Stanisław Gutowski: America’s Secret Weapon in World War I

Abstract

World War I erupted at a time when immigrants were entering the United States at a rate of almost one million per year. According to the 1910 census, there were 13,515,886 foreign-born residents, accounting for 14.7 percent of the population. Among the two largest nationality groups, Italians and Poles, 51.3 percent of the former and 45.8 percent of the latter lacked any English-language skills on arrival. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the lack of functional English among a large proportion of the population posed a major problem for those eligible for conscription into the US armed forces. How could the hundreds of thousands of potential recruits be effectively trained when so many barely understood basic English, if at all? This article chronicles the efforts of Stanisław Antoni Gutowski, a Polish immigrant from Grajewo in the Łomża Voivodeship in northeastern Poland, who successfully developed a comprehensive and effective training program that not only prepared people for service in the armed forces but also for obtaining citizenship and the English skills they would need to open doors to opportunity in civilian life.