The Polish peasant in Europe and America : monograph of an immigrant group

Front matter

ALBERT R MANN

UBRARV

AT

Part I Social Disorganization Chapter Page

I The Concept of Social Disorganization i

II Disorganization or the Family 8

III Disorganization of the Community 4S

IV Struggle for the Preservation of the Old Social System 87

V Revolutionary Attitudes 139-17 5

Class Revolutionism 143

Religious Revolutionism 154

PART II SOCIAL REORGANIZATION I The Concept of Social Reorganization 177

II Leadership 181

III Education 209

rv The Wider Community AND the R6le of the Press . . . 341

V Cooperative Institutions 271

VI The Role of the Peasant in National Life .... 306

Introduction

In the first two volumes of this work we have studied the traditional primary-group organization of the Polish peasant as it has been handed down to the present generation from many past centuries. We noticed that this organization has been rapidly changing during the last fifty years, so that there is probably not a single peasant community where it could be found in a pure and unmixed form; everywhere new types are combined with it. In our third volume we have followed the life-history of an individual who, living amidst this process of change, finds in his environment no place for himself, for his fundamental attitudes correspond entirely to the old type of social organization whereas by his social status he no longer belongs to this organization and is thrown without any permanent guidance into various new conditions to which he can adapt himself always only partially and imperfectly.

We shall now try to determine in detail those new types of social organization which substitute themselves for the old ones, and investigate the process by which this substitution occurs. Although limited to the Polish peasant, our investigation will endeavor to reach conclusions which may serve as hypothetical general sociological laws, to be verified by a comparison with other societies. For the specific evolution leading from the primary-group to a social organization based upon rational co-operation is a very general phenomenon.

viii INTRODUCTION

The primary-group is found not only in savage societies and among European peasants; it is not a survival of the past, but a spontaneous institution, found in all societies, in all classes, on all stages of cultural development, sometimes more, sometimes less isolated from the more complex and rational social systems, seldom, if ever, completely absorbing the interests of its members, but still constituting the most important form of social life for the immense majority of mankind, j We must realize that only in a few large cities scattered over the world the primary-group has lost its importance, and even there this loss begins to be felt as a rather dangerous effect of social evolution, as is shown by the recent attempts to reconstruct the community in American cities. Of course, the relative influence of the primary-group as compared with the higher forms of social organization is stronger in the case of the savage than in that of the peasant, stronger in the case of the peasant than in that of a half intellectual inhabitant of a provincial town, and is reduced to a minimum in the life of a business man in a large city, of a politician, a scientist, an artist; but it is still only a matter of degree. Innumerable human interests all through the world are still on a stage where their pursuit is chiefly dependent on the direct social response and recognition of the primary-group which constitutes the individual's immediate environment. It is therefore most important, both for theoretic and for practical purposes, to study the social process by which these interests become independent, economic, political, moral, intellectual, religious, aesthetic aims, pursued for their own sake, and social groups become rationally organized for the purpose of an efficient common pursuit of these aims. Our

INTRODUCTION fa

civilization, when taken not only in its highest manifestations but in its totality, is still in the midst of the same process of change which began half a century ago among the Polish peasants ; it is on the average much more advanced, much more distant from the exclusive predominance of the primary-group type, but it is still very far from a thoroughgoing teleological systematization of values and a rational control of attitudes. {

The evolution of the Polish peasant has with reference to this problem the specific importance of a social experiment in which certain essential processes are given in a relatively simple and isolated form — ^not merged in such a complexity of interfering phenomena as similar processes occurring in culturally more productive classes or in cultural centers with a more heterogeneous population, a richer stock of traditions, a more intense economic, political, intellectual life. We have even found that a further limitation of our subject in time and space was indispensable for methodical purposes. We are actually taking into account only a period of twenty to twenty-five years — the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries — and, except for certain important points where we use for comparison data collected in Posen under German domination, our materials are territorially limited to what was before the War Russian Poland, and in particular to that part of it which formed a separate administrative unit since the Congress of Vienna and was known as the Congress Kingdom.

