{"id":338,"date":"2014-01-27T03:42:43","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T03:42:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stampingamericanmemory.org\/?page_id=338"},"modified":"2016-07-01T21:34:43","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T21:34:43","slug":"revolutionary-heroes-from-poland","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/shaping-national-identity-with-commemoratives-in-1920s-1930s\/revolutionary-heroes-from-poland\/","title":{"rendered":"Revolutionary Heroes from Poland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Polish Americans and immigrants fought to honor two Polish Revolutionary War heroes on stamps as part of a larger strategy to portray Polish Americans as good Americans with ancestral ties to the birth of the United States as a nation.<\/p>\n

In the 1920s, Congress overwhelmingly approved immigration restrictions that imposed strict quotas on individuals arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe. Restrictions came in reaction to both political concerns over post-World War I radicalism and eugenically-influenced charges of racial inferiority based on biology (see Anniversaries and Immigration Policy<\/a>). Poles, for example, were described as a distinct \u201crace\u201d of people. ((Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity<\/em> (University of California Press, 1985) and Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color<\/em>, 1998. During a Kosciusko Day celebration in New York City, for example, the mayor referred to Poles as a separate \u201crace.\u201d See \u201c5,000 Hear Mayor Praise Kosciusko,\u201d New York Times, October 16, 1933, 19. )) Few legislators spoke out to oppose the quotas. Representative Robert H. Clancy, however, defended immigrants for their positive contributions to the US including the Polish:<\/p>\n

Polish-Americans are as industrious and as frugal and as loyal to our institutions as any class of people who have come to the shores of this country in the past 300 years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clancy also mentioned the contributions of Polish citizens during the Revolution to highlight a \u201chigh place\u201d they had earned in American history. ((Robert H. Clancy, >em>Congressional Record (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1924), 6529\u201332.)) Polish-American groups broadcast the achievements of Revolutionary War heroes to anchor their people to the origins of the United States and to distinguish themselves from other eastern Europeans by showcasing their long history of being loyal Americans.<\/p>\n\"General<\/a><\/span>General Count Casimir Pulaski Memorial, Washington, DC. Dedicated 1910 (Photograph taken by Wally Gobetz, 2009 , Flickr.com.<\/a><\/small><\/span>\n

Efforts began in the early twentieth century to recognize the contributions of Count Casimir Pulaski and General Thaddeus Kosciuszko with statues and postage memorials. In 1910, monuments honoring both men were dedicated in Washington; Pulaski\u2019s financed by Congress and Kosciuszko\u2019s donated to \u201cthe people\u201d by the Polish American Alliance. ((\u201cMonuments of Two Polish Heroes to Be Unveiled in Washington May 12,\u201d The Atlanta Constitution<\/em>, May 11, 1910, 1; \u201cNation to Honor Polish Patriots,\u201d Chicago Daily Tribune<\/em>, May 9, 1910, 6. For stamps that were eventually approved, such as those honoring Thaddeus Kosciuszko (Design files, #734), see rejection letters for why petitions were denied for specific years in the stamp\u2019s design file.)) Pulaski was a Polish nobleman who volunteered to fight for the colonies and is known as the Father of the American Calvary. He fought and died at the Battle of Savannah in 1779 and the city honored him as a local hero. To further extend Pulaski\u2019s reputation as a national hero, the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution spearheaded a stamp campaign in 1929. They co-sponsored an event commemorating the 150th anniversary of the fall of Count Pulaski at the battle of Savannah, Georgia. Supporting the DAR\u2019s efforts to secure a stamp was Georgia Congressman Charles Edwards, who petitioned the Postmaster General to support a Pulaski commemorative and commented that \u201cthe Daughters of the American Revolution would not sponsor anything that is not real meritorious and entirely worthy.\u201d According to Edwards, the DAR properly vetted the stamp’s subject matter and it passed their patriotic test demonstrating Pulaski was an early model Polish immigrant. Honoring Pulaski as a war hero was not in question when President Herbert Hoover declared October 11, 1929 as \u201cPulaski Day,\u201d yet no stamp came. ((\u201cSavannah Exalts Pulaski\u2019s Memory,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, October 6, 1929, N1; Telamon Culyer, \u201cSesqui-Centennial of Georgia\u2019s First Clash of Armies,\u201d The Atlanta Constitution<\/em>, October 6, 1929, J1; \u201cNotable Fete Is Planned to Honor Pulaski,\u201d The Washington Post<\/em>, October 6, 1929, S5. In Design Files (#690): Bernice E. Smith, \u201cLetter to Congressman Charles G. Edwards,\u201d letter, April 5, 1929; Charles G. Edwards, \u201cLetter to Honorable Walter F. Brown,\u201d April 6, 1929; American Consul Central, \u201cLetter to Honorable Secretary of State,\u201d September 23, 1930.)) Hoover and Congress acknowledged Pulaski as a national hero, but earning a commemorative stamp proved more difficult.<\/p>\n\"Von<\/a><\/span>Von Steuben Issue, 1930 (Photo, Smithsonian National Postal Museum)<\/small><\/span>\n

