Customer Reviews

The Eagle and the Cross: A History of the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, 1873-2000 (Eastern European Monographs)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This review appeared in no. 3 (2004) issue of Nihil Novi: The Bulletin of the Kosciuszko Chair in Polish Studies, the University of Virginia:

John Radziłowski, The Eagle and the Cross: A History of the Polish Roman Catholic Union in America, 1873-2000 (Boulder, CO. and New York: East European Monographs and Columbia University Press, 2003).

For many years, the history of the Polish diaspora in America has been treated as a topic of minor importance. Polish scholars have tended to view immigrants as part of the history of other countries and no longer germane to the story of Poland. American scholars have also largely ignored Polonia, whether through unfamiliarity with the Polish language or ignorance.
Yet this immigration of millions of people from one country to the other had a major impact on both Poland and America. Millions left the Polish countryside during the crucial years of the late nineteenth century and significant numbers left after World War II and again in recent decades. But these immigrants did not merely affect Polish history by their absence. In America, many immigrants developed a heightened sense of Polishness. When Polish culture was restricted and even banned in the old country, many immigrants first heard Chopin, read Mickiewicz, or celebrated May 3rd in America. Many immigrants who came from impoverished rural areas were first exposed to the glories of Poland in Chicago, Buffalo, or Detroit rather than in Krakow, Warsaw, or Poznan.
In addition, Polish immigrants sent millions of dollars to rebuild Poland after both world wars. Tens of thousands joined a volunteer army during World War I to fight on behalf of Polish liberty. Having experienced democracy, freedom of speech, and the right to vote in America, immigrants transmitted those ideals back to their friends and family in their home villages through letters and visits. If today Poland is considered one of the most pro-American countries in Europe, this is a result of attitudes engendered by Polish immigrants.
In America, Poles shaped urban, industrial life. They were a driving force behind the development and expansion of major urban centers such as Chicago and Detroit. Poles played a crucial though often forgotten in role in America's first civil rights movement-the struggle for the rights of workers in the decades prior to World War II.
John Radziłowski's book, The Eagle and the Cross, is an effort to shed light on this often-overlooked history by focusing on the history of the first significant Polish organization in the New World, the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America (PRCUA). The Union, a fraternal insurance society founded in 1873, was based on the ideals of Catholic positivism and was in harmony with the intellectual and cultural trends that were prominent in Poland at that time. Many of its founders had their roots in a rejection of Romanticism. Instead, they sought to build up Poland's moral, economic, educational, and cultural resources through "organic work."
These ideas were adapted to the needs of Polish immigrants in America by the priests and sisters of Congregation of the Resurrection, founded in Paris by Polish expatriates in the 1830s. The Resurrectionists were engaged in a vigorous counterattack against socialism, materialism, and modernism. Through the PRCUA, they sought to keep Polish immigrants faithful to the Catholic Church, true to their Polish heritage, and to avoid the temptations and perils of the new industrial cities. As Radziłowski shows, by the 1920s the PRCUA developed a major and impressive range of activities that reached out to the Polish community in America but which also mobilized that community to aid the cause of Poland where needed.
The book breaks new ground in that it is the first English-language history of this important organization, which continues to play a key role in American Polonia to this day. Radziłowski argues that in the past, scholars of Polonia have focused more attention on secular, radical, or dissenter organizations, often overlooking groups like the PRCUA and generally taking for granted the importance of Catholicism (in all its complexity) in shaping the character of the Polish diaspora. It chronicles the range and impact of PRCUA activities and shows how connected American Polonia has been to both American and Polish history over the last century and a half. Intriguingly, the book suggests, but does not fully develop, a connection between the ideals of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Polish positivism and the philosophical roots of Pope John Paul II.
The Eagle and the Cross fills an important gap in our knowledge about Polish and American history and challenges scholars to rethink the role of the millions of people who helped build two nations.

