John Radzilowski

Fecund Newcomers or Dying Ethnics? Demographic Approaches to the History of Polish and Italian Immigrants and Their Children in the United States, 1880 to 1980

INTRODUCTION

THE MASSIVE WAVE OF immigration to the United States from east-central and southern Europe between 1880 and 1924 remains one of the most significant migration events in American history. The size of this migration was well understood even by contemporaries. However, interest in immigrant demography after the initial act of immigration has been infrequent, if not wholly lacking. This has limited our understanding of the communities formed out of this migration and their impact on U.S. history.

This is particularly unfortunate as the large-scale immigration from east-central and southern Europe created very special demographic conditions that not only have shaped the nature of the communities created by this migration but have played a major role in forming contemporary and later scholarly perspectives on those communities. Immigrants from east-central and southern Europe arrived in the United States largely as young laborers, either unmarried or recently married. Unlike immigration from Ireland or Germany, immigration from east-central and southern Europe occurred very intensively within a fairly short period of time. As a result, these immigrants had large numbers of children within the span of a few decades after arriving in the New World. This immigrant "baby boom," which peaked roughly in the years 1915–25, has been largely overlooked by scholars and yet represents an important explanatory tool for understanding the impact of this period of immigration on subsequent U.S. history.

Efforts to understand what were once called "new immigrants" generally have emphasized cultural explanations, traditionally revolving around the question of the degree to which immigrants and their children "assimilated" into American culture and society or retained their ethnicity.¹ Most recently, this line of inquiry has tended to focus on the degree to which European immigrants and their children were considered (or considered themselves) "white."²

Views of immigrants at the time of their arrival tended to see the massive wave of newcomers as a threat to the American way of life. A wide variety of books and articles raised alarms that the new immigrants were "out-breeding" old-stock Americans and those with preferred ethnic pedigrees in northern and western Europe. In the writing of the time, views of the newcomers had distinct racial, biological, and sexual overtones. Edna Ferber, in her novel American Beauty (1931), contrasted the crude sexual energy of Polish immigrant men with the weakness of the New England Yankees: "These men were very male, too. ... You saw the sinews rippling beneath the cheap stuff of their sweaty shirts. Far, far too heady a draught for the digestion of this timorous New England remnant of a dying people. For the remaining native men were stringly of withers, lean shanked, of vinegar blood, and hard wrung."³

In the decades following World War II, this image of vigorous, young (though racially threatening) immigrants was forgotten, replaced with the image of ethnic communities that were assimilating and/or dying out. They were viewed as communities in which only the old retained significant traces of ethnicity. This was a view countered in the late 1960s and 1970s by proponents of the "new ethnicity."⁴

These two contrasting opinions, however, are themselves the result of observers viewing two different sides of a peculiar demographic artifact: the massive though forgotten baby boom among southern and east-central European immigrants in the early decades of the twentieth century. To consider this baby boom and its implications for the study of immigration, scholars could, for example, track the birthrates of four of the largest European immigrant groups, two from western Europe (Irish and Germans) and two from east-central and southern Europe (Poles and Italians), comparing them to the rates for other groups.

THE FORGOTTEN BABY BOOM

In 1960 the U.S. census analyzed the age of the so-called foreign-stock population—that is, immigrants and their U.S.–born children. The survey showed that children of immigrants were significantly older on average than the population as a whole.⁵Figure 1 illustrates that the median age of the U.S. population was 29.5 years, whereas the median age of the children of immigrants was significantly higher. There was also a disparity between immigrant groups from western and northern Europe and those from east-central and southern Europe. Italians and Poles had median ages of 38.6 and 41.3 respectively, while the median age of second-generation Germans was 56.6 and 52.2 for Irish.

Figure 1. Median Age of Select Foreign Stock Groups versus U.S. Median Age, 1960.

