The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh

by Sheldon Anderson

  During the war, famous Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski was instrumental in lobbying the Western Allies for the reconstruction of Poland. As a young man, Paderewski had used some of the money he made from winning music competitions to travel the Polish countryside, visiting towns and villages much like Wierzchownia:

  I had heard many tales of suffering among the poor in Russian Poland. And I wanted to see for myself. I found conditions even worse than depicted, and the trip left an indelible impression on my mind, and to some extent altered the course of my life. I became convinced of the righteousness of the Polish cause, and understood fully, for the first time, the great longing of the Poles for liberty.17

  By the outbreak of war, Paderewski was already a celebrity in the United States, having played hundreds of concerts in the previous two decades. In 1916, he met President Wilson at the White House and toured the country, calling for Poland’s independence. In April 1917, Paderewski spoke at the Polish Falcon Convention in Pittsburgh, rallying Polish Americans to the war effort. The Falcons were a Polish American association that promoted Polish patriotism and physical education. It was at one of these clubs on Cleveland’s Broadway Avenue that Stella Walsh got her first taste of athletic competition. When Wilson declared war on the Central Powers later that month, Paderewski induced many Falcons to serve in the U.S. Army. Others went to France to fight in Polish divisions under Polish general Józef Haller. After the war, some of these soldiers joined the army of the new Polish state.

  In January 1918, Wilson outlined U.S. war aims in his Fourteen Points. Paderewski helped draft the thirteenth point, which called for an “independent [Polish] state.” Poland was the only East European country that Wilson promised independence; he merely proposed “autonomous development” for the other nationalities in the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. At the end of the war in 1918, Poland returned to the European State System after a 123-year hiatus. Paderewski became prime minister and represented Poland at the Paris Peace Conference.

  By default, Stanisława Walasiewicz was now a citizen of the new Polish state, but like so many American immigrants in the early twentieth century, she had dual allegiances. The Polish American community in Cleveland kept her connected to her place of birth, but there was no question about going back to Poland. She had no memory of that place. The new Poland was desperately poor anyway, and Julian and Weronica were not about to uproot the family to return to Wierzchownia.

  While Paderewski was instrumental in burnishing the image of Polish Americans during the war, the specter of Bolshevism emanating from Russia prompted a “Red Scare” in the United States after the war. The government was especially suspicious of East European immigrants. U.S. attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer declared that the

  blaze of revolution . . . was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.18

  There was an anti-Semitic element to Palmer’s arrests and deportations, in part because Russian Jews like Emma Goldman were overrepresented in the ranks of anarchists and radical leftists. “Red Emma” was among the deportees.

  Goldman had a Polish-Jewish counterpart in Rosa Luxemburg, one of the most prominent European Marxists of the early twentieth century. “Red Rosa” was born in Zamość, a Polish town in Russia. She left Russia in 1889, but returned to Warsaw for the failed 1905 Russian Revolution. She fled the country for Germany and became a leader of the German Social Democratic Party. Luxemburg demonstrated against World War I, which put her in the crosshairs of radical nationalists who blamed Jews and Communists for Germany’s capitulation in 1918. Adolf Hitler’s Nazis called it a “stab in the back.” In January 1919, right-wing German soldiers shot Luxemburg and threw her body into a Berlin canal.

  There were thousands of Poles (many of them Polish Jews) in the socialist movement in the United States, but there were no Poles in prominent leadership positions. Russian leftists were the main target of Palmer’s raids, and Polish Catholics vigorously tried to distinguish themselves from their Slavic kinsmen. Many Poles had greater hatred for Russians than for Germans. One section of the Polish community in Cleveland was anti-Russian and supported General Józef Piłsudski. In 1920, Piłsudski led the Polish Army to victory against the Red Army in the so-called Miracle on the Vistula, saving the new Polish state. Another group of Polish immigrants supported the staunchly nationalist, anti-Semitic Roman Dmowski, who had rested his hopes for a new Polish state on tsarist Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution scuttled those plans and undermined his support. Piłsudski grabbed dictatorial power in Poland in 1926, and remains to this day a controversial figure in Polish history. There is no record of the Walasiewicz family’s political leanings, although like most working-class Poles in the neighborhood, they probably voted for the Democratic Party.

  Palmer’s raids stemmed, in part, from fears among Anglo-Saxon Protestants that the influx of Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe was changing American culture for the worse. In the late nineteenth century, “race” had become a social construct to distinguish between Caucasians: Anglo Americans were at the top of the hierarchy, with Irish, Italians, and Poles, for example, on lower rungs of the racial scale. Of course, African Americans were put into another racial category altogether, and now they were coming north to work in the urban factories in the so-called Great Migration. From 1910 to 1920, more than a half-million African Americans moved north, and in the 1920s, 750,000 more left the South. The black population of some northern cities doubled in the 1920s.

