The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Read online

  Ruthless Russian repression forged a stiff Polish resistance movement that erupted in rebellions in 1830 and 1863. In the wake of the futile Polish “January Rising” of 1863–1864, thousands of Poles were exiled to Siberia. One Polish family housed the young Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, who served time in a Siberian penal colony from 1897 to 1900. Poles were forced to learn Russian in school, classes conducted in Polish were prohibited, and the Russian language was used in public affairs. Warsaw University became a Russian institution in 1869. Conscription into the Russian Army was particularly onerous for Poles.

  Following the revolution of 1905 and the shocking loss in the war with Japan, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to share power with a duma. The tsar’s repeated dissolution of that parliamentary body was, in part, a reaction to persistent Polish calls for greater autonomy. A Russian police report from 1911, the year Stanisława was born, reveals the extent to which Russian agents monitored the Polish national movement. Polish teachers worked underground in so-called flying schools to keep Polish culture alive. “In the house of Pergricht,” one Russian police report found, “a dangerous person by the name of Rusek is teaching. . . . In some of the schools, e.g., in Rusek’s, Góralska’s, or in that of the Drozdowska sisters, a considerable number of [Polish] children, up to fifty at a time, are taught in two shifts.”2

  The situation of Poles in Russia was typical of many oppressed minorities in Europe at the time. The lack of political rights and economic opportunity precipitated the greatest migration of peoples in history. Many Poles went to western Germany and France to work, but the lure of the United States—the “land of the free”—was particularly strong.

  Julian and his young wife and child were among an estimated 4 million Poles who immigrated to the United States from 1870 to 1914. According to the 1870 U.S. Census, there were only seventy Poles in Cleveland, but because there was no Polish state, many ethnic Poles probably registered as Russians, Germans, or Austrians. Official visas and passports were virtually nonexistent. Passenger manifests had two categories for immigrants coming to the United States: “nationality” and “race or people.” Julian and Weronica listed “Russia” in the first line and “Polish” in the second. After World War I, there were between 50,000 and 80,000 Poles in Cleveland, comprising 10 percent of the city’s population. One Polish journalist visiting the Warszawa neighborhood of Cleveland was astounded by the number of Polish speakers. “This is not America!” he exclaimed.3

  In the late nineteenth century, the United States became the world’s premier industrial power, and there was work to be had in the burgeoning factories. Spurred on by demand from the U.S. Civil War, iron and steel mills popped up along the Great Lakes and throughout the Ohio River Valley. Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Buffalo were booming industrial cities in the late nineteenth century, and Poles came in droves to work in the factories.

  Cleveland was a big steel town; Henry Chisholm built one of the first Bessemer mills in 1868, and by the 1890s, the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company had about 8,000 workers, the largest employer in Cleveland.4 At the turn of the century, Ohio was second only to Pennsylvania in steelmaking. After World War I, about half of the workers in the American Steel and Wire factories in Cleveland were Polish.5 Łukasz Musial found work at a steel mill in Donora, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh. Julian and Bolesław Walasiewicz went to work at the old Newburgh steel mill in Cleveland, which had been built in 1857.

  The first Walasiewicz house on Warsaw Avenue (top) and the Clement Avenue house, which was the family residence for sixty-five years. Author photos.

  In the summer of 1912, Weronica and little Stanisława left Wierzchownia to join Julian in the United States. On June 13, the two sailed from Bremen on the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamer Chemnitz, bound for Baltimore. Weronica did not speak English, had a thirteen-month-old baby in tow, and carried five dollars and a train ticket to Cleveland in her pocket. Weronica must have felt some additional trepidation in boarding that ship because the mighty Titanic had gone down on the Atlantic crossing only two months earlier.

  In early July, Julian was reunited with his young wife and saw his infant daughter for the first time. They moved into a tiny house at 3932 East 67th Street, not far from Bolesław’s house on Warsaw Avenue. The family easily transitioned into their new life. Julian had steady work, they had a house with the luxury of running water, and the neighborhood was full of Poles, so there was no need to learn English. Stanisława’s two younger sisters, Sophia and Clara, were born there. In 1926, the family settled into a house a few blocks away on Clement Avenue, where Weronica lived until her death in 1991. Ninety years after the Walasiewicz family bought the Clement Avenue property, Clara’s son Joe Battiato was still living in the dilapidated old house.

  Polish immigrants found solace and support in their ethnic neighborhood, but prejudice and discrimination also limited their options to live and work elsewhere. At the turn of the century, Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the United States were alarmed that a critical mass of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe was threatening the cultural identity of the nation. These immigrants posed a challenge to the elites’ idea of what it meant to be an American. The United States was supposed to be a “melting pot,” but, in fact, it was difficult for these new immigrants—mostly Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Jews—to assimilate and identify with their new country. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, against Imperial Germany, German Americans fell into this “less desirable” ethnic category as well. Compounded by the fear of German and foreign “Bolshevik” elements, the government began to demand passports and other identification papers to weed out suspect peoples.

