THE POLISH EMIGRATION^207IMMIGRANTS TO USAa) Giving Poland as their 'place or country of birth':
1820-1885 33,489
1885-1898 131,694
1933-1946 46,473
1947-1972 466,001
Total 677,657
b) Identified as Polish by 'race or people':
1899-1907 675,038
1908-1919 677,620
1920-1932 90,815
Total 1,443,473
TOTAL: Polish Immigrants 2,121,130
less Re-emigrants
1908-1932 294,824
1947-1972 2,766
Total 297,590
TOTAL: Permanent Polish Immigrants 1,823,540^7
Despite their numbers, however, the Polish Americans have still to make a
proportionate impact on American life. Isolated instances of individual success,
such as Senator Edmund Muskie, John Krol, Archbishop of Philadelphia, or
Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, cannot conceal the fact that Polish Americans
do not yet, as a community, enjoy great social prestige. As an organized group,
they cannot compete with the influence, for instance, of the three million
American Jews. Nor have their votes or their lobbying ever inspired US Foreign
Policy to defend Poland's interests. In two World Wars, they made a dispropor-
tionate contribution to the US armed services. Drawn from only 4 per cent of the
total population, in 1917—18 they supplied 12 per cent of America's war dead,
and in 1941-5 17 per cent of America's enlisted men. In social terms, their edu-
cational and communal organizations are less effective than those of the
Ukrainians, with whom they are often compared. In political terms, their prob-
lems command less notice than those of the Blacks, Chicans, or Amerindians. In
the vicious world of the American ethnic jungle, the 'stupid and ignorant Pole'
has been widely accepted as a standard stereotype, and provides the butt for
innumerable and (for the Poles) insulting 'Polish jokes'. How different from the
popular stereotype of the 'noble Polish lord' still current in parts of Europe!
Reasons no doubt exist. Like the Irish and the Sicilians, the greatest influx of
Poles at the start of the century, especially from Galicia, contained a dispro-
portionate number of 'the wretched refuse' of Europe's most 'teeming shore'—
people so oppressed by poverty and near-starvation that they made for America
from an instinct of mere survival. They accepted the most degrading forms of
employment, withstood the most grinding labour, suffered the greatest