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 and author Hieronim Jabłoński. Courtesy 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