This comparatively old population among eastern and southern European Americans in 1960 was the result of a very high number of births in the period between 1906 and 1935. Figure 2 tracks the number of people born in each decade who were alive in 1960 among the four groups in comparison with the overall U.S. populations. The most notable feature is the dramatic spike in births among Italians and Poles in this thirty-year period. Of all Polish Americans alive in 1960, more than one-third were born between 1916 and 1925. One-quarter were born between 1906 and 1915. Among Italians, 30 percent were born in the period 1916–25 and 21 percent in the decade before and the decade after this peak, respectively. Interestingly, a similar though less dramatic peak among Germans and Irish can be observed in the period 1886–1905.

Figure 2. Decades of Birth of Children of Immigrants versus Overall U.S., 1960.

The peak in births among Polish and Italian immigrants coincides closely with the peak years of immigration to the United States where the dominant stream of newcomers was from east-central and southern Europe. Arrivals to the United States increased sharply after 1900 and continued at high levels until the start of World War I in 1914. The peak year of immigration was 1907, when about 1.3 million immigrants arrived on America's shores.⁶ Thus, within a decade of their arrival in the United States, immigrants from east-central and southern Europe began to have very large families.

It might be argued that the 1960 census analysis is unfairly skewed against the children of the earlier wave of immigrants, since the average life expectancy of a person born in 1900 was less than fifty years.⁷ However, we can also turn to other bodies of evidence to confirm the size and nature of this baby boom.

One such approach is to examine birthrates among particular immigrant groups. The high number of children being born to immigrant women was of particular concern to a variety of groups after 1900, including social reformers, advocates of immigration restrictions, and the growing eugenics movement.⁸ In 1909 the Dillingham Commission of the U.S Congress was charged with investigating immigration with an eye toward restriction and devoted one of its volumes of research to immigrant birthrates. Titling its volume The Fecundity of Immigrant Women, the commission's researchers used childbirth statistics from the 1900 census for immigrant women in Rhode Island, Ohio, and Minnesota.⁹

Table 1 compares the major groups under consideration. The figures indicate that Italian and, especially, Polish women were having large families already by 1900 in comparison to women who were born in the United States of native-born parents. Although rural women overall had more children, among Polish women in rural Minnesota, almost three-quarters reported bearing more than five children. Figures for Italian women are much more in line with their Irish and German counterparts, although Italian women generally had more children per year of marriage than either Irish or German women. This resulted in communities where half the population was below the age of sixteen.¹⁰ By 1910 the number of children of Polish immigrants exceeded the number of actual immigrants.¹¹Table 1 indicates that the nativist fear of immigrant birthrates had some factual basis and was not simply the result of feverish race prejudice.

Table 1. Childbearing among Married Native White and First-Generation Immigrant Women, Rhode Island, Ohio, and Minnesota, 1900

Rhode Island

	Percentage bearing no children	Percentage Bearing +5 children	Average number of children	Average years married per child borne

Native white of native parentage	17.5	9.2	2.0	5.6
Irish	7.6	42.1	3.7	2.9
German	9.5	24.9	3.0	3.5
Italian	5.1	40.8	3.8	2.8

Cleveland, Ohio

	Percentage bearing no children	Percentage Bearing +5 children	Average number of children	Average years married per child borne

Native white of native parentage	15.2	6.3	1.6	5.2
Irish	8.6	40.9	3.5	2.8
German	4.7	36.7	3.5	2.9
Italian	4.9	33.9	3.4	2.6
Polish	2.3	60.5	4.4	2.2

48 Rural Counties, Ohio

	Percentage bearing no children	Percentage Bearing +5 children	Average number of children	Average years married per child borne

Native white of native parentage	5.7	16.8	3.4	4.1
Irish	5.0	37.4	4.6	3.1
German	3.8	36.5	4.7	3.0
Italian	4.5	31.4	4.5	3.0
Polish	2.7	49.6	5.6	2.5

Minneapolis, Minnesota

	Percentage bearing no children	Percentage Bearing +5 children	Average number of children	Average years married per child borne

Native white of native parentage	12.7	5.9	2.4	5.7
Irish	7.3	35.7	4.1	3.1
German	5.4	24.0	4.0	3.5
Polish	9.7	54.8	5.4	2.6

21 Rural Counties, Minnesota

	Percentage bearing no children	Percentage Bearing +5 children	Average number of children	Average years married per child borne

Native white of native parentage	5.1	14.9	3.4	4.2
Irish	7.2	39.2	4.9	2.9
German	1.8	50.5	5.2	2.7
Polish	1.7	73.9	6.7	2.1

Source: U.S. Immigration Commission, Fecundity of Immigrant Women, 61st Cong., 3rd sess. (Washington, DC, 1909). The category of women bearing no children was for women under age 45 married 10–19 years. For an explanation of the methodology, see the introduction to this volume of the Commission's reports.

