About Kuryer Polski

Kuryer Polski

Kuryer Polski, the "Polish Courier," was a Polish-language daily newspaper published in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from 1888 until 1962. It was the first Polish-language daily newspaper in the United States, founded by the immigrant journalist Michał Kruszka with $125 borrowed from friends, and under his leadership it became a national voice of Polish America — pro-labour, strongly nationalist and famously willing to fight the Catholic hierarchy of Milwaukee over the rights of Polish Catholics, even to the point of being forbidden reading for the archdiocese's Catholics. It published for seventy-four years.

Milwaukee's Polish community, concentrated on the city's South Side around great parishes such as St. Josaphat, was one of the largest and most organized in America. The Kuryer was its paper in a sense few immigrant newspapers achieved: Milwaukee's Poles read it, fought over it, were married, buried and politically mobilized in its columns, and measured their standing in American life by the battles it chose to fight.

Michał Kruszka's Road to Milwaukee

Michał Kruszka was born in 1860 in Słabomierz, in the Prussian Province of Posen, and was educated at the colleges of Filehne and Wągrowiec. Arrested as a young man by the Kaiser's police for pro-Polish agitation and protests against the Germanization of his native Poznań region, he left Prussia after his release and arrived in the United States in 1880. He learned English, received a business-school education at Elizabeth, New Jersey, and in 1883 came to Milwaukee as an insurance salesman.

His real passions, however, were politics and journalism. Kruszka entered politics himself, winning a seat in the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1890 as a Democrat, and two years later he became the first Polish state senator in the United States, elected to the Wisconsin State Senate. His editorial philosophy he summarized himself: when he had to sound a delicate piano string he used a soft mallet, but when he had to straighten a crooked rail, he used fire and a sledgehammer.

Failed Weeklies and the Founding of 1888

Kruszka's path to the Kuryer ran through a series of failures. From 1885 he attempted Polish-language publishing in Milwaukee: the weekly Tygodnik Anonsowy, an advertising weekly, was soon followed by another weekly, Krytyka. With backing from a group of Polish labour leaders he began a daily paper, Dziennik Polski, in 1887. All three ventures failed financially in relatively short order.

After borrowing $125 from friends, Kruszka made one final attempt. On 23 June 1888, with a staff of three and assets of $125, he published the first edition of the Kuryer Polski, its inaugural headline boldly announcing that it was the only Polish daily in America, representing Polish interests in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Central and South America. This time the paper succeeded. In 1899 Kruszka incorporated the Kuryer Publishing Company, and by 1915 the Kuryer Polski boasted a readership of more than forty thousand.

Editorial Stance: Labour, Nation and Party

The Kuryer's editorial stance was pro-labour and strongly Polish nationalist. Politically it was aligned until 1900 with Wisconsin's Democratic Party — Kruszka's own party — after which he reversed its course in favour of the progressive Republican cause. Its declared motto was the representation of Polish interests in America, and its definition of those interests was expansive: Polish representation in politics, in fraternal life and, most explosively, in the Church.

The paper also promoted the Polish language itself. Its support for Polish-language instruction in Milwaukee's public schools, a demand of parents who wanted their children literate in the language of the home and the parish, put it on a collision course with the Roman Catholic archdiocese, which viewed public-school Polish as undermining the faith of Polish children and their support for the parochial schools on which the archdiocese's Polish apostolate depended.

War with the Archdiocese

The Kuryer's deepest conflict concerned the place of Poles in the American Catholic hierarchy. The paper campaigned for the appointment of Polish priests as bishops in America, arguing that a church whose congregations were so heavily Polish could not justly be governed exclusively by German and Irish prelates. Milwaukee's Archbishop Sebastian Gebhard Messmer opposed the appointment of a Polish bishop for his Polish parishes, and the paper answered him in print for years.