  In 1917, Congress passed an immigration law that increased the tax on immigration and called for anyone age sixteen or older to pass a literacy test. Congress had already set a precedent for the formal exclusion of certain immigrant groups with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The 1924 Immigration Act codified quotas of immigrants from certain countries, favoring those from the British Isles and Western Europe, while limiting newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe. Poland’s quota fell from 30,977 in 1923 to 5,982 in 1924.

  Public schools expanded social studies curricula in U.S. history and politics to inculcate these immigrants with a strong sense of mainstream Anglo-American identity. Facing blatant discrimination, the newer immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe gravitated toward their own neighborhoods in the big northern industrial cities—New York City, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland. They struggled to overcome such stereotypes as the “drunken Irish pug” or the “dumb Polak.” Poles in the German Empire were seen as second-class citizens, and German Americans were the particular purveyors of these slurs against Poles.

  Prejudice against Polish Americans worsened after Leon Czolgosz, a second-generation Pole from Cleveland, shot President William McKinley on September 6, 1901, in Buffalo, New York. It was the third assassination of a U.S. president in four decades. Abraham Lincoln was killed in 1865, and James Garfield was shot in 1881. Czolgosz’s family had left Prussian Poland in 1873, and Leon was born in Detroit shortly after the family arrived in the United States. In 1881, Paul Czolgosz moved the family to a small farm near Cleveland. Leon eventually worked at the same American Steel and Wire mill in Newburgh that employed Julian Walasiewicz.

  Cleveland’s power brokers had regarded the city’s Slavic community with suspicion even before McKinley’s assassination. At times, Poles were recruited to replace striking Irish iron workers, creating bitter hostility between the two ethnic communities. In 1882, Czechs and Poles were hired as strike-breakers at the Cleveland Rolling Mills. Three years later, they themselves went on strike for higher wages, but their violent takeover of the mills alienated other steelworkers. The depression of 1893 ruined the dreams of many migrant workers to rise out of their desperate condition, and Czolgosz moved from job to
job and city to city to find work.

  Czolgosz’s parents raised him in the Polish Catholic Church, but he renounced religion and embraced anarchism. Friends and family said he had no close familial, social, or ethnic connections. Czolgosz was a troubled soul; at the time of the assassination he had taken the alias Fred C. Nieman, which means “no one” in German. He could not connect with the Polish American community, his new country, or even his working-class friends. His stepmother, who at the time was living with Czolgosz’s father Paul on Fleet Avenue in the Slavic Village, told the press that Leon was insane: “I have always said he was crazy. . . . He must have been crazy or he would never have tried anything like that.” Czolgosz’s aunt Mary said that “he was a strange boy and an awful coward. He had few friends because he did not associate with anyone.”6

  Appalled at the harsh conditions for workers in U.S. factories, Czolgosz was radicalized by Marxist and anarchist literature. He became a blind follower of Emma Goldman, one of the most prominent anarchists in the United States at the turn of the century. Czolgosz went to see “Red Emma” speak in Cleveland on May 6, four months before he shot the president. “I do not believe in violence or in taking human life,” Goldman declared.

  But desperate evils require desperate remedies, and in this country things are getting desperate. We hear of the assassination of emperors and kings—the king of Italy falls, the president of France falls, and the hand that strikes the blow strikes in the name of outraged justice. . . . I do not approve of violence or assassination; but when it does take place the man who strikes the blow is a hero. He has done what others who are suffering from oppression have not the courage to do.7

  The timid, impressionable young man was smitten with Goldman’s emotional denunciation of the exploitive capitalist class. Czolgosz had a brief audience with her after the speech. He was also inspired by Italian American anarchist Gaetano Bresci, who had assassinated Italy’s King Umberto a year earlier. Bresci was sentenced to life in prison, but he died there in suspicious circumstances in May 1901, a few months before McKinley’s assassination. Goldman eulogized Bresci in the leftist paper Free Society.

  The press announced that the president was scheduled to appear at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in early September 1901. Czolgosz took a train to Buffalo, rented a room at John Nowak’s saloon, bought a .32-caliber revolver, and waited for McKinley to come to town. On September 6, Czolgosz stood in a reception line to shake hands with the president. When he got to McKinley, Czolgosz reached out and shot him twice at point-blank range, once in the chest and once in the stomach. Asked why he shot the president, Czolgosz replied simply, “I am an anarchist, and I did my duty.”8

  McKinley developed gangrene and died of septic shock eight days later. Modern-day antibiotic drugs would have saved him. The president was interred in his hometown of Canton, Ohio, about sixty miles south of Cleveland. Goldman did not lament McKinley’s death but found kind words for her young anarchist follower: “My heart goes out to him [Czolgosz] in deep sympathy, and to all the victims of a system of inequality, and the many who will die the forerunners of a better, nobler, grander life.”9

  Polish American Leon Czolgosz lived and worked in Cleveland before assassinating President William McKinley in 1901. Library of Congress.

