TYSSOWSKI, JOHN (March 8, 1811 -- April 5, 1857)Introduction. The field abounds in Polish and English accounts of John Tyssowski, who was in the vanguard of another wave of Polish refugees to the United States, and the latest one by James S. Pula in The Polish American Encyclopedia would for the most part satisfy the average reader. German historians, however, have failed to put Tyssowski in his proper place as far as the Deutsche Schnellpost is concerned.
In April 2011, while attending a ACPC meeting in Chicago, Peter J. Obst, my assistant, visited the Polish Museum in America and picked up copies (at $1. a page) of two letters by Tyssowski stored in Poland that deal with his ownership and editorship of Deutsche Schnellpost. He translated them from Polish to English. This is the result of that material. Thanks to the staff of the Polish Museum for that.
When John Tyssowski came to New York with his wife and four children, supposedly on the Marcellus, July 2, 1847, owning a liberal weekly newspaper, Deutsche Schnellpost, printed in the German language and read by thousands of political refugees around the country, hardly crossed his mind. The newspaper was established by Wilhelm Eichthal, a German bookseller in New York, and met the demand of readers, many of whom were Polish and read German very well, for news of the political unrest in Europe. After Eichthal died in the last month of 1847, the publication changed hands twice in six weeks. Then a German radical named Karl Heinzen, who arrived in New York on January 21, 1848, and John Tyssowski, also known as a radical, made a collection and borrowed money from friends, each in his own circle, to buy the Deutsche Schnellpost for 1,159 thallers (Tyssowski's word).
In his first letter on the matter, Tyssowski wrote to the Democratic Society in Paris, January 31, 1848, from his home, 169 East 21st Street, in the city of New York, "So now all I need is some support for this publication from Europe, first some subscribers and second some correspondents on a regular basis. I do not need to convince you much, brothers, what a happy opportunity we have found in America to support our cause.
I repeat, it is the hand of providence and other powers at work, so that a publication in another language became our standard and a brave means of communication. Your position in France is such that you cannot publish much there that you may want to appear (in print) to the public. I beg you, therefore, to send us regularly all the newspapers that are kind to us and your own articles in any language."
Obviously, the Deutsche Schnellpost was two papers in one. Heizen edited the German part of the newspaper and Tyssowski took care of the news and opinions for Polish subscribers. He sent to the Paris Poles the first issue he and Heinzen edited -- fresh off the press on January 31, 1848 -- and asked for details of Heizen that he didn't know from Germans living in France. The two had just met in New York and resumed the publication of a newspaper. "As for all of Europe," Tyssowski wrote in Polish, "we intend to write in the democratic-revolutionary spirit, or to put it in Polish -- to cause ferment in all of Europe. As for America, we will limit ourselves to a strictly neutral position and on this we will notice the more important actions or visible trends, not according to our partisan line but being above partisanship, according to the general principles of true democracy.
"A short description of this is: America has political freedom. It is a means not an aim, and this means must assist her in reaching social freedom, that is to eliminate privilege though it be hidden by whatever mask. And it will be our task to differeniate between decent faces from masks and rip off mercilessly those masks. I expect that we will gain the trust of the public and will be able to publish in the English language, and then our publication will become that which we intend, that is to serve openly and directly our cause. Today I must limit myself to the influence which I have with the local German people, but this only shows that the Germans support us."
Like a shopper checking off items on a grocery list, Tyssowski ran down a lot of things on his mind at an important moment in his journalistic career. Carl Wittke, one of the German historians in American academia who paid little attention to Tyssowski, half owner of Deutsche Schnellpost, noted that Heizen left his post on the newspaper two months later, in March, when news reached New York that French insurgents toppled the king of France in February In Refugees of Revolution -- the German Forty Eighters in America, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1952, Wittke wrote, "Heinzen started for Liverpool, on the return voyage of the Cambria, with some $400 of his own money, of which nearly half was borrowed, which he planned to pay back by free advertising in his Deutsche Schnellpost." He took an active part in revolutionary activity in Germany. When his efforts were suppressed, he fled to Switzerland and then returned to New York, where he tried to revive the Deutsche Schnellpost. Wittke said he was "plagued to the end of his days by critics who accused him of wasting funds intended for the Revolution in extravagant living,"
The one-sided version in Wittke's writings differs a lot from Tyssowski's letter to his friends in Paris. Without thinking of Tyssowski, Wittke chose the word "Revolution" rather than Deutsche Schnellpost in describing the mess Heizen left in the hands of his business partner. On top of this, many German historians but not Florian Stasik, a Polish historian, have overlooked the fact that Tyssowski remained the sole editor and publisher of a foreign language newspaper in New York. Stasik, however, emphasized in his book, Polish Political Emigres in the United States of America, that "News of the revolution in France burst like a thunderclap among the political emigres of other nationalities living in the United States."
On March 24, when he wrote again to the Polish emigres in France, Tyssowski did not know that his business partner, about whom he knew little, left him without the means to publish the Deutsche Schnellpost. Tyssowski said in that letter that he had no reply to his previous one. It was the first sign that the Polish refugees in Paris had no confidence in him or the newspaper. Whatever the reason for their indifference, whether the newspaper was too radical, the editor too naive, or not Polish enough, each one with a different opinion, as is common in the land of the white eagle, Tyssowski was the one who tried to keep the fire burning. "For here (Schnellpost)," he wrote from New York, "I have in my hands a strong tool to support our cause, but in the spirit of the public here I can do nothing without the basis of new facts. And it is only you, citizens, who can aid me in this." For various reasons the newspaper became unpopular and lost sunscribers and advertisers. Without money Tyssowski could not keep the paper alive. It did not appear again, albeit briefly, until Heinzen found it literally in a ditch where he had left it in 1848. With the help of Kacper Tochman, a prominent Polish lawyer, Tyssowski and his family moved to the lawyer's home in Washington, D, C., and he went to work for the federal government.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (2011) [email protected]
Tyssowski, John
Statesman. Cartographer. Leader of the Cracow Insurrection in 1846. Born in Tarnow, Poland in 1811; completed philosophy course at the University of Lwow and in 1830 took active part in the Polish insurrection against the Russians. In 1846 proclaimed himself leader of the Republic of Cracow but shortly was driven out by the Austrians, taken prisoner and banished to America, arriving here in July, 1847. Obtained the post in the United States Geodetic Survey and later in the United States Patent Office. Died in Washington, D.C., on April 4, 1857.From: "Who's Who in Polish America" by Rev. Francis Bolek, Editor-in-Chief; Harbinger House, New York, 1943