I5uring the period and in the territories which we are taking into account, the social evolution of the peasants went on, of course, in continual interaction with the wider social milieu with which the peasant comr INTRODUCTION

munity was getting more closely in touch. The gradual disappearance of the old isolation of these communities, the growing participation of the peasant in nation-wide and even world-wide social processes, his slow but progressive incorporation into Polish national and general human civilization, constitute the most essential features of this evolution.^ If we could leave out of consideration the dependence of the community on the state as manifested in tax-paying, military service and criminal prosecution, and ignore the few outside elements which the country nobleman, the priest, the merchant brought into community life, we might say that some 50 to 75 years ago a large part of the peasant communities in Poland were almost entirely self-sufficient. Their social organization, their intellectual and religious life, their economic activities would have been immediately very little affected if the rest of humanity had suddenly progressed or regressed two thousand years. Of course, there had been a continual infiltration of outside influences, particularly due to the contact with the higher classes ; but this infiltration was so slow that the social values, though imperceptibly changing and broadening the content of social life, were completely assimilated by the community without requiring any reflective and planful adaptation and readjustment, without calling for institutional organization of the relations between the community and its wider social environment. All organization which existed within the community was exclusively concerned with the internal life of the latter and ignored the social world outside of its limits. Under these conditions, the first result of the growing connection between the community and the outside world is naturally a more or less far-going process of

INTRODUCTION ri

disorganization; new attitudes develop in the members of the group which cannot be adequately controlled by the old social organization because they cannot find an adequate expression in the old primary-group institutions. The group tries to defend itself against this disorganization by methods consciously tending to strengthen the influence of the traditional rules of behavior; but this endeavor, often efficient as long as the outside contacts remain limited to some particular field of interests, loses more and more of its effectiveness when these contacts continue to develop and extend gradually to all fields of social activity. The problem; is then no longer how to suppress the new attitudes, but how to find for them institutional expression, how to utilize them for socially productive purposes, instead of permitting them to remain in a status where they express themselves merely in individual revolt and social revolution.

This problem is evidently common to all societies in periods of rapid change. We find it in a savage group brought in contact with western civilization, and in the most extensive and highly complicated modern national group where the rapid growth of new attitudes is no longer the effect of external influences but of the internal complexity of social activities. But in the case of the peasant community the solution of this problem is much easier than in the case of the savage group or in that of a whole complex national society. For the peasant community, however much isolated socially from its immediate environment, is territorially an integral part of a wider modern political unit, and the peasant class belongs culturally to a race whose upper strata have already produced a full national civilization. These rii- INTRODUCTION

Upper strata possess ready social institutions based in a large measure upon differentiated cultural interests, not merely upon primary-group attitudes, and therefore able to overcome any primary-group isolation. They include many individuals who consider the social isolation and the relatively low cultural level of the peasant communities an undesirable phenomenon, who tend to raise this level and to make the peasant participate in the cultural life of the nation, who are conscious of their aims and of their methods and thus able to become the leaders of the peasant class in social reconstruction. This is precisely what we find in Poland. Evidently, such a condition is only temporary, and one of the most interesting problems of the future is whether the growing cultural development of the peasants will lead to their unification as a class with their own specific interests and their own class-leaders, or to their gradual fusion with other classes. Both solutions seem possible ; in political life, we find at this moment the first solution already clearly outlined and a powerful peasant party constituted, but at the same time, in spite of the politicians, in social life the old class system is slowly but continuously yielding to a new, more complex and more flexible one, in which there is no place for a peasant class but only for professional organizations.

The materials which we are using in this volume have naturally a much less direct and personal character than those used in the first three volumes. Most of them come from popular newspapers and institutions; some have been collected by ourselves in personal investigation ; some are systematically presented by other writers. Almost every document, even a peasant letter written to a newspaper, was consciously made by its au-

INTRODUCTION xiii

thor to bear on some particular question, is a product of a more or less methodical reflection about social phenomena ; none is as naive and unflective as, for instance, a family letter. While this character of the documents makes their understanding relatively easy for the reader, it forces us to rely much less than in the earlier volumes on the intrinsic value of each document in particular and much more on their selection and systematic organization.

PART I SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION

Chapter I The Concept Of Social Disorganization

The concept of social disorganization as we shall use it in this and the following volumes refers primarily to institutions and only secondarily to men. Just as group-organization embodied in socially systematized schemes of behavior imposed as rules upon individuals never exactly coincides with individual life-organization consisting in personally systematized schemes of behavior, so social disorganization never exactly corresponds to individual disorganization, f Even if we imagined a group lacking all internal differentiation, I. e., a group in which every member would accept all the socially sanctioned and none but the socially sanctioned rules of behavior as schemes of his own conduct, still every member would systematize these schemes differently in his personal evolution, would make a different life-organization out of them, because neither his temperament nor his life-history would be exactly the same as those of other members. As a matter of fact, such a uniform group is a pure fiction ; even in the least differentiated groups we find socially sanctioned rules of behavior which explicitly apply only to certain classes of individuals and are not supposed to be used by others in organizing their conduct, and we find individuals who in organizing their conduct use some personal schemes of their own invention besides the traditionally sanctioned social rules. Moreover, the progress of social differentiation is accompanied by a growth of special institutions, consisting essentially in a systematic organization of a certain number of socially selected schemes for the permanent achievement of certain results. This institutional organization and the life-organization of any of the individuals through whose activity the institution is socially realized partly overlap, but one individual cannot fully realize in his life the whole systematic organization of the institution since the latter always implies the collaboration of many, and on the other hand each individual has many interests which have to be organized outside of this particular institution.

