The west-side press: Polish, German, and Hungarian papers

1873–1953

The papers of the immigrant city: South Bend's factories drew Poles, Germans, and Hungarians in the tens of thousands, and each community kept a press of its own. Howard's chapter gives the Polish and German papers of 1907 in full. The Goniec Polski — the Polish Messenger — was a semi-weekly six-column folio, independent in politics, under editor and proprietor George W. J. Kalczynski. The German line ran from the Indiana Courier, established in 1873 in German and bought soon after by Gustav Fickentscher, who renamed it the South Bend Courier; Andrew Troeger was afterward associated with him in the management, and the paper was, in Howard's phrase, "always a liberal, democratic journal." The Sources chapter, from Ayer's directory figures, adds the German Indiana-Posten, published from 1899. The 1921 city directory shows the Polish press still standing on the west side at the height of the immigration: its Division Street listing places a "Polish National Daily" at 1101 W. Division, beside the Polish Falcons' hall — the directory's own words for the paper it found there. The Goniec's working life in the record is long enough that a county obituary index compiled for genealogists draws on it as a source paper alongside the Tribune, the Register, and the Mishawaka Enterprise. Its founding and its end are settled by the Library of Congress newspaper directory entry, the pull named for it: the first number appeared on 27 June 1896, and the paper ran until 1964.

The Hungarian press is the fullest of the three in the bibliography, because John W. Miller's Indiana Newspapers Bibliography catalogued it whole, and the Indiana State Library's account of its own holdings prints the runs. Igazság — Truth — a politically independent Hungarian paper, ran from about 1906 to 1910; no library or institution in Indiana holds it. A paper called simply The News ran for a short period the bibliography does not fix. Magyar Tudósító, the Hungarian Bulletin, was published from 1911 to 1919 and concentrated on helping to Americanize the Hungarian immigrants. És Vidéke was published from 1925 to 1926. The longest survivor was Városi Élet — City Life — for which the State Library holds the longest microfilm run of any of the city's Hungarian papers, from January 1934 to January 1953. The whole Hungarian line had ceased before the next migration reached the county, the roughly three hundred Hungarians who came after the uprising of 1956. One name the record does not support is worth dispelling at its size: no South Bend paper called Głos Ludowy stands in the record — that title, the People's Voice, was Detroit's Polish-American labor weekly, begun there in 1923, and its history belongs to Detroit.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), Chapter VII, §6 — the Goniec Polski under Kalczynski and the Indiana Courier / South Bend Courier line under Fickentscher and Troeger.
2. John W. Miller, Indiana Newspapers Bibliography (Indiana Historical Society, 1982), as summarized in the Indiana State Library's "Ethnic South Bend newspapers" — the Hungarian titles and runs: Igazság (c. 1906–10), The News, Magyar Tudósító (1911–19), És Vidéke (1925–26), and Városi Élet (1934–53), with the holdings notes.
3. R. L. Polk & Co., South Bend city directory (1921), Division Street listing — "Polish National Daily," 1101 W. Division; Gertrude Ladewski's St. Joseph County obituary index — the Goniec Polski among its source papers.
4. New York Public Library research catalog, Głos Ludowy — begun 23 March 1923, published at Detroit by the Glos Ludowy Association: the name belongs to Detroit's record, not this city's.