THE UNITED STATES AND POLAND

The United States and Poland part I
Historical Reflections

Piotr Wandycz, Yale University

American-Polish relations, in a broad sense, stretch over a long period of time, and indeed certain important contacts antecede the emergence of the United States. However inter-state relations, properly speaking, of course have a much shorter span. Still, this relationship is sufficiently long to permit certain generalizations from a historical perspective.

Let me start by saying that there have been lights and shadows in American-Polish relations; this is perfectly normal in intercourse among most nations. It is a historian's duty to note both, since only then can a reasonably full and balanced picture emerge. What are the specific features that distinguish mutual attitudes, policies and relations in the past and the present; and how may they affect the future? We must approach them on various levels, and I hope that you will allow me to indulge in some sweeping generalizations.

In the first place we are dealing here with an uneven partnership. America has always been more of a giver than a taker. As a Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki once remarked that America "invaded" Poland with various products, beginning with potatoes and ending with film and technology. The relationship was often of a compensatory nature - the story of American success and the American dream compensating the often dreary reality, lack of freedom, poverty, foreign oppression. America appeared as the promised land, the land of plenty where everyone had a chance to succeed.

The American way of life was by definition good and prosperous. That helps to explain why when "A Streetcar Named Desire" was played in Warsaw, the directors avoided showing the squalor of the New Orleans slums for fear of being accused of anti-American communist propaganda. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, very few Poles visited the United States and only some made critical observations, for instance, the writer Henryk Sienkiewicz in his letters from America.

If Americans were generally admired, the Poles, by contrast, did not have a good press in the United States. History textbooks invariably mentioned the Polish political follies as exemplified by the "liberum veto", criticized the oppression of peasants and mistreatment of Jews. To many Americans, who bothered to think about the subject at all, the Poles appeared either as vain and ungovernable Polish aristocrats or as poor and backward peasants - the dumb Polacks - subject of the notorious Polish jokes. Please note that I am speaking here about the past rather than about the present.

Another generalization: American and Polish outlooks and attitudes toward culture, politics, society or economics often offered a telling contrast. The Poles, as many Central Europeans, are history-conscious. The burden of the past, often an unhappy past, weighs on them heavily. The period of partitions and oppression by foreign powers produced national complexes. It lends, for instance, to a distrust of such terms as "compromise", for compromise meant surrender to the enemy. Lost causes, heroism, martyrology have occupied a large place in people's thinking. The "gloria victis" (glory to the defeated) mentality made others view the Poles as hopeless idealists and romantics.

By contrast Americans do not care for history and tend to look toward the future. As the writer Emily Hahn once put it, "we always think that what we are experiencing is new". Indeed, a premium is set on the term "new" as it occurs in concepts that range from "new deal" to "new frontier". American idealism, indeed Protestant-tinged moralism and pragmatism constitute the two poles between which most American policies oscillate. If national outlook can be expressed in proverbs, such sayings as "nothing succeeds like success" or "if you cannot beat them, join them" or the expression "selling" a program, seem very American and would appear incomprehensible or unacceptable to the Poles.

A third generalization: during the last 200 years the American story has been a success story. The corresponding period for the Poles was totally different. In the words of a prominent Polish historian, Henryk Wereszycki, during the last 200 years Poland was forced between freedom and oppression. We can note here curious coincidences: the almost simultaneous emergence of the United States and the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or the outbreak of the Civil War almost coinciding with the Polish January 1863 Uprising. Both developments had long-ranging repercussions, of which more later.

A fourth general observation: Poland and the "Polish Question", as often as not, have been of marginal importance to the United States. They rose to prominence only at certain moments: toward the end of both World Wars, and at the time of the emergence of Solidarity.

The reason for that phenomenon is fairly obvious. The United States as a world power, and subsequently the world superpower has had a global outlook and global concerns. Poland could be of interest to the United States only within a broad context when Polish issues affected the international scene. By contrast, Poland even in the days of its past glory in the 16th and 17th centuries - when it was the largest state in Europe - was always a power with limited interests. Later on, it ceased to determine its own fate and became dependent on others. Let me now try to illustrate some of the above sweeping generalizations - I am fully aware that generalizations are little more than working hypotheses - and look at certain aspects of American-Polish relations.

As I mentioned at the onset I shall try to point to both lights and shadows in order not to distort the picture. Polish interest in the New World goes back to the sixteenth century, and as some historians (for instance Janusz Tazbir) have shown, it was quite considerable. There were also early contacts as well as Polish contributions to American growth and development.

