Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski
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educational and social development, so-called organic work. Organized efforts began, often clandestinely and under threat of arrest, to educate the peasants and instill in them a sense of national loyalty. Women were especially active in the organic work movement, which turned reading into a political act. According to Davies,
If the typical Polish “patriot” at any time up to 1864 had been a young man with a sabre or revolver in his hand, the typical patriot at the turn of the century was a young lady of good family with a textbook under her shawl. . . . They were as determined to manufacture “true Poles” as the state authorities were intent on training “real Germans” or “good Russians”; and they had an utter idealist contempt for [those] who, though intelligent, had betrayed the national culture.4
Polish positivism and particularly the organic work movement was early Polonia’s strongest literary influence. Positivist writers like Henryk Sienkiewicz, Bolesław Prus, Eliza Orzeszkowa, and Maria Konopnicka were among those most often reprinted by Polonian publishers and serialized in Polonian newspapers. In particular, the work of Orzeszkowa and Konopnicka influenced the activists of America’s Polish Women’s Alliance and prominent immigrant women writers like Helena Staś. However, not all immigrant writers, including Staś, fall neatly into the mold, and positivism went through its own permutations and produced its own offshoots, of which Polonian writers were aware and which their own work reflects. In fact, as Matthew Frye Jacobson asserts, the “strategy of cultural nation-building . . . in effect blended elements of both the positivist and the insurrectionary approaches.”5
Still, positivism, with its characteristic emphasis on social issues, often bordering on polemics, is readable in the subject, theme, and style of much early Polonian writing. What is more, positivism’s strong ties to journalism reflect those of Polish immigrant writers who, in addition to serializing their work in newspapers, contributed articles on social issues and served on editorial staffs. Polonia’s most active publishers issued products similar to (and sometimes pirated from) the literatura ludowa, people’s literature aimed at peasant and urban proletariat readers, with which immigrants were likely to be already familiar.6 These connections dovetail with Polonian literature’s preoccupation with defining and encouraging a Polish identity among readers in America, who were most easily reached through newspapers and cheap imprints. They echo in the carefully stated aims of Polish-American publishers, who were conscious of their difficult position straddling the interests of the immigrant intelligentsia and the peasant majority and who attempted to appeal to both while fending off accusations that they disseminated scandal and calumny rather than knowledge and enlightenment.
The children’s section of a 1910 Polish-American women’s magazine, Ogniwo, illustrating the connection between women and reading, a legacy of Polish positivism. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago
Under partition, the very language was weighted with symbolic meaning, as simple names, phrases, and terms like solidarity had become nuanced with layers of historical interconnections and ideological reverberations. This capacity has been noted in the later, communist-era literature of the Soviet satellite period. But Polish literature had already honed this “conspiracy of understanding”7 during the partitions. The terms of the polemics and the literary shape immigrant authors and publishers gave them reflect attempts to straddle two continents, balancing the concrete needs of an immigrant constituency with political and cultural interests in what was perceived by all factions as a fight for the very survival of everything Polish.
Within Polonia’s identity politics, the contingencies of regional identity, social class, and religion, all of which affected economic and social opportunities, reflect a kaleidoscopic puzzle of ideologies and agendas, sometimes contradictory, sometimes blended in surprising and unlikely combinations, but growing out of a European as well as an American experience. These divisions, apparent in the literature these immigrants and their children wrote and read, underscore the difficulties of any monolithic, static conception of American Polonia; 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