Lithuanian Americans

Lithuania is the largest of the three Baltic states, on the shore of the Baltic Sea in northern Europe. The Lithuanian language is one of the only surviving languages of the Baltic family, along with Latvian. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was once the largest European country, controlling much of the region along with Ukraine and parts of Russia; with Poland, it formed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a two-state union, from 1569 until 1795, when the Russian Empire succeeded in annexing most of it. Lithuania regained independence from Russia after World War I only to be occupied throughout World War II and annexed by the Soviet Union. It was the first Soviet republic to declare independence, doing so in 1990, precipitating the collapse of European Communism.

Today there are 712,165 Lithuanian Americans, according to the most recent census information—a decline of nearly 100,000 since the 811,865 reported in the 1990 census. The first Lithuanian immigrant was Aleksandras Karolis Kursius, a Lithuanian noble who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1659 and founded the first Latin school in the colony. However, he left two years later because of a salary dispute. Still, he was indicative of the pre-Civil War Lithuanian immigrants to the United States, who continued to arrive in small numbers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries: largely professionals, well educated, often nobles or wealthy, fluent in the language of the colony or country in which they resided and often other languages as well. Immigration to the United States in greater numbers began in the Gilded Age, as hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians arrived in the country.

Advances in transportation had made travel safer, faster, and cheaper, a factor driving much of the 19th-century immigration to the United States for all European groups, both because it made it easier to come to the United States and because, once in the country, there were lands to be claimed in the west, which was quickly growing because of expansion of the railroad. What prompted the Lithuanian migration at this time was the combination of a country-wide famine and the abolition of the institution of serfdom, which gave many Lithuanians the legal right to relocate—something they had previously lacked. This accounts for the initial surge.

Waves of Lithuanian immigration continued because of increased Russian tyranny in its treatment of Lithuania and other vassal nations as well as the economic depression prevailing in Lithuania (though the United States experienced a prolonged depression as well, in the later quarter of the century). The combination of Lithuanian independence in 1918 and new U.S. restrictions on immigration in 1924 ended the influx. In 1930, the Lithuanian American population equaled 6 percent of Lithuania's total population—a large number given that the transfer [Page 1357]in population had occurred in only two or three generations.

The next wave of Lithuanian immigration came during and after World War II, as refugees (Dipukai, in Lithuanian) fled their country, which was occupied first by Nazi Germany and then by the Soviet Union, which annexed it and turned it into a Soviet republic. Many of these refugees were well-educated professionals, even political leaders. Many of them considered themselves not immigrants but exiles, intending to return to Lithuania when the Communists left power. It took 50 years—and some did return, or their children or grandchildren did, which may account for the population loss of the last 20 years. Many others, though, were too acclimated to their American lives and had no desire to spend their twilight years in the country of their birth after they had spent their lives in an adopted country.

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