The figures from 1900, however, represent only the start of significant immigration from east-central and southern Europe. Further evidence of the baby boom among immigrants from these regions can be found by sampling particular ethnic communities. To further illustrate how the immigrant baby boom played out on the local level, Table 2 provides examples of baptism and school enrollment from parish jubilee books of east-central and southern European communities.¹²

Table 2. Baptisms and School Enrollments in Selected East European Immigrant Church Parishes, 1900–40

Baptism

Name	Ethnicity	Location	Founded	1900	1905	1910	1915	1920	1925	1930	1935	1940	Peak Year	Peak Amt

St. Joseph	Slovenian	Joliet, IL	1891	149	194	181	199	150	151	86	68	80	1915	199
St. Mary	Polish	Green Bay, WI	1898	21	66	62	71	64	52	45	24	42	1911	68
St. Joseph*	Polish	Norwich, CT	1904	n/a	95	159	201	197	106	67	59	41	1917	260
St. Ladislaus	Polish	Chicago, IL	1914	n/a	n/a	n/a	16	36	57	54	45	40	1927	79
St. Wenceslaus	Polish	Chicago, IL	1912	n/a	n/a	n/a	112	144	134	118	65	84	1926	140
St. Florian	Polish	Hamtramck, MI	1908	n/a	n/a	74	871	1119	476	294	249	360	1917	1492
St. Stanislaus Kostka	Polish	Brooklyn, NY	1896	367	629	690	736	352	267	186	165	204	1908	917
Holy Cross	Polish	Minneapolis, MN	1886	109	186	280	429	146	140	73	64	105	1914	438

School Enrollment

Name	Ethnicity	Location	Founded	1900	1905	1910	1915	1920	1925	1930	1935	1940	Peak Year	Peak Amt

St. Joseph	Slovenian	Joliet, IL	1896	199	218	480	641	692	802	831	659	513	1929	873
St. Laurence	Polish	Philadelphia, PA	1882	303	369	365	496	640	932	822	510	342	1928	957
St. Stanislaus B & M	Polish	New York, NY	1908	n/a	n/a	375	584	900	955	868	589	378	1922	1000
Most Holy Rosary	Italian	Perth Amboy, NJ	1925	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	152	n/a	219	205	1934	229
St. Florian	Polish	Hamtramck, MI	1911	n/a	n/a	n/a	876	2546	2553	2415	1677	1234	1924	2853
Holy Trinity	Polish	Utica, NY	1899	n/a	220	420	759	1022	1368	1083	645	517	1924	1393

*Counts births rather than baptisms

For all east-central and southern European parishes for which statistics were readily available, baptisms peaked within the same period identified by the census as the peak period of births. In the case of Holy Trinity parish in Utica, New York, a Polish Roman Catholic parish, baptisms peaked in 1910 at about 450. This peak occurred two years after the parish's peak year for marriages, 1908.¹³ As might be expected for most of the parishes surveyed, school enrollments peaked slightly later. In the 1930s, both baptisms and school enrollments drop off, as might be predicted from Figure 2.

THE BABY BOOM AND THE SHAPE OF IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES

Births among Poles and Italians in the United States increased dramatically in the two decades after 1905. In the sample taken by the census in 1960, births among Poles increased more than 2.75 times from the decade 1896–1905 to the decade 1906–15 and more than 3.1 times among Italians. The Polish baby boom occurred slightly earlier than the Italian boom, but the Italian was slightly more sustained.

