At the same time, Andrzej Kłossowski calls Dyniewicz “the first modern capitalist Polish publisher in the United States.”13 His Gazeta polska narodowa had its beginnings in 1873, and Dyniewicz began publishing books three years later. After he retired in 1913, the reorganized Polish American Publishing Company managed to continue into the 1950s. By the early years of the twentieth century, however, business was already booming for Antoni Paryski, Dyniewicz’s onetime typesetter and already a steady contributor to Polish-American and mainstream American newspapers, under various pseudonyms.14 It was Paryski who most deliberately manipulated the power of the press and of modern advertising and promotional methods to sell himself and his publications, taking his cue from American journalism and American and European models of popular book production. Using a carefully articulated populist rhetoric, Paryski took pains to situate himself as an independent voice for the common people, outside the sphere of clerical and partisan interests that fragmented the community, particularly during Paryski’s boom years, before World War I. Reviled from the pulpit for his anticlericalism, he wore proudly the claim that priests had refused the sacraments to Ameryka-Echo readers.15 In particular, Paryski exploited Polish class divisions to align himself with his largest potential audience of consumers, the mass of peasant immigrants who began arriving from Russian and Austrian Poland in the 1890s and early 1900s.
Like many of Polonia’s founding journalists and writers, Paryski, though he came from an illiterate peasant family, had belonged to the emerging urban professional class before emigrating in 1883, allegedly when the Warsaw judge for whom he had been a clerk was arrested for revolutionary activity.16 Struggling for a living in America and educating himself (he entered the University of Michigan in the early 1880s but was forced to give up his studies for lack of funds), he became a Knights of Labor organizer among the immigrants, rising to an executive position. But at an 1887 executive meeting, in a characteristically confrontational move, Paryski reportedly resigned his post, accusing Terrence Powderly of “venality and dishonesty” in a Chicago stockyards strike.17
Antoni Paryski, not long after his arrival in the United States. Source: [Rosiński], Antoni A. Paryski: Życie, prace, i czyny. Courtesy Paryski family
Whatever his origins, Paryski carefully and deliberately positioned himself on the side of the immigrant masses, warning his readers against exploitation and betrayal by those who claimed to serve their interests, and calling attention to the power relationships that wound through Polonia’s attempts to create and control a unified community. Czesław Łukaszkiewicz, whose novels Paryski published, eulogized his colleague as “The Teacher of the [Polish] Emigration” and “The Champion of the People.”18 Others called him an agent of discontent and dissension. Paryski’s career is a complicated, carefully measured mix of opportunism and idealism that made his the success story of Polish-American publishing. Writing in the 1930s, a factory worker claimed, “Everything I know today I owe to the publisher A. A. Paryski, because I read his books by the stack.”19
Mindful that most of his customers had only a minimal education and little or no acquaintance with Polish high culture, Paryski worked meticulously to maneuver even the most questionable of his publications into the category of educational material, addressing his argument at two audiences: peasant immigrants, who would contrast Paryski’s sanctioning—however patronizing—of their choice of simple reading material with the sanctimonious disdain of the intelligentsia, and Polonia’s intellectual leadership, who would have to grant Paryski’s nobility of purpose and utility of strategy. Paryski journalist Stefan Nesterowicz characterizes his employer in the language of positivism:
Long years of experience have taught him that one must first teach the people to read, then put the simplest books, even childish ones, into their hands, and then gradually encourage them to read things more and more serious, more and more worthwhile. . . . The man who today bought himself the tales of The Thousand and One Nights will tomorrow require a crime novel, the day after tomorrow a novel of manners, then a historical novel; later he will buy himself a history text. This book will encourage him to study geography, then physics, and in this way his hunger for knowledge will awaken.20
Paryski walked a careful line between educator and businessman, and the works he published sometimes blurred the boundaries between literature, polemics, and advertising. The newly arrived immigrant in Sen na jawie (The daydream) is promised “Salvation, Prosperity, Equality, the Homeland, [and] Absolute Freedom,”21 but he must first align himself with one of Polonia’s ideological factions. He is disillusioned by each in turn: by a debauched clergy, by cynically faithless socialists, and by German and Irish union leaders in the pay of the bosses.22 The self-styled Patriots are so contentious, the immigrant decides, that their newspaper, Concordia, should be called Discordia—a clear reference to the Polish National Alliance weekly Zgoda, or Harmony.23 Only Ameryka-Echo speaks with an honest voice: “Paryski teaches people to follow their own mind, walk under their own power, and not be led like children” (42).
Paryski’s assessment of his own importance may have been more than self-promotion. Numerous immigrant memoirs solicited by the restored Polish government in the 1930s cite his influence. A factory worker writes: “I got the paper Ameryka-Echo and went home and read while my wife listened. I have to admit that at that time the paper was rather progressive. I once read an article from the pen of the now departed Mr. Paryski that people arrive at knowledge and prosperity through reading, that it doesn’t matter what they read as long as they read and read and read some more. I listened to that advice.”24
Cover of Alfons J. Staniewski’s The Daydream (1911). An immigrant is pulled by competing representatives of Polishness: the socialist, the religionist, and the revolutionary.
Another laborer recalls the new ideas reading inspired as the source of an awakened national consciousness (and, no doubt, conflict):
When I got to America I went to church every Sunday and holy day for a year, during which time I wasn’t interested in papers and books. After meeting the fellows who were living with me at my sister’s, who owned several dozen books and got the papers every day, I started to read Ameryka-Echo and Gwiazda Polarna. . . . I liked reading [Ameryka-Echo] so much, and reading in general, that I couldn’t wait to get home from work to see what was new in the paper. I borrowed books from the fellows and in the factory I read on the sly. There was [Sienkiewicz’s] Potop, Ogniem i mieczem, Krzyżacy, Pan Wołodyjowski, and other little brochures. Those books and newspapers opened my eyes, so that from then on I felt what I was and what Poland was, what a series of battles she went through for her national unity, about the heroes and traitors. I wanted to know everything at once, so I didn’t have time to go