Book Review

Canada and the United States

The city of Chicago, to the present day, maintains its status as the most powerful magnetic attraction for Polish immigrants of any major urban area in America. The 1990 census reported a total of 9.3 million persons of Polish ancestry in the United States, ten percent of whom resided in the state of Illinois. The Chicago metropolitan area incorporated nearly 900,000 individuals of Polish ancestry, making Chicago Polonia the largest Polish settlement in the world outside of Warsaw, the capital of Poland. For this reason, numerous scholars in the twentieth century have attempted to describe the sometimes painful processes of assimilation experienced by Poles in Chicago and elsewhere. William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's multi-volume classic, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1919), was largely based on data which focused on the infrastructure of Polish fraternal organizations: namely, the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America (PRCU) and the Polish National Alliance (PNA). The intense competition between the Unionists and Alliancists was duely noted by Thomas and Znaniecki, as well as by Waclaw Kruszka, the priest-historian of the landmark Historya Polska w Ameryce (1905–1908), issued in a new four-volume translation by the Catholic University of America Press under the title Polish History in America to 1908 (1993–1999). During World War II and the immediate postwar era, the work of Miecislaus Haiman provided a bridge between the early classic accounts of Kruszka and Thomas and Znaniecki and the "ethnic persistence school" pioneered by Victor Greene in For God and Country: The Rise of Polish and Lithuanian Consciousness in America (1975). Greene's work was accompanied by Edward Kantowicz, Polish American Politics in Chicago, 1888–1940 (1975), this reviewer's Polish Catholics in Chicago, 1850–1920: A Religious History (1981), and Dominic Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Change: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1922 (1991). However, none of these histories covered the post-World War II experience of Cold War Chicago Polonia.

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