and the intracommunity power struggles that are a subtext in much of this literature quickly dispel the commonly held perception of a cohesive and conservative immigrant community.
Editorial staff of Chicago’s Głos ludowy. Telesfor Chełchowski, who wrote under the pseudonym Szczypawka, is third from the left. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago
At the same time, because of political freedom and the intermingling of Polish immigrants from various areas of partitioned Poland and from different social levels, the consolidation of a Polish consciousness seemed possible in this country to a greater degree than it had in Europe, and many writers took advantage of this opportunity to try to instill in their readers a sense of peoplehood and national unity. Milwaukee publisher and politician Michał Kruszka wrote that “in the New World we have the best opportunity to exist as Poles, . . . to feel Polish, . . . to establish Polish societies, to pray in Polish.” Kruszka and others saw no contradiction between simultaneously held American and Polish identities. “I am an enthusiastic Pole,” he wrote, “and at the same time a [loyal] American.”8
Ethnic identities were being shaped and formed in a continuing personal and collective dialogue within the immigrant settlements, between the immigrants and their native lands, between the host country and the immigrant communities, and among immigrant groups themselves. But the strands of Polishness and Polish-Americanness are often difficult to differentiate and never remained static. Polish-language immigrant literature reveals these changing concerns and aspirations, as well as the varied and permeable meanings of Polishness influenced by shifting conditions on both sides of the ocean. And because of the commercial opportunism of Polish-American publishers, these works also reveal how the immigrants voted with their nickels and dimes for the community values and identities expressed in the literature they bought.
Although Poles have been settling in the United States since the days of Jamestown, their numbers did not become significant until late in the nineteenth century. Before then, isolated pioneer families like the Zaborowskis (later, Zabriskie) and the Sądowskis (Sandusky), had contributed to American settlement, and it is likely that over one hundred Polish-Americans and Poles, including the celebrated generals Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski, fought in the American War of Independence.9 But the first noticeable wave of immigration from Poland consisted of 234 emigrés from the 1830 insurrection (the November Uprising), followed by smaller groups after the failed insurrections of 1846, 1848, and 1863. It was the November Uprising exiles, in fact, for whom the first Polish-language book in the United States appeared, as well as the first periodical devoted to Polish issues.10
However, it was only with the 1854 arrival in Galveston harbor of a group of immigrants from Upper Silesia, in the Prussian area of partitioned Poland, that visibly Polish communities began to take shape in America. The town they founded, Panna Maria, Texas,11 is generally acknowledged as the first permanent Polish settlement in the New World, followed by settlements in Michigan (1857) and Wisconsin (1858).12 These first communities and ones that followed in the 1860s and early 1870s were primarily rural. But by 1867 a Polish parish was forming in Chicago, and in 1871 the first Polish parish in Detroit was established. The last quarter of the nineteenth century would see the transformation of American Polonia from a loose collection of scattered farm towns to a highly organized network of mostly urban neighborhoods.
The first wave of Polish immigrants in what America would call the Great Migration came from Prussian Poland in the 1870s and 1880s, propelled by land consolidation and Kulturkampf hostility to Polish language and culture.13 In America, these immigrants, many with a Polish national consciousness developed in response to oppression, formed the advance guard of Polonia’s emerging leadership. They, along with intellectuals and former insurrectionists who were beginning to arrive from Russian Poland after the January Uprising of 1863, established Polonia’s early parishes, businesses, and community organizations.14 As conditions in Prussia improved, the number of new arrivals dropped considerably, and although they tended to hold positions of power in American Polish communities, Prussian Poles would make up the smallest percentage of Polish immigrants.
In Russian Poland, which constituted the largest remnant of Polish lands, shifting social categories, economic pressures, and political and cultural oppression had by the 1880s fueled an immigration that continued to grow until World War I. Overlapping that wave was immigration from the Austrian-held territory of Galicia, which began in earnest in the mid-1890s and continued unabated until it too was cut off by the outbreak of the war. Polish culture had been freest to develop under Austrian authorities, who after the mid-nineteenth century did not suppress the Polish language or artistic expression, or close Polish universities. But Galician misery had become a byword in the impoverished countryside. Although Poles from all three partitions entered the same urban immigrant enclaves, the newly arrived were at a disadvantage economically and socially, and tensions between them led to conflict:
The saddest thing was that [the Prussians] called their brothers from the Austrian partition, “You Galician,” and those from the Russian partition, “You Russki,” taking them for something less than desirable. Those from the Austrian and Russian partitions, taking revenge, called their brothers from under Prussia, “You Prussian!” There wasn’t really anything serious about it, but you could notice the aversion and bias of one partition for another. The most wronged was the Austrian partition. For them there was no other name but Galician, maybe because they were the poorest.15
While the great wave of turn-of-the-century immigration to America tends to be perceived as a distinctly peasant movement prompted by financial necessity, in actuality economic, social, and political factors combined, often indistinguishably, to propel immigration not only from the peasantry but also, although in much smaller numbers, from the petty nobility, the intelligentsia, and the professional middle class. (The landless nobility, in fact, might very well have been poorer than their peasant neighbors.) Still, the enormous Russian and Galician immigrations, making up over 90 percent of the estimated 1.5 million Polish immigrants who arrived between 1891 and 1914, consisted largely of poor peasants.16
This presented special problems for patriotic author-activists in American Polonia, Poland’s “fourth partition.”17 Not only did Poles arrive in this country as citizens of three autonomous nations, with immigration experiences shaped by distinct historical circumstances that were often sources of rivalry and suspicion, but those from the rural peasantry were unlikely to conceive of themselves as Polish at all. Back in Europe, a highly parochial worldview focused peasant interests within the family, or at most the okolica or parafia, the immediate neighborhood or parish, rather than within larger collectivities.18 They might also identify with a geographic and cultural region: regional identities were particularly dominant among, for instance, the Kashubians of northwestern Poland, the Silesians of the southwest, and the Górale of south central and southeastern Poland, where dialect and cultural connections with non-Polish-speaking neighbors further differentiated them from other Poles. In 1892 Milwaukee’s Kuryer polski complained that
Poles in many Polish colonies are dividing themselves not only into “Prussians,” “Austrians,” and “Russian Poles,” but even into “Varsovians,” “Poznanians,” “Galicians,” “Silesians,” “Kashubians,” “Mazurians,” and so on. Even the papers call them such. We in Milwaukee have not yet reached this “height of civilization.” . . . Here one is called nothing but, in the old style, a Pole!19
However, it was a new phenomenon that these mostly peasant immigrants might be perceived as Poles. Not only did peasants tend to identify themselves with much less abstract collectivities, but until the mid-nineteenth century the identity of Pole had been reserved for the nobility.20 The distrustful and often adversarial relationship between the Polish gentry and peasantry reflected past