Equally significant as the rise in births in the period 1906–25 is the sharp decline thereafter (see Figure 3). Although the number of U.S. births declined slightly among nearly all groups in the 1930s and early 1940s, the drop-off among east-central and southern Europeans was nearly as dramatic as the previous baby boom had been. The generation of immigrants that had created the baby boom in the period 1906–25 began to pass out of the prime childbearing years by the 1930s.

Figure 3. Decades of Birth of Children of Immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland, 1960.

The peculiar demography of these communities was the result of mass emigration from east-central and southern Europe that affected mainly people of childbearing age—mostly the young—and that occurred within a relatively compact period of time and was halted artificially by the immigration restrictions of 1924. (German or Irish immigration, by contrast, was more consistent over the course of period from the 1840s to the 1920s but without the dramatic peaks seen among groups such as Poles and Italians.) This demography shaped southern and east-central ethnic communities in the United States in important ways.

The large number of young people in these communities created a well-defined second generation whose collective experiences were quite distinct from those of their immigrant parents. There was little overlap between the generations, contrary to what would have been the case had immigration occurred more gradually over a longer period of time. Unlike their parents, who came from relatively diverse regional and local backgrounds, this large cohort of the children of the immigrants came of age in an American context. This second generation has often been overlooked by scholars of these communities.¹⁴ At the same time, it has been recognized that ethnic culture and the markers of that culture underwent profound change, in response both to the changing American context of the 1920s and 1930s and to the changing internal dynamics of the ethnic groups' own communities. Among those internal dynamics, scholars must now consider the impact of demography.

One of the most obvious responses to the large number of young people in their own communities was the development of a vast array of ethnic youth organizations and activities beginning in the 1920s. These ranged from scholarship programs to baseball leagues to summer camps to folk dance and scouting groups. Ethnic fraternal organizations led the way, devoting pages of their newspapers to youth concerns, creating insurance policies for the children of immigrants, and directly sponsoring youth activities.¹⁵ To one extent or another, the leadership of each immigrant community affected by the baby boom recognized some form of "youth problem"—namely, large numbers of young people whose connections to the ancestral culture (or its diaspora mutation) were often tenuous and whose loyalty to the new community organizations created in their parents' generation was up for grabs.

One result of too many ethnic youth concentrated in relatively new immigrant neighborhoods without strong community structures was a spike in crime and gang activity. As the children of immigrants entered the ages when criminal and deviant activity reaches its peak, many observers—both internal and external—felt that the immigrant communities were spiraling out of control.¹⁶ By the 1920s, there were nearly 150 Polish street gangs in the city of Chicago, the largest number of any ethnic group. The next most numerous gangs in Chicago were Italian (48), Irish (75), and African American (63).¹⁷ In Detroit and Chicago, Polish youth were the largest single group of inmates in the juvenile justice system.¹⁸

Ethnic street gangs were based in neighborhoods and made up of boys between the ages of eight and perhaps twenty. Some of the gangs identified by University of Chicago researchers were merely groups of boys who hung around with each other, played sports, and sometimes engaged in petty mischief or theft.¹⁹ Others had a more dangerous nature. One University of Chicago field researcher reported that

A very noticeable development in the summer months have been [sic] the universality of boys' gangs in the segregated residential areas [i.e., ethnic neighborhoods]. Every community where there are any considerable number of children living in somewhat congested community has the boys' gangs developed [sic]. These appear to flourish most often during evening hours. These gangs are often found on the street at relatively late hours. Their danger to indivuduals [sic] and to communities is very apparent.²⁰

Crime remained a significant problem in urban immigrant communities from the 1910s through the early 1930s. By the late 1930s a large proportion of the children of the immigrant baby boom began to age out of the high crime years (ages thirteen to seventeen)

THE 1940s AND BEYOND

When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the high number of births among east-central and southern European immigrants in the early and mid-1920s meant that their children fell into the age cohorts most likely to see military service (men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six). The result was extremely high rates of service among east-central and southern Europeans. A survey taken in the spring of 1944 among Polish-American parishes revealed that in a few communities, an astonishing 40 percent of all parish members were in service.²¹ Although similar contemporary surveys do not exist for other east-central and southern European groups, there is little reason to doubt that similar high rates of service were found among those groups as well.