Surprisingly the following year,\u00a0 strong rebukes came from a Polish newspaper that may have influenced the government\u2019s decision to print a Pulaski commemorative. The paper accused U.S. postal authorities of using a \u201cdouble standard\u201d when choosing whom to honor on stamps with the headline, \u201cPolish Proposition Refused\u2014Germans Favored.” According to this paper\u2019s editor, the USPOD honored a German Revolutionary War hero, Baron Frederic Wilhelm von Steuben, on a stamp, and refused to reciprocate for a Polish Pulaski.<\/p>\n

French newspaper editors even decried the choice of the von Steuben stamp. They did not seek a Pulaski stamp, but rather sought recognition for French military officers who fought for independence, including Lafayette and Rochambeau. Missing from the correspondence file were panicky or angry letters from government officials strongly urging the Postmaster General to order a Pulaski stamp quickly. A few months later, however, nearly fifteen months after the Savannah anniversary celebration, a Pulaski issue was announced. ((Design Files (#690): Bernice E. Smith, \u201cLetter to Congressman Charles G. Edwards,\u201d letter, April 5, 1929; Charles G. Edwards, \u201cLetter to Honorable Walter F. Brown,\u201d April 6, 1929; American Consul Central, \u201cLetter to Honorable Secretary of State,\u201d September 23, 1930.)) This episode demonstrates that the world noticed when a government printed new stamps, placing postal officials in a challenging role. Their decisions held enormous political weight and carried cultural meaning far beyond those petitioning for stamp subjects.<\/p>\n

This can been seen in the ways that non-collecting Americans noticed new stamps and questioned the reasoning behind postal choices. Present in the archive’s files for the Pulaski stamp was an angry letter from a citizen who asked why the USPOD honored Pulaski with a stamp and did not chose an American soldier instead. She spoke of her fears of first-generation immigrants held by many fellow citizens. Mrs. M.A. Van Wagner criticized Polish immigrants for coming to the U.S. only to \u201cget employment here and take our American dollars back to Poland\u201d while others remained unemployed (presumably she meant native-borns) in the early years of the Depression. For Van Wagner, the Pulaski stamp signified another way that America had been \u201cforgnised\u201d similar to the \u201cgangs” of foreigners who were responsible for importing \u201cpoison\u201d liquor during Prohibition. ((M. A. Van Wagner to Postmaster General, 2 January 1931, Design Files,(#690) )) Her letter stands alone in the Pulaski file as one of protest, but her emotional reaction to this stamp reflects real sentiments felt by some Americans in the interwar period not only towards eastern European immigrants, but also in the power she felt stamps possessed in representing, or perhaps misrepresenting in this case, an official narrative of her country. Stamps may have been small, but their images were powerful.<\/p>\n

