The First Wave: The Pre-1914 Immigration

Ukrainians who immigrated to the New World prior to the First World War invariably sought to improve their wretched socioeconomic condition. To do so, they generally chose one of two approaches.

The other category of early Ukrainian immigrants was made up of those who left their villages with the intention of continuing an agricultural way of life in countries where land was cheap and available. From the outset, these immigrants – who usually arrived with their families – intended to stay in their new homelands permanently. Because such lands were usually located in unsettled regions, such as remote parts of Brazil and Canada, these immigrants faced a backbreaking, solitary struggle against nature. Immigration to the United States

Individual Ukrainians found their way to America long before the massive wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ukrainian names appear among the founders of the Jamestown colony in Virginia as well as among the combatants in the American Revolution and Civil War. When Russia established colonies in Alaska and California in the early 19th century, Ukrainian Cossacks and civilians were among their inhabitants. However, the man who is commonly recognized as the first nationally conscious Ukrainian in America is Ahapii Hon-charenko, an Orthodox priest from the Kiev region, who had been personally acquainted with Taras Shevchenko and had espoused revolutionary ideas.

But the first large group of Ukrainian immigrants to the United States was very different from these picturesque forerunners. Composed mostly of hard-working peasants, it originated in Transcarpathia and the Lemko regions, the westernmost and least developed of Ukrainian lands. News about the semi-mythical land far across the sea where one could earn ten to twenty times as much as at home first reached the Lemkos and Transcarpathians from their Slovak, Polish, and Hungarian neighbors. In 1877, an opportunity arose to test the veracity of these tales. That year, a Pennsylvania coal company, confronted by a strike, decided to bring in cheap labor from the poorest areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to act as strikebreakers. When its agents offered young Lemkos and Transcarpathians money for the journey – to be deducted later from their earnings – the company found many eager takers. As encouraging news (often exaggerated by agents of the steamship companies) and impressive amounts of money began to arrive in their home villages from the early immigrants, the exodus to America grew rapidly.

Like countless immigrants who preceded and followed them, the young men who made the long, arduous journey to the United States quickly realized that while the country offered many opportunities, it also demanded backbreaking work. From the outset, most of the newcomers were shunted off to the coal mines and steel mills of western Pennsylvania, and the area became the heartland of early Ukrainian immigration.

The early years were difficult: the erstwhile villagers were confronted by a strange land and an incomprehensible language; they were thrust into bustling, confusing cities and towns, where they labored among huge, constantly moving, noisy machines. Prior to the First World War, the average earnings of a factory worker or miner were about $1–2 for a nine-to-ten-hour working day. Usually they lived in crowded company shacks or in boardinghouses. Because the early immigrants intended to return home as soon as they saved several hundred dollars, they were often extremely frugal and spent little money on food, clothing, and other necessities. But many found it difficult to resist the lure of the korchma (tavern). The Ukrainian immigrants were generally a self-sufficient and law-abiding group; compared to the other immigrant groups, they had one of the lowest percentages of people on charity (0.04%) or accused of breaking the law (0.02%). In contrast, 4% of the Irish, 1.8% of the German, and 1% of the Polish immigrants were charged with criminal offenses.¹

The seemingly temporary nature of the early immigrants’ stay in the United States greatly influenced their attitude toward American society: they neglected to learn English, to establish contacts with Americans, or to obtain United States citizenship. Few showed any interest in the American political process. Their orientation remained focused very much on their homeland. But as immigration continued and grew, changes set in. More and more of the newcomers decided to stay in the United States. Also, Ukrainian women began to arrive in greater numbers, although as late as 1905, they still made up only 25–30% of the immigrants. Usually they worked as domestic help, often for Ukrainian- or Polish-speaking Jewish families. Later, many of them found employment as seamstresses in clothing factories. As families were established in the United States and wives and children came to join their husbands and fathers, Ukrainian communities and neighborhoods evolved.

