Performing the Polish-American Patriot: Civic Performance and Hyphenated Identity in World War I Chicago

In the years directly preceding World War I, American immigration numbers soared, with Italians, Jews, and Poles leading all other groups.¹ Concerns about the numbers and the fact that these new arrivals did not conform to “native-born” Americans’ ideas of the nation’s citizenry—namely, these immigrants were not Anglo-Saxon Protestants—resulted in Americanization campaigns that hoped to instill white middle-class values in immigrant communities.² As news of the war filled the papers between 1914 and 1916, concerns surfaced about immigrant loyalty, causing many émigrés to disband their national societies, Anglicize their names, and cease staging national holiday celebrations and ethnic theatre to avoid harassment.³ History documents well these instances of immigrants erasing the traces of their ethnic heritage to dispel suspicions of disloyalty during the war.⁴ Fewer stories persist, at least in the popular imagination, of the inverse: instances of immigrants presenting their ethnic heritage to allay fears rather than provoke them. The Polish immigrant community in Chicago, the third largest national group in the city, embraced what I will call their Polishness,⁵ and, instead of fomenting suspicion of Polishness as something anti-American, it read as a truly patriotic American expression.

The Polish community turned to theatre and performance to reframe the discourse of assimilation. By shifting from performance practices that presented exclusively Polish identity (1914–1916) to performance practices that presented a Polish-American identity (1917–1918), Chicago’s Poles successfully redefined American patriotism, furthered the homeland cause, and prepared for U.S. entry into World War I. Drawing on their decades-long tradition of Polish-language plays and Polish national holiday celebrations, the Polish community created and made visible a new hyphenated identity, that of the Polish-American patriot. These performances not only demonstrated a resistance to Americanization campaigns but also indexed changing American foreign policy and renegotiated the relationship between “immigrant” and “American.”

By analyzing Polish civic performance during World War I, I show the potential for performance as an intervention in debates about immigration and nativist rhetoric. By civic performance, I mean those performances that helped define the city by bringing together a large, heterogeneous audience and putting the city’s values on display. Civic performances were usually experiments in sociality. As Jill Dolan states, “performance offers a way to practice imagining new forms of social relationships.”⁶ I show here how the Polish immigrant community learned to use performance to contest the rhetoric that Polishness was inherently non-American. Polish parades and exhibitions showed Chicago what Poles looked like, where they lived, and what their values were. Instead of allowing nativists and Americanizers to generate the discourse of alien national disloyalty, these Poles used performance to subvert dominant power relationships and become the subjects of the discourse instead of the objects. Furthermore, the community shifted from private, community-based performance practices to broader, city wide performance practices to help audiences reconceptualize immigrant bodies. By parading down Chicago’s streets or participating in patriotic choruses, the Polish community used Polish bodies as a surface to rework immigrant identity and refute negative stereotypes of non-Anglos.⁷ I argue here that by engaging in a range of embodied practices, the Polish immigrant community performed the possibility of ethnic-Americanness in a time when Americanness increasingly excluded immigrants.

Americanization

The first Americanization campaigns were the result of the U.S. Immigration Commission, or Dillingham Commission, a congressional subcommittee led by Senator William Paul Dillingham. The commission spent three years (1907–10) investigating American immigrants and published a forty-two-volume report in 1911. A large portion of the report was dedicated to a “Dictionary of Races of Peoples,” which used William Ripley’s hierarchies from his book The Races of Europe. In the “Dictionary,” the most “advanced” race was the Anglo-Saxon, which enjoyed a majority in the United States, Britain, Germany (and the German-speaking lowlands), and the Scandinavian Peninsula.⁸ Anglo-Saxons, argued the report, proved their civilized acumen in their laws and democratic institutions, whereas non-Anglo groups, such...