Lithuanian Americans

LITHUANIAN AMERICANS. The first wave of migration from Lithuania to the New World followed the widespread famines of 1867 and 1868, although individuals had immigrated to the United States as early as the seventeenth century and in greater numbers following the anti-czarist uprisings in Poland and Lithuania in 1795, 1831, and 1863. The majority of later immigrants were young peasants who fled to escape both famine and conscription into the Russian army. They crossed the border into East Prussia mostly on foot, traveled across Germany working often as farmhands, and managed, when they reached Hamburg, to book steerage travel to America.

Most Lithuanians settled first in the mining areas of Pennsylvania. Their communities soon divided into believers and secularists, known as Laisvamaniai (freethinkers). At the turn of the century, Lithuanian students and other revolutionaries fleeing czarist oppression found a fertile field for organizing among these coal miners, who had already learned some lessons about the class struggle from their Irish and Italian co-workers.

In 1878 Gazieta Lietuviška (Lithuanian Gazette) appeared in New York. Its ideology was a joint Lithuanian-Polish nationalism. It closed a year later. In 1884 Unija (Union) marked the beginning of the leftist movement among Lithuanian Americans. Between 1894 and 1898 dozens of socialist groups sprang up among Lithuanian workers in Pennsylvania, New York, and other areas of the Northeast. The groups were known as koupos (detachments); some were independent, others were loosely linked to the Socialist Labor Party. At the same time, individual Lithuanian Marxists, mostly recently arrived from Lithuania or from exile in Siberia, started to propagate socialism.

In 1904 the Lithuanian Atheist Association of America called a joint socialist conference in New York, where the delegates elected Dr. Sliupas to represent American Lithuanian workers at the Second International congress in Amsterdam, Holland. But Sliupas was not seated because the Social-Democratic Party of Lithuania objected to the representation of a “nongeographic entity.” Theoretically, then, Lithuanian socialism was represented in Amsterdam by Rosa Luxemburg, who was seated as the representative of the Socialist Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, although her knowledge of Lithuania was minimal.

After the 1905 revolution in Russia, large numbers of educated Lithuanian socialists arrived in the United States and a gradual crystallization of forces took place: the secular camp gradually split into a clearly socialist movement on the one hand and a liberal-bourgeois movement on the other, both confronting the clergy-led Catholic organizations. A clearly socialist publication, Kova, appeared at that time in the New York area, and another, Naujoji Gadynė (New era), began in Pennsylvania. Kova published until the start of World War I, when it was forced to close.
The participation of Lithuanian workers in the American trade union movement was always significant. Among the twenty-one miners who were killed by sheriff’s deputies during the Pennsylvania strikes in 1897 were five Lithuanians. Not only in the coal mines but also in steel (Cleveland and Pittsburgh), meat packing (Chicago), needle trades (New York), and textiles (New England), Lithuanians played a role in organizing. In the 1930s Lithuanians were prominently represented in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, especially in the automobile industry.
Politically the Lithuanian socialist movement had gradually split into right and left wings during the early 1920s with the left taking the majority. Two daily newspapers, Laisve (Liberty) in New York and Vilnis (Surge) in Chicago, represented the movement. Many organizations came into being, the most prominent being the Lithuanian Workers Literary Society, the fraternal Lithuanian Workers Association, and the Lithuanian Art Union. The right wing of the socialist movement became increasingly conservative.

When Lithuania became incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940, the Lithuanian American community split sharply. While the Left greeted the development, the Right saw it as a catastrophe and welcomed the Nazi conquest of Lithuania in 1941. After the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, tens of thousands of Lithuanians, among them a number of Nazi collaborators, fled the returning Soviets, and many of these refugees reached the United States. The balance of political forces in the community changed dramatically: the new arrivals, sophisticated and educated, many formerly connected to the government apparatus in Lithuania, inaugurated an atmosphere of fear and quasi-terror, especially in Chicago, where the Left found itself under constant attack. By the 1960s, with both sides aging and many retiring to Florida, internecine struggles had ebbed. Laisve and Vilnis, the former Left dailies, became semiweeklies. In 1988 Laisve closed its doors.

Buhle, Paul. Marxism in the USA. London: Verso, 1987.

Lithuanian Socialist and Communist Federations (1904-1930s) history, Marxist.org.

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/lf/lfedlithuanian.html