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Blejwas - American Polonia and Września

the pressures to Americanize new arrivals in the latter part of the 19^lh and early 20^lh century? Would the American Poles, described by Professor Emil Dunikowski in 1891 as “the fourth sector” of Poland,¹ be lost to the national cause?

Without surveys, public opinion polis, and statistical studies, a precise, comprehensive answer concerning the national consciousness of the Polish peasant in America prior to World War I is difficult to provide. However, one can examine American Polonia’s topography, its institutions, organizations, and media and public discourse and draw conclusions about the diaspora’s relationship to the homeland. American Polonia’s public and rhetorical reaction to homeland developments is also a gauge, albeit limited, of American Polonia’s political consciousness. The reaction of the American Poles to the 1901 school strike in Września, where Prussian school authorities corporally punished Polish children punished for refusing to accept religionm lessons in German and tried and sentenced their parents to imprisonment and fines is an early example of Polonia, as the “fourth sector”, asserting its role as an intermediary between Poland and America.²

American Polonia in 1901

In 1901 the Polish American community was nearly a half-century old. Immigrants from Silesia established the first permanent Polish settlement in Panna Maria, Texas in 1854. Emigration from the Polish lands accelerated after the American Civil War. Until 1890 the greatest numbers came from the Prussian sector, and Prussian Poles, together with political exiles who had arrived before and after the January 1863 Insurrection, laid the organizational foundation of American Polonia. Emigration to America from the Prussian sector declined after 1890 but rosę dramatically from the Austrian and Russian sectors until interrupted by World War I.³

In his pioneering history, Reverend Wacław Kruszka asked “How many of us are there in America, or at least in the United States?” He posed the question in 1905 when the Great Peasant Economic Emigration was already a demographic presence in America. The answer was difficult to establish because of inconsistent record keeping by American immigration officials and because Jews, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belarusins also emigrated from the lands that once constituted the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. Kruszka believed that official American statistics for 1900 - 383,595 - were too Iow. Basing his estimates upon the total number of Poles living “within the borders of a parish,” the priest-historian calculated that there were 1,902,370 Poles in some 800 settlements where there were some 520 Polish Roman Catholic churches and

2

1

   Przegląd Emigracyjny, I, no. 6 (1892), 51-2 and no. 12 (December 15, 1892), 117-18.

2

   On the Września affair see John J. Kulczycki, School Strikes in Prussian Poland, 1901 - 1907: The Struggle Over Bilingual Education (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1981. LXXXI1), 49-81; John J. Kulczycki, Strajki szkolne w zaborze pruskim, 1901-1907 (Poznań: Urząd Wojewódzki w Poznaniu, Wydział Kultury i Sztuki, 1993), 91-114.

3

   On American Polonia see James S. Pula, Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community (New York, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1995), and John J. Bukowczyk, And My Children Did Not Know Me. A History of the Polish-Americans (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987).