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Lithuanians in Michigan
By Marius K. Grazulis Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2009Marius K. Grazulis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-813-3
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Lithuanian History as a Background to Immigration
To understand the variables impacting Lithuanian immigration to Michigan in the 1860s, one must understand the geopolitical realities of Lithuania in medieval Europe. Geographically, Lithuania has generally held its ethnogeographic boundaries since the year 1000. Without the port of Klaipeda (Memel in German), its fifty-mile coast on the Baltic Sea would be reduced to a handful of miles. Besides its small coast, in medieval times Lithuania was landlocked by huge, dense forests. With only one waterway, the Nemunas River (the Nieman River, in German), leading inland and no valuable resources, the country was not considered by invaders to be worth the struggle to fight through the forest and then a Lithuanian army on the other side. This is a major reason why Lithuanians were the last Europeans to be Christianized. The Lithuanian state finally unified itself in the 1200s in reaction to the Livonian Order (geographically Latvia today) and the Teutonic Order (which became known as Prussia, but is called the Kaliningrad Region today) trying to Christianize Lithuania. Ultimately, the enemies on all sides forced Lithuanians to actively fight the aggression. Lithuania fought with much success. The Lithuanian Empire under Vytautas (Witold) the Great in the early 1400s reached its largest geographic extent. Its borders reached from near Moscow in the east to Poland in the west and from Novgorod in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Of course, the population was not ethnically Lithuanian, because empires of this kind were created through military invasion or alliance. As one can see, Lithuanians have always had to interact with Russians, Germans, and Poles.
Lithuania, despite fiercely defending its pagan culture, became a Roman Catholic state because of political realities. To defeat the Teutonic invasion, Vytautas the Great made an alliance with his first cousin, King Jogaila of Poland (Jogiella, in Polish). In the epic battle at Tannenburg (Zalgiris in Lithuanian) in 1410, the Polish/Lithuanian alliance defeated the Teutonic Order and prevented any invasion of Lithuania by the Teutonic Order. This Polish-Lithuanian alliance had a huge impact on the Lithuanian culture for centuries to come. The alliance became an official state order through the Union of Lublin in 1569. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish Kingdom became equal political partners through one state. Unfortunately, there was no cultural equality. The Lithuanian culture was considered the epitome of the backward peasant life. Lithuanian royalty and landowners used the Polish language and with time ignored the Lithuanian language. The royalty lost their connection to the average Lithuanian. In time, Poles saw the Lithuanians as unenlightened Poles, when in fact they were two separate ethnicities. Linguists have confirmed this by the separation of the two in language. Although both are from the Indo-European family of languages, the Polish language is a part of the Slavic branch, while Lithuanian is Baltic. (The only other language in the Baltic branch is Latvian.)
While language and culture split the Poles and Lithuanians, another sociological entity held them together: Roman Catholicism. The Lithuanians, while still holding on to pagan beliefs, slowly became Roman Catholic. Polish priests went into Lithuania in the Middle Ages and converted the Lithuanian pagans to Catholicism. What the Teutonic Knights could not accomplish by sword, the Poles accomplished through alliance. Today, Lithuanians worldwide are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. Despite the linguistic and cultural dispute, the glue of Catholicism created a dynamic relationship between Lithuanians and Polish immigrants coming to the United States.
After years of political and geographic recession caused by Swedish, Austrian, Prussian, and Russian encroachments, by 1795 Lithuania and Poland did not formally exist. The Third Partition between the Russian Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and the Prussian Empire condemned Poland-Lithuania into seemingly historical oblivion. All of Lithuania fell under the rule of the Russian Empire.
Russian rule was harsh for Lithuanians. The tsar declared a cultural war on Lithuania in an attempt to russify it. Lithuanian private schools were shut down because they taught Lithuanian language and culture, as opposed to Russian, which was taught in the public schools. Most importantly, the only Lithuanian university at that time, the Vilnius University, was closed in 1832 for revolutionary activity during the uprisings in 1831. The Lithuanian Latin alphabet was replaced by the Cyrillic (the Russian alphabet) phonetic equivalent in 1864. Lithuanian men were forced to serve a twenty-five-year conscription period in the czarist army. The tsar's advisor in Lithuania tried to wipe away the Lithuanian culture and language from the people's memory.
Consequences to this cultural war were many. With the idea of nationalism running wild in Europe, a Lithuanian cultural renewal from the grassroots created a backlash to these anti-Lithuanian policies. Peasants began teaching the Lithuanian language in the Latin alphabet to their children at home. Lithuanian book smugglers from Tilze (Tilsit in German), a city controlled by Prussia across the Nemunas River, infiltrated the countryside with the help of Lithuanian parish priests, like Maironis. Many of the books were bankrolled and even printed in the United States by Lithuanian-Americans. In the end, the Lithuanian cultural backlash resulted in the political goal of independence. The movement gained a lot of momentum from Lithuanians in the United States starting in the 1890s. Independence was finally achieved in 1918. Another consequence to the tsar's cultural war was the first wave of immigrants to the United States and Michigan. A trickle of Lithuanians came to the United States in the 1860s and to Michigan in the 1870s in reaction to negative tsarist economic and social policies in Lithuania.
CHAPTER 2
The First and Second Waves of Lithuanians in Michigan
The first wave of Lithuanian immigrants came to the United States beginning in 1860. This wave ended in 1918, near the end of World War I, with the creation of the Lithuanian republic. The difference between the first and second waves of Lithuanians coming to the United States and Michigan is slight. The emigrating agent changed from tsarist Russian to independent Lithuanian, meaning the cultural reasons for leaving Lithuania disappeared. However, the economic reasons for leaving Lithuania continued. Therefore, the first and second waves of Lithuanian immigration will be generally treated as one and the same in this study.
Genealogists and historians have a difficult, if not impossible, task in trying to identify Lithuanians in the census data prior to 1920. The first problem would be the problem of determining "country of origin." As mentioned, Lithuania was a part of tsarist Russia. Therefore, when immigrants declared where they had originated, many wrote down Russia, even though they came from a Lithuanian village. Knowing Lithuanian geography helps in this endeavor, because the village or city of birth was documented on the 1920 United States Census. In fact, the United States Census did not recognize the ethnicity of "Lithuanian" until 1899. But even then, one must be careful because Lithuanian minorities lived throughout the area near the borders of Lithuania in the cities and villages of Poland, Russia, Latvia, and Prussia. A Lithuanian immigrant documenting he was from Minsk, Lida, Grodno, or Naugard, Russia, coming to Michigan could very well have been the first Lithuanian to live in Michigan.
Another problem with determining the country of origin is the fea
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Excerpted from Lithuanians in Michigan by Marius K. Grazulis. Copyright © 2009 by Marius K. Grazulis. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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