To service them, the more enterprising immigrants established small businesses such as boardinghouses, groceries, and butcher stores. Not surprisingly, the most lucrative businesses were taverns, and their owners were often the richest and most influential men in the communities. But generally, Ukrainian immigrants were slow to explore ways of making a living except as laborers. Little wonder, for few were prepared to work as anything else. For example, in 1905, a peak year, when 14,500 Ukrainians arrived, only 7 had a higher education (4 of them were priests), 200 were skilled workers or artisans, and the rest were peasants and unskilled laborers. Few went into farming, for this undertaking required a long-term commitment and considerable capital. The only significant group that did so were the Stundists (a Protestant sect) from Russian-ruled Ukraine who arrived in the 1890s and settled in Virginia and North Dakota.

It is difficult to establish how many Ukrainians there were in the United States prior to the First World War. A complicating factor is that some immigrants made multiple trips between their new and old homelands. Because many Ukrainians were uneducated and their national consciousness was low, they were classified by American immigration authorities and census-takers as Hungarians or Austrians, that is, according to the states from which they had come. Some identified themselves with related and more established groups, such as Slovaks. And because the traditional name for West Ukrainians was Rusyns, many were called Russians. In any case, most estimates place the number of Ukrainians in the United States in 1914 at about 250,000–300,000. About half of these were Transcarpathians and Lemkos, who had started to arrive in the 1880s and 1890s, and the other half were mostly Galicians, who came in appreciable numbers about a decade later. They constituted only a tiny fraction of the approximately 25 million immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1861 and 1914.

In the Ukrainian village, the church was the focus of spiritual and social life. All the major events in a peasant’s life – his christening, wedding, and funeral – and most communal festivities were associated with religion. When they arrived in the United States, Ukrainian immigrants sorely missed their churches, without which their lives seemed meaningless, monotonous, and gray. Consequently, the earliest forms of communal organization they set up among themselves were churches and parishes.

In 1884, Ivan Voliansky, an energetic priest from Galicia, arrived in Pennsylvania to minister to his brethren. Within a year he built the first Ukrainian church in America in the town of Shenandoah. He also helped to organize several other parishes in central Pennsylvania. Voliansky was soon joined by a growing number of priests from Galicia and, later, from Transcarpathia. In the final decade of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th century, a wave of church building and parish organizing swept through the evolving immigrant communities. In 1907, the rapidly growing number of Greek Catholic parishes forced the Vatican to establish a Greek Catholic eparchy (diocese) based in Philadelphia and to appoint the Galician monk Soter Ortynsky as its first bishop. By 1913, the Greek Catholic diocese numbered 152 parishes, 154 priests, and about 500,000 parishioners.

But the churches not only served as the focus of communal life, they also became an arena for bitter conflicts engendered by the new American environment. Indeed, for the early immigrants, “church politics” were usually the only politics that mattered. A major problem, which became acute before the appointment of Ortynsky, was the strained relations that developed between the Greek Catholic immigrants and the largely Irish hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church. Ignorant of the particularities of the Greek Catholic rite and contemptuous of all East Europeans, Roman Catholic bishops often made matters difficult for them.

Greek Catholic priests who came to the United States with their families had additional reasons for being dissatisfied with the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Because Roman Catholic priests, unlike their Greek Catholic colleagues, were not allowed to marry, Roman Catholic bishops refused to recognize married clergymen from Transcarpathia and Galicia as legitimate priests. As the case of Alexis Toth illustrates, the controversial issue of celibacy soon had major repercussions for both Greek and Roman Catholicism in America.

A respected professor of theology in Transcarpathia, a consecrated priest, and a widower, Toth arrived in Minneapolis in 1889 to serve as the pastor of the local Greek Catholic parish. But because he had been married, the Roman Catholic archbishop excommunicated him. Unable to gain redress and convinced that the ancient Byzantine traditions of his rite, which Rome had recognized, were being trampled, Toth and his 365 parishioners made a dramatic decision in 1891 – they went over to Orthodoxy. In the following decades, tens of thousands of Lemko, Transcarpathian, and Galician immigrants, urged on by the well-financed Russian Orthodox Mission in America, opted for membership in the Russian Orthodox church. By 1914 they constituted the overwhelming majority of the Orthodox in the United States, and Alexis Toth was hailed as the “father of Orthodoxy” in that country.

