Bulgarian Americans

BULGARIAN AMERICANS. The major period of Bulgarian immigration was between 1900 and 1920. Most of these immigrants settled in industrial centers among other Slavs. Many became factory workers, while a smaller number worked in railroad construction. Having participated in progressive movements in their native land, Bulgarians early joined the ranks of American labor and by 1910 had established Marxist groups in many of their communities. The Bulgarian Socialist Federation, founded in 1910, affiliated with the Socialist Labor Party in 1917 and became its second largest foreign-language federation. In 1919, many became Communists.

The most famous personality in the early period was George Andreytchine (1894-1949?), who was drawn to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and became a key leader in the IWW-led strike of sixteen-thousand Mesabi Range miners in 1916. A year later he was among the 101 members of the IWW convicted in the infamous Chicago mass trial, where he received a sentence of twenty years in prison and a $20,000 fine. While fighting the conviction in higher courts, he worked with John Reed during the founding of the American communist movement in 1919. When his appeal process ran out two years later, he joined seven other Wobblies in choosing exile in the Soviet Union with William D. “Big Bill” Haywood rather than returning to Leavenworth Prison.

In the succeeding decade politically progressive Bulgarians gravitated to the Worker Education Clubs founded in Detroit, Michigan, in 1925 and the Macedonian-American League founded in Gary, Indiana, in 1931. They also gave considerable public support to compatriot Georgi Dimitrov, who was accused of complicity in setting the German Reichstag on fire in 1933. Detroit’s Suzanni (Consciousness), a weekly newspaper, was particularly aggressive in supporting Dimitrov.

During the early 1930s Bulgarians were active in hunger marches, and later in the decade they participated in sit-down strikes in the auto and steel industries, where they were staunch supporters of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Although the smallest of the Slavic groups (100,000), Bulgarians played an important interethnic role by helping to unite Slavic American organizations on behalf of the war effort.

At war’s end the influence of progressive thought among Bulgarians, as among other Slavic groups, was substantial, but this political current ebbed considerably with the coming of McCarthyism and the Cold War. A number of Bulgarians were deported, and radical organizations went into a decline from which they have never recovered.

George Andreytchine Papers. MS 553. In HarryWeinberger Papers. Archives at Yale. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/1961609