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Blejwas - American Polonia and Września

amerykańskiej, o której Bracia Rodacy za Oceanem mylnie informanwani, mylne i krzywdzące otrzymują i rozgłaszają wieści].²³ Such a body would correct the erroneous and unfavorable impressions of American Polonia held by Poles in Poland and encourage and assist Poles from the Old Country in establishing commercial and industrial links in America.

The Września Affair

The commissions and resolutions of the Second Polish Catholic Congress indicate that schools, the preservation of native language, and relations with the Old Country were very much on the minds of many American Poles in 1901. The American Poles debated “eąuality of rights” for the Polish clergy in the Roman Catholic Church in America under the pressure of growing schism. The larger issue was American Catholicism recognizing and embracing cultural pluralism, the right of the faithful to retain that which madę them uniąue, their language, customs, and traditions. The American Poles resisted and protested efforts to forcibly denationalize them through the compulsory Americanization of their parishes. In America the issue was with the Roman Catholic Church, in Prussian Poland with the State.

The Polish community in America and its media were pre-disposed to be receptive to news from Września. Many organizers of the earliest organizations, both priests and secular activists, had migrated from the Prussian sector in the wake of the German migration to America. In America there were parishes that originated as joint Polish - German initiatives. The personal investment by Poles in parish affairs across the ocean was an expression of Old World relations and experiences. The migration from Prussian Poland arrived with practical ideas, some based on German models, for parish - community organization that envisioned immigrant settlements as economic entities. The relationship with their German neighbors in America was not the only element in the extemal shaping of the Polish American community. Poles from the Prussian sector were personally familiar with Bismarck’s Kulturkampf and the Germanization policies of the Prussian government. In America they also struggled to emancipate themselves from German control of their religious life in the New World and establish their own, Polish parishes.²⁴

The Poles in America regularly read in Zgoda, the PNA’s official organ, and Naród Polski, the PRCU official organ, about the persecution of Poles in the Prussian sector and the condemnations of the HaKaTa and its supporters and activities. Similar stories were to be found in Ameryka, an independent weekly published by Antoni Paryski in Toledo, Ohio. In 1901 there were reports about dismissals of Poles from the military and civil service, Polish soldiers compelled to confess in German, the expulsion of Polish students from gymnasia and the university for engaging in Polish cultural initiatives, the ban on Polish in churches and in schools, and reports of teachers seizing Polish language school books from their students. One comment on the administrative harassment of Poles described it as “fierce German purges [that] are prepared to cut off the heads of all Poles and to order them to walk about on all four hands and legs. The punishments for our sins do not matter and it is not enough for our enemy to severely persecute us. We will still conduct an obstinate battle” [Zażarte niemczyska gotowi wszystkim ²³ Kruszka, 1,421 -22.

Mieczysław Szawleski, Wychodźtwo Polskie w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki (Lwów: Ossolińeum, 1924), 82 -3.

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