American ethnic group of immigrants from east Europe. Nine million Americans claim
Polish descent, according to the 1990 U.S.Census. The vast majority of Polish Americans
are descendants of two million landless peasant immigrants who became unskilled
laborers for the New World’s mines, mills, foundries, factories, and slaughterhouses.
These representatives of the economic immigration of 1860–1929 arrived in greatest
numbers during the opening decades of the 20th century. At mid-century, a second
political immigration of 150,000 World War II refugees entered under the Displaced
Persons Act of 1948–1954. These were a more educated, urban, nationally conscious
group of circumstance-driven emigres. Recently, a third wave of highly educated, urban
immigrants—currently estimated at 200,000—appeared in an increasing number of postSolidarity exiles who, since the former Polish government’s imposition of martial law in
1981, seek economic opportunity, career advancement, and status improvement in
America.
The first two generations of the economic immigration built the communities and
established the institutional structures for the perpetuation of Polish American cultural
traditions. The recorded evidence of Polish American folklore derives primarily from
these peasant immigrant generations. In the late 20th century, their subsequent
generations, along with those of World War II and Solidarity groups, play the leading
role in the modification and transformation of tradition in Polish America.
While dispersed throughout the nation, Polish Americans are concentrated in their
original 19th-century settlement areas in the Mid-Atlantic, New England, and Upper
Midwestern states. Their largest active population centers are in the metropolitan areas of
Chicago, New York, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.
Significant but smaller concentrations appear in Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, Toledo,
South Bend, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and cities of coastal Connecticut and
Northeastern New Jersey. Remnants of rural communities, often secondary settlement
areas, can be found throughout the Northeastern American quadrant, most noticeably in
the farmlands of the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts, and in the central
portions of Wisconsin. The earliest rural settlements in Panna Maria, Texas (1854),
Polonia, Wisconsin (1856), and Parisville, Michigan (1857) have in the 1990s Polish
Americans in their fifth and sixth generations, while the more representative urban
centers are characteristically in their third and fourth generations.
Polish Americans use the term “Polonia” to designate their organized community. An
intricate interaction of superterritorial organizations such as the Polish American
Congress, the Polish National Alliance, the Polish Roman Catholic Union, and the Polish
Women’s Alliance, combined with informal social networks, maintain a Polonia on both
local and national levels. Characteristic behavioral norms that place high value on status
competition reinforce individual involvement in Polonia’s community life long after its
predicted demise.
On the immediate local level, community life centers around family, parish, and
neighborhood. In the major urban settlement areas, these foundational community centers
can be located by the dominant presence of their characteristically ornate, magnificent
Roman Catholic churches. Chicago has forty-three Polish parishes; Detroit has thirty. The
earliest inner-city, ethnic parishes have declined in membership since the 1960s as the
upwardly mobile third and fourth generations have moved to outer-city fringes and
suburban neighborhoods, where they have become members of nonethnic territorial
parishes, have intermarried with members of other Catholic groups, and have dispensed
with the Polish language. Inner-city parishes, many of which now serve African
American and Latin American populations, continue to fulfill both the liturgical needs of
recent Polish-speaking immigrants as well as the symbolic needs of English-speaking
Polish Americans in connection with rites of passage and calendrical customs.
A Polish presence in America from 1608 to 1854 had no demographic consequences
yet contributed a legacy of myth and legend of great importance for ethnic traditions and
symbols. Polish glassmakers and soap makers, among the first colonists at Jamestown,
were enfranchised after staging America’s first organized industrial strike in 1619. Polish
American tradition also credits the Jamestown Poles with playing the first game of
baseball in the New World.
This early period provides Polish America with its two most celebrated legendary
heroes, Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski, the eminent, aristocratic generals in
the War of Independence. Kosciuszko, the father of West Point and fervent champion of
democratic ideals, has both a more luminous international reputation and a greater appeal
to recent Polish immigrants as well as later, American-born generations. Pulaski, the
father of the American cavalry, who gave his life on the Revolutionary battlefield and
whose name is more easily spelled and pronounced, remains the more prominent ethnic
and national figure. The United States has seven counties and twenty towns named for
Pulaski, one of each for Kosciuszko. In 1911 the U.S. Congress established the national
observance of October 11 in memory of Pulaski’s sacrificial death; in 1986 the state of
Illinois recognized Pulaski’s birthday, March 4, as a legal holiday. Major cities of Polonia
me morialize both Pulaski and Kosciuszko through statues, monuments, and names of streets,
bridges, and schools. Both are common patrons of organizations and clubs. Portraits of
the two Revolutionary heroes are standard fixtures in meeting halls and business
establishments. As meaningful focal points for parades, celebrations, festivals, banquets,
and balls, both equip Polonia with potent symbols for expressing a simultaneous sense of
ethnic particularism and broad national identity.
Other military exiles arrived after partitioned Polands unsuccessful, Kosciuszkoinspired insurrection against czarist Russia in 1794 and those of 1830, 1848, and 1863.