There is, of course, a certain reciprocal dependence between social organization and individual life-organization. We have discussed in Volume III the influence which social organization exercises upon the individual ; we shall see in this and in the following volumes how the life-organization of individual members of a group, particularly of leading members, influences social organization. But the nature of this reciprocal influence in each particular case is a problem to be studied, not a dog^a to be accepted in advance.

These points must be kept in mind if we are to understand 1;liQ question of social disorganization. We can define'^he'latter briefly as a decrease of the influence of existing social rules of behavior upon individual meni- .bers of the group. This decrease may present innumerable degrees, ranging from a single break of some particular rule by one individual up to a general decay of all the institutions of the group^ Now, social disorganization in this sense has no unequivocal connection whatever with ■ individual disorganization, -which consists in a decrease of the individual's ability to organize his whole life for the efficient, progressive and

CONCEPT OF SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION 3

continuous realization of his fundamental interests^ An individual who breaks some or even most of the social rules prevailing in his group may indeed do this because he is losing the minimum capacity of life-organization required by social conformism ; but he may also reject the schemes of behavior imposed by his milieu because they hinder him in reaching a more efficient and more comprehensive life-organization. On the other hand also, the social organization of a group may be very permanent and strong in the sense that no opposition is manifested to the existing rules and institutions; and yet, this lack of opposition may be simply the result of the narrowness of the interests of the group-members and may be accompanied by a very rudimentary, mechanical and inefficient life-organization of each member individually. Of course, a strong group organization may be also the product of a conscious moral effort of its members and thus correspond to a very high degree of life-organization of each of them individually. ' It is therefepe impossible to conclude from social as to individual organization or disorganization, or vice versa. In other words, social organization is not coextensive with individual morality, nor does social disorganization correspond to individual demoralization.

SocTal disorganization is not an exceptional phenomenon limited to certain periods or certain societies ; some of it is found always and everywhere, since always and everywhere there are individual cases of breaking social rules, cases which" exercise some disorganizing influence on group institutions and, if not counteracted, are apt to multiply and to lead to a complete decay of the latter. But during periods of social stability this continuous incipient disorganization is continuously neutralized by such activities of the group as reinforce with the help of social sanctions the power of existing rules. The stability of group institutions is thus simply a dynamic equilibrium of processes of disorganization and reorganisation. This equilibrium is disturbed when processes of disorganization can no longer be checked by any attempts to reinforce the existing rules. A period of prevalent disorganization follows, which may lead to a complete dissolution of the group. More usually, however, it is counteracted and stoppe^liefore it reaches this limit by a new process of reorganization which in this case does not consist in a mere reinforcement of the decaying organization, but in a production of new schemes of behavior and new institutions better adapted to the changed demands of the group; we call this production of new schemes and institutions social reconstruction. Social reconstruction is possible only because, and in so far as, during the period of social disorganization a part at least of the members of the group have not become individually disorganized, but, on the contrary, have been working toward a new and more efficient personal life-organization and have expressed a part at least of the constructive tendencies implied in their individual activities in an effort to produce new social institutions.

In studying the process of social disorganization we must, of course, in accordance with the chief aim of all science, try to explain it causally, i. e., to analyze its concrete complexity into simple facts which could be subordinated to more or less general laws of causally determined becoming. We have seen in our first volume (Methodological Note) that in the field of social reality a causal fact contains three components, i. e., an effect, whether individual or social, always has a composite

CONCEPT OF SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION 5

cause, containing both an individual (subjective) and a social (objective) element. We have called the subjective socio-psychological elements of social reality attitudes and the objective, social elements which impose themselves upon the individual as g^ven and provoke his reaction social values. If we want to explain causally the appearance of an attitude, we must remember that it is never produced by an external influence alone, but by an external influence plus a definite tendency or predisposition, in other words,lby a social value acting upon or, more exactly, appealing to some preexisting attitude. If we want to explain causally the appearance of a social value — a scheme of behavior, an institution, a material product — we cannot do it by merely going back to some subjective, psychological phenomenon of "will" or "feeling" or "reflection," but we must take into account as part of the real cause the preexisting objective, social data which in combination with a subjective tendency gave rise to this effect ; in other words, we must explain a social value by an attitude acting upon or influenced by some preexisting social value.

