The Exile Mission. Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann

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      INTRODUCTION

      THROUGHOUT THE EIGHTEENTH AND nineteenth centuries, the Polish nation repeatedly fought first to retain and, later, to regain its independence after expansionist neighbors Prussia, Russia, and Austria had divided historically Polish territories among themselves in three successive partitions in 1772, 1793, and 1795. The two largest Polish national uprisings—the 1830 November Uprising and the 1863 January Uprising—failed under the overwhelming military might of the partitioning powers. But no oppressors could defeat the spirit of the Polish people, whose national anthem proclaimed, “Poland is not overcome yet, as long as we are still alive.” Even while continuing their armed resistance, Poles also struggled against the attempts of foreign administrations to make them forget who they were and to transform them into Germans or Russians. Poles consciously resisted the politics of denationalization and took special care to preserve and to develop Polish national culture, language, traditions, and history. Their dreams of an independent state became a reality in the Treaty of Versailles: Poland regained its independence as a new and democratic state in 1918, after 123 years of partition.

      The concept of the exile’s responsibility toward the homeland has roots as deep as the 1830 November Uprising, whose failure drove thousands of political émigrés out of Poland. Most of them settled in France, Great Britain, and Belgium, where they carried out activities intended to provide political and spiritual leadership to the nation. The Great Emigration (Wielka Emigracja), as it came to be known, produced important Polish intellectual and artistic legacies, weaving together the nation’s Romantic tradition and profound patriotic feelings. The poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, historian Joachim Lelewel, and political writer Maurycy Mochnacki belong to the pantheon of Polish arts and letters.¹

      Adam Mickiewicz’s contribution to the astounding output of the Wielka Emigracja included the creation of a vision and a metaphor that described the role of Polish exiles, whom he called “Pilgrims.” “The Polish Pilgrims are the soul of the Polish Nation,” he wrote, and the Pilgrim’s vow is “to journey to the holy land, the free country.” On this journey, the Pilgrims were to be guided by “star and compass”: “And the star of the Pilgrims is heavenly faith, and the compass is love of country.”² Mickiewicz’s vision and other political writings of the Great Emigration laid the foundation for the exile mission, an unwritten set of beliefs, goals, and responsibilities of Polish emigrants, which placed patriotic work for Poland at the center of their duties toward the homeland. For many decades thereafter, the exile mission guided and defined the experience of émigrés in different countries, including the United States. During and immediately after World War II, the exile mission again became a motivating force for the Polish political diaspora on many continents. It also rested at the heart of the relationship between postwar political refugees and later generations of Polish Americans.

      In the nineteenth century, waves of Polish immigrants to the United States had adopted the nationalistic ideology of struggle for a free Poland.³ American Polonia considered itself the “fourth partition of Poland,” whose duty was to speak for the subjugated nation.⁴ The process of nationalization of the peasant masses in America took place among “contentious organizational competition in Polish immigrant communities, immigrant parishes and schools, patriot priests, the immigrant press, and the intimidating encounter with the host society.”⁵ The debates over the role of Polish immigrants within their own community, as well as in relationship to the Roman Catholic Church and the homeland, were reflected in disputes between American Polonia’s two largest fraternals, the Polish Roman Catholic Union (PRCU, 1873) and the Polish National Alliance (PNA, 1880). An elite collection of political émigrés active in the Polish community in the United States played a particularly important role in building national consciousness among the economic immigrants. They responded to the 1879 appeal of Agaton Giller, a political exile after the January Uprising, to organize the immigrant masses for patriotic work for Poland and to persuade them to accept the exile mission. Through the activities of those early nationalists, Polish immigrants developed a strong and meaningful relationship with the homeland. Gradually, this political culture based on the ideas of exile, displacement, and injury translated itself into New World nationalism, expressed in ethnic popular culture and literature as well as in political allegiance and relationship to the American state and its policies.⁶

      Although some of the first Polish communities on American soil were established by political exiles after the failed insurrections of the nineteenth century, it was the later, more massive, and largely economic immigration that gave character to the Polish settlement in the United States.⁷ About 64.5 percent of Polish immigrants worked in agriculture prior to emigration. Once they arrived in America, almost 90 percent settled in urban industrial areas, performing unskilled labor in factories in the East and Northeast. Poles also found jobs in mining and smaller industries in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. Those who decided to work in agriculture settled mostly in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, or in smaller communities in the Connecticut River valley and upstate New York. More than 2 million immigrants left the Polish territories for America between 1871 and 1914.⁸ The Polish-American community, consisting of these immigrants and their American-born children, topped the 3 million mark by 1910.⁹

      Polish immigrants brought with them a traditional peasant culture based on religion (overwhelmingly Roman Catholic), a strong family structure, and a sense of community. Despite some sociological predictions of social disorganization resulting from the transition from a preindustrial agrarian setting to modern industrial life, Polonia communities survived and flourished in America. They were usually organized on the parish basis and centered СКАЧАТЬ