Many Americans supported the immigration restrictions in Johnson-Reed, so viewing an eastern European, Pulaski, on a stamp may have angered them. It seemed hypocritical of the government to limit immigration of specific groups of people because they were not considered fit for citizenship, and then a few years later honor an individual representing one those groups on a federal stamp. This occasion was not the first time the U.S. government recognized the achievements of Pulaski, but the accessibility of a commemorative stamp meant that more people\u2014across the United States and around the world\u2014saw first-hand that the federal government celebrated a Polish hero as an American one.<\/p>\n\"Tadeusz<\/a><\/span>Tadeusz Kosciuszko, lithograph, 1833 (Image, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery)<\/small><\/span>\n

Concurrent to the Pulaski stamp campaign, petitions arrived at the USPOD seeking a stamp to honor another Polish Revolutionary War hero, Thaddeus Kosciuszko. At the time of his death in 1817, Poles and Americans mourned his legacy as a war hero and his commitment to fighting for liberty worldwide. His legacy continued on in the form of monuments and celebrations dedicated in his honor. ((Gary B Nash, Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kos\u0301ciuszko, and Agrippa Hull: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation<\/em> (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 207\u2013213. Interestingly, Kosciuszko was an amateur artist who sketched Thomas Jefferson. See some examples at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, http:\/\/npgportraits.si.edu\/emuseumCAP\/code\/emuseum.asp?style=single&currentrecord=1&page=search&profile=People&searchdesc=Name%20contains%20Kosciusko……&searchstring=Name\/,\/contains\/,\/Kosciusko\/,\/false\/,\/false&newvalues=1&rawsearch=constituentid\/,\/is\/,\/10335\/,\/false\/,\/true&newstyle=text&newprofile=CAP&newsearchdesc=Related%20to%20Tadeusz%20Kosciuszko&newcurrentrecord=1&module=CAP&moduleid=1<\/a>)) Among those commemorative efforts was one to immortalize his legacy on a postage stamp that would reach across the U.S. and abroad to his homeland of Poland. The Kosciuszko Foundation first petitioned the Postmaster General in 1926, by way of New York Senator Royal S. Copeland to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the general\u2019s \u201ccoming\u201d to the colonies. ((Senator Royal S. Copeland, \u201cLetter to Postmaster General Harry S. New,\u201d April 29, 1926, Design Files (#734). ))<\/p>\n

After those attempts failed, queries were reshaped and the Foundation asked for a stamp that would instead honor the 150th anniversary of his \u201cnaturalization as an American citizen.\u201d From 1931 to 1933, hundreds of endorsement letters arrived in the office of the Postmaster General supporting this stamp, accumulating a greater volume than supported Pulaski\u2019s stamp just a few years earlier. Seven years after the first requests, Postmaster Farley fittingly chose to announce the Kosciuszko issue on Polish Day at the Century of Progress World\u2019s Fair in Chicago (1933). Farley claimed that he was \u201chappy to convey (his) highest regard for the American citizens of Polish extraction\u201d and declared that Kosciuszko\u2019s name would be \u201cforever perpetuated in the hearts of American people.\u201d ((Design file (#734) Copeland to New, 29 April 1926; Senator Couzens (MI), S.J. Res. 248 “Authorizing the Issuance of a Special Postage Stamp in Honor of Brig. Gen. Thaddens Kosciuszko,” S.J. Res. 248, Congressional Record, 74 (February 6,1931) p.4121. The design file is filled with letters of support coming from individuals, politicians, businessmen, and fraternal organizations. Information Office, Post Office Department, press release, July 22, 1933. ))<\/p>\n

