Immigrants from Poland have developed a strong ethnic community, which they commonly refer to as Polonia, serving both the interests of the immigrants and endeavoring to contribute to the emergence of an independent Poland.

The first Poles to arrive in the United States in large numbers were the political exiles from the 1848 revolutions. In the 1880s they were joined by many economic emigrants from occupied Poland pulled by the lure of jobs in America’s burgeoning cities. These immigrants concentrated in major industrial centers, primarily in the Midwest (Buffalo, NY, Chicago, IL, Detroit, MI, Milwaukee, WI, Cleveland, OH and Pittsburgh, PA) and the Northeast (New York City, NY, Philadelphia, PA, and Boston). Polonia emerged in these cities around the Roman Catholic Churches and the flourishing newspapers. Polish Jews tended to be identified by religion, replicating divisions in their homeland. Poles were also strongly committed to labor and socialist movements (stemming from their revolutionary activity earlier in the century), and New York’s Polish Socialist Alliance in America published Rabotnik Polski (Polish Worker).

As was the case for many other ethnic groups, legislation in the 1920s virtually cut off fresh immigrants just as the independent nation emerged. But, the Polish community started to grow once again in the 1940s. With the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 many refugees (mainly Catholic) ended up coming to the United States. This trend accelerated after the Second World War, when the Truman administration used the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 to allow Poles fleeing Soviet occupation to enter the US. Between 1945 and 1954 as many as 178,000 Poles arrived in the country, and 75,000 more followed prior to the easing of immigration restrictions in 1965.

Many of these new arrivals were either intellectuals or professionals. Having grown up in an independent Poland and wishing to protect Polish culture, they often came into conflict with the blue-collar leaders of Polonia. Such friction occurred at a time also when many second- and third-generation Polish Americans were beginning to leave the areas of Polish concentration and move to the suburbs. A simultaneous revival of cultural practices and communal organizations in the city occurred within the residual community that remained behind, so that when the 1960s rejection of suburban lifestyles and the celebration of ethnicity occurred, the Polish American culture was still vibrant.

This strong sense of ethnic identity was drawn on by novelists like W.S. Kimiczak in The 1,000 Hour Day (1966) and the better-known, albeit controversial, Jerzy Kosinski.

By 1969, census estimates placed the Polish American community at about 4 million people, though many Poles felt that this was a significant under count and that the number was above 6 million. With its size and its concentration in particular metropolitan areas, the community wielded considerable political influence. Since the Roosevelt era, Poles had been aligned with the Democratic Party, especially in local elections (emphasizing the Democrats’ appeal to workingclass and Catholic immigrants). After the war, Poles tended to change their national vote according to American foreign policy and the handling of the Soviet Union. Truman lost Polish American voters to Dwight Eisenhower, who made various promises about winning back territory from the USSR.

John F. Kennedy, as the first Catholic president and a hawk in foreign policy was able to recapture them; while the failure of the Polish candidate Edmund Muskie to win the Democratic nomination in 1972 persuaded many Polish Americans to vote for Nixon (an irony since it was later shown that Nixon’s dirty tricks had helped to destroy Muskie’s candidacy). But Polish Americans also fit within the Nixon image of the “Silent Majority” working-class ethnics on whom the Republicans hoped to build their new post-civil-rights constituency And, while nine out of ten Poles had voted for Roosevelt, during the Reagan years only about half were voting Democratic.

Besides Muskie, a senator for Maine, several other Polish Americans have been prominent in politics. John Dingell has been the Chairperson of the Energy and Commerce Committee; Leon Jaworski, led the Watergate investigation; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Cold War immigrant, was Jimmy Carter’s hawkish National Security advisor. The success of such individuals has gone a long way to counteracting the negative stereotypes associated with Polish Americans. “Polish jokes” have been a staple in comedy houses and the networks’ sitcoms, long after Irish and black jokes have been considered in bad taste. In “All in the Family” (CBS, 1971–9), for example, Archie Bunker mercilessly ridiculed his son-in-law, Michael Stivik, allowing the show to expose many of the issues associated with stereotyping and, since Michael was clearly much smarter than Archie, to contest them as well.

Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, immigration from Poland has continued at variable rates. Return migration and support for the new state have also been more common, especially with the revival of the Polish economy.