in the United States.  Chicago alone shelters over 100,000 of these people, and Cleveland 45,000.  These immigrants as a rule own the neat, box-like houses in which they live, where flower-pots and tiny gardens bespeak a love of growing things, and lace curtains, carpets, and center tables testify to the influence of an American environment.  The Bohemians are much given to clubs, lodges, and societies, which usually have rooms over Bohemian saloons.  The second generation is prone to free thinking and has a weakness for radical socialism.

The Bohemians are assiduous readers, and illiteracy is almost unknown among them.  They support many periodicals and several thriving publishing houses.  They cling to their language with a religious fervor.  Their literature and the history which it preserves is their pride.  Yet this love of their own traditions is no barrier, apparently, to forming strong attachments to American institutions.  The Bohemians are active in politics, and in the cities where they congregate they see that they have their share of the public offices.  There are more highly skilled workmen among them than are to be found in any other Slavic group; and the second generation of Bohemians in America has produced many brilliant professional men and successful business men.  As one writer puts it:  “The miracle which America works upon the Bohemians is more remarkable than any other of our national achievements.  The downcast look so characteristic of them in Prague is nearly gone, the surliness and unfriendliness disappear, and the young Bohemian of the second or third generation is as frank and open as his neighbor with his Anglo-Saxon heritage."[36]

The bitter, political and racial suppression that made the Bohemian surly and defiant seem, on the other hand, to have left the Polish peasant stolid, patient, and very illiterate.  Polish settlements were made in Texas and Wisconsin in the fifties and before 1880 a large number of Poles were scattered through New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.  Since then great numbers have come over in the new migrations until today, it is estimated, at least three million persons of Polish parentage live in the United States.[37] The men in the earlier migrations frequently settled on the land; the recent comers hasten to the mines and the metal working centers, where their strong though untrained hands are in constant demand.

The majority of the Poles have come to America to stay.  They remain, however, very clannish and according to the Federal Industrial Commission, without the “desire to fuse socially.”  The recent Polish immigrant is very circumscribed in his mental horizon, clings tenaciously to his language, which he hears exclusively in his home and his church, his lodge, and his saloon, and is unresponsive to his American environment.  Not until the second and third generation is reached does the spirit of American democracy make headway against his lethal stolidity.  Now that Poland has been made free as a result of the Great War, it may be that the Pole’s inherited indifference will give way to national aspirations and that, in the resurrection of his historic hope of freedom, he will find an animating stimulant.