"Polak to katolik" (A Pole is a Catholic) is a traditional aphorism, but in what sense is it true? This has never been an easy question in Polish history, esp. in the past when Poland was a much more ethnically heterogenous state. Neither was it an easy question for American Polonia, as the existence of the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America (PRCUA) and the Polish National Alliance (PNA) attest. But, as Dr. John Radziłowski shows in this sympathetic yet professionally critical history of the 131-year old PRCUA, the PRCUA/PNA divide was more than "simply a matter of one group that stressed Catholicism pitted against another group that stressed a broader nationalism" (p. 87). To reduce the difference between the PRCUA and the PNA to a "Catholic-versus-secular division" (p. 89) is facile. To the degree that it presumes what Richard Neuhaus calls "the naked public square" of contemporary radical secularism, it is also anachronistic.

The PRCUA/PNA difference lay at the level of ideals, emerging

from a longstanding division in Polish attitudes that had emerged by the end of the eighteenth century. . . . The Alliance emerged out of Poland's nineteenth-century Romantic tradition. . . . Romantics saw Poland as the 'Christ among nations,' and its problems were the result of the evil actions of its autocratic neighbors. . . . . [T]he Union . . . . came out of Poland's Positivist tradition. . . . They believed Poland had lost its independence due to its own weakness, and its problems could be best solved by building up the nation's internal resources" (pp. 89, 90).

For the PNA, priority belonged to naród, "all Poles and persons of Polish descent residing anywhere in the world" (p. 89). For the PRCUA, priority belonged to okolica, the local environment and neighborhood. The nationalists wanted to build from the top down, instilling ethnic consciousness in peasants who, prior to their emigration, probably never traveled far from their villages. The PRCUA wanted to build from the bottom up, starting with vigorous local communities centered on local parishes (p. 90).

In PNA eyes, at least at the start, American Polonia was ephemeral: "once Poland regained its independence, most Polish immigrants would return home" (p. 90). PRCUA more quickly recognized that American Polonia was something here-to-stay, and was thus more readily invested in building it up. Paradoxically, the PNA was the greater proponent of naturalization and assimilation, convinced that American Polonia could leverage their U.S. ties to the advantage of the Polish cause. The PRCUA, more fearful that a secularist, materialist and consumerist culture could lead Polish Catholics astray, sought to forge a comfortable Polonian subculture that would keep those evils at bay. How many people know, for example, that the PRCUA launched its own colonization program? In seeking to keep Polish villagers down on the farm, it promoted settlement in Polonian communities formed in Nebraska in the 1870s. That effort was not marginal: its impact could be felt a century later. "In 1980, Sherman County, Nebraska, had the highest percentage of Polish Americans of any county in the United States" (p. 64).

"Organic work" was the credo of Polish Positivism and the motto of PRCUA. Building up families and communities were the PRCUA's goals. Radziłowski discusses their varied contributions, from establishing a social safety net through insurance funds and death benefits for immigrants thrust into the cauldron of 19th century industrial America to camps and sports programs aimed at maintaining Polish cultural identity among youth to efforts to provide relief and reconstruction assistance to Poles and Poland following two world wars. Polish Americans played a key role in the struggle of America's labor unions, and PRCUA assisted its working class members both by demanding workplace social justice as well as providing assistance to strikers.

The changing demographics of Polonia, new patterns of immigration and the atomization of American life to the detriment of civil society and voluntary organizations all have their impact on PRCUA today. Radziłowski is aware of the problems faced by Polish-American organizational life, but he keeps perspective while sounding an upbeat note:

. . . [E]arlier generations faced far greater problems with far smaller resources. The PRCUA, today an organization with close to $300 million in insurance . . . began as a loose collection of church societies with no central administration, no funds, no death benefits, no headquarters, no library, no museum, and only a semi-official newspaper. The Polonia of that time was universally poor, poorly educated, politically impotent, and oppressed. The Polish homeland was little more than a colony of foreign powers. A century and a quarter later, the picture is completely different, like night and day" (p. 313-14).

Amply illustrated and well documented, this book deserves to be on the bookshelves of all Polish-Americans. The photographs and cartoon sketches truly prove that "a picture is worth a thousand words." A special chapter is dedicated to the unappreciated "Smithsonian" of American Polonia, the Polish Museum of America. As always, Radziłowski anchors the history of PRCUA against the larger backdrop of the histories of American Polonia, Poland, and America. Highly recommended.