American Poles are rightly proud of the fact that already in 1608 a group of skilled Polish artisans - presumably brought in by Captain Smith - was active in Jamestown. In the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries individual Poles, frequently Protestants, made their way to America. Names of such towns as Sandusky and Zabriskie testify to the activity of representatives of the Sadowski and Zaborowski families. The Polish Brethren whose signal contribution to the emergence of Unitarianism is generally recognized were very active in the West, and Harvard College early acquired the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum. The Polish interest and involvement in the American War of Independence has been thoroughly explored by historians.

The contributions to the American war effort on the part of such famous volunteers as Kazimierz Pulaski and Tadeusz Kosciuszko are well known and need not be stressed here. We are reminded of them by the important monuments near the White House and the annual Pulaski Day Parade. What is less known is the important role the American example played in the debates at the Warsaw parliament which adopted the May 3, 1791 Constitution. It was the first written constitution in Europe and the second after that of the United States.

In turn, how seriously the events in Poland surrounding it were treated can be attested by a debate at Harvard in 1972 on the three revolutions: the American, the French and the Polish. Kosciuszko was lionized when he visited America again almost exactly 200 years ago.

By this time Poland had been already wiped off the political map of Europe by the three partitioning powers: Prussia, Austria and Russia. The contrast between the American success and Poland's catastrophe struck a Polish poet already after the first partition when he wrote to his American friend: "When I think, Sir, that with three million people, and without money you have shaken off the yoke of such a power as England, and have acquired such an extensive territory - and that Poland has suffered herself to be robbed of five million souls and a vast country - I acknowledge, I do not understand the cause of such a difference".

And he concluded by saying that if God would not show pity on Poland's fate "I will say to my countrymen: Come, cross the seas, and insure to your children liberty and prosperity". In the words of American historian Albert Lord "for most outsiders the partitions have overshadowed all the preceding periods of Polish history" providing an example of how a state ought not to be governed or how badly people can mismanage its national life. But, there is more to it.

During the crucially important nineteenth century when the United States expanded from the Atlantic to the Pacific following what has been called Manifest Destiny, there was no Polish state with which the United States could have had normal inter-state, diplomatic intercourse.

I consider this fact of capital importance, for it affected the basis of their very relationship. The Poles deprived of their statehood and rising against the partitioners again and again were worthy of sympathy, pity, even some assistance - moral and material - but were not considered as a political factor.

During the 1830 November uprising, pro-Polish groups emerged in the United States and poems entitled "Freedom! Freedom! Hear the Shout!" or "Rise, White Eagle, Rise" appeared. The Russian tsar was denounced in sharp terms, incidentally, not for the first time, as a tyrant and barbarian.

Several prominent Americans, such as Morse, Emerson and Fenimore Cooper organized a Polish-American Committee in Paris which collected donations. A well-known surgeon departed to Poland to repay the debt owed to Kosciuszko and Pulaski. Books with Polish themes, including a History of Poland were published. The United States, faithful to George Washington's directive of no entangling alliances could offer little tangible political or military assistance. In John Quincy Adams' words, however, whenever a banner of freedom was unfurled there was America's "heart, benedictions and prayers", and early nineteenth century Poland had a share of them.

A significant change, however, took place in the 1860s. In February 1861, crowds in Warsaw were clashing with Russian troops; in April 1861 the first shots of the American civil war were fired at Fort Sumter. The year 1861 was also a memorable year in the Russian Empire witnessing the emancipation of serfs by tsar Alexander II.

A combination of these events had a tremendous bearing on American-Polish relations. Washington's sympathies for Russia - already evident earlier - acquired a new dimension. Internationally, Britain and France which demonstrated pro-Confederate and pro-Polish attitudes found themselves in conflict with St. Petersburg. The Russian fleet, fearing a blockade sailed out of the Atlantic, visiting New York and San Francisco, where it met with an enthusiastic welcome.

To Americans watching the reforms in Russia, a Polish uprising appeared not only a folly but a reactionary move by the ever conspiring nobility. Comparisons began to be drawn between the progressive Union and Russia on the one hand and the secessionist South and Poland on the other. As a journalist remarked ironically, had the Polish rebellion broken out three years earlier there would have been a declamations about Kosciuszko and Sobieski and denunciations of the tsar. Now a rebel was a rebel and deserved hanging. A famous cartoon in the London "Punch" showed the tsar with the caption: Abraham I and Alexander II. With the sale of Alaska in 1867 by the "old and faithful friend of the United States" as a contemporary commentator put it, American-Russian rapprochement received another boost. The significance of all this was fairly obvious.

An attitude developed equating the integrity of the United States with that of Russia. Any movements undermining the latter came to be seen not only as unjustifiable but also as undermining a great power needed in the world of states. This, to my mind, explains why the principle of national self-determinations applied after World War I to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was not applied to Russia - Colonel House, for one, remarked on that.

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