that their interests were essentially in opposition. And these tensions had been manipulated by the partitioning powers to help defeat Polish independence movements. The insurrections, it was charged, had failed in part because of lack of cooperation—and at times open warfare—between peasants and the gentry, from which the revolutionary movements originated. But while class distinctions, deeply etched in Polish society, continued to be sources of power and influence within Polonia, new opportunities for dialogue and understanding (as well as new reasons for resentment) also became possible as American conditions cast Polish social strata together in closer proximity than ever before.21 The results would be important not just for the position of the Polish community in America, but would have implications for the status of any future Polish state.
Since most Polish peasant immigrants arrived in this country, like other newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe, as temporary sojourners, the national ideals and loyalties that immigrant authors encouraged among their readers not only would shape an American-Polonian consciousness, but could be expected to reach their European villages as well. Franciszek Bujak notes the importance of Polish publications from Chicago brought back by returning Galician migrants: “As more and more of such cases appeared in the village, the entire structural organization of the countryside was altered.”22 One of the earliest immigrant works of fiction concerns a peasant who was hanged by Polish insurrectionists for supporting the czar. When a new insurrection against Russia erupts, his sons return from America to redeem the family name by joining the fight for independence. It is in America that the sons have come to perceive their father as a traitor, in America that the family has been transformed from peasants into Poles, prepared to rescue the Polish homeland.23
Among all the factors in debates over Polish national identity, however, the thorniest was religion. As a multiethnic state, Poland had been the home of Roman Catholics, Jews, Russian orthodox, Muslims, Lutherans, Calvinists, Baptists, and others. And so while Polishness is now associated almost universally with Roman Catholicism (the result of later historical developments and political positioning), the significance of religion to ethnic and national identity has at times in Polish and Polish-American history been a matter for heated debate, a disputed claim rather than a clearly designated border. In particular, opinions on the position of the Jew shifted and varied, with neither Jews nor Christians agreeing even among themselves on the Jewish place in national social, cultural, and economic life. Polish positivists largely favored assimilation. But they were opposed by conservative Catholics and Zionists alike, in a debate that became increasingly vitriolic after World War I. In the United States as well there were Jewish Poles active in Polonian institutional and public life and many others who, though they might think of Polish Christians and Polish Jews as distinct peoples, nevertheless relied on a continuing relationship between them.
Immigrant socialists in Canada, with author Alfons Staniewski (“Ajotes”) at front center. The shield at upper left reads, Knowledge Is Power. Source: Casimir J. Mazurkiewicz and Victor Turek, Alfons J. Staniewski (1879–1941): A Chapter in the History of the Polish-Language Press in Canada (Toronto: Polish Alliance Press, 1961). Courtesy Polish Alliance Press
Immigrant authors themselves represented a range of these positions and backgrounds, as far as can be determined from sometimes inadequate biographical and bibliographical information. For instance, they seem to have come in comparable numbers from all three partitions, with Galicia slightly overrepresented, perhaps because of Austria-Hungary’s laissez-faire treatment of Polish culture. Although most authors were probably Roman Catholic, they represent a spectrum of attitudes toward the role of religion in national life, and some of the most prolific had placed themselves outside the Catholic mainstream. Writers emerged from the National Catholic Church, from the Polish Baptist Church, from the Episcopalian faith, and from theosophical circles. Some rejected organized religion altogether. Jews are frequent characters in Polish-American works, and Jewish immigrants wrote prolifically in Yiddish, but only one identifiably Jewish author wrote in Polish for Polish-American publishers. In Poland, Jewish writers tended to write in Yiddish or Hebrew until the interwar period, when a visibly Jewish Polish-language literature began to emerge.24 No comparable body of literature exists in America, however. With the exception of Piotr Yolles, Jewish immigrant writers seem to have chosen Yiddish or English as their creative language, perhaps because most arrived in the United States too early, and identified too strongly with a multinational Jewish immigrant collectivity, to be significantly influenced by social and cultural trends developing in the new Poland.
As far as it has been possible to determine, most Polish immigrant authors came from Poland’s intelligentsia or its emerging professional class. Many were college educated, though a few, like Stanisław Osada and Helena Staś, were largely self-taught.25 But by the beginning of World War I it was no longer true, as Lwów’s Ruch literacki had claimed in 1876, that Polonia’s authors were simply writers of opportunity rather than vocation.26 A handful of writers, including Henryk Nagiel, Wojciech Mórawski, Józef Orłowski, Stefania Laudyn, and Czesław Łukaszkiewicz, had begun their literary careers in Europe, while others had at least contributed to European newspapers.
Immigrant writers also represented a range of political positions, from socialists to right-wing “Endeks,” followers of Roman Dmowski’s National Democratic Movement. Wiktor Karłowski and Kazimierz Neuman had fought in the 1863 uprising. An American right- and left-wing dichotomy sheds little light on the tangle of Polish-American political strategies, however, which sought to balance Polish issues in three rival European empires with immigrant interests in the United States. To understand the rival stances taken by Polonian activists, one must look to European ideological trends, to the varied conceptions of Polishness and strategies for Polish cultural and political survival that competed for followers in partitioned Poland and its diaspora communities.
Felicja Romanowska, singer, musician, and author. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago
The debate over who could be called a Pole, far from being a side issue of concern only to immigrant ideologues, was a controlling and shaping element in Polonia’s development. It would play a part in settlement patterns, in the establishment of the parishes that would become the dominant feature of Polish-American neighborhoods, and in the creation of Polonia’s highly structured organizational life. These matrices of Polishness are reflected in Polonia’s earliest institutional rivalries, the most fundamental of which, between the Nationalists, whose first loyalty was to a restored Poland, and the Religionists, who emphasized the Polish Catholic’s relationship to America and the Church, was personified in two powerful ethnic fraternals, the Polish National Alliance (PNA) and the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America (PRCU). The PNA (in Polish, Związek Narodowy Polski), founded in 1880, and the PRCU (Zjednoczenie Rzymsko-Katolickie w Ameryce), established in 1873, were sharp competitors in their early years, not just for subscribers to their insurance funds, but for the ideological loyalties of larger Polonia, which both organizations claimed to represent. Although tensions lessened over the years, leading rather to differences in degree than in kind, the PNA and PRCU disagreed in essence over the definition of a Pole. For the PRCU, Catholicism was fundamental to Polishness. Like some activists in Europe, however, the early PNA organizers developed an inclusive ideology of Polishness that was meant to unite all inhabitants of the former multiethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, regardless of religion, class, political orientation, language, or ethnicity. (To some of those inhabitants, experiencing their own awakening national consciousness, this would come to sound more like Polish hegemony than national unity.)27 And so the PNA accepted members regardless of religious conviction, resulting in charges of atheist, socialist, and Jewish influence.
Editor
