Ethnics against Ethnicity: European Immigrants and Foreign-Language Instruction, 1890—1940

Jonathan Zimmerman

In March 1937, a Polish American journal in Chicago launched a bitter attack upon the city's Polish American community. Six years earlier, Polish leaders had persuaded Chicago's board of education to provide Polish-language instruction in any high school where twenty-five or more students requested it. By 1935, however, just four schools reported classes in the subject. In Chicago, the world's second largest Polish city, only a few hundred children studied the Polish language in public schools.1	1
The blame for this lamentable situation lay squarely with the Poles themselves, the journal emphasized, not with Chicago's English-stock citizenry. Here the journal took aim at a teacher and self-described "leader of Polish-American youth," who had recently argued that "snooping authorities" in his school prevented him from speaking—much less teaching—his ancestral tongue. "He had deliberately forsaken Polish," the journal editorialized, "and to justify his position . . . was hauling a fantastic excuse out of the mists of idiocy." Hardly a victim of nativist repression, the teacher "voluntarily threw away the precious sesame [of] his people." Even worse, he faulted others for the loss. "This did not occur in a country where sadistic persecutors closed parochial schools, smashed Polish presses, or tore out tongues because they had uttered Polish words," the journal scolded. "No, this happened in the United States, where the keeping of mother cultures is condoned—even encouraged."2	2
Then why, the journal asked, had Poles relinquished their mother language? The answer was neatly captured in the journal's own name, the New American. Upon arriving on America's shores, Polish immigrants sought—and, in large part, achieved—"greater financial well-being," the journal wrote. In the process, however, they too often sold their cultural birthright for a Yankee pottage. "We lost sight of first principles," the New American grumbled. "Now, our dogma called for a swift disintegration, for a microscopic destroyal of everything Polish in our make-up." To revive especially the Polish language, the journal looked to an unlikely source: Polish youth. Up until then, it acknowledged, this new generation had been exceptionally eager to shed any traces of the Old World. If a Polish renaissance was to occur, however, young Polish Americans would have to occasion it. "It is up to this youth to preserve its noble heritage," the journal wrote hopefully. "There is only one way open to the latter, and that is to know the Polish language."3	. . .