The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans

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      While working in the Grand Rapids library collecting data for this book, I wrote out a check for photocopying one day, and the librarian who had been helping me smiled and said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were an Eerdmans.” In Grand Rapids, home of Eerdmans Publishing Company, the name identifies me. It places me both in an elite circle of prominent names and in the Dutch ethnic community—and class and ethnicity overlap. I smiled at the comment, ego-pleased to be identified, but self-conscious of the fact that my class and ethnic heritage were both mislabeled. While distant bloodlines connect me to the publishing company (my great-grandfather was the cousin of William B. Eerdmans), my lived experiences do not. I tell him, “Yeah, I’m an Erdmans, but I come from the Polish side of the family that no one mentions.” He didn’t laugh.

      In the early twentieth century, the Yankee Protestants and Dutch Calvinists were the industrial, political, and moral leaders of Grand Rapids. Poles and other new immigrants (e.g., Lithuanians and Italians) occupied the lower class rungs.⁴ The Poles were paid less than their Dutch co-workers, they were politically underrepresented, and they were morally criticized for their more unrestrained leisure activities.⁵

      This all changed, however, by midcentury. With immigration sharply curtailed, the community became mostly second- and third-generation Americans of Polish descent. That descent was often hidden, as in the case of the first Polish-American mayor, Stanley (Dyszkiewicz) Davis, elected in 1953. Class mobility accompanied cultural assimilation and the practices and homes of the professional middle class outgrew the Polish West Side. Moreover, with the strong post–World War II economy and the presence of the automobile industry and its labor union, the United Automobile Workers, many Polish Americans occupied secure working-class positions. While the Dutch remained the cultural, religious, and intellectual leaders (Calvin College and Hope College, both Calvinist institutions, are the most prominent local schools), Polish Americans were moving on up.

      The only discrimination the Grasinski Girls identified occurred more than forty years ago and was linked to their religious identity. In Grand Rapids, this identity is bundled with ethnic identity, so that we speak of Polish Catholics and Dutch Calvinists. Fran recalls that, during the Depression years, “We had a hard time finding [a place to] rent because, uh, because we were Catholic. I mean, there were a lot of people against the Catholics at that time.” Angel had the most explicit examples of discrimination. One of the reasons she was conscious of them was because she moved through Grand Rapids under the cover of her husband’s Dutch surname. She could then see people treat her differently when they found out she wasn’t Christian Reform or Dutch, and, as she said earlier, she made it clear she was not.

      We were discriminated against twice. The first place was when we got married. We wanted to rent a home from a lady, and it said, “Christian couple wanted.” And we are Christian, we’re Catholic. And everything was fine and dandy, she was going to rent it to us, and then Dad asked her where the nearest Catholic Church was. And just like that, she looked at us and said, “You’re not Christian, you’re Catholic. I would never rent to you.” I said, “Okay.” I guess I didn’t want to live in a place where somebody didn’t want me.

      A second, similar instance occurred when they tried to buy a home in a predominantly Dutch suburb.

      Forty years ago, ethnic identity was still a basis for ranking in Grand Rapids, but it was linked to religious identity. Even so, the discrimination they experienced was mild and infrequent; those were the only examples that any of the five sisters reported. By the time they married and bought houses in the suburbs, the Grasinski Girls were structurally and culturally assimilated, as were most third- and fourth-generation European Americans. This assimilation, along with the increased presence of blacks and Latinos in the city, made race the more salient basis for delineation of neighborhoods, friendships, and jobs.

      While Poles were subject to prejudice, discrimination, and racist beliefs of inferiority in the early part of the twentieth century, by midcentury they had been racialized into the dominant white category.⁶ As early as the 1960s, census reports show that on measures of median school years completed and family income, Polish Americans were doing as well as other ethnic groups of European ancestry and better than nonwhite groups. Polish Americans were still more likely to be found in working-class positions, however, and their aggregate income levels were influenced more by unionized high-wage blue-collar positions than by a significant movement into the white-collar middle class. While there has always been a Polish-American middle class, the occupational mobility of Polish Americans was stunted until the 1970s, when the sons and daughters of the blue-collar aristocracy began graduating from college.⁷ By the 1980s, however, Polish Americans were as similar to other European descendants on indicators of income, occupation, and education as they were distinguishable from the descendants of African slaves and Latin American immigrants.⁸

      Despite these indicators of parity, some scholars continue to argue that Polish Americans are a discriminated group, underrepresented in corporate, political, academic, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.⁹ And, in fact, there is evidence that Polish Americans are still negatively stereotyped as dumb, racist, and uncultured.¹⁰ Antidefamation groups continue to fight the stereotypes perpetuated in joke books, television sitcoms, advertisements, and documentaries.¹¹ While there is some evidence that Polish Americans experience discrimination, this was not the case for the Grasinski Girls.

      The Grasinski Girls did hear Polish jokes, which they brushed aside with self-confidence. Angel said, “Once in a while, somebody’d say a Polish joke, but you can make it Polish or Dutch; I don’t get offended by that. Wherever I’ve worked, I’ve always managed to convince them that I was much smarter than they were.” I laughed when she said this. “No! I’m not kidding you!” she responded. I found this somewhat incredible. Polish-American antidefamation organizations actively fight the Polish joke, scholars write about the problems of the Polish joke, and this Polish-American woman hears Polish jokes and it does not bother her because she believes she is smarter than the joke tellers. She sees no need to repeat Stanley Kowalski’s defensive moan, “I am not a Polack . . . I am a hundred percent American!” Angel’s American status is not threatened by her Polish ancestry because, despite the lingering jokes, her family and most Polish Americans have become secure in their identity as Americans. Their acceptance as Americans gives them the confidence to more openly embrace their Polish heritage. Since the 1970s, the stigma of Polishness has given way to a “Kiss-me-I’m-Polish” attitude. Some of the factors accounting for this overt ethnic pride include the government-supported policy of multiculturalism, the identity movements of the 1960s, as well as the election of a Polish pope in 1978 and the international attention on the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s.¹²

      The valuation of their ethnic heritage comes in part from their reference group, their co-ethnics. Except for Mari, each of the Grasinski Girls, while she was a “Grasinski,” lived in Polish-American communities where their ethnicity was valued. As Angel explains, “Growing up in this community of Polish Catholic people, you have gotten all your self-esteem, so by the time you’re grown up, I mean, if somebody wants to say something about Polish, you don’t care, because your self-esteem, it’s already high. Like I said, when we went to high school, we were always looked up to because we were the Polish girls, you know, the pretty girls and smart and respectful. So that sort of validated it.” When they left the safe haven of the Polish neighborhoods they also left the mark of their stigma, their Polish names, behind. The two sisters who kept their Polish identifiers, Caroline Matecki and Nadine Grasinski, also remained within Polish communities—Caroline in Hilliards and Nadine with the Polish Felician Order of nuns. The others, as they moved into non-Polish neighborhoods, did so with non-Polish married names, which gave them the choice of whether and when to reveal their ethnic identity. For European Americans, the surname is a patent ethnic marker which becomes the lightning rod for prejudice and discrimination. Without their Polish maiden names (and by marrying men without Polish surnames), they decreased their chances of experiencing discrimination.¹³

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