ABSTRACT
Between 1880 and 1914, immigrants from Poland were the second-largest nationality group to arrive in America, surpassed in number only by those from Italy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Poles had established vibrant ethnic communities throughout the industrial heartland of America, from the textile mills of New England to the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia and on to the steel mills and slaughterhouses of Chicago. Largely a movement of agricultural workers seeking better economic conditions than those in rural Eastern Europe, they migrated, as they said, “za chlebem”—for bread. They found employment in the expanding backbone of American industrial development—in textiles, mines, steel, and petroleum, and specialized industries such as meatpacking. By 1900, the communities they established, whether in large cities or small towns, had developed into relatively self-sustaining neighborhoods with their own social and cultural organizations, churches, schools, entrepreneurs, and civic and religious leaders. The first decade of the twentieth century marked a watershed in the development of these communities and their relationships with the dominant American culture, especially the emerging labor activism.