Kosciuszko’s 1797 triumphal return visit to his second country, along with the increasing
frequency of American exposure to rebellious and aristocratic Polish emigres, led to the
construction of the nation’s first Polish stereotype in the early 19th century The familiar
freedom-loving Pole became a fixed image of American admiration for all that was
noble, chivalrous, passionate, cultivated, and high minded. Throughout the 19th century,
American popular fiction, poetry, and theater perpetuated this romantic image, based on
the PulaskiKosciuszko prototype, expressing a Polish national ideal that essentially
corresponded with the American “Spirit of 76.” The popular romantic stereotype
endured, to a lesser degree, into the 20th century, where it remains alive as recently as
1983, in the pages of James Michener’s best-selling novel Poland.
A second American stereotype of the 20th century depends upon an image of the more
familiar Polish American as a member of an urban, working-class, ethnic minority group.
The primary vehicle for this stereotype is American folklore, particularly the ethnic riddle
joke known as the “Polack” joke. The “Polack” in these jokes is characteristically poor,
stupid, dirty, inept, and tasteless. Some of these joke texts show a familiarity with Polish history and custom. Some refer to Polish American ethnographic realities such as
personal and geographic names. Most conform to the parent universal numskull type.
Unlike its variant numskull traditions that remain localized, directed at other locally
prominent, working-class, minority groups, the “Polack” joke has persisted in American
tradition on a national level. The exoteric ethnic-slur term “Polack” can be converted to
esoteric use among Polish Americans in restricted social contexts. Exoteric usage often
confuses the slur term with the Polish word Polak, the singular form for Polish male.
Polish speakers hear a distinct phonemic difference in the first syllable of the two words
(based on the distinction of a Polish open o and the English closed o) and do not accept
the slur term as a substitute for the Polish word. Popular culture, particularly film,
continues to employ the “Polack” joke, its stereotype, and its slur term to the frustrated
displeasure of the members of Polonia.
Polish American oral traditions collected from the first and second generations of the
economic immigrants show a characteristic tendency to preserve the memory of peasant
agricultural folklife traditions in village Poland. Some of the texts deal with sorrow of
immigration and have America as a referent. The principal collections, Harriet
Pawlowska’s folksongs and Marion Moore Coleman’s folktales, represent traditional
texts that have clear analogs in the ethnographic materials assembled in sixty-six volumes
by Kolberg in 19thcentury Poland. Polish American proverb collections show that some
forms remain unaltered on both sides of the Atlantic, for example, Gosc w dom, Bog w
dom (Guest in the home, God in the home). Others show changes and inventions that
derive from a New World context. The Polish American proverb Musial ale nie chcial
(He had to, but he did not want to) has a totally American meaning, rendering it
incomprehensible and unproverbial to a European Pole. For Polish Americans, familiar
with both the heroic stature of baseball star Stan Musial and the national media
broadcasters’ inability to say “Musial” the Polish way (like English “Mooshaw”), the
proverb’s meaning involves commentary on both the undesirability and the inevitability
of either anglicizing or mispronouncing a difficult Polish surname.
Polish American oral tradition also contains many English-language narratives
featuring a common Polish word, phrase, or cultural detail that can be understood and
transmitted by Polish Americans with little or no knowledge of the mother tongue. Many
of these take the form of the immigrant epic, a series of comic incidents in which the
humor derives from the misunderstanding of a word in the home or host language. Others
playfully focus on satirical or parodic comment on wedding and funeral customs. Still
others deal with questions of identity, group conflict, and ethnic discrimination. One such
narrative attributes the invention of the Volkswagen to a Polish guy in Detroit whose
genius remains unrecognized in Europe and America. Western injustice is corrected only
in Japan, where, the tale playfully claims, the Volkswagen has been named with the
Polish words—and Japanese sounds—Jaka Ta Mala Car”(What a tiny car!).
Polish American jokes sometimes follow the riddle-joke pattern but contain sufficient
esoteric content to confine their transmission to insiders. “What’s the sound of a Polish
grandfather clock?—tock, tock.” (Since “tock” is phonetically equivalent to Polish tak,
the word for yes, its association with the word “grandfather” imparts an affirmative
message about heritage to the ears of a Polish American.) Comparable oral traditions
commonly appear in the narratives of the third and fourth generations.
Customs and rituals associated with the Catholic liturgical calendar and the life cycle
remain popular among Polish Americans of all backgrounds. Those traditions dependent
upon material culture for their production and performance show a practice pattern
shifting from homemade, family-centered activity to a manufactured, commercialized,
public sphere. This trend may be indicative of the increasing value of symbolic ethnicity
for Polish Americans. The Easter customs associated with swiecone, the paraliturgical
blessing of food baskets on Holy Saturday, also converts to elaborate parties and
banquets. So, too, does the secular Dyngus-Smigus Day on the Monday after Easter, a
gender-based ritual water dousing and reed switching, in which young males customarily
sprinkle young females with water or perfume prior to, or alternatively to, switching them
with reeds. On the following day, the girls reciprocate the favor. These events are often
sponsored by either Polish American cultural and fraternal organizations or by
entrepreneurs of Polish restaurants, specialty shops, and mass media. Public, commercial
entertainment for such symbolic affairs also occasions revival and transmission of
traditional village dance and the rural arts of pisanki (egg painting) and wycinanki (cutpaper designs).
