What is the origin of the stereotype that Polish people lack intelligence?

Around 35 years ago some of my elderly Jewish relatives got to wondering how jokes about Polish people being stupid got started. One of the people present was an elderly Polish Catholic woman who had married a Polish Jewish man (my relative by marriage). I have to say, that this elderly Polish Catholic woman was the only "stupid" Polish person I've ever met. Every other person I've known to be Polish (usually because they've immigrated to this country since WWII) was very bright. Honestly, I don't really know if this elderly Polish lady was really stupid. Perhaps she just had the brains to keep her mouth shut unless she agreed with what was being said. She also had basically no education (so if she had been bright in math, who would know?) She couldn't have been entirely stupid, as she stayed happily married her whole life and with lots of children who loved her.

Anyway, the conclusion reached by the group (which she chimed in and agreed to) is that the reason Polish people were thought of as stupid in America is because so many Polish Jews had moved to America, and due to Polish antisemitism, Jews had developed lots of jokes about how stupid Polish people were and easy to fool (so as to make themselves feel less afraid while being the minority still living in Poland).

I believe many ethnic groups were felt to be inferior mentally by immigration officials in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This included not just Poles but also Jews and Italians. Gould wrote a book about the silly "intelligence" tests given immigrants which asked questions about baseball, etc.

If you feel that somehow even now this belief is widely held about Poles, it could stem simply from the "Polish Joke" which followed a certain pattern. These I don't think are very popular anymore. Similar jokes were told about blonde women a generation or two later.

I was told by a polish woman this term came from the fact that Nazi's would come to people's (non-Jewish) homes of high stature and education, tell them they had a choice of siding with the Germans or not. If not, they were murdered. Most being proud Pols chose the latter.

It's common for nearby groups to have jokes told about them, from gentle ribbing going on to more serious X-ism, where X is race, or national, or whatever. Inside the US, there are jokes about Texans, New Englanders, Vermonters. Ohio has jokes about neighboring Kentucky. I imagine that most nations have the same thing with countries alongside.

Since there was a large amount of US immmigration from Germany in the 1800s, followed by a lesser, later influx from Poland, that the US has taken on a bit of the German attitude towards their neighbors to the East.

Facts seem to show so-called Polish jokes are mainly Jewish American gags about (imagined) Poles. For example, books by a Jewish "comic" Larry Wilde, gags in Hollywood films e.g. by Allen. The extreme vulgarity, including frequent references to feces, and contempt towards the Poles makes these "jokes" a case of hate propaganda against a national group.

I have also read that the denigration of Poles was a deliberate tactic of Stalin's wartime propaganda in order to blunt the western reaction to his planned takeover of Poland after the war. He didn't want the western people to realize how much Poland actually contributed to the war effort against the Nazis. Polish units fought in North Africa and Italy. Polish airmen made up a significant percentage of pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain. France surrendered but was always part of the meetings at Yalta, etc. Poland never surrendered but was excluded at Stalin's insistence.

The origin of the stereotype that Polish people have inferior intelligence came from Nazi German propaganda that ironically NBC-TV/Hollywood introduced into the US in the 196O's (despite NBC-TV claiming to be against the Nazis) in many of its TV shows like the "Tonight Show" and any other show where the word "Polish" would be mentioned and maligned. NBC-TV's George Schlatter bashed Polish people a lot in his show "Laugh-In" which ridiculed Polish people with subhuman intelligence jokes.

The Polish American Guardian Society, The Polish American "Post Eagle" newspaper and the Polish American Congress Anti-Bigotry committee hold Anti-Polish TV Bigots mostly responsible for using the power of TV to malign the image of Polish people.

Chet Grabowski, the editor of the "Post Eagle", was credited with much of the decline in so called "Polish jokes" from mainstream TV media, according to the Polish American Singer Bobby Vinton.

Mostly good old fashioned racism. The target is different for different cultures (Polish people in USA, Irish people in UK, etc.), but the general idea is to insult the people you don't like.

Derogatory racial (for lack of a better word) stereotypes tell much about the people who spread them. For instance, in my field - software development, you are not likely to come across "Polish jokes", because some of the best developers in top tech firms are Polish and Polish universities regularly outperform US teams in international programming contests. If you hear such jokes at work then it probably means that you aren't working in a cutting edge technology corporation.

