ABSTRACT
In 1939, Polish-Americans formed the Polish American Council to coordinate their war relief efforts and lend support to Poland's government-in-exile organized in Paris, then London, by General Wladyslaw Sikorski. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 recast Polish-American ideology and identity—at least for a time—changed the social composition of its only recently self-contained enclaves, and revised its organizational life. After older ethnic neighborhoods began to show signs of demographic and economic decline, urban neglect usually piled on top of other ills. Polish displaced persons with working-class, artisanal, and farming backgrounds integrated easily into blue-collar Polish America. Between 1940 and 1960, the urban neighborhoods of Polish America held their own. Rural Polish America followed a path similar in many ways to that taken by the urban neighborhoods. The mass mobilization associated with the Second World War had quite the opposite effect.