  On September 23, Czolgosz went on trial in Buffalo. After three days of testimony, the twelve-man jury took thirty minutes to convict him of murder. Presiding judge Truman C. White addressed the defendant as follows: “Czolgosz, in taking the life of our beloved president you committed a crime which shocked and outraged the moral sense of the world.”10 White sentenced him to death. Czolgosz expressed no remorse, saying, “I killed the president because he was the enemy of good people—the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”11

  Czolgosz spent his last days in solitary confinement at Auburn Prison in upstate New York. Justice was immediate in those days. In the United States today, it takes, on average, more than a decade to carry out a death sentence. One inmate in Florida spent thirty-three years on death row before being put to death in 2011. Czolgosz went to the electric chair on October 29, 1901, a little more than seven weeks after the assassination. None of his family members were there. Prison guards threw sulfuric acid on his face to make it unrecognizable, and he was buried at Soule Cemetery in the little town of Sennett, New York, about five miles north of Auburn. Edison Studios filmed a macabre reenactment of the death chamber scene, with officials hovering around an actor playing Czolgosz as electric current surged through his body. The opening scenes of the short film feature actual footage of Auburn Prison on the day of the execution.

  Czolgosz had tried in vain to identify with the American working classes and the anarchist movement, which, by nature, was multiethnic, interregional, and disparate. He found no solace or comfort among the Polish neighborhoods in U.S. cities, which gave so many immigrants a sense of community and belonging, the Walasiewicz family included. Czolgosz was a disgrace to his family and Polish Americans throughout the Great Lakes area. According to an article in a September 1901 issue of the New York-based journal the Literary Digest, “A number of Polish societies and journals of this country have repudiated the idea of his Polish nationality, claiming that he is a Russian Hebrew.” Many Poles pointed out that Goldman was Jewish. The Chicago daily Dziennik Narodowy [National Daily], one of the most important Polish American newspapers in the country, wrote that the name Czolgosz was likely Hungarian or Slavonian, not Polish. One Polish leader from New York told Literary Digest that the Czolgosz brothers and sisters “spat on all things Polish,” and that Czolgosz had called himself “Nieman,” a German name.12 Cleveland’s Plain Dealer quoted a resolution from Polish American demonstrators: “The Polish nation can boast of never having produced a man who would stain its reputation by attacking authority because [the Polish nation is] imbued with Christian principles.”13

  The image of Poles in the United States changed for the better when the United States went to war with Germany in April 1917. German Americans now became the target of suspicion, prejudice, and ridicule, shifting the focus off of Poles and other Eastern European immigrants. German-language books were removed from libraries, German-language newspapers closed, and German-language classes in public schools were eliminated. Many German Americans altered their names and enlisted in the U.S. Army to show their loyalty to the United States. One famous photo from the time shows several children standing at Edison Park in Chicago in front of a sign that reads, “Danger!! To pro-Germans.” Beneath that is, “Loyal Americans are welcome to Edison Park.” President Woodrow Wilson spoke out against so-called hyphenated Americans and declared that “every citizen must declare himself American—or traitor.”14 In 1918, Congress passed the Sedition Act, and after the war Ohio enacted a law mandating that school lessons be conducted in English. Both measures mainly targeted German Americans.

  Julian Walasiewicz got out of Europe only a few years before the continent became embroiled in World War I. Poles in Russia found themselves fighting on the side of the Triple Entente, while German and Austrian Poles were conscripted into the armies of the Central Powers. If the Walasiewicz family had stayed in Wierzchownia, Julian might have perished with the Russian Army fighting against fellow Poles. Polish poet Edward Słoński wrote about this prospect of a Polish soldier in the German Army facing a Russian Pole across enemy lines:

  So when you catch me in your sights

  I beg you, play your part,

  And sink your Muscovite bullet

  Deep in my Polish heart.

  Now I see the vision clearly

  Caring not that we’ll both be dead;

  For that which has not perished

  Shall rise from the blood that we shed.15

  An old Polish prayer envisions the day when Poles would have the chance to fight for the independence of their country:

  God of the Jagiellos!
God of Sobieski! God of Kościuszko! Have pity on our country and on us. Grant us to pray again to Thee as our fathers prayed, on the battlefield with weapons in our hands, before an altar made of drums and cannons, beneath a canopy of our eagles and our flags.16

  Cleveland’s Polish community ran Red Cross fundraisers and organized Liberty Loan drives for the Allied war effort.

  Some 1.9 million Poles fought in World War I, suffering 450,000 dead. In spite of this high price in blood, the war was a godsend to Poles’ aspirations for the resurrection of their country. The division of Poles in three different empires seemed an insurmountable obstacle to the return of the Polish state, unless, as famous Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz once wrote, this prayer was answered: “Deliver us, oh Lord. For a universal war for the freedom of the nations, we beseech thee, oh Lord.” World War I was just that “universal” conflict. The seemingly impossible happened when the partitioning powers lost the war, even though they fought on opposite sides. The tsar was overthrown in early 1917, and Lenin’s Bolsheviks grabbed power that fall, promising Russians “peace, bread, and land.” Lenin extricated Soviet Russia from the war, capitulating to the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. When the Germans surrendered to the Western Allies in November, the Central Powers’ victory in the east was rendered null and void. Germany and Austria were at the mercy of the Western Allies, and the Soviet Red Army could not prevent the creation of the new Polish state.