Abstract
Over the past one hundred years and more, Polish immigration to the United States has made up, by far, the largest of all such population movements from Eastern and East-central Europe to this country. The greatest number of immigrants entered between the 1870s and 1914 and, together, they created a dense network of church, fraternal, cultural, and social institutions and associations that eventually came to be known as the Polonia, or Polish American community. Into this community arrived smaller but significant later migrations of Poles in the years between World Wars I and II (1918 to 1939), after World War II, from 1945 into the 1960s, and, most recently, from the 1970s on. The result of these movements was a diverse Polish American population that has come to number at least nine to ten million in all. Indeed, throughout America’s history over the past century, the Polish population in the United States has comprised at least half of all those persons originating from Eastern and East-central Europe.
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Notes
Donald E. Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours: Polish American Efforts on Poland’s Behalf, 1863–1991 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1991), 20–72
Andrzej Brozek, Polish Americans 1854–1939 (Warsaw: Interpress, 1985).
Richard C. Lukas, The Strange Allies: The United States and Poland, 1941–1945 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 107–27
In Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1942–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 283–84.
James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970)
Frank Friedel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendesvous with Destiny (New York: Little Brown, 1990)
Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007).
On the tragic story of the murder of more than 10,000 Polish officers on Stalin’s orders, see Janusz Zawodny, Death in the Forest (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1962).
Robert Szymczak, “Oskar Lange, Polonia, and the Polish-Soviet Dilemma in World War II,” The Polish Review 40, no. 1 (1995): 2–38
Piotr S. Wandycz, The United States and Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 283–84
The most severe recent criticism of Roosevelt’s failure to pressure Stalin to support the Poles in Warsaw is that of Norman Davies, Rising ‘44 (New York: Mac-Millan, 2003), 619–37
Peter Irons, “’The Test is Poland’: Polish Americans and the Origins of the Cold War,” Polish American Studies 30, no. 2 (1973): 5–65.
Edward Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland (New York: Wiley, 1958), 324.
Jan Karski, The Great Powers and Poland, 1919–1945: From Versailles to Yalta (New York: University Press of America, 1985), 544–51
Rozmarek’s criticisms of UNRRA are detailed in Polish in the pages of an official history of the Polish National Alliance. See Adam Olszewski, Historia Zwiazku Narodowego Polskiego, vol. 6 (Chicago: Alliance Printers and Publishers, 1967), 85–140
On the elections in Poland, see Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 131. Mikolajczyk declared his party had won as much as 90 percent of the popular vote. The regime gave 10.3 percent to his PSL. On the amazing falsification of the results, see Ewa Toranska’s interview of Jakub Berman, the top Polish Stalinist figure in Poland at the time, in Them: Stalin’s Polish Puppets (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1987), 275–81.
George F. Kennan was one of many who thought the speech went too far in its sweep. However, and significantly, in his memoir, he lamented his own failure to even mention Soviet control of Eastern Europe in his celebrated 1947 Foreign Affairs article, which became identified with the U.S. containment policy of the Soviet Union. See George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), 333–41
Robert D. Ubriaco Jr., “Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: Cold War Political Culture, Polish American Politics, the Truman Doctrine, and the Victory Thesis,” The Polish Review 51, nos. 3–4 (2006): 273.
Ubriaco, “Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due,” 278; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 683–84
Robert Szymczak, “A Matter of Honor: Polonia and the Congressional Investigation of the Katyn Forest Massacre,” Polish American Studies 41, no. 1 (1984): 25–65.
Kennedy’s remarks to the fifth national convention of the Polish American Congress in Chicago on October 1, 1960, are in Jan Wszelaki, ed., John F. Kennedy and Poland (New York: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, 1964), 89–101
Michael O’Brien, John F. Kennedy: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005), 361–63.
Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004)
Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Old and New Polonias: Tensions within an Ethnic Community,” Polish American Studies, 38, no. 2 (1981): 55–83.
Data on the Polish vote in all presidential elections from 1944 to 1980 is cited in Donald Pienkos, “Polish-American Ethnicity in the Political Life of the United States” in America’s Ethnic Politics, ed. Joseph Roucek and Bernard Eisenberg (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 287.
Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955).
Carter carried the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Maryland for 128 of the 297 electoral votes he won. Ford won only his home state of Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois for 72 electoral votes. On the impact of Ford’s gaffe, see Thomas De Frank, Write It When I’m Gone: Remarkable Off-The-Record Conversations With Gerald R. Ford (New York: Putnam, 2007), 54–55
Robert Novak, Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years of Reporting in Washington (New York: Crown Forum, 2007), 275–77
Reagan won nine of the ten most heavily Polish states in 1980, losing only in Maryland to Carter. He won all ten in 1984. George H. W. Bush carried seven of the ten most heavily Polish states in 1988 in winning the Electoral College vote 426–111. Only Massachusetts, the home state of his opponent, New York, and Wisconsin went to the Democratic Party candidate. Polish American voting in the three Reagan-era elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988, are based on unpublished estimates by the author and those of John Kromkowski of the Catholic University of America. See also Donald E. Pienkos, “Polish Americans in Congressional Politics: Assets and Constraints,” The Polish Review 48, no. 2 (2003): 185–94.
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© 2009 Ieva Zake
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Pienkos, D. (2009). The Polish American Congress, Polish Americans, and the Politics of Anti-Communism. In: Zake, I. (eds) Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S.. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621596_2
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