Polish Chicago, Solidarity's American Heartland

At its demographic peak in the early twentieth century, Chicago was often called the second-largest Polish city in the world after Warsaw, though historians note that Lodz and Wroclaw likely had larger Polish populations than Chicago ever did. Poles had been arriving in waves since the eighteen sixties, settling first on the Northwest Side along Milwaukee Avenue in a neighborhood they called Polish Downtown, then spreading to Bucktown, Wicker Park, and neighborhoods further north and west. By nineteen hundred, there were more Poles in Chicago than in Krakow.

The community built what immigrant communities build when the surrounding culture does not accommodate them: their own institutions. The Polish Daily News, published in Chicago continuously since nineteen oh eight, is the longest-running Polish-language daily newspaper in the United States, more than a century of news produced for readers who were maintaining a language the second and third generations were beginning to lose. The Polish Museum of America, established in nineteen thirty-five on Milwaukee Avenue, is one of the oldest ethnic museums in the country, holding over one hundred thousand volumes and archive materials. The church parishes of Polish Downtown were complete social institutions, running schools, credit unions, and social halls alongside the nave.

In the nineteen eighties, the Polish community in Chicago became something it had not been before: politically significant beyond its own borders. When the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland came under martial law in December nineteen eighty-one, Chicago Poles organized fundraising, political lobbying, and support networks that made the city one of the primary nodes of the American Solidarity support system. Polish Chicago sent money, sent delegations, sent pressure to the Reagan administration, and sent a signal to Warsaw that there was organized institutional support in the largest Polish city outside Poland.

The Polish Museum of America on Milwaukee Avenue still operates. The neighborhood around it is considerably more gentrified than it was when the museum was founded.