Wheeling's Polonia: Reconstructing Polish Community in a West Virginia Steel Town

Abstract

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the Upper Ohio Valley's thriving coal, rail, steel, and pottery industries attracted a multiethnic population of eastern and southern European immigrants. Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, and Croatians joined a growing industrial proletariat, relegated to the most dangerous and unhealthy work and facing widespread xenophobia and discrimination. Wheeling, a commercial center in West Virginia's northern panhandle since the early 1800s (a half century before western Virginia broke away from the mother state), anchored one of industrial America's many small regional networks, including Weirton and Benwood in West Virginia and Steubenville and Martins Ferry in Ohio.William Hal Gorby tells the story of Wheeling's Polish Catholic immigrants and their American-born descendants between 1870 and 1950 as they constructed and defended their identities as Catholics and workers. Gorby concludes that the city's Polish American “unskilled” steelworkers, facing antagonism from their brethren in the dwindling crafts, formed a “subculture of opposition” based on two visions, “one advocating class solidarity, the other ethnic Catholic solidarity” (98). Toughened within this oppositional culture, these workers supported organized labor's strikes before and after World War I, even though they were discriminated against by the craft-oriented Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers. Later they flocked to the Steelworkers Organizing Committee and the CIO when these opened the labor movement to all workers in the mass industries.The vitality of Catholic culture in Wheeling's Polonia was grounded largely in St. Stanislaus Parish, whose patriarch, Father Emil Musial, guided his church for fifty years. In addition to reinforcing traditional ceremonial bonds through parochial education, local Polish-centered festivals, holidays, and weddings, Musial facilitated the integration of St. Stanislaus parishioners into a network of cultural and political support groups such as the Polish National Alliance, the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, and the Catholic Women's League. In the pre–World War I years, says Gorby, Wheeling's Polonia ironically had an indefinite sense of Polish national solidarity. Migrants’ village and regional ties to three distinct European empires (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia) engendered only a “loose identification of a unified Polish identity” (40). The Great War and the struggle for an independent Polish republic supplanted prior provincialism among Wheeling's Poles and connected them both to the ideal of Polish nationhood and to America. A sense of newly unified ethnic pride, combined with the concentration of Poles into “a crowded, medium-sized industrial city,” brought an evolution away from old provincial ties and toward an Americanized Polishness. Interestingly, Gorby explains how high school football helped break barriers between Wheeling's ethnic enclaves. As second-generation Poles gravitated to public schools in the 1920s and 1930s, increasing contact with native whites and other ethnic groups through secular education and athletic competition fostered “a common purpose.” This generated a sense of solidarity among players, classmates, and adults from disparate neighborhoods and backgrounds (178). Gorby concludes that these “interethnic relations helped provide the background for the union organizing drives of the 1930s and 1940s” (3).The labor movement provided a critical partner for strengthening St. Stanislaus's commitment equally to the spiritual and material well-being of Polonia's working-class Catholics. Fr. Musial invoked the 1891 papal encyclical on the rights and duties of capital and labor, Rerum Novarum, a foundational text for Catholic social justice. Gorby describes Rerum Novarum as a model for a “corporatist alliance between capital, labor, and the government” that defended private property but spoke out against “unrestrained capitalism” and for the “just compensation and guarantee of individual rights” (114–16). These values were consistent with conservative trade unionism and the tenets of industrial democracy and “left-leaning Americanism” as envisioned in the 1919 steel strike (despite the Communist affiliation of its chief organizer, William Z. Foster) (149). Musial's take on Catholic social justice tolerated the radical threads of the early CIO, accepting the labor movement as the “secular avenue for moral regeneration in industrial America” (96). The alliance between the Church and the labor movement served as a counterweight to Wheeling's vital Socialist movement, led by Walter Hilton, editor of the Socialist Party's newspaper, the Wheeling Majority, and Valentine Reuther, the father of working-class leaders Walter, Victor, and Roy Reuther. Gorby contends that the Church's social services and sensitivity to workers’ daily “lived experience” was more in tune with a “left-leaning moral capitalism” than the Socialists’ radical critique of capitalist exploitation was (240). By the Depression era, acknowledging the numerical strength and aspirations of Wheeling's proletariat, the Ohio Valley Trades and Labor Assembly had jettisoned its traditional class and ethnic exclusivity. Workers “still lived in ethnic communities,” says Gorby, “but increasingly developed a union consciousness through their local unions.” The embodiment of moral capitalism was Walter Reuther's United Steelworkers of America (USWA), seen by steelworkers as “the reason for their increasing security,” which was peaking in the early 1950s, the close of Gorby's study. The USWA “was a vital part of their worldview and just as important as their local Catholic parish” (238).Gorby questions the perception among some labor historians that “the children of immigrants broke from their insular ethnic communities” (241) as they joined working-class coalitions through the CIO and the Democratic Party (220–23). He argues that although that may have been the rule in large urban centers, in rural-industrial locales like Wheeling, “ethnicity, religion, and class were all equally important in providing a secure community” (242).Wheeling's Polonia joins other important studies of rural industrial communities by West Virginia and Appalachian historians in the last two decades, including Ken Fones-Wolf's Glass Towns; Deb Weiner's Coalfield Jews; William H. Turner's Harlan Renaissance; Lou Martin's Smokestacks in the Hills; Joe Trotter Jr.’s African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry; Jessica Wilkerson's To Live Here, You Have to Fight; and Trans-national West Virginia, edited by Ken Fones-Wolf and Ron Lewis. Gorby documents an impressive range of local, state, and national archives and secondary literature. His writing is direct and nuanced, sensitive and sympathetic, and unburdened by empty rhetorical flourishes. This is a good book, one to which educators and labor, immigration, religion, Appalachian, and cultural historians should turn. They will be well served.