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Blejwas - American Polonia and Września

Stanislaus A. Blejwas received his B.A. [1963] from Providence College and his M.A. [1966] and Ph D [1973] from Columbia University in Polish and East European history. He is CSU University Professor of History and holder of the Endowed Chair of Polish and Polish American Studies at Central Connecticut State University. His publications include Realism in Polish Politics: Warsaw Positivism and National Survival in Nineteenth Century Poland (Yale Slavic and East European Monographs, 1984), Pastor of the Poles: Polish American Essays (co-edited with M. B. Biskupski, Polish Studies Monographs, I, 1982), and histories of the Polish American and Lithuanian American immigrant and ethnic communities and organizations in New England. His articles have appeared in The Polish Review, Polish American Studies, Jewish Social Studies, PNCC Studies, Journal of American Ethnic History, Przegląd Polonijny, Studia Polonijne, Polish-Anglo Saxon Studies, Analecta Cracoviensia, Austrian History Yearbook, Connecticut History, The Connecticut Review, and in the following collections: The Dean ’s Papers 1966, The Polish Presence in Canada and America (1982), Polish Americans and Their History: Community, Culture and Politics (1996), and Ethnicity. Culture. City: Polish Americans in the USA (1998). He recently completed a history of the Polish Singers Alliance of America, and will shortly publish Puritans, Yankees, and Poles: New England Polish American Essays. Professor Blejwas is on the editorial boards of Polin and Polish American Studies, is an honorary member of the Polonia Research Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences [Warsaw], and is a member of the U. S. Holocaust Memoriał Council.

American Polonia and the School Strike in Września by

Stanisław A. Blejwas

The national consciousness of the Polish peasant is an issue debated in Polish politics and history sińce the partitions. Beginning with Kościuszko’s Insurrection in 1794 and continuing through World War II, the peasant’s integration into the struggle to recover independence and the level of his national consciousness occupied the attention of politicians and researchers.¹ The question assumed a unique dimension when the Great Peasant Economic Emigration to America accelerated after the American Civil War as political activists now fretted about the futurę of the Poles in America. Did the migrating peasants possess a Polish national consciousness? If they did, would they be denationalized in America? If the peasants only possessed what Stanisław Ossowski called a private homeland, could the peasant immigrant in a foreign land across an ocean be educated to identify with an ideological homeland?² Particularly in the absence of a Polish State, could Polish peasant immigrants in America be mobilized for the cause of independence? Furthermore, how could the immigrant’s nationalization be achieved in the face of

1

For a recent discussion see Jan Molenda, Chłopi. Naród. Niepodległość. Kstałtowanie się postaw narodowych i obywatelskich chłopów w Galicji i Królestwie Polskim w przedeniu odrodzenia Polski (Warsaw: NERITON, 1999. Instytut Historii PAN).

2

Stanisław Ossowski, O ojczyźnie i narodzie (Warsaw: 1984), 26, cited by Jan Molenda, “The Formation of National Consciousness of the Polish Peasants and the Part They Played in the Regaining of Independence of Poland”, Acta Poloniae Historica, 63-64 (1991), 124. Ossowski was discussing the peasants in Poland, but his observations are transferable to the peasant immigrants abroad.