Kruszka's brother, Father Wacław Kruszka, was among the most assertive advocates of Polish representation in the Church's upper ranks. Contrary to the archbishop's wishes, Wacław travelled to Rome in 1903 to present his grievances against the German- and Irish-dominated American Church directly to the Holy See. Only in 1908 did Rome name a Pole, Paul Rhode, as auxiliary bishop of Chicago. In 1908 Wacław also published, through his brother's enterprise, his multi-volume History of the Poles in America — the first history of the Polish people in America, authoritative if controversial.

The archdiocese escalated. In 1906 the Church sponsored a rival Catholic Polish-language daily, Nowiny Polskie, to compete with the Kuryer. In 1912 Milwaukee's bishops went further and forbade Catholics to read the Kuryer Polski at all — a prohibition that produced a long, highly publicized court battle fought in the name of freedom of the press. The conflict eventually eased with the appointment of Father Edward Kozłowski as the first Polish bishop in Milwaukee, the concession for which the paper had campaigned for a generation.

The Paper at Its Height

On 27 June 1908 the Kuryer Polski celebrated its twentieth anniversary as, by its chroniclers' account, the largest newspaper in Milwaukee, surpassing even the city's American newspapers in that respect; the anniversary production ran to sixty-six pages and was distinguished by the quality of its articles and advertisements. Kruszka, who had a business education in printing, published bilingual material that made the newspaper attractive across the language line, and the Kuryer's influence extended nationally through the Polish communities of the Americas it had claimed as its constituency in its first headline.

The paper's offices stood in the city's life as well as its columns; the Kuryer Publishing Company operated from the Herold Building at 435 Broadway Street, and a photograph of a Kuryer carrier with the fortieth-anniversary edition in 1928 survives in Milwaukee's digital collections. Kruszka himself did not live to see that anniversary: the founder died on 2 December 1918, in the year Poland regained the independence his paper had demanded for thirty years.

Successors and Editors

The Kuryer Polski continued until 1962 under a succession of able editors. Its editors-in-chief across the decades included Kruszka himself from 1888 to 1899, Franciszek H. Jabłoński in the early 1900s, Stanisław J. Zwierzchowski from 1919, Czesław — or Chester — Dziadulewicz from 1928 to 1936, Józef Kapmarski from 1937 to 1940, Franciszek Plichta in the late 1950s, and Jane Sorbogne-Boguslawski, who closed the paper's history as editor in 1961 and 1962.

Survival itself was an achievement in those decades. The quota acts of the 1920s ended mass Polish immigration, the Depression squeezed every foreign-language paper, and the second generation of Milwaukee Poles read English. That the Kuryer outlived almost all of its founding-era contemporaries elsewhere in America testified to the institutional loyalty it had built on Milwaukee's South Side.

The Final Issue: September 1962

The original Kuryer Polski ended its run on 23 September 1962, seventy-four years after its founding. A later Milwaukee weekly borrowed the Kurier Polski name briefly in the later 1960s, but the daily founded by Kruszka — the first Polish daily in the United States — was finished.

Its closure marked the end of daily Polish-language journalism in Milwaukee, a city where the Polish press had once been strong enough to sustain rival dailies and to defy an archbishop. The community the Kuryer had served remained — its parishes, basilica and fraternal institutions enduring on the South Side — but it now read its news in English.

Legacy and the Digital Kuryer

The Kuryer Polski's historical reputation rests on the combination it embodied: a commercial immigrant daily that was simultaneously a labour paper, a nationalist organ and a combatant in the greatest church-politics struggle in Polish-American history. Its campaigns helped force the question of Polish representation in the American hierarchy onto the agenda of Rome itself, and its pages preserved, day by day, the life of Milwaukee Polonia for three-quarters of a century.

The paper's issues are preserved in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries' digital collections, where the Kuryer Polski archive makes the daily available to researchers, and local historians continue to draw on it as the fundamental source for Polish Milwaukee. In a fitting coda, the Kuryer Polski name was revived in digital form by Milwaukee's Polish community in the twenty-first century, invoking the original paper's founding mission of representing Polish interests in America.