American Slav Congress

AMERICAN SLAV CONGRESS. Organizers of the American Slav Congress (ASC) sometimes traced its origins to a Pittsburgh conference in December 1938 at which 400 representatives of Slavic organizations in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio condemned the recent Munich Accords and laid plans for a new organization to mobilize anti-Hitler protest. However, little evidence exists for any organizing activity from 1939 to 1941 while the Hitler-Stalin Pact was in effect. Soon after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the plan was revived, and an organizational meeting was held on 7 December 1941 in Detroit with Attorney General Francis Biddle as a keynote speaker. With the US entry into the war, labor activists of East European origin supported the idea of an organization to mobilize mass support for the war effort as a whole and for the American-Soviet alliance in particular. They realized that Slavic Americans represented the vast majority of workers in key defense industries such as coal, steel, auto, electrical equipment, and rubber, yet many Slavic groups were torn by dissension over the issue of Soviet claims to certain territories in Eastern Europe and were separated by interethnic conflicts.

The first congress was held in Detroit on 25 April 1942, attended by 2,458 official delegates and more than 500 guests. Prior to this meeting, the Polish Section of the International Workers Order had sponsored a three-month lecture tour by two Polish organizers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations—Stanley Nowak and Boleslaw (“Billy”) Gebert—to raise interest in the proposed organization. Twelve ethnic groups sent representatives to the first congress: Bulgarians, Carpatho-Ruthenians, Croatians, Czechs, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenians, and Ukrainians. The delegates elected Leo Krzycki (vice president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America) president of the ASC and Blair Gunther (a Pittsburgh judge active with the Polish National Alliance, the largest Polish American fraternal) chair. George Pirinsky, a Macedonian, was chosen executive secretary. The convention adopted the slogan “Unity, Production, Speed” and concluded with a victory rally at the State Fair Coliseum at which Paul McNutt, chief of the new War Manpower Commission, spoke.

The first ASC platform called for member organizations to organize war-bond drives, Russian war relief, anti-Nazi propaganda, and demonstrations supporting the Roosevelt administration’s alliance with the Soviet Union. On the first anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Slavic unity demonstrations were held in sixty-eight cities; the largest, filling Chicago’s Soldier Field, commemorated the victory of Polish-Lithuanian forces over the Teutonic Knights in June 1410. The ASC also sponsored radio programs in Slavic languages and published, in English, the Slavic American.

In his memoirs, Boleslaw Gebert, the secretary of the Polish Bureau of the Communist Party, USA, for many years, insisted that although Communists were a minority among officials of the Congress, they were its “motor and driving force.” Gebert himself was one of the most experienced organizers in the ASC. George Pirinsky, also a Party member, served as executive secretary from its inception until 1951.

Although the 1942 congress succeeded in attracting the interest of a broad spectrum of Slavic American fraternals as well as Roman Catholic clergy, by the second congress in Pittsburgh in September 1944, many of those organizations and individuals (including Blair Gunther) had abandoned the ASC. Controversy surrounding visits by the University of Chicago economist Oskar Lange and a Roman Catholic priest, Rev. Stanislaus Orlemanski (both prominent supporters of the ASC), with Stalin in the spring of 1944 had contributed to the decline of the ASC’s influence. By 1944 ad hoc leftist organizations created by the founders of the ASC predominated, for example the Kosciuszko Patriotic League (established 1943), the American Polish Labor Council (established 1944), and the United Committee of South Slavic Americans, a pro-Tito coalition organized in 1943 by Louis Adamic, the Slovenian writer, and Zlatko Balokovic, the Croatian violinist and vice-president of the ASC.

Delegations from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union and Slavic representatives from Mexico and Canada attended the third congress in Pittsburgh in September 1946. A simultaneous mass rally in Madison Square Garden publicized the congress slogan: “Restore Roosevelt’s Peace Policy—Maintain Big Three Unity.” Henry Wallace addressed the fourth and last congress in Chicago in September 1948 and ASC members promoted his presidential campaign.

As the ASC shifted its focus to supporting pro-Soviet governments in Eastern Europe and protesting the Cold War policies of the Truman administration, it faced increasing pressure. As early as 1946, the Justice Department demanded that performing artists invited from Eastern Europe by the ASC register as foreign agents. By 1947, officers of International Workers Order lodges and other ethnic organizations still friendly to the ASC were being subpoenaed to testify before congressional committees. Some faced deportation proceedings. Foreign language newspapers and radio programs which carried ASC news were forced to close offices. In 1948, the attorney general put the ASC on the list of enemy organizations and George Pirinsky, still executive secretary, was arrested. Leo Krzycki resigned as president in 1950, and with Pirinsky’s deportation to Bulgaria in 1951, the ASC disbanded.

Enyeart, John P. Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic’s Fight for Democracy. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2020.

Irons, Peter H. “The Test Is Poland’: Polish Americans and the Origins of the Cold War.” Polish American Studies 30, no. 2 (Autumn 1973).

Lukas, Richard C. The Strange Allies: The United States and Poland, 1941–45. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978.

Miller, Eugene. “Leo Krzycki: Polish American Labor Leader.” Polish American Studies 33, no. 2 (Autumn 1976).

Nowak, Margaret Collingwood, Two Who Were There: A Biography of Stanley Nowak. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.

Sadler, Charles. “Pro-Soviet Polish Americans’: Oskar Lange and Russia’s Friends in the Polonia, 1941–45.” Polish Review 22, no. 4 (1977).