MASS IMMIGRATION
As the middle of the century approached the situation began to change
radically. There came a marked improvement in the accommodations and
regularity of the trans-Atlantic ships and contacts between North
America and Europe began to multiply.
Then came the Spring of the Nations, the year 1848, with the efforts of
the Germans and the peoples of Austria-Hungary to put an end to the
prevailing absolutism. This movement failed but it led a large number of
Germans who had supported the Frankfort General Assembly to leave their
native land and to seek refuge in the United States. Most of them
drifted west, settling in many of the Central States and the Middle
West. They took up free land and settled down to become prosperous
farmers. The rumors of their success in adapting themselves to their new
environment spread beyond Germany and fired the resolution of other
discontented peoples.
The first to respond on any large scale were the Czechs. They began to
come in thousands, also tending toward the Middle West and settling on
the new frontiers which had been pushed westward by the coming of the
Germans. They soon began to form extensive colonies in the still
sparsely settled areas of Nebraska, Iowa, and other states until the
coming of the American Civil War, which briefly checked the movement. In
their new homes, and in small communities, they formed a large segment
of the population. They endeavored to transplant their old traditions
and mode of life to America and to establish their own institutions,
making changes only as American law and environment dictated.[14]
The Poles were the next Slavic people to follow. The earliest immigrants
were, as we might expect, from Austrian Poland but after the failure of
the uprising of 1863, refugees from Russian Poland and the area under
German control began to flow in. The earliest immigrants, like the first
Czechs, moved west but after the Civil War the great American industrial
expansion began and the majority of later immigrants were attracted by
the possibilities for work in the mines and factories which were being
built, especially in Pennsylvania. The movement for immigration was
sponsored not only by the employers, who desired a constant supply of
unskilled and cheap labor, but also by the steamship companies which
sent their agents through the European villages and painted in glowing
terms the possibilities of advancement and of wealth in the United
States.
Their blandishments did not fall upon empty ears in the more backward
and underprivileged areas. In a steadily increasing stream, there began
to come to the United States, Slovaks, Ukrainians from Galicia and the
Carpathian area, Croats, and, to a lesser degree, Serbs. There was even
a small settlement of Lusatian Serbs in Texas. This process continued
until the beginning of World War I.
The immigrant ranks included a certain number of educated people but
these were to a large degree interested in some form of art, attracted
by the opportunities for practicing their talents in the United States.
The political immigrants were relatively few for since they had hopes of
affecting conditions in their homelands they preferred to find temporary
refuge in some European country.
The majority of immigrants came from those strata which had become
accustomed to leaving their homes as migratory and seasonal workers.
Most were scarcely literate and were little aware of the cultural
progress that was going on in their homelands. At first they came merely
in the hope of saving up enough money to return and live with more
comfort in their native villages. But it was not long before they either
despaired of this or were attracted to the American mode of living and
sent for their wives and families. Many of these early arrivals had
little national consciousness and the Slovaks and Ukrainians in
particular reflected the conditions prevailing in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century.
The change from the hard but traditional life of the Slavic village to
the confusion and grimness of the American mining or factory town was a
disagreeable shock to many of these immigrants, for it was primarily the
agricultural population of Eastern Europe that poured into the American
factories and mines. The newcomers were exploited everywhere and with
their ignorance of English were at a disadvantage in competing with
their neighbors.
However, they rapidly adapted themselves to their changed environment.
They began to form various kinds of associations for their own advantage
and leaders of their own groups began to appear. Some of these were
unscrupulous men who learned some English and didn’t blush to drain
money from their less fortunate comrades. But the number of those who
seriously worked for the good of the immigration steadily grew and
finally eliminated, to a large extent, the more greedy and grasping
pseudo-leaders.[15]
The Slavic communities in the United States owe much to the priests who
came to serve in the churches which they established in all the Slavic
centers. Some of them had come with the authorization of their superiors
in the Old World. Others simply followed the outflow from their villages
and arrived in America with little more knowledge of conditions than
their flocks. Their lack of familiarity with the legal conditions
governing church property in the United States involved them in many
difficulties. Even the immigrant Roman Catholic priests serving the
Poles and Slovaks could not, at first, easily fit themselves into the
framework of their Church in the United States and through
misunderstandings they often got into controversies with the Roman
Catholic hierarchy here, consisting mainly of Irish and Germans, and all
too often they were tempted to declare their complete independence and
make needless issues over extra-ritual customs and parish organization.