The rush to Orthodoxy had important national/ethnic implications for the Ukrainian-Rusyn immigrants. Because many of them came from the most underdeveloped and isolated Ukrainian regions, such as Transcarpathia, they were generally untouched by the developing sense of Ukrainian national consciousness. Russophilism was also widespread among their clergy, as it had been in the “Old Country.” Consequently, when the uneducated Rusyns entered the Russian Orthodox church in the United States, its hierarchy usually succeeded in convincing them that they were ethnic Russians. Today, at a time of heightened consciousness of ethnic origins, the Americanized descendants of these pseudo-Russians are often at a loss to explain why their “Russian roots” lead back to patently Ukrainian lands. The Galician/Transcarpathian schism

Another divisive conflict that developed within the context of the church was the Galician/Transcarpathian schism. Transcarpathia, which was ruled by Hungarians until 1918, was one of the areas least exposed to the Galicia-based Ukrainian national movement. Initially, the immigrants who arrived from Transcarpathia and, somewhat later, from Galicia established their communities and churches together because they shared a common language, folk customs, the Greek Catholic rite, and their traditional Rusyn identity. But gradually tensions arose between their respective clergies.

Competition for well-established parishes first divided the two factions. Later, the appointment of Ortynsky, a Galician, as bishop infuriated the Transcarpathian clergy, and they launched a vicious campaign against him and all Galicians. In order to alienate their parishioners from Ortynsky, the Transcarpathian clergy exaggerated the differences between Transcarpathians and Galicians. Because their competitors were nationally conscious Ukrainians, the Ukrainian national movement became a major focus of their attacks. Ortynsky and all Galicians were accused of caring more about nationalism than religion. They were denounced as traitors to Rusyn traditions for adopting the modern term Ukrainian. For good measure, the socially conservative and elitist Transcarpathian priests warned their parishioners that the Galician clergy, many of whom were social activists, were godless, socialist radicals.

For their part, the Galician priests denounced their Transcarpathian rivals as Magyarones who were more loyal to Hungarian interests than to those of their own people. In fact, the Transcarpathian clergy generally did speak Hungarian at home and, quite often, even in church. Some continued to receive money from the Budapest government even after they arrived in the United States. Many openly cooperated with the Hungarian government in its efforts to prevent the spread of Ukrainian national consciousness among Transcarpathian immigrants. In the United States, as in the “Old Country,” this undermining was usually done by arguing that the Transcarpathian Rusyns constituted a distinct nationality from their Galician compatriots.

Unable to have one of their own appointed bishop, the Transcarpathian clergy demanded that the Vatican create a separate Greek Catholic diocese. In their words, they could not “acquiesce in being ecclesiastically united with the Galician Ukrainians” because “under the guise of the Catholic church, they might be thrown into the slavery of Ukrainianism.”² Anxious to eliminate the constant feuding, the Vatican gave in. In 1916, it created a separate diocese, based in Pittsburgh, for what came to be called the Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic church. In 1924 it consisted of 155 churches, 129 priests, and about 290,000 parishioners. Meanwhile, the original Philadelphia diocese became the base of the Ukrainian Catholic church, which numbered 144 churches, 129 priests, and about 240,000 parishioners. Thus, the Transcarpathian/Galician split became institutionalized.

In the decades after the split, the Transcarpathian church vacillated over which national orientation it should adopt. Unable to decide, it opted to avoid the issue altogether. Consequently, today it deemphasizes ethnicity and urges its faithful to identify themselves primarily in terms of the Greek Catholic (Byzantine) rite. But the legacy of this bitter Transcarpathian/Galician feud of the late 19th and early 20th centuries remains: although the people in Transcarpathia today consider themselves to be Ukrainians, their distant relatives in the United States still subscribe to the view that they are “anything but Ukrainians.”

