Up with Ethnics

...Yet for some still unexplored reason they led the way among the city's ethnics in local and state political participation— electing the city's current mayor, Paul Marcincin, in 1977...

...At the same time historians who lacked a recent immigrant background, such as John Higham, emphasized the destructive force of nativist hostility to "outsiders.' Now younger historians, many of them (like Stolarik) products of the University of Minnesota's doctoral program, are pointing to the continuity of culture from the Old World to the New, the persistence of language and custom, the continuing strength of the traditional family and church...

...Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the focus of Stolarik's study, was founded bythe Moravians, a Protestant sect whose origins in what is now Czechoslovakia were overshadowed when its members moved westward and became Germanized before migrating to America in the mid-18 th century...

...And they paid for it, amazingly, with $1.00-a-month deductions automatically taken out of the pay envelopes of Catholic Slovak steelworkers— an arrangement made possible by the friendship between a priest and a vice president of Bethlehem Steel...

...Arriving in this country, they were initially relegated to a lowly status in the industrial cities of the Northeast...

...Besides religion and its profound importance in daily life, Stolarik examines all the institutions that served Bethlehem's Slovaks...

...consider, for instance, the implications of the steel industry' s collapse for employment in the Northeast...

...Rather, he measures the socio-economic ascent of the Slovaks in terms of their feelings about the opposing powers in World Wars I and II as well as in theCold War...

...Stolarik s positive presentation of three generations of Slovaks in Bethlehem stands in contrast—no doubt in healthy contrast—to the earlier depiction of downbeaten newcomers, a portrait fostered by the continuing popularity of such books as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle...

...So they built the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius, named for the ninth-century missionaries who rescued the Slavs, including the Slovaks, from German culture by inventing a precursor of the Cyrillic alphabet...

...Meanwhile, Lutheran Slovaks put up Saint John's Lutheran Church, although its ethnic identity was eventually diluted by the addition of outsiders...

...Neither the Holy Infancy Church, for the Irish Catholics, nor the Holy Ghost Church, for their German coreligionists, met the cultural and religious needs of the Catholic Slovaks...

...By 1900 it boasted the home office and a major mill of 1 he Bethlehem Steel Company, t hus at I racl ing I housands of Eastern and Southern Europeans, though very few Jews and practically no blacks...

...Before that transformation, Bethlehem's Slovaks had been passive in the matter of labor union organization...

...This is a fresh and interesting perspective, but I think it is less important for understanding the Slovaks' advancement than the post-World War II affluence that transported them out of the South Side and into colleges, enabling them to take white-collar positions and live in the suburbs...

...On Ihe North Side were the Moravians, | heir fellow German Protestants and some while-collar Irish who had escaped Ihe Soul h Side, the sile of 1 he steel planl and a dozen Catholic churches...

...Americanization was the primary concern of the earliest historians of immigration, since they tended to be from old-line families and were openly fearful that the incoming stream would pollute the purity of the wasp waters...

...Stolarik implicitly suggests that the discrepancy may be explained by the growing geographical and social mobility of Slovaks, especially the third generation, for (as he shows) the decline of the extended family speeded up assimilation...

...Through Ihe city flows Ihe Lehigh River...

...These newcomers and their progeny not only survived, however...

...But Stolarik seems overoptimis-tic about what lies ahead...

...in time they prospered...

...Indeed, in a chapter called "From Hunkie to Slovak," he never discusses what the boys on the North Side called the Boys from the South...

...The first immigrant-stock historians, asif to calm those fears, sought to prove that their forebears had quickly becomegood Americans...

...It is not his chosen task to compare Slovak progress to thai of oilier white ethnic groups, though, so we cannot know whether there is a correlation between upward mobility and political success...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, San Francisco State University The Slovaks who left their corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were mostly peasants fleeing the rule of Hungarian landlords and German officials...

...Other Slovaks were the force behind the construction of the Greek Catholic UniateChurch of Saints Peter and Paul, where the congregation was Slovak and Russian...

...A later generation of scholars, led by Harvard's Oscar Handlin, treated immigration as a process in which hapless peasants were wrenched off their plots, dispatched across the ocean, stripped of their traditional cultures, and ballered into submission here...

...The village they established in the New World gradually evolved from a small spiritual community into a burgeoning railroad and iron center...

...Not the least interesting aspect of lodgelife was a fascination with sports—part of becoming an American...

...These included boarding houses and saloons catering to newly arrived young bachelors intent on returning home wealthy, and fraternal lodges originally organized to provide insurance for the ill and widowed but eventually reflecting geographical origins in Europe and social divisions in the United States...

...To insights of this kind Stolarik adds his own Slovak birthright: Unlike Michael Novak and other Slavs who have grown upintheU.S.,he appears to carry no anger born of ethnic slurs...

...If the past was not as bad as we formerly thought, the future is unlikely to be as good as we hoped...

...M. Mark Stolarik, himself born in Slovakia during World War II but educated in North America, describes and explains that experience...