Drawing on the international literature on migration and immigrant associations, mainly in the context of North and South America, but also including several other global immigration contexts, this essay highlights several main questions and issues. It discusses the definition of voluntary associations and the principal impetus for associational activities among immigrant newcomers. Using examples from specific types of organisation (secret societies, credit associations, mutual benefit societies, religious groups, hometown associations, political groups), it examines the factors that shape immigrants’ formal sociability. The paper then addresses the class and gender composition of memberships, compares the associative practices of the mostly European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the mostly Asian, Latin American and African arrivals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and discusses the issue of state involvement. The essay approaches the topic from a ...

Immigrants and Associations: A Global and Historical Perspective

Saints, Sinners, and Socialists on the Southside: Polish Catholic Immigrant Workers, Politics, and Culture in Wheeling, West Virginia, 1890-1930 William Hal Gorby In the years after the Civil War, Wheeling, West Virginia developed into a major manufacturing center in the Northern Panhandle. Until 1885, Wheeling was the state capital of West Virginia and was the center of cut nail production in America. The city already possessed a large population of Irish and German immigrants. However, with the decline of the nail industry and the transition to steel manufacturing in the Upper Ohio Valley, by the 1890’s, Wheeling attracted many immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. These immigrants took their places at the bottom of the industrial hierarchy and were relegated to the most menial unskilled jobs in the steel mills, coal mines, tobacco works, and glass factories of the Wheeling District. These “new immigrants,” especially the Poles, left a world where it was becoming difficult to persist on the land. Poles began looking across the continent for higher wages. Making seasonal labor trips to the industrial core areas of Western Germany and the factories around growing cities like Warsaw and Lublin, Polish peasants also embarked more permanently to America. While settling in many of the United States’ largest cities, a sizable number arrived in Wheeling. Here they lived in the heart of the city’s factory district, and after 1900 also the center of the vice district. Often neglected and despised by city leaders and even the local labor movement, Poles were left to create their own life in Wheeling. Arriving in Wheeling, Polish peasants had to form a self-sustaining ethnic community if they were going to survive. This was difficult since Polish immigrants were divided by ethnic and regional differences. By 1900, Wheeling’s Polish immigrants began to form their community through the grass roots efforts of an active laity and their young priest Father Emil Musial. They built the parish of St. Ladislaus in the heart of South Wheeling. Ethnic community formation allowed for the creation of popular ethnic spaces, cultural events, and a strong Polish Catholic education. Through a mixture of religious piety and cultural nationalism, the community’s parish, social halls, and homes allowed the Poles to develop a distinct identity, promoted a strong family economy, while still living amidst a mixture of other immigrant groups. World War I and the subsequent decade were vital for the community. While supporting the American war effort offered proof of the Poles’ own loyalty in the minds of the native born majority, the post-war strikes in the local steel industry led to much animosity and surveillance of the Polish community. However, the era witnessed the beginnings of the Poles working with other Catholic immigrant groups, the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, and within the labor movement. However, the success of the Wheeling Steel Corporation in busting the steelworkers union forced Poles to look inward again at their community. This also came as fears grew about the relationship of the second generation to those who remained tied to the old parish and ethnic Polonia world. The community’s response and the increasing inter-ethnic interactions helped provide the background for the union organizing drives of the 1930’s.

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Saints, Sinners, and Socialists on the Southside: Polish Catholic Immigrant Workers, Politics, and Culture in Wheeling, West Virginia, 1890-1930

In early twentieth-century America, the novel technology called “eugenics”—a potent hybrid of biological science, statistical method, and cultural assumptions—won a diverse following of academics, animal breeders, social workers, criminologists, psychiatrists, institutional superintendents, philanthropists, and activists spanning the political spectrum from socialists to white supremacists. Although heirs to the Enlightenment pursuits of science, reason, and a rationally organized state, eugenicists rejected the Enlightenment's egalitarian strain, insisting that hereditary endowment determined social structure. Fusing Darwin's theory of evolution and Mendel's discoveries in plant heredity, eugenicists claimed to find distinct genetic roots for the many problems of personality and society that alarmed their contemporaries: from “feeble-mindedness” and “psychopathy” to “delinquency” and “hypersexuality.” Within the bright lines of a eugenic worldview, the poverty and crime that pervaded an avowedly meritocratic urban-industrial democracy were comprehended as the offspring of hereditary “mental defects,” racial “mongrelization,” and sentimental charitable efforts that, in a vain attempt to reform deviant individuals, had only assured their survival and reproduction.

The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900–1930

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United states immigration, 1840-1940: a selective guide to materials in the british library

L'A. etudie les publications a caractere ethnique et plus particulierement la presse de certaines populations immigrees aux Etats-Unis. Il examine les sentiments a l'endroit du pays d'origine et les attaques subies par ces communautes dans le pays d'accueil. Il s'efforce d'evaluer ces phenomenes a partir de donnees collectees dans les communautes polonaise, suedoise et italienne dont il passe en revue la presse pour la periode allant de 1877 a 1914. Les italiens au contraire des deux autres groupes semblent avoir beaucoup plus soufferts d'une certaine hostilite, ce qui transparait dans la presse de la communaute qui ressemble a la presse afro-americaine a la meme periode

Organization Building in the Wake of Ethnic Conflict: A Comparison of Three Ethnic Groups

The "new immigrants" who came from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the century have rarely been the subject of detailed scholarly examination In particular, Poles and other Slavic groups have usually been written about in a filiopietist manner Edward Kantowicz fills this gap with his incisive work on Poles in Chicago Kantowicz examines such questions as why Chicago, with the largest Polish population of any city outside of Poland, has never elected a Polish mayor The author also examines the origins of the heavily Democratic allegiance of Polish voters Kantowicz demonstrates that Chicago Poles were voting Democratic long before Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, or the New Deal Kantowicz has made extensive use of registration lists and voting records to construct a statistical picture of Polish-American voting behavior in Chicago He draws on church records and census records to provide a detailed description of Chicago's many Polish neighborhoods He also has studied the city's Polish-language press as well as the few manuscript collections left by Polish-American politicians These collections, together with data gleaned from interviews with individuals who were acquainted with these figures, are used to sketch profiles of the political leaders of Polonia's capital Kantowicz focuses on the goals which the Polish-American community pursued in politics, the issues they deemed important, and the functions which politics served for them He links this analysis to observations on the homeland and the reasons for which the Poles emigrated In this context he is able to draw conclusions about the nature of the ethnic politics in general His work will appeal to a variety of readers: urban and twentieth-century historians, political scientists, and sociologists

Edward R. Kantowicz

Papers

Polish-American Politics in Chicago, 1888-1940