The Polish American Congress, Polish Americans, and the Politics of Anti-Communism

  • Donald Pienkos
Chapter

Abstract

Over the past one hundred years and more, Polish immigration to the United States has made up, by far, the largest of all such population movements from Eastern and East-central Europe to this country. The greatest number of immigrants entered between the 1870s and 1914 and, together, they created a dense network of church, fraternal, cultural, and social institutions and associations that eventually came to be known as the Polonia, or Polish American community. Into this community arrived smaller but significant later migrations of Poles in the years between World Wars I and II (1918 to 1939), after World War II, from 1945 into the 1960s, and, most recently, from the 1970s on. The result of these movements was a diverse Polish American population that has come to number at least nine to ten million in all. Indeed, throughout America’s history over the past century, the Polish population in the United States has comprised at least half of all those persons originating from Eastern and East-central Europe.

Keywords

Presidential Election Democratic Party Republican Party Electoral Vote Popular Vote 
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Notes

  1. 1.
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  29. 27.
    Reagan won nine of the ten most heavily Polish states in 1980, losing only in Maryland to Carter. He won all ten in 1984. George H. W. Bush carried seven of the ten most heavily Polish states in 1988 in winning the Electoral College vote 426–111. Only Massachusetts, the home state of his opponent, New York, and Wisconsin went to the Democratic Party candidate. Polish American voting in the three Reagan-era elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988, are based on unpublished estimates by the author and those of John Kromkowski of the Catholic University of America. See also Donald E. Pienkos, “Polish Americans in Congressional Politics: Assets and Constraints,” The Polish Review 48, no. 2 (2003): 185–94.Google Scholar

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© Ieva Zake 2009

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  • Donald Pienkos

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