Citizenship was a key element in pitching this stamp, which also was reflected in the announcements printed in newspapers. Kosciuszko\u2019s \u201cadmission to American citizenship\u201d and the \u201cprivilege of becoming a citizen\u201d were celebrated alongside his military service. Much like Farley who paid homage to Polish citizens, other reactions to the issue emphasized that the General\u2019s legacy on a stamp \u201chonors not only the man himself, but his countrymen who have come by the hundreds of thousands to the country he helped to establish as a land of liberty for all men.\u201d ((\u201cStamp to Honor Kosciusko,\u201d New York Times, <\/em>July 23, 1933, 13; <\/em>Richard McPCabeen, \u201cThe Stamp Collector,\u201d Chicago Daily Tribune<\/em>, August 13, 1933, D4;<\/em> \u201cThe Stamp Album,\u201d The Washington Post<\/em>, <\/em>August 20, 1933, SMA3; and Editorial, \u201cHonoring Kosciusko,\u201d Hartford Courant,<\/em><\/em> July 27, 1933.)) Whether Kosciuszko actually became an American citizen was not questioned at the time, but the stamp offered a strong symbolic gesture and honor for all people with Polish heritage as bestowed upon them by the government.\u00a0 Like the pre-revolutionary pilgrims, the Polish were nation builders, too.<\/p>\n

Choosing to honor Kosciuszko\u2019s \u201cnaturalization\u201d proved to be a curious claim made by the Foundation. There appears to be no documentary evidence to support the claim that he became an American citizen, even though he was held in high regard and called a friend by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other Revolutionary War-era notable figures. After the War, Kosciuszko haggled with the new Congress, like other soldiers, to be paid back wages for his service in the Continental Army. He earned membership in the Society of the Cincinnati<\/a>, which was limited to military officers who served during the Revolution. Kosciuszko returned to his native Poland to where he led resistance and fought, unsuccessfully, against Russian occupation and oppression. He published the \u201cAct of Insurrection,\u201d similar to the Declaration of Independence, and also freed the serfs in Poland in 1794. After some initial victories, Kosciuszko\u2019s resistance was crushed by the Russian forces and he was taken prisoner and held in Russia. A few years later he returned to the United States, committed to freeing his homeland. ((An excellent telling of Kosciuszko\u2019s travails and travels can be found in Nash, Friends of Liberty<\/em>.))<\/p>\n

Kosciuszko hoped to lobby support for Polish independence from American and French governments, but found himself politically opposed to John Adams\u2019s anti-France policies. In light of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Thomas Jefferson urged Kosciuszko to leave the country to avoid imprisonment. If Kosciuszko had been naturalized, he would not have needed to flee the country. According to Congressional records in 1976, Representative John H. Dent tried to rectify that by submitting a resolution to confer citizenship upon Kosciuszko, perhaps in the spirit of the Bicentennial celebrations. Kosciuszko\u2019s actual status was less important than the way that Polish-American cultural groups constructed his historical identity as an American citizen. ((Nash, Friends of Liberty. Regarding the stamp, I found some correspondence from 1986 in the design file that asked then-curator of the National Postal Museum where they could find documentary evidence of Kosciuszko\u2019s naturalization. The curator said there was no documentary evidence and attached a letter written in 1953 to the Director of the Public Library of Newark stating that there was no official \u201cnaturalization, but that through his deeds and actions he became an \u2018American\u2019.\u201d See also Representative Dent, (PA), H.J.Res.771, Joint Resolution to Confer U.S. Citizenship Upon Thaddeus Kosciusko, Congressional Record<\/em>, 122, (January 21,1976) p.544.)) These groups believed there was a lot at stake by representing Kosciuszko as a citizen as well as a military hero. Polish immigrants and Polish Americans were conflicted, much like immigrants and citizens of Norwegian descent discussed earlier<\/a>, about how best to balance their cultural and political identities as Poles and as Americans.<\/p>\n

Unlike the Norse-American stamps which depicted ships and represented migration, the Pulaski and Kosciuszko stamps depicted each man in very different ways.<\/p>\n\"Pulaski\"<\/a><\/span>General Pulaski, 2-cent, 1931 (Photo, National Postal Museum Collection)<\/small><\/span>\n

