). Their social dislocations were documented in William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's sociological classic, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), but Polish communities (known individually and collectively as Polonia) sustained a vital immigrant life. Polish Roman Catholic parishes (over eight hundred at their 1930s peak), with their parochial schools and teaching nuns, provided cradle‐to‐grave social services and encapsulated immigrant spiritual and aesthetic life. The largest, in Chicago, with over forty thousand parishioners, also gave rise to the first notable Polish‐American leaders, such as the Resurrectionist priest, Reverend Wincenty Barzyński.

Two rival fraternal organizations, the Polish Roman Catholic Union (1873) and the secular Polish National Alliance (1880) argued about, then compromised on Polish American ethnic identity: Polish and Roman Catholic. Within the Catholic church, other Poles, led by Reverend Wenceslaus Kruszka, fought for Polish equality within the heavily Irish hierarchy. This campaign succeeded modestly in 1908 when the Reverend Paul Rhode became the first Polish‐American Roman Catholic bishop. Polish nationalism and lay‐trusteeism produced the largest schism ever to rock American Roman Catholicism, the 1904 founding of the Polish National Catholic church by the Scranton cleric, the Reverend Francis Hodur. The Polish nationalist movement won a major victory after World War I, when the pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski and others persuaded the Woodrow Wilson administration to support a united, independent Poland.

Involved in the Progressive Era's labor and radical movements (a Polish anarchist assassinated President William McKinley in 1901), Polish workers later played a key role in the rise of the United Automobile Workers and other industrial unions. Polish Americans overwhelmingly supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic party in the 1930s, a loyalty shaken by the 1945 Yalta Conference, which left Poland a Soviet satellite and sparked fifty years of anitcommunist activism by the Polish American Congress, Polonia's political umbrella organization.

From the 1940s through 1965, about 250,000 Polish “displaced persons” came to America. The 1965 reform of the U.S. immigration law combined with Poland's 1968 political crackdowns brought 67,000 more. émigrés from Poland's anti‐communist labor movement, Solidarity, with others seeking economic opportunity, added another 64,000 after 1980. Another 668,000 Poles visited between 1965 and 1989, many illegally extending tourist visas. Meanwhile, with high rates of home ownership, older urban Polish‐American communities endured. But suburban out‐migration, intermarriage, language loss, assimilation, and upward mobility undercut the ethnic group identification of Polish Americans—estimated at 10 million in 1998.

Despite their economic and cultural achievements, Polish Americans tended to score low in “social status” rankings owing to persistent ethnic stereotyping. Late twentieth‐century Polish‐American politics focused on antidefamation, cultural survival, Poland's membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, accurate census enumeration, and improvement in Polish‐Jewish relations, historically a difficult issue. In Democratic party politics, Polish‐American visibility peaked with Senator Edmund Muskie's 1968 vice‐presidential nomination. Thereafter, however, Polish Americans, like other white ethnics, voted increasingly Republican.
See also Anarchism; Anticommunism; Immigrant Labor; Industrialization; Labor Movements; Race and Ethnicity; Roman Catholicism; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

Victor Greene , Poles, in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom, 1980, pp. 787–803.
Norman Davies , God's Playground: A History of Poland, 2 vols., 1984.
John J. Bukowczyk , And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of Polish‐Americans, 1987.
Thomas S. Gladsky , Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature, 1992.
James S. Pula , Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community, 1995.
John J. Bukowczyk, ed., Polish Americans and Their History: Community, Culture, and Politics, 1996.

John J. Bukowczyk