As a result of these religious and regional controversies, about 20% of the early immigrants from West Ukrainian lands called themselves Orthodox “Russians,” another 40% identified themselves as Greek or Byzantine Catholic Ruthenians/Rusyns, and the remaining 40% were Ukrainian Greek Catholics.³ Fraternal organizations

Having established their churches, the Ukrainian immigrants next attempted to find communal ways of dealing with their pressing practical needs. Foremost among them was the desire for at least a minimal sense of economic security. Work in the mines and factories was exhausting and dangerous. The hours were long and by American standards, the pay was poor. As might be expected, cases of serious illness, loss of limbs, and fatal accidents were all too frequent. Furthermore, there were no company or government plans to aid those who were incapacitated or their families. In response to the problem, fraternal benefit societies or brotherhoods (bratstva) emerged among the various immigrant groups to aid their members.

For a modest monthly payment, these fraternal associations provided insurance in case of illness, incapacitation, or death. Moreover, as their membership and capital grew, they usually sought to address the cultural and educational needs of their members. For the immigrants, the appeal of the fraternal associations was both economic and social: they brought together people of their “own kind” and used their native language. Unlike the churches, the fraternal associations had no roots in the “Old Country”; they were an organic response to the environment encountered by the immigrant in the United States.

In 1885, Reverend Voliansky organized the first Ukrainian fraternal benefit society in America. Consisting of several dozen members, its primary goal was to provide burial costs for deceased colleagues. When Voliansky returned to Galicia, the society disbanded. But others cropped up throughout Pennsylvania. In 1892, the Union of Greek Catholic Russian (Rusyn) Brotherhoods was established and in time grew to considerable size. However, it soon fell under the domination of the pro-Hungarian Transcarpathian clergy and adopted an increasingly hostile attitude toward nationally conscious Ukrainians.

The impetus to found an avowedly Ukrainian fraternal benefit society came from a group of eight young, dynamic, and committed priests who had recently arrived from Galicia and came to be called the “American Circle.” Imbued with the activist spirit of the Galician intelligentsia, the group formed the backbone of the Greek Catholic church’s drive for ecclesiastical autonomy. Two of its members, Ivan Konstantynovych and Hryhorii Hrushka, became the founders, in 1894, of a fraternal benefit society called the Russkyi Narodnyi Soiuz (Ruthenian National Union), based in Jersey City. In 1915, this organization changed its name to the Ukrainian National Association. Today, with close to 85,000 members, it is the largest and wealthiest Ukrainian secular organization outside the borders of Ukraine.

During the First World War, it became evident that the immigrants had reached a higher level of political sophistication. In 1914, two central organizations, the Federation of Ukrainians in the United States and its rival, the Ukrainian Alliance of America, gathered substantial amounts of money for refugees displaced by the war in their homeland. Later, in 1919, the Ukrainian National Committee worked closely with diplomats from the various Ukrainian national governments in publishing English-language materials about the Ukrainian question. It also made a concerted effort to convince the White House and Congress to recognize Ukrainian independence. Immigration to Brazil

Initially, Brazil was the most popular destination for West Ukrainians in search of land. In 1895, when agents of Italian shipping companies appeared in Galicia with promises of cheap, fertile land in Brazil, the “Brazilian fever” took hold. Over 15,000 impoverished peasants, who had only the vaguest idea where Brazil was, made their way to that country. But instead of the promised black soil, they received plots of uncleared jungle in the state of Parana, near the town of Prudentopolis.

Left to their own devices, exposed to a debilitating climate, confronted by hostile Indians, and, worst of all, bereft of medical facilities and supplies, many of them perished soon after arrival. Others returned home. The remainder set about making a home in the wilderness. Despite the demoralizing difficulties, the dream of cheap land continued to attract Galicians to Brazil. In the years before the First World War another wave of about 15,000–20,000 Ukrainian immigrants arrived in the Parana region. However, as word of more favorable conditions in the United States and Canada spread, immigration to Brazil shrank. In the interwar period, only 9000 Ukrainians, mainly from Volhynia, went there. After the Second World War, another 7000 joined them. But many of these later left for North America. Today, the Ukrainians in Brazil number an estimated 150,000. Close to 80% of them live in a compact mass in the province of Parana in an area known as “Brazilian Ukraine.” The city of Prudentopolis is the center of Ukrainian life in the country. As might be expected, the Ukrainian Catholic church in Brazil, which includes 17 parishes and 52 priests, is by far the strongest Ukrainian institution in the land.