As long as we are concerned with disorganization alone, leaving provisionally aside the following process of reconstruction, the phenomenon which we want to explain is evidentlyj_the appearance of such attitudes as ! '■ impair the efficiency of existing rules of behavior and ,' thus lead to the decay of social institutions. Every so- ! . cial rule is the expression of a definite combination of certain attitudes; if instead of these attitudes some others appear, the influence of the rule is disturbed. There may be thus several different ways in which a rule can lose its efficiency, and still more numerous ways in which an institution, which always involves several regulating schemes, can fall into decay. The causal explanation of any particular case of social disorganization demands thus that we find, first of all, /what are the particular attitudes whose appearance manifests itself socially in the loss of influence of the existing social ; rules, and then try to determine the causes of these at- ■ titudes. Our tendency should be, of course, to analyze the apparent diversity and complexity of particular social processes into a limited number of more or less general causal facts, and this tendency can be realized in the study of disorganization if we find that the decay of different rules existing in a given society is the objective manifestation of similar attitudes, that, in other words, many given, apparently different phenomena of disorganization can be causally explained in the same way. We cannot reach any laws of social disorganization, i. €., we cannot find causes which always and every- Iwhere produce social disorganization ; we can only hope to determine laws of socio-psychological becoming, i. e., find causes which always and everywhere produce certain definite attitudes, and these causes will explain also social disorganization in all those cases in which it will be found that the attitudes produced by them are the real background of social disorganization, that the decay of given rules or institutions is merely the objective, superficial manifestation of the appearance of these attitudes. Our task is the same as that of the physicist or chemist who does not attempt to find laws of the multiform changes which happen in the sensual appearance of our material environment, but searches for laws of the more fundamental and general processes which are supposed to underlie those directly observable changes, and explains the latter causally only in so far as it can be shown that they are the superficial manifestations of certain deeper, causally explicable effects.

CONCEPT OF SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION 7

In the next section, "Disorganization of the Family," we offer an explicit illustration of our method, analyzing in detail the problems raised by every document and showing the process by which the conclusion is reached. It would be, of course, superfluous for the professional sociologist and tiresome for the amateur reader if we pursued this exposition of the technique of research throughout the whole volume ; in the following sections we state therefore only the general conclusions with just enough particular suggestions to make the bearing of the documents quite clear.

Chapter II

We have met in our first three volumes many cases of partial family disorganization. We did not attempt there to explain them completely but limited ourselves to a few general indications of their probable factors. In none of these cases did disorganization go farther than a loss of active solidarity and sometimes quarrelling. This is, of course, the usual situation; our materials represented an average picture of peasant life. Perhaps they even showed more disorganization than is found on the average among Polish peasants, since they were selected from letters written by emigrants and to emigrants, and wherever there is emigration, dissolution of the family is progressing more rapidly than in groups whose members remain territorially united and live in the same conditions as their forefathers did. In fact, even a rapid survey of the materials published in the preceding volumes shows clearly that emigration of individual family members abroad and emigration of whole families from the country to the city are the two main factors of familial disorganization. But it is evident that this generalization is too vague and superficial to be anything more than a starting-point of scientific research. Change of conditions is a factor, but not a cause of social happenings; it merely furnishes influences which will produce definite effects only when combined with definite preexisting attitudes and is a cause only together with the latter. In individual emigration and in changes from country to city life certain new attitudes are produced by new social values acting in combination with certain preexisting attitudes and these new attitudes are the ultimate social realities which underlie family disorganization and which we must determine and explain causally. But these new attitudes often fail to appear in spite of changed conditions, and other attitudes, which do not undermine family life but only modify its form, may appear instead; on the other hand, attitudes which are back of family disorganization appear not only in individuals and families that have moved to the city or abroad, but also in many of those who are still living in the country, in their old communities, so that influences similar to those which affect family life in the city or abroad must be also active in country communities. The fact that family disorganization is less general in the latter than among individuals and families living outside of their primary social milieu admits two different explanations — either the influences which, in connection with certain preexisting attitudes, produce disorganization are less widely spread and less continuous in old country communities than in cities or foreign milieux, or the process of disorganization is there more efficiently counteracted by efforts of social reorganization. As a matter of fact, the two reasons coexist in various proportions.