Polish American Christmas customs feature the religious folksong (koleda) primarily
in family and church contexts. Here too, organized community events aid the revival of
ancient folklore—for example, the production of medieval Nativity plays as miniature
puppet theatricals (szopka). Christmas Eve supper (Wigilia) involving ritual sharing of an
unleavened bread wafer (oplatek) along with a fixed number of meadess dishes may
become a public occasion replete with meat-filled traditional foods and orchestrated
entertainment beyond the capacity of the family.
Life-cycle folkways manifest similar contemporary adaptation. The band leader or the
church organist usually arranges and performs traditional singing at weddings and
funerals. The customary meal and social gathering after the wedding (poprawiny) or
funeral (stypa) now commonly falls under the care of restaurateurs and caterers. Ethnic
foods prepared within the household show the lingering persistence of regional variation.
Popular favorites include sausage (kielbasa), stuffed cabbage (golabek), dumpling
(pierogi), crepe (nalesnik), duck’s blood soup (czarnina), sauerkraut (kapusta), and
jellyfilled pastry (paczek). Polish Americans in the 1990s can satisfy both their culinary
tastes and their identificational needs through convenient purchases at the neighborhood
store, the supermarket, or the expanding restaurant trade. A widespread Polish American
custom of distributing the jelly doughnut to outsiders at the workplace on Shrove
Tuesday, makes “Paczki Day” an eagerly anticipated event among the general American
populace in the major urban settlement areas.
Polish American polka music hybridizes folk and popular traditions into a lively,
subcultural entertainment complex sometimes labeled “polka culture” or “Hupaj Siupaj
culture,” from the nonsense words of a traditional Polish drinking song. The Polish
American polka phenomenon emphasizes a participatory, dynamic song-and-dance
experience, learned and perfected through personal imitation of friends, neighbors, and
kin at weddings, picnics, festivals, and bars within the contexts of general frivolity,
eating, drinking, and socializing. At special events, like “polkabrations,” participants may
wear handmade or commercial costumes with ethnically meaningful colors and designs,
in addition to jackets, buttons, bumper stickers, posters, and other signs that proclaim
ethnic identity in creative ways.
There are many different Polish American polka styles. An urban, Eastern style,
dominant in the 1930s and 1940s, gave way to the now prevalent rural, Chicago style in
the 1950s. Adherents of the Eastern style prefer fast-paced, highly orchestrated, fixed
compositions of formally trained New York musicians. The Chicago style, originated
after World War II by L’il Wally Jagiello, a self-taught, Chicago-born, child virtuoso,
began as a revitalization of the Polish village polka. Its practitioners favor informality,
improvisation, slower tempo, and vocals reliant upon Polish folksong. Soulful
emotionalism and attachment to ethnic roots as much as their practicality for the dance,
attract second- and third-generation mu-sicians to this popular development. Recent
variations of the nationally prevalent Chicago style incorporate the influences of rock,
blues, and country-western music.
Polish Americans are likely to continue their superterritorial organizations well into
the future. Their expressions of ethnicity can be expected to undergo continued
adaptation, as well as unforseen revival and revitalization as evidenced in the polka.
Involvement of professional and commercial interests in the formerly private sphere
lessens the folkloric dimension of folklife while it increases both the knowledge of ethnic
content and the options for selective ethnic experience. As Polish American populations
disperse along with upward mobility, the need to create self-identity through association
with collective heritage may extend the domain of public ethnic celebration that depends
upon the realities of folk tradition.
John A.Gutowski
References
Bukowczyk, John J. 1987. And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish Americans.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Clements, William M. 1969. The Types of the Polack Joke. Folklore Forum, Bibliographic and
Special Series, Vol. 3. November.
Coleman, Marion Moore. 1965. A World Remembered: Tales and Lore of the Polish Land.
Cheshire, CT: Cherry Hill.
Gladsky, Thomas S. 1992. Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American
Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Knab, Sophie Hodorowicz. 1993. Polish Customs, Traditions, and Folklore. New York:
Hippocrene.
Lopata, Helena Znaniecki. 1976. Polish Americans: Status Competition in an Ethnic Community.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Obidinski, Eugene E., and Helen Stankiewicz Zand. 1987. Polish Folkways in America. Lanham,
MD: University Press of America.
Pawlowska, Harriet. 1961. Merrily We Sing: 105 Polish Folksongs. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.
Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. 1918–1920. The Polish Peasant in Europe and
America. 5 vols. Boston: Richard G.Badger.
Wrobel, Paul. 1979. Our Way: Family, Parish, and Neighborhood in a Polish-American
Community. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.