Editor’s Note: For centuries, Ukrainians have left their homeland and ended up in many nations of the world, especially Canada and the United States. Part two of The Great Exodus series explores the arrival to America.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Ukrainians can thank one Orthodox priest from the Kyiv region for introducing poet Taras Shevchenko and the Ukrainian language to the people of the United States.
Ahapii Honcharenko, a political exile who throughout his long life would be a thorn in the side of czarist Russia, was the first documented Ukrainian on U.S. soil.Having settled in San Francisco, California, after arriving in America in 1865, he started to publish the Alaska Herald-Svoboda, a semi-monthly publication that came out in the Ukrainian, Russian and English languages two years later, after the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867.
Along with Alaska, the paper was circulated in Siberia, Japan, China and the Sandwich Islands and also appears to have covered events in California. It seems strange today that Honcharenko published a newspaper for people in Alaska while himself stationed in San Francisco, but that’s the story. The publication survived for nine years, according to the Library of Congress.
Aimed at Alaska’s Slavic inhabitants, the paper’s first issue featured an article about Ukraine’s famed bard Taras Shevchenko and the Constitution of the United States, translated into Russian.
(The late actor Jack Palance)
Honcharenko knew Shevchenko and espoused revolutionary ideas, Orest Subtelny wrote in his groundbreaking “Ukraine: A History.”
Known for his opinionated views, the priest wrote on Aug. 15, 1869 of the Slavonian community that inhabited San Francisco at the time; there were presumably Ukrainians among that crowd.
“All of its members are more or less civilized; that is to say they are not savages,” the Alaska Herald-Svoboda reported. “The mercantile portion is principally engaged in keeping bar-rooms, saloons, coffee-house, restaurants, etc. All are prosperous. They retain all their pristine instincts of jealousy, lust and vindictiveness.”
Honcharenko would later become a prominent figure in California where in the early 20th century he would try to establish a Ukrainian socialist colony, Subtelny noted.
Another Ukrainian who came to the U.S. in its early years was Nicholas Sudzilovsky-Russel, a physician and revolutionary from Kyiv, who came to California in the 1880s and then moved to Hawaii, where he became president of the Hawaiian Senate.
It is without doubt that other Ukrainians arrived in America before Honcharenko.
(Football great Mike Ditka)
Although little is known about these individuals, the Encyclopedia of Ukraine notes that “isolated individuals from what is today Ukraine began arriving with the first white settlers in the New World.
Ukrainian-sounding names appear in references to and in the records of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and of New Amsterdam (now New York), in the rolls of the American revolutionary army, and in the U.S. census of 1790.”
Like Canada, the U.S. experienced several waves of Ukrainian immigration.
The reasons migrants left their ethnic homeland for each country in North America mirrored the other in substantial ways, with economic and political reasons leading the way.
Yet the U.S. differed from Canada in important ways.
While Canada developed a policy of multiculturalism and embraced the diverse ethnic groups, the U.S. adopted a philosophy of being the great melting pot to encourage assimilation. American cities such as New York and Philadelphia hosted a medley of diverse languages and cultures, but newcomers and their offspring were encouraged to put their ethnic heritage aside and become American.
(Actress Milla Jovovich)
In addition, if Ukrainian migrants traveled to Canada to stay – that country offered early migrants substantial free land plots – those who went to the U.S. traversed with the idea of staying in the country temporarily.
Although the work was backbreaking, the U.S. was a haven for those willing to labor in its steel and textile mills. Indeed, about one-third of all migrants who traveled to America returned home by the 1930s, historical records suggest.
Because of the sheer numbers of immigrants who traveled there over the decades, the make-up of those who eventually settled in the U.S., as well as the government’s integration policies, Ukrainians have not achieved the type of political influence their brethren have in Canada.
That does not mean, however, they have not left an imprint.
Throughout the U.S., the presence of Ukrainians can be felt, from the graveyards of Leadville, Colorado where tombstones are etched in Cyrillic, reflecting the many individuals who labored in some of the country’s most lucrative silver mines, to the memorable films made by Jack Palance, the Academy Award-winning actor and son of Ukrainian migrants from today’s Ternopil and Lviv regions.
Palance first worked as a miner in Pennsylvania before setting out to pursue a career in boxing and then acting.
(American foreign policy expert Paula Dobriansky)
The first wave of Ukrainian migration to the U.S. lasted from the 1870s to 1914.
To work a plethora of mines in the east, the majority of individuals who arrived there were men from the Transcarpathian region and later were joined by their brethren from Halychyna, which comprises much of today’s western Ukraine.
Despite priest Honcharenko’s Orthodox faith, most of these early migrants were what today would be characterized as Ukrainian Catholics.
“The unfamiliar and even hostile surroundings gave rise to a yearning for their own familiar institutions, in particular their own church, which had been the center of their social life in Europe,” Bohdan Procko, professor emeritus at Villanova University, wrote in a 1973 article about the ethnic experience in Pennsylvania.“It was the Ukrainian … immigrants in Shenandoah in 1884 who made the first attempt to obtain a priest from Europe.”
(Ahapii Honcharenko, first recorded Ukrainian in America in 1865)
The second migration wave lasted from 1920 to 1939. It was during this period that America showed its unflattering colors. Tired of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, the U.S. Congress imposed restrictions on Ukrainian migration, limiting the number to 20,000 individuals.
Starting from 1947 and up until 1955, the third wave of immigrants rushed in. Like those who ended up in Canada, many of these travelers witnessed the horrors of World War II and lived in displaced persons’ camps in Europe in the post-war years.
A final migration that began in 1991 and continues to this day was spurred by the demise of the Soviet Union. Washington created a unique program for migrants to enter the U.S., known as the green card lottery, which since 1990 has helped thousands of Ukrainians establish new lives in the U.S.
Next in part three of The Great Exodus: Communities converge in Canada and the United States.
Part 1:Ukrainian exodus to North America
Part 3: How to be Ukrainian in a new, foreign land
Part 4: Ukrainians abroad strive to keep alive cultural traditions of the homeland
Kyiv Post staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected]