The 1980 U.S. census provides an excellent benchmark date for examining veteran status among various groups, since it was the first census to include the ancestry self-identification question with the largest possible number of living World War II veterans. Table 3 demonstrates that among Poles and Italians, World War II veterans made up half or more of all veterans within those groups. World War II veterans also made up a larger percent of the overall community among these two groups than in the other selected groups—nearly 10 percent in the case of Polish Americans. A similar survey conducted on Ukrainian-American veterans in the 2000 census suggests that this profile is shared by the many smaller east-central and southern European groups and not confined to Poles and Italians.²² Although the Census Bureau does not report data from Jewish Americans—the majority of whom had roots in the same period of mass immigration—there is no reason to suggest that the Jewish pattern of military service in World War II would vary substantially from other east-central and southern European ethnic groups.

Table 3. World War II Veterans in Selected Groups, 19801

	Veterans as a Percent of All Males Age 16+	WWII and WWII/Korean Veterans	WWII Vets as a Percent of Total Population	WWII Vets as a Percent. of All Veterans

Overall U.S.	34.2	11,092,169	4.8	40.5
African American	25.6	669,760	2.5	32.3
German American	37.3	1,126,599	6.2	39.3
Irish American	40.5	746,302	7.2	43.5
Italian American	37.4	574,758	8.3	50.7
Polish American	41.6	368,541	9.7	52.6

11980 Census of the Population. Vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population, Chapter C: General Social and Economic Characteristics. Part 1, United States Summary (Washington, DC, 1983), tables 85, 179. This table combines the categories of World War II veterans and veterans who served in both World War II and Korea, which the census tabulated separately.

The large generation of the children of the east-central and southern European immigrants who arrived before 1924 had a powerful common experience during the war years. The war affected their families and communities in critical ways that deserve further research. This was especially true of those born in the years after 1920, who were the most likely to experience military service. Those born prior to 1921 were more likely to experience the war through the service of younger relatives and by work in war-related industries. These young people had important, formative experiences away from family, church, and community that emphasized a common American identity rather than a purely ethnic one and further inculcated them with a strong sense of patriotism. Beyond this, however, it is difficult to assess more fully the war's impact on the life courses of this large cohort of white ethnics without further research.²³

Little in-depth research has been conducted on postwar east-central and southern European ethnic communities.²⁴ The demographic profile of these groups suggests the need for additional research that transcends both the dominant paradigm of "whiteness" and the old assimilation versus retention dichotomy. The demography and age structure of an ethnic group matters, and thus east-central and southern Europeans cannot be understood as simply conforming to a paradigm that sees all white ethnics as the same or similar. In what ways did demography affect how east-central and southern Europeans in post-World War II America perceived their own evolving ethnic and racial identity, the position of their communities on a changing urban landscape, and their interaction with larger economic and political forces, including the in-migration of new (and by then younger) racial and ethnic minorities?

CONCLUSIONS

Demography provides a framework in which to understand the cultural, economic, and social developments surrounding communities created from the massive migration from east-central and southern Europe to the United States prior to the 1924 change in immigration laws. Their processes of cultural change and organizational restructuring were directly affected by their unique demographic patterns. Those patterns differed sharply from older immigrant communities and from the American mainstream. The initial immigrant generation created institutions and cultural markers that were adapted to the American milieu. As the massive baby boom in these communities came of age, however, it forced a reordering of cultural norms and institutional priorities. Our understanding of this process remains limited. How did the "baby boom" of second-generation ethnics, which came of age during the 1920s and 1930s and had formative experiences during the war years, force them to imagine their ethnic and racial identity anew in an American context that was itself undergoing rapid change?

The demography of the "new immigrants" should also force us to consider how scholars of immigration have traditionally conceptualized immigrant communities. The notion of immigrant generations as clear and distinct cohorts was originally developed with so-called new immigration clearly in mind. Yet, this immigration wave occurred within a relatively short time period compared to the older immigration from western and northern Europe and, perhaps, the more recent wave of immigration from Latin America and Asia. As we have seen, this brief but intense wave of newcomers created unique demographic characteristics that do not transfer readily as a model to earlier immigrants and constitute conditions that may never be repeated in U.S. history. In this respect the 1924 restriction on immigration from east-central and southern Europe had especially profound effects on European ethnic communities from those areas, creating conditions that were quite unlike those of other groups before or since.