The cases which we shall analyze show disorganization either verging on or passing into crime. Such cases are, of course, relatively rare. We have had almost none in the preceding three volumes; it must be added that we could hardly expect to receive any such data which collecting documents directly from the authors or the relatives of the authors. A large quantity of criminological materials is contained in some popular lo THE POLISH PEASANT

newspapers. This is due to the social function of the popular newspaper destined particularly for the peasant class. As we shall see in detail later on, the peasant newspaper is a concrete bond unifying all the peasant communities throughout the country and creating a nation-wide peasant social opinion partly by imitating, partly by modifying the type of social opinion found in the primary community. It has regular or occasional peasant correspondents in every community who describe whatever things and events they consider important. As everybody knows, nothing stirs a primary group so much as a crime, precisely because of its social abnormality. It is not strange, therefore, that crimes constituted, particularly during the early period of the development of the peasant press, the main content of the informing letters which an editor received from his peasant correspondents. He had to publish them, for the peasant press in the beginning was forced to adapt itself to the attitudes of its public in order to obtain an influence which would permit it gradually to modify these attitudes. Thus, in the Congress Kingdom, only after 25 years of intense development some peasant newspapers could stop publishing news about crimes; this coincided with the constitutional evolution of 1905 and the following years, which gave some freedom of political activities and, by partly removing the prohibition of writing about political matters, permitted the popular newspaper to offer a more constructive material to the curiosity of its readers.

The data contained in popular newspapers are, of course, not very detailed, but this disadvantage is partly offset by the fact that they have been furnished by peasant members of the respective communities and thus every fact is described as seen by the community itself.

DISORGANIZATION OF THE FAMILY ii

not by an outside observer. A few selected examples follow :

I. When the father keeps the farm and has 8 children, then he has bread enough, and moreover beautiful horses, cattle and model farming. But this cannot last for ever, for when the children grow up, the father thinks how to give them dowry. And when the time comes, he gives some 500 roubles to one child; for another he has perhaps only 100 or 200 roubles, so he borrows money and gives the dowry to this daughter and son, and the rest of the children remain at home. And so, when death comes and orders him to go to eternity, he leaves perhaps four or five children at home. They have everything in the granary and barn; quite enough. Then they begin to farm [in a new way]. One takes some sheaves from the barn secretly, before the second; the second snatches a bushel or two of corn from the brother, the brother snatches anything else before the sister and so the farming goes on in a way that is painful to see. One brother keeps a hog, the other brother keeps a second hog, the third brother keeps a foal, the sister keeps some chickens and geese for herself and so: "This is mine, and that is yours." And then they sell this "their own" and give the money away to Jews for German clothes, hats, watches. But when it becomes necessary to repair anything in the farm outfit, a cart, a plow, a harrow, then [everybody says] : "I am not the farm-owner." When the village-elder comes for taxes, Bartek sends him to Maciek, Maciek to Pawel or Gawel, etc. At last the elder sees that he will not come to the end, and he levies on the farmstock, takes a horse or a cow. Then the farm-owner must show himself and pay. . . .

Letter from the archives of the newspaper Gaseta Sviiqtecena; unpublished.

In the foregoing the writer is evidently describing a typical situation, not a particular case. Such cases occur almost regularly now when the parents die and the children are left together (see Vol. II, p. 158 ff. for similar case). If the mother is alive, her presence acts as a check on the process of disorganization ; even if she is not the real manager of the farm; she is at least a bond keeping the group unified and soHdary. When mother or even father is alive, there may be incipient or partial disorganization ; only the latter is counterbalanced in its manifestations by other attitudes.

The situation here is very clear and very instructive. Disorganization is limited to the economic field alone. It consists in a decay of the institution of economic family solidarity which, as we know from Volume I, consisted in an actual (though never abstractly formulated) common ownership of property and common use of income. Here property is still common though individual members do not show as much interest in it as each would if it were his personal property, which is a sure sign of the decay of the spirit of communism that in its original unreflective form implies no conscious separation of individual and social interest. In the matter of income we find a complete individualization; every member tries to set aside as "his own" as large a part of the common income as possible. Under the old family system the normal tendency of the peasant was to have as many goods as possible pass from a lower to a higher economic category, to turn all property into land and as much as possible of income into property, whereas here the tendency is just the opposite: goods which would normally be classed as property (farm-stock) are treated as income, i. e., are sold and the money used for personal expenses.