Background of news –
Political repercussions of priest’s trip
By Jay G. Hayden
Washington –
The part foreign events may play in the approaching American presidential election is strikingly exemplified in the storm now going on among Polish-Americans over the visit to Moscow of Rev. Stanislaus Orlemanski and Prof. Oscar Lange.
The vital political circumstance is that news of this pilgrimage arrived just when Catholic and Polish-American Democrats had joined in a warning to President Roosevelt that the worst mistake he could make was to give countenance to these and other pro-Soviet Poles in the United States.
It is doubtful if the discontent of anti-Russian Poles or Catholics was much assuaged by the recent letter of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, which explained that Father Orlemanski and Prof. Lange “are making this trip as private American citizens… They have no official status, and, therefore, are not, in any sense, representatives or spokesmen of the United States government.”
Mr. Hull said the Soviet government furnished their transportation to Moscow.
Big vote in nine states
The Polish-American vote is large concentrated in nine states, all extremely close in 1940. If these states all had gone for Wendell L. Willkie, he would have had 259 electoral votes, just seven short of a winning majority.
As shown by the census, the largest Polish-American population is in New York, which Mr. Roosevelt carried in 1940 by the slim margin of 1.8%.
The other states in order of Polish-American population, each with its percentage margin of victory at the 1940 polls, are as follows:
| Illinois | Roosevelt | 1.2% |
| Pennsylvania | Roosevelt | 3.5% |
| Michigan | Willkie | 0.1% |
| New Jersey | Roosevelt | 1.8% |
| Massachusetts | Roosevelt | 2.4% |
| Ohio | Roosevelt | 2.2% |
| Connecticut | Roosevelt | 3.7% |
| Wisconsin | Roosevelt | 0.9% |
Now strongly Democratic
Of all Congressional districts the one with the largest preponderance of Polish-American voters is the 1st Michigan. This district elected Republicans from 1924 to 1930. In 1932, it went Democratic, 51,620 to 21,764, and it has remained so by even greater margins since that time. In 1942, its present Democratic Representative, George G. Sadowski, received 48,620 votes, as against 13,691 for his Republican opponent.
The change in Polish vote undoubtedly accounted for the fact that Michigan had Democratic governors for six of the 10 years between 1932 and 1942.
Alignment of Polish-American voters on the Democratic side was similarly responsible in large degree for the huge majorities candidates of that party rolled up in the same decade in such previously-Republican cities as Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Hartford, all vital to Democratic victory in their states.