Polish Americans were represented in the American temperance movement, and the first wave of immigrants was affected by prohibition. A leading Pole in the Temperance movement in the United States was Colonel John Sobieski, a lineal descendant of Polish King John III Sobieski, who served as a Union general in the American Civil War. In 1879, he married a prominent abolitionist and prohibitionist Lydia Gertrude Lemen, an American from Salem, Illinois. Through his wife's affiliation, he became a leading member of the Polish branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and preached against alcohol in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois to prohibition-camps. Sobieski and the predominantly Protestant Christian Temperance groups never made great in-roads into the Polish community. Polish Catholics immigrants frequently heard lectures and received literature from the Catholic Church against alcohol. Polish immigrants were distrustful of the Irish-dominated American Catholic Church, and did not resonate with the temperance movement in great numbers. A visit by Archbishop John Ireland to the in St. Paul in 1887 was ineffective in drawing them to the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America. The Polish language press covered the topic of abstinence occasionally in the U.S. It was not until 1900 that the introduced sanctions for alcoholics among its membership, and abstinence generally was unpopular among American Poles. In New Britain, Connecticut, Father Lucian Bojnowski started an abstinence association which offended a local Polish club, he received a death threat in response. In 1911, Father Walter Kwiatkowski founded a newspaper called (The Abstainer) promoting local abstinence societies. The newspaper did not last long, and the Polish abstinence groups never united. The Polish National Catholic Church never created official policies towards abstinence from alcohol, nor took it as a priority that differed from the Catholic Church.