  In 1922, Henry and Emma Owens, from Oakville, Alabama, put their family on a train to Cleveland, where Henry and three of his older sons went to work in the steel mills. They were among the 34,000 African Americans living in Cleveland in 1920. A decade later, that number had jumped to 64,000. The youngest of the Owens’s ten children was named James Cleveland Owens, later known as Jesse Owens, one of the two greatest sprinters of the first half of the twentieth century. The other was fellow Clevelander Stella Walsh. Harrison Dillard won the gold medal in the 100-meter dash at the 1948 Olympic Games in London. Dillard also hailed from Cleveland, giving the city three gold medalists in the 100 meters in three consecutive Olympics.

  Jesse was nine when the family moved to Cleveland. The Owens found a house on the east side of town, just a few miles from the Walasiewicz home. They lived in a predominantly Polish neighborhood as well. According to historian William J. Baker, “[The Poles] ignored his [Jesse’s] strange color; he ignored their strange accents. They were ‘peasants and strangers’ all, newcomers to an alien environment.”19 Owens attended Fairmount Junior High, where comedian Bob Hope had joked around a few years earlier.20

  The migration of African Americans to the North accelerated their calls for racial justice. Women were also challenging white men’s political power and threatening traditional gender roles. In 1919, after a long fight, suffragettes finally convinced Congress to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. Spurred on by economic opportunities that opened up during the war, as well as gaining the franchise, some women in the Roaring Twenties were behaving in ways that made prudish conservatives shudder. Making matters worse in their minds were the Hollywood movies showing these women smoking, drinking, dancing, flashing more skin, and flaunting their independence. As an immigrant woman athlete, Stella Walsh did not fit into mainstream America’s idea of bourgeois femininity.

  The division of Poles into Germany, Austria, and Russia before 1918 magnified the importance of cultural institutions as keepers and purveyors of a shared Polish national experience. The Catholic Church, church schools, and sokółs—cultural and recreation centers in Polish communities in Europe and expatriate communities—kept alive Polish consci
ousness and the idea of a reconstituted Polish state. Julian and Weronica sent their eldest daughter to the neighborhood elementary school at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church on Lansing Avenue. The cornerstone of the church was laid in 1914, and it had a four-room elementary school. Stanisława was one of the first students to attend the new sixteen-room classroom, which the church built in 1918. The dwindling Polish Catholic population in Cleveland’s Slavic Village today has forced the diocese to close many of the old parishes, but Immaculate Heart of Mary still serves the community. Stanisława spoke Polish at home and learned English on the street and at school.

  Walsh attended elementary school at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church on Lansing Avenue. Author photo.

  After elementary school, Stanisława attended South High School on Broadway and Osage avenues, less than a mile from her house. It was her first foray into the public school system, where she received regular exposure to a community outside of Warszawa. At South, she encountered teachers who had difficulty pronouncing Stanisława Walasiewicz: “The teachers decided my name was a tongue twister,” she said. “So they changed it [to Stella Walsh].”21 Outside of her circle of family and friends, and in Poland, she would be known as Stella Walsh for the rest of her life. Walsh was a solid Anglo name that did not give away her Polish background, an ethnic tag that often drew bigoted ridicule. Eventually she learned perfect English. For those who did not know her, Walsh she was as Middle America as they came. She was unabashed about her Polishness, however; the signature on most of her sports memorabilia reads, “Stella Walsh Walasiewiczowna,” one of the many variations of her name she used.

  Walsh finished her high school years at Notre Dame Academy on 1332 Ansel Road, near Doan Brook. Locals called the school the “Castle on Ansel.” The spirit of the great Stella Walsh no longer inspires students in these schools. Her alma maters have closed or moved. In 1963, Notre Dame moved to Chardon, Ohio, about thirty miles east of Cleveland. The Ansel location has been turned into an apartment building. Immaculate Heart elementary closed in 2003, and South High School shut its doors in 2010.

  At an early age, Walsh discovered that she could outsprint both girls and boys. She began to train with the local Polish Falcon club on 7146 Broadway Avenue. The Falcons’ gymnasium was half the size of a regular basketball court, but it was better than nothing. After leaving Immaculate Heart elementary school, the Falcons became a key connection to Walsh’s Polish heritage and her homeland. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the club subsidized her trips to a number of Falcon meets in the United States and Europe.

  Walsh entered into a sporting world that was dominated by men; furthermore, Polish identity was fashioned around a masculine personification of the nation through such figures as Sobieski, Kościuszko, Pułaski, and Piłsudski. The one female icon for the devout Catholic country is the revered figure of the Madonna, and specifically the painting of the Black Madonna of Cze¸stochowa, which hangs in the monastery at Jasna Góra in southern Poland. According to legend, in 1655, the Black Madonna miraculously saved the monastery from a Swedish siege and turned the tide of the Second Northern War. Some believers think her image appeared in the clouds over Warsaw during the Red Army invasion in 1920, once again saving the nation.

  The most famous Polish woman of the time was physicist Marie Sklodowska. Born in Warsaw in 1867, Sklodowska also left the oppression of Russian Poland, traveling first to Kraków (under Austrian rule) and then to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. Together with her husband Pierre Curie, Marie Sklodowska Curie became world renowned for her pioneering work in radioactivity. The Curies won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903.

  Cleveland’s Slavic Village. Map by Gracia Lindberg.

