Polish National Alliance
The PNA and PRCU were not the only organizational embodiments of Polonia’s competing self-conceptions, however. Other political and religious factions formed, with varying and shifting degrees of intercooperation. Eighteen eighty-seven marked the establishment of Polonia’s Falcon (Sokół) movement, based on the Czech model of physical fitness and military exercise but with a specifically Polish agenda that emphasized readiness to fight for the Polish cause. In 1898 the Polish Women’s Alliance (Związek Polek w Ameryce) was founded, partially in reaction to the PNA’s refusal to grant women full membership rights. (This policy changed in 1900, after which the PNA and PWA often cooperated closely.) In its formative years, the PWA was heavily influenced by European feminism and Polish positivism, and most immigrant women writers came from its ranks. Polish-American socialist, communist, and labor organizations also emerged early on and remained significant until the 1950s.28 And in the late 1890s, but with roots in earlier “church wars” over financial and liturgical control of ethnic parishes, an independent Polish National Catholic Church (PNCC) was taking shape around a populist ideology that combined uncompromising Polishness with an American insistence on autonomy.29
These organizations and others grew out of just some of the varying models of Polishness that were developing through dialogue and diatribe taking place on both sides of the ocean, particularly in the years before World War I. Polish immigrant literature, like its European models heavily invested in the national cause, gave voice to these internal debates as it attempted to shape and consolidate a Polish identity among readers from all corners of the former Poland, readers who in all likelihood had never thought of themselves as Polish before arriving in America. Crafting a strategy of national survival did not stop after Poland’s resurrection in 1919, however. Rather, it shifted to considerations of Polonia’s obligations toward and relationship to the new state, as well as increasingly pressing issues of second-generation ethnicity in America. The imagery of treason continued, even as the belief in an expansive Polishness found new, hopeful expression.
Emil Dunikowski, describing American Polonia in a series of letters originally published in the Galician press, quotes a public speech made by Lithuanian-born PNA activist Julian Andrzejkowicz, in Hazleton, Pennsylvania: “The fact of our homeland’s partition, the infamous treaties that divided us up, have been effaced by the Polish people in America. Lithuanians, Rusyns, those from Great Poland, from Mazury, Krakowians, and even Silesians, feel ourselves brothers, and children of one mother—Poland.”30 Andrzejkowicz’s optimistic rhetoric reflects not only one of early Polonia’s major constellations of national self-representation, but the conviction that in America an idealized Poland was being created, one that admitted internal diversity but emphasized and essentialized an overriding collective loyalty grounded in the imagery of common blood. The work of immigrant writers is evidence of this belief, that the Polish community in America could indeed form the foundation of a Polish national spirit, whatever shape it might take.
2
“Blessed Are the Light Bearers”
Polish-American Publishing before World War II
“ONE CANNOT TALK about Polishness,” wrote Artur Waldo in 1938, “without the POLISH BOOK.” Waldo was referring not to books imported from Europe, but to ones supplied by American Polonia’s own publishers.1 Common perceptions of low rates of literacy and lack of interest in or leisure for reading notwithstanding, the immigrant publishing industry, from its tentative beginnings in the 1870s, had mushroomed by the early twentieth century to include scores of companies producing tens of thousands of titles, including many written by immigrants themselves.
Who were these publishers of Polish-language books in America, and what sorts of materials did they offer their immigrant readers? What political, ideological, and economic factors guided their choice of titles, and how did these decisions shape American Polonia’s ethnic consciousness and national loyalties? Finally why, by the mid-1920s, were companies forced to consolidate already diminishing energies and resources, leaving by 1938, Waldo’s “Year of the Polish Book,” only a handful of struggling publishers? Polish-American publishing followed the growth and decline of immigration itself, but numbers of new arrivals alone fail to account for the changes in book production. Implicated in patterns of reading, writing, and publishing are Polonia’s varied but interacting ideological positions and purposes, as well as fluctuating political, social, and historical circumstances in Europe and America.
Polish-American publishing, situated within the general movement toward the popularization and commodification of cultural production, developed along patterns common to the American and European popular book industry. Like the American cheap fiction Michael Denning describes, and the work of Polish positivists of the same era, immigrant publishing, including that by Poles, had strong ties to journalism, sharing the same technologies, distribution methods, writers, and readers. According to Werner Sollors, these ties are so universal that it is “appropriate to focus an account of America’s polyethnic literature not merely on the development of books but on the centrality of journalism in the literature of practically all ethnic groups.”2
This connection to the press helped shape the physical forms, literary styles, and thematic content of the literature offered to and created by the immigrant communities, taking on particular coloring within each ethnic context. In the Polish case, it encouraged an emphasis on polemics and partisanship that reflected the divisions within Poland and Polonia even as the literature argued for proper avenues of unification.3 If literature and journalism were intertwined, so were journalism and politics, and so the literature reflects these affiliations and rivalries, as well as the inevitable intraorganizational struggles for power and focus.
Printery of Robotnik polski, published by the Polish Socialist Party, Chicago, circa 1900. The paper, which also printed immigrant fiction, later moved to New York. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago
Immigrant literary efforts were not only published in book or pamphlet format by publishers who were often affiliated with newspapers, but also printed in the columns of these same, sometimes highly partisan, papers. Just as every major Polonian organization was represented by its own newspaper, the journalistic arm of a fraternal or other community organization might also take up book publishing: for instance, Dziennik zjednoczony, the PRCU’s official paper, published several of Artur Waldo’s works, including the novel Czar miasta Kościuszko (The charm of the town of Kosciuszko) and the collection of short stories about Gen. Józef Haller’s Blue Army, which Waldo edited, Czyn zbrojny Polonii Stanów Zjednoczonych w nowelkach, gawędach, i opowiadaniach wojskowych (The armed effort of U.S. Polonia in novellas, tales, and short stories).4 The paper put out by the Resurrectionist Order of Catholic priests, Dziennik chicagoski, besides printing Polish-American fiction in its columns, published works by Karol Wachtl and popular playwright Szczęsny Zahajkiewicz. In addition, its affiliate, the Polish Publishing Company (Spółka Wydawnictwa Polskiego), issued works under its own imprint.
Among other institutions and their affiliate newspapers that branched into publishing was the Polish National Catholic Church. Its newspapers, Rola Boża and Straż, and the Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Polskiej Narodowej Szkoły (Society of Friends of the Polish National School) issued works supporting the National Church and its fraternal, Spójna. One of these was PNCC founder Franciszek Hodur’s apocalyptic novella Faryzeusze i Saduceusze (The Pharisees and the Sadduccees). Another newspaper that branched into book publishing was the socialist Dziennik ludowy, along with its satirical supplement, Bicz Boży, and its affiliate bookstore, Księgarnia Ludowa.5 The Smulski Company published not only Gazeta katolicka and parochial school textbooks, but works by Karol Wachtl, Stanisław Osada, Iza Pobóg, and Stefania Laudyn,
