CHAPTER 2

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.