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Running head:   THE STORY OF THE WESTERN SLAVS IN THE UNITED STATES

The Story of the Western Slavs in the United States
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Abstract
The purpose of this essay is an analysis of the experience of early 20th century Western Slavic immigrants to the United States.   The Western Slavic group includes Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Slovakia.   Through the use of first and second person sources, the motivation for this group's exodus from their homeland as well as the challenges they experienced upon arrival are discussed.



My Western Slavic ancestors hailed from the Central European countries of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Slovakia.   And although history took relatively little notice of their immigration to America, the journey was an eventful one, fraught with difficulties.   Indeed, the story of the Western Slavic migrants is one of a road paved with obstacles, from poverty to prejudice.   Still, the Western Slavs had no shortage of motivation to immigrate to the United States; from a practically Feudal economic system of serfdom, to three-fold persecution from the Russians, Germans, and Austro-Hungarians throughout the early 20th century, to a lack of jobs or even land on which to subsist, fate forced the hand of many struggling Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks.
The Slavic people were actually the second largest group of immigrants among the Central and Eastern European population, with approximately 3.4 million arriving in the United States between 1899 and 1924 (Bade & Weiner, 1997)   The presumptive influence this number of immigrants might have been expected to have was mitigated by three factors.   The first was that the Slavic migration was part of a second wave of immigrants;   the first wave, which began in 1815, included primarily Northern and Western Europeans who were already fairly well established in society before the Western Slavic migration began.   The second factor was the...