THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL ASSOCIATION'S FIRST CENTURY

Turning the pages back...

February 19, 1944

On this publication date, The Ukrainian Weekly saluted the Ukrainian National Association's jubilee year with a front-page editorial "Fifty Years of Service," stressing the achievements of the organization.

Recounting the UNA's successes in the fields of education and life insurance, the article stressed the "Americanizing" programs the UNA had conducted, the vast rise in membership (from under 500 to 42,060 in late 1943), and its sponsorship of Yale University Press' publication of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's "History of Ukraine" and George Vernadsky's "Bohdan, Hetman of Ukraine."

The Weekly's writer was also under sway of the war fervor of the times, and focused on the armed struggle at hand:

"... the UNA has played the leading role in the efforts the Ukrainian Americans have made from their very advent here to help their kinsmen in their native but foreign occupied and now war-torn Ukraine to gain their national freedom. Today, in exerting all their energies to help our country win this war against the Nazis and Japs, the UNA and its members find inspiration, too, in the cherished hope that when victory is won and tyranny dethroned, the Ukrainians over there will be given an equal right, with other enslaved peoples, to establish their own independent Ukrainian state. That is their inalienable right. And to the upholding of that right the UNA has been dedicated from the very first days of its existence."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 20, 1994, No. 8, Vol. LXII

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