Pulaski visually is associated with Poland with his portrait flanked by the modern flags of Poland and the United States. Generally, other commemoratives did not print the U.S. flag. Pulaski\u2019s portrait appears in the center where he casts his glance to his left, to the side where the Polish flag appears from behind his portrait. In contrast, the Kosciuszko design did not feature either flag. Perhaps because the stamp commemorated the 150th anniversary of his \u201cnaturalization\u201d as an American citizen, flags were not necessary for indicating his nation of origin; Kosciusko was American, Pulaski was Polish. ((Max G Johl, The United States Commemorative Stamps of the Twentieth Century<\/em> (New York, H.L. Lindquist, 1947), 268\u20139.)) The final design represented Kosciuszko standing as a military officer, distinguishing him from other Revolutionary War citizen-soldier stamps, and instead identified him as a leader.<\/p>\n\"Kosciusko\"<\/a><\/span>Kosciuszko, 5-cent, 1933 (Photo, National Postal Museum Collection)<\/small><\/span>\n

The stamp engraving reproduces the full-bodied statue of him that sits in Lafayette Park across from the White House in Washington. Kosciuszko appears larger than life as he looks down upon the stamp reader from his pedestal. Like many other Revolutionary War officers represented on stamps, he is standing, not on horseback, with sword drawn and appears ready to lead a battle. Pulaski, who was a royal Count, looks out from his portrait wearing a dress military uniform. Oddly, he is not on horseback although he is credited as founding the American Calvary. No identifying language tells a stamp consumer that Pulaski died at the Battle of Savannah. And unless one read the newspaper announcements discussing the stamp, or as a collector purchased the first day cover, the average American probably did not understand that the dates printed on the Kosciuszko, 1783-1933, celebrated his fictional naturalization. ((The first day cover stamped in Kosciuszko, Mississippi, reads that he became a citizen by an act of Congress in 1783, perpetuating the myth of naturalization. See: \u201c734-11a 5c Kosciuszko, Kosciusko MS, 10\/13\/33, S, UNKN DESIGNER (Blue Env),\u201d eBay, accessed December 31, 2013.))<\/p>\n\"The<\/a><\/span>The first day cover stamped in Kosciuszko, Mississippi\u00a0reads that he became a citizen by an act of Congress in 1783, (Photo from eBay).<\/small><\/span>\n

Obtaining these commemoratives were great achievements for the fraternal and Polish heritage organizations that fought for these stamps to demonstrate ethnic pride and claim a piece of American heritage, and as another means for establishing their status as racially white. Even as cultural and legal definitions of whiteness were changing in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s, their members experienced discrimination and understood that Poles and other eastern European immigrants were defined as racially different from old stock immigrants hailing from western Europe. Celebrating Kosciuszko\u2019s naturalization tells us that it was important for the Polish National Alliance, Polish Roman Catholic Union, and other organizations to broadcast their hereditary claims to Revolutionary lineage, and American citizenship. The first naturalization law in 1790 dictated that only a \u201cfree white person\u201d was eligible for citizenship. Kosciuszko qualified as white and fit for citizenship, contradicting the justifications behind immigration restrictions of people from Poland found in the Quota Act and Johnson-Reed. In the early twentieth century, Polish Americans were inching their way out of an in-between status, racially, and used the accomplishments of two Polish military men who volunteered (and died, in Pulaski\u2019s case) for the American cause during Revolutionary War as their connection to the origins of the republic. ((Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America\u2019s Immigrants Became White, The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs<\/em>; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color<\/em>, 1998.))<\/p>\n

Polish American groups received help from the USPOD in proving their people to be fit and loyal American citizens, since their ancestors fought to establish the United States as an independent nation. The legal and cultural murkiness of racial classification in the early twentieth century made it more imperative for first and second generation immigrants to be able to stake their claim to whiteness. For Polish immigrants, earning two stamps helped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Polish Americans and immigrants fought to honor two Polish Revolutionary War heroes on stamps as part of a larger strategy to portray Polish Americans as good Americans with ancestral ties to the birth of the United States as a nation. In the 1920s, Congress overwhelmingly approved immigration restrictions that imposed strict quotas on individuals arriving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":191,"menu_order":8,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-338","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9B6tX-5s","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":817,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/338\/revisions\/817"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}