Moreover, the unique demographic profile has influenced both the historiography and the popular perceptions of this immigrant wave in ways that scholars and other observers have largely failed to recognize. In light of the forgotten baby boom among southern and east-central European immigrants, the observations of concerned nativists early in the twentieth century, as well as the views of proponents of various scholarly approaches, from the original assimilation theory to the "new ethnicity" to the "whiteness" paradigm, call to mind the story of the wise men and the elephant in which the blindfolded sages each touch a different part of the elephant and come to quite different conclusions about its nature.

NOTES

^1. See, for example, Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston, 1951); Rudolph J. Vecoli, "Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted," Journal of American History 51, no. 3 (December 1964): 404–17.

^2. See, for example, Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1996); David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Become White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York, 2005).

^3. Edna Ferber, American Beauty, 69, quoted in Stanislaus A. Blejwas, "Puritans and Poles: The New England Literary Image of the Polish Peasant Immigrant," Polish American Studies 42, no. 2 (Autumn 1985): 46–88. There is a body of recent research related to early-twentieth-century perceptions of immigrants. See, for example, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign People at Home and Abroad (New York, 2000); John Radzilowski, "Views of Polish Peasants in Europe and the United States, 1890s–1930s," Polish Review 47, no. 4 (2002): 393–406.

^4. See Dirk Hoerder, "Cultural Retention of Acculturation: The Current Debate on Multiculturalism in Historical Perspective," in Ethnicity. Culture. City. Polish Americans in the U.S.A.: Cultural Aspects of Urban Life, 1870–1950, in Comparative Perspective, ed. T. Gladsky et al. (Warsaw, 1998), 29–49.

^5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Age of the Foreign Stock by Country of Origin: 1960," 1960 Census of the Population: Supplementary Reports, PC(S1)-47, July 28, 1965 (hereafter "Age of the Foreign Stock"). I have found no effort to analyze the results of this report in light of the literature on immigration, though the census has available some statistical reports on the history of the foreign-born population. See Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon, "Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States: 1850–1990," http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/twps0029.html.

^6. Philip Taylor, Distant Magnet: European Immigration to the USA (New York, 1971), 103. See also Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York, 1990), 188–89.

^7. See National Center for Health Statistics, Health, United States, 2004 (Hyattsville, MD, 2004), Table 27, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus04trend.pdf#027.

^8. On the latter, see Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York, 2003).

^9. The number of Poles in Rhode Island and the number of Italians in Minnesota were not large enough in 1900 to be calculated separately and are thus not included.

^10. John Radzilowski, "Hidden Cosmos: The Life Worlds of Polish Immigrants in Two Minnesota Communities, 1875–1925," (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 1999), 152–55, 194, 200–01; idem, Out on the Wind: Poles and Danes in Lincoln County, Minnesota, 1880–1905 (Marshall, MN, 1992), 53.

^11. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, taken in the Year 1910. Vol. 1: Population: General Report and Analysis (Washington, DC, 1913), 968–69.

