Dominic A. Pacyga - American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago

Dominic A. Pacyga

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40661-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40675-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226406756.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pacyga, Dominic A., author.

Title: American Warsaw : the rise, fall, and rebirth of Polish Chicago / Dominic A. Pacyga.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019001788 | ISBN 9780226406619 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226406756 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Polish AmericansIllinoisChicagoHistory. | Chicago (Ill.)History.

Classification: LCC F548.9.P7 P329 2019 | DDC 977.3/11dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001788

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Beatrice,

whose sense of Polsko amazes me

History teaches us that nations do not die off so long as their lud (peasantry) continues to live, making it possible to revive the half-dead members of a nation and pour new life into it via the activities of its intellectual work.

DR. ANTONI KALINA , editor of Lud

Writing any ethnic groups history in Chicago is a difficult task. Especially challenging is trying to tell the story of as large and influential an ethnic group as the Poles. The Chicago area has long been a destination for Polish immigrants, and so the history of Chicagos Polonia (i.e., people of Polish descent living outside Poland) is one that straddles both the city and its suburbs. Scratch a Chicagoan, and you may very well find a Polish connection. Polish Americans are everywhere. The city often proclaims itself as Polands second city, with only Warsaw containing a larger Polish population. And as mythical as this claim may beand it is a myththere is some truth to it, as many Chicagoans know the difference between kielbasa and pierogi and have a few other Polish words in their vocabulary. Yet most real Poles will tell you that Chicago, with its vast ethnic and racial diversity and its capitalist mores, is hardly a Polish city. Nonetheless, there is something Polish about it because Polish immigrants and their descendants have left their mark on the city by the lake. More than fifty wholly Polish or Polish-dominated Catholic parishes, along with numerous Polish National Catholic churches, have dotted the landscape. In addition, Polish businesspeople, politicians, educators, and even mobsters have joined the ranks of Chicagos elite. Several Polish Catholic high schools educated the citys children across the North, South, and West Sides. Polish nuns taught generations of Chicagos children, not all of them Catholic or of Polish descent. Labor unions benefited from Polish membership and dues. Professional sports teams often went out of their way to include names such as Piet, Ostrowski, Kluzewski, Paciorek, Konerko, Pierzynski, Grabowski, and Ditka. The citys radio waves shook with the sound of polkas and with the religious preaching of Father Justins Rosary Hour, as well as with the comedy of Bruno Junior Zieliski. Later television and radio programs hosted by Bob Lewandowski and others also shaped the local media. Polish could often be heard on the streets of the cityeven if it was the mongrelized version known as Po Chicagosku. In the post-1945 era, Warsaw was the first of Chicagos many international sister cities.

Chicago has had a long and fruitful relationship with Poland and with what might be better called the Polish lands. Poles appeared in the frontier settlement of Chicago as early as the 1830s. The formative migration, however, began some twenty years later and culminated with the creation of St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish in 1867. Over the next sixty years, Chicagos Polonia expanded across the cityscape. Polish immigrants originally flocked to at least five distinct Chicago neighborhoods, which housed heavy industry, attracting the so-called new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Poles came in large numbers to work on factory, packinghouse, and steel mill floors during the huge economic migration they called Za Chlebem, or the migration for bread. This vast movement lasted from just before Americas Civil War until the mid-1920s, when congressional fiat basically ended migration from the Other Europe. This, however, would not be the last movement of Poles to Chicago.

Afterward, at least three later migrations reshaped and invigorated Chicagos Polonia. The migration of displaced persons after World War Two, the small immigration during the Communist years, and the so-called Solidarity exodus all shaped the city. Polish Chicago has also long been marked by both a return migration to Poland and a movement to other places across the world, creating a web of information and economic ties. Indeed, since the year 2000, many Poles have returned to Poland or migrated to other parts of the European Union.

Map of the five original Polish neighborhoods in Chicago. (Courtesy Chicago CartoGraphics.)

Polish immigration to Chicago and the United States is also a part of Polish history. While immigration has long played an important role in the history of the United States, Polish historians largely ignored or simply mentioned the great migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when writing the history of Poland. One of my arguments in this book is that Polish history cannot be fully understood without including the role of the emigration. Conversely, Polish Chicago and Polish America cannot be understood without understanding Polish history and, in particular, the history of the Polish peasantry and the forces that motivated them, especially after the 1860s.

In the nineteenth century, Poland struggled to regain its independence from the three powersGermany, Russia, and Austria-Hungarythat had occupied Poland almost continuously since the end of the eighteenth century. The demise of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, organized in the Middle Ages and once the largest state in Europe, obsessed Poles, and they constantly agitated for its reestablishment. The Polish quest to regain the countrys independence haunted European politics for more than a century. While the three empires might compete with each other, they all agreed that Poland should not be reestablished. Major uprisings, led largely by the upper classes, broke out in occupied Poland throughout the nineteenth century, and each ended in disastrous defeat. Peasants, for the most part, either ignored or opposed these rebellions, often seeing the occupying empires as their protectors or benefactors against the Polish nobility. Polish aristocrats and their brothers, the lower gentry, looked down on the peasantry whom they exploited and often did not consider to be true Poles. After the disastrous defeat of the 1863 insurrection against the Russian Empire, however, both Polish noblemen and intellectuals looked to the folk to help bring about the resurrection of the Polish state. The identification of the peasantry as the soul of the nation soon emerged.