The situation was even worse for the Catholic priests of the Eastern
Rite (the Uniats) who ministered to the Ukrainians from Galicia and the
Carpathians. These people insisted at first upon a married clergy and
since they often came without proper credentials, they were looked at
askance by the hierarchy who had no experience or personal knowledge of
this Rite. In addition, many of the priests from the Carpathians had
been under strong Hungarian influence at home and found it difficult to
serve their flocks adequately in the New World. The Russian Orthodox
were somewhat better off, especially after the seat of the Archbishopric
was moved to New York. But, there again, many parishes indulged in
almost continuous appeals to the civil authority against the
administration of the church. However, by the end of World War I, most
misunderstandings had been eliminated on all sides and the way was open
for smooth and steady development.
Yet it was the priests who became the first community leaders to guide
the immigrants to a new and better life in which they retained as much
as possible of their old traditions.
They and the more experienced lay leaders played a great role in the
organization of the Slavs into fraternal societies, which had risen in
the United States even before the Revolution and since then had grown
steadily and found a place both in American life and American law. On
the payment of small sums they provided protection to their members,
payments in case of death or inability to work and, in some cases other
assistance.
The value of this system was early recognized by the Slavic leaders. At
first the societies were small and purely local but in time the
individual groups tended to unite into central organizations which
acquired larger and larger capital resources. These societies, whether
directly connected with churches or not, gradually came to form a
distinctive feature of Slavic-American life. Today there is no Slavic
group which does not have one or more such organization of national
significance. Among the leaders are the Czechoslovak National Alliance,
the Polish National Alliance, the Ukrainian National Association, the
Serb National Federation, the Polish Roman Catholic Union, the Ukrainian
Workingmen’s Association, the Ukrainian Providence Association, the
Croatian National Alliance. They possess large reserve funds and are
leaders in financial, social, political and cultural work.
Furthermore, as we shall see, it is out of these large, freely
organized, fraternal organizations, with or without church support, that
certain forms of Slavic scholarship have developed in the United States.
This was inconsiderable in the beginning but it has grown and improved
steadily and is destined to play a very important role in the future,
especially in the case of those countries from which there has been an
extensive immigration.
Russian immigration has followed a quite different course. During the
nineteenth century, the Russian Empire tried to channel all movement
from home areas to Siberia instead of across the ocean. For this
purpose, the government appropriated large sums of money and furnished
transportation first from the Black Sea ports to the Pacific coast and
then later along the Trans-Siberian railroad. As a result, prior to
1908, almost the entire Russian immigration into the United States was
from the non-Russian areas in the northwest. This includes the Finns,
the Lithuanians, the Poles and the Jews who began to leave Russia in
large numbers in the nineties because of the anti-Semitic outbreaks.
The actual Russian population of Russian Alaska had been small. But,
during the second half of the nineteenth century, after its sale, a
number of Russians drifted across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco.
The seat of the Archbishopric of the Aleutian Islands and North America
was moved from Sitka to San Francisco. In 1900, there were enough
Russians on the Atlantic coast to warrant Tikhon, later Patriarch of
Moscow, moving his episcopal seat to New York.[16] This was done not
only to serve the needs of the Russian Orthodox population but to enable
him to exert an influence on the Greeks and other Orthodox who had
emigrated to the east coast. About 1905, the difficulties between the
Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Catholics of the Eastern Rite made
opportune a Russian attempt to bring the Eastern Rite adherents back to
Orthodoxy. At the outbreak of World War I the bulk of the Russian
Orthodox Church in America consisted of converts from Galicia and the
Carpathians. There also had been Russian immigration after the
revolutionary disturbances of 1905, but in 1904 the actual Russian
immigration in America was small, far less in numbers than any other
Slavic group except the Bulgarians.
