The Fifties: Accommodating the new immigrants (10/10/93)

ANNIVERSARY REVIEW

The Fifties: Accommodating the new immigrants

A flood of Ukrainians displaced by the turmoil of World War II surged into North America as the 1950s began. The Weekly, which until then had been most concerned with keeping Ukrainian American youth tuned into their ethnic heritage, now had to adjust to accommodate the new arrivals. More news about new organizations and new talent from Ukraine began to appear on The Weekly's pages.

Displaced musicians and artists from Ukraine who were becoming successful in the West were chronicled again and again on the paper's pages. The Taras Shevchenko Bandurist Choir stole the hearts of North American Ukrainians in 1950 with their first major tour on this continent. The Weekly wrote on January 9, of the rave reviews given the group by the New York Herald Tribune after its Carnegie Hall concert in New York.

Much was written about the immigration process itself. The work of the Ukrainian American Relief Commission, which was aiding Ukrainians arriving in the U.S., often was mentioned in news stories. A 1951 article mentioned that to that time the Ukrainian community had donated $917,000 towards the resettlement of and relief for displaced persons, an effort that continued until May 1953, when The Weekly announced that the last 40 Ukrainian refugees had arrived under the latest refugee relief program.

The Weekly identified the newcomers as "DPs" (displaced persons), a term that increasingly had a negative connotation as friction increased between those born in the U.S. and the newcomers who maintained organizations carried over from Europe and made little perceptive effort to assimilate. One 1950 editorial questioned what it would take to get the newly arrived involved in community work. Another one stated that something must be wrong when 98 percent of those in attendance at a memorial for the just-assassinated UPA leader Gen. Taras Chuprynka were recent immigrants. It called on the younger generation Ukrainian Americans to engage the newly arrived in conversation and activities to overcome the growing polarization between the groups.

The editorial was speaking to its largest audience, the youth. After all, the paper's motto was "dedicated to the ideals and interests of young Americans of Ukrainian descent," which was coined in 1933 by the paper's founder and editor Stephen Shumeyko.

That dedication was expressed in myriad articles and columns that appeared throughout the decade. The Ukrainian Youth League of North America, founded by Editor Shumeyko, received particular attention. Its yearly convention was well publicized and then covered under bold headlines. Meetings of its executive board were written up, and articles about its sports programs appeared regularly in The Weekly.

Youth as a whole was given special attention. Young adults who received scholarships or graduated from college were often given front-page play. A special column called Ukrainian Youth News became a weekly feature by the middle of the decade. Finally, the accomplishments of bright young stars such as actor Jack Palance and child prodigy pianist Roman Rudnytsky were regularly described, as was a yearly listing of the Ukrainian All-American College Football Team.

But the paper always kept one ear turned toward Ukraine, where the ashes of World War II were still smoldering in the form of a strong underground movement in western Ukraine. The decade began and ended with the deaths of individuals who defined the movement.

On October 30, 1950, The Weekly reported the death of Gen. Taras Chuprynka (Roman Shukhevych), commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in Ukraine, who dynamited himself in his headquarters near Lviv rather than be captured by KGB agents who had surrounded the bunker.

Nine years later almost to the day, on October 15, 1959 Stepan Bandera, leader of the underground movement in Ukraine, was assassinated by a person later proved to be a KGB agent as he was entering his home in Munich, Germany. In between, the paper wrote of the December 1955 slaughter of 500 Ukrainian women run over by Soviet tanks in a Siberian concentration camp, and the last major action by the UPA in March 1959, in which it detonated explosives in three Carpathian cities, Uzhhorod, Mukachevo and Khust.

The Weekly received much of that information from newly arrived immigrants who had close ties with the underground movement, and from Radio Liberty, a government news service.

Another government radio, Voice of America, caught the full wrath of The Weekly in the early 1950s. The newspaper took it to task initially for placing Ukraine under the direction of the Soviet area desk and later because the broadcast service's personnel and themes were "dependent wholly on the Russian section," as the paper explained. In a May 1953 editorial, The Weekly said, "the Ukrainian section of the VOA has been so overwhelmingly pro-Russian... that it has been labeled by the Ukrainian press as the "Ukrainian-language Voice of Russia."

The diaspora showed its support for friends and relatives stuck behind the Iron Curtain and for the existence of an independent Ukrainian state with manifestations and protests.

Loyalty Parades and Independence Day demonstrations were customary, and it was not unusual that thousands would participate. Normal also were appearances by senators, governors and congressmen at these events. At the 25th commemoration of the Ukrainian Great Famine held in New York in 1958, The Ukrainian Weekly reported that legendary American statesmen Averell Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller both addressed the thousands that gathered.

When 500 Ukrainian women in a Soviet concentration camps were trampled by tanks in 1955, the diaspora responded by demonstrating at the Soviet Embassy in New York. And when Nikita Khruschev arrived in the U.S. in September 1959, about 3,000 people marched on Fifth Avenue decrying his visit.

Ukrainians expressed their concern also for those less fortunate living here. In spring 1952, a young 3 1/2 year-old Ukrainian boy, Michael Goy, who was born without hands, captured the love and attention not only of the Ukrainian community of the tri-state area but also of the residents of Newark.

The son of Ukrainian immigrants became the subject of several articles in The Weekly and dozens of fundraising efforts. Cap'n Snafu (as he was unexplainably called, although probably because the lead in the first Weekly article started: "Snafued by fate...") received money from bowling teams, appeared on T.V. game shows and attended Easter egg hunts, all set up to raise the $5,000 needed to fit him with a set of artificial limbs. One man simply came into the offices of the Newark Star-Ledger, another paper spearheading the effort, plunked down $50 in cash and walked out without giving his name. By the youngster's fourth birthday, May 25, 1952, $6.674.04 had been raised for Cap'n Snafu.

- Roman Woronowycz

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