In recent times, a significant and growing minority of Brazil’s Ukrainians have become professionals, businessmen, and educators. But the majority of the Ukrainians are still poor farmers, who live much like the early immigrants did. This relative lack of change makes them unique among the Ukrainian communities abroad. Provided with poor land, engaged in unprofitable occupations, and inhabiting underdeveloped and isolated regions, Brazil’s Ukrainian farmers are isolated from the modern sectors of Brazil’s economy. They continue to live in villages and cottages that look much like those of their ancestors. Although over 90% are Brazilian born, lack of contact with non-Ukrainians has allowed them to retain their language. In many ways, their rural communities are the closest approximation that exists of the 19th-century Galician village. Immigration to Canada

While Brazil was a disappointment, Canada – in time and after tremendous effort – more than lived up to the expectations of Ukrainian immigrants. Its vast prairies soon became the major destination of the land-seeking peasants from Galicia and Bukovyna. The adventurous Ivan Pylypiw and Vasyl Eleniak are commonly considered to be the first Ukrainian immigrants to Canada. The two set out for western Canada in 1891 and liked what they saw. Upon his return to Galicia, Pylypiw convinced six families from his home village of Nebyliw to move to Canada. Consequently, in 1892, the “Nebyliw Group” established the first permanent Ukrainian settlement in Canada in the locality of Edna-Star, near Edmonton in Alberta.

But the individual who was most responsible for transforming the early trickle of immigrants to Canada into a massive migration was Iosyf Oleskiw. A professor of agriculture and a populist committed to aiding the peasantry, he visited Canada in 1895 to observe conditions firsthand. Impressed by the opportunities the Canadian west offered for agricultural settlement, Oleskiw published a number of widely circulated pamphlets that discouraged immigration to Brazil and advised peasants to go to Canada instead. In his successful efforts to popularize immigration to Canada, Oleskiw received support from Canadian authorities. The minister of the interior, Clifford Sifton, was particularly impressed by the suitability of the hardy Ukrainians for taming the wild prairies: “I think a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and half a dozen children, is good quality.”⁴ In time, glowing letters from Canada, which often painted conditions in overly rosy colors, and the exhortations of agents for steamship companies served as the major impetus for the growing immigration to the prairies.

Canada clearly had much to offer. The soil of the prairies was rich, although it did require backbreaking work to clear it of thick brush. Water was plentiful. Wood, scarce and highly prized in the “Old Country,” was abundantly available for fuel and construction. And the climate was much like at home. Anxious to populate the uninhabited prairies, the government was practically giving land away at the nominal cost of $10 per 160 acres. Ukrainians were allowed to settle in blocs, so that for miles around they had people of their own kind as neighbors. An added attraction was that Canada’s political system was stable and democratic, while its society and economy were modern and expanding.

The opportunities that Canada offered were great, but so was the effort required to take advantage of them. The newcomers arrived in a foreign land with little or no money, unable to speak English and often illiterate. After a long, exhausting journey, they were left to fend for themselves amidst cold, uninhabited plains. Simple survival was the first and most daunting task. To provide shelter against the harsh climate, they built primitive, one-room huts. Lacking money and unable to plant crops until the land was cleared, they faced the threat of constant hunger and even starvation. To earn money for necessities, men crisscrossed the countryside in search of work. Meanwhile, the women were left on their isolated homesteads to improve dwellings or to build new ones, to somehow feed and care for the children, and to begin the backbreaking task of clearing the land. Unable to afford machinery or even draught animals, the immigrants accomplished their work by hand. Usually several years passed before the first crops were ready. And to clear an entire homestead often took fifteen to twenty years of exhausting work.