  In 1912, the same year that Stanisława and her mother left for the United States, acclaimed Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz led a group of Polish professors to Paris to plead with Sklodowska Curie to return to Warsaw to head a new research laboratory. “We are losing confidence in our intellectual faculties,” Sienkiewicz told her. “We are being lowered in the opinion of our enemies, and we are abandoning hope for the future. . . . Possessing you in Warsaw, we should feel stronger, we should lift our heads now bent under so many misfortunes.” Sklodowska Curie was torn between her loyalty to Poland and her work in Paris. In 1913, she visited Warsaw for the opening of a new radioactive laboratory that would be run by two of her assistants. She condemned Russian rule of Poland, saying, “This poor country, massacred by an absurd and barbarous domination, really does a great deal to defend its moral and intellectual life. A day may come perhaps when oppression will have to retreat, and it is necessary to last out until then. But what an existence! What conditions!”22 Walsh would face a similar dilemma twenty years later in deciding whether to run for the United States or Poland in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. But by that time Poland was an independent state and tsarist Russia was gone, making her decision easier.

  The Polish Falcon Nest on Broadway Avenue in 1945 (top) and today. Walsh began her athletic career at the club, which is about one mile from her house. Cleveland State University.

  A woman like Sklodowska Curie at the pinnacle of the scientific world was an anomaly. The Polish Falcon athlete, in most people’s mind, was not a woman either. The Polish Falcons patterned themselves after the nineteenth-century Czech sokol, which was a sporting association founded in Prague in 1862. The Czech sokol got its inspiration from Father Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s German Turnen movement earlier in the century. Turnen, a term derived from an old Germanic word meaning warrior, intended to engender a liberal German patriotism and hone young men’s bodies for the birth of a new, unified Germany. Jahn’s Turnen had an explicit German national and egalitarian character, which the conservative authorities considered revolutionary. Jahn’s movement was outlawed, and Jahn was imprisoned. The founder of the Czech clubs, Miroslav Tyrš, declared that “no club can unite Slavic youth and men by so natural and strong a means as the Sokol brotherhood.”23

  Every six years the Czechs held a slet—a big athletic event that attracted hundreds of Czech athletes from throughout the world. Participants often showed up in traditional Czech garb. These events had a nationalist agenda, namely to gain independence from the Hapsburg Empire. Worried about subterfuge, the Hapsburg authorities kept a close watch on sokol members.

  The Poles formed their first sokół (in Polish) in the Austrian Galician capital of Lwów in 1867. In 1892, the Polish sokółs held their first zlot in Lwów. More than a thousand athletes came from Galicia, the Czech lands, and Prussian Poland. The prewar zlots were staged in Austrian Poland, where Poles enjoyed more cultural freedom than their fellow nationals in the German and Russian empires. After the 1905 Russian Revolution, a Falcon Alliance was formed in Warsaw, but it was outlawed two years later.

  In 1887, Felix L. Pietrowicz founded the first sokół in the United States. He called the Chicago sokół a Falcon “nest.” Pietrowicz wrote that “a ‘Falcon’ is the modern transformation of an ancient man to a modern man and . . . into a ‘new’ and different, better Pole, and therefore better United States citizen.”24 In 1912, the Falcons moved their national headquarters to Pittsburgh, which was more or less equidistant from the largest Polish communities in New York City and Chicago. By the 1930s, the Falcons had some 10,000 members.

  The Polish Falcons of America adopted the adage “w zdrowym ciele zdrowy duch” [a healthy spirit in a healthy body], which mirrored the British promotion of “muscular Christianity” and Max Nordau’s idea of “Muskeljudentum” [muscular Jewishness]. The Polish sokółs borrowed gymnastic techniques from Turnen and Swedish sports clubs that connected sports with military drill. In this age of social Darwinism, a strong body was associated with a healthy, virile, masculine nation. To compete on Polish teams against other national teams maintained a sense of ethnic pride in the face of German and Russian discrimination. Winning was a way to compare favorably to other national group
s.

  In 1904, Poles established Falcon Nest 50 on the East Side of Cleveland, and in 1909, another nest (141) was started on the South Side. In 1911, the year Walsh was born, Nest 141 moved into a building at 7146 Broadway, where prospective Polish soldiers trained during World War I. Stan Musial began playing sports at his local Falcon Nest 247 in Donora, about 150 miles southeast of Cleveland. There was some division within the Polish community in the United States about whether the Falcon mission was training soldiers or grooming athletes, but in 1914, the Falcons affirmed their mission as furthering the “physical and spiritual rebirth of the Polish nation through all possible means.” Facing discrimination against suspected leftist East Europeans after the war, Falcon president Teofil Starzynski emphasized loyalty to both the United States and the new Polish state. In a pointed reference to the Soviet Union, Starzynski said that Falcon culture and values were “rooted in Western civilization” and not in the “barbaric culture of the East.”25

  The Falcon Nest on Broadway was within walking distance of the Walasiewicz house, and in playing sports there Walsh had her second home. The Falcons were a strong tug on Walsh’s Polish identity at the same time she was finding her niche in the Cleveland sports scene; athletics became her passion, her identity, and her one and only love.

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  Cleveland’s “Twentieth-Century Flyer”