That being said, I like the answer given by TED, because it explains the issue in terms of a self defence mechanism of a society which experiences mass immigration. I would like to add to this though as there are additional factors at play, all revolving around the image of Poles and Poland in the US, which shed some light on why the derogatory stereotypes haven't died so far.

I think much of the problem boils down to the fact that Poles as immigrants have been an easy target.

I think a large part of the people who tell Polish or Irish jokes would like to make derogatory comments about "blacks" or Jews. But with the level of protection those groups enjoy in a modern state, it's hardly possible. Polish look, on the other hand, is not much different from the Anglo-Saxon one (which traditionally has been the look of the US establishment) and their culture is also quite similar. Thus Poles don't deserve protection in the eyes of the anti-racist lobby.

The observation of what recently happened in the UK seems to corroborate this theory. After 2004 UK experienced mass Polish immigration. This time there was no "dumb Polacks" stereotype, but the attacks aimed at Polish immigrants were frequent - from typical ("Poles take our jobs and send all the money home") to very ridiculous ones ("Poles hunt for swans in public parks") and even physical attacks. The interesting thing though is that at the same time UK has been dealing with a very large immigration from Africa and Asia. Under other circumstances those immigrants would be the primary target of discrimination as they were more culturally alien than the Poles (not to mention the very different physical appearance). But that never happened as the political culture of the UK would result in the immediate stigmatisation of the attacker. Instead, the suppressed anger was directed at "Eastern Europeans", without consequences.

Secondly, at the time of the mass Polish emigration to Americas there was no Polish state. Poles were second class citizens of Germany, Russia and Austria. It is hard to be proud of your nationality when your country has been conquered. And it is common not to respect a nation that has failed. Nations that are likely to be respected are nations that have demonstrated their strength via powerful statehood. I think the Irish experienced that too.

Thirdly, Polish emigration to USA, Brazil and Argentina was mostly economical. They were mostly impoverished peasant. The wealthy and politically active Polish intelligentsia stayed in Europe. So it took time before the US Polonia could produce leaders able to represent their interest within the US.

The final blow came when Poland got into Soviet sphere of influence after WWII. For over 50 years there was no Polish ambassador which could defend Polish American while acting as a representative of a US-friendly state. Quite the contrary, as a Warsaw pact member, Poland became de facto an enemy of the US. If Cold War was to escalate into WWIII, American troops in Europe would likely face Polish People's Republic troops. American media of that period must have taken note of that. Another aspect is that USA was a strongly pro capitalist country and as such it promoted the image of communist economy as inferior. So the news coverage from Poland for a very long time stressed the backwardness of the Polish economy. This message was so strong that to this very day people in the USA have an image of Poland that is very removed from reality.

Paradoxically, Poland and Poles had already been deliberately negatively depicted in the US during WWII, while being an ally of the USA! This has been well documented and explained in the book "Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945". To cut a story short, it takes some bad luck to be negatively portrayed twice: first because of being anti-Soviet and later because of being pro-Soviet. That's what happened to Poland though.

There is also one, often overlooked, factor that I personally think had a big impact on Polish image in the USA - the never ending Polish - Jewish conflict. It's too complex to even attempt to describe it here - the important thing though is that media have become a weapon in this conflict and so Poles were doomed to lose it, since Poles didn't engage in media at similar frequency as the Jews. This has resulted in some polonophobic ideas leaking into popular American culture, as described in the book "Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture".

(In contrast, I think it was the long lasting media involvement that was the primary factor which catapulted the Jewish minority into upper echelons of American establishment. Which is ironic because the bulk of Jewish immigrants came to the USA from the territories of former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and so they too were often called "dumb Polacks" upon landing on American soil.)

Finally, Polish Americans have not been numerous and influential enough to be a force to be reckoned with for politicians. A presidential candidate won't put up a Polish American as vice president just for the sake of securing votes of that minority, since there are more numerous groups to appease.

Last but not least, Polish language is extremely difficult for a foreigner. Learning it requires much more time and dedication than for example Italian or Spanish. That's a barrier that very few people are ready to overcome, so Polish culture and literature is little known. This leaves space to assume that it is somehow inferior.