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 exploitations and betrayals and the mutual conviction that their interests were essentially in opposition. And these tensions had been manipulated by the partitioning powers to help defeat Polish independence movements. The insurrections, it was charged, had failed in part because of lack of cooperation—and at times open warfare—between peasants and the gentry, from which the revolutionary movements originated. But while class distinctions, deeply etched in Polish society, continued to be sources of power and influence within Polonia, new opportunities for dialogue and understanding (as well as new reasons for resentment) also became possible as American conditions cast Polish social strata together in closer proximity than ever before.21 The results would be important not just for the position of the Polish community in America, but would have implications for the status of any future Polish state.
Since most Polish peasant immigrants arrived in this country, like other newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe, as temporary sojourners, the national ideals and loyalties that immigrant authors encouraged among their readers not only would shape an American-Polonian consciousness, but could be expected to reach their European villages as well. Franciszek Bujak notes the importance of Polish publications from Chicago brought back by returning Galician migrants: “As more and more of such cases appeared in the village, the entire structural organization of the countryside was altered.”22 One of the earliest immigrant works of fiction concerns a peasant who was hanged by Polish insurrectionists for supporting the czar. When a new insurrection against Russia erupts, his sons return from America to redeem the family name by joining the fight for independence. It is in America that the sons have come to perceive their father as a traitor, in America that the family has been transformed from peasants into Poles, prepared to rescue the Polish homeland.23
Among all the factors in debates over Polish national identity, however, the thorniest was religion. As a multiethnic state, Poland had been the home of Roman Catholics, Jews, Russian orthodox, Muslims, Lutherans, Calvinists, Baptists, and others. And so while Polishness is now associated almost universally with Roman Catholicism (the result of later historical developments and political positioning), the significance of religion to ethnic and national identity has at times in Polish and Polish-American history been a matter for heated debate, a disputed claim rather than a clearly designated border. In particular, opinions on the position of the Jew shifted and varied, with neither Jews nor Christians agreeing even among themselves on the Jewish place in national social, cultural, and economic life. Polish positivists largely favored assimilation. But they were opposed by conservative Catholics and Zionists alike, in a debate that became increasingly vitriolic after World War I. In the United States as well there were Jewish Poles active in Polonian institutional and public life and many others who, though they might think of Polish Christians and Polish Jews as distinct peoples, nevertheless relied on a continuing relationship between them.
Immigrant socialists in Canada, with author Alfons Staniewski (“Ajotes”) at front center. The shield at upper left reads, Knowledge Is Power. Source: Casimir J. Mazurkiewicz and Victor Turek, Alfons J. Staniewski (1879–1941): A Chapter in the History of the Polish-Language Press in Canada (Toronto: Polish Alliance Press, 1961). Courtesy Polish Alliance Press
Immigrant authors themselves represented a range of these positions and backgrounds, as far as can be determined from sometimes inadequate biographical and bibliographical information. For instance, they seem to have come in comparable numbers from all three partitions, with Galicia slightly overrepresented, perhaps because of Austria-Hungary’s laissez-faire treatment of Polish culture. Although most authors were probably Roman Catholic, they represent a spectrum of attitudes toward the role of religion in national life, and some of the most prolific had placed themselves outside the Catholic mainstream. Writers emerged from the National Catholic Church, from the Polish Baptist Church, from the Episcopalian faith, and from theosophical circles. Some rejected organized religion altogether. Jews are frequent characters in Polish-American works, and Jewish immigrants wrote prolifically in Yiddish, but only one identifiably Jewish author wrote in Polish for Polish-American publishers. In Poland, Jewish writers tended to write in Yiddish or Hebrew until the interwar period, when a visibly Jewish Polish-language literature began to emerge.24 No comparable body of literature exists in America, however. With the exception of Piotr Yolles, Jewish immigrant writers seem