To make matters worse, the immigrants had to face overt discrimination. Although Sifton and a few government officials recognized the usefulness of Ukrainian immigrants, many Canadians did not. Confronted for the first time by immigrants who were not Anglo-Saxons, the population of western Canada protested against the “dumping of filthy, penniless and ignorant foreigners” in its communities. Many newspapers fulminated against bringing in the “scum of Europe,” which would lower the moral and intellectual standards of Canadian society. The fact that the immigrants lived in compact communities, continued to wear traditional clothes, spoke their own language, and worshiped in the Byzantine rite added to their unwelcome foreignness.

Despite these difficulties, the Ukrainian immigrants slowly established themselves. In time they brought millions of acres under cultivation. Their neat, white, thatched cottages and onion-domed churches dotted the broad Canadian plains. When grain prices rose rapidly prior to the First World War, many Ukrainians prospered. As their reputation as hard workers and dedicated farmers grew, public hostility towards them slowly abated. Indeed, Canadians gradually began to recognize the crucial role the hardy Ukrainian immigrant played in transforming the uninhabited prairie into one of the world’s most productive grain fields.

By the time the First World War broke out, about 170,000 Ukrainians had come to Canada. Of these, over 85% settled in the prairies. Those Ukrainians who chose to settle in a city usually chose Winnipeg, which became the major center of Ukrainian-Canadian communal life. Because the total population of the Canadian west in 1896 was only about 200,000, it is evident that the newcomers could not but exert a major impact on the region. If the war had not interrupted the flow of Ukrainians to the Canadian prairies, it might well have become a largely Ukrainian region. Religious issues

As elsewhere, churches were the earliest and strongest institutions established by the immigrants. In Canada, as in the United States, their growth was also accompanied by bitter controversies. Totally lacking Greek Catholic priests, the newcomers turned to their brethren in the United States for help. In 1897, responding to their appeal, Reverend Nestor Dmytriw traveled from Pennsylvania to visit the pioneers on the prairies and to celebrate the first Greek Catholic mass on Canadian soil. In subsequent years, several other Ukrainian priests from Pennsylvania made similar visitations. But these stop-gap measures were clearly incapable of providing stable ecclesiastical leadership and organization for the immigrants.

For its part, the local Roman Catholic hierarchy, which was French Canadian, attempted to impose its jurisdiction over the newcomers. However, in the face of opposition, it retreated. Later, it showed a greater tolerance of Greek Catholics than did the Irish bishops in the United States. Nonetheless, problems remained. Most pressing was the lack of priests. Because a papal edict in 1894 forbade married Greek Catholic priests from serving in North America and because the few celibate priests who emigrated from Galicia usually went to the United States or Brazil, Canada could not depend on the “Old Country” for clergymen. To deal with the dilemma, French and Belgian priests, some of whom accepted the Greek Catholic rite, were assigned to work among the immigrants.

But this measure was unsatisfactory. The immigrants found it difficult to communicate with their non-Ukrainian priests; the celibacy issue was a constant irritant; and the perennial problem of the immigrants’ reluctance to deed their churches to Roman Catholic bishops also flared up in Canada. Imbued with the spirit of the New World, many wanted their church to be free of all outside influence.

In 1903, Bishop Serafim, a Russian Orthodox cleric of dubious background, came to Winnipeg from the United States. Backed by a group of radical intelligentsia seeking to create a Ukrainian church that would be independent both of Roman Catholicism and of Russian Orthodoxy, he established the so-called Independent Greek church. His solution for the lack of clergy was straightforward but canonically questionable: he simply ordained about fifty educated and semi-educated community leaders as priests in the new church. These men spread throughout the countryside preaching a brand of Orthodoxy that rejected the authority of any patriarch and accepted trustee ownership of church property. This message obviously appealed to the immigrants, for in two years the new church gained over 60,000 adherents. However, this allegiance was a transitory phenomenon, and within several years Serafim’s church disintegrated.