^12. Parish histories only rarely provide this type of statistic. The histories chosen for Table 2 were chosen by looking though all such histories in the collection of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Thanks are extended to the staff for allowing me to browse the stacks. Works used are Most Holy Rosary Parish, Perth Amboy, N.J., Golden Anniversary, 1908–1925 (Perth Amboy, NJ, 1958); St. Stanislaus Kostka, Brooklyn, Greenpoint, New York (New York, 1972); Golden Anniversary, St. Ladislaus Parish, 1914–1964 (Chicago, 1964); St. Wenceslaus Parish, Golden Jubilee, 1912–1962 (Chicago, 1962); Louis L. Makulec, Church of St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr on East Seventh Street in New York City, 1874–1954 (New York, 1954); Rev. Constantine Klukowski, History of St. Mary of the Angels Catholic Church, Green Bay, Wisconsin, 1898–1954 (Pulaski, WI, 1956); Fr. Bolesław Kumor, Dzieje Parafii Polskiej Rzymsko-Katolickiej św. Józefa w Norwich, Conn., 1904–1979 (Norwich, CT, 1980); Pamietnik Diamentowego Jubileuszu Parafji św. Wawrzyńca w Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1882–1957 (Philadelphia, 1957); History of St. Joseph's Parish, Joliet, Illinois, 1891–1941 (Joliet, IL, 1941); Church of the Holy Cross, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1886–1986 (Minneapolis, 1986); Holy Trinity Church, Utica, New York, Diamond Jubilee, 1896–1971 (Utica, NY, 1971).

^13. Holy Trinity Church, Utica, New York, Diamond Jubilee, 1896–1971, 37, 42.

^14. See Thaddeus C. Radzilowski, "The Second Generation: The Unknown Polonia," Polish American Studies 43, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 5–12.

^15. See, for example, John Radzilowski, The Eagle and the Cross: A History of the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, 1873–2000 (New York, 2003), 176–90; June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism: Slovaks and Other New Immigrants in the Interwar Era (Philadelphia, 2004); Myron B. Kuropas, Ukrainian-American Citadel: The First One Hundred Years of the Ukrainian National Association (Boulder, CO, 1996), 296 passim.

^16. See John Radzilowski, "Crime, Delinquency, Deviance, and Reform in Polish Chicago, 1890s–1940s," Fiedorczyk Endowed Lecture in Polish and Polish-American Studies, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, April 25, 2001; idem, "Conflict between Poles and Jews in Chicago, 1900–1919," Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 19 (2007): 117–33.

^17. Frederick M. Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1936), 191–93.

^18. Radzilowski, "Crime, Delinquency, Deviance, and Reform in Polish Chicago."

^19. On the more benign form of the Polish youth gang, see Burton W. Taylor, "Our Club Juniors: A Study of a Boy Gang in South Chicago," Ernest Watson Burgess Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library Special Collections, University of Chicago, box 179, folder 7. See also James R. Barrett and David R. Roediger, "The Irish and the 'Americanization' of the 'New Immigrants' in the Streets and Churches of the Urban United States, 1900–1930," Journal of American Ethnic History 24, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 3–33.

^20. Paul Cressy, "Report on Summer Work with the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, 1925," Burgess Papers, box 129, folder 5, 3.

^21. John Radzilowski, "American Polonia in World War II: Toward a Social History," Polish American Studies 58, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 63–80. The survey resides in the archives of the Polish Museum of America in Chicago. Extant results of the survey are found in the accompanying article: Stanley Schmidt and Sally Smyrski, "Data on Polish-American Participation in World War II," Polish American Studies 58, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 81–96. Unfortunately, similar contemporary data are not known to exist on other groups mentioned in this study.

^22. Oleh Wolowyna, "Ukrainian Veterans in the United States: Census Data Profile," Ukrainian Weekly, Jan. 11, 2004, http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/2004/020406.shtml.

^23. A few studies of selected groups have been conducted on this matter that might provide models but do not speak to the unique experiences of second-generation east-central and southern European Americans. See, for example, Glen H. Elder Jr., Aimée R. Dechter, and Hiromi Taniguchi, "World War II Mobilization in Men's Worklives: Continuity or Disruption for the Middle Class?" CDE Working Paper 99–20, Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999, http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/99-20.pdf; John Modell, Marc Goulden, and Sigurdur Magnusson, "World War II in the Lives of Black Americans: Some Findings and Interpretations," Journal of American History 76 (1989): 830–48.

^24. One more recent work is rather impressionistic but valuable, though it largely overlooked ethnicity: Robert Bruno, Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown (Ithaca, NY, 1999). Cf. my review of this work, at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=288131081625556. One important study of postwar Polish Americans in Detroit is Paul Wrobel, Our Way: Family, Parish, and Neighborhood in a Polish-American Community (Notre Dame, IN, 1979).

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