Ethnics against Ethnicity: European Immigrants and Foreign-Language Instruction, 1890-1940

Abstract

In March 1937, a Polish American journal in Chicago launched a bitter attack upon the city's Polish American community. Six years earlier, Polish leaders had persuaded Chicago's board of education to provide Polish-language instruction in any high school where twenty-five or more students requested it. By 1935, however, just four schools reported classes in the subject. In Chicago, the world's second largest Polish city, only a few hundred children studied the Polish language in public schools.1 The blame for this lamentable situation lay squarely with the Poles themselves, the journal emphasized, not with Chicago's English-stock citizenry. Here the journal took aim at a teacher and self-described “leader of Polish-American youth,” who had recently argued that “snooping authorities” in his school prevented him from speaking—much less teaching—his ancestral tongue. “He had deliberately forsaken Polish,” the journal editorialized, “and to justify his position … was hauling a fantastic excuse out of the mists of idiocy.” Hardly a victim of nativist repression, the teacher “voluntarily threw away the precious sesame [of] his people.” Even worse, he faulted others for the loss. “This did not occur in a country where sadistic persecutors closed parochial schools, smashed Polish presses, or tore out tongues because they had uttered Polish words,” the journal scolded. “No, this happened in the United States, where the keeping of mother cultures is condoned—even encouraged.”2