Polish Americans

POLISH AMERICANS. In the mid-1880s émigré intellectuals from Poland established the first Polish socialist societies in the United States. They soon formed several dozen Polish locals of the Socialist Labor Party, which attracted immigrant craftsmen and industrial workers from the Prussian partition, many of whom had had previous contact with socialists in Europe and German anarchists in America. By 1900 experienced organizers from Russian Poland created the Związek Socjalistów Polskich (Polish Socialist Alliance), which supported the left wing of the Polish independence movement aiming to reunite Polish territories absorbed into the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires.

In 1908 the alliance split into a minority that supported Józef Piłudski’s faction in Europe (dedicated to building a secret military organization and terrorist actions against czarist authority) and a majority that stressed mass education and cooperation with the labor movement. The majority faction formed itself into the Polish Section of the Socialist Party and published the Dziennik Ludowy (People’s Daily) at its Chicago headquarters. The most important constituency for both groups came from literate semiskilled and skilled workers with some urban experience before emigration, especially those from the Russian-dominated partition. Many were recruited through the popular education programs of the People’s University run by the Polish Section and by leftist activists among miners in the Pennsylvania anthracite region and textile workers in New England. By 1914 the combined membership of both factions was about ten thousand. Polish socialists achieved wider influence by holding key positions and organizing locals in the Polish National Alliance, the leading secular fraternal, the Związek Młodzieży Polskiej (Young Men’s Alliance), and the Związek Sokołów (Falcons).

In 1912 both factions agreed to back Piłsudski in the coming war to force the demand for a democratic Polish state onto the international diplomatic agenda; a Left coalition dominated the Komitet Obrony Narodowej (Committee for National Defense), created to raise funds and volunteers from America for the Legions. By 1916 most of the Polish Section was expelled from the anti-war Socialist Party. Once the United States entered the war and supported the formation of a Polish army in France, the Polish Left became further isolated—failing to convince the majority of Polish Americans that the new army was a tool of Roman Dmowski’s right-wing National Democratic Party. The committee also had problems explaining to U.S. military intelligence the anticzarist nature of Piłsudski’s alliance with Germany. In the meantime, a handful of anti-war Poles, tied to Rosa Luxemburg’s Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, took over the shell of the Polish Section of the Socialist Party and eventually formed the Polish Bureau of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1920s the bulk of the old Polish Left, having lost a great deal of its credibility (with Polish Americans and with the American Socialist Party) during the war, concentrated on the more exciting task of building the socialist movement in the new Polish state.

In the 1930s “Billy” Gebert and other members of the Polish Bureau played a leading role in organizing second-generation Polish Americans in the auto, steel, and meat-packing industries into the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Their paper, the Głos Ludowy (People’s Voice), was published in Detroit into the 1970s. Leo Krzycki (chair of the Socialist Party’s national executive committee and vice president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America on loan to the Congress of Industrial Organizations from 1936) and Stanley Nowak were also key labor organizers who emerged from the Polish Left during this period. Nowak had a large popular following and was elected several times to the Michigan State Assembly.

In 1942 Gebert, Krzycki, Nowak, and Oskar Lange (the University of Chicago economist) helped found the American Slav Congress, which supported Roosevelt’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. As in World War I, positions taken by the organized Polish American Left on foreign affairs alienated the majority of Polish Americans—this was especially true after the Yalta agreement of 1945.

Brożek, Andrzej. Polish Americans, 1854–1939. Warsaw: Interpress, 1985.

Frančić, Mirosław. Komitet Obrony Narodowej w Ameryce, 1912–1918. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1983.

Gebert, Bolesław. Z Tykocina za Ocean. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1982.

Groniowski, Krzysztof. “ Socjalistyczna Emigracja Polska w USA.” Z Pola Walki, no. 1 (1977).

Nowak, Margaret Collingwood. Two Who Were There. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990.

Wieczerzak, Joseph. “Bishop Francis Hodur and the Socialists.” Polish American Studies 40 (fall 1983).

Don Binkowski Collection of Leo Krzycki Memorabilia. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives. Cornell University Library. https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/KCL06353mb.html