By 1914, the Slavic communities in the United States especially the
Czechs, the Slovaks and the Poles, were already well organized. These,
with their national committees, played a considerable role in securing
the independence of their homeland. They supported directly and through
their American non-Slavic friends the work of Thomas G. Masaryk and
Ignace Paderewski. Similarly, Professor Michael I. Pupin stood out as
the leader of the Serbs and indeed of all the Yugoslavs. The Ukrainians
were less fortunate, for at the moment they had no leader well known to
the American public and they encountered the opposition of both Russian
and Polish groups, whose nations had dominated Ukraine for centuries.
After World War I, the interrupted stream of immigration again broke
through and during the early years it assumed even larger proportions
than it had previously. In addition, many White Russians who had fled
from the Bolsheviks came to the United States.
The cultural level of the Slavic communities rose rapidly, assisted by
better educational opportunities for them both at home and in the
immigration. A large number of highly educated Russians had come over
and the opening of Washington legations for Poland, Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia gave the immigrants pride in their own origin and intensified
their contact with cultural work being done in their liberated
homelands. The same effect was achieved by the Ukrainian diplomatic
mission to Washington under Dr. Bachinsky and later Dr. Luke Myshuha,
although unfortunately this did not receive final recognition by the
United States.
In 1924, this influx of immigrants was brought to a halt by the passing
of American immigration laws which introduced the principle of national
quotas and regulated the number of immigrants admitted each year by a
ratio based upon previous arrivals. This penalized the Slavs severely
for their immigration had been relatively recent and their quotas were
reduced almost to the vanishing point. Contrariwise, the peoples of
Northern Europe, who had arrived earlier, were assigned quotas which
they never filled.
So, from then until World War II, the American Slavic communities
remained relatively static in numbers, growing only by natural
increases. However, this was also a period when earlier efforts began to
bear fruit and Slavic cultural and financial importance increased
rapidly. The second generation, educated in American schools, was
beginning to produce a new type of leadership. It took its place in the
general American cultural, economic and political life with consequent
results upon both the country as a whole and upon the Slavs. There was
increased cooperation between the Slavs and the rest of the American
population, a period of growth and development from within.
After World War II, the displaced persons from Europe began to enter the
United States in large numbers. From 1939 on, there came a surprisingly
large number of highly educated persons, largely Poles, who were fleeing
from both the Nazis and the Communists. These new arrivals revivified
the intellectual and cultural interests of the older immigrants and
their descendants and, furthermore, they brought the best traditions of
education and scholarship from their homelands.
We can thus divide the growth of Slavic influence into four periods.
I. _From the beginning to 1848._ During this period, the immigrants
arrived as individuals and with few exceptions were absorbed rapidly and
almost completely into the main streams of American life.
II. _From 1848 to 1924._ This was the period of the mass immigration,
largely of unskilled laborers who came to secure the material benefits
of life in the United States. Yet it was also the period when the
general outlines of Slavic life in America were being sketched,
organizational and church affiliations were made, and the immigrant
groups were taking root as large units in the United States.
III. _From 1924 to 1939._ Despite the almost complete lack of
immigration, Slavic communities were beginning to attract the attention
of the American public. Internally they were completing their adaptation
to the American mode of life with far greater success than had seemed
possible a few decades before.
IV. _Since World War II._ Most of the leaders who refused to accept
Communism have come to the United States. The outstanding scholars and
artists have also come to find refuge. In some instances, it is no
exaggeration to say that centers of the higher culture have been
transferred to the United States. Simultaneously, the emergence of this
country as the spokesman and champion of the free world has awakened far
broader classes of the American public to the importance of the Slavs in
the modern world and has led to a greater demand for scholarship in
those fields which concern the Slavic nations.
There are thus two separate streams of Slavic scholarship in the United
States. The one is the normal inclusion of Slavic subjects, history,
culture and languages into the American universities and colleges. This
has been a normal process of development, just as in other areas of
study. Side by side with this, however, have been the efforts of the
national Slavic groups in the United States. These two streams developed
for many years in almost complete separation, but between the two World
Wars they began to affect each other. Since World War II, the two
streams are slowly but surely merging and it is probable that in the
future they will be completely consolidated to the advantage of Slavic
scholarship, the American people, and the entire free world which still
maintains those universal ideals that have come to dominate
civilization.