(This column will be published in the November 2024 print issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.)

In her debate with Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris shrewdly argued that Trump’s refusal to say he wanted Ukraine to win the war against Russia would appall many of “Pennsylvania’s 800,000 Polish-American voters.”

Harris probably knows just about as many unicorns as she does Pennsylvania Polish Americans, but some Polish Americans in Pennsylvania and elsewhere have surely been put off by Republicans expressing admiration for Vladimir Putin, disdain for anyone voicing concern over the invasion, and even glee at the prospect of Ukraine’s defeat. This may matter because Polish Americans are heavily concentrated in some swing states, namely Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

This possible opening for Harris was needlessly created by thoughtless comments from a handful of people who know nothing of Polish history. Alas, these folks couldn’t discuss Ukraine without sounding as soft on Russia as Phil Donahue was on the Soviets in the 1980s. 

Kamala’s bid for Polish votes made me think of a real Polish American, my Grandma Piatak’s older sister, baptized Marianna Bronislawa Kowalczyk in January 1908 at one of Cleveland’s beautiful Polish churches. I’ve always been something of a sentimentalist; my Aunt Mary could not afford to be sentimental. Her mother refused to learn English or to work, and her alcoholic father abandoned the family when she was 15. Mary then became the sole breadwinner for her mother and three younger siblings. She worked multiple jobs until retirement. When she got married and had a child, her work outside the home shifted to cleaning offices at night at one of Cleveland’s many manufacturing facilities, a job she worked alongside my grandma.

I remember discussing foreign policy with my Aunt Mary just once. I, the budding Buckleyite idealist, wanted the United States to keep fighting the Communists in Southeast Asia. Mary had no use for Communism (or for Russian rule over Poland), but her view was that the time for Americans to fight the North Vietnamese was when the Viet Cong launched an invasion of Long Beach. We had more than enough problems to deal with in the good old U. S. of A.

The actual daughter of real immigrants, Mary was sharp as a tack and far too smart to believe either that “diversity is America’s greatest strength” or that “we are a nation of immigrants.” She was very grateful that she was born in America, not Poland. She never complained about America in any way, and she made no attempt to pass along the Polish language. “We are in America, so we speak American,” was a favorite saying of hers.

The issues that mattered most to Aunt Mary were jobs, welfare, and crime. As I noted recently in these pages (“Rebuilding What We’ve Lost,” June/July 2024 Chronicles), Cleveland in 1949 was the second-wealthiest metropolitan area in the United States, just behind Detroit. The basis of Cleveland’s economy was manufacturing. Aunt Mary would have been dumbfounded by the notion that the “global economy” took precedence over the American economy, and outraged by American corporations firing American workers and shuttering American factories to send jobs overseas. Trump’s support for tariffs would have made sense to her.

Politically, few things made Aunt Mary as angry as did welfare. She had no problem with government assistance for people unable to work; she could not fathom why the federal government would give assistance to people unwilling to work. Her whole life showed how strongly she agreed with St. Paul: if a man refuses to work, then neither should he eat. 

That the Democratic Party has openly embraced illegal immigration and favors giving government benefits to people who have no right even being in America would have been sufficient to alienate Aunt Mary from the Democratic Party forever. That Kamala Harris and most prominent Democrats treated George Floyd as a national hero would have appalled her.

That Tim Walz wailed about “systemic racism” and “white privilege” instead of protecting Minneapolis from a lawless and violent mob would have sickened her. If Aunt Mary were still alive, I bet I could make good money hosting a television program where she took on any academic, politician, or celebrity  who wanted to lecture her about being an undeserving beneficiary of an unearned “white privilege.”

I love Poland. I despise Putin. I am deeply impressed by the tenacity and courage the Ukrainians have shown in defending Ukraine from Muscovite aggression. But America has been a good home for our family. The Democrats want that home to disappear. The prospect of cultural Marxists cementing their rule over America is far worse than the prospect of Russians once again whining about how Poland threatens Russia. I stand with Aunt Mary. ◆