The threat of losing its faithful to a hybrid form of Orthodoxy galvanized the Greek Catholic church. In 1910, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, the hierarch of the Greek Catholic church in Galicia, toured the Ukrainian-Canadian communities in a morale-boosting and fact-finding mission. Several years later he convinced the Belgian Redemptorist Order to establish a Greek Catholic rite branch in Galicia. Some of its celibate members were then sent as missionaries to Canada’s Ukrainian communities. Responding to Sheptytsky’s appeals, in 1912 the Vatican appointed Nykyta Budka as the first Greek Catholic bishop in Canada. Unlike Ortynsky in the United States, Budka received far-ranging authority from the outset. Soon, Greek Catholic churches, parishes, and schools multiplied in the prairies. By 1931, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church encompassed about 58% of Ukrainians in Canada and had 100 priests and 350 parishes. But because about 80% of immigrants had originally been Greek Catholic, it was evident that Budka’s church had suffered serious losses.

Many of those who rejected Greek Catholicism entered the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox church, formed in 1918. The base of support for this church was varied. It included the rising Ukrainian-Canadian intelligentsia (mostly bilingual teachers) who espoused the anticlericalism of the Galician Radical party, Orthodox Bukovynians, and the former members of Serafim’s defunct church. Because its clergy was Ukrainian and because it was committed to retaining Ukrainian ecclesiastical traditions and practices, the Orthodox church in Canada became closely associated with the growth of Ukrainian national consciousness, which greatly added to its popularity. Thus, while only 15% of the Ukrainians who came to Canada were originally Orthodox, by 1931, over 24% of Ukrainian Canadians belonged to the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox church. The Presbyterian church, which actively proselytized among the Ukrainians, also attracted a considerable number of the immigrants. Secular organizations

Like the churches, the first secular organizations among the immigrants were transplants from the the “Old Country.” As they did in the villages of Galicia and Bukovyna, the Prosvita societies, reading rooms (chytalni), and community centers (narodni domy) spread throughout the prairies. By 1925, there were about 250 such cultural/educational organizations in Canada.

In terms of formal education, the Ukrainian Canadians briefly enjoyed an advantage that no other Ukrainian immigration possessed. Because their rural communities were totally or overwhelmingly Ukrainian, they were allowed to establish publicly financed bilingual school systems. Approximately 400 such school districts, located mostly in Manitoba, were in existence by 1916. To provide teachers for these schools, the Manitoba government established the Ruthenian Training School in Winnipeg in 1907. Well-versed in both English and Ukrainian, its graduates formed a core of secular, educated community leaders.

But the First World War and a mounting anti-foreigner hysteria brought an end to the bilingual school systems. Nevertheless, the immigrants were determined that their children should receive a Ukrainian-language as well as an English-language education. In part, private Greek Catholic schools founded by the Basilian Order and the Serving Sisters responded to this need. Parish-based ridni shkoly also proliferated. However, members of the anticlerical intelligentsia sought other options. In 1916, they founded the Mohyla Ukrainian Institute in Saskatoon. Essentially, the institute was a student residence (bursa) whose main function was to provide a Ukrainian environment, including courses in the Ukrainian language, literature, and history, for rural students who had come to the city to complete their education. Similar institutes or bursy, usually affiliated with various religious denominations, were also organized in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Toronto. Members of these institutes also added greatly to the growing ranks of Ukrainian political and cultural activists.

Although prior to the First World War most Ukrainians in Canada had been unsophisticated peasant-farmers, signs of a growing political awareness had emerged among them. One form of political activity reflected the ideological trends spreading in their homeland. In 1907 prominent Ukrainian-Canadian leaders, such as Kyrylo Genyk-Berezovsky, Ivan Bodrug, Ivan Ne-grych, Myroslav Stechishin, and Taras Ferley (all socialists of the Galician Radical party mold), founded the Ukrainian Socialist Union. Simultaneously, they and others became involved in local Canadian politics. Given their majority in many localities, by 1902 the Ukrainians had already elected their countrymen to municipal office. In 1913, Andrew Shandro won a seat in the Alberta provincial parliament.

Canadian political commentators noted, with some alarm, that “one fact stands out with tremendous clearness – the Ruthenians have become a force… throughout the prairies.”⁵ But if Ukrainians assumed that they were fully integrated into the Canadian political system, they were rudely disabused of this notion during the First World War. Because many of the immigrants still held Austrian passports, about 6000 were classified as “enemy aliens” and incarcerated in detention camps for the duration of the war.