American Polonia changed decisively in the postwar years. Its core constituency, and that of the Polish Singers Alliance as well, was the ever decreasing original immigrant generation and its second-generation children. The third- and fourth-generation successors of this so-called “old Polonia” arrived on Polonia's stage as the original urban enclaves of their predecessors declined as people migrated to the suburbs and immersed themselves in an ever more homogenized mass American consumer culture. These changes became clearer in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, mass anti-war protests, and rapidly changing social mores challenged accepted notions about the fundamental principles of America and what it meant to be an American. The rapidity and depth of change were disorienting. One response among third- and fourth-generation White, European ethnics was the attempted recovery of one's ethnic roots. A modest White Ethnic Revival occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, accentuated, in the case of the Polish American community, by the bitter sting of “Polack jokes” in the national media. Polish and other ethnic Americans re-thought and re-defined their vision of their place in an America shortly to celebrate its bicentennial. White ethnic Americans, well before the age of political correctness and diversity, demanded a reaffirmation of America's pluralism.

Developments in Poland accentuated the tentativeness of Polish Americans during this period when traditional social moorings were loosened or cut entirely. In 1956, the upheaval known as the Polish October brought to power a more liberal and national communist regime under Władysław Gomułka and the promise of a “Polish road” to socialism.1 Abandoning the paranoid isolationism characteristic of Stalinism, the new regime also reached out to the Polish Diaspora to find friends and legitimacy among the anti-Communist Polish communities in the West. The Polonia Society, established in 1955 in Warsaw, organized this outreach to the Diaspora. Such changes, together with an American foreign policy that talked in the late 1960s of “building bridges” to the East and détente, compelled American Poles to rethink their previous political rejection of the Warsaw regime. The Polish American Congress still refused to recognize the new communist regime, and continued to urge American Poles to shun the regime and its representatives.