Reflections on Polish-American Heritage Month Part III

HAMTRAMCK, Mich. - The birth of Polonia as a new people in America awaited the arrival after 1850 of the waves of ordinary immigrants who came to these shores from the partitioned lands of Poland. The first thing the new immigrants did was create a new community, with new leadership and a different kind of society. The immigrants had to ask themselves, “Who are we?” “How shall we live together?” “Who are our leaders?” Most of the struggles in early Polonia were the birth pangs of a new society and a new people being born. To answer these questions they had to draw on the memories, traditions and resources they brought with themselves and merge them with their experiences in America.

A key element of this new culture was a definition of themselves as Polish that required them to transcend stubborn local and regional identities. The first step to becoming Polish American was to become Polish, as incongruous as that sounds to us today. They found themselves creating a community and a common identity with those who would have been aliens and foreigners to them in the Old World.

The Polish revolutionary, Agaton Giller described with surprise the process by which the immigrants became Polish. He wrote: “Every Polish peasant, from whatever Polish province he comes….when transferred to a strange soil develops a Polish sentiment and a consciousness of his national character. This phenomenon is incomprehensible for those who saw the peasant at home without a consciousness of national duties. And yet it is quite natural.”

They not only became Polish in America, but also often before their relatives in Poland did. Polish sojourners, who came and went, sometimes with as much frequency as Mexican immigrants today do, brought with them the new identity and taught it to their families and friends. Its expression in America, however, took different forms than it did in Poland. These became part of the new culture of Polonia. They invented these forms, often based on the example of American models. Sometimes they learned them from other immigrants, particularly Germans near whom they usually settled.

It is clear that Polonia was not simply transplanted rural Poland in urban America. It was not a fading remnant of Polish village culture doomed to disappear as the immigrants became modernized. Polonia was a new society born of Polish culture in its encounter – even collision – with a protean, dynamic America. For all of the discrimination, prejudice and even violence Poles faced, they found an America more willing to accept new arrivals and to change itself to accommodate them than almost any other modern world culture, even as it itself changed the newcomers.

We helped to shape and re-shape the America we entered. We even formed its physical environment. In many cities we built entire neighborhoods out of raw farmland and established in these institutionally complete communities with churches, halls, schools, thrift institutions, cultural centers and businesses. We often created what there was of beauty and humanity in some of the bleakest industrial neighborhoods of urban America. In the process we defined the meaning of neighborhood life for our neighbors and ourselves.

If I am asked what is one of the major contributions of Polish immigrants and their children in America I say it is the CIO in the 1930s. About 600,000 Poles came over to the new unions in a two-year period and helped to change America and in the process articulated a specific sense of social justice that became a part of the Polish-American ethos.

Later, Poles were to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces in higher numbers per capita than any other ethnic group in America. A sense of patriotism tied to military service in a war for human rights and democracy against an enemy that had brutally subjugated their ancestral homeland reinforced for Polish Americans the Polish mottos that “wherever people fight for freedom, there is Poland” and “for your freedom and ours”. The Second World War allowed us to combine seamlessly both our Polish and American legacies into what became a long standing element of Polish American identity.

The children of the immigrant generation created a new popular American youth culture after the First World War – the so-called Polka Culture. It was a vernacular youth culture created by the children of the immigrants. It was characterized by the enormous popularity of the dance as part of the cultural context of new social clubs, dance halls, illegal prohibition gin, and rebellion against Victorian standards. It was part of the Polish American response to the “Era of the Flapper” and the Jazz Age. Many Polish American Polka Musicians were also accomplished Jazz and Big Band music performers and those musical trends affected the evolution of the Polka. Its popularity continues even today.

At the same time, Polish immigrants and their children learned high Polish culture here in America. Few had ever heard Chopin’s music played or read Sienkiewicz or Mickiewicz in their villages. The first time most of the Polish newcomers to America ever saw a Polish play or heard standard Polish spoken on stage, it was in Chicago, or Detroit or Buffalo. It was in America that they learned Polish History. It was also here that young women immigrants as wives and mothers adapted the Wigilia, the Swieconka and other family paraliturgies to life in crowded urban neighborhoods.

These examples have only scratched the surface of this story. There is indeed so much we can learn from our past and our tradition that can empower us as we seek to create a future for our community.

One of the reasons we don’t recognize the significance of all we have done and how we have shaped the life and culture of many parts of the United States is because we have succeeded to a considerable degree in making our contributions a part of the American fabric. America has made our contributions its own.

The debates about whether we have “assimilated” or not are sometimes wrongheaded. We have not so much “assimilated”- if that means we have become identical to Anglo-Saxons- as made ourselves “at home” in America. If we “assimilated”, it was into a world we ourselves created. In many respects and in many localities our fellow Americans are living in our world as much as we are in theirs. It is not a “Polish” world but one shaped by people from Polish lands informed by values and traditions they brought with them.

For more information, contact Virginia Skrzyniarz at
313.733.4535 or by
email at skrzyniarz@piastinstitute.org