Foreword
It is my pleasure to write a foreword to this Website in connection with the wonderful Roman B.J. Kwasniewski photographic collection housed in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Library.
It was my privilege to play a part in bringing the Kwasniewski collection to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries over two decades ago. Of course, there are several other individuals who had crucial roles in this effort, and each merits recognition here.
Back in 1974, I was selected to present the fifth annual Morris Fromkin Memorial Lecture at the UWM Library. This series, which continues to this day, had been established through a bequest from Mr. Fromkin, a then recently deceased attorney with a life-long interest in American social issues. In my talk, “Progressives, Socialists, and the Milwaukee Poles,” I discussed the political and cultural dynamics of the city’s already substantial Polish immigrant and ethnic community in the period from the 1880s to World War II.
I later revised my presentation for publication in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, the official historical journal of the our state. Significantly, this fine journal's policy was to include relevant photographs and other visual materials in the text of its articles. But here a problem appeared. The Wisconsin History Society in Madison simply did not possess any suitable photos for my piece. Not to worry, the editor, Paul Hass, assured me. He and his associate, John Holzhueter, had contacts with people in Milwaukee who possessed private photograph collections that might be of use. As a matter of fact, we visited several of them and included a number of their pictures in my article. These illustrations enhanced the piece, which was recognized with the William Hesseltine award as the best contribution to the Wisconsin Magazine of History published in 1978.
At this same time this was going on, I was making my own inquiries of a number of Milwaukee south side photo shops in the hope that they too might have pictures useful for the publication. But here I ran into a dead end. For various reasons none had saved their old inventories.
I then received a suggestion, this time from a good friend, Janet Dziadulewicz Branden, a very knowledgeable and active member of the Milwaukee Polish-American community. Janet urged me to contact an old timer named Roman Kwasniewski. Years before, Kwasniewski had owned the Park Studio, which was located between Kosciuszko Park and the St. Josaphat Basilica church on Lincoln Avenue on the city’s near south side.
I telephoned Kwasniewski several times, with no luck. Then almost as an afterthought I wrote him a brief note. There was no reply and I forgot about the matter.
One morning in December 1978 I was looking over my office mail and came across a letter from someone named John Kaczmarowski. His message was brief and to the point: “The building is being sold next week. If you want to look at the photographs, let me know as soon as possible."
I immediately telephoned Mr. Kaczmarowski, who was the 92-year old Roman Kwasniewski's son-in-law, and we arranged a meeting at the building. I then spoke with William Roselle, Director of the Golda Meir Library. Bill was enthusiastic about my going and proposed that several of the Library’s staff accompany me. A few days later Fromkin bibliographer Stanley Mallach and UWM’s resident photographer, John Alley, drove wth me to the old studio. There, as we followed our host through the musty, unoccupied building, we were delighted to come across a trove of thousands of glass plate negatives and hundreds of positive prints, all in amazingly good condition. The negatives, nearly all of which were studio portraits, were well identified as to the subjects and the dates when they were made. All were available, Kaczmarowski told us, but only for purchase. (He regretfully explained that his father-in-law’s nursing home and medical expenses had become a growing burden to the family.)
This was a problem, since we had no authorization to pay anything for the collection. But things changed quickly after a telephone call I made to Janet Branden. Once apprised of the situation, Janet, in her capacity as a past president of Polanki, the Polish Women’s Cultural Club of Milwaukee, said she would immediately contact the club's president, Rita Michalak, about the matter. Within a few minutes, Rita called back to assure me that the club would cover the cost of the collection’s purchase.
Just days later, Mr. Roselle saw to it that the collection was transferred to the University, where it was placed in storage until I had the opportunity that summer to examine its contents. He also made sure that other parts of the collection that were not initially discovered at the building were also brought to UWM.
In mid 1982, working with Stan Mallach and Wilbur Stolt, the UWM Library’s bibliographer, I completed the creation of the first permanent exhibition of more than 140 photos from the Kwasniewski collection. This exhibit emphasized the people who had been part of the large Polish ethnic community, or Polonia, that had flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, on Milwaukee’s south side. Its inaugural public display was, most appropriately, at the very first Polish Festival on Milwaukee’s lake front Summerfest grounds that Labor Day weekend.
More than twenty years later, I still recall the popular response to the exhibit, one of palpable excitement as crowds four and five deep pressed forward to gaze at the enlarged photos that so beautifully depicted their community, its life, work, sports and ceremony. Clearly, they were seeing their own story for the very first time. That weekend some 40,000 people viewed the exhibit. Since then, it has been shown on a number of occasions and has never failed to generate a positive response. The same has been true for a second exhibit of Kwasniewski’s work that was organized under the direction of Mr. Timothy Ericson, head of the Library's division of archives and special collections. This exhibition focused on Kwasniewski's photos of buildings and neighborhoods of the community. It nicely complemented the first exhibit.
In the mid 1980s and through the generous and far-sighted efforts of Wisconsin State Senator John R. Plewa, state funds were set aside to systematically catalog the entire collection for the first time so as to make it more readily accessible. This big project was directed by Peter Watson Boone, Roselle's successor as Library Director, and Mr. Ericson. The result is the Roman B.J. Kwasniewski Photographic Collection that we have today. Over the years, their work has permitted countless visitors to the Library to view the photos in the collection and to make copies of family pictures for themselves and their children. In addition, Kwasniewski’s photos have been used in calendars and in scholarly books as well. One early example among the latter is John Bukowczyk’s fine monograph, And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish-Americans (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).
Most recently in December 2003, a new work published by the Wisconsin State Historical Society appeared, one that included more than 170 of Kwasniewski's pictures. Organized by Ms. Christel T. Maass of the Library's archives department, the publication is titled Illuminating the Particular: Photographs of Milwaukee's Polish South Side. This book, which benefits from the text provided by Milwaukee historian John Gurda, owes its existence to the leadership of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Library, most notably its recently retired Director, Peter Watson Boone and Acting Director Ewa Barczyk. Through their efforts and those of their predecessors and colleagues, the extraordinary work of Roman Kwasniewski will be available for viewing and use for generations to come.
Milwaukee’s Polish Experience: A Capsule Overview
While a Pole was reputed to be residing in Milwaukee in 1846, the year the city was founded, Polish immigrants only became especially noticeable members of the city’s population from the 1860s, when they established their first parish church, named in honor of St. Stanislaus Kostka, and located not far from the present church on the corner of 5th and Mitchell streets.
From then onward, the Polish immigration, most of it hailing from the German zone of the old Polish state that been destroyed by Russia, Austria and Prussia between 1772 and 1795, rapidly swelled. By the 1880s there were more than 30,000 persons of Polish birth or ancestry in Milwaukee. In 1906, more than 70,000 were Polish, 22 percent of a city-wide population of 313,000. Since then and to this day, the Polish population of Milwaukee and Milwaukee county has remained fairly constant at about 20 percent of the total.
However, while the Poles were a considerable presence in Milwaukee, they were always overshadowed by city's German-origin inhabitants. An absolute majority of Milwaukee's population for most of the 20th century, Americans of German ancestry still accounted for a considerable portion of the population in the city and in Milwaukee County too. Interestingly, relatively few Poles who migrated to America from the Austrian or Russian-ruled zones of the partitioned country ever settled in Milwaukee. Those immigrants more frequently landed in the Polish communities in Chicago, for example, and in huge numbers. They usually largely arrived later, mainly between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. But by this time the Polish immigration, like the German migration to Milwaukee had long since ended as a mass phenomenon. (Only in the years after World War II would there be new, but much smaller Polish and German immigrations to Milwaukee, with a still smaller Polish migration arriving here in the 1980s.)
Because of the very size of the German immigration, neighborhoods heavily populated by German newcomers, their offspring and descendents were to be found nearly everywhere in Milwaukee. Moreover, their numbers and their culture came to define Milwaukee to many observers as the German-American city par excellence. In contrast, the Poles of Milwaukee tended to live in more concentrated neighborhoods that were located in several distinctive areas in and just outside the confines of the city. By far the largest of these was on Milwaukee's near south side, from Lake Michigan west eventually to the city limits and beyond, and north and south between National and Oklahoma Avenues. In this area lived more than three-fourths of the entire Polish population. Other Polish communities were on the northeast side, along Humboldt Boulevard westward to what became Capitol Drive, and in working class towns like Cudahy just south of the city.)
Poles came to Milwaukee, and to Wisconsin, for the same reasons that caused their countrymen, and peoples from other lands as well, to settle throughout the United States in the decades after 1854, when mass Polish migration to this country first began. These reasons involved their desire to seek work, better living conditions, and the religious and political freedoms they had been denied in their unhappy homeland. Most came to stay, and overwhelmingly that is what they did, in Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, and elsewhere throughout the middle west and east, the regions of the United States where they were always most concentrated.
The Polish immigrants to Milwaukee did not have an easy time, especially in the early decades. Practically none knew the English language or American social practices and few brought much money with them to help them settle here. But the great majority were willing to work at whatever jobs they could find; gradually and laboriously, most succeeded in building new lives for themselves and their families. Ironically, it was in this early era of Polish migration and settlement in Milwaukee that the most significant edifices of the immigrants and their offspring, the Roman Catholic churches, were built. By the 1920s twenty had been erected, all of them impressive in their physical size and beauty. Milwaukee’s Poles, whose own first homes were usually very modest frame structures, were willing to sacrifice to make their churches almost like the palaces and manor houses they remembered from the old country. Among these great temples of faith were the churches of St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr on Mitchell Street, Saint Hyacinth on Becher, and most significant of all, the majestic Saint Josaphat on 6th and Lincoln, dedicated in 1901 and elevated in 1929 by the Vatican to the special status of a Basilica.
Not surprisingly, the earliest corps of community leaders in the years of the still largely immigrant Polish community came from the ranks of the clergy. Indeed, there were so many of these individuals, in Milwaukee and elsewhere in the many Polish communities around the country, that it is truly unfair to single out any few for mention here, although one, the Rev. Waclaw Kruszka, author of the first serious history of the Polish community in America and pastor of St. Adalbert Parish, deserves to be remembered.
Things would eventually change; by the first and second decades of the 20th century, when a second phase of the development of Milwaukee’s Polish community was already in bloom, new aspirants interested in providing community leadership were becoming visible, although few saw themselves as committed to displacing the clergy from their positions of authority.
This new generation of ethnic leaders included businessmen like Michael Kruszka (Waclaw Kruszka's half-brother), the ambitious and energetic founder-publisher of the widely read and influential Polish language daily, the Kuryer Polski, and the industrialist Sylvester Wabiszewski, labor unionists like Leon Krzycki and Walter Polakowski, John Kleczka, the first U.S. Congressman of Polish descent anywhere in America, and Polish fraternal leaders like Francis X. Swietlik, later dean of the Marquette University School of Law and still later a Milwaukee County judge. Significantly, while the mass of Polish Americans of Milwaukee were traditionally seen as identifying with the political aims of the Democratic Party, their leaders, at least in the early years were more diverse in their views. Thus, Kruszka was ever a political maverick, Krzycki and Polakowski became prominent advocates of America’s socialist party in the years between 1910 and the onset of the Great Depression, Kleczka was a life-long Republican, and Swietlik, aligned himself with each of the major parties at various times during his long career.
In the years after World War II, Milwaukee’s Polish Americans, entered a third phase of their community's existence. This phase indeed continues to the present time. These years have been marked by the departure of thousands to new, outlying, sections of Milwaukee, to its neighboring suburbs, and in recent years to destinations beyond Milwaukee County and beyond Wisconsin too. Intermarriage, initially outside the Polish ethnic heritage and more recently outside their traditional Roman Catholic faith tradition, have become increasingly widely accepted among Americans of Polish ancestry. Indeed, in the early years of the twenty-first century nearly all Americans of Polish heritage are three, four and even five generations removed from the immigration experience. This process of continuing assimilation into the ever-changing American national culture will most certainly continue.
Assimilation has other dimensions too; clearly, today’s Polish Americans of Milwaukee are far better educated than their parents and grandparents thirty and forty years ago and far more likely to be engaged in better paying work. Assimila-tion also means the gradual transformation of the many ethnic institutions that for so long defined Milwaukee’s Polish experience before World War II, most significantly the once imposing Polish parishes and historically substantial Polish fraternal societies.
One may ask, what have Polish Americans contributed to Milwaukee, to Wisconsin, and to America? This indeed is a very broad question, but a question to which one may hazard an educated guess. Briefly put, the Polish Americans, in Milwaukee and elsewhere, have almost universally embraced the opportunities presented to them to be good citizens and to contribute their talents in making their communities better places in which to live. Many have worked hard and long for the causes of the freedom and well-being of Poland, the country of their ancestors. By their various efforts, they have realized the dreams of their immigrant forebears who risked and sacrificed so much to come to, and settle in, the United States. They and their descendants, moreover, are likely to continue to contribute to the betterment of American society and in many ways.
The photos of Roman B.J. Kwasniewski show much of this, too. They are invaluably representative of the second phase of the Polish-American settlement experience in Milwaukee, the era after World War I and before World War II. This was a critical time for the children and grandchildren of the Polish immigration to Milwaukee in establishing themselves as citizens of this country. It was also a time that was used by many to make better lives for themselves and their families. The photos in this wonderful and so lovingly preserved collection show a dynamic and solid community, one that provided real benefits, moral and material, to its members. If one picture is worth a thousand words, just how many volumes are to be found in this extraordinary collection?
Donald
E. Pienkos